A Plague of Giants

by Kevin Hearne

  She nodded, allowing that such knowledge would have been outside my experience. “These barracks are on one side of an open courtyard, and on the other is the armory.” She paused at one of three open doorways on the left side of the hall and gestured inside. “Here are your quarters. Standard gerstad accommodations. You have an office in front, your personal space in the back.”

  “I have an office? For office work?” I peered through the door to find a bare wooden desk and chair with a couple of chairs in front of it for guests. A door behind the desk presumably led to a bedroom. I wanted to collapse on it already but also had some anxiety about making the bed properly afterward. I was fairly certain that I would not be able to do it according to regulations.

  “You’re an officer,” she said. “But you won’t have much use for it. You won’t have any paperwork to speak of. Report to the armory and see Mynstad du Möcher for a uniform and sundries. Anyone can direct you to the mess hall for meals. I’ll let you settle in for the day but report to me at the Wellspring in the morning for duty. We’ll begin your training then.”

  “Okay. I mean, yes, Second Könstad. Am I supposed to salute or something?”

  “I’m not a stickler for that sort of thing, but some people are. Ask the Mynstad to walk you through the proprieties so that you don’t accidentally offend anyone. I’d do it myself, but I need to return.”

  “Right, right, you’re busy. Thank you.”

  “If you don’t mind the question, how old are you, Gerstad du Raffert?” she asked. I told her, and she remarked on how unusual it was to have a new tidal mariner in his middle age.

  “Forgive me, but are you not nearly the same age?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, her expression turning sad. “I am twenty-nine. War always takes your life. Sometimes it’s just not all at once.”

  I remembered that when we met at the chowder house, Fintan had mentioned that Nara du Fesset would show up in his tale eventually. I hoped she was well wherever she was and was completing her mission safely. Mynstad du Möcher got a mention, too; I’d have to congratulate her on her few seconds of fame.

  Elynea invited me to accompany her to work to meet her new employer, so after we dropped off the kids at school, we trekked to the southwestern industrial district to the furniture workshop of Bel Tes Wey, an older Fornish woman who had planted large trees all around her building that spread their canopy over the roof. Those trees, I realized, could be seen from the wall during the bard’s performances. I had assumed they indicated a public park of some kind, but no, it was a business doubling as a home. I could see structures built among the branches. Elynea followed my eyes and answered the question I was thinking.

  “Yes, she lives up there, along with a couple of her clan members. A little bit of home, she says. Can’t stand the thought of sleeping on ground level.”

  “Which clan?”

  “The Green Beetles. Her nephew ships back and forth to Forn, bringing up hardwoods for her. His wife—her niece, I guess—is just a month or two away from becoming a master herself, so Bel is ready for a new apprentice and there’s plenty of work right now. I showed her yesterday that I already knew a couple of things, the only thing Garst was good for, and she said she’d take me on.”

  The shop smelled divine even if sawdust coated almost everything. Invigorating, the scent of wood. I saw nine Brynts in the shop, all working on something or other, and two diminutive white women under five feet tall working among them. The older of them came over when she spied Elynea. Hands gnarled and face weathered by time, back somewhat bent by the weight of age and her hair gone gray, she nonetheless possessed a quick step and a ready smile.

  “Ah, my new apprentice! Welcome to your first day. Who’s this, then?” she asked, chucking her chin at me.

  “Oh!” Elynea said, looking at me. “This is … my friend, Master Dervan du Alöbar.”

  Yes, friend: that worked. A friend and not a husband who couldn’t save his dying wife. Elynea was not Sarena and didn’t need me to save her. I’d taken the time last night to work that much out, at least: since I couldn’t save Sarena, I’d been trying to save Elynea instead even though her situation was not remotely similar. Strange how we unconsciously steer ourselves into new spectacular mistakes while trying to avoid repeating our past failures.

  “It’s a pleasure,” Bel said, nodding once to me out of politeness but clearly not interested. She had work on her mind and turned to Elynea. “Ready to begin?”

