As she cut across the water’s edge toward the trio of rocks, she thought about Horace Dewn. About Bastion Rook. About the Grateful Throne on which her sister sat. Horace had told her that the throne was hers for the taking, if she wanted it. There were conditions, of course. There had to be conditions. No one, save one’s father and mother—and even then—offers you fortune without stipulations.
If Bastion and Horace were offering her the crown, then they would benefit in some manner. But Oriana had to wonder if it was a better option than staying in Torbinen. Her trust in Farris was quickly eroding, and opportunities like the one Horace was offering her didn’t come along but once.
Those troubling thoughts were whisked away at the exact moment a blue crab startled and scuttled in absolute terror. This was also the exact moment Oriana felt her heart trying to jump out of her chest. She heard a deafening roar, as if the heavens had collapsed and were plunging through the clouds. She forgot just how loud an iron dragon keyed up on a diet of metal and stone could be, much less two of them.
Click and Clack bayed once more as they jerked their heads back repeatedly, their mouths chomping down on the rope. One final cry, a great bellow that could have been heard in the wetlands of Baelous, and the dragons jarred the giant loose. They schlepped him through the shallow inland waters, his arm bending in ways that inflexible rock shouldn’t bend.
Oriana heard Lamella and Wurtic’s voices, and soon after the dragons slowed. A ramp of sand met the giant’s bottom half, lifting him farther out of the water. The shoreline was close now, only thirty feet away. With each flap of Click and Clack’s wings, that distance shrunk considerably.
“Get out of the way!” someone hollered, scattering sorcerers and dragon tamers who were spectating the event.
The dragons hauled the giant headfirst onto the sandy banks of the Pinnacle, finally releasing the attached rope as its feet emerged from the water.
Oriana took her time getting over there; she needed to act cool and composed. Her people looked to her for guidance, and a proclivity for frantic and distraught behavior in times of uncertainty wouldn’t do. But dammit did she want to run and fuss over this mysterious creature. Or creation.
By the time she did arrive, sorcerers and dragon tamers had swarmed the thing like ants who’d gotten word the carcass of a worm was ripe for the picking.
“Look how big its head is,” a woman said.
“The head? Look at these feet! Bigger than me.”
“You’re short enough to be a dwarf, Borm, so that’s not very impressive.”
“Ah, shut it, you ugly-mugged bastard.”
Oriana went to tell them all to scatter but stopped herself. They deserved to satisfy their curiosity. They deserved more than that, in truth, but at least she could give them this.
As the crowd near the giant’s toes thinned out, Oriana pushed herself closer.
“Gods above,” she whispered to herself. She reached out, touched the smooth whitewashed sole of the thing’s foot. “Or maybe gods below. This… isn’t natural.”
Deep wrinkles had formed in its heel, and a small chunk had been carved out in the webbing of its toes. The foot loomed over Oriana like a tree, its toes resembling stunted branches.
She put a flattened hand atop her head and measured her height compared to the giant’s foot. It was roughly twelve feet taller than she was.
“You know,” said a familiar grouchy voice, “you could have helped me tie the bloody boat to the dock instead of scamperin’ away.”
Oriana didn’t bother acknowledging Gamen. She was too enthralled with this… this… specimen. She went around to the ankle, huge and bulbous. She dragged a nail across its stony flesh, wondering if real, honest flesh lay underneath. And if not, what would that mean?
“Gamen the Boat Docker,” Gamen said, “that’s what I’ll be known as from now on. Gamen the—”
Oriana kicked him. “Shush.”
He mumbled something. “We’re damned lucky. You know that?”
“Luck isn’t what I’d call this find.”
“Way I see it,” Gamen said, “he could’ve keeled over farther out in the ocean. And we would have never known he was there. At least he had the courtesy to bow out of this world on a sandbar.”
Oriana ignored what she deemed were Gamen’s ramblings. She heard every word he said, but paid it barely any mind. But as she moved upwards, toward the giant’s knee, one of her thoughts—a distant thought on the fringe of her mind—made her consider the Glass Sea’s depth.
