The Blacktongue Thief

58 Come the Giants

“You look like … you had a difficult time,” Galva said.

“Shyte,” Norrigal said. “You could have said he looked like shyte, because he does.” And then, more intimately, she said only to me, “You do,” and softly kissed my lower lip.

“Tell us,” Yorbez said. “Tell us where is our Mireya.”

We followed the trail for hours, Norrigal wearing her false nose, me checking for donkey tracks, up gentle hills crowned with old cairns and down rocky passes; past an old well with Sterish writing promising cold snowmelt water but which turned out mucky and nearly dry; past the huge image of an elephant carved into the white stone of a green hill, the style of that one looking Keshite, probably a tribute to the bygone glory of the mountain folks’ ancestors.

We came to a tor crowned with a sort of round wooden henge, probably a calendar. I climbed it for a bird’s-eye view, doing my best to dodge the abundance of sheepshyte carpeting the place. I suppose sheep like a nice view, too. The countryside was beautiful, with stands of yellow trees smattered about and blue firs and faraway lakes, poor Hrava lying dead behind us, but as I looked east and south where the path continued, I saw no sign of the party we were chasing.

Back on the path, I now took a good look at the pain-in-the-ass musicians and noticed that Gorbol had a pair of black eyes to go with Bizh’s shortened nose, so I could only guess that he had tried to pilfer someone’s pack or had gotten up to other mischief. The musicians refrained from playing anything, which was a blessing, but by mutual accord, the rest of us all started walking faster. Gorbol, Nazh, and Bizh fell behind, struggling to keep up but receding. They were useless, and helpless, and sure to die without us. I almost felt bad. No, actually, I did feel bad, but Galva had her queen to catch, and you never knew if the quarter hour or half day they cost us might be the difference between Mireya’s life and her death.

They were almost out of sight behind us when we found the donkey, dead, its head smashed flat. Two dead giants lay near, their faces blackened with having been dead awhile, and a less-than-fresh dead man in leper’s saffron robes, also lying flat as a frog in a wheel rut.

“Shyte,” I said.

Galva and Yorbez stood agape. They had likely never seen a real giant before, not in anything but old engravings, and the size of them is breathtaking that first time. And really, every time after.

I looked closer at the saffron-robed fellow, cleaved and mashed as he was, one eye horrid with looking up at us from the mess of his head. In the north, they put saffron robes on lepers to warn others of their coming. This man, though wrapped in dirty bandages, was no leper. Where some of his bandages had come off with the violence of his death (being ground into pulp with the bloody fifty-pound bronze axe-head stuck in the dirt near the road was my best guess), I saw that his skin was covered not in sores but tattoos in various languages, not unlike Sesta’s. This was no sick man. It was an Assassin-Adept, one of the Guild’s elite killers disguised to pass as a leper on the road. That was how they had hoped to get out of Oustrim, we surmised, crossing into Molrova where the Guild operated unhindered and going back underground with the queen.

But where was she?

The flies were thick here—all this had transpired a day or two ago.

We didn’t see the log flying at us until it was too late.

The giant must have thrown it from a hundred yards off, and to be fair, when I call it a log, to her, it was really just a hunting-stick. It was a good throw, too. A bull’s-eye. It caught Norrigal low and plowed her off her feet, snapping both legs, and if the gods are kind, one day I will forget how that sounded, though I haven’t yet and don’t expect to. We know too much about the gods to hope for their benevolence, do we not?

Norrigal was on her back and thankfully insensible, though at the time, I did not know she was not dead. The log, six feet long if an inch and too wide for a big man to throttle with his hands, had skidded to a halt near a plume of settling dust, and I looked back the way it had come. Three bigguns long-legged the dwindling square acre between us, quivering the earth with their footfalls.

“There! A cave!” Galva yelled, pointing at a sort of frowning slit-mouth in the rocky hill’s face. It might or might not be tall enough for a man to slide through. It might or might not admit a giant, but it seemed a better gamble than the road. The man I’d been a month before would have huffed it up that hill and mourned Norrigal later, but that man had died with an oath under a dark sky. Quick as a snake, I bent and stripped the false nose from her, pinched the real one to try to wake her—she moaned but didn’t wake.

There wasn’t time to pick her up with care, and scooping her careless might be the death of her.

“Not without Norrigal!” I shouted. In that instant, I saw Galva consider the possibility her queen was in that cave and weigh it against the dishonor of leaving a comrade to die in the road. She nodded and shook her horse-staff into life, mounting the clockwork beast.

I took my strung bow off my shoulder and readied an arrow. Yorbez huffed a breath to ready herself and drew her sword, about to put all those mornings running uphill to use. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but we charged the fucking giants.

Two of the bigguns were male, one female. The first fellow had even bluer, fuzzier tattoos than the ones in Hrava, his dark red dreadlocks roughly the same color as my hair bouncing as he ran, his bronze axe glinting in the weak sun. The woman who threw the log because she had no weapon now in hand, had the same almost-to-the-teats girdle as the men, her exposed dugs flopping, her muscly arms as powerful-looking as those of her fellows. The last giant had a wicked-looking flail with three heads, and a thought came to me I had no time to muse on at the moment, but which I later explored at length; we were goblins to them. We were little, fast, dirty-fighting fuckers fit to beat with flails and clubs. Only we didn’t bite and were even smaller in comparison. When at last we came together, we would have likely died but for the sound of the cornemuse.

