A Plague of Giants

by Kevin Hearne

  “I disagree. The bard has been tremendously accurate regarding everything we can easily confirm here. There is no reason to believe he’s being false elsewhere in his tale, especially since that would betray his duty to the poet goddess.”

  “There is every reason to believe it! He’s accurate regarding Brynt matters precisely because you can check his facts and you are his host! Meanwhile he fabricates scandalous behavior about Nentians and paints one of our viceroys as a murderer!”

  “Interesting. Do you think that he is also fabricating the clan squabbles of Forn? Or that he is sugarcoating the behavior of Gorin Mogen, who did, in fact, invade your country?”

  “I cannot speak to those. But the Nentian portions of his tale are despicable falsehoods.”

  “Do you offer any proof of this beyond your word?”

  “My word is much better than his!”

  “I disagree,” the pelenaut said in a flat voice. No qualifiers, no subtlety. Rölly told the ambassador that his word was held in less regard than that of a man the ambassador had just accused of being a liar. Silence fell for a moment except I crunched into my breakfast, rapt.

  “So it’s personal insults now, too,” Torghala said. “You’ve been dismissive of our concerns from the beginning. And you recalled all your hygienists some months ago, thereby condemning our people to die of diesease. I see what you think of us.” I nearly choked on my toast. Torghala had just made himself toast whether he realized it yet or not. Rölly’s expression roiled from mild annoyance to barely controlled rage.

  “I recalled hygienists from the entire world. We have a severe health crisis here right now far beyond any that might be afflicting Ghurana Nent, and Brynts’ first loyalty must be to the land that blessed them. Gerstad.”

  One of the mariners stiffened. “Yes, sir?”

  “Take the ambassador into custody—but gently, and with utmost respect. March him down to the docks and put him and his entourage here on the first ship to Rael at my expense.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What?” Torghala spluttered as the mariners moved to either side of him.

  “You have made yourself an unwelcome guest by suggesting that I am murdering your people when I’m trying to save my own. Ghurana Nent can send another ambassador—or not—at its leisure.”

  “No, I never made such a suggestion! You misunderstood me.”

  “I don’t think so. Gerstad, take him away now.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Jasindur Torghala, an ambassador no more, shouted that this was outrageous, he’d said nothing improper, the pelenaut was acting out of all proportion, there would be dire consequences, and so on, as he was prodded forward by the mariners. Rölly gave the Lung a tight grin and a nod. “See to the details, will you?”

  “I shall,” Föstyr replied with a small bow, and then he trailed after the mariners, leaving me there alone with my tea and half-eaten toast staring at my old friend. He saw me for the first time and started.

  “Dervan! Have you been there all this while? I’m sorry you were disturbed.”

  “No, that was fabulous,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “Not at all. We knew Torghala would overstep eventually.” Rölly closed the distance between us and clapped me on the shoulder.

  “Why’d he wait until now to complain about the manuscript, do you think?” I asked.

  “He was taking far too long discovering the information for himself, so one of Föstyr’s lads made sure he found out last night.”

  My chin dropped and pulled my mouth wide open. “You wanted him to do that?”

  “We didn’t know how precisely he’d respond, but we knew he’d be upset and do something stupid. Worked out pretty well. I needed to get rid of him because I’ve gotten reports that he might be a source of renewed attacks against the bard, and I also don’t need him reporting to the king what’s being said about his various viceroys. Not that they’ve had any contact since the invasions began. Regardless, I have a feeling the story will only get worse in their eyes, and I’m tired of it.”

  “Bones in the abyss,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t know how you think of all this.”

  “Flow studies,” he said. “Water always finds a way through. The path may twist and fall over rocks, but it gets there. You just have to be willing to navigate the currents.”

  I nodded, not knowing how to respond except with the standard politeness: “Would you like to come in for some tea?”

  “No, thank you. I have to get back to the palace. But I’m glad I got to see you this morning; that was a pleasant surprise. Be well, Dervan.”

  “You, too, Rölly.”

