A Plague of Giants (Seven Kennings #1) - Kevin Hearne Page 0,142

flight of flaming arrows arced high over the walls, and the spearmen raised their shields above their heads to form an impromptu roof. Not a single soldier died from the arrows. They died instead from the flames.

Once the fire shafts landed among the men, thudding into shields or falling into the earth nearby, the true power of the Hathrim lavaborn was made manifest. From a distance, perhaps peeking over the tops of their walls, they spread those tiny fires to the nearest scraps of clothing. And once that ignited and they had more fire to play with, they spread it even farther, and in seconds there were ranks of men slapping at themselves or rolling on the ground, and they were so preoccupied with their pain and screaming that they never saw the second volley of regular arrows coming, never raised their shields, and those who were managing their personal fires got perforated instead.

Twice more the unseen Hathrim archers behind the walls repeated the pattern—a volley of fire arrows, spreading the flames to clothing, followed by a volley of regular arrows—and that was all it took for the army to break. The rearmost ranks wanted none of what was happening up front and pelted back to the trench, which never did ignite as we assumed it would. And as they ran from the screaming deaths of their cohorts, they did no little amount of screaming themselves. Meanwhile the lavaborn kept at their work on the front ranks, encouraging the flames to leap from soldier to soldier, alive or already dead, until all had fallen and the field was one large cook fire with greasy black smoke roiling and turning the sunset red as the fat of all those sacrificed men snapped and popped through dusk and into the night.

I hoped Ghuyedai heard it and it haunted him as it haunts me still. I hope he smelled the stench of those deaths and had it fill his lungs. I hoped he saw the terrified eyes of his men as they ran back over that trench, crying and with snot dribbling down over their lips, praying to Kalaad to spare them from being burned alive. I hoped he’d be declared unfit for duty. But I think those were all hollow hopes.

A better hope was that the Triune Council would have a good answer for what we witnessed that day, for they would need to respond to this slaughter for sure, and someone far better schooled in tactics than Ghuyedai would need to craft a plan of attack. We had seen no evidence that they had a true fury among them, but the city of Baghra Khek clearly had enough lesser lavaborn to burn whatever they wanted. With flights of arrows and fire they had slain close to two thousand men without ever exposing themselves to danger. A chill in my guts told me many more would have to die before the Hathrim were defeated.

—

“Meanwhile,” the bard said, returning to his current self and pulling out another seeming sphere, “the world’s first plaguebringer still had a Seeking to conduct in the aftermath of Madhep’s death.”

The figure of Abhinava Khose materialized in the smoke, and he, too, looked subtly different. Taller and older as a result of the aging penalty exacted by his kenning and with a look in his eyes that already hinted that the price of his power was grinding away his soul.

I gave Madhep to Kalaad in the sky, but when it came to the soldiers, I looked to Tamhan with pleading eyes. He did it, giving them more respect than they had given us, and then we moved our camp. The tired kids got on the horses, and we hiked a couple of miles in the darkness before stopping once more for the night. One of them noticed aloud that she hadn’t been bitten or even harassed by a single insect since she’d been in my company, and once she said that, the others realized that it was true for them as well. This small relief from a lifelong source of annoyance impressed them, I think, even more than summoning the swarms. Causing bugs to bite was not that big a deal to them. Preventing bugs from biting, though? That was miraculous.

It was wearying to pretend I was comfortable in a congregation of strangers. They all had been recruited by Tamhan, and to be honest with myself, even he was familiar only by the grace of a single day. I