A Plague of Giants

by Kevin Hearne

  “Recognize my request that you dissolve your naval blockade immediately and allow ships to pass freely up and down our own coast.”

  “Or what?”

  “Or we will be forced to make you comply.”

  The Hathrim hearth snorted. “You must of course do as your conscience dictates, Junior Tactician. But know that the citizens of Baghra Khek will defend themselves if you attack.”

  “You are the former citizens of Harthrad and have no right to be here whatsoever.”

  “Do send your viceroy down to tell us that in person.”

  “You can be sure I will.”

  “Is there anything else?” She turned to us with a raised eyebrow, and Numa shook her head. “Very well. I will send the Raelech stonecutters out to you as soon as I return.” Her gaze swiveled back to Nasreghur, and she beamed at him. “Good day to you, friends. But I should warn you all that we have established a perimeter around our walls marked by a trench. Please do not cross that trench or we will be forced to consider it an attack on our people and defend ourselves accordingly.”

  “That trench is on Nentian soil and means nothing,” Nasreghur asserted. “If we cross it and you attack us, then you will be at fault for beginning hostilities. This is our land, and by definition we are the defenders here, not you.”

  The hearth shrugged. “A disagreement, then.”

  Sefir and La Mastik bowed in concert and turned their backs on us, leaving us bemused and the junior tactician frustrated.

  We reported the details to Tactician Ghuyedai, and he cursed once and spat before nodding to another one of his officers to proceed with some prearranged orders. Shouts and shuffling ensued, and it looked like they were forming ranks to march forward.

  “Before you proceed, Tactician,” Numa said, “may we ask you to wait until our stonecutters are returned? They are supposed to be coming directly.”

  “Perhaps,” Ghuyedai said. “Will you march with us against the invaders?”

  “We cannot directly attack without permission of the Triune Council,” Numa replied, “but we can aid you in other small ways.”

  “How?”

  “They mentioned a trench. You’ll need passage over it. Tarrech can smooth the way for your troops, fill it in.”

  “But you won’t fight with us?”

  “As the junior tactician stated during the parley, it’s your land to defend. You have to defend it before the provisions of the Sovereignty Accords can be triggered.”

  Ghuyedai was not pleased by the answer, but he couldn’t argue the point. And our offer wasn’t insignificant: bridging the trench quickly with Tarrech’s kenning would be far more convenient than breaking out spades.

  “However,” I added, “if they do not return our stonecutters as they promised, that will be a different matter.”

  Numa and Tarrech both nodded, and Ghuyedai grunted. “Very well,” he said. “Let me know when you have them back. I have preparations to make in the meantime.”

  We three Raelechs strode ahead to find the trench the Hathrim had spoken of. It was only a hundred lengths away from where the parley had taken place. The Hathrim had merely stepped over it with their long legs, but it was a bit too wide for us to do the same thing. Its smooth sides and the shallow stone trough in the bottom marked it as the work of our stonecutters. The trough was filled with oil. Try to cross it and the lavaborn would spark it, turning the trench into a ring of fire. And once they had fire to work with, they would spread it quickly. Whoever crossed here first would almost certainly burn to death: that was always the promise of the lavaborn.

  We waited at parade rest, and the sun had sunk only a smidgen toward its home in the western ocean before we saw a single houndsman emerge from the walls with three small figures walking before him. It was our stonecutters.

  “They’re keeping us out of it for now,” Tarrech said, a note of regret in his voice.

  “Yes. They’ve made a huge mistake coming here, but they’re playing it about as well as they can,” Numa said. “We’re going to get intelligence on their layout and defenses from our people, but it might not matter. It looks like they’ve made decent plans. Tarrech, can you tell from this distance whether they’ve salted everything?”

  “A moment,” he said, closing his eyes and visibly sinking into the earth. He was rooted up to his calves in it. While he probed at the earthen defenses of the Hathrim through his kenning, Numa and I kept our eyes on the approaching houndsman. Both rider and hound were fully armored. Tarrech raised himself back up to the surface and opened his eyes while they were still out of earshot.

