A Plague of Giants (Seven Kennings #1) - Kevin Hearne Page 0,222

Thank you. The faster you work and the faster you get me out of the city safely, the sooner that wheelmouth leaves your shoulder.”

He seethed for a few minutes as he got out paper and began to write, the wheelmouth looking on all the while, but after a few lines of preamble his anger melted away and he chuckled softly.

“You know, Abhinava, you’re delightful.”

“Am I?”

“Very. I haven’t been outmaneuvered like this in so long. My own fault, really, for underestimating you, but it’s refreshing. And I’m starting to think the Hathrim won’t stand a chance against you.”

“We’ll see. Animals burn just like anything else.”

“I’m sure you’ll find a way to surprise them.”

I wasn’t fooled. The viceroy was like a wheat dog that had lunged too far, had gotten swiped on the nose, and had pulled back to circle and wait for an opening to attack again. But he wrote a fine charter and a finer mercenary contract to engage me against the Hathrim. I was to target and eliminate all the lavaborn I could ahead of the Nentian army’s arrival in the south. He also drafted a requisition and took me past the chamberlain and soldiers waiting in the hall to their logistic support officer. I was given my pick of provisions, from food to tools to clothes, along with a heavy purse of coins, and they returned my horses all brushed and groomed with shining new saddles. I had the viceroy accompany me on foot out of bowshot range, and there I had him first drop his sword to the ground and then stand still while the wheelmouth climbed down his robe and scurried on its hundred legs into the grass.

“I’ll see you below the Godsteeth,” I said. “And I hope that afterward we’ll be able to work together to improve Ghurana Nent for all its citizens.”

“I’ll look forward to it,” the viceroy said, but his eyes already glittered with imagined violence against me.

I pointed the horses toward the nughobe grove where I’d left Murr and Eep and left him to walk back to his squalid city.

Despite the crinkle of signed and sealed papers in my new pack, I understood that nothing was guaranteed. None of my contracts would matter if I died, and that might have been precisely what he was thinking: I can promise the boy anything he wants because the giants will burn him alive. And the charter was good only in Hashan Khek, not the entire country; I’d have to get it signed by the king. Even if I was successful against the Hathrim, I already expected a serious attempt to have me killed. But I thought that at last I had taken some positive steps in the right direction. I couldn’t help my family anymore, but I had hope that I could help everyone else’s.

—

“And now let’s move right here to the gates of Pelemyn,” Fintan called out to Survivor Field, “except months ago, when Culland du Raffert arrived from Tömerhil.” The smoke from the seeming stone whooshed up and resolved into a bedraggled, weary man.

Bryn’s Lung, the heart of the Second Kenning, is a strange chimney of coral and rock near the palace that empties into the bay via a cave. Or, looked at the other way, the chimney is the exhalation of the underwater cave. During high tide, pressure from rolling waves would force water into the cave and up the chimney and create a sort of salty ejaculation at the surface that was the source of many sniggering jokes. It was half seriously suggested as a metaphor for the lord Bryn’s life-giving powers. But officially it was his lung rather than some other organ, and the water plumes jetting out of the top were properly thought of as exhalations rather than ejaculations.

The reef surrounding Bryn’s Lung was a strange little ecosystem of tidal pools and mosses and amphibians that was closely monitored by a mixed force of church and palace officials. It rose just slightly above sea level at high tide and was fed by the periodic “breathing” of the Lung. During low tide, one could dive into the chimney and attempt to swim down and then through until one emerged from the cave into the bay. You’d either be blessed by Bryn and make it—the only way to swim such a distance—or drown.

Seekers like myself had to queue up and talk to both a secular official and a church official before diving in, and during high tide, while Bryn’s Lung