The Giant Among Us Read Free Page B

Tavis found himself looking at a huge sword, lodged in the rubble pile over which he had leapt. The weapon was ten feet long, with a leather hilt and a double-edged blade as wide as a human body.
    “Tavis?” Brianna’s voice was barely audible across the length of High Meadow. “Report!”
    “We’re fine, Milady,” Tavis yelled. He was glad she could not see him, for his cheeks were burning with embarrassment. The queen’s personal scout should not allow a giant to surprise him. “Well join you shortly.”
    The scout eased the tension on his bow and pivoted to find the stranger sitting hunched in the base of a shattered hut, barely discernible from the stones around him. The man was turned half toward the heart of the village, his horned helmet slowly twisting back and forth as though he expected a second giant to appear any moment Tavis followed the stranger’s lead and crouched behind the remains of the hut Although the scout could not sense the cause of the man’s alarm, he had seen enough of the warrior’s mettle to respect his judgment. He kept his arrow nocked and watched for the second giant.
    An eddy appeared in the fog, about twenty feet above the stranger’s head. The current resembled an inverted plume of steam, alternately billowing downward and upward, like smoke from the nostrils of a snorting dragon.
    “Run, stranger!”
    As the scout cried the warning, he drew Bear Driller’s mighty bowstring and loosed the thick arrow toward the eddy. The shaft hissed away into the fog, then ripped into something leathery. A gurgling cry rasped across the village. Red blood came spilling out of the sky and splashed into the rubble behind the stranger, spattering the man’s armor with drops as large as his pauldrons. The astonished warrior sprang up and spun to face the giant.
    The scout cursed the man’s bravery. With the fellow standing so close, Tavis did not dare utter the command words that would activate his arrow’s magic runes. “No!” he called. “Run!”
    The stranger swung his hammer into the fog. The blow landed with a sonorous thump, and the giant grunted in pain. A huge silhouette limped out of the haze, stooping over to hold his knee with one hand. Even hunched over, the marauder loomed over his foe like a mountain. He was easily half-again as large as a hill giant, with a wild mane of silvery hair, skin as white as snow, and a trickle of dark blood dripping from his arrow wound. With an air of hateful disdain, the great savage glared down at his attacker, and the stranger wisely froze to avoid triggering an assault Tavis no longer felt quite so foolish. The marauder was a fog giant, the sneakiest of all the true giant races. They had thick, puffy pads on the soles of their feet that enabled them to move in near silence. As their name implied, they took full advantage of their stealth by inhabiting foggy areas where their skin and hair coloring served as ideal camouflage.
    The fog giant drew himself to his full height his head vanishing into the hazy sky Tavis screamed a mighty battle cry and started forward, hoping to draw the giant toward himself. The unknown warrior slammed his hammer into the marauder’s leg. The massive knee buckled sideways.
    An angry bellow pealed over the rubble, then a huge, double-bladed axe arced down out of the haze and struck the stranger’s enchanted armor with a sharp clang. The man did not disappear in a spray of blood, as Tavis had expected, but simply sailed into the fog. He crashed down some distance away, without even a groan to suggest he had survived.
    The giant grunted, then stepped toward Tavis.
    The scout yelled, “Basil is wise!”
    A ray of shimmering blue lanced out of the giant’s throat wound. The brute roared in astonishment and started to raise a hand to his neck, then the runearrow detonated. The marauder’s head disappeared in a brilliant burst of sapphire light, leaving the body to teeter on its own. The corpse continued to stand for