  He strode back toward the palace unaccompanied as if he were an ordinary citizen and not the leader of the country. People were too occupied with their thoughts or errands to worry about who else was walking along the street. They paid him no mind. He wasn’t wearing a crown or anything especially fancy that day, and without an escort of guards to signal that he was someone important, he blended in.

  It gave me hope, seeing that. Everybody was getting to work. It was time for me to do the same. I ducked back inside and wrote a letter to the chief scholar of the university, inquiring whether there might be a position for me when the new semester began.

  I still felt braced for work when I met Fintan for lunch. It was in the only restaurant of its kind, a Hathrim establishment where the chef and bartender were a married couple of sparkers living far, far away from the source of the First Kenning. They used their talents to create gourmet fare: perfectly cooked food and alcoholic beverages set on fire. The ceilings were ridiculously high and the doorways quite wide, but the actual servers were Brynts in their employ. We had bladefin steaks in a salted orange demi-glace and some flash-grilled southern vegetables that must have just arrived from Forn or Kauria.

  Our server must have told the owners that the bard was in the house, for after the lunch rush had passed, they both came out and loomed over us, grinning.

  “Hello,” said the Hathrim woman, who was dressed in a huge kitchen apron smeared with a few sauces. “I’m Hollit, and this is my husband, Orden.” She was probably eleven feet tall, and he had maybe half a foot on her. “Are you the Raelech bard, sir?”

  “Yes. Thank you for your work; it was delicious.”

  They beamed. “I’m glad to hear it,” Hollit said. “And the admiration is mutual. We are very much enjoying your work.”

  Fintan gave them a wry smile. “You’re enjoying Gorin Mogen laying waste to armies, eh?”

  “No, Gorin Mogen is a fiery boil on the ass of the world,” Orden said. “We’re from Haradok originally, and no one south of Olenik really likes him—except for his hearth, I guess. He’s one of the most arrogant Hearthfires ever. But we do like hearing about our people. Especially La Mastik, the priestess of Thurik’s Flame. She sounds like someone of our mind. I wish you had told us more of her thoughts, actually. But this is all news to us, as it is to everyone else. We’re enjoying it very much, and we are hoping she will be able to teach Mogen to burn clean without so much smoke and spite.”

  “But please don’t spoil anything!” Hollit added, her huge hands splayed out in a halting motion. “We relish the suspense. We simply wanted to thank you and refuse payment for your lunch today. It’s our privilege to have you visit.”

  “Oh, well, eating that bladefin was a privilege. Thank you.”

  They nodded and smiled and left us to our work. After a couple of minutes Fintan commented in a pinched voice, “They were such a nice couple. Hard to imagine them setting you on fire with a thought, isn’t it? But they could.”

  “Ugh. Why’d you have to mention it? I don’t want to think about that.”

  “I never wanted to think about it either. But after you see the lavaborn do that to people, you never look at them the same way. You say to yourself instead, ‘If I say the wrong thing right now, will they cook me down and sweep the ashes into the trash?’ ”

  �
�Stop it.”

  “Look at me, Dervan,” Fintan said, pointing to his temple. “I’m sweating.”

  He was. His skin had turned ashen, and he looked sick. His hand trembled. “Lord of the Deep, Fintan, if you knew you were going to have this reaction, why did you come here?”

  “I didn’t know,” he replied in an intense whisper. “I thought maybe telling yesterday’s tale would put it all behind me. But obviously that hasn’t happened.”

  “Are you going to be able to tell the story anymore?”

  “Oh, I’ll be fine. I’ll be fine,” he said. “There won’t be any more of the Hathrim for a few days anyway. And telling the story is nothing like being in their presence.”

  “You’re shaking.”

  “I know. I guess echoes of war can reverberate for a long time,” he said. Reaching out for his pint of ale, he downed the whole thing in greedy gulps and ordered another.

  “Will you be all right today?” I asked again.

  He took a deep breath and nodded. “Yeah. It’ll pass.” He wiped his brow and tried to dismiss the spell by shaking his head. Clearing his throat, he said, “Let’s get back to work.”

  Once he got on the wall and faced Survivor Field, you’d never know he had suffered a nervous episode. But perhaps his choice of a song had something to do with his state of mind. “Something from Rael today,” he said, strumming a chord on his harp, “about seeking your own good fortune as opposed to waiting for it to happen. A traditional nine-liner.”