  We waved farewell, and I took myself to the armory for a workout with Mynstad du Möcher, whose foul mood from earlier had lifted. “Nara is back!” she told me, and her grin was huge.

  “Ah, excellent! She’s well?”

  The grin faded. “Recuperating, but it’ll be fine.”

  That didn’t sound good. “Recuperating?”

  “She broke an arm, but it was clean and should heal straight. The most important things are that she’s back and she feels good about whatever she did.”

  “She still can’t tell you?”

  The Mynstad shook her head. “Nope. Terrible secret. And I don’t care. She’s here, and she won’t be doing anything like it again—she promised me that. So that’s good enough for me.”

  It gratified me to hear that Nara felt good about the mission, whatever it was. I’d worried that she would let guilt gnaw away at her confidence until she felt worthless.

  The morning went so well that I wondered if Fintan would tell me over lunch that he had good news, too: that practicing presence had eliminated his nervous condition and nightmares. That turned out not to be the case.

  “I still had nightmares,” he told me when I met him, “not that I expected them to disappear immediately. Still, I went to see Kindin Ladd this morning because I think the idea has merit. He led me through some mental exercises, and I’d like to go back to the Hathrim restaurant again if you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all.”

  I noticed that there were new servers there, and once Orden and Hollit came out to say hello, I apologized for not sending over Elynea, explaining that she had found another job already. They waved away my concern and thanked us for coming back.

  “We really enjoy the food,” Fintan said. I watched him to see how he was doing. No visible signs of distress, but perhaps it would hit him once the giants left the table, as it had before. The Hathrim thanked us again and lumbered back to the kitchen and the bar, but I kept my eyes on the bard. He laid his hands flat on the table. He visibly took some deep breaths and his eyes darted around the room, but his expression remained neutral.

  “Are you all right?” I asked. He wasn’t sweating or shaking, but neither did he seem completely unaffected.

  “I think so,” he said, a tiny tug at the corners of his mouth signaling victory. “There really is something to this, living in the present, focusing on breathing peace, and all that other stuff the Kaurians are always saying. It’s not just a slogan. This is working.”

  “How?”

  “I’m breathing consciously. I’m noting that you’re worried. I’m also noting that no one else is, that they all feel safe. At the same time, I’m getting flashes of the massacre of the Nentians who Gorin Mogen set on fire and men being eaten or torn apart by hounds, split in two by giant axes, imagining Hollit and Orden participating in that, all of it. That’s never going away. As you said, some things you see you can never unsee, never forget. But it’s not present like the rest of everything here. It’s not as important as what’s in front of me now. So it cannot affect me today like it did yesterday, and this is something I can do all the time. This is an improvement.”

  I allowed that it was. Fintan closed his eyes and took a couple more deep breaths, and when he opened them again, his smile was more confident.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s get to work.”

  Once upon the wall, Fintan said, “Today concerns one of your country’s most historic events. But it also involves a Raelech and a Kaurian, and I was thi
nking about Gondel Vedd, wandering around your country with the mistral’s osprey on his shoulder. But I inquired at the Kaurian embassy about his house—the Kaurians all have broad family associations named after birds—and was told that he’s from the house of Terns. I was taught all the House Hymns during my apprenticeship, which are brief verses of values given to Kaurians as children, and I thought I’d share Gondel’s with you today.

  Dive and glide, swoop and sail,

  In your duty never fail,

  Be sustained on isles and seas,

  Soar the winds of Reinei’s peace,

  In every action may you earn

  Your honor in the house of Tern.

  “We’ll begin with the stonecutter Meara, who came to Brynlön after the collapse of the Granite Tunnel.”

