A Plague of Giants

by Kevin Hearne

  When the bard finished speaking to the city, the temblor had me climb the steps to the garrison tower, where we found the bard waiting. Her name was Laera, and she’d been the only bard in Baseld since I’d moved there.

  “Temblor, I’ve been expecting you,” she said.

  “My thanks. Can you project my voice to just the garrison, please?”

  “Certainly.”

  Priyit first called everyone to assemble in the training ground, and while that happened another temblor joined us, an older man I think Gaerit didn’t particularly like. But it was Priyit who spoke once the soldiers had mustered. “May the Huntress bless you all today. Half of the garrison will go with me into the tunnel as soon as possible to stop the Bone Giants before they get here. The other half shall remain here under command of Temblor Maerton to defend the city should we fail, provide a rear guard as citizens evacuate, and keep order in the meantime among a frightened populace. Neither duty is enviable or glorious, but they are both necessary. May I have volunteers to go into the tunnel?”

  Every single soldier in the garrison volunteered, so Priyit first picked anyone who had family in Bennelin, including Gaerit, figuring they’d like to get a measure of revenge, and then gestured to the soldiers massed on the eastern side of the training ground and said, “Plus you lot. Armor, shields, and spears. No staves. Fast as you can. We leave in a quarter hour.”

  Gaerit and I were able to exchange a glance but not speak in advance of mobilization; we marched toward the Granite Tunnel a half hour after the temblor’s orders, and they armed me, too, in spite of the fact that I hadn’t practiced with weapons since my days in the Colaiste. I found Gaerit and matched pace next to him. His jaw was set like a jagged cliff, and his eyes were dark with the promise of violence.

  Trying to lighten his mood, I waggled the shield and spear and said, “I hold these in front of me, right?” He didn’t think it was funny; his expression even registered disgust that I would try to joke right then, and I felt alone and unloved like barren soil. But then I reflected that perhaps this was a mood that shouldn’t be lightened. If ever there was a time for him to feel violent and justified in doing so, it was now. My selfish desire to have one last soft look from him before we met an uncertain future had caused me to open my mouth when it should have stayed shut.

  “I’m sorry, Gaerit,” I whispered to him. “I’m just nervous. Fight well for the Huntress. Be safe. I love you.”

  I started to lengthen my stride to catch up with the temblor near the front, but Gaerit called me back. The bunched muscles in his jaw relaxed as I waited, looking at him with a question in my brows. His shoulders relaxed, the smooth brown skin stretched over his arms arranging itself into planes I knew well, the way they did when he wasn’t tense.

  “Forgive me, Meara,” he said. “I didn’t mean to be curt with you. I’m simply upset about the news. My family …”

  “I know, I know. All the things I want to do I can’t do while we’re on the march, so I said something stupid. I’m sorry.”

  His mouth slid into a half grin. “We’ll go down to the riverbank later, roll around in the mud, and make love like otters, and we’ll both feel better.” The soldiers near him heard that, eyes shifting and smirks appearing on their faces, but I didn’t care.

  “I hope you’re not just saying that, because rolling in the mud is a serious promise.”

  “I will keep it. Because I love you, too. Now go march with the temblor. I know you’re supposed to save us all somehow.”

  No need for a half grin now: reassured, I beamed at him and scurried forward to join the temblor and caught up with her as the entrance to the Granite Tunnel gaped before us.

  It was fretted with the ornate bas-relief sculpture of stonecutters and masons long since past, and the weight of the mountain above it never loomed so heavy. The tunnel connecting Rael and Brynlön under the Poet’s Range had been the work of three hundred stonecutters, working in concert to create not only a vital and safe trade route between our countries but a wonder of the world, a testament to the power of our kenning. The same three hundred stonecutters also had created the Basalt Tunnel to Ghurana Nent underneath the Huntress Range, allowing the breadth of the continent to be connected via the Merchant Trail. It felt unwholesome to wall that up, to tarnish such a legacy and a monument in the space of minutes, to effectively destroy its function, however temporarily. But I supposed it was less unwholesome than everyone I knew dying at the sword of something called a Bone Giant.

  People streamed out of the tunnel as we marched in, bundles held under their arms and slung on their backs, some pulling carts or riding horse-drawn wagons. Worried evacuees from the tunnel warrens, wondering where they should go. And some of them—quite a few of them—were Brynts who must be refugees, running in advance of the army. It was their bleak, hopeless faces that drove home to me the urgency of our mission. How horrific it must be to be forced out of your home with nothing but the clothes on your back. If we failed—more specifically, if I failed—to hold this army back, then everyone in Baseld and perhaps beyond would wear the same bleak expressions.

  I thought perhaps I finally had an insight to what coal must feel like being pressed into a diamond.

  I was marching near the front of the column with Temblor Priyit some while later when a young courier sped up from the Brynt side of the tunnel and halted in front of her, saluting and stating that he had a scouting report.

  “The enemy forces are only a quarter hour away, Temblor, moving at double time.”

  “Size of force?”

  “They are depleted—they’ve been drinking from the Gravewater, and it’s taken a toll. But they are still an army of six or seven thousand.”