The smaller cousin of Norholt bagpipes, the cornemuse is popular from Ispanthia west to Molrova. Some people love the wail of the high, reedy pipes, and some people find them not unlike the strangling of a cat. I had been in the latter camp, but now? I love them. They sound like mercy and good luck. They sound like the very voice of Cassa, goddess of second chances, telling you your death is not today.

The sound of a cornemuse came up now, the pipes keening with the air squeezed out of Gorbol’s underarm bag. The musicians, who had begun a stumble-run toward us when they saw the giants coming down a far hill, were now close enough to be heard. The tattooed giant was swinging for me, but his axe slowed down. Not a lot. Just enough so the bronze blade cut air as I dodged just out of its nearly horizontal arc.

I ducked between his legs, brushing my head on the bottom of his leather-stripped skirt and getting an unfortunate whiff of him. The female bellowed as Galva on her stone-and-wood horse similarly thwarted the giant’s attempt to swat her with a paddle-hand, then cut her arm with her bullnutter. Flail had tried for Yorbez, but he was moving slower, too, and only sprayed dirt. The older Spanth wasn’t close enough to touch him yet—bullnutters with their two-foot blades aren’t the ideal weapons for giants—but got behind him. We were all behind the giants now. We kept running, wanting to lead the battle away from where Norrigal lay, then turned.

The giants ran off the path and split to surround us, but their running looked wrong. Now the drummer, Bizh, had started beating his hip-drum, and I noticed something odd—his drumbeats exactly matched the steps of the lead giant, and as his drumbeats slowed, so slowed the giant’s legs. Nazh was playing her pipe at the same drowsing tempo. It was a careful, powerful bit of magic. They had started playing at the same beat the giants moved to find accord with them, then slowed, and slowed the giants.

“Ha!” I shouted, shooting an arrow that Flail just managed to catch with his leather bracer—I don’t think that one even drew blood, but then I shot both of his eyes out. Galva and Yorbez ran at him and finished him, cutting his legs above his boots until he fell to his knees.

Yorbez then stabbed his neck while he grabbed Galva off her clockwork horse, which turned staff again as soon as the Spanth was off of it, and tried to fling her to her death. At full speed, he would have vaulted Galva three stories in the air, but as it was, he just sort of pushed her off, then looked down to see his beard and belly soaking red. Axe was coming for me now, moving like he was underwater, tears of frustration forming in his eyes as he gritted his teeth. I understood how he felt. One of the great truths of magic is that it is profoundly unfair. On the other hand, so is being twelve feet tall.

I did for Axe now, tossing down my bow and drawing Palthra, using first his boot and then his girdle as steps up, then cutting, with difficulty, the main of his neck and starting the fountain of his blood. As with the biggun felled by the Spanths, that came out fast, the first spurt sending a great ruby gout of it against the powder-blue Oustrim sky, no small part of the next spurt jetting on my arm and face. I was blinded myself and fell. So by the spell’s logic, and every spell has logic, blood once out of the body wasn’t bound by the magic. I hit the ground, sleeved blood out of my eyes and only just rolled away in time not to be pressed forever into the earth by the weight of the slow-falling bastard.

That’s when the tree hit the musicians.

The female biggun had uprooted a dead, leaning tree and, if she could not throw it for her lack of speed, she could push it out of her hands at them. Caught up in the music-making, I supposed no one of them wanted to be the first to flee and break the spell, so none of them fled, and the spell was broken anyway as they were crushed.

The sound brought it home, the screams of Gorbol and Bizh, the surprised yelp of Nazh, the terrifying crack of dead wood hitting flesh, earth, and bone. The screaming of the injured musicians turned into peeping. Gorbol’s and Bizh’s clothes now flattened, empty, and a mouse ran out of Gorbol’s sleeve. The mouse that had been Bizh was too badly injured to run away and went in a sad circle, then he rolled on his back and died.

The giant, fast again, kicked a spray of dirt and stones at Galva and Yorbez, who had started at her, forcing them to hunch and cover against the hail of debris. I grabbed my bow off the ground, shot arrows at her face, sticking one eye so she howled in rage and pain, and distracting her so that the Ispanthians, charging her again, could cut her down while I rained arrows into her.

She died just as a cloud passed over the sun.

I saw the shadow rolling across the rocky earth, then saw the shadow’s end and the sun’s frontier returning.

I may have been delirious, but I thought I spied the shape of a wolf in the trees now slinking off. Not that I really believed the gods were physical realities, but at that moment, I didn’t believe they weren’t.

“Thank you, Solgrannon, god of war, for strengthening our arms against our foes,” I said, “and I’ll drink to you, Fothannon, when next I have drink, for the mischief these musicians made.”

Now if I could just figure out who to pray to about Norrigal.