A Plague of Giants Read online

  “Who told you that?”

  “I dined with the Raelech ambassador to Brynlön last night, and he mentioned it.”

  “Did he also mention that my wife has passed?”

  Fintan blanched. “No. No, he didn’t, and I’m so sorry to hear it. I would not have brought it up if I had known.”

  “Why did you bring it up?”

  “I remember my master speaking of her once. He met her in Killae and praised her wit.”

  “Really? When was this?”

  “Three years ago.”

  Well before her death, then. She made at least two trips that year, I think. I remember she complained that one of the members of the Triune Council at that time had been more than unusually stupid.

  “Huh. And you merely wished to pass on your master’s compliment?”

  “Well, I had intended to notice out loud that you seemed to be a couple wedded to diplomacy as well as each other, not unlike my own wife and myself, but now it already seems like one of the most inept pratfalls in the history of conversational gambits.”

  “I’m not a diplomat of any sort.”

  “Oh? Your position in the Wellspring, then—?”

  “Is both recent and temporary,” I finished. “I used to teach at the university,” I added, anticipating his next question.

  “Ah, but the university is closed. I understand now. Well, I’m not much of a diplomat either. I nearly got myself skewered when I first arrived, and now I’ve quite likely offended you and who knows who else since I’ve been here.”

  I assured him that I was not offended. “Though I can’t speak for others,” I said.

  He grinned at me and gave a soft chuckle. “I will take what relief I can, then.”

  Sarena’s few lessons to me on her deathbed came back to me as Fintan spoke. “The Raelechs are so very affable,” she had told me. “They want every conversation to be as pleasant as milk and cake. Too much of that sugar will make you sick, though. A little milk and cake can make you happy, but it’s easy to go too far with them. You have to remember they’re our allies, not our friends, and even friends don’t always watch out for one another like they should.”

  Bryn of the Deep, I miss her. And I was already seeing what she meant. Fintan was quite likable but clearly calculating behind all that good nature; though he made light of planning what to say to me, the fact was he had planned it in a way that ensured we would be speaking of politics sooner rather than later.

  I could not fault him, though; I was calculating, too. Perhaps I could dive deeper under the surface than he could. The challenge of outwitting him excited me, as I imagined Rölly thought it would. Hopefully my enthusiasm wouldn’t lead me to drown.

  The wooden benches had been expanded and were already filled to capacity when we arrived for the afternoon performance. A cheer greeted the bard when he stepped up onto his stage with his harp.

  “Friends! Fifteen minutes until we begin! One of our tales will be set in Kauria. Their love of peace permeates everything they do—even tending their gardens. So today I will sing you a brief hymn sung by gardeners and farmers alike before they tend their crops or their flowers and herbs, and then we will get to the stories. This is ‘A Gardener’s Ward Against Discord.’

  Bees will sting,

  Ants will bite,

  Birds shall dive

  And nothing shall thrive

  When Anger, Spite,

  And Impatience arrive.

  Still your wrath,

  Calm your mind,

  You should know

  Your garden will grow

  When you are kind,

  Reinei’s wind will make it so.

  “Let me introduce you now to a young Nentian man,” the Raelech bard said after the fifteen-minute waiting period. “I had occasion to speak with him earlier, and his story will be free-form as it progresses, but for this first appearance I will share with you one of his journal entries, verbatim, dated Thaw 21, 3041. His name is Abhinava Khose.”

  The copper-skinned Nentian lad who took shape in the bard’s smoke was tall and lean yet muscular; he would bulk up soon as he matured into an imposing man, the sort that does not stand so much as loom in your presence. He had a broad nose and the long, straight black hair of his people falling to his chest. His leathers, flared at the shoulders, were dyed in tans to blend in with the grasses of the Nentian plains. He wore khernhide boots that indicated privileged status, and his voice was a smooth baritone.

  This is my last day pretending to be a proud Khose hunter.

