A Plague of Giants (Seven Kennings #1) - Kevin Hearne Page 0,4

as much as my peaceful occupations helped. It didn’t make it easy: it just made it possible. If you drape the word duty over murder, well—you can hardly tell it’s murder anymore. Add the words in wartime, and the word murder simply disappears.

How, then, should I do my duty? Summoning large waves to wash men overboard would be inefficient and tax my system so much that I would age quickly and become useless. Better to use funneled, targeted currents similar to what I used to propel myself quickly through the water.

My first effort to capsize the nearest boat gave the occupants a scare but didn’t succeed. A bit stronger, then: triple the force I would use for myself, applied to the right side of the keel, amidships. Over it went, bodies thrashing in the cold water, and I felt a small ache bloom between my eyes. It was not entirely without cost, then, to focus that kind of pressure, but it was a small cost. Propelling myself to the site, I drew out a black volcanic knife chipped from the flows of the Glass Desert, ideal for water work, and opened some long gashes along the limbs of these unnaturally tall invaders, passing through them to get to the other side, where another boat awaited my attention. Blood in the water would bring the bladefins along to finish the job I had started. Probability of a feeding frenzy was high.

As I repeated the process on the next boat, tumbling tall bodies into the deep, the true size of the force seeped into my consciousness, chilling me far more than the water did. It was no mere raiding party but an army of many thousands, capable of sacking the city. Had I been sleeping at home rather than on duty in the water, most if not all of them would have already landed before I could do anything. I could only hope that the mariners on night patrol would be able to handle those who slipped past me while I did everything I could to prevent any more from landing.

After the second boat, I zipped through the waves back to Pelemyn’s docks to take out the leading ships—the fewer that landed, the better. From there I worked my way back out, always taking out the nearest boat first. Even if some of the invaders managed to swim for shore, they would be cold and weary and demoralized when they tried to attack the walls and would be attacking singly or in very small groups rather than large waves.

Once near the docks, I saw that three ships had landed and a small horde of skeletal giants were disembarking, swords held high, removing all doubt about the nature of this fleet. I wanted to go ashore and help or raise the alarm but knew that my priority had to be preventing the rest from landing.

The ache between my eyes grew incrementally with every ship I scuttled, and I was breathing heavily after three. After the fifth the bladefins and other predators had homed in on the blood and were finishing what I had started. More blood meant more predators on the way; they could chew through the army for me if I could just get them into the water.

I had to dodge several bladefins myself, but they never came back for a second pass when there were so many other easy targets thrashing about, practically begging to be eaten.

And they were eaten. The invaders screamed underwater, but still I heard them, garbled bubbles of terror popping in my ears as jaws sank into them, their severed limbs and intestines floating past me in clouds of blood, each drop a siren call to frenzy for everything in the ocean possessed of more teeth than brains. Seeing and hearing that hurt me, for even then I doubted I was doing the right thing. Had we spoken the same language, I wondered, could we have avoided it all?

They did not look as if they had come to talk, and that was what my duty told me. But even if my duty stood tall and proud like the cliffs of Setyrön, waves of guilt kept crashing against them, determined to wear them down as I dumped ship after ship into the ocean and men flailed and gasped and died. And every effort I made to force water to do my will drew days of my life away, unseen like the undertow of tides yet felt and feared