The Giant's Almanac by Andrew Zurcher (black female authors .txt) 📕

as he teetered. He hardly noticed. His eyes were on the fish meat, willing it across the gap, willing it down, willing it to stay square. The birds screamed as it fell. They fell with it, swirling. The light of Dina’s torches, across the courtyard, flared wildly as she swung them with frenzied violence.

Then the meat hit – slapping the shining stones, dead on target. This time his cast really had been a bullseye. As Fitz fell backwards, pulled into the arms of the other Prents, he saw the largest of the albatrosses, the king with his battered beak, diving towards his quarry. The other birds scattered before his prerogative. By the time Fitz had got his bearings again, the giant bird was already alighting on the highest pitch of the roof above them. The meat hung from his beak. He raised one foot, sank it into the flesh of the fish, and pulled it down with fierce hunger. From the bottom of the tarred skin, as it was torn away, the largest of the diamonds – a ball the size of a fist – dropped to the roof and began to roll downward.

Fingal, tall and sharp, caught it in his hand.

From across the courtyard, behind them, there came a scream – not of fear, nor of danger, but of rage. Her three torches had dropped to the ground, and Dina was already shimmying, fast, up the side of the far wall.

‘Did anyone even see her go?’ Padge was watching Dina with interest, or awe.

Adrenaline and pride surging through his body, Fitz turned to watch Dina. He didn’t understand: of course they had all been watching Dina, watching her progress, all along.

Then he saw what Padge meant. He wasn’t referring to Dina at all, but to Payne. She was kneeling at the top of the roof, directly above Dina, her hands on the drainpipe where it attached to the guttering.

No. Where it used to attach to the guttering.

Dina kept climbing. It was still her best move.

‘Elegant,’ said Navy, matter-of-fact. She turned to Fitz. ‘You’re probably not used to all this calculation – but there’s only one way we’re walking into the House of the Jack to get Russ, and that is if the Jack isn’t there. Unless someone is in danger, he’ll sit on the helix like a broody hen on her egg, and we won’t get past him. Payne, anticipating this, is going to put Dina where only the Jack can save her.’

‘But that’s awful,’ Fitz protested. ‘The snakes – they’ll kill her –’

‘Payne has done her maths,’ said Navy. ‘So has Dina. She wouldn’t have screamed like that if she didn’t know she’d lost.’

As Dina reached the top of the drainpipe, it seemed for a moment that she would make it, that she would leap free of the collapsing metal, that she would sink her grasp into Payne’s wrists, grab her hair – something. But Payne chose her moment and pushed with all her strength, ripping the metal and its last bolts free of the stonework. Under Dina’s weight it tottered for an instant, and leaned back, then – for agonies of long seconds – seemed to hang in the moonlight with Dina, helpless, flapping her arms around it. And then it began to fall backwards, ripping the rest of its bolts from the wall and collapsing in slow motion directly towards the fountain. Dina didn’t pick up even a scratch; she landed standing on a pile of diamonds, a hefty sheared length of drainpipe in her furious hands.

She spread her stance and planted her feet on the fountain’s rim. ‘I concede,’ she shouted, not bothering to look up. With wide sweeps of the iron pipe, held like a staff, she began to ward the snakes from the perimeter.

Navy smiled. ‘She’ll be fine, Fitz. Especially after the Jack has cleared the courtyard. Come on.’

Keeping low, they passed in single file back into the Registry, Padge in the lead, Fitz in the rear – carrying in his fist the big diamond, which Fingal had surrendered to him as his right. In the courtyard outside the Registry they met Payne, who had come down by a roof and a trellis, and was not – for once – sorry to receive the congratulations of the other Prents. Fitz noticed with satisfaction that, as they crossed the court to skirt the Commissary on their way round to the House of the Jack, Dolly allowed Payne to slip into the file ahead of her.

‘It’s not like the Jack to leave the doors open for us,’ Padge said with surprise when they reached their destination.

‘He doesn’t want us to break anything,’ said Dolly, gaily.

‘Anything else,’ Padge corrected her.

‘Don’t worry,’ Navy said to Fitz, as she held open for him one of the big leaves of the Jack’s great wooden doors; ‘he’ll be in the Commissary Yard now, plucking Dina to safety. I guarantee it. That’s how these things always work.’ Fitz nodded and passed in behind the other Prents. ‘Only,’ Navy added, confidentially, ‘it’s usually me he’s saving.’

The Jack had lit the hall with candles, which still burned. The Prents swarmed over the complex illusory topography of the floor, making for the very centre of the Helix. There in the base of the mechanism, just as Dina had predicted, framed by its unlocked iron cage, the socket stood empty where the ball-diamond, the Blank Eye, took the weight of the turning staircases above. Padge held out his hand as Fitz approached, took from him the huge jewel, and crammed it into its place. He winched the mechanism back into gear, and then signalled to Navy to turn the wheel that drove the Helix. As she spun it, the two interlocked sets of stairs began to rotate on their pivot, swinging slowly free of the high rooms to which only moments before they had offered easy access. It was obvious, Fitz thought, where they would find Russ – the only alcove, at the highest elevation,