  I don’t think what I feel matters to anyone but me, but I must tell it to someone. Since I have no one to tell—or no one who will care—I will tell it to this small journal. I think my aunt gave it to me years ago when I was a child, thinking I would draw something cute in it and make memories for my later years. It has collected dust until now, but I am glad to have found it again. I will fill it with memories that fall short of adorable but will perhaps prove invaluable to me later on. Though I am still quite young, already I can see how I change as I age, looking back at my old self at fourteen and fifteen and wondering what that kid was thinking. So perhaps what I write today will help me some years hence. More likely it will make me laugh at my own foolishness.

  I have walked seventeen years under Kalaad’s blue sky, and my father says I should choose a bride soon. He says it like I should choose a melon in the marketplace for breakfast, which I doubt the girls would appreciate. When we are in the city, he keeps pointing at girls and saying, “How about her?” and I shrug my indifference, never saying what I really think.

  That one’s eyes are flat dead things.

  That one has a voice like claws on stone.

  That one smells like borchatta soup.

  And none of them are the boy I love. He is the son of a chaktu butcher with whom my father frequently does business because they were schooled together. He is so strong and beautiful but has never shown any interest in me, so I imagine that someday soon his father will talk to him like mine does and have him choose a bride like she was some kind of breakfast fruit. A bridefruit.

  That day is coming for me also. And then I will have to tell Father—and Mother, too—that I have no interest in women except as friends. I am sakhret, and so their dreams for me are not going to work out the way they hoped.

  Father will be angry at first, but I hope not frightfully so. He will be more upset that I didn’t tell him sooner than upset by the thing itself. What will anger him far more is telling him that I don’t wish to be a hunter like the rest of the Khose men since before the First Kenning. The whole family is to go out tomorrow on the annual khern hunt, and I would rather do almost anything else. Clean the stables. Walk alone in the Gravewood. Choose a bridefruit. Ugh.

  I cannot pinpoint the moment when I stopped wishing to hunt animals or even eat them. Maybe it was the scream of a khek hare or the terrified bleating of a gut goat. Some creature’s peaceful grazing interrupted by violent death so that we could graze later on its flesh marinated in a slow-cooked sauce and turn its hide into boot leather. I simply do not want to make my life’s work ending the lives of other creatures. He will say it is the way of animals to hunt and eat other animals, and that is true. But I have no taste for hunting anymore.

  That is not to say I have no skill at it. Or that I have skill at anything else. I do not know what else I want to do, and if I tell my family I don’t want to be a hunter, I know that’s one of the first questions they will ask me: What else will you do, Abhi? How will you put food on the table if you do not put a spear through its neck first?

  And I don’t know for sure. Go to Rael, perhaps, where they have the Third Kenning and their Triple Goddess to match and know who they are as a people. There is no national identity crisis there. The Earth Shapers are so very grounded, ha ha. I have no interest in pursuing their kenning, but perhaps I could apprentice myself to a beekeeper …?

  Kalaad in the sky, I need to think of something better
than that! Father will stomp me into the grass if I tell him I want to keep bees.

  Maybe a farmer. Something he doesn’t fully understand but he respects. I need to be ready with an answer when he hands me a spear tomorrow and I refuse to take it.

  Whatever happens, I know my life will be much different when the sun rises than it is today, and I thought I should record a small part of it before it’s gone forever.

  “That was short, I know,” the bard said, “but diary entries are rarely much longer. Soon enough Abhi will long for the days when all he had to worry about was the annual khern hunt. We will come back to him tomorrow but return now to our greensleeve, Nel Kit ben Sah, who has left her cousin to recuperate and returned to her duty on the western coast.”

  Coastal patrol is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, we are always looking out into the sun and never drinking the twilight peace of the canopy, but on the other, there’s a decent chance we’ll see something strange at least once a week.