  “They’ve been blasted through,” he said. “Even this trench is salted. Filling it in will require moving a lot of earth from outside the ruined area, and I’ll need the stonecutters’ help to do it to avoid strain. But here’s a surprise: they have crops on the far side.”

  “Inside the trench circumference or out of it?” Numa asked.

  “Inside.”

  “So that’s obviously not salted earth. Can you do something to it from here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Wait until tonight,” Numa said, “when they won’t see any sign of it in progress. Then ruin those crops from underneath.”

  “You mean try to leave the rows intact?”

  “Yes, so they’ll never even know it was done. I’d prefer them to be counting on that harvest coming in so they won’t make other plans for a few weeks.”

  When our stonecutters reached the trench and we could see their faces, they were uniformly tragic. By this time they knew how badly they’d been fooled and that they had taken money to help the Hathrim establish a city in the borders of Ghurana Nent. And there was no way for them to refund the payment and undo their work; the salting of the city ensured that any blessed Raelech would have to tear down those walls in person, and for that to happen we’d have to expose ourselves to attack.

  One of them saw my Jereh band and cried out, “Oh, triple damn, they’ve sent a bard here! Now everyone will know about this!”

  “They’ll know about the incident,” I admitted, “but I swear to Kaelin I’ll never reveal your names.”

  The houndsman, a younger giant who nevertheless sported an impressive black beard, dismounted and removed several interlocking sections of wooden planks that had been slung from either side of his hound in something akin to saddlebags. When he had affixed them all together and then bound them on the sides at intervals with metal spring clamps, he hauled the whole thing over and stretched it across the trench. It was a portable bridge, eight feet long and three feet wide, easy for a giant to assemble. He waved to it and stepped back, and I wondered if they had made that here out of Nentian timber or if it was something they had brought with them.

  “Go in peace,” he said, though he nearly choked on the words. They floated down to us like dead leaves. “The people of Baghra Khek are grateful for your aid.” That was the third time I’d heard them use a Nentian name for their walled encampment. Perhaps the Hathrim thought if they repeated it enough, we’d think of it as legitimate. The stonecutters made no answer but wasted no time crossing the trench, and afterward the giant promptly lifted the bridge away and disassembled it. We said nothing until he had mounted his hound and ridden out of earshot.

  “I will need to debrief the three of you and then report to the Triune Council,” Numa said, breaking the silence. “And after that you will be sent back to finish the work you were originally contracted for in Hashan Khek. You must do everything the viceroy asks to make up for this colossal blunder. If he asks you to complete work outside the scope of the original contract, you are hereby directly ordered by the Triune Council to complete it without charge.”

  They fairly trembled and began to apologize. Numa cut them off.

  “Everyone understands that you were duped into thinking you were building in Hathrir. Apologies won’t fix the problem. Only action will. When we rejoin the Nentians, you will not apologize; is that clear? That would put
us further in the Nentians’ debt. The Hathrim are to blame for being duplicitous. You will say only that you will do your best to mend the situation.”

  They all nodded and assured her it would be done.

  “Any idea who that houndsman was?” Numa asked.

  One of the stonecutters nodded his head. “That was Jerin Mogen.”

  “That was Jerin Mogen? Is he lavaborn?”

  “He is.”

  “And Hearth Sefir, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many lavaborn do you think they have?”

  The stonecutters looked at each other and shrugged. “Twenty?” one guessed. “Thirty or forty?”

  “This is not going to end well,” I said. “They’ll have no problem setting us on fire.”

  “We should let the tactician know,” Numa said. “Maybe we can convince him to hold off on the attack and think about it.”

  “He needs siege weapons at the very least,” Tarrech agreed. “If he sends men in there now, they’ll be mown down.”

