A Plague of Giants (Seven Kennings #1) - Kevin Hearne Page 0,197

wall in minutes and give them enough time to retreat behind it.

I couldn’t think about that pressure, though. I had to focus on the stone and soil of the mountain above and reshape it to fulfill a new purpose. This was not a simple movement of virgin earth but rather a modification of older work. The ceiling had been strengthened and solidified by the will of three hundred stonecutters. I had to break through that by the force of my will alone and then draw down a thin slice of mountain to seal off the tunnel.

The tight seals of the past did not wish to be broken, however, and they were much more powerful than I had anticipated. My forebears had shored up the ceiling as strongly as they possibly could to prevent collapse even in an earthquake. And so the temblor interrupted me as I was trying to pierce through the layers of protection because it had been several minutes, the sound of the approaching enemy was growing louder, and nothing had happened.

“What’s the delay, stonecutter?” she growled. I explained and said the wall would form quickly once I broke through the protections of the past. “Hurry it up,” she said, as if I had been idle.

Spreading my efforts or my focus across the width of the tunnel wasn’t working; I was peeling away strips of protection like an onion, but it felt as if I was making very little progress. I tried a different tactic, focusing my kenning on a small area in the middle and drilling up through the seals. That went faster, and once my kenning touched virgin rock above, I spread out my focus across the width of the tunnel again but only a single length’s thickness and attacked the seals from above, prising them apart, until they shattered into pieces like shards of glass. Nothing that anyone else could see, of course; it was simply what it felt like to me in the trance of my kenning.

With a strip of the seals gone I could now draw down the mountain, and it was then that it occurred to me that it would have been far wiser and much quicker to deal with the seals on the floor of the tunnel—which were much thinner and did not involve the potential for a cave-in once broken—and make a wall rise up instead of descend, but it was too late to begin anew and those hadn’t been my orders. In the gap between switching my focus from one task to another, the outside world penetrated. Combat had been joined, and the Bone Giants fell upon our soldiers with their strange swords. Over the tops of rows of Raelech heads I saw the heads and shoulders of pale, ghastly creatures floating above them, swinging their weapons down and sometimes crashing into shields, sometimes recoiling as spears thrust out from the formation and pierced their bodies; then, when they were yanked out, the barbs pulled forth intestines through the gaps in their bone armor. The blood, I thought, looked obscene against their white skin.

The temblor, still standing nearby, looked up and saw nothing before turning to me with a snarl on her face, all her affable demeanor gone. She shouted over the din, “The wall, stonecutter! Get me that wall now or we’re all going to die!”

It rocked me back into focus, and I stretched out with my senses to the strip of virgin rock and chanted the stonecutter’s hymn, providing structure to my thoughts and a shape to the kenning. Rock sheared and shifted, popped and cracked as it began to slide down from the ceiling in a slab one length wide, and all my muscles tensed with the strain of containing it. The mountain above was heavy and wanted the tunnel closed.

“That’s it! Faster!” the temblor said.

“I can’t go faster,” I explained through gritted teeth. “I have to control the descent or I won’t be able to stop it.”

“The floor will stop it!”

“No—you don’t understand. I mean the seals are fragile now.”

“As fast as you can, stonecutter. Our warriors are strong but cannot hold forever—no, don’t look! Concentrate on your job.”

“Quit interrupting me and I will.”

The mountain wanted to heal itself; the Granite Tunnel was an open wound, and now that it felt a break in the seals keeping it out, it wanted to reclaim all that space. Letting the rock descend was easy: all my straining was to keep the edges of the seals in the