soldiers gasped once, and then they fell, too, ten at a time, as I rushed the shore and cleared a space for me to secure those documents. I opened my waterproof satchel as I left the surf and saw that the army was a truly huge one. There were not hundreds but thousands. My mouth dried up as I absorbed the odds of survival and instinct screamed at me to turn back now, take the death of a field commander, and call it victory. The only thing I had in my favor was surprise and perhaps, bizarrely, my comparatively small stature. None of the giants more than a rank or two back could see me over the heads and shoulders of their brothers. And in the time that it took them to turn, see that the people behind them had fallen, and look around for danger, it was already upon them, and they fell, too.
But cries of alarm spread up the column faster than I could work, and as I reached the leader and knelt down beside him, long, bony fingers were pointing in my direction and conclusions were being reached: The short woman who came from the sea must somehow be responsible for sixty—no, seventy!—dead giants! Kill her! At least that’s what my imagination supplied to match their foreign words.
A rank of them took two steps, raising weapons, before I exploded their brains. A stab of pain shot between my eyes after that; I was pushing myself too hard now, aging with each new effort.
The fallen bearded officer or whatever he was smelled horrible already; it was too soon to be decay, so he must have polluted the air as part of his daily existence. Did these savages never bathe?
I had to push him over onto his back since he had fallen on top of the papers. Grunting with the effort, I looked up as I worked and put down two more groups of ten giants charging in my direction. That gave the rest of them pause, and there was some discussion on how to proceed. I took advantage and scooped up all the papers I could, cramming them into my satchel. I even reached into his tattered cloth bag and pulled out more, shoving them into my satchel and sealing it as the Bone Giants decided that spears might work and hurled a bunch in my direction.
Scrambling away from the body in a panicked crab walk on all fours, I avoided most of them. One sheared through the skin on the inside of my right calf, and another sank through the top of my left foot, pinning me to the beach. The rest thudded into the body of their leader or around it. I screamed and yanked out the spear, closing my eyes as I did so, and when I opened them, I saw a group of giants behind the foremost preparing to send another volley my way, since the first had enjoyed some success. Gritting my teeth, I pushed the water in their heads hard, disrupting their throws as they fell backward, already dead. My skull throbbed every bit as much as my foot after that, but I pushed myself up onto my right leg, testing the calf, and though it stung, it still functioned well enough. I purposely did not look at my left foot, fearing I’d faint if I saw the wound. I hopped on my right foot experimentally, holding my left foot off the ground with a bent knee, and when I didn’t crash to the ground, I lunged toward the sea.
The mob of giants rippled and flowed in my direction, a roar building among them as it sank in that a single woman had killed more than a hundred of them, had stolen their leader’s writings, and was both wounded and trying to escape.
In furtive glances over my shoulder, I looked for the ones with spears and pushed the water in their skulls away and let the ones with swords come on. They had some ground to cover and they would cover it pretty quickly, but not as quickly as a thrown spear. Once they closed the distance, I figured the spears wouldn’t keep coming for fear of hitting their own men—and their stature would hide me from the view of others, perhaps.
Whooshing sounds, gritty impacts, and blurs in my vision told me that I didn’t get all the spear throwers, but the distance and my convulsive movements made me a difficult target.