  We were four hundred.

  The temblor turned to me. “Stonecutter Meara. Can you tell how far into the tunnel we are right now?”

  “Aye. A moment.” I removed my boots, closed my eyes to block out visual distraction, and stretched out with my kenning to sense the mountain above us and the long, smooth tunnel carved out of it by stonecutters long dead. I located my position within it and opened my eyes. “A little less than a quarter of the way, Temblor.” The Bone Giants moved fast, indeed. Had we delayed, we might not have been able to meet them in the tunnel at all. She gave a curt nod and addressed the courier once more. “So that should mean that they are entirely within the tunnel at this point if they are marching in anything like a formation and not stretched out.”

  “I believe that is correct, Temblor.”

  “Excellent,” she said with a tight grin of satisfaction. “Stonecutter, begin constructing your wall right here. When it’s finished, seal them in at the other end with another wall.”

  “My range may not be that great, Temblor.”

  The satisfaction disappeared. “It’s not? How far back can you build another wall?”

  “I have never tried to build a wall out of my sight, so I am unsure. A thousand lengths? Two thousand, maybe?”

  A frown now. “That won’t trap enough of them. They could retreat and get out.”

  “But it would at least keep Baseld safe until the Council can send a juggernaut to finish them,” the courier said.

  “True enough. Stopping them is the primary objective, and elimination is secondary. Please begin, stonecutter, building from the top down. I will array my forces in front of you to give you time to complete it should it be necessary.” Noises echoing off stone from down the tunnel suggested that it might. The temblor paused, listening, then continued. “Leave some room at the bottom so that we may execute an orderly retreat underneath, and once we’re safe, you complete it. We’ll worry about sealing them in from behind later.”

  She shouted orders to the column, and they marched ahead and filled the width of the tunnel in a tight formation, shields overlapping and spears pointed outward. Gaerit was among them, and he gave me the tiniest of nods and a hint of a smile as he passed by. He was in the third row, which worried me. I had to build
the wall in minutes and give them enough time to retreat behind it.

  I couldn’t think about that pressure, though. I had to focus on the stone and soil of the mountain above and reshape it to fulfill a new purpose. This was not a simple movement of virgin earth but rather a modification of older work. The ceiling had been strengthened and solidified by the will of three hundred stonecutters. I had to break through that by the force of my will alone and then draw down a thin slice of mountain to seal off the tunnel.

  The tight seals of the past did not wish to be broken, however, and they were much more powerful than I had anticipated. My forebears had shored up the ceiling as strongly as they possibly could to prevent collapse even in an earthquake. And so the temblor interrupted me as I was trying to pierce through the layers of protection because it had been several minutes, the sound of the approaching enemy was growing louder, and nothing had happened.

  “What’s the delay, stonecutter?” she growled. I explained and said the wall would form quickly once I broke through the protections of the past. “Hurry it up,” she said, as if I had been idle.

  Spreading my efforts or my focus across the width of the tunnel wasn’t working; I was peeling away strips of protection like an onion, but it felt as if I was making very little progress. I tried a different tactic, focusing my kenning on a small area in the middle and drilling up through the seals. That went faster, and once my kenning touched virgin rock above, I spread out my focus across the width of the tunnel again but only a single length’s thickness and attacked the seals from above, prising them apart, until they shattered into pieces like shards of glass. Nothing that anyone else could see, of course; it was simply what it felt like to me in the trance of my kenning.

  With a strip of the seals gone I could now draw down the mountain, and it was then that it occurred to me that it would have been far wiser and much quicker to deal with the seals on the floor of the tunnel—which were much thinner and did not involve the potential for a cave-in once broken—and make a wall rise up instead of descend, but it was too late to begin anew and those hadn’t been my orders. In the gap between switching my focus from one task to another, the outside world penetrated. Combat had been joined, and the Bone Giants fell upon our soldiers with their strange swords. Over the tops of rows of Raelech heads I saw the heads and shoulders of pale, ghastly creatures floating above them, swinging their weapons down and sometimes crashing into shields, sometimes recoiling as spears thrust out from the formation and pierced their bodies; then, when they were yanked out, the barbs pulled forth intestines through the gaps in their bone armor. The blood, I thought, looked obscene against their white skin.

  The temblor, still standing nearby, looked up and saw nothing before turning to me with a snarl on her face, all her affable demeanor gone. She shouted over the din, “The wall, stonecutter! Get me that wall now or we’re all going to die!”

  It rocked me back into focus, and I stretched out with my senses to the strip of virgin rock and chanted the stonecutter’s hymn, providing structure to my thoughts and a shape to the kenning. Rock sheared and shifted, popped and cracked as it began to slide down from the ceiling in a slab one length wide, and all my muscles tensed with the strain of containing it. The mountain above was heavy and wanted the tunnel closed.

  “That’s it! Faster!” the temblor said.

  “I can’t go faster,” I explained through gritted teeth. “I have to control the descent or I won’t be able to stop it.”

  “The floor will stop it!”

