The second missile gashed across the last giant’s elbow, spraying a cloud of red mist high into the air, then vanished into the dust haze. At first, Agis thought the titan had narrowly avoided death, but the fellow’s eyes glazed over and he began to stagger about as though he were too intoxicated to stand. A moment later, his knees buckled and he fell into the dust, his muscles twitching madly.
“Poisoned harpoons. Now ye know why we call her the Viper,” Kester chuckled, using the king’s eye to watch the giant die. “That makes three of five. What happened to the other two our lookout reported?”
Agis did not answer, for he had broken into a cold sweat and fallen to quivering. His temples throbbed with a fierce, maddening pain, and his intestines burned as though he had swallowed fire. He felt a terrible punishment rising from his gut, and the noble knew he had overreached the limits of his endurance. He found himself leaning over to void his stomach, still struggling to keep his hands on the floater’s dome.
“What’s wrong with ye, Agis?” demanded Kester. “If ye let us down now, we’ll sink!”
“It’s Tithian’s fever!” Agis gasped, struggling to pull himself upright. “I can’t-”
A tremendous boom sounded from the Shadow Viper’s stern, bringing the caravel to an abrupt halt. Agis flew out of his seat and rolled clear to the rear gunnel. He hit his head against a bone stanchion, then found himself lying in a tangled mess with Kester, the helmsman, and a half-dozen other sailors. A foul smell, almost as rank as the one he had left behind in the cockpit, filled his nostrils.
Agis looked up and found himself staring at two sets of immense blue eyes. Beneath each pair of orbs were a craggy nose and cavernous mouth filled with broken teeth as large as stalactites.
“They’re too small to be Saram spies!” growled one giant.
The other scowled in confusion, then raised a sword-length finger to scratch between the mats of his hair. “We’d better take them to Mag’r,” he said. “The sachem will know what they are.”
SEVEN
TABLE OF CHIEFS
Bathed in the full fury of the crimson sun, Tithian and Agis stood on a slate-topped table more expansive than a Tyrian plaza. The heat shimmered off the black surface in torpid waves, blistering their feet and scorching their lips, leaving their parched throats bloated with thirst. Nymos lay half-conscious at the king’s side, his reptilian body unable to cool his blood in the face of the scalding temperature. At the jozhal’s side stood Kester, swaying and perilously close to collapsing herself.
The ship’s crew cowered a short distance away. Despite the helmsman’s efforts to keep them quiet, the terrified slaves murmured anxiously among themselves and cast nervous glances over their shoulders, where the end of the table overhung a sheer cliff that dropped a thousand feet into the Sea of Silt’s pearly haze.
The walls of a mountain canyon flanked the table on both sides. A pair of stone benches, as tall and broad as Tyr’s ramparts, had been carved into each of these rocky slopes. On these benches sat a dozen giants, all with blocky, humanlike heads marked by lumpy features and rough skin. Each wore the crude figure of his tribe’s totem-a sheep, goat, erdlu, or similar domestic animal-tattooed on his sloped brow. Most wore their hair and beards in the long, snarled braids coveted as raw material by Balican rope makers. Their angry shouts rumbled back and forth over the table like thunder, so loud that Tithian could understand only half of the words.
“We’ve been ignored long enough,” Tithian growled.
The king started across the broken slate toward the head of the table, where a round-faced giant sat upon a throne of black basalt. Carved from the shoulder of a volcanic peak, the great chair was as large as the Golden Palace itself. On the titan’s clean-shaven head rested a circlet of tree boughs woven into a brown-leaved garland of royalty, identifying the wearer, Tithian supposed, as the monarch. The giant’s eyes were witless and dull, with puffy lids and brown irises that showed life only when they flashed in anger or malice. From his bloated cheeks sagged great jowls, hanging well over his fleshy neck and trembling like a loose sail whenever he bared his jagged teeth to sneer or laugh.
Tithian had taken only a half-dozen steps when Agis’s fingers gouged into his arm. “What are you doing?” the noble demanded.
“Saving us,” the king replied.
“Ye’ve done enough already,” hissed Kester, her eyes narrowed in anger as she joined the pair. “We wouldn’t be here if ye hadn’t killed my floaters.”
“I wouldn’t have had to, if you hadn’t locked me in the brig-but here we are,” Tithian hissed. He looked back to Agis and locked gazes. “I warned you it would be impossible to recover the Dark Lens without me. Now I’ll show you why.”
The king pulled free and continued forward, stopping next to a clay tankard as high as his chest. The giant in the throne paid him no attention, but continued to bellow at a tribesman near the middle of the table, more than thirty paces away. Tithian casually turned his palm groundward and summoned the energy to cast a spell.
On the rocky hillsides above the giants’ heads, grassy clumps of daggerblade and balls of yellow tumblethistle began to wilt as Tithian drained the life force from their roots. Within an instant, every plant within the reach of a giant had turned to ash, leaving the canyon walls as black and lifeless as the surface of the slate table.
The giant’s hand descended like a kes’trekel on a sun-bloated corpse. He grabbed his tankard and flipped it over, spilling five gallons of golden mead over Tithian’s head, and placed the vessel over the king’s shoulders.
“No magic!” he boomed.
Inside the mug, the muffled voice echoed painfully in Tithian’s ears.
“Too late!” Tithian hissed.
The Tyrian brought his hands up and plucked a stray thread from the hem of his cassock, then wrapped this around the tip of his index finger. Pointing the digit at the giant, he uttered a spell and pulled the thread down past his first knuckle.
Again, the giant’s voice reverberated through the tankard, this time screaming in surprise as his crown slipped down around his throat and began to constrict. Cries of alarm erupted all around, and the table began to shake as giants to both sides leaped to their feet. Tithian smiled to himself and twisted the ends of the thread, tightening the loop until his finger began to throb from having the blood cut off.
Tithian felt the tankard being lifted from his head. “Is this your idea of help?” Agis demanded, tossing the vessel aside. “You’ll get us killed!”
“Do I strike you as someone with so little regard for his own life?” Tithian replied.
“You strike me as a maniac,” sneered Nymos. The little jozhal teetered at the noble’s side, holding himself upright by clinging to Agis’s belt with a three-fingered hand. “Now cancel your magic, before-”
“Too late for that!” said Kester, pulling Nymos and Agis away by their arms. “Stand aside, unless ye want to get mashed with him!”
Tithian looked up to see several giants stretching their arms toward him, their palms stretched out to smash him flat.
“Stop!” Tithian yelled. “If I die, so does your chief!”
Tithian pointed toward the basalt throne. The ruler’s crown had all but disappeared into the folds of his corpulent neck, and the giant’s filthy nails were scratching great rifts into his flesh as he tried to work a fingertip beneath the constricting boughs.
“You’re lying!” growled one of the giants, a lanky fellow with red beard and hair. “How can you kill our sachem if you’re dead?”
“Magic,” Tithian replied, raising the finger with the thread looped around it. “If I die, this string will tighten until it cuts the tip of my finger off. Your sachem’s crown will do the same thing, except that it will cut off his head instead of his fingertip.”