  But there was no dissuading Ghuyedai. He wanted all nations to get involved in lancing the boil of Gorin Mogen, and to do that, Nentian blood had to be spilled defending against an invasion of Nentian soil. He was eager to be about the spilling, but the men he was going to send over that trench would not realize their role was to die; they were going to march, trusting that their general had a plan to win the day, and the horror of it grew in my mind. They would die because of a failure in diplomacy. The wording of the Sovereignty Accords required the blood of a defending army against an invading army to trigger the other countries’ participation, the thinking at the time being that no one wanted to be drawn into a war over minor skirmishes or the work of pirate raiding parties, but now I was beginning to see the practical application of it here, and my stomach churned with sourness. Ghuyedai would cast away these men’s lives like stones into the ocean because that would get him what the viceroy wanted.

  “Give us that passage across the trench now, if you please,” he said after the stonecutters had briefed him on the defenses they’d built for the Hathrim. “We’re crossing before sunset.”

  The way we saw it, we had little choice but to accommodate him. The Triune Council wanted to aid the Nentians without risking our people, and the tactician’s request qualified. The stonecutters worked in concert with Tarrech, each blessed by the earth goddess Dinae, and their combined efforts ensured that none of them had to strain. Outside of the salted zone bordering the trench, they shifted enough earth to fall into it and fill it for about twenty feet across, smothering the oil and thereby allowing an army to pass over it in narrow columns. It would have taken men with shovels an hour or more to accomplish this, but the stonecutters and juggernaut completed it in a couple of minutes, though it left dust hanging in the air for much longer. The result was a scalloped section of earth on our side of the trench that troops would dip into before rising up to cross the new land bridge. Ghuyedai gave two orders: the conscripts were to march on the city under the leadership of one of his officers, and Nasreghur was to take a company of men back to Hashan Khek with the stonecutters in tow and his preliminary report.

  The setting sun warmed the right sides of our faces as we faced south and watched the Nentian conscripts cross the trench. They were armed with shields and spears. My personal belief—a nonmilitary opinion, admittedly—was that they should be armed with full pikes if they wanted a chance against the houndsmen, but perhaps they felt safer with shields.

  Tactician Ghuyedai did have a company of pikemen, I noted, but he kept them in reserve along with his regulars. The ranks of spearmen marched across the trench and I kept waiting for it to ignite, all my muscles tense, but it remained cold and quiet. And so remained the city of Baghra Khek in the distance. No houndsmen formed up outside the walls unless they were mustering on the far side of the city where we could not see. No Hathrim infantry emerged to challenge the oncoming army, and we heard no alarms or saw any sign of activity from the walls. It was as if the Nentians marched on an abandoned fort.

  That changed once they got into bowshot range. A flight of flaming arrows arced high over the walls, and the spearmen raised their shields above their heads to form an impromptu roof. Not a single soldier died from the arrows. They died instead from the flames.

  Once the fire shafts landed among the men, thudding into shields or falling into the earth nearby, the true power of the Hathrim lavaborn was made manifest. From a distance, perhaps peeking over the tops of their walls, they spread those tiny fires to the nearest scraps of clothing. And once that ignited and they had more fire to play with, they spread it even farther, and in seconds there were ranks of men slapping at themselves or rolling on the ground, and they were so preoccupied with their pain and screaming that they never saw the second volley of regular arrows coming, never raised their shields, and those who were managing their personal fires got perforated instead.

  Twice more the unseen Hathrim archers behind the walls repeated the pattern—a volley of fire arrows, spreading the flames to clothing, followed by a volley of regular arrows—and that was all it took for the army to break. The rearmost ranks wanted none of what was happening up front and pelted back to the trench, which never did ignite as we assumed it would. And as they ran from the screaming deaths of their cohorts, they did no little amount of screaming themselves. Meanwhile the lavaborn kept at their work on the front ranks, encouraging the flames to leap from soldier to soldier, alive or already dead, until all had fallen and the field was one large cook fire with greasy black smoke roiling and turning the sunset red as the fat of all those sacrificed men snapped and popped through dusk and into the night.