  Deep in stone and mineral and lime

  Waiting for pressure and sufficient time

  Are diamonds and emeralds and sapphires;

  So in our fragile hearts and minds

  Waiting for affection of different kinds

  Are virtues the goddess admires;

  But do not passively wait to thrive,

  For this very moment you may strive

  To whatever your will aspires.

  “Switching gears now to a very different person,” Fintan said. “An introduction, in fact, to a stonecutter named Meara in the northern Raelech city of Baseld, connected by the Granite Tunnel to the Brynt city of Grynek.”

  The figure who took shape out of the seeming smoke had the mellow brown complexion of Raelechs, with her straight black hair gently waving down to her shoulders. She was petite and had a young person’s smooth skin, unweathered yet by too many years in the sun. She had a long nose and dimples on both sides of her face. Unlike the other Raelechs I had seen to that point, her clothing was more fashionable than utilitarian. Perhaps those blessed by the earth goddess to actually move the earth around carried a certain cultural cachet in Rael, a higher status. Her Jereh band had the brown sard of Dinae on the left, the master amethyst in the middle, and a maroon moonstone on the right, all set in a single person’s bronze rather than the married gold.

  I am a woman who loves her mud. It’s an unusual affection, I know, but where most people see filth, I see potential. And not just in mud but in all the myriad forms the earth takes beneath our feet. It already shows us the vast range of shapes and colors it can take, and our imaginations, combined with the blessing of the earth goddess Dinae, can transform a sodden mess into something sublime. Or dress up the plain in fancier clothes.

  Baseld is an old city, its basic structures built long ago, so my duties are split between maintenance and what I like to call sparkle work. I have been teaming with masons to face old structures with swirled marble and granite or polished mosaics of light jade, malachite, and onyx. And inside the Granite Tunnel, where many people have chosen to live and work full time, I have been often employed to help line the walls with reflective polished tiles that magnify a candle’s light. It is still mud that fascinates me, though. Nothing to recommend it as a material except the shape one can give it, so it is a pure medium to my way of thinking. I have a sculpture space in the city where I create nothing but mud figures, which wash away and melt in the rain, allowing me to make new ones when the clouds part.

  It is not the glamorous life that Raelechs might associate with the title of “stonecutter,” but it is a peaceful, fulfilling, prosperous one, and my betrothed, a soldier in the garrison, is aggressive enough for the two of us. We balance each other out, I suppose: my calm serenity is a foil for the boiling within him, and his energy and passion ensure that I do not get bored. Plus, Gaerit is often filthy. And he has a southern accent and knows how to cook. My kind of man.

  My sparkle work for the city came to an abrupt end with the visit of a courier and a temblor to my home on a misty morning.

  “Stonecutter Meara, I am sent by the Triune Council with orders for you,” the courier said.

  “Ha! The Triune Council?” I grinned at them. “Who put you up to this? Was it Gaerit?”

  “No, I’m really from the Council. An invading army approaches the Granite Tunnel from the Brynlön side. Temblor Priyit is taking a force into the tunnel to meet them, and you are to assist to the best of your abilities to prevent this army from ever reaching Baseld.”

  I snorted in disbelief. “Assist how? I’m no juggernaut.”

  “The Council is well aware. But you are the only Earth Shaper of sufficient power to make a difference. You are Rael’s only option.”

  Dinae and Kaelin and Raena, too, she was serious. “I don’t understand what you wish me to do.”

  The temblor spoke. “We need you to seal the Granite Tunnel. Create a wall that they cannot pass, and once they reach it, create another one behind them. Trap them in the tunnel. They will all die in a week, and Rael will be safe.”

  “But there are people living in the tunnel! Homes carved into the mountain!”

  “We will be evacuating, of course, but that is why we must move into the tunnel to meet this army halfway,” the temblor replied. “Should we meet them earlier than we planned or be surprised by advance scouts, I am taking half our garrison along to provide you time enough to seal off the tunnel. You should be in no danger.”

