And then he saw it: the motley of the Riddler darkly shimmering in the grass before him, as if Fitz could somehow see him standing below the ground. He shook his head, trying to clear his eyes.
‘Ssssssssssss.’
A long rectangular patch of the grass seemed to lift slightly, then to open, and Fitz saw that it wasn’t grass at all, but the illusion of grass; beneath the glass panel that he had taken for the lawn, the Riddler was beckoning to him, from only a metre or two away.
‘Quickly,’ whispered the Riddler. ‘Wolves hunt in packs.’
Fitz ran towards the gap that the Riddler had opened in the lawn, fell to his side, and rolled into the void, twisting his torso so that his feet would drop into the hole before his body. He pushed against the soft turf edge with his stomach, controlling the short drop into the tunnel with his arms. Behind him, the Riddler let the glass pane fall noiselessly to.
‘What is this place?’ said Fitz, looking around. They seemed to be in a low sort of tunnel, the walls constructed of stone slabs not dissimilar to those of the perimeter wall of the Heresy, the floor gravel like the path outside. ‘Is this part of the Sensorium?’
‘Every artery runs with blood – not just the heart,’ answered the Riddler.
Fitz nodded. It made a kind of sense.
The Riddler was unslinging his pack. With a single fluid gesture, he took it from his shoulder and scattered its contents on the floor of the tunnel. Fitz wasn’t surprised to see the Five Fetters, each of the leather straps with its iron buckle and its burnished steel spikes. He might not have been surprised, but his chest constricted anyway.
‘Why this, now? It’s hardly the right time for a lesson,’ he said.
‘A bird cannot fly the nest until it sees the nest,’ said the Riddler.
‘Is the Heresy the nest?’
The Riddler spat on the gravel. He picked up one of the Gyves, and held it out. Fitz took it, still hesitating. Dark and mortared though they were, the walls around them glowed faintly with that luminescence that he had come to associate with the Sensorium. He knew if he pressed his hands to the stones he would feel nothing but cool glass.
‘They smell blood miles off,’ said the Riddler. He tried to hand Fitz the second Gyve. ‘Close the wound.’
Wolves. Arteries. Blood. Fitz stared at the Riddler, turning the words over in his head. The Officers would be coming for him – he knew that much. They would be looking for his weakness.
Nest.
‘Are you talking about my mother?’
The Riddler raised his eyebrows, pursed his mouth, and tilted his head, as if in derision. ‘As if boys had mothers,’ he said.
Fitz threaded the strap of the first Gyve to his left ankle, and drew it tight, driving the spikes into the inner base of his leg. He had gritted his teeth, but he felt little – only a tiny prick, followed by the familiar dead weight in his mouth. His taste was gone. He took the other Gyve and the two Manacles from the Riddler. Each of them he strapped on and tightened, finding the points with ease, dreading the moment of loss but hardly noticing it when it finally arrived. The Riddler held the Collar. He didn’t speak, but waited until Fitz was ready, then placed it with care round his neck, fitting it so that the central spike sat directly over his spine, the buckle lying to Fitz’s right. He nodded with his eyes, and the Riddler began to draw it tight.
The explosions of thought torrented into his mind like ever, like breathing honey, like the thick slip of eternity into moment. He was growing accustomed to it, to the veering, blazing disorientation of it; he had even begun to like it, and thought of it as the fast rush of sense that a jumper might feel before the wings of the parachute opened, or a diver the moment before the plunge hit, and the water slugged the leap in its cocoon of deceleration and clarity. Fitz watched the rush wash over his mind as a storm rips across a flat and ready landscape, savouring the rip and slash of it that meant the eye was near.
‘Fitz,’ said the Riddler, ‘Fitz, wake up.’
His face was there. Fitz held it for a moment, and smiled.
‘Thanks,’ he said.
‘Guess where,’ said the Riddler.
‘Always here,’ said Fitz, putting out his arms to grasp two soaring trunks, beeches by the look of them, standing close. Around him the Bellman’s Wood lay still and quiet, muted in the moments before evening. It would soon be dark.
The Riddler was a long way off. Fitz could see his motley shuttling between trees as he sprinted away.
‘Come on,’ he said, into Fitz’s ear. ‘You don’t have two seconds to rub together, not tonight.’
Fitz chased after him. He tried to shout to him, to ask where they were going, but there were leaves stuffed in his mouth and in his nose a terrible stench, so terrible that he could hardly breathe, much less speak. And he was running, his body jolting like a dead thing at every step, every step like a stumble. Always the light was falling, and he was finding it harder to pick out the Riddler’s coat among the trees, to sight him as he vanished like the glow between the still trunks. The woods were growing so thick. There was dirt under his nails; his nails ached with it, as if he had been scraping the ground, clawing at the earth and the roots, at the clay beneath the soil. The woods were growing so thick. His skin was clammy, moist and cold; he could feel it shrivelling as he ran, slowly puckering as the water leached from his body into the night. The woods were growing so thick that he couldn’t get through them. He stopped, tangled in
