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

carried him across the valley and through the Gate of Resignation. They told him how the Master had appeared, bruised and frail, at Feeding, and had been greeted in silence by the other Officers, how they had risen as one from the table and left the hall. They told him how the Master now kept to his study, how he feared a conspiracy against him. But all the words passed over Fitz, leaving no impression at all. He couldn’t hold them.

When he was strong enough, Fitz passed hours reading over his book, and after a few days began again to attend lessons; but though his body moved from place to place, keeping its appointments and making its appearances, his mind sluggish and inert could not help but tarry – in his room, at the tombs, atop a wall in the dark. Fitz moved through his days as if in a trance, even in the afternoons when usually his thoughts were clear; it was as if words, sights, sounds, even smells came into him and passed through his body without his knowledge, as if the shell of him but not the soul remained. Bright sudden things, loud noises, extremities of any kind made him not flinch, but ever more retract; one evening, climbing the stairs to his room after lessons, he had to pause before the top, unable for the present to lift his legs again.

Dina was in his room. Fitz was surprised; he had only just left her, on the stairs outside the House of the Jack. Somehow she had contrived to slip back to his room before him, so quickly and silently that he had had no inkling of her presence.

‘We have another lesson today,’ she said. She was agitated, and her voice seemed to strain tight from between her teeth, like the thin, high note scraped from a string, a string that was about to snap.

Fitz’s eyes looked at her. He could feel them hanging heavy like lead balls in his cheeks. He couldn’t think what to say.

Dina ground her right heel into the floor. She never wore shoes, and her soles ought to have been calloused and tough, but they seemed instead supple, soft as the inside of her arm. Fitz could hear that delicate skin chafing against the stone floor of the tower room.

‘The Master,’ she said, answering the question he hadn’t asked. ‘The Master has summoned us to a lesson.’ Her voice was flat as her foot ought to have been. Fitz sought out her eyes. Whatever the tension in her heel, in her voice, her eyes were serene as ever. The long ice would never melt, there, no matter what heat or frenzy raged in her heart. That ice was equal to anything.

I know, Fitz tried to say. He called us to a lesson, but you never came.

He followed her down to the court, across the flags, and up the stairs to the Master’s own tower. It was a tall tower, and as they climbed Fitz matched his pace, the lifting of his exhausted legs, to Dina’s own. Or anyway he tried, lagging. When he finally caught up with her, at the heavy wooden door to the Master’s study, he found it standing open. Dina put her palm flat on one of its dark, carved panels, looked at Fitz with an inscrutable challenge, and pushed it wide.

The Master sat slumped behind his desk. A grey pallor draped his face, as his crumpled body, though suited in stiff black, draped the heavy oak chair – almost a throne – in which he sat. His eyes followed them with minute precision as they crossed the twelve-sided tower room, walled on every side with bookcases, and took the two chairs set before the desk. Fitz sat on the right, Dina on the left. However difficult the last week had been for him, Fitz thought, it had been harder for the Master.

He looked at them for a long time. On any other day, in any other company, Fitz would have fidgeted. But at last, here, in this study, at the very heart of the Heresy and in the Master’s presence, with Dina at his side – after all the uncertainty and exhaustion, the sickness and confusion of the last week – he felt an overwhelming sense of safety. If he’d told her, he knew what Dina would have said: it’s just the lingering effect of the stack, she’d have said, her lip tending towards the curl of a supercilious sneer. But it was more than that. He knew the feeling, recognized it. After all that Dina had said and done – from the day of his enrolment, to his first case, to that night outside the Sensorium – he couldn’t explain it. Despite that mockery on her cheeks, despite the distance in her eyes, despite her imperious commands, her ridicule, here in the Mastery with Dina at his side, he still knew what he felt.

It was the feeling of home.

‘My two apprentices,’ said the Master.

‘I didn’t think you were well enough to see us for lessons,’ said Dina.

‘But you see that I am,’ answered the Master.

‘What will you teach us?’ she fired back.

The Master regarded her.

‘When I was young,’ the Master said, ‘I lived my life as if in a dream.’ He spoke slowly, and with effort. ‘From place to place I walked as if on air. I breathed light. The ground was not yet hard to me. The cold did not yet sound like a cracked bell in my joints. In those days, my eyes were not yet draped with shadows.’

The Master had pushed himself up, straightening his folded spine, and sat now with his arms flat on the arms of his broad oak chair. Its tall carved back towered above his head. From one of the finials that crowned it, his hat hung askew. He looked at them with intensity, first one, then the other, then back again, his dark eyes boring into them, tight and