A Plague of Giants (Seven Kennings #1) - Kevin Hearne Page 0,198

ceiling intact, to prevent them from expanding.

Despite the wall descending, the clash of steel and the juicy noises of flesh being torn and blood being spilled only grew louder. Death screams floated above it all, and they chilled my spine. I kept my eyes averted from the battle, looking at the stone above, and soon it had descended low enough that I couldn’t see the fight in my peripheral vision. That was some relief, but halting the descent of the slab short of the floor was a monumental effort that left me sweating and gasping with the beginnings of a headache. The soldiers would have to drop prone and roll underneath, and the temblor was yelling that the Raelechs should begin doing precisely that.

“Retreat under the wall! Your duty is done! Retreat now! Retreat!”

Soon the soldiers began to appear, and the temblor had them stand at the ready with their spears. “If one of those giants comes through, you stab him and let me know,” she said, and then to me, “As soon as the enemy appears, you drop the wall the rest of the way, understand?”

“Understood,” I managed, my hands braced on my knees as I bent, trying to recover my breath. My arms trembled with exhaustion. Earth shaping of this magnitude drained one so quickly; that was why they had used three hundred stonecutters in the past to do this work.

Ten warriors rolled underneath the slab and stood, their faces grim and even frightened. Another ten, and ten more, helped to their feet and deployed in ranks as the temblor continued to shout orders. Ninety warriors in all came through, and then a Bone Giant appeared underneath the stone on the far side and was immediately speared through the neck.

“Giants!” the nearby warriors cried, and even as they did so another appeared, and another, at different points across the width of the tunnel, and the temblor turned to me. “Drop the wall now, stonecutter.”

“But more of our people might be coming,” I said. None had come through close to our side of the tunnel, and that was the side on which my fiancé had been deployed.

“Now, stonecutter! The rest of the garrison is dead or we wouldn’t see Bone Giants coming through!”

“But…where’s Gaerit? I don’t see Gaerit!”

The temblor grabbed me by the tunic and growled. “He is either here or he isn’t. If he isn’t, he’s not going to be coming through just because you wish it. But Rael remains in danger until you do your job, so do it already!”

A Bone Giant tried to roll out from under the wall near us, and the warrior standing sentinel there promptly speared him in the throat. The bodies of the first few giants conveniently prevented the advance of others underneath the wall, and we could effectively hold them now, but there would be no more Raelechs returning either. The temblor was right: either my fiancé was on our side of the wall and I hadn’t seen him or he was already dead on the other side with three hundred other soldiers.

“All right, all right,” I said to get the temblor to back off, but my eyes searched desperately over her shoulder for some glimpse of Gaerit. I didn’t see him, and it drained my spirit more than my earth shaping had. Already I felt like a failure. If I had not been so slow in breaking through the seals, those warriors would not have died. Or if the courier had warned us just a little bit sooner. If we had started the process earlier in the tunnel. If I hadn’t been the only stonecutter in Baseld. If we had a juggernaut to send instead.

“Hurry up!” the temblor barked.

Her peremptory command and lack of empathy punctured what little control I had, and in a momentary flash of anger I let the stone drop down abruptly, crushing anyone underneath it and sealing off the tunnel. But I had paid no attention to the seals as I released the stone, no attention to the ripple effect such a sudden shift would have on the mountain above. A shock wave tremor curled through the seals of the old stonecutters, and they shattered at the top of the wall. And that breakage triggered more and more as the pressure of the mountain rushed to fill a void, and the seals began to unravel on either side of the wall, too fast and too strong for me to contain them. The mountain fell down on