Echoes

by Honor Raconteur

  “I don’t…hear anything,” Chi ventured cautiously, craning his neck in different directions. “That surely couldn’t have been all of them.”

  “We might have forced them into a temporary retreat,” Bannen opined, although his tone was doubtful. He didn’t really believe it.

  I glanced at both men. Hard to read in the scattered lighting from the ground, I felt unsure of what they were thinking, only that it wasn’t pleasant. “And the only way for us to know for sure is…how? Stand up here all night in the humidity waiting for them to show up, and likely driving ourselves to either nervous breakdowns or heart attacks?”

  “You know,” Chi observed to Bannen deadpan, “when she describes it that way, it just has such amazing appeal, you know?”

  “Doesn’t it though? Oww, wife, that’s my rib.”

  I did not let up the pressure, poking my finger into his ribcage even harder, because I wanted an answer, not these two bantering.

  Groaning, he squirmed away from me, pulling my wrist to the side to escape a hole being drilled into his side. “Yes, it probably means we’ll be on watch the rest of the night. I don’t think we should all stand here, though, let’s take it in shifts. HEY, MAKSOHM!”

  “WHAT, BANNEN?”

  “RENA DOESN’T SEE ANYTHING ELSE COMING. WANT TO TAKE THIS IN WATCHES?”

  There was a beat as Maksohm mulled this over and consulted someone else, his tone audible, but only half of his words discernable. Then he shouted back, “YES! CHI, TAKE FIRST WATCH, THEN BANNEN, THEN RENA.”

  That was sensible order, really. Chi had the sharpest eyes here aside from Dag and I, and he was sure to spot something if the cenebre rallied in the next few hours. If not, odds were they wouldn’t come again at all tonight, and letting me take the longest shift to sleep would leave me well rested to tackle the situation tomorrow. At least, I hoped that was his logic. I wasn’t sure if I should ask to clarify.

  Bannen doffed his shirt, leaving him in an undershirt, and wrapped it around me, and I nestled against the side of the tower. Even in the height of summer, the stone had just enough chill to it that I felt it, but the shirt offset that and I hoped that even curled up and half-upright like this, I could catch at least some sleep. Bannen settled in next to me, and I pillowed my head on his shoulder. I wasn’t in the least sleepy, adrenaline still rushing through me, but I knew I should rest while it was on offer. I drank deeply from my canteen before passing it to the others, and they all rehydrated as well before settling in.

  It was going to be a long night.

  By the time the sun rose, I felt drained of all energy. Rena had panda eyes, Chi was sliding into being dry drunk, and the rest of our crew was some mix of the three. Staring blearily at the lightening sky, and the sun peeking out just over the side of the mountain, I wished strongly for hot tea. Coffee. Maybe just the grounds. Just pour them in, a little hot water, I’d swish and swallow. It would be fine. “Just for the record, I’m firmly against bats now. Chi, your thing might be monkeys, but mine is bats because black things with wings that can fly at me and go through shields like they don’t even exist and try to take my head off? Not a fan.”

  “Bats are now my thing too,” Chi promised darkly, then yawned. “I don’t care if these things weren’t bats. They looked close enough that they had a bat as an ancestor, and I don’t like them. They aren’t getting any birthday cards from me.”

  Rena, being the practical one, used the wall and my arm to lever herself up to her feet, huddling inside of my shirt. The dawn air had a slight nip to it. I felt it more now, as we’d been standing around idly for the past few hours. Fighting warmed up the blood, but standing watch cooled it. A shiver danced along my skin. I’d love to get my shirt back but my wife looked the wrong side of cold. I’d let her keep it until we could get inside somewhere.

  “I haven’t seen any sign of them since dawn threatened,” Chi observed, sounding almost idle, “so it seems like legend had it right and they really do hate sunlight. Just in case, let me hang out here, maybe you two go down and find out how we fared?”

  Part of me dreaded finding out. I’d heard a lot of blood-curdling screams during the course of the night, more than a few voices raised in either pain or grief, and even with Emily working full load, we only had one healer. She couldn’t possibly have saved everyone. Grimly, I nodded, then opened the trap door in the floor and climbed down the ladder.

