Heartland

XXVI

I got in front of Antoine, and the peacock shield of the Chorus flinched like a hundred eyes blinking in shock as masonry and granite hurled across the open expanse of the porch. The eruption was mainly directed upward, the result of a massive object throwing itself toward the sky, but there were still quite a few pieces that came straight at us. A cloud of grit billowed out from the broken church as one of the alcoves collapsed, and it was several long moments before we could see clearly.

A giant, walking through the wreckage of man's greatest architectural achievement-a cathedral built to inspire us to contemplate the majesty and enormity of Heaven's work-and here was a creature who could touch the ceiling of that vaulted space. With one of his hands. The statue from the grotto hadn't grown proportionally. The legs were as thick as some of the pillars in the various chapels, and the torso reminded me of some of the redwoods in Northern California. But one of the arms was long and thin, as if the mass ratio was correct but length was more important than girth, while the other was a stump, ending in something that vaguely looked like an open sore with a short nail protruding from it like an inflamed ingrown hair. The head was small too. The long braids coming off the back of its skull were long and very mobile-more like snakes all the time-but the rest of the skull seemed unfinished. A face had been roughed in, but with very little detail. As if it were ornamental, and not meant to be functional.

"Somehow," I offered, "I don't think it's going to be big on conversation."

The giant fought its way free of the walls of the church, knocking the last part of the west wall down, and I caught sight of its feet. It had two central legs that ended in flat columns, like the feet of an elephant, and sprouting from the upper part of its calves were a number of smaller supports that worked in the same way that the flying buttresses on the church behind it held up the central vault of the nave. These buttresses moved, accordion-style, in concert with each ponderous step.

Antoine and I remained still, hiding behind the staring eyes of the Chorus' peacock shield, as the giant turned its shadowy face toward the sun. The granite of the head flowed and rippled in the sunlight and the features became more prominent-a nose emerged, a slashing line opened into a mouth, and two sunken pits caught some of the sunlight and kept it. The jaw lengthened too, growing something that started as a beard and became more stalks like its hair.

"Spiertz," Antoine muttered behind me, recognizing the face even with its tentacled chin.

"So he's really in there." I couldn't help but be impressed. It was an incredible feat. Surviving without the flesh, Spiertz had bound his soul to the rock of the mount and forged it into a body. I wondered if the Chorus could even touch him. Could they even find him in the rock?

"How do you kill stone?" Antoine wondered.

"Wish I knew," I answered.

Spiertz swung his head in our direction. It was bigger now, more correctly proportioned with the rest of his body, and the face bore a frozen expression. Caught somewhere between amusement and horror, his open mouth gaped. The stone of his chest rippled like water and we heard a rattling sound like sand in a pipe a second before a stream of tiny rocks shot from the giant's mouth. The peacock eyes of the Chorus flashed crimson with the impact of a thousand stones, and I groaned as the Chorus squeezed my spine.

Behind me, Antoine whispered a string of words and the scattering spray of sand off my shield flashed white and fused into glass. He kept the spell active for a few seconds, letting the curve of glass build up as more sand scattered along the convex surface until we were almost enclosed in a protective bubble. He grabbed my arm and pulled me back, both of us ducking under the far edge of his barrier. A second later, the glass shattered as the giant brought a heavy foot down on the white dome.

Antoine raised his left hand and slashed it down, and a blot of blue lightning cut through the air between his fingers and the giant. One of the flying buttresses sheared off, sparks erupting from the cut, and the giant wobbled momentarily as the other supports slammed down, adapting to the new configuration.

I had a chance to get a better look at the stump, and I realized what was protruding from the center of the inflamed end. "The Spear," I Whispered to Antoine. "He's got the Spear already."

The giant swung its long arm at us, a wide sweep that would take our heads off if we remained standing upright. At first I thought I had miscalculated the length of its arm, but when the Chorus translated all the energy patterns into vectors of force, I realized the arm was growing longer as it moved. I sprawled on my ass and Antoine leaped forward, tucking his head and rolling clumsily. The arm whistled over my head, but caught Antoine's heel, knocking him to the side and spoiling his roll.

The giant tried to step on Antoine, and while it missed with its heavy leg, one of the buttresses hammered down on Antoine's leg. Lightning flashed again, and the buttress disintegrated into a spray of stone chips. The giant swept its arm down once more, striking the pavement of the terrace with a crack of thunder, and when it pulled the arm free, the long whip of stone was festooned with shards and splinters of concrete.

The Chorus attached themselves like a limpet mine to one of the remaining buttresses on the nearby leg, and with an acknowledgement from me, they detonated-an explosion of silver light that shattered the support. The giant whirled its spike-encrusted arm at me, and one of the ragged shards of concrete tore a hole out of the shoulder of my jacket. Got a little bit of me too.

Antoine blew off another leglet as the giant stepped away from us. That left four remaining on its left leg, and as it retreated, I thought for a second that we might actually bring it down before it managed to hit us with its spiked arm, and then I realized it wasn't making a defensive withdrawal so much as fleeing. It crashed into the building along the southern edge of the terrace, and its weight took it through the upper floor. It vanished into a cloud of debris, and we heard the crackling, shattering sound of falling rock as it tumbled down the side of the mount.

"Where the hell is it going?" I asked Antoine.

"Paris," he replied. He knocked some of the dust off his suit jacket, though it didn't much improve the condition of the garment. There were a number of tiny gashes on his face from rock chips. "You think he wants to be trapped in that body forever?"