  I hoped Ghuyedai heard it and it haunted him as it haunts me still. I hope he smelled the stench of those deaths and had it fill his lungs. I hoped he saw the terrified eyes of his men as they ran back over that trench, crying and with snot dribbling down over their lips, praying to Kalaad to spare them from being burned alive. I hoped he’d be declared unfit for duty. But I think those were all hollow hopes.

  A better hope was that the Triune Council would have a good answer for what we witnessed that day, for they would need to respond to this slaughter for sure, and someone far better schooled in tactics than Ghuyedai would need to craft a plan of attack. We had seen no evidence that they had a true fury among them, but the city of Baghra Khek clearly had enough lesser lavaborn to burn whatever they wanted. With flights of arrows and fire they had slain close to two thousand men without ever exposing themselves to danger. A chill in my guts told me many more would have to die before the Hathrim were defeated.

  “Meanwhile,” the bard said, returning to his current self and pulling out another seeming sphere, “the world’s first plaguebringer still had a Seeking to conduct in the aftermath of Madhep’s death.”

  The figure of Abhinava Khose materialized in the smoke, and he, too, looked subtly different. Taller and older as a result of the aging penalty exacted by his kenning and with a look in his eyes that already hinted that the price of his power was grinding away his soul.

  I gave Madhep to Kalaad in the sky, but when it came to the soldiers, I looked to Tamhan with pleading eyes. He did it, giving them more respect than they had given us, and then we moved our camp. The tired kids got on the horses, and we hiked a couple of miles in the darkness before stopping once more for the night. One of them noticed aloud that she hadn’t been bitten or even harassed by a single insect since she’d been in my company, and once she said that, the others realized that it was true for them as well. This small relief from a lifelong source of annoyance impressed them, I think, even more than summoning the swarms. Causing bugs to bite was not that big a deal to them. Preventing bugs from biting, though? That was miraculous.

  It was wearying to pretend I was comfortable in a congregation of strangers. They all had been recruited by Tamhan, and to be honest with myself, even he was familiar only by the grace of a single day. I had known of him for a lo
ng time, but we hadn’t really spoken until the day before, and though we got along well, he also got along well with everyone, and I couldn’t assume that he felt closer to me than any of the Seekers. Because Tamhan looked to me, and I suppose because I was the one with the kenning, they all looked to me to lead them when what I wished for the most was to walk off alone and give my frustration and regret its proper voice and time. I saw in their eyes that they carried a set of expectations in their field bags that I couldn’t fulfill. I couldn’t make their lives better. All I could do was lead them to the nughobe grove and hope that at least one of them would be blessed.

  The fear growing in my chest was that they might all die. In the eyes of the authorities of Khul Bashab, I would be responsible for killing all these kids. And I’d be responsible for the soldiers’ deaths and Madhep’s as well: authorities never take responsibility for their misconduct.

  I already felt responsible for those men, and it was a heavy burden in my mind on top of all the others, one I would have to carry for a long time. I might have doomed all chance of being accepted or even allowed to exist by the government with a single uncontrolled flare of my temper. That one unguarded reaction might prevent me from doing so much good.

  There are healers I know, for example, who believe that insects can spread disease. If that is a truth and I can stop insects from biting, then think how many lives I could save if only I was allowed. Would that not in time make up for the lives I took?

  But already I see no path by which I can be forgiven for what happened. Madhep’s family wouldn’t forgive me, if any of them could be found, and Tamhan’s father would make sure the viceroy didn’t either. Not that the viceroy would need an incentive to turn against me after I killed a bunch of his men and took their horses.

  We started small fires and tried to sleep, hoping perhaps that we would wake and find it had been a nightmare, easily banished. I took care to make sure everyone was within a sphere of my protection before picking my place to lie down, close to Tamhan but not close enough.