  Yesterday in the night, for example, one of the Hathrim mountains bloomed into the sky. The ash blossom could be seen in the dawn, spreading and flattening in the blue and promising gray rain on our green forest. We think it is Mount Thayil above Harthrad, though we cannot be sure. But I have never seen anything so strange as what I saw early this morning. I don’t think I’ve even heard of such a thing.

  In the black hour before sunrise, flickering lights danced on distant waves. Many tens of tiny fires moving north on the surface of the ocean.

  I knew it could only be one thing: Who else builds ships that can stand the scorch of fire? Only the giants do this. Lacking trees, they build glass boats and burn putrid blocks of compressed vegetables and dung in large steel bowls and keep the blaze going forever with the talents of their firelords.

  Seeing their trade barges pass in the night is common. But those ships keep fairly close to the shore and move in ones and twos, and we can hear the beat of the drum and the grunt of the oarsmen as they pull their way through the water. These were far out—so far that I would not have seen them without the fires—and making no noise that I could hear over the susurrus of the tide. And there were far too many of them to represent a trade convoy. In all my years of patrol I have seen no more than six rowing together. These were many tens.

  What could it mean? Follow the branches until you get to the trunk: the ash blossom was indeed Mount Thayil, and it represented the death of Harthrad. The Hathrim had to evacuate their land. But instead of going south to other Hathrim cities, Hearthfire Gorin Mogen was moving his people north. All of his people. To where?

  I doubted that he would be so foolish as to make landfall on Forn, though we should be wary of it regardless. Desperation can drive anyone to madness. Or maybe it wasn’t mad; if he planned to cut down our trees and return south, the potential income from such a timber raid might be significant enough to finance the building of a new city. Panic seized me at the thought. We didn’t have any thornhands up here in the north since the Hathrim timber pirates typically attacked our southern shores, so who could stop him? I couldn’t do it all by myself.

  That branch, I decided—I hoped!—was unlikely. He wouldn’t conscript his entire population into piracy and risk them against our defenses. I mentally leapt elsewhere: the vast stands of pine on the north slopes of the Godsteeth were unguarded by the Nentians and represented unthinkable riches. What if he landed there, clear-cut as much as he could ship, and then sailed south to start anew? The death cries of the trees would be horrible, but I don’t think the Canopy would move to prevent it, and that might be the same calculation Mogen already made. I could hear the arguments of the cautious now: We should not risk our roots for trees outside our borders. If the Nentians cannot be bothered to worry about their resources, why should we? It is Forn we are pledged to protect, a fact no one can dispute, and so the Canopy will allow an unspeakable desecration and I will have nightmares and feel the bite of axes in my limbs for weeks after it happens. My eyes fill up just thinking about it.

  The trees from our side of the Godsteeth would be even more profitable, of course, and we would need to patrol the passes in great numbers to make sure the Hathrim never harvested so much as deadwood without permission.

  When morning came, they extinguished their fires and I could see nothing, sunlight glinting off water and distance disguising details. But there was no question that this had to be reported to the Canopy. Greensleeves up and down the coast needed to know about this, and if the Hathrim were heading for Ghurana Nent, the Nentians needed to be warned, too. They might not care as we did about the clear-cutting, but they would care about their borders being breached.

  The details and the thinking cannot be communicated well by root and stem, so I am on my way to report to Pont in service to the Canopy, breaking my journey to record this and spade a small meal down my throat, dangling my feet over the edge of the Leaf Road. No doubt some other greensleeves will be there, adding their branches of understanding to the problem. With any luck, Pen might be well enough to travel now and meet me at the Second Tree. I would be proud to introduce her to everyone. And if I can convince the Canopy to defend the northern slopes of the Godsteeth from wholesale slaughter, I will.

  A flash, a cloud of green smoke, and Nel Kit ben Sah dissolved all too soon. The bard bowed to Survivor Field, saying, “More from Nel tomorrow. But now I must introduce you to Gondel Vedd, a linguist at the Senn College of Languages at the University of Linlauen in Kauria. Please excuse his initial appearance—he will clean up nicely later, I assure you.”

