When Porto whispered to Aerling about what he’d seen, the leader nodded, then motioned to the group to split into two parts. Aerling chose Porto to accompany him, along with a whippet-fast young fellow from Vestvennby named Kolbjorn, who despite his name—he had proudly informed Porto it meant “black bear”—was so pale and slender that he looked more Norn than Rimmersman. Aerling sent the other two with the old campaigner Dragi, to make their way up behind the trees while Porto and the other two approached from the front.
They climbed toward the copse as slowly and as silently as they could manage, crawling on their bellies through snow and over rocks until they had reached the trees. Unlike his fellows, Porto did not carry a bow—several attempts to teach him to shoot had failed to convinced him it was worth tripping over it—so he unsheathed his sword and stayed as low as he could behind Aerling and Kolbjorn. They paused frequently to listen and look for any sign of movement where Porto had seen something gleaming, but when the wind slowed, the mountainside seemed utterly silent.
At last they reached an overhang of stone just below their target where they sheltered for long moments, waiting for the wind to rise again. When it did, Aerling motioned to them both, then scrambled up over the top and charged into the clearing with Porto and Kolbjorn just behind him.
The open space between the pines was empty, nothing but muddy scrapes on the ground, half covered by snow, to show anyone had ever been there. But something shiny hung from a tree branch about chest-high. Aerling lifted it from the place it had caught, then brought it back to show the other two. It was a necklace of some kind, a piece of pale blue crystal about the size of a finger, carved crudely in the shape of a woman. Its slender chain was broken. Porto guessed that it had caught on the branch as one of the Norns had retreated from a skirmish. He leaned nearer and saw that what had at first appeared plain and even crude was instead beautifully simple: each angle was perfectly shaped, and the closer he looked the less he could make out what it was supposed to be.
Aerling held his hand out, proffering the necklace. “You saw it, Southerner. It’s yours.”
Porto’s first desire was to step back. Although in some ways the thing was beautiful—how brightly it would glimmer against Sida’s breast when he brought it home to her!—it was alien, too; just looking at it filled him with a sudden, fierce pain of homesickness.
Someone shouted in alarm from beyond the trees, a ragged, rising cry that ended abruptly. Even as Porto and his two companions turned from side to side, trying to judge the direction it had come from, another voice shrieked out a single word: “Hunë!”
It took Porto a moment to understand, but then terror came: it was a Rimmersgard word he had heard before and always to his sorrow. Giant. It meant giant.
A terrible crash, loud as thunder but far closer, then suddenly trees were falling everywhere around them. A moment later, even as Kolbjorn turned and dashed out of the clearing, Porto realized that the trees were all falling from one direction, and that Kolbjorn had sensibly, if not bravely, gone the other way. Porto had only a moment to lament his own slow reflexes, then something hurtled out of the mass of broken, sagging trees and landed at Aerling’s feet. It was the headless corpse of Dragi, recognizable only by the boots the old soldier always cared for so lovingly.
More trees fell, making the ground jump; one of them nearly crushed Porto, but he threw himself to one side. Then the monster emerged out of the fog, striding over the felled trunks, sweeping smaller trees out of its path as if they were reeds.
Porto had seen giants before, when the troops had crossed over into the Nornfells, and he had watched from a grateful distance as the Rimmersmen had killed them, usually by sheer force of numbers. A dozen or more soldiers would pierce the huge beasts with arrows then keep them at bay with long spears until they finally fell bleeding to the ground, where they could be finished. But he had never seen one so close, and it all but stopped his heart.
The monstrous creature was half again the height of a man, with long arms and a face as ugly and full of rage as a demon’s from another world. Its shaggy fur was as white as the snow itself, which meant it was still young, and unlike those Porto had seen in battle, it did not wear the leather harness that the Norns put on those who fought for them. As the giant pulled itself loose from the last fallen tree and advanced on Aerling, it bared its huge, yellow fangs. The stench of rotting flesh made Porto gag even as he stumbled back.
But Aerling was wedged between two fallen trees, branches tangling him from all sides. The Mountain Goat leader tried to work his bow free and could not, so he let go of it and pulled his sword instead. The giant growled, a rumble Porto could feel deep in the bones of his chest, then slapped at Aerling with a hand the size of a serving platter. The Rimmersman lunged at the massive paw and managed to sink his blade into the creature’s wrist, but the heavy hand knocked him loose from the trees that had held him. Aerling flew half a dozen steps across the clearing and landed like a mealsack among the broken trunks.
Porto’s blood was thundering so loudly in his brain that he could not think. He wanted to pray, wanted to tell his wife goodbye, but all he could see was that red, dripping mouth and the creature’s deep-set eyes as it moved toward him, splintering fallen wood beneath its feet. Porto turned and ran. Snagged by branches, stumbling across toppled trees, his retreat seemed impossibly, fatally slow, but he dared not look back. At last he reached the center of the clearing where Aerling lay motionless, only a few steps away from the edge of the outcrop they had climbed. Porto knew that if he jumped off the stony shelf the giant would be on him before he could rise, and that would be the end.
He set his back foot, dodged a swipe from a huge, hairy hand, and swung at the thing’s legs, but he caught his sword on the spiky branch of a fallen tree and barely creased the giant’s fur. In a heartbeat, the beast had lurched forward and snatched him up into the air. Porto’s sword fell from his fingers as the breath whistled out of him.
Yellow teeth grimaced only inches from his face. Tiny eyes peered out at him from under the bony shelf of the monster’s brow, and in that moment of ultimate, dreamlike terror, he could see something looking back at him, a mocking intelligence in the giant’s inhuman gaze that was almost worse than anything else.
Then the creature’s hot, putrid breath blasted him as it let out a sudden, deafening roar. Porto was flung to the side so hard he bounced, the world turning up and down, whirling around him until it seemed almost like a dream. At last he stopped rolling and lay flat. Airless, he gasped and choked, struggling to fill his burning lungs and to rise before the monster seized him again. But the giant was doing some kind of bizarre dance and seemed not even to notice him; instead it whirled in place, flailing its huge arms and roaring so loudly that the branches on the remaining trees shook and rattled.
Something was dangling from the giant’s neck, though Porto could make little sense of any of it. His air was out, his sight was going black, and no matter what he did he could not seem to suck anything into his straining chest. Still, he could not help thinking that it looked almost like the giant’s throat was pulsing blood.
Another shape joined the dance, tiny, slender, and swift. It was Kolbjorn, and he held a long, crooked spear in his hand. As a little air began to creep back into Porto’s starving lungs, and his vision cleared, he saw that the thing wagging in the monster’s gorge was also a crude spear. As the monster spun and contorted, trying to dislodge that weapon, Kolbjorn kept stabbing at him with his other spear. The young Vestiman had not run away after all, but had found fallen branches and hastily carved the ends into sharp points.