Beyond the Pinnacle, solid land plunged off into an abyss that you could not fathom ever seeing, even in the perfectly pure waters of the Glass Sea. It was deep enough to conceal two cities stacked atop each other.
What secrets did those murky depths hold?
A tepid voice jarred her back into the present. “Uh…”
“You’re not the only one who saw that,” said a man.
Oriana followed the voices. They brought her around to the other side of the giant, where a crowd now gathered. “What’s happening?”
The small horde parted, revealing to Oriana something she did not wish to see.
If rock could move itself, the sight before her wouldn’t have been so disturbing. But rock cannot move. It’s inanimate. It’s idle. At least, it’s supposed to be.
The giant’s finger wiggled up, and it wiggled down. Another finger followed, and then two more. It looked as if there was a great thawing underway.
Perhaps there was. There were other explanations, too, but Oriana didn’t care for any of them.
“Everyone,” she said, conjuring forth as calm a demeanor as she could, “back away. Form a circle. Come on, go.”
“Get a move on!” Gamen shouted, snapping his proverbial taskmaster’s whip. He jogged around the giant’s head, finding Oriana reaching a trembling hand out toward the giant. “Ori, I think you ought to take your own advice.”
Every finger of the giant’s hands now moved independently of the others. That didn’t stamp out Oriana’s curiosity, though. She reached farther, took a step forward. She was within inches of the giant’s arm.
And then she jumped. And she gasped.
An arm of solid stone swung itself up toward the giant’s head, dragging with it sand and shell. It left behind a massive trench in its wake.
“Time to leave,” Gamen said, taking Oriana’s wrist and yanking her back. He grabbed her by the shoulders, pushed her ahead of him and screamed at her to run.
Thick sand sucked at her feet. Fragments of shells stabbed into her toes, sliced up her soggy flesh. But she ran. She ran because she knew what was coming.
She heard her breath rasp in her ears. Heard her heart slam in her throat. Heard… Gamen?
She kept running but looked over her shoulder, and then she stopped. Gamen was on his stomach, spitting out sand. He lifted his head like a baby on its belly and shouted, “Go!”
“I’m not leaving you,” Oriana answered, wheeling herself around.
The sudden change of expression on her face—from steely resolve to a deathly grimness—made Gamen mouth, It’s okay. He looked past her, at an Oathbreaker preparing to shield him, and cried, “Don’t you dare. And that’s an order, Oathbr—”
Oriana shrieked. An arm of solid rock—no, it was far more like a pillar—swept downward and more or less pulverized Gamen into a mush of blood and bone. There was other stuff in there too, a soup of it, but Oriana couldn’t bear the image.
Memories hit her hard, or nightmares, rather, of blood fountaining from her father’s face and soiling his snowy beard as he died a gruesome death. But she had been strong then, and she had to be now too.
She jogged away from Gamen’s scattered remains, toward a clump of sorcerers. “Spread out in a circle,” she ordered. “Surround it. Aemon, Fraun, where are you?”
Aemon and Fraun were Oathbreakers, able to shield sorcerers—or anyone else, for that matter—from injury and death. Oathbreakers weren’t common as fa
r as sorcerers went, so Oriana considered herself fortunate to have acquired two of them. But two was never enough.
Both Oathbreakers shouted out their position.
“Aemon,” Oriana said, “take the bottom, Fraun the top. You won’t be able to reach everyone, but do your best. Tamers, how many dragons are in the sky?” It was too cloudy to see even one.
“Ten,” a tamer said.
“Plus Clack,” Lamella said, sitting atop the dragon who was settled near the tip of the Pinnacle.
“And Click,” put in Wurtic.
Oriana wrapped her hair up in a sloppy ponytail; better to wage war with two eyes that can see clearly than two eyes obscured by flashes of amber. “Keep them where they are until I give the word.”
“Ori, this thing’s movin’ a whole helluva lot.”
Oriana looked back. The giant punched his enormous fist into the sand, forming a crater beneath. He sat up and slammed his other fist down, shaking the Pinnacle in its entirety.
