At the base of the stairs Fitz laid his palm flat on the door frame and stood, breathing, trying to hold the world in one place. His chest, his head swam. Thoughts shouldered into his head.
They’re using me. They’re using all of us. They’re even using themselves.
Fitz ran into the dark. He didn’t care where he was going, and gave it no thought. If his eyes saw the ground before him, they committed the benefit of that sensation to his feet and not to his understanding. If his ears heard the report of his feet on stone, or if his jangled nerves registered the shudder of his staggering steps, he knew nothing of it – only that his body continued to stagger in a kind of sustained fall through court after court, past the dizzying pillars and buttresses and beams and arches and sills and cornerstones and bricks and posts and lamps and copings and every hard and solid thing from which the buildings of the Heresy had been fashioned, on which they had been founded and from which they were raised. The concrete reality of them, irrefutable and inexorable as the end that lay before him, threatened to grind him like a mill, and he knew only that he wanted, as the Jack had said, to run.
To run, but not like a river – like the wind, that is its own master.
The further he went, the darker the courts became. At first lighted windows and the lamps slung on posts had illuminated every paved stone of every court; now in the outer courts, and then among the outbuildings within the inner skirtings of the grounds, Fitz found himself on gravelled paths among shrubs and trees, winding through paths where he had to feel and hear, rather than see, his way. As he slowed, and pushed against the growth, the darkness, and the thick pungency of musk rose and lilac, lavender, honeysuckle and mint, he came gradually back to himself. Turn by turn, his senses settled, and he touched with his hands, and saw with his eyes, and smelled and tasted and heard that which was before him and around him on every side.
He found himself standing beside a dark path outside the walls of the Registry. His gown like the night had slipped off his shoulders and was trailing in long grass; above the tall stems where they wafted in the light of a new moon swayed stiff heads of seed. A slight chill of damp brushed his ankles where the morning’s rain, collected in the roots and thick stems of the grass below, had begun to seep into his socks. In the night air he heard the last of the autumn caterpillars moving through nearby leaves, their mouths rustling like another breeze within the breeze. On his lips the taste of mint, especially, gathered as he breathed. Everything in the near-stillness collected into itself. Everything seemed an arrow striking home.
A hand fell on his shoulder: twisted, tense and tight, its grasp was as sudden as it was final. At another moment he might have screamed with the jolt and shock of it; but now and in this place, his skin seemed to welcome the pain of the arrest as if it had expected it.
‘Running away,’ said the thin rasp of the Rack.
Fitz stood still, and said nothing. He concentrated on the pressure of the Rack’s second, third and fourth fingers, which were digging into the soft flesh beneath his collarbone. The bruises that were forming beneath each of these fingers, like lamps in the night, both darkened and lightened the touch.
‘You’ve been conspiring with the Master all along,’ said the Rack. His thumb turned in Fitz’s back with the motion of a slow screw, grinding its thread.
‘No,’ Fitz whispered.
‘No,’ the Rack answered. ‘You’re too weak for that. No, you’re not worthy even of his conspiracy. You’re a drone in the hive. He has been manipulating you.’
‘No,’ Fitz whispered again.
‘Did you ever stop to wonder who your real parents are?’
Fitz was silent. The Rack’s fingers kneaded his skin now, as if he were massaging Fitz’s shoulder.
‘Did you ever wonder how it was that Habi Ahmadi, of all people, came to be your neighbour in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere? Did you ever wonder whether those books you took from the library in the big house – perhaps, just maybe – they weren’t just your choices? Maybe the books you thought you were choosing were set out for you, by someone else? Maybe you took one, now and again, that had been left on a table? Maybe the books to which you set your hand had been pulled out, just a little, from the shelf? Maybe the windows had been opened to let the light fall on particular titles?’
‘No,’ Fitz whispered. He thought of the shutters in Mr Ahmadi’s library, of the drift of the sunlight as it moved across the shelves through the afternoon. It wasn’t possible. The Rack put his other hand on Fitz’s left shoulder. He ground his fingers into the bones and muscles around Fitz’s neck, the grip so tight that he didn’t try to pull away.
A wrong move and he’ll break my neck.
‘What were you learning from all those books?’ asked the Rack. His voice was thin, a drill that cut into Fitz’s ears the way a saw cuts into stone, with a piercing whine. ‘What did they teach you? That you were special? That some extraordinary fate was waiting for you?’
Fitz’s mind raced over the books he had borrowed from Mr Ahmadi’s library: stories of adventure and ambition, stories of cunning, achievement and courage, of resolute determination in the face of adversity, of perseverance and endurance. Stories that taught him –
‘Did you think your life was like a life in a story? Did you think some sort of magic would