  The courier’s eyes bored into mine. “The Triune Council is counting on your full cooperation, stonecutter. As is the city of Baseld and indeed the nation.”

  “Of course, of course, but … what army?” I asked, trying to catch up. “This is the first I’ve heard of it.”

  The temblor held up a hand to encourage patience. Her Jereh band was bronze, I saw, not gold. “I’ll brief you in a moment.” She turned to the courier. “You can inform the Triune Council that the stonecutter is engaged.”

  “Yes, I am,” I said.

  “Blessings of the Triple Goddess on you both,” she said, and departed so swiftly that our hair blew in the wind of her passing.

  Temblor Priyit offered up a smirk to me. She was a Nentian immigrant who’d been blessed by the Triple Goddess when she sought a kenning—one of many who came to Rael, since the Nentians didn’t have their own kenning and the Fornish didn’t let outsiders be Seekers at the First Tree. “What did you have planned for today? Bringing up some nice marble for a new sculpture?”

  “Miners sent over a shipment of raw gold-flecked quartz from the Lochlaen quarry. I was going to shape them into translucent tiles for the interior of a dome.”

  “Ha! Well, never mind that. You get to save the country instead. Come with me to the garrison.”

  And it was during that walk to the garrison that I learned that much of Brynlön had been overrun by a people being called the Bone Giants and that the army headed our way had depopulated almost all the Brynt river cities.

  “Almost all?”

  “The quartermaster of Fornyd had the good sense to evacuate her people in advance. She warned the quartermasters of Sturföd and Grynek, but they were either unconvinced by the warning or unable to convince their populace of the danger. The Bone Giants move fast.”

  “How fast?”

  “They’re already in the tunnel.”

  “Shit!”

  “If it weren’t for our couriers, we’d be taken by surprise, too. And we lost Ben
nelin because of their surprise attack from the sea.”

  “Shit! Bennelin lost? As in captured or …?”

  “As in wiped out. Everyone dead. The juggernaut at Fandlin took out the invaders after the fact, but no one could save Bennelin.”

  “Goddesses, no.” Gaerit was from there originally, which meant that his family would be gone. We’d been planning on visiting them after we got married; I’d always wanted to see the Brynt Sea anyway, but now I supposed that dream had been snuffed like a lonely candle.

  “How is this possible? Why haven’t we heard about this yet?”

  “Because the city bard hasn’t been told. She’s being told right now, though. That’s where the courier went after she left us. The Triune has been employing the couriers for a lot of scouting missions and essential military operations, and spreading news wasn’t their priority. But no doubt we’ll hear the bard’s voice soon enough. I understand the Brynts lost several other cities as well.”

  I walked along with the temblor, stunned, trying to process it all, and I simply couldn’t. Instead, I noticed that although the temblor had adopted Rael’s customs and fought for us now, she hadn’t entirely given up on her own culture’s fascination for boots. I marveled at first that I could think of anything besides the tragedy of all those lives lost, but then realized that I was desperate to think of anything else, even something as insignificant as fabulous footwear. I remember the bard at the Colaiste remarking on our tendency to do that: “Small material things can be a shelter from an emotional storm,” she said, “but if you hide away in them, you’ll be hiding from life. Sometimes you have to face that bad weather. It will catch you out eventually.”

  Here I was, caught out and still trying to hide.

  As we entered the stone walls surrounding the garrison, the rich voice of the city bard entered our ears, floating above the city, declaring that she had dire news and emergency instructions from the Triune Council. The tunnel must begin to evacuate immediately because of the approach of an invading army of many thousands. All soldiers were to report to the garrison. And then the details: Bennelin, lost. All but four Brynt cities, lost. No reason for the attack and no hope of negotiation. The Bone Giants appeared to have no kenning but won through surprise attacks in large numbers. And I could see heads shaking, no one wanting to believe it was true, but bards don’t spread falsehoods when they speak to cities; they can lose their kenning that way, as the Lying Bard of Bechlan did, long ago. It was that thought and the thought of seeing all these people in front of me dead that broke through the shock and let me imagine what horrors must lie outside our city, which had been safe for so long. Tears escaped my eyes and dropped to the earth, emotion honoring the poet goddess.