“Ori,” said Paerth, an elementalist who stood beside her. He was a portly man with thick chops and a bowl of sinewy blond hair atop his head, dressed in a long green tunic that resembled a gown. “I know all men die the same, but what about giants?”
Oriana clenched her jaw, but in silence shared his concern. After all, how do you hurt rock, particularly with elemental sorcery? Mountains get struck by lightning and slammed with gale winds, yet still they stand. Their forests can burn and smolder, and their very foundation can tremble as the ground shifts and quakes, but they remain tall and imposing.
The giant swiveled his head to the right. He paused, then swiveled it to the left, and for the first time Oriana saw his facial features. He had a nose and two eyes and all the features that she expected to see on an actual person, except everything was larger by several factors.
The giant swallowed. At least Oriana thought he swallowed. She couldn’t be sure. His mouth opened and for a long time nothing came out.
“What’s it doing?” Paerth said, twirling his uneven chops.
“Surveying,” Oriana answered. “Calculating, maybe. I don’t know. I’m not a giant whisperer.”
“We can get the jump on him if we—”
“No,” she said, shutting him down. “We don’t know if he’s our enemy. Maybe he’s—”
The giant interrupted her with a fulminating voice that spat out a string of unintelligible words. Perhaps they weren’t words at all, but rather gibberish. She couldn’t tell.
He slammed his boulder-sized fist into the sand again. The Pinnacle shivered as if a cold fear had seized it.
“I don’t think he’s of the friendly variety,” Paerth said.
“No,” Oriana agreed. “I don’t think so either.” She inhaled a haughty breath of wet salt, then let it out between pursed lips. All right, she thought. She cupped her hands around her mouth and gave the order. “He means us harm. End him, now!”
The sharp yellows and pale pinks of dawn churned. They became a runny mixture not unlike the slime of an egg yolk, and then they flared an eye-stinging orange. The sky didn’t actually change at all; it was merely an illusion produced by a massive tail of fire that soared down from the heavens and collided violently with the giant.
The elementalist who’d summoned it looked on in disbelief as the giant was now on his feet, his face of stone carved into an expression of hatred.
A bolt of lightning crackled and struck the giant. It imprinted a charred patch on the top of his rocky skull, but otherwise didn’t faze him. He stumbled toward several sorcerers. His approach was unsteady and lethargic, but still he lumbered ahead, staggered by a wall of ice that rose up from the Glass Sea and skidded across the sand, shattering into his spine.
“This isn’t working,” Oriana said. Sorcery had always worked. She’d never envisioned a time when it wouldn’t. She spun around, her ponytail whipping her cheek. “Wurtic, Lam! Take him down. Hurry.”
Wurtic gave a thumbs-up and relayed the order to Lamella. They both yanked the reins of their dragons, who were munching on a small quarry of stone. Click and Clack reacted as one would expect, by blaming the other for the sudden interruption of their meal. They snapped at each other and roared with anger, but Wurtic and Lamella quickly brought them to heel.
“What are they doing?” Oriana said, looking back to the giant. He was within striking distance of the outer edge of sorcerers. They hadn’t run. Why weren’t they fleeing? “Retreat!” Oriana screamed as loudly as she could.
The sky rained pellets of ice and fire onto the giant, but he shrugged off the fury of the elements.
One swipe of his arm was all that it took. Or rather, all that it should have taken had Aemon not blessed those sorcerers with his shield. The giant’s fist struck an invisible and immovable wall. He reeled back in surprise.
Above, Oriana heard a whoosh, and two great beasts with scales the color of burnt steel flew toward the giant. Their lips were peeled back, revealing two rows of teeth that had, since their youth, crumbled and devoured the very stone this giant was made of.
Clack reached the giant first. He, as Clack always had, opted for an ungraceful resolution. He slammed his fortified frame of armored scales into the giant, toppling him.
Click came down on his back, and together they clawed and bit at the giant’s spine. They ripped stone from his body, lifted their heads high in the air and swallowed—then went ravenously back to their meal.
