by Kevin Hearne
I gathered quickly that Tuala and the diplomat had met many times before. They addressed each other informally with given names and cordial nods, and through that I caught the diplomat’s name, Harach. He had a taut, stringy body for an older man; so many of them despair and falter at the signs of age, but he was battling defiantly to defeat them. His eyes were quick, taking in both my relative youth and my Jereh band in a single glance.
Tuala introduced me, and he welcomed me to Tömerhil. Then she proceeded to deliver the news that I had destroyed the invading Bone Giant army in the Granite Tunnel and saved Baseld. Curiously, she left out that I had also destroyed half of Baseld’s garrison, and it gave Harach the impression that I was a heroine rather than a failure.
“Stonecutter Meara, I am not only honored but grateful to meet you in person,” he said, and bowed to me. “Thank you for defending Baseld. I myself am from there, and most of my relations still reside in that fair city.”
His gratitude was so out of tune with what I felt that I gasped, and when he looked up to see how he had erred, I struggled to control myself and muster an appropriate response.
“The honor was mine,” I said. “Forgive me. I didn’t expect to be commended for doing my duty.”
Tuala stepped forward and pulled a folded piece of paper sealed with wax from her pack. She extended it to him and said, “From the Triune Council.”
“Ah.” He took it, broke the seal, and frowned as he read. “Oh.” His eyes flicked up to me, and I knew that he must have read about the total destruction of the tunnel and Baseld’s soldiers, along with my banishment. He continued reading and then said, “I see.” He folded the paper with crisp movements, and it disappeared behind his back with his other hand as he addressed me. “I am informed that your own funds are to be converted to Brynt currency and a stipend be paid to you for services to Brynlön henceforth in perpetuity. I’m to accompany you along with Courier Tuala to visit the quartermaster and send missives to my colleagues throughout Brynlön informing them of your situation, and then you are to report monthly to the nearest embassy for your living. Otherwise you are to live and work where you see fit. Does that comport with what you’ve been told?”
It didn’t. I hadn’t been told that much. It sounded like I could simply collect a monthly stipend in any Brynt city and not actually do anything for it, which, when I looked at it from the Triune’s perspective, made the most sense. I’d saved a Raelech city but at tremendous cost. Banishing me with a living was their best move politically, which I hadn’t been clearheaded enough to see before. Depending on who was listening, they could emphasize either the banishment or the eternal honor they did me, and I’d never be there to contradict them. And it had clearly been Dechtira’s idea. She saw that I didn’t want to go back to Baseld, saw perhaps the trouble it would cause, and contrived this “punishment” as a matter of convenience more than anything else.
Not that any of that mattered to me. I would work because I needed to.
“Close enough, Diplomat,” I replied.
The quartermaster of Tömerhil, when we met him soon thereafter, spat out a mouthful of wine when he heard that the Bone Giants had been completely destroyed in the Granite Tunnel and that it was closed for the foreseeable future.
“Good news and bad news,” he said.
“We will, of course, let you know when it reopens, but that may not be for some long while,” Harach said. Both he and Tuala left out my role in that but introduced me as someone who would help as needed in Brynlön. At that the quartermaster frowned, but in thought rather than disapproval. Or maybe he was just confused by my bare feet.
“I don’t think a stonecutter would be as useful here right now as along the river cities. I’m sure the quartermaster of Fornyd could use you now, but perhaps she doesn’t need you as urgently as somewhere else. The Bone Giants are not an imminent threat to her anymore. But to the south—well, that’s a different story. They’ve taken Göfyrd, and they’re occupying it. I know you’re not a juggernaut, but if there’s anything you can do there …” He trailed off and raised his eyebrows, which created several deep grooves in his forehead.
I had no idea what I could do. My career—short as it was thus far and until the Granite Tunnel—had been entirely focused on civic beautification, not military action. My Gaerit and hundreds more died because I’d been forced into a role I didn’t know how to play. But that wasn’t what the quartermaster wanted to hear.