  The immediate area below, square and small as it was, had no one in it. Take a single foot outside of that, and I barely found enough floorspace to put a foot down without either stepping on someone or tripping over a leg. It was insanely packed, so much so that I felt glad we’d been posted up on top instead of inside, as I did not like crowded conditions for long periods of time.

  The building itself showed little damage, but I could see the toil of the night on the faces and bodies of the people around me. People had bandages on, clothes torn, bruises forming visibly on their skin. Mirrors lay discarded carefully on top of the tables, ready to lift again at a moment’s notice. As Rena and I stepped down, all eyes turned toward us, silence rippling out in a small wave.

  “Is it safe?” A woman with a small child asleep in her lap caught my sleeve, holding me hostage, her dark eyes intense with emotion. “Are they gone?”

  “Haven’t seen a shadow of them in two hours,” I answered honestly. “We think they retreated with the dawn. Safe enough, for now.”

  She hoped for a different answer, I could see it in the bitter twist of her mouth, but nodded, accepting the truth I handed her instead.

  The front door opened, I could hear it, then a voice boomed out, “Bannen, Rena, you down here?”

  “We are,” Rena called back, crowding up against my back. She didn’t have the room to step around me. “We’ll come to you.”

  “Alright. Ladies and gents,” Vaughn called to the rest of the building, his voluminous words echoing effortlessly through the building, “we think the cenebre have retreated for now. We’re going to wait another hour to make sure, then we’ll temporarily release you to go to your homes. Be aware that people are coming from Gargan and the MISD to help us, and we expect them to start arriving today. We won’t face the cenebre short-handed like this again. We’ll do whatever it takes to stop this from reoccurring, but be patient, we’ve not fought these things in hundreds of years. It might take more than one try on our part.”

  Only weariness met this announcement and a few strangled curse words. It wasn’t the best of news for us, either, as that meant Vaughn didn’t have a plan. I liked plans. They tended to get the job done.

  It took hopping, giant, stretchy leaps, and a few dance steps I’d half-forgotten I knew, but eventually we made it to the door. Vaughn reached out and grabbed our arms, lifting us the rest of the way so we didn’t have to fight the last ten feet of the foyer to freedom. “You’re a bro,” I told him gratefully.

  Chuckling, he sat me down, then picked up my wife like she was a toddler and held her to him. Rena snuggled right in with a sigh of relief. “You’re like a heater,” she complimented him, purring in true contentment, eyes at half-mast.

  “It’s why I came,” he assured her, voice rumbling with amusement, a grin tugging at his mouth as he looked down at her. “To keep you warm and beat up legends.”

  “And we’re glad you did,” she assured him happily.

  Vee, Wade, Hugo, and Maksohm all drifted out from different doors and joined us at the front. I didn’t see Emily, which didn’t surprise me, but more alarmingly, I didn’t see Dag. “Vee, where’s the squirt?”

  “Fast asleep,” she informed me, jerking a thumb toward the church. “I got him squirreled away with Dax. He did good until about three hours ago, but when nothing else came at us, the adrenaline wore off and he fell asleep on me.”

  “It was rather funny,” Wade tacked on with a wide grin. “He was stretched out over her shoulders like a cat, not at all worried she’d drop him.”

  I’d be worr
ied. Vee did drop people occasionally. Which was fine for me, I had superior reflexes, but I hadn’t trained those into Dag just yet. But as long as he was fine and in a safe spot, I wouldn’t worry about him just now. “Good. Maksohm, hate to ask, but what was our casualty rate?”

  “Sixteen dead, about thirty wounded,” he answered, taut and drawn. “Emily nearly put herself into a Mind Down before I could stop her. I’ll be very glad to have reinforcements come in. I spoke with Director Salvatore not two minutes ago and he assures me that they’re being portaled up as quickly as he can manage it. I expect the first wave in about three hours. We’ll get fifteen agents before sunset.”

  That sounded infinitely better than what we’d been working with last night, but still sadly insufficient. I didn’t say that because Maksohm’s frown told me he already knew the obvious.

