Page 60 of The Thrice-Bound Fool

On we rode.

I had a look at these bigguns. One in particular stood out to me; a young fair-haired one, to look at him. Merely twelve feet tall. He had a crown he’d made from some flowering bush and looked less like a soldier than an adolescent out on a lark. Oh, he had a club, but he carried it now like a walking stick, now like a yoke. He was ever on the margins of the group, stopping to study this or that plant, then catching up again. He had fallen behind completely when a tide of small birds danced shapes in the sky, watching as if he’d never seen anything so beautiful. One of the other bigguns had peeled off to sort him out, bringing him back with tugs on the ear that looked more like an uncle’s correction than military discipline.

Something told me to keep an eye on the horizon, and I never ignore that inner voice. I took a quick survey of my luck and found it was riding normal. This was helpful in that it kept me away from the twin follies of hope and fear, neither one of which is usually worth a wet burp, and especially not when you’re in a cage.

I still couldn’t help the sense that something more was going to happen.

“What do you keep looking for?” the Spanth asked me.

“I’ll tell you when I see it.”

“Good. I cannot wait.”

A moment passed.

“There!” I said, nodding where I thought I’d seen a reflection behind us.

We both looked in that direction.

“I see nothing,” she said, but kept staring, I suppose for want of anything else to do.

It was at this moment that the leader of this particular troop of giants chose to introduce himself.

“Good day!” a huge voice boomed, and the eighteen-footer came over and hunched down at the cart. “So you are speaking Arvisk?” he said. Fuck, he was big. The biggest one I had seen so far, but I would see bigger. Much bigger.

“I call it Galtish, but yah. It seems we share a tongue.”

That was an unfortunate turn of phrase, because now he squinted and leaned closer, trying to get a look inside my mouth.

“Your tongue is black.”

“Yes, I’ve noticed,” I said.

“Are you a liar?”

“You do understand what a useless question that is,” I said, too weary now to suffer fools, even one who could kill me with a hard piss.

He began making an angry face then.

“What did you say to him, jilnaedu?” Galva said in Holtish. She didn’t understand the words, but like many of the violent, she knew the look of someone contemplating violence.

Instead of answering, I thought I’d better distract the elephant-sized karker from deciding we were better squashed than whole.

“I’m called Kinch,” I said to him brightly, with a big shyte-eating smile. “What’s your name?”

He unclenched his meaty boulder of face a bit and said, “I am…”

But I never learned what he was called.

Close lightning. Hard thunder. Those are the nearest sounds I can name to the racket I now heard. There was a flash, and the loudest BANG of my life. The cart rocked, dust flew, something cut me, something else rushed by my face. The cloth covering that had screened the top of our cage to give shade was blown off and drifted to the ground many yards away, smoldering. Now something heavy rocked the cart again and threw shadow on us. My ears rang like someone had shouted hard in each of them. The Spanth looked wide-eyed, also dazed. Her lips moved, but I could only hear ringing. I almost said, “What?” or maybe I did, but I couldn’t hear it if so. As the dust cleared and I put my hand to my cut cheek and pulled away gritty, bloody fingers, I noticed something the size of a large man lying across the roof-bars of our cage-cart. It writhed. It wasn’t a man at all. It was an arm, or most of one. It was trying to make a fist, clenching and unclenching. Galva leaned back—the better to see what was above her—and in doing so, she leaned into the blood spattering from the fresh-severed limb, and was soon masked in red.

We were no longer moving forward, as our camels were dead.

The giant whose name I never learned walked on, one arm gone below the shoulder, his hair singed and much of it standing on end. He looked around and stumbled, made dizzy by the act of turning his head. His face, when it turned our way, was so much blind, wailing meat. I knew he was wailing because his mouth was an O of horror, but it would be some time before my hearing came back.

He took two more shaky steps, then fell hard and heavy, never to rise again.

Several others of his kind lay dead or dying near him.