“I’ll do my best, sir,” I told him, and his face spread into a smile. That was what he wanted to hear.
The outlying farms surrounding Göfyrd were abandoned, populated only by lonesome goats and sheep bleating at our passage, simply wanting to be milked or fed, missing their people. The reason behind their neglect struck me anew: in Baseld there were families missing their people, too.
When the road emerged from lines of trees serving as windbreaks and property markers, we saw the city of Göfyrd nestled at the river mouth below. There were hedgerows marking farm boundaries from here on but no more trees. It gave anyone atop the walls an excellent view but afforded us the same. Clouds of blackwings circled above and around the city.
At the edge of a once-prosperous family farm, Tuala crouched down with me behind some sort of native shrubbery with waxy dark green leaves and white four-petaled flowers, and we scanned the walls from a distance. It was difficult to tell whether they were manned.
“We’re too far away. I’m going to need to scout.”
“Watch out for earthwork traps.”
“Always.” She flashed a quick grin at me and departed in such a rush of displaced air that I was blown over sideways. I laughed and got up and brushed myself off, and then a flash of movement in my peripheral vision jerked my head to the right. Six Bone Giants had emerged from the nearby farmhouse and were running directly toward me, the clatter of their armor becoming clearer and louder with every step. The farms were not quite as abandoned as I thought, and I saw the cleverness: they were using farms to set little infantry traps for scouts.
“Tuala!” I called, but she was already out of hearing. I had my staves but was a year out of practice with my combat training. Six-to-one odds didn’t look good either, and they were moving fast. The Bone Giants weren’t meat squirrels, but maybe a little dirt in their eyes would at least slow them down. I threw up some sediment in their path, and it did make them lose a few steps as they clawed at their faces and spat, but I hadn’t stopped them. I didn’t know what else to do; the juggernauts were trained to use their kenning in a military fashion, but stonecutters weren’t. Could I make rocks erupt from the ground to hit them directly in their, uh, rocks? Perhaps when I was more skilled.
Better, perhaps, to disrupt the ground they had to cross to get to me. Throw up obstacles. They were bunched up, swords raised, and looking at me rather than at their feet. I called on a patch of the earth to ripple and shake in front of them, just a handbreadth of topsoil made uncertain, and they tumbled in a heap of gangly white limbs. One of them accidentally cut deeply into another with his sword, and an awful scream split the air, illustrating why parents always tell their children not to run with sharp objects. But that didn’t stop them. All except the hacked one got up again, even more determined to cut me down. They came more slowly now, careful of their footing, but they kept closing the distance. When I shook the ground beneath them once more, they wobbled but remained on their feet and would soon be able to take a swipe at me. A different tactic, then.
Focusing on the leader, I had the sod leap at him from all sides, trapping him at the waist, so that it appeared he was erupting out of an enormous anthill. That held him motionless, the weight of the earth too much for him, but that still left four, and the effort of moving and shaping that much ground so quickly left me winded. When the others stopped to check on him, he shouted and gestured that they should keep going without him.
Repeating that maneuver would be pointless. It took too much effort, and there would still
be three left in range to take me out. If I was going to move that much earth, I might as well take them all out at once. Grunting with exertion—pain like a diamond blade stabbed me between the eyes—I tore lose a broad strip of sod, roots, and soil two hands deep and curled it back toward me. The egg-white eyes bulged in their painted black sockets, but they kept coming, and so I pushed that roll of earth back as hard as I could, flattening three of the four, their cries of alarm cut off as the sod covered them in a final blanket. Spots swam in my vision, and I fell backward onto my rear, legs suddenly unable to support my weight. Stonecutters were not supposed to move that much earth with such violent force. We could move tremendous weight, erect walls and more, so long as we did it at a measured pace. Whenever we moved too fast, something went wrong: the collapse of the Granite Tunnel, for example, or my current collapse. The one giant who had managed to retreat in time, avoiding the slap-down, saw me blinking furiously on the ground and charged, thinking that I was too drained to react in time.
