Chapter 64 — The Giant VI (Bonus)
Fourteen, near enough.
Two groups, sitting and standing near the middle in loose clusters, and none of them were in good condition.
One Meridian fighter had his forearm wrapped so tightly the fingers had gone pale. Another man was leaning against a section of wall while a healer worked on something under his arm and he stared at the ceiling.
Somebody’s shield was in three pieces on the floor beside them.
Armour scored, gear filthy, weapons dull with something that was not water.
Their trials had been serious too.
---
Several of them turned when we came out of the treeline.
Renard was first.
He came across about ten metres before he stopped, and I watched his eyes go over the four of us and then past us, into the opening we had walked out of, looking for two more people to appear behind us.
He stayed on that dark gap for about three seconds.
Then he came back.
"Where are Calder and O’Rourke?"
---
Gideon did not soften anything and he did not defend himself.
"Calder attacked me on the first watch. From behind, no warning. I killed him."
Somebody in the second group said something under their breath and stopped.
"O’Rourke was working with him. He tried to control the account before the others woke, and when that failed he fought me. During the Giant he attacked me from behind a second time while I was down. Two witnesses saw that one."
He tilted his head about a centimetre toward Erik and Clara.
"He ran afterward. I followed him and killed him. That is all of it."
---
Renard’s face did something ugly and controlled.
"You," he said to Erik. "What did you see."
Erik Lind did not embellish one syllable of it, and I have a great deal of respect for what he did next.
"I did not see Calder attack anybody. I was asleep. I woke up to shouting and came out and Calder was dead on the ground and Rook and O’Rourke were fighting."
"And?"
"And both of them were accusing each other and I could not tell you which one was lying." He shifted his grip. "Then the Giant arrived.
And during the fight, with the monster on top of us, I saw O’Rourke break off the leg we were all working and go at Rook’s back while Rook was down on one knee."
"You are certain of that."
"I am certain of that. Nolan called the warning before it landed."
Clara said almost exactly the same thing, in fewer words, and added nothing to it either.
Neither of them pretended to know what happened before they woke.
---
Renard stood there for a while.
Around the chamber, nobody was shouting. That is not what happens.
What happens is that voices drop by half and people look at each other, and two men who had put their weapons down pick them back up without appearing to think about it, and a healer stops working for a second and then carries on.
Some of them were looking at Gideon.
Some of them were looking at me, and I could see exactly what that look was, because it is the same look I have been getting since the freight yard with one new thing added to it.
Renard’s attention kept moving between Erik and Clara, which is correct, because they are the only two people in the chamber who are not somebody’s son and not somebody’s employee.
"This is going in a report," he said finally. "All of it. Every name. And it is not being settled here."
"No," Gideon agreed.
---
Then one of the other outsiders asked the question that changed the room.
"Were you thrown into a forest?"
Erik’s head came up. "Yes."
"Six of you?"
"Six."
"Us as well." The man laughed, once, and it did not have anything in it. "Six. Trees you cannot see the top of. Shouted for the rest of you for ten minutes and got nothing."
Someone from the third group was already nodding.
---
It came out over the next few minutes and it fitted together too neatly to be an accident.
Three groups. Six, seven and seven. Different sections of forest. None of them within earshot of the others at any point across an entire day.
All three shouted. None of them got an answer.
All three walked for hours, found tracks and claw marks and nothing that attacked them, and made camp when the light went.
And all three met a Giant.
Not the same Giant. Renard’s people described theirs as taller than ours and thinner. The third group’s had come at them out of standing water at the bottom of a slope.
Every one of them killed it. Every one of them lost the mist and found a path afterward.
That is a machine. That is a designed thing. Somebody built this layer to take a raid apart into fixed pieces and test each piece separately.
---
I looked at them while they talked.
At the wrapped forearm. At the man against the wall who had not stood up. At the broken shield. At the healer who had run out of whatever she uses and was doing the rest of it with her hands and a roll of tape.