Oriana had never expected to hear the cries of a giant, but on this day she did. They were not whimpers or high-pitched wails, but rather brief howls of tremendous depth—the kind of heavy thunder that you feel rumbling in your very bones.
Eventually those noises ceased, and the giant’s corpse had rather crumbled into chunks of scattered stone that Click and Clack eagerly scooped up.
“Paerth,” Oriana said, grabbing his hand, “you’re coming with me.” She dragged him along, toward the tip of the Pinnacle. With a finger on her necklace, she plucked it out from under her shirt, revealing the whistle she used to call Sarpella. She blew into it and kept toward the tip.
Paerth stumbled along. “Hells, woman! What are you doing?”
“Gamen,” Oriana murmured, looking into the sky for Sarpella. A flash of ice dashed out from behind a puffy cloud, and Oriana smiled.
“Gamen’s dead,” Paerth reminded her.
“Before he died, he said something to me.”
Paerth waited for more. When he didn’t get more, he requested it. “Something as in…?”
“He said we’re lucky that the giant didn’t die farther out, in the deep parts.” She and Paerth arrived at the farthest point of the Pinnacle at the same time as Sarpella. The dragon purred when Oriana rubbed her leathery cheek. She stepped onto the stirrup, sat herself on the saddle, and lent a hand to Paerth.
Paerth parted his bangs and took her hand. “Sorry to say, but I don’t understand.”
“Straight out, girl,” Oriana said. Sarpella took to the sky with one rise and fall of her wings. Oriana looked over her shoulder, at Paerth. “The giant wasn’t dead. He was…” She searched for the right word.
“Hibernating?” Paerth suggested.
“Let’s go with that. He was hibernating. Why? I don’t know, but I’m fairly certain he didn’t want to be found. So he wouldn’t intentionally settle on a sandbar as his place of hibernation, would he?”
Paerth lifted his head sagely. He was beginning to understand. “You’re hoping there aren’t more where he came from.”
“Exactly. And for that, I need you. The water’s too deep to see bottom. So conjure me light when I tell you to.”
“Uh… I—ho—what, er… light?”
“Fire. You’re a fire elementalist. So conjure me fire. And send it into the sea.”
He rubbed his nose. “Fire and water aren’t known to cohabitate.”
Oriana patted Sarpella’s noduled skull. “A little farther.” She glanced at Paerth. “Your fire has melted steel before.
I’ve seen it.”
“Yes. Steel, however—”
“Steel only melts at an extremely high temperature. I’ve seen a blacksmith plunge his metals hot from the forge into a tub of water before. And the water does not purge the orange heat, not immediately.”
Paerth’s face told her he remained unconvinced. Still, he offered his help. “I’ll give it a try, at the least. Tell me when.”
“Now,” Oriana said.
Paerth’s eyes closed. His nostrils flared, and his lips quivered. He’d retreated into his respective elemental plane, where magma flows poured from the sky like celestial waterfalls, and unwieldy flames as tall as mountains and as dense as a forest marched across the lands.
He brought back with him a globe of fire that fell from the sky and splashed into the ocean. It sunk like a brick, illuminating what had once been utter blackness. The flares that gathered on its surface vanished one by one, replaced by a hardened black crust. But before the water fully extinguished it, the fireball nearly touched bottom.
Oriana covered her mouth as dread overtook her. “Oh, no. No… no.”
On the bed of the Glass Sea lay rows upon rows and columns and columns of stone limbs, faces of rock, legs chiseled from the mountains themselves.
There had to be hundreds, maybe even a thousand, and that was only from what she could see.
What were these giants? Where did they come from, and more importantly, why?
She hated questions without answers. But she wasn’t sure she wanted answers to these questions. Sometimes ignorance makes life more enjoyable.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Catali hadn’t felt the sting of regret in quite some time. But as she rubbed her nose and felt the burn of raw nostrils, she greatly regretted indulging in spice with Nape. It was good—very good—but then it turned bad, and the good was never better than the bad was horrible.
She had a headache, and now her nose was bleeding for the fifth time since she had woken up. Also, she had a voice in her ear that never stopped talking.
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