He was right. I knew I was in danger but couldn’t think of what to do about it, the pain in my head was so fierce. And perhaps I was hallucinating, for the Bone Giant’s legs seemed absurdly long and thin, stepping over land like a crane mincing through the shallows of a pond, and the rattling of his bone armor clapped in my ears like applause for my imminent death.
His sword flashed above his head, and the hallucination continued, for there was a wet, percussive crunch and the Bone Giant’s body caved in sideways, practically folding in half like a rug beaten by a rod as something blurred behind him, and once he fell over next to me, broken and twitching, a knife handle sprouted underneath his jaw, the blade rammed up through his mouth and into the brain. And then Tuala was standing over him, chest heaving and her right arm looking strange at the shoulder.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Alive,” I managed. “Your arm …”
“Dislocated it just now when I hit him.”
“Oh! That was you …”
“Yes. You’re out of it. Hold on; I have to get the others.”
“Others?”
Tuala picked up the strange sword that the Bone Giant had dropped and carried it in her left hand, jogging toward a mound with a tall white man stuck in it that I suddenly remembered creating. “Oh, yeah,” I said. “I think that guy was gonna kill me.” Tuala circled around to his left, got behind him, sped up, and his skull was split abruptly down the middle. She left the sword embedded in his flesh at the top of his rib cage, the two halves of his head and neck resting on his shoulders like the open petals of a blood lily. “Well, he probably won’t kill me now,” I said, “but this headache might.”
I tried to locate Tuala after that and discovered she had gone to finish off the wounded one who’d been injured by one of his fellows. I blinked a couple of times, and she was right next to me.
“Meara, can you stand?”
“Hm? Stand. On my feet. Maybe? Help me up.” I raised a hand, and she grasped me by the arm with her left hand, pulling me to my feet. The movement did nothing good for my headache. A sudden wave of nausea overcame me, and I vomited on the body of the Bone Giant.
“Aww. That was such a good breakfast, too.”
“I’m sorry, Meara.”
“Don’t be. I think that’s what I needed, honestly. I feel better already.”
“Good. Then you can help me put my arm back in its socket.”
“How’d you do that?”
“I hit that Bone Giant with a stave at top speed,” she explained. “Deadly to him but not without consequence to me.”
“Uh … I don’t know how to do this.”
“Both hands firmly on my biceps, then roll it back in.”
“I take it you’ve done this before?”
A tight nod. “Happens a lot.”
Tuala hissed when I grabbed her arm but nodded. “Do it. Do it!”
I tried to do it, and judging by the sounds Tuala made, I was doing it wrong. I was simultaneously trying to push and roll it in, as she said, but that wasn’t accomplishing anything except more pain for her.
“No, no, just … hold it steady and I’ll roll it in from my end, all right? Just put my arm in your strongest grip and hold it still.”
We both gritted our teeth, though mine was more in sympathy as Tuala grunted, shifted her torso, and rolled that socket onto the end of her arm bone with a dull pop.
“Ahh! Much better, thank you. Now observe the city.”
“Why?” I turned my head toward Göfyrd, and my question was answered. A largish group of Bone Giants were streaming out of the gate and running our way. “Oh, goddess. That looks like more than six.”
“A lot more than six,” Tuala agreed. “There’s a whole army in there. Sentries on the walls, towers fully staffed, and they saw me make my scouting run. I’m fast but not invisible. So what do you want to do?”
“I’m not sure.”
“We can run, easy. That’s an option.”
We hadn’t run in the Granite Tunnel, and I didn’t want to run here, either. We had a short time to think because the city gates were more distant than the farmhouse. I felt taxed already to my limits; that searing pain, faded now, was the signal one was aging and should back off. I had pushed the kenning too far. Thinking of that brought up a memory of my temblor in the Colaiste, Temblor Kavich, growling out military history through his beard: “The earth will nourish you until it is time to return and nourish it yourself, and your enemies will either send you back early or press you, like the earth would, into gemstones.”