  Few people cross the Poet’s Range to get to Brynlön because it is passable only for a few months of the year and during that time it’s fraught with all sorts of natural dangers. Nothing like the legendary flesh eels of the Nentian plains that take you in your sleep but other things that you will see coming before they eat you alive and screaming. Mountain wolves, for example, sound rather boring when you’re not being actively chased by a pack of them. They do become exciting very quickly in such a circumstance, and for a while Tuala and I had them on our tail. But they couldn’t keep up with the speed of a courier, and we soon left them behind. Still, their barking and howling attracted the attention of a chittering scurry of flying meat squirrels that could keep up.

  They are not technically squirrels at all, though they do bear a marked resemblance and I suppose whoever named them wanted to give people nightmares when they saw the nicer ones. Meat squirrels don’t eat seeds and nuts. They are arboreal carnivores, watching from the trees, and typically they prefer to gather quietly above their prey’s head and simply glide down on top of them, splaying their limbs wide and letting the skin stretched between them act to slow their descent. And then, where a normal squirrel would have a nice pair of choppers for cracking nuts, the meat squirrel has a mouth full of serrated teeth for tearing flesh. But they also have tremendously powerful back legs that let them jump between tree trunks far faster than they could glide between them, allowing them to pursue running prey on the forest floor until they can get close enough to jump on top of them. I had heard of their existence before and Tuala warned me that we might wake up a scurry of them on our way, but that didn’t really prepare me for the horror of them. They were cute, making little scratching noises on the trunks of snakewood pines, until they opened their mouths. That’s when I saw the teeth that would scoop out gobbets of my flesh and make quick work of me, since there were twenty or more of them. I’d probably be able to defend myself with my kenning if I had to, but against that many hungry mouths all at once? If they opened up an artery, I might bleed out anyway.

  When we packed for the trip, we took nothing but food and water and wooden sparring staves that took me back to my Colaiste days. There were secure and furnished shelters, Tuala assured me, built along the way for the couriers’ use by stonecutters in days gone by, and of course I could build a new one for us if need be.

  “I didn’t know there were shelters up there,” I said.

  “We don’t advertise their existence because we’d rather they didn’t become attractive to outlaws. Better for everyone to believe there’s no safety to be found in the Poet’s Range.”

  I believed that viscerally as the first meat squirrel leapt at me from the branches of a snakewood pine, its tiny needle claws scrabbling for purchase on my shoulder and gouging deep grooves but ultimately failing to catch and falling to the trail as we churned past.

  Another squirrel leapt for Tuala ahead of me. She spotted it and slapped it away with one of her staves in a move that looked almost identical to the basic warm-ups taught to first-year students at the Colaiste. I withdrew my staves, determined to follow her example, and found them immediately useful. A meat squirrel landed on the back of my neck, and I bashed it with a stave blindly until its spine broke and it stopped trying to bite its way through to mine.

  It occurred to me that since the squirrels were so dependent on speed and accurate trajectory to bring us down, anything we could do to foil either one of those would keep us safe. Tuala was using her kenning to the utmost, but I had yet to contribute. It wasn’t a common problem for stonecutters in the cities of Rael, trying to outsmart meat squirrels. The problem was that I couldn’t really communicate effectively with the earth moving at such speed and with shoes on. But why, I thought, did I need shoes? The earth would never harm me. It was a fashion affectation more than a necessity and one I’d never understood: Were shoes invented merely to hide toes from people who found them disgusting? I definitely didn’t need them or, once I thought about it, really want them. If I was to live my life in exile, I might as well be comfortable and practical and throw fashion down the deepest mine shaft underneath Jeremech. Since Tuala’s kenning allowed us to travel insanely fast while only jogging, I was able to slap my shoes off my heels and then alter my gait to kick them through the air in tumbling arcs. I called to the earth then and focused on the trail ahead and threw up surface rocks and topsoil in a thin screen the width of a fingernail. It was the same principle as erecting a wall except that I didn’t try to keep any shape to it. I just threw sediment up into the air that the meat squirrels were trying to navigate to get to us. Not a serious impediment unless they met face-first with a rock but perhaps enough to disorient them or scare them away from leaping at us.

