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

stared hard at Fitz. Fitz wasn’t sure he wanted to be treated like a person. ‘Anyway, they mixed so much raw stack in his plate tonight he’ll be lucky if he remembers his own name tomorrow night, much less our conversation. Lucky fool.’

Ignorantia sapientia.

‘The thing that makes the Heresy the Heresy is that we who run it, we who teach in it, we who are its Officers, we take an unflinching view of what is real. We hold no illusions about the world, or about ourselves. Nor do we ever tickle your senses with magic, or strain your credulity with deceptions, sleights, feints, phantasms. We have tried and tested every possible representation there is, and practise constantly the refutation of illusions and false coherence. You know this much from the time you have spent here. Our goal is simple: to put this clarity of vision and understanding to work in the world, for our own benefit. We own many corporations – some legally vested in the Heresy by name, others operated through the hands of our members. Governments come to us for advice; and if they don’t, we remind them – by toppling them – that they must. But this is straightforward; these are the clumsy levers of power that any fool, that the Riddler himself, could operate.’

Fitz sat on his hands, unsure where the Jack was going.

‘We control society around us a little more thoroughly than that. Tell me,’ said the Jack, ‘if you wanted to change a river – change the nature of its flow, the kind of water that ran in it, the sort of life that lived in it, everything about it – would you start upstream, at its source, or downstream, at its mouth?’

Fitz imagined a river and the water flowing through it.

‘Upstream,’ he said. ‘Anything you do at the source will be carried down to the rest of the river.’

‘Imagine a tree is a river, except that its course lies not across the land, but in time. It starts as a seed, a shoot, a sapling; but over time it flows into itself, reaching its sea at the moment that it pours its last burst of vital force into the ripening of its last fruit. That piece of fruit, at the moment it drops from the tree, is the latest mouth of the river of that tree, spreading from its whole life’s course into the ocean of its end. If you wanted to shape the course of that tree, where would you intervene? When would you intervene?’

‘At the beginning,’ said Fitz. ‘At the root. At the seed.’

‘So it is with society. So it is with the Heresy. If you want to control the man, teach the boy. Raise the girl, and you will own the woman she becomes. If you want power among any people, understand its children. Shape the seed, and the fruit is yours; mould the children, train them, and they will grow into the adults you require.

‘We’re not training Apprentices, boy. We’re running experiments on you. We don’t teach; we test. Do you want to know what the Heresy really is? We are in the business of power. We want it, so we create it. We create it by finding out how children work, so that we can use that knowledge to control them. We feed you stack and set you tasks, and then we study you to find out how you complete them, and what sort of person you become. When we have stripped you of every last shred of imagination, when we have scoured and sanded you down, blasting away your ideals, your principles, your passions, your sentiments, when we have robbed you of your creativity and walked off with it, when we have wrecked and wasted the last of your dreams, then – then – we send you to a Black Wedding. If you survive it, we give you a job, and we use you for the rest of your life, because like a knife that has been forged in the heart of some black sun, then – when the forging is at last complete, and you are hard, when you are hard – and not until then – then you can be trusted. Trusted not to think for yourself, trusted not to resist. Trusted not to believe in anything, to stand up for anything. And if you don’t survive – and you won’t survive, you can’t – then at least we don’t have to clean up the mess.’

Fitz felt like he was going to throw up.

The Jack was staring at him with pure and consuming rage. ‘That is the Heresy,’ he said.

‘Stop,’ said the Keeper.

Stop, Fitz didn’t say.

Fitz knew he had begun to tremble, then shake, but he was aware of it in the way he might be aware of a storm on a dark night, when he was lying safe in his bed. The shaking wasn’t him; his body wasn’t his. All he knew of himself was the sense that he was far away. The nausea, the slack and listless paralysis that had crept over him while the Jack was ranting – this couldn’t reach him. He was somewhere else.

‘But you Apprentices – you’re the tip of the iceberg. You have no real idea what we really do. Beneath the Heresy lies a network of dungeons, prisons, laboratories the likes of which you wouldn’t believe. You kids, you know about the Offs, the Fells, the Serfs. You think you know everything. But you don’t know about the Subjects. You never think of the Subs. We keep them like cattle – not the kind you see pastured on hills, but the kind you don’t see, the kind farmers lock in cages so tight they have to be cut free when they’re slaughtered. Down below, in the rock, in the cellars, a dedicated army of Fells tests them morning, noon and night. We feed them strange things, things that aren’t even food; we starve them of sleep; we