  “No—you don’t understand. I mean the seals are fragile now.”

  “As fast as you can, stonecutter. Our warriors are strong but cannot hold forever—no, don’t look! Concentrate on your job.”

  “Quit interrupting me and I will.”

  The mountain wanted to heal itself; the Granite Tunnel was an open wound, and now that it felt a break in the seals keeping it out, it wanted to reclaim all that space. Letting the rock descend was easy: all my straining was to keep the edges of the seals in the ceiling intact, to prevent them from expanding.

  Despite the wall descending, the clash of steel and the juicy noises of flesh being torn and blood being spilled only grew louder. Death screams floated above it all, and they chilled my spine. I kept my eyes averted from the battle, looking at the stone above, and soon it had descended low enough that I couldn’t see the fight in my peripheral vision. That was some relief, but halting the descent of the slab short of the floor was a monumental effort that left me sweating and gasping with the beginnings of a headache. The soldiers would have to drop prone and roll underneath, and the temblor was yelling that the Raelechs should begin doing precisely that.

  “Retreat under the wall! Your duty is done! Retreat now! Retreat!”

  Soon the soldiers began to appear, and the temblor had them stand at the ready with their spears. “If one of those giants comes through, you stab him and let me know,” she said, and then to me, “As soon as the enemy appears, you drop the wall the rest of the way, understand?”

  “Understood,” I managed, my hands braced on my knees as I bent, trying to recover my breath. My arms trembled with exhaustion. Earth shaping of this magnitude drained one so quickly; that was why they had used three hundred stonecutters in the past to do this work.

  Ten warriors rolled underneath the slab and stood, their faces grim and even frightened. Another ten, and ten more, helped to their feet and deployed in ranks as the temblor continued to shout orders. Ninety warriors in all came through, and then a Bone Giant appeared underneath the stone on the far side and was immediately speared through the neck.

  “Giants!” the nearby warriors cried, and even as they did so another appeared, and another, at different points across the width of the tunnel, and the temblor turned to me. “Drop the wall now, stonecutter.”

  “But more of our people might be coming,” I said. None had come through close to our side of the tunnel, and that was the side on which my fiancé had been deployed.

  “Now, stonecutter! The rest of the garrison is dead or we wouldn’t see Bone Giants coming through!”

  “But … where’s Gaerit? I don’t see Gaerit!”

  The temblor grabbed me by the tunic and growled. “He is either here or he isn’t. If he isn’t, he’s not going to be coming through just because you wish it. But Rael remains in danger until you do your job, so do it already!”

  A Bone Giant tried to roll out from under the wall near us, and the warrior standing sentinel there promptly speared him in the throat. The bodies of the first few giants conveniently prevented the advance of others underneath the wall, and we could effectively hold them now, but there would be no more Raelechs returning either. The temblor was right: either my fiancé was on our side of the wall and I hadn’t seen him or he was already dead on the other side with three hundred other soldiers.

  “All right, all right,” I said to get the temblor to back off, but my eyes searched desperately over her shoulder for some glimpse of Gaerit. I didn’t see him, and it drained my spirit more than my earth shaping had. Already I felt like a failure. If I had not been so slow in breaking through the seals, those warriors would not have died. Or if the courier had warned us just a little bit sooner. If we had started the process earlier in the tunnel. If I hadn’t been the only stonecutter in Baseld. If we had a juggernaut to send instead.

  “Hurry up!” the temblor barked.

  Her peremptory command and lack of empathy punctured what little control I had, and in a momentary flash of anger I let the stone drop down abruptly, crushing anyone underneath it and sealing off the tunnel. But I had paid no attention to the seals as I released the stone, no attention to the ripple effect such a sudden shift would have on the mountain above. A shock wave tremor curled through the seals of the old stonecutters, and they shattered at the top of the wall. And that breakage triggered more and more as the pressure of the mountain rushed to fill a void, and the seals began to unravel on either side of the wall,
too fast and too strong for me to contain them. The mountain fell down on top of us from the center outward, crushing everyone but me and the temblor underneath tons of granite. Our kenning ensured that we could not die by any force of earth. The rock weighed on my head and shoulders like the hand of a gentle friend, no more, and it would be the same for the temblor. Not so for anyone else. The Bone Giants were no more, but neither were the Raelechs. I had managed in a moment of weakness to kill everyone who was not already dead and turn the Granite Tunnel into a long, silent tomb. The Poet’s Range had closed itself.

  The enormity of it crushed me since the mountain could not. I wept in the dark and the dirt where no one could hear me, and when my breaths became short, I exerted myself and cleared some space around me so that I could take in a proper lungful of air. I realized that the temblor would need air, too, for though she could punch through almost anything with the strength of her kenning, she’d need to breathe first. After the initial trial of their kenning, temblors did not do well underground.

  I could sense the human-size absence of rock nearby and shifted the earth so that I could move toward her and bring her into my hollowed-out space with a little bit of breathing room. She coughed and sputtered as the rock and sediment shifted away, taking in huge gasps of air.

  “Wondered if you were going to let me suffocate,” she said.

  “What? Of course not!”