I watched the cloud of dust that rose in the wake of the giant. "It seems like it is working pretty well for him so far."

Antoine limped toward the ruined edge of the terrace. His right pant leg was shiny with fresh blood. "The man is slipping away," he said. "Couldn't you feel it? Spiertz had moved his soul into the rock, but it's too foreign a substance. His soul can't be sustained; it is going to break up and become nothing more than an appetite."

I stood next to Antoine and looked down the hill. The giant was in the village below, thrashing its way through the buildings. Heading for the wall surrounding the base of the mount. Beyond that lay the shallow water of the bay, and then the mainland. From there, straight toward the sun until it reached Paris.

I remembered a bit of trivia that Lafoutain had offered. "Les Michelettes." I pointed them out to Antoine.

"Medieval technology," he said. "It lasts forever, doesn't it?"

"Let's hope so."

Antoine did the heavy lifting while I prepped the projectile. A bombard was one of those medieval inventions that was simple in design, cumbersome in construction, and devastating in effect. The bombard was nothing more than a very heavy tube that, when filled with powder and a projectile, hurled a heavy object very far and very hard. They were very good at bringing walls down without the need of putting men within arrow range, and when engineers discovered that stone balls tended to shatter due to their velocity, they opted to make bigger guns. The supergun arms race went on-bigger is better! — until someone discovered how to mass produce iron balls, at which time the need for large-bore guns dropped.

The downside of a big gun was that it was heavy, and not so easily transported, as the English realized during the fifteenth century when they were getting the shit kicked out of them by a bunch of French knights. The two guns left behind were hauled back to the walls of Mont-Saint-Michel and mounted there, like trophies, so everyone would know the English had not only been beaten, but they had left their cool toys behind. At some point, an officious bureaucrat had ordered the cannons filled, but as they had opted to use fairly cheap cement, it didn't take us long to clean out one of the cannons.

Having positioned the re-bored cannon, Antoine sighted down the length of his good arm and took a distance reading on the retreating giant. It had started on the causeway, but by the time we reached the lower wall of the island, it had reached the first breach. The pavement had collapsed under its weight and it had fallen into the sea, where it had run afoul of an old law of alchemy: salt water and stone don't mix well. It had been slowed by the ocean's touch, and it had climbed back up to the road once more, but the next break had confounded it again, and the second time it had stayed in the water. Sluggish in the grip of the salty sea, it forged toward the shore, but it was moving slowly so there was little danger of it being out of range.

I packed the throat of one of the Michelettes with glass, sand, a car battery and gasoline, a bunch of scrap metal torn from the same car that I had taken the battery and gas from, and a ragged block of rusted iron I had scavenged from the ornamental gate. Submerged in several inches of blood-tinged gasoline, the armament was a solidifying mass of Chorus-tinged intent, waiting for the trigger of my Will.

"Make it count," Antoine said, squinting at the giant.

I bit my tongue, hard enough to taste blood, and nodded.

He closed his eyes, exhaled slowly, and raised his arm a few inches. His magick moved the cannon sympathetically, lifting the barrel off the shelf of the wall. Veins in his neck stood out as he held the cannon in place, and I gave him a few more seconds to dig his anchors in. Pointing the bombard in the right direction was only half the trick, the other half was making sure it stayed on target as the projectile fired. His forehead creased with exertion as his finger quivered for a second, and then he found his center. The jitter in his finger stopped and the skin of his forehead smoothed out.

"Ignis," I whispered, and the cannon fired.

For the brief seconds of the projectile's flight, my perception was bound to it. The wind burned my hard skin, and I screamed as I tore through the morning air. I knew where I was going; I saw my target, and my focus never wavered. The shape of the giant grew quickly in my field of vision, too quickly, and then there was nothing but the shuddering blankness of impact. I gasped, hurled back into my own frame of reference, and the Chorus melted from my skin.

"You missed," Antoine pronounced. The cannon lay behind us, knocked askew by the force of the blast.

Shading my eyes, I stared out at the foundering giant. It couldn't get up, the sea's poisonous touch was too great on it now, and it thrashed about in the surf like it was caught in quicksand. "I guess that depends on what I had been aiming for," I said, glancing over at Antoine.

The giant's left shoulder and stump were gone, torn off by the impact of my improvised projectile. Somewhere near the water's edge was a piece of rock with the Spear imbedded in it.

"We have to destroy him," I reminded Antoine. "The tide'll go out enough for him to crawl to shore, and then he's going to repair that shoulder and start marching on Paris again."

Antoine nodded. "I suppose you have a plan?"

I did. While gathering materials for the cannon shot, I had realized something about stone. Mountains weren't permanent. They lasted thousands of millennia, but eventually, through erosion by wind and water, they could be reduced to a flat spot on the terrain. Given time and temperament, a mountain could be worn done, one grain of sand at a time. The trick was speeding that process up. Spiertz's soul was in the rock, diffused so widely that the Chorus couldn't find him, but what if the area and mass of rock were reduced to a smaller amount? If the statue was hacked up into pieces, could I find the piece that held Spiertz and break him?

"First," I said, "we're going to need the Spear. And then, well, you're going to have to trust me."

"Can you do it without the ominous theatrics?"

"I need a conduit."

Antoine grimaced, understanding the nature of my plan. "No. That's not going to work."

"You can ground yourself better than I can, and I know how to siphon energy from a living source. I'm going to need a lot of power, and your feeding it to me is the easiest way." I glanced at his shortened sleeve. "Besides, this plan requires two hands. You're missing one. It's like drawing the short straw."