A Plague of Giants (Seven Kennings #1) - Kevin Hearne Page 0,243

the tower, I met Meara, who looked to be in her midtwenties and weary beyond measure. We nodded helplessly at each other, unable to speak except through our eyes. Hers had pain in them, and she didn’t smile at me the way the courier had. Perhaps she had lost her family in Bennelin the way I’d lost mine in Festwyf. We wouldn’t get to trade tragedies, however.

The view of the city was better but not good enough. I could see sentries on the walls much more clearly now but not into the city itself. Perhaps the stonecutter could mend that.

I turned to Tuala and asked, “Can Meara get me a look down into the city? Raise the tower, maybe, until I can see over the battlements?”

After Tuala’s translation, that turned out to be something Meara could do. The tower lurched for a moment under my feet, then rose as the ground built beneath us.

I don’t know precisely how high we climbed, because I never took my eyes off the city. As we rose above the walls, I could finally see them and understand what they’d done. Being told is one thing, but seeing it is another. Milky ghouls on sticklike legs, teeming in the streets, and…dragging bodies around. Brynt bodies, men, women, and children, all murdered by those horrible creatures like wraiths made flesh.

“Why?” I murmured, not really expecting an answer, but Tuala gave me one.

“Because they thought they could get away with it,” she said.

“But what are they doing? With the people?”

The courier shrugged. “I don’t think they’re going to bury them in the ground or in the sea like you and I would. They appear to be dragging them all into one big pile. See there? My guess is they’re going to burn them.”

“Burn…?” My fingers twitched first, but the tremors spread all over my body, just as they had when I’d heard the news about Festwyf. All those poor people, hauled around like so much meat, only to be melted down to ashes, denied their return to the ocean. My family was little better off, still left where they were slain in Festwyf. My thumb caught on the edge of the satchel in its restless quivering, and I unslung it from my shoulders, handing it to the courier. “That’s the last of me,” I told her.

She stared at me, uncomprehending. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

“Whatever you like. It’s yours now. I’m going to practice my dry direction.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

Sunlight glinted on the scalloped surface of the bay as if a school of moonscales had surfaced to feed. “The people of Göfyrd deserve to be buried properly at sea,” I said, “and the Bone Giants deserve to drown in it.”

I didn’t talk any more after that, though Tuala tried to get me to explain. She would see for herself soon enough.

All my trembling rage and despair I channeled into calling the waters of the shining blue bay. And it resisted because what I wanted was not the path of least resistance, but I poured my emotions into it and pulled, and it pulled back until I quaked with the effort. Still the waters receded from the shore and built into a wave—no ordinary wave but one shaped by my will to do the right thing. To bring Göfyrd vengeance and peace. Justice and a final rest. A reaping, yes, but also a cleansing.

Needles of pain fired hot and bright throughout my body, the toll for such a kenning already being exacted, but I kept calling the water anyway. How strange that the process of liquefying your organs should feel so blasted hot.

The roar of that building water matched the roar in my ears and the roar tearing from my throat—or maybe it was all one, the same roar I’d heard back in Fornyd, calling to me even then, and I understood that it had always been the Lord of the Deep, calling me to this duty, calling me home to the sea.

—

Without a word, Fintan threw down a black sphere and changed seemings directly back to the stonecutter Meara.

This strange Brynt man who looked so uncomfortable in his military uniform was in fact a tidal mariner: the Second Kenning’s equivalent of a juggernaut. I didn’t speak the language—yet—so we did little more than make eye contact and nod. I wished I could have talked to him, though. He looked like he could relate to the week I’d had.

Mild mannered at first, he