  “I don’t know how many are coming from Gargan.” Vaughn used his free hand to scratch at the stubble on his chin, a salt and pepper blend, apparently not bothered that my wife showed no interest in standing on her own feet. “I left word for some of the warriors to come, the ones sufficient in giant’s magic, but I don’t know how many can respond. We’re in planting season for summer vegetables right now.”

  Feeding giants took full time dedication so we all understood how important it was for everyone to be on deck for planting season. Even those who weren’t farmers by trade had family gardens to start.

  “Vaughn,” Maksohm started, then stopped, brows furrowed as he worked through what he wanted to say. “Something you told Chi last night stuck with me. You drew an analogy between what the cenebre were doing and what a man would do. That if a man broke into our house and broke our windows, we’d chase after him.”

  “Yes, so I did,” Vaughn agreed, bushy eyebrows arching a little in question. “That is how animals work too, and I do not think the cenebre much different.”

  “Taking this thought another step, if a man broke into my house and broke my windows, I’d certainly chase him, but I’d also forgive him if he came back with new windows. Or fixed what he’d broken. Not all animals work on that theory, but some of them are intelligent enough to be bargained with. Are the cenebre?”

  Vaughn rocked back on his heels for a moment, a low sound vibrating in his throat as he hummed and considered. “I do not know. The records have it that they’re as intelligent as a rodent. They don’t have the intelligence to be bargained with. But I believe it’s worth a try. It is not wise to beard the lion in its own den, or to follow a snake into its burrow. I do not want to try to clear the mountain of the cenebre by fighting it. My ancestors tried this. We have a whole ballad that sings of the battle and the many losses they incurred. I do not recommend it.”

  If a giant, who shared my opinion that danger was fun, thought it a bad idea, I did not want to do it.

  Chi leaned over from the bell tower and called down, “But Vaughn, I thought crawling through a monster-infested mountain was your idea of a good time!”

  The giant laughed and pointed a finger up at him. “Sarcasm suits you well, little cousin, but I know you’re not that crazy.”

  “Shut it, I’m totally that crazy, especially after staying up all night shooting at things that I believed were part of a child’s bedtime story. That could randomly phase through my arrows if they concentrated. Right now, in fact, I’m eighty percent exhaustion, ten percent sarcasm, and twenty percent of don’t care.”

  Rena, of course, added that up and pointed out in amusement, “That’s a hundred and ten percent.”

  “Twenty percent of me doesn’t care,” he repeated blandly.

  “Should’ve seen that coming,” she observed, more to herself than anyone else. “Well, I’m with Vaughn, I do not like the idea of going into that mountain and fighting with scary cenebre. That does not sound like my idea of a good time, oddly enough. But I’m not sure how, to extend the metaphor, you plan to fix those broken windows? I poofed the stone out of existence, it’s not like we can shovel it back in.”

  “No,” Vaughn agreed in a tone that didn’t really agree at all. “But we have the ability to close it up again, I think. If I put enough people up on top of the mountain, we can awaken its energy and cause the tunnel to collapse back in. Done carefully, we will only disturb that section.”

  Giant’s magic could move an incredible amount of dirt or stone, especially when they linked energies and worked together. I’d seen groups of six men literally move a hill that was in the wrong spot for them to plant. It took them a good three hours and some sort of complicated footwork that looked more like a dance than magic, but they’d done it. I had no doubt that if they put their minds to it, they could manage to collapse Rena’s tunnel without too much effort. “Are the three of you enough to do that?”

  Vaughn cast a considering glance at Vee, which she caught, and she lifted both hands in the air and shook her head violently in denial. Huffing out an understanding breath, he answered me, “No, we’ll need at least one more, I think. We’ll have to wait for one of our brethren to get here. Maksohm?”

  As the most senior agent here, all of this fell under Maksohm’s leadership, and it was nice of Vaughn to respect that even though he was definitely the most senior person here. Maksohm spread his hands in a shrug to either side as he craned his neck to look up at the Elder. “You’re the expert on these creatures, not me. I think that it’s certainly worth a try. How long will it take for you to do this?”

