A Plague of Giants (Seven Kennings #1) - Kevin Hearne Page 0,199

top of us from the center outward, crushing everyone but me and the temblor underneath tons of granite. Our kenning ensured that we could not die by any force of earth. The rock weighed on my head and shoulders like the hand of a gentle friend, no more, and it would be the same for the temblor. Not so for anyone else. The Bone Giants were no more, but neither were the Raelechs. I had managed in a moment of weakness to kill everyone who was not already dead and turn the Granite Tunnel into a long, silent tomb. The Poet’s Range had closed itself.

The enormity of it crushed me since the mountain could not. I wept in the dark and the dirt where no one could hear me, and when my breaths became short, I exerted myself and cleared some space around me so that I could take in a proper lungful of air. I realized that the temblor would need air, too, for though she could punch through almost anything with the strength of her kenning, she’d need to breathe first. After the initial trial of their kenning, temblors did not do well underground.

I could sense the human-size absence of rock nearby and shifted the earth so that I could move toward her and bring her into my hollowed-out space with a little bit of breathing room. She coughed and sputtered as the rock and sediment shifted away, taking in huge gasps of air.

“Wondered if you were going to let me suffocate,” she said.

“What? Of course not!”

She coughed a few more times, and I could hear her brush rubble off her tunic, and then a scraping sound and a few sparks in the darkness announced that she had a flint and candle in her pouch. Both flint and candle, she claimed, were Hathrim-enchanted, but it still took a while to get it sparked up. Once it finally lit, she gave me a cursory glance, then looked at her long dust-covered hair with dismay. “What happened, stonecutter?”

“The seals gave way, and I wasn’t strong enough to stop them all by myself. We should have built the wall from the floor up, and there wouldn’t have been any danger of a cave-in.”

Temblor Priyit froze, her eyes narrowing. “So I gave you the wrong orders. Is that what you’re saying?”

“Yes. Ordering me to break the seals on the ceiling and build the wall from the top down was the wrong call.”

“I see. So I’m to be blamed for this?”

“It’s not assigning blame; it’s recognizing how we got here. At the same time, I should have thought of it earlier. And I should have paid attention to the seals when I dropped the wall the rest of the way. It was my fault, and I expect the Triune will punish me accordingly.”

“Punish you?” The temblor’s mouth twisted into a broad grin made lurid by the candlelight, and she raised a hand, palm up. “We won! The Bone Giants are dead! Baseld is safe!”

“It doesn’t feel like a win when all our soldiers are dead.”

She waved my objection away. “The Bone Giants did most of that. Fewer than a hundred of them were able to retreat.”

“So you can just shrug off the unnecessary deaths of close to a hundred soldiers?”

Priyit gave me an exaggerated shrug to demonstrate that she could. “I didn’t kill them. It was an accident.”

My mouth gaped. I had no problem taking my share of the blame, for I had indeed been responsible. What shocked me was that Priyit didn’t seem to feel responsible for any part of it or even question whether perhaps we should have begun our work as soon as we’d passed the populated areas rather than go farther into the tunnel. The enemy was crushed and she was alive, and that was all that mattered to her.

The temblor handed me the candle and pulled her long hair into a knot in the back, waiting for me to say something, and when I didn’t, she gestured in the direction of Baseld. “Well? Shouldn’t we be going?”

“Not yet. The dead need to be spoken for. We should sing the Dirge for the Fallen.”

“Oh.” The temblor folded her arms and looked down. “I don’t feel comfortable with that. I grew up with Kalaad, you know, in Ghurana Nent.”

“But you’ve been blessed by the Triple Goddess, and these soldiers were under your command.”

“Yes, and I’m grateful for their blessing and honored by the faith the Triune Council has placed in