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

Fitz didn’t know for how long he ran, climbed, crawled and staggered across the wide meadow that separated the Heresy walls from the rising ground of the sea cliffs to the west. It might have been an hour; it might have been two. By the time the ground began to rise, and he found himself pushing up against the slope, now in the lee of the scouring winds, he felt exhausted. He didn’t know which direction he had taken, whether he was on the right path or not; only he knew that somehow he had threaded the sprawling carpets of thorny gorse and rough heather, that his ankles had not twisted in the treacherous voids between slippery stones, that though he had fallen – often – among the meadow’s trickling streams, he had not dashed out his teeth or gouged his unseeing eyes.

That’s not bad for a path, then.

Now he found himself stretched on drier stone, pulling raw-skinned fingers across rough surfaces that sometimes held, sometimes crumbled beneath his talon grip. He drew his breath steadily, pacing himself, never pausing to try to gauge the way but always taking the vertical, moving ever up. He was conscious that his trousers had torn and that his knees, where they knocked and pivoted against the jagged and pebbled surfaces of unyielding boulders, left little prints of blood among the moss and lichen. Still he climbed.

After a long time, when he had long since ceased to hear the wind rushing overhead into the valley, when he had long since ceased to notice the cold that was hardening off the long tautness of his brittle sinews, the cloud above him broke and moonlight like a dazzling angel floated on the air. Fitz had come to rest on a slab of something that seemed like granite, as cold as the bottom of the sea and harder than he had thought possible. His bones where they ground on the rock through his skin seemed to burn, and he had laid his cheek as if to sleep on the stone’s stippled and unyielding pillow. He had only meant to pause for a moment. In the moonlight that startled him, falling from above, he stared stupidly to the side, at first seeing only a near foreground of rock after rock, their edges serrated in a sharp relief of sudden silver. He thought as his eyes began to close that the ridges of stone lay like the crests tipped with white that swelled over the sea, and he wondered in an abstraction as heavy as sleep why the waves were still, and how he had fallen among them.

Then something moved.

Fitz felt adrenaline spear through him as violently as if it had been fisted through his guts. He pushed himself to his knees, following the thrashing form with his eyes. It lay at a distance of a hundred metres, on higher ground than his. He found himself running, tripping over the rocks.

The Master recognized him long before Fitz’s muddled eyes could recall the man before him.

‘Child.’

Fitz stopped. His right hand grasped a stone before him; his left foot lay pinched in a crevice between two boulders. He had been about to gasp with pain. Now it hung suspended, exquisite, both in his foot and out of the gap of it, while he stared at the supine form shackled to the rock beneath a splash of moonlight, swept with rain and bloodied.

‘You came.’ The Master’s voice vied with the wind and surfed on its low rush, hitting Fitz’s ear in a turbulent crush of sound from which he felt he had to disentangle before he could understand it. ‘I wasn’t sure you would come. I didn’t think you would find me.’

Fitz pulled his foot free. Even in the moonlight it was hard to make sense of what he was seeing. The Master was dressed, wearing the same clothes as ever – the black suit, the white shirt stiff beneath his jacket. His polished black shoes were laced on his feet. But in places his clothes had been torn open, and his skin seemed to extrude through the gashes in the cloth. One of the soles of his shoes hung, limp, from the bottom of his foot. His familiar hat, his sign and the soul of him, was nowhere to be seen. But stranger than all this, he lay bound to the rock, riveted to its flat face, by five hooped rings that contained his ankles, his wrists, and his neck.

‘Who did this to you?’

Fitz stood over the Master. Blood crusted on his temple. There was none in his skin. His body, paler than his shirt, looked like it had been cast up from the sea and washed over the cliffs.

‘I don’t know,’ answered the Master. ‘Whoever it was knocked me over the head, first. I woke up here like this.’

Something stirred at the side of his vision. Fitz immediately crouched, defensive. He brushed the rock beneath him with one hand, sweeping for loose stones.

It was only another albatross. In fact there were four or five of them, standing sentinel almost in a row, on a near stone.

No sooner had Fitz relaxed than he was forced to spring backwards. With balletic precision, folding its broad wings as it set its body down, another bird dropped through the darkness and landed inches from the Master’s head. It hopped slightly towards him as Fitz stumbled away, inclining its head. Water gushed briefly from its bill, landing on the Master’s cheek. He turned his mouth to it as well as he could, pushing his lax pale flesh against the iron ring that bound his neck. Some of the liquid dribbled between his lips, and he drank it down.

Thought and feeling drained from Fitz’s body while he looked on in simple amazement. Having emptied its bill, the bird with a brief expression of its wings hopped to join the others, ten feet away.