A Plague of Giants

by Kevin Hearne

  “I’d imagine not.”

  “No. But don’t you find it odd that Ghurana Nent finally discovers the Sixth Kenning just when we need it most? To counter our destruction by the First Kenning, I mean?”

  I shrugged. “It’s a coincidence.”

  “A fortunate one, if so. And again, I’m glad you’re here. So let’s do this: I will contract with you to head south and take care of this Hathrim threat, because it is dire. And when you’re finished with that, we can formally set up your clave and do such other business as you wish.”

  That was far too glib. Far too easy. Send me off to be killed by the Hearthfire of Harthrad, would he? Ha! “Let’s set up the clave first. It’s not like the Hathrim are outside the walls this very moment.”

  The viceroy’s pasted-on pleasant expression melted into a clenched jaw. “We are under an existential threat. And you have yet to prove that you can do anything except murder the cavalry of Khul Bashab. You need to make amends.”

  “I most certainly will. Under a contract that is permitted under the articles of the Beast Callers clave, which we will take the time to draft and sign right now.”

  There was no hint of amusement or even patience in the viceroy’s voice as he pointed a finger at me. “I’m not drafting anything for a boy who’s done nothing yet for his people. You can work for me now—as a paid mercenary—or you can fight me. And if you fight me, you will spend yourself to old age and early death. That’s how these kennings work, right?”

  “More or less,” I admitted while simultaneously asking the spiders and assorted other insects and small creatures to move along the walls behind the crossbowmen. They were all looking up at us, not down at their feet. And the viceroy’s sudden ultimatum told me all I needed to know about his true character. He was arbitrary and stubborn like my father and like that cavalry captain. “But I’m not trying to fight you. I’m trying to help you even as you help me. I can fight these giants under a clave contract. And then you and I and the other Beast Callers can usher in a new era of peace and prosperity for Hashan Khek. We both win.”

  The viceroy pressed his lips together and shook his head in regret. “I like it better when I win the way I want to and don’t have some hunter brat thinking airy lovey-dovey Kaurian peace will spread over the world if we just be nice to animals.”

  That confirmed he wouldn’t be negotiating in good faith. He’d be ordering those crossbowmen to act against me soon, so I commanded the bugs to crawl up the crossbowmen and chamberlain and bite at will. I had the wheelmouth crawl up the viceroy’s chair and then his armored back. Khaghesh was the first to scream and start slapping at his clothes, followed shortly by all the crossbowmen, who dropped their weapons in an attempt to crush the bugs chewing them up.

  “Don’t move, Viceroy,” I said as he gripped the arms of his chair as a prelude to lunging out of it. “There’s a wheelmouth at your neck, and he will bite at my command.”

  Melishev sneered at me. “I think I’d know if a wheelmouth was crawling on me.”

  “Not through all that armor of yours. Turn your head, very slowly, and look at your left shoulder. Don’t jump or try to brush him off. It won’t end well.”

  Melishev Lohmet swiveled his head to the left and saw the gaping serrated circle of a wheelmouth’s jaws facing him. That left eye muscle jumped so much that the eye simply closed and stayed that way. For the first time, I saw fear in his face rather than barely restrained malice or amusement. And because I had caused that and witnessed it, he would forever be my enemy.

  “Dismiss your soldiers and your chamberlain. I’ll call off the bugs.” I did exactly that, except for the wheelmouth. I asked him to stay precisely where he was, ready to strike. Melishev ordered everyone out, and I added, “Leave those crossbows on the ground.” They would depart with some painful bites and a lingering sense of horror but nothing worse.

  “We’ll be waiting for you outside,” Khaghesh promised me, and I was sure they would. Once we had privacy, I leaned forward and told Melishev to look at me, not the wheelmouth.

  “I’m not advocating airy lovey-dovey Kaurian peace, Viceroy. This hunter brat can be ruthless, too. I can kill you right now without spending myself at all and deal with your replacement. Or I can wipe out every single soldier in the city and simply take over. As I said earlier—I’m not sure you were listening—if I wanted to take your power, I would have taken it already. Are you listening now, and do you understand?”

