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

he knew, from whose library he had borrowed books, a man who had spent the night saving him from fire, wind, earth and water, now sat before him like some sort of judge of the underworld, severe, uncompromising and final.

That was it, wasn’t it. The game is already ended. They think they know what I am going to do.

He looked at the row of adult faces where, ranged before him, they sat. As his gaze ran along the table, even before his eyes settled on her, with a jolt as if struck he remembered where he had seen that woman’s face before – she must be the Commissar, he thought. She looked familiar.

I almost remember.

‘There are many things you do not know,’ Mr Ahmadi prompted him. Fitz’s gaze snapped back to him. The others looked at him, too, and sharply. Fitz thought he must be breaking with tradition. They were expecting something.

‘There’s nothing I need to know,’ Fitz said. ‘I don’t want to ask any questions.’

At that, most of the adults at the table sat up. They looked at each other, clearly unsettled. Dina began to crush Fitz’s left hand in her right. Mr Ahmadi, alone, remained impassive, though Fitz thought perhaps a smile had started at the corner of his mouth.

So you are there.

‘That is also your right,’ said Mr Ahmadi. ‘But now you must choose.’

The adults at the table now regarded Fitz, and Fitz alone, with interest. They studied him as he did them, each appraising the other. Fitz took them in turn: at the table’s right end, the Registrar, tall and meticulously barbered, his thick moustache trimmed at hard angles round his mouth, and on his head the round cap of red; at the table’s left end, also capped in red, the Commissar, of middle age and height, stout as a barrel, her face flanked by brown curls tucked behind her ears; to her left another woman, the Keeper, sharp and small like a tack, every stretch of her skin and long felt gown taut, as if pulled and twisted tight by the plait of gold she wore beneath her green cap, that lay across her shoulder as might a snake; opposite her, next to the Registrar, also wearing a green cap, the Sweeper, a fat dollop of a man whose gold buttons, down the length of his blue felt coat, seemed on the verge of popping off, and whose thick chubs of hands lay holding one another, on the table, like raw sausages extruded from their cases; beside him Arwan, the Jack, as massive and as powerful as a tower, his face all granite, heavy and impassive, capped in blue; his double, the man they called the Rack, ancient and wiry, his jaw stubbled with white, and white the wisps of hair that fringed his wrinkled face from beneath his loose blue cap; at the centre of the table, Mr Ahmadi – the Master – still in his cape and tall black hat; and beside him, the empty chair.

‘I choose Dina,’ said Fitz.

Arwan stood up, upsetting the table with his enormous legs. He wasn’t alone in his evident shock; all of the adults – save only Mr Ahmadi, who now really was smiling – seemed to have had the wind knocked out of them. The Keeper turned to the Rack, putting her hand on his arm, but her mouth, though it moved, made no words. The Sweeper crushed the flesh of his fingers together, muttering. Arwan, finding himself on his feet and his head knocking among the pendant lanterns, recovered his dignity by flattening the creases in his felt coat, then rounding the table and stalking off. He left the courtyard door standing open; in the draught the fire roared.

‘So be it,’ said Mr Ahmadi. He turned to the other Officers, meeting their gazes one by one, and then leaned back again in his chair. ‘I will train him,’ he announced. His eyes, like the fire, seemed to crackle and flame as they settled on Dina. ‘But because he has chosen you, it falls to you to take him in to the Sad King.’

The Registrar picked up his pen with reluctance, and added a note to the foot of the page on which he had written Fitz’s name. Fitz noticed that the greater part of the large white leaf he had left blank.

‘Your death is enrolled,’ said the Registrar. He unbuttoned his cassock and slipped his pen into a pocket within. ‘You have much to learn, but nothing left to lose.’

Mr Ahmadi stood, and took up his hat and placed it on his head. Leaning a little over the table, hands splayed, he balanced his whole weight on the tips of his fingers.

‘Now you must go in to the Sad King. Dina will show you the way.’

Mr Ahmadi nodded to the Registrar. The tall man in the red coat had already risen from the table. Without ceremony he pulled open the low wooden door in the corner, and stood beside it so that the two children could pass through. His hand in Dina’s, his eyes on her flushed face, Fitz followed her past the table, past the Registrar, past the old and uneven door hinged and studded with heavy iron. As they stepped through the passage into the room beyond, the Registrar was already closing the door; Fitz heard it shut snug upon his heels.

And then he hardly cared.

Fitz had followed Dina into a hall of light. The room itself was huge, an open and cavernous, high-beamed space that, like the low Porch from which they had entered, was lit by lanterns hanging chained from the ceiling – but here, by hundreds and by thousands how much greater, both brighter and more golden! Lights washing across its steep nave, lights trickling and in cascade, lights pendant on long and sinuous chains that swept to peaks only to plummet heavy with their deep glow once more, tides of lights, swells of lights, lights that gathered by folds