they had the sites staked out, tiny fires that would be family hearths someday. They had the beginnings of a smithy going if I wasn’t mistaken, and a long mead hall. It spoke of extensive planning; no one suffers a surprise eruption of his or her home and lays out a new city like this so quickly without thinking about it long beforehand.
The eruption of Mount Thayil might have been a catastrophe for those who couldn’t escape it, but this level of organization made it clear that it was also something for which Gorin Mogen had been waiting.
“We can’t have this here. They can ship all their firelords to this point, walk over the pass, and overwhelm us. Stage timber raids on our hardwoods all along the western coast from the safety of their port. No. We can’t have it.”
It was impossible to tell where Mogen’s personal hearth was; no markers of importance or ostentation separated one fire from another. The giants all dressed alike in leathers, but I had heard that you could tell the lavaborn apart from the rest sometimes by the color of the leather; theirs had to be made out of the fireproof hide of lava dragons, which were gray creatures with black heads and a black spiny ridge all the way down to the tips of their tails, sometimes with a swirl of maroon here and there. Some of the giants had different hair colors, but I had no idea what color Mogen’s was supposed to be.
They had sown crops outside the walls, so they were definitely going to be staying for months. The walls, though, were undeniable proof that they intended to claim the land as their own. One simply didn’t go to the expense or trouble otherwise.
We could ruin their crops without a problem—so could the Raelechs—but they wouldn’t be depending on them for sustenance. They had the sea and a glass fleet. They’d trade with other Hathrim cities for all they needed or simply cast nets off the coast, and no one could stop them. The problem of how we would ever get them to leave without a full-scale war of allied forces grew and grew in my mind until I remembered that it wasn’t a problem I had to solve. I was meant to defend the Canopy, not besiege a Hathrim city on the plains. Let the strategists worry about that. All I had to do was get them the information they needed to do their jobs.
“Count everything,” I said. “We need numbers above all. Look especially for hounds, realizing that some are on patrol, and also see if you can spy any Raelechs milling about; the Triune Council would like to know.”
Silence stretched except for the susurrus of the ocean on our left and the sad sounds of chopping wood to our right. There were thousands of Hathrim below. Nearly ten thousand; when we consulted, the grassgliders’ figures and mine varied somewhat, but we put their numbers between nine thousand two hundred and nine thousand six hundred. And with Hathrim you almost had to count every single one as a potential military threat. Any giant could kick one of us in the chest and break our rib cage.
They had sixty-five hounds, though some of them were pups as tall as me; a protected well inside the walls; and what looked like an extensive cache of grain and other foodstuffs that they had brought with them. We could see the brown bags of it piled underneath a rudimentary shelter from the rain.
I supposed the key figure beyond their raw population would be to estimate how many lavaborn they had and of what strength. Sparkers and firelords were bad enough, but if they had a fury, we might as well give up now. Mere giants could be overcome, but giants made of fire were another thing entirely.
The number of giants wearing gray or black leathers was far too high, approaching a thousand. There was no way they had that many lavaborn. But that also meant we had no way to tell what we were facing.
Nef spotted the Raelechs because of the new construction. The wall was complete—it extended all the way to the shore and enclosed a vast area, so much that I thought it would be difficult to defend, but then I thought that anything besides the Canopy would be difficult to defend. I supposed that if you had lavaborn able to set attackers on fire, that would make it easier.