  “Yes to both.”

  “That’s good. Because I came to you in a peaceful manner, and you were the one who decided to flex on me, giving me a stupid either-or decision to make. When you push me like that, I push back hard. Just ask the very dead cavalry of Khul Bashab. So now let me give you an ultimatum: either you write up a legal and valid Beast Callers clave charter right now and then a contract for me to fight the Hathrim or I will have the wheelmouth bore into your twitchy left eye there. What’s it going to be?”

  “The charter and contract,” the viceroy said.

  “Excellent. Thank you. The faster you work and the faster you get me out of the city safely, the sooner that wheelmouth leaves your shoulder.”

  He seethed for a few minutes as he got out paper and began to write, the wheelmouth looking on all the while, but after a few lines of preamble his anger melted away and he chuckled softly.

  “You know, Abhinava, you’re delightful.”

  “Am I?”

  “Very. I haven’t been outmaneuvered like this in so long. My own fault, really, for underestimating you, but it’s refreshing. And I’m starting to think the Hathrim won’t stand a chance against you.”

  “We’ll see. Animals burn just like anything else.”

  “I’m sure you’ll find a way to surprise them.”

  I wasn’t fooled. The viceroy was like a wheat dog that had lunged too far, had gotten swiped on the nose, and had pulled back to circle and wait for an opening to attack again. But he wrote a fine charter and a finer mercenary contract to engage me against the Hathrim. I was to target and eliminate all the lavaborn I could ahead of the Nentian army’s arrival in the south. He also drafted a requisition and took me past the chamberlain and soldiers waiting in the hall to their logistic support officer. I was given my pick of provisions, from food to tools to clothes, along with a heavy purse of coins, and they returned my horses all brushed and groomed with shining new saddles. I had the viceroy accompany me on foot out of bowshot range, and there I had him first drop his sword to the ground and then stand still while the wheelmouth climbed down his robe and scurried on its hundred legs into the grass.

  “I’ll see you below the Godsteeth,” I said. “And I hope that afterward we’ll be able to work together to improve Ghurana Nent for all its citizens.”

  “I’ll look forward to it,” the viceroy said, but his eyes already glittered with imagined violence against me.

  I pointed the horses toward the nughobe grove where I’d left Murr and Eep and left him to walk back to his squalid city.

  Despite the crinkle of signed and sealed papers in my new pack, I understood that nothing was guaranteed. None of my contracts would matter if I died, and that might have been precisely what he was thinking: I can promise the boy anything he wants because the giants will burn him alive. And the charter was good only in Hashan Khek, not the entire country; I’d have to get it signed by the king. Even if I was successful against the Hathrim, I already expected a serious attempt to have me killed. But I thought that at last I had taken some positive steps in the right direction. I couldn’t help my family anymore, but I had hope that I could help everyone else’s.

  “And now let’s move right here to the gates of Pelemyn,” Fintan called out to Survivor Field, “except months ago, when Culland du Raffert arrived from Tömerhil.” The smoke from the seeming stone whooshed up and resolved into a bedraggled, weary man.

  Bryn’s Lung, the heart of the Second Kenning, is a strange chimney of coral and rock near the palace that
empties into the bay via a cave. Or, looked at the other way, the chimney is the exhalation of the underwater cave. During high tide, pressure from rolling waves would force water into the cave and up the chimney and create a sort of salty ejaculation at the surface that was the source of many sniggering jokes. It was half seriously suggested as a metaphor for the lord Bryn’s life-giving powers. But officially it was his lung rather than some other organ, and the water plumes jetting out of the top were properly thought of as exhalations rather than ejaculations.

  The reef surrounding Bryn’s Lung was a strange little ecosystem of tidal pools and mosses and amphibians that was closely monitored by a mixed force of church and palace officials. It rose just slightly above sea level at high tide and was fed by the periodic “breathing” of the Lung. During low tide, one could dive into the chimney and attempt to swim down and then through until one emerged from the cave into the bay. You’d either be blessed by Bryn and make it—the only way to swim such a distance—or drown.

