The Giant's Almanac, Andrew Zurcher [accelerated reader books txt] 📗

coat like priests at their libations; he adjusted his belt, drew down and smoothed the long drop of his coat to his knees. He brushed his trousers. His slippers had on them the dust of one or another of the courts; with deliberate strokes, he swept it away. There was no mirror in his room, but he hardly needed one anyway; he saw himself in his mind, and with careful fingers he picked a parting in his hair, and smoothed each strand so that it lay evenly over his forehead, and upon his ears.

At last he was ready. He pulled the door of his room shut behind him, and paused on the top step of the tower stairs. The stairs had a sound like the inside of a shell, the sound of the sea as if heard from a great distance. He walked down into it.

Fitz arrived in the hall and took his place just as the other Prents were sitting. Already the gong had sounded, and the Officers – all save the Master – had begun First Feeding. It was obvious that the others, too, knew something was wrong, that they sensed in the air that same thickening, that same congestion full of omen that Fitz had felt. On his approach to the table, he had seen them whispering, heard them sharing rumours – that the Officers had imprisoned the Master, that the Master had tried to eject the Rack from his office, that the Heresy was under fresh attack. Fitz hadn’t heard every syllable of the fevered, half-voiced words. But now, the meal begun, no one spoke at all, not even Navy. Across from him, Dina’s face showed no trace of the anger in which she had left the Master’s study, but her eyes never met Fitz’s; they seemed to be still, fixed on her plate. After a few minutes, she set down her fork and put her fingertips to the table on either side of her plate.

‘Eat up, rabble,’ she said, her words like metal in a mouth of metal. ‘I’m tired.’

She pushed herself to her feet, stepped out of her place, and disappeared from the hall. The moment her back was turned, from the opposite end of the table Navy rose and scurried to her place.

‘First Prent,’ she said, quietly, but firmly, while she sat. No one demurred.

Second followed First Feeding. The Servers danced their complex dance, delivering platters and tureens, taking away plates and cutlery, each spinning round the other, fleets of them coming and going from the hall. Out of the corner of his eye, while he ate and did not eat, Fitz monitored their regular motion. Every hair on his neck stood at attention; no spoon touched a bowl at his table, no hand reached into a basket for a crust of bread, no cup met a lip but he marked it, and noted it down. From the Officers’ table he caught occasional words where they rode high on the flood of ambient noise and bustle: ‘never again’ he heard the Commissar say, ‘too lenient’ in the big voice of the Jack, ‘I’ll know soon’ in the thin rasp of the Rack. Fitz gathered all this motion and noise, every discrete observation, and parsed it all.

When the attack finally came, he was ready for it. From the far end of the hall, two Serfs began to cross the long floor. The line they took between two of the long benches was unlike the motion of every other Serf. In their hands they carried no platters. Their feet did not dance quick steps between feeders. On and on, inexorably, they came. Beyond Navy’s bowed head, though without looking directly at them, Fitz could sense with perfect clarity their meaning and their aim. He breathed, and straightened. The others at his table sensed it. The Officers had turned, and broken off their conversations. By the time the first Serf struck the gong, the hall was already hushed. The second Serf stood by Fitz’s side.

‘No,’ whispered Fingal with ferocious intensity. ‘No.’

The Serf standing next to Fitz was a tall man with a face that looked as if it had been hacked out of stone. Even his beard, grey and square, gave nothing away. His eyes were sand. In his hand he grasped a large handbell, brass with a thick oak handle. To the astonishment of the entire hall, he held it up and rang it – three sharp, sacred peals.

Fingal stood up.

‘Sit down, boy,’ said the Rack in a withering hiss. Fingal sat.

The Bellman waited for the last peal to cease shuddering in the brass of the bell. When the sound had died fully away, he turned to the table and set the bell directly in front of Fitz. Hundreds of eyes watched his face. His own, he thought, were among them.

‘Fitzroy Worth, Apprentice to the Master, you are called to your Black Wedding. Do you accept?’

‘He can’t do it,’ bellowed the Jack. ‘He won’t even survive the preparations.’

No one answered him.

Fitz had been staring at his plate. Now he drew his head up, level, and looked directly before him. Everything in Navy’s eyes, in the round turn of her lips, in the white tips of her fingers where they pressed the table’s oak top told him no, told him to resist, told him to fight, to run, to hide.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I accept.’

Let it be next week.

‘What must I do?’

‘The wedding party will assemble at daybreak at the Palace of the Heresiarch. Mark well the hour, for the game is already ended.’

The Bellman turned again and – joined by his fellow – strode the length of the silent hall. They departed through the far door.

Uproar followed: benches were overturned, plates and glasses dashed heedlessly to the floor, Serfs sent sprawling as hundreds of Fells, Offs and Prents rose as one to their feet. Fitz had just time to grab the wedding bell by the handle, and clutch it to his chest, before the Jack