  Instead of answering, Vaughn asked Rena, “Your tunnel was how large? Exactly.”

  “Eighteen hundred and ninety feet long, thirteen feet wide, fourteen feet tall,” she rattled off.

  “Hmm, we’d be there all day if we tried to fill that in. I don’t think they’d take kindly to us stomping around on top of the mountain for ten hours.”

  “Maybe just the entrance?” Maksohm suggested. “Prove that we’re not interested in going back in.”

  “It’s not a bad thought. I think it will work, and if we do just the first twenty feet inside the entrance, it would take an hour at most,” Vaughn answered, free hand see-sawing back and forth. “Maybe two, depending on how stubborn the stone is. And if we have to fight off cenebre while trying to collapse the tunnel.”

  I feared that last one the most. Although they seemed very determined to stay out of the sunlight, so maybe if we stayed outside, we’d be fine? I crossed my fingers and hoped for that strongly. If all went well, and Vaughn’s plan worked, we still couldn’t just leave tomorrow. We’d need to stay two or three days to make sure that the cenebre were content to stay in the mountain after this. Two or three days of resting on a knife’s edge sounded exhausting. I felt every ounce of exhaustion from fighting and running for the past twenty-two hours.

  “Maksohm, when’s nap time?” When my team leader quirked a very eloquent brow at me, I realized I probably could have phrased that better. Then Chi snickered and I knew I could have phrased that better, or at least used a different tone so I didn’t sound like a whiny two-year-old. “You know that thing inside your head that keeps you from saying stuff you probably shouldn’t? Mine’s broken.”

  “Fortunately for you,” Maksohm retorted, his admirably straight face hiding the fact he laughed on some internal level, “I figured that out a while ago. Yes, Bannen, we will all have nap time at some point today before we go face the big, scary monsters up in the mountain.”

  “Sounds like the best offer I’ve had all week,” Rena muttered to Vaughn. “I ask you, why do children get designated naps when adults need them more?”

  “A question for the ages, my Rena,” the Elder answered with a shrug that lifted her a half-foot further into the air. “I feel a nap coming on myself. Let’s tell people they can go home and rest first, then hope that some soul has pity and offers us food and a pillow.”

  We had people to temporarily settle back in their homes, breakfast to find, and logistics to put in motion in order to protect the town. The train was coming back in, already on its way, but
it would take a few hours to get there. As soon as it did, we’d ship more people out, just in case. While waiting, we might as well eat. I could tell my husband was tired, his feet dragging as much as mine, but we couldn’t really stop and rest until the other MISD agents got here.

  Thankfully, they did somewhere around noon and hit the ground running. The mayor helped find food for all of us, one of the restaurant owners opening his place up and feeding us for free, which we all heartily appreciated. The food did much to restore me, and my stomach stopped threatening to chew on my backbone, although I still wanted a nap.

  It didn’t look like we’d get one.

  We just didn’t have enough time. It took three hours to trudge back up to the mountain, and here we were with only about eight hours of daylight left. We literally had enough time to go up, try something, then race back down again. If it didn’t work, we needed to be in place to protect the town. If it did, we wouldn’t know it until sunset.

  More battles have been won and lost in history due to logistics. I never really appreciated that until now, facing our own logistics in this battle.

  Maksohm trotted off as soon as the first senior agent—or at least a senior-enough-agent—appeared on scene. I assumed he was briefing the woman so that she could take over. That part went more or less past me because the rest of our expected giants arrived well before the train did, sprinting the entire distance in and using earth magic outrageously in order to boost their speed. They came to a halt at the train platform, a little winded but pleased they’d arrived in such good time. I recognized only three faces out of the five but that didn’t bother me. I really loved the three people I knew. Running up the stairs of the platform, I waved an arm over my head. “Piper, Quincy, Blaine!”

  “There’s our Rena.” Quincy took two long strides before sweeping me up in a careful hug, which I appreciated, as he could squash me like a paper cup without meaning to. Even among the giants, Quincy was on the strong side. I threw both arms around his massive neck, barely reaching all the way around, avoiding his bushy beard so I could breathe. “We came as fast as we could.”