  Seekers like myself had to queue up and talk to both a secular official and a church official before diving in, and during high tide, while Bryn’s Lung was heaving full force, no one was allowed near it.

  I arrived from Tömerhil during high tide, weary from travel and grief, my family lost for certain, and had to wait hours before the queue even began to move. The people in front and in back of me had no interest in conversation. Why try to befriend someone who most likely would be dead soon? Like me, I suspect that most people in line had little left to live for. There was only a sullen acceptance of boredom. Or perhaps I was misinterpreting the silence for piety and meditation and the thinking of profound thoughts in advance of seeking a blessing from the Lord of the Deep. In truth I can speak for no one but myself.

  The entrance to the Lung was a narrow gated hall reminiscent of a covered bridge, and to enter the area one first had to speak to a longshoreman who had spoken the same words so many times that his voice had become a despairing monotone.

  “Welcome, Seeker,” he said without a trace of welcome. “You understand that by diving into Bryn’s Lung you will most likely drown and your body be eaten by marine animals and never recovered?”

  “Uh. Yeah?”

  He shoved a piece of paper at me, along with a quill already wet with ink. “Please fill out your name in the blank, last residence, and sign at the bottom.”

  There was quite a bit of fine print beneath the basic blanks at the top and the signature at the bottom. “What is this?”

  “Conditional bequeathal of all your worldly possessions to the government of the pelenaut should you not have an executable will, and of course if you are blessed, the bequeathal is null.”

  “All my worldly possessions? You’re looking at them.” Maybe I still had a house in Fornyd. Or a warehouse in Festwyf. What did it matter?

  “Someone will enjoy those clothes,” the longshoreman said.

  “May they bring them warmth,” I said, filling out the form and signing it.

  “Thank you, citizen. Disrobe after you talk to the priest and leave your clothes with the attendant at the end of the hall.”

  I thought of several quips about disrobing priests but figured the longshoreman had already heard them all by now and asked instead, “Is it always this busy?”

  “No; it’s only since the attack. Lots of people figure they have nothing to lose anymore.”

  “Yeah, that’s me, too.” I moved on so that he could repeat himself to the next person in line.

  The priestess of the Lord Bryn was a kind older woman in the traditional long robe of chromatic blues. Unlike the disaffected longshoreman, she recognized me as an individual who might have a story. But I didn’t want to tell her mine, and after a minimal effort at politeness, I moved on.

  The entrance to the Lung was an impressive seven feet in circumference, allowing some much-needed room to dive in without hitting the sides of the chimney. Some people gracelessly did just that, leaping too far or not far enough and catching themselves on the rocks, dashing open their heads or otherwise killing themselves before they even hit the water. The suction of low tide in the chimney ensured that they didn’t remain floating on the surface, but I had heard that sometimes their bodies would remain in the chimney for a while and people had to swim past them to reach the cave. One of the blessed periodically swam up into the chimney to make sure it was clear, a vital but grisly task I would never want to call my own.

  One last bored longshoreman stood near the edge of the Lung to give final instructions. “Dive in headfirst and swim straight down for the light. When you’re in the cave, you’ll know it and you need to swim for the open sea, which is the black hole of the cave mouth.”

  “What’s the light? I mean what’s making it?”

  “The interior of the cave is coated with organisms that produce their own light.”

  Mincing my way to the edge of the Lung, the coral sharp against the tender soles of my bare feet, I stared down into the roiling cauldron of black water and felt a cool spray misting up from it. The water’s surface rested perhaps a body’s length below, and though I could see no light glowing in its depths, I felt sure it would show up eventually.

  “Jump in or walk away,” the longshoreman droned. “Don’t hold up the line.”

  “A moment.”

  I told my dead wife and kids one more time that I was sorry for how they died, for not being there to help, for not keeping them safe. And then I remembered to be thankful for the time I did have with them, for it truly had been a blessing.