I thought it unlikely I’d ever be a gem. But maybe this confrontation would harden me from soft soapstone into granite. I wished Temblor Kavich were here to counsel me now.
“Stand next to me,” I said to Tuala, beckoning her to follow me three lengths away from the Bone Giant’s body.
“What are you going to do?”
“What I should have done in the tunnel. Build from the ground up.”
The farmland near the coast was rich and aerated and relatively free of rocks, having been plowed and harvested and fertilized for many years. A modest earthwork should be manageable, especially since I had the luxury of a full minute or so rather than a few seconds in which to do it.
I scrunched my toes in the turf. It was springy soil, watered well by recent rains and ideal for shaping. I reached out with my kenning and pulled it underneath us in a generous circle, and we rose on a thick pillar of earth as the first rattle and clack of bones reached our ears. By the time we could easily count them, our feet were already above their heads, though not by much.
“You know they climb walls, right? Stand on one another’s shoulders?” Tuala asked.
“I heard, yes. Bennelin and others. I have a plan.”
“Glad to hear it. I think there are close to fifty of them coming.”
“Right. I’d get your staves out just in case they decide to jump. How’s the shoulder?”
“Well enough to smash fingers.”
I braced myself for the headache to come but did what prep work I could as the Bone Giants clacked and snapped closer, macabre skull faces promising all that they had to deliver. Through my feet, through my kenning, I could feel the earth all around my tower and urged it to loosen up, especially in the direction from which the Bone Giants were coming. And once they got in range, I commanded the earth to loosen more, become like sand pulling at their feet, reducing their speed. The leaders tripped, and that tripped up some behind them, and then the challenge began. I commanded the earth to hold on to their feet, even draw them down into it up to their knees, a very different process from throwing earth up to their waists. Smarter to allow the earth to give way and then firm up, compact around their ankles and calves, a far more efficient operation that froze them in the ground. Except that I had to do it nearly fifty times while still urging the pillar to rise higher. After the tenth giant had been frozen in such a manner I felt that headache coming back. And the rest of them w
ere at the base of the tower—sinking into the earth mostly but able to steady themselves, and one leapt onto the back of another braced against the pillar and lifted himself up to where he could take a hack at us.
Tuala was ready. She sped herself up and rotated at the hips as she swept her staves left, the left one smacking away the sword as it came for her and the right one busting open the real skull under all that paint. He tumbled away, and Tuala said as she peered down, “They’re surrounding us. I won’t be able to catch them all if they come from all sides. Might need to revise your plan.”
That wasn’t it: I just needed to commit to hurting myself to hurt them more. I pushed hard with my kenning to loosen the softened earth even more around the base of the pillar so that it wouldn’t bear their weight, and they sank up to their knees as I wished. That set off a mass vocalization of alarm and surprise, along with a lance of pain through my head and torso that brought me to my knees.
“Good, that’s working, but they can still get out if they try,” Tuala said. “Close them up now.”
“Hhk … can’t,” I said, clutching at my chest. “Feels like I’m burning from the inside.”
Tuala spared me a fleeting glimpse. “Oh. Yeah, that’s about right. Burning your life away when you strain your kenning.” She turned away to gaze down at the enemy. “Well, with the ground all soft like that I don’t think they can do their spooky ladder trick effectively. But maybe get over here and just do one at a time. We don’t want them to figure this out.”
Splaying flat on the top of my improvised tower, I dragged myself to the edge, grunting as I went, until I reached the edge and peered over. The Bone Giants were doing their best to win free of the soil only to find that there was no such thing as solid land nearby. They could force their way out of the affected area, perhaps, if they thought to do that, but they were still trying to get to us instead. They would try clawing their way up the tower, I guessed, since it was earth and not solid rock.