  Once Fintan cast down his next black sphere, a Kaurian man, mildly stooped and on the edge of elderly or, to be charitable, in very late middle age, looked around in wonder. He was bald on top, his remaining hair was white and unkempt, and he had a mustard stain on his tunic. He didn’t look particularly brilliant or heroic but did have a quick intelligence in his eyes. His voice surprised me; it was a high tenor but strong and confident.

  A hammering fist on the door woke me after a fitful two hours’ sleep, and it was still black as tar in my rooms. I’d stayed up until my last candle guttered out, reviewing ancient texts on the origins of the Rift—again—and my eyelids felt weighted and sticky as if someone had poured honey on them as a practical joke. “Gondel Vedd! The mistral requires your counsel!” a voice boomed, followed shortly thereafter by more pounding. Apparently Her Grace wanted answers on the Rift, too. Or else I was in serious trouble. My husband grumbled, and I felt him burrow underneath the covers next to me.

  I stumbled blindly out of bed, kicked over the chamber pot, and groped my way toward the front door. An impatient cyclone frowned at me when I opened it. He held a lantern up to my eyes, and I squinted at the sudden glare.

  “You’re Gondel Vedd?” He sounded disappointed, as though he’d expected someone much more impressive. My parents would have sympathized. They’d always expected me to be much more impressive as well.

  “Yes, I am he. How may I help you?”

  “The mistral requires your presence at the palace. I’m to bring you to her immediately.” He said this quickly, as if the speed of his tongue could lend greater urgency to his mission.

  “Is my head to be struck off?”

  The cyclone blanched, the question taking him by surprise. He considered it seriously, though, unable to appreciate the absurdity—for why would the mistral need to decapitate men when she could simply feed them to the ocean?—and then said in reassuring tones, “I doubt it, Scholar. That form of execution is only practiced by the Nentians.”

  “Ah. You relieve me excessively. Let me get dressed. What time is it, Cyclone?” I called.

  “Two hours before dawn, I think.”

  “Too blasted early,” my love mumbled.

  “You could show some concern here,” I whispered to him.

  “Mmf. Can’t be mad at me. I’m unconscious.”

  “You can be sure we’ll talk when you’re conscious, then.”

  What had h
appened that the mistral needed to see me at this time of night? Perhaps she needed my aid translating something in the old language. I hoped it was something simple like that. I could see no other positive reason for sending a cyclone for me at this hour. Mistrals do not bestow medals and titles on scholars before breakfast. Or after it, if we are to speak honestly.

  “Has the mistral not slept?” I asked.

  “I’d be surprised if she had, what with this—well. You’ll see.”

  Interesting. Whatever had happened today had little to do with me, then. Until now. “I’m sorry to hear of her unrest. But the wind will bring us peace,” I said, taking comfort in the ritual phrase.

  “We breathe it as we speak,” the cyclone answered automatically.

  I shoved my ancient shanks into some breeches and hastily pulled a tunic over my head. Finding my belt proved problematic, and I could almost feel the cyclone’s impatience boiling over as I scrambled to find it.

  “What are you doing, Scholar?” he called from the doorway. “We must be on our way.”

  Finding my boots was no problem at all. I nearly tripped over them, and I yelped in fear. That was a broken hip narrowly escaped. And Maron slept through it, ripping out a tremendous snore.

  “Are you all right, Scholar?”

  “Yes, a moment. Almost ready.” I was probably a mismatched horror, and the fops at court—if any were awake—would mock me mercilessly, but on the whole I counted it better than appearing nude. Careful searching allowed me to find the pitcher of water on my bureau. I poured some into the washbasin next to it and splashed my face, then tried to tame my hair by drowning it so that it hung from my scalp like sodden clumps of wool.

  “All right, we can go now,” I said, returning to the front door. The cyclone’s face suggested that his second impression of me was worse than the first.

  A chariot awaited in the street, and we managed to travel three whole blocks before the cyclone brought up my family.