  “It’s all over now, though,” I said, and dived into Bryn’s Lung.

  The shock of the cold stole most of my breath away immediately, escaping from my mouth in startled bubbles, but I kicked and parted the water with my hands, trying to push it behind me and force my body down, and then I opened my eyes to search for the light. There was none, but I kept kicking and stroking, and after a few more seconds I saw a dull gleam in the center of my vision. I kept swimming and wondered if I would reach it, but it grew in size with each passing moment. It didn’t get any brighter, however—just bigger.

  My lungs burned to suck in a deep gulp of oxygen and my muscles cried out for energy, and I hadn’t even made it to the cave yet. Did everyone simply drown in the chimney and then get flushed into the ocean, turning Seekers into metaphorical turds? I wanted to see the cave, at least, before I drowned, so I kept going even though my arms and legs were turning into weak noodles and I was chilled to the bone.

  The glow of the light abruptly expanded in my vision, extending off to my left and continuing below me until I realized I was seeing the outline of the cave, illuminated in green and blue and occasional pinpoints of white. Immediately to my right was the back wall of the cave, its bare rock beneath my fingers and devoid of any life. Fleetingly I wondered why the back would be lifeless while the walls and ceiling were covered, but that thought was pushed out by the sight of the cave floor and the silhouettes of bodies floating just above it. Drowned Seekers, including the man who’d jumped in before me—I’d be joining them shortly as my lungs couldn’t take it anymore. And on the cave floor, a carpet of bones and flesh picked over by crabs and eels and other scavengers. No bladefins, though, or larger predators; the blessed must keep them out somehow. And they must also periodically clear away some of the debris or the cave would be choked with remains before long.

  I couldn’t hold my breath any longer and the cave mouth and surface were so very far away, but I had seen what I wished to see, and that was enough: the mystery of Bryn’s Lung was revealed to my eyes, and there was no longer any need to struggle. I would give my body to the sea and eventually be borne by currents across the world. My mouth opened reflexively to gasp for air, and I welcomed the expected rush of seawater into my lungs, except that I actually drew breath instead. That first gasp was followed by another, and another, and not a single drop of water entered my mouth or my nose. It was singularly odd to be completely submerged, to
feel water on my very eyeballs, yet somehow breathe only air through my mouth and nose. I was treading water, trying to figure out where the air was coming from, when a hand latched on to my hair and pulled.

  There was some spirited movement after that.

  The hand belonged to another Seeker swimming down through the chimney: the one who’d been behind me in line and who couldn’t breathe in the water like most humans. I saw a flash of pleading eyes in the murk—terrified, really—as she tried to grab on to me and follow me wherever I was going. Not a logical move since I wasn’t going anywhere, but she was panicked and rethinking her decision to drown at the worst possible time.

  Belatedly, I realized that since I could somehow breathe and the water did not seem so cold anymore, I quite possibly could save her, and I bunched my legs against the back wall and pushed off, grasping her arm and trying to pull her along with me. My speed was far less impressive than I had hoped.

  She went slack and dead before I had managed four lengths, and reluctantly I let her go. I would never make it to the surface in time to revive her, and it reminded me once again of how I’d failed my family in much the same way: I had been far too late to help.

  But my breathing continued and even calmed, and the water felt pleasant instead of freezing, and it finally penetrated that I had become one of Bryn’s blessed and could not drown or suffer any ills from water.

  I should have been elated—I think that’s the proper response—but instead I felt cheated of my peace. I would have to grieve longer and start some new career determined by the nature of my blessing. Whatever new talents I possessed, they didn’t include forgetfulness.

  Forty-two years old, widowed and childless, import business a ruin, but suddenly a man with prospects in an underwater cave.

  Another Seeker dropped down out of the chimney, weakly clawing through the water, but I turned my back so that I wouldn’t have to watch him die. There was nothing I could do except get on with being whoever I was supposed to be now.