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

had counted their way past four dirty arches of sooted brick when Mr Ahmadi stopped abruptly in front of a heavy steel door. They crushed together in the darkness, like half a worm, thrashing. ‘Help me,’ said Mr Ahmadi to Ned, and the two men pushed their shoulders against the metal until with a heavy and grating reluctance it shifted inward – just far enough to allow them all to slip through. They climbed an interminable circling staircase, this one clean, well-lit and clinical. It issued through a small service lobby on to a broad, dark street.

Fitz had never seen a city, and was completely unprepared for the rushing air, the moving lights, the knots of people, and the tall buildings that suddenly surrounded them. But he had hardly a second to take it in, for Mr Ahmadi had already begun to rush them across the broad road, down to a corner where black cars coasted through green lights, and into a large walled park edged with dense shrubs and canopied with trees. ‘Go, go,’ he urged, nearly pushing them through the gates of the park – first Clare, then Ned, and last of all Fitz – as he scanned the surrounding streets and their traffic of pedestrians, buses and cabs.

The park muted the enormity and clamorous bustle of the city, and Fitz tried to match his stride to Ned’s as his leather heels rang out on the paved path that ran diagonally through the park’s centre. Iron benches were dotted along the lanterned ways, but they sat empty, deserted like the park as a whole – with the exception of a small group of men laid out and sleeping, surrounded by cardboard boxes, round a dry fountain at the park’s very centre.

As they passed, one of these men jumped to his feet and walked directly up to Ned. Ned stopped. The man held out his hand, smiling. Half his teeth were gold that glittered beneath the lights almost as brightly as the grease in his matted, dark hair. Despite the heat he was wearing a heavy padded coat with a furred hood over what looked like thick canvas trousers and an even coarser shirt. He looked dirty. Ned tried to circle round him, holding his arm back to ward off Clare and Fitz, but the man dodged with him at every step, holding his pace and his gaze – and always smiling.

Still ten or twenty metres behind them, Mr Ahmadi had stepped up his pace to catch them. Fitz watched him anxiously.

‘Look,’ said Ned to the man. ‘We don’t –’

Aslan trotted up, sat in front of the great, hooded man, and barked.

‘Shut up, Aslan, old mate,’ he said, and laid his huge hand like a mitt on the dog’s eager head, scuffling him hard on his neck between the ears. Aslan was evidently delighted. ‘We’ve got quiet work to do.’

By the time Mr Ahmadi reached them, the other three men were on their feet, stretching and groaning but in good humour.

‘Habi,’ said the big man who was their leader, ‘you’re useless at introductions.’

‘We’ve not met proper–’ began Ned More.

But Mr Ahmadi cut him off. ‘Arwan Abramanian, Ned More, Clare Worth,’ said Mr Ahmadi. To Ned he added, ‘Behind you are Athos, Porthos and Aramis – but deal with Arwan. You’ll get the most English out of him.’

‘And the most sense,’ said Arwan, laughing.

Even his laugh, thought Fitz, was too large.

‘I want to get out of the open,’ said Mr Ahmadi. He was standing off from the little group. His gaze still shifted round the park, watching the paths, checking the trees in succession, as if he expected someone to dart out from behind one of them at any second.

Arwan stopped laughing. ‘Are you taking the boy in?’ he asked. Fitz shrank instinctively against Clare’s side. Mr Ahmadi nodded.

‘Then step inside my office.’ Walking quickly, Arwan led them to the far corner of the park, where a boarded doorway blocked the entrance to a disused toilet. He reached his huge hand through a gap in the wood, up to the elbow, and released some sort of catch; the whole barrier swung open easily. As Arwan turned to usher them in, Fitz realized that Mr Ahmadi was not with them.

Lingering by the fountain, not far from the piles of cardboard boxes draped with quilts and sleeping bags, he stood, legs apart, his head cocked to one shoulder, deep in concentration. Before him in the air his hands danced, fingers seeming to pick from the darkness with extraordinary agility minute motes – or not to pick them, but to shift and move them, as if he were rearranging in the raked light of the lamp above him the little dust that swirled before his rapt and attentive gaze.

‘What is he doing?’ Clare asked Arwan.

‘Thinking,’ said Arwan. He frowned.

Suddenly Mr Ahmadi looked up. His eyes shot across the space between them as if he had loosed them from a sling, and Fitz felt them hit as hard.

‘He’s here,’ he said. Softly though he spoke, his voice seemed to carry, and Fitz realized that the noise of the streets around them – muffled before by the lush foliage of shrubs and trees, by the distance and darkness, but still there, a comfortable cocoon – had died completely away.

‘Who?’ said Ned. ‘Who does he mean?’

But Mr Ahmadi had begun to sprint towards the little hut. Head inclined so that the top of his hat tipped towards them, his black cape fanning behind as he ran, the cloth spread dark against the wider cloth of the darkness, he seemed to fly at them.

As Arwan muscled him into the shadows of the little building, from the corner of his eye Fitz thought he glimpsed wide wings soaring above the park, thought he saw forms shifting in the thick undergrowth to every side, thought he caught on the hush of the night a quiet descant of whispering.

That, or something, had spooked Aslan. Threading Fitz’s legs as a rope