Twenty of us went in. Eighteen are standing on this floor, and every one of the three Giants took everything a group had.
And the two who are missing were not killed by the dungeon. They were killed by a man, over a thing a man wanted.
Now take a weaker team.
Take twenty people with one high-level Player instead of six, and split them into three, and put a Level Thirty-Seven regenerating Giant in front of each piece with no captain and no healer and nobody coming.
The Bureau’s monitors watched twenty-two life-signatures go out over nine hours and never found out why.
I know why.
And it has nothing whatsoever to do with Cormac Keane, and I need to keep those two things separate in my head, because the moment I stop being able to tell the difference between a murderer and a dungeon I will start getting people killed.
---
Then I saw him.
Cormac was in the third group, sitting on his heels near the edge of it, working at a buckle on his thigh rig.
His gear was in a worse state than mine. The whole left side of his jacket was gone at the seam and he had somebody’s field dressing taped across his forearm, and there was dried blood down the outside of his leg.
Whatever his six had met, it had gone through him properly.
He looked exactly like a tired man fixing a strap.
---
Then somebody near him said the two names.
His fingers stopped.
That is all it was. He was drawing a strap through a buckle and his hand simply stopped moving, mid-pull, for something between half a second and a second.
Then his eyes came up.
They came up and they found me across forty metres of dark stone, past nine other people, without hunting for me first, and they were completely different from every other time this man has looked at me.
Then it was gone.
His hand went back to the buckle and finished the pull, and he said something to the person beside him and got a tired sort of half-laugh out of them, and he was a tired man fixing a strap again.
---
I did not look away fast, because looking away fast is its own answer.
I let my eyes carry on past him and land on the healer.
But I had it, and there is no getting rid of it now.
Two men who belong to him walked into that forest with Jace Nolan, and Jace Nolan walked out and they did not. He has just learned that in a single sentence, in a room full of people, with no time to prepare his face.
And he is going to spend the rest of this dungeon working out how much I know.
---
I was still deciding what to do about that when I realised nobody else was listening to any of it.
The conversation about Ewan and Declan had gone quiet without anybody ending it. Erik had stopped mid-sentence. Two of the Meridian people had turned all the way around.
They were all facing the far end of the chamber.
I turned.
---
It was so far away that at first I thought it was part of the wall.
A shape, low and broad, sitting or crouched in the dark past the edge of what our lights could reach.
Big enough that the fallen blocks of stone around it read as rubble rather than as boulders, and those blocks were the size of a car.
Its outline was wrong for anything.
There were too many angles in the shoulders and the back did not go where a back goes.
And it was breathing.
Every few seconds a low sound came down the chamber, deep, moving, like air being pulled through a furnace door, and each time it came the dust on the floor near it lifted and settled.
---
The pressure arrived before anything moved.
I felt it on my forearms first. The hair came up along both of them under the gauntlet cuffs, all at once, the way it does before a storm.
Then my breathing changed without my permission. It got heavier and shallower at the same time, and my chest had to work for air that was not any thinner than it had been ten seconds earlier.
Around the chamber it went through everybody.
Two of the wounded stopped talking mid-word. The healer’s hands came off her patient.
A man who had been sitting on the floor with his back to the wall put a hand down and pushed himself upright on a leg that clearly should not have been carrying him.
Gideon Rook’s head turned away from Cormac Keane and did not turn back.
"Nobody moves," Renard said, and his voice had gone very flat. "Whatever happened in that forest is a problem for a room with a door on it. Not this one."
---
Then it lifted its head.
Stone ground underneath it as the weight shifted, a long dragging scrape that went the whole length of that chamber and came back off the walls.
It stood.
It kept standing. It went up and up past the point where any of it made sense, and the pressure came down the chamber with it and I felt it push flat against my chest like a hand.
Nobody in that raid said a single word.
Then the System identified it.