A Plague of Giants (Seven Kennings #1) - Kevin Hearne Page 0,124

at the pub and have some beers

(Chorus)

—

“We haven’t heard from our Kaurian scholar in a while, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t busy. Today I’d like to share with you the many discoveries he made about the enemy in that uncomfortable, windless dungeon.”

Fintan took the seeming of Gondel Vedd, who appeared this time with a clean set of clothes.

For want of a better name, we have taken to calling Saviič and his people Bone Giants. They are certainly not Hathrim or even related to them. They have no kenning of fire, though they have heard of it. They have heard of all the kennings, including one we have not found and another that remains a mystery.

I have made excellent progress in working out Saviič’s language, but it is not fast enough to satisfy anyone, least of all myself. We moved rapidly through children’s language cards that taught me the words for basic nouns and verbs. Most abstract concepts are still difficult to grasp, however, and I am often thrown off by the syntax of his language. He loads up the front ends of his sentences with nouns and objects and modifiers, and they seem to hang there, suspended and inanimate, until the verb and its modifiers are tacked on to the end. I find myself waiting for the verb so much that I lose much of what went before and have to ask him to repeat: Who died again? Where and how?

Today I thought I had learned enough to speak of where Saviič had come from. Instead of bringing Zanata Sedam with me into the dungeon, I brought a map of Teldwen. An incomplete map, apparently, that I was very anxious to fill in. Not least because I have been asked every day by Teela Parr where his home might be. I wonder what will consume the court’s curiosity after Saviič points off the edge of the map and says, “I live over there somewhere.”

For that is essentially what he did. I showed him the map and pointed to Linlauen so that he could see where he was, and after reviewing the words for directions and distances, he estimated that his country was roughly due east of Keft and off the edge of the map, far past the point where creatures of the deep would pull ships down into the dark and snack on the sailors before they had a chance to drown.

It is called Ecula, and his people are Eculans. (That being said, I doubt the “Bone Giant” nickname will go away anytime soon since the court has spoken of little else for days. It is difficult to look at him and think of anything but his stature and starved appearance. After his first gluttonous meal, his food intake has shrunk to birdlike levels.)

Saviič pointed to the archipelago between Forn and Kauria and indicated that Ecula was much like that: a series of islands with no overwhelmingly large landmass. He drew a tight cluster of five islands, named each, and claimed that there were floating bridges spanning the straits and nets at either end to keep man-eaters out of their “civil waters.”

“What are the man-eaters?” I asked. He sketched pictures of bladefins and longarms and two different monstrosities that could only be classified as krakens, and I nodded, grinning.

A whole new country! Islands connected with floating bridges and protected waterways! What a sight that must be! Obviously they had a rich religious life, so think of what else they must have to offer. What did Eculan art look like? What did their music sound like? And how would we ever enjoy these things if we couldn’t cross the ocean?

That inspired a new host of questions for Saviič. How did he survive the crossing? Why did he dare it, and why dare it alone?

His answer to the first question was rather flip: he survived because nothing ate him. But his answer to why stretched the limits of credibility. He claimed to be a merchant interested in trade. That would bring joy to the monied interests in the court, no doubt, but Saviič did not dress or behave like any merchant I have ever seen. For one thing, he still preferred near nudity. The merchants I know like to be dressed head to toe in the finest clothing they can afford, which is a public projection of their success as much as it is a taste for luxury. And most merchants tend not to be starved and sunburned skeletons but rather