  Only one tried it, and I saw the whole thing. He leapt for Tuala from behind and to her left, and as he passed through the curtain of earth I was throwing up, sediment buffeted him from underneath and threw off his trajectory just enough that he sailed behind Tuala’s back and in front of me, landing somewhere on the right side of the trail. His momentum carried him farther on the ground, and by that time we had passed, never slowing, and he’d never catch up. The rest of the meat squirrels, either seeing his failure or simply afraid of my kenning, gave up and ceased to pursue us. I kept up the screen for perhaps another mile and let it drop to see if we had any stubborn ones on our trail. We did not, and I thanked the Triple Goddess aloud for that.

  “There’s a bunker up ahead we can rest in,” Tuala called back, and I responded with enthusiasm to the idea. We veered off the well-traveled trail and into dense woods for only a few hundred lengths to find a half-buried shelter constructed by some stonecutter many generations ago. Without being shown where it was, you’d never expect it to be there; it was close to the trail but not visible from it. Highly unlikely that anyone but Raelech couriers would ever use it.

  The stone bunker was well ventilated but had no openings large enough to admit wildlife. There was a fireplace and a stack of wood and kindling nearby, a primitive tank privy behind a privacy curtain, and two straw tick beds resting on top of a raised platform. Not luxurious but safe.

  A pedestal held a basin for washing up, but there was no water except what we brought with us. I used some of mine to wash my wounds and drank the rest.

  “Are you all right?” Tuala asked.

  “I imagine I will be eventually.”

  “Hungry?”

  “Not in the least.” I shuddered at the thought of eating right then, having come too close to being eaten myself.

  “Well, we’re not over the range yet, and it’s only a couple of hours until sunset. It’s unwise to run at night, so we might as well stay here. What shall we talk about?”

  “Anything. But yeah, let’s talk.”

  The truth was I preferred running for my life from the meat squirrels to being alone with my haunted thoughts. I think perhaps Tuala sensed that, and she chatted away, kindly giving me something to focus on besides mourning and pain. But eventually darkness fell, she wound down, and even the fire she had laid quieted from a lively crackle to sullen, smoldering coals. She snored softly on her bed, and I did my best to sob quietly in mine, nearly suffocating und
er a blanket of guilt, unable to avoid it any longer with distractions of one kind or another. The shock of what had happened in the Granite Tunnel had sloughed away in the run, and now the enormity of it oppressed me: I’d lost my love, my job, and my country in a moment. Maybe my work in the future would balance the scales somehow, but I’d never get back what I’d lost. It was not the first time I wished that I could be as unfeeling as stone.

  Sleep relieved me eventually, and in the morning I felt hungry enough to eat our basic bread and dried meats and fruits. My neck and shoulder stung but not, I hoped, with the deep pain of infection.

  “We’ll have a Brynt hygienist look at it regardless,” Tuala assured me.

  “How long until we’re in Tömerhil?”

  “We can make it today if we don’t stop and if you’re up to it. Or else we rest and get there tomorrow.”

  “Let’s try to get there today.”

  There were no natural threats once we descended the Poet’s Range and followed a riverbank trail to Tömerhil. It was my first time in Brynlön, and it seemed like a softer land somehow than Rael, rounded leafy canopies instead of the pointed needles I was used to in the mountains, flowering bushes that held few predators and gave shelter to hares and hedgehogs. We arrived at dusk and entered a chaotic city stuffed to the walls with refugees from the river cities. The walls were in fine condition and in no danger of attack. What they needed was a few cities’ worth of food and space.

  Tuala led me first to the Raelech embassy rather than the quartermaster’s Wellspring. There were several Raelechs in the room we were ushered into, but the lead diplomat was identifiable by his Jereh band: the white onyx of the Triune, master’s amethyst, and citrine. I’d never met a diplomat myself since they were all stationed abroad. But he was very interested to meet Tuala: everyone was, I supposed. Wherever she went, she was instantly the most important person in the room since she had information no one else did. I wondered what that must be like.