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

Fitz said nothing. There was nothing to say. In some way, somehow, he had always known – all the Prents had always known – that their place at the Heresy was some sort of curse. Till now, it had been inexplicable, a riddle. It would have been better had it remained that way.

‘I knew where the key was. For many years, since long before the Heresiarch died, I have known exactly where it was waiting. Three times over the past few weeks I have summoned the Officers. Three times I have waited patiently. Three times no one has answered the call. I think, when I summoned them, that the other Officers feared I would abandon them. But I would never have done that, child.’

‘I know,’ said Fitz.

‘The other night, after the fight on the lawns, I decided I would take my chances in the darkness, and climb for the key without the call. This would be a dangerous journey, because outside the walls the rules of the game are not secure. Outside the walls I am not safe.’

‘The key was here, in the catacombs?’

‘Yes.’

‘But someone attacked you before you could get to the tomb?’

‘No, I got to the tomb. I looked upon the Heresiarchs of old.’

Fitz shuddered, but this time not with the cold.

‘The key wasn’t there.’

A cloud crossed before the moon.

‘One of the other Officers is playing a dark game. A game within the game. I thought – bringing you here to the Heresy – they would be sure to answer my call. Once I was in the palace, you would have nothing to fear, you would come of age, and I could –’

The Master broke off as the moon swept back into a clear expanse of the night sky. Fitz had been seeking for the light with keen, tenacious eyes. Now it blinded him, and he looked away.

The Master was unable to look away. Two moons in his two eyes burned like silver flames.

‘Fitz, my father was the Heresiarch, like his father before him.’

‘I know,’ said Fitz. He turned towards the valley, and tried to judge the distance across it, back to the Gate of Resignation.

Downhill. Two hours.

‘What you don’t know is that I hated him.’ Fitz looked at the Master. With his arms spread wide, and his ankles bolted to the rock, he looked as if he were being crucified. It was horrible. It was torture. But it looked, too, somehow comical. Two of the albatrosses, sitting face to face, parleyed with their bills and stuttered staccato clicks, as if they were tap-dancing in an old film.

‘I hated him,’ said the Master again. ‘And on the day when he summoned the Officers to the Heresiarchy, to take up the office for which he had been born, on that day I left this place – as I thought – forever. I turned my back on my apprenticeship to my father, the Master. I turned my back on everything I had known, on all my friends, on my own – on everyone.’

The Master’s breath came in short, shallow draughts. Every sentence dropped from him as water drops down a pane of glass, discontinuously and in runs.

‘I lived for a while. I lived, I loved, I made discoveries. I became another man. I became something other than a man. I learned things about the world, and about the Heresy too, that I cannot unlearn. But I was never at peace. Eventually I went to the sea. Maybe I thought I would die there, swallowed in a storm. Perhaps I thought the opposite; perhaps I thought it would be the making of me. The sea is like that – a place where your purpose steals over you, belatedly, as a sun that rises only after the dawn. I had a little boat – two sails, a simple cabin – and I lost myself in the gorgeous whelming swells of the southern oceans. Swells like houses, swells like … like mountains. You cannot – imagine them. What could my little boat do against seas like that? For days I had tried sailing athwart them, tacking up and down their endless slopes while the gales shredded the canvas on the mast. It was no use. I took in my sails, and let the sea push me where it would. I watched from the deck till I was weary. Till I dreamed. Till I raved. Till I collapsed.

‘These birds found me, then. I don’t know how close I was to death. I still had a little water. I had a little food. What I didn’t have was the least will to carry on. And then one day that great king of albatrosses – that one, there –’ the Master would have gestured with his hand, if he could have, but the flick of his eyes in the moonlight was enough, and Fitz saw a few metres away, huddled in the dark, the eyes of the great bird, watching him – ‘he was hanging in the wind off my wrecked bows.’

Fitz watched the eyes that were watching him. They were old eyes, and sharp, eyes that could thread winds in a storm, and pick out a fish from the deep a mile off. He wondered what they were seeing in him. He wondered if there were anything in him to be seen, at all.

‘He was still hanging there, hovering on the winds, two days later when the swells deposited me into a flat sea. Do you know,’ said the Master, as he watched the silent clouds racing over him, as deep as the sea and as swollen, ‘that an albatross’s wings are relaxed when they are open, and not when they are closed?’ He was silent a while. ‘It’s a strain on them, not to be flying. It’s difficult for them to be still.’

‘They’ve been sitting on the roofs of the Heresy for months,’ said Fitz. Now that he wasn’t climbing, and his limbs were