The Lost Years (33 page)

“What treachery is this?” Stangmar slashed his sword through the air as he raged at the ghouliants. “We told you to find any other intruders!”

Angrily, he grabbed one of the ghouliants’ swords and thrust it straight into the soldier’s belly. The ghouliant shuddered, but did not utter any sound. Then he slowly pulled the sword out again, facing Stangmar as if nothing had happened.

Stangmar strode up to me, still kneeling at the edge of the shattered Cauldron. His face taut, he raised his sword high above me. As I turned toward him, my head tangled with black hair so like his own, he hesitated for an instant.

“Curse you, boy! The sight of you—and the cut of that cursed blade—has awakened feelings in us. Feelings we thought we had forgotten, and wish only to forget again! And now our task is twice as wretched. For though we must do what we must do, the pain will be all the greater.”

Suddenly, Stangmar’s mouth dropped open in astonishment. He faltered, stepping backward in fright.

For within the remains of the Cauldron, a strange thing was happening. As if a gentle breeze had started to blow through the hall, the hairs on Shim’s head were stirring, quivering. Slowly at first, then with increasing speed, his nose started to grow larger. Then his ears. Then the rest of his head, neck, and shoulders. His arms too began swelling, followed by his chest, hips, legs, and feet. His clothes expanded with him, growing larger by the second.

Then came the greater miracle. Shim opened his eyes. More amazed, perhaps, than anyone else, he groped at his expanding body with his swelling hands.

“I is getting bigger! I is getting bigger!”

By the time Shim’s head was pushing against the ceiling, Stangmar recovered his senses. “It’s a giant!” he cried to the ghouliants. “Attack him before he ruins us all!”

The nearest ghouliant dashed forward and ran his sword into the part of Shim’s body that was closest. That happened to be his left knee.

“Oww!” howled Shim, clutching his knee. “Stingded by a bee!”

Instinctively, the once-little giant curled himself up into a ball. This only made him an easier target, however. The ghouliants gathered around, poking and stabbing him with the fury of an angry swarm. Meanwhile, Shim’s body continued to expand, with no sign of slowing. Before long, the pressure of his shoulders and back against the ceiling made it start to buckle. Chunks of stone rained down on us. A hole opened in the ceiling.

One of the towers on the battlements fell, crashing into Shim’s still-growing nose. But instead of making him curl up tighter to escape harm, the blow made something else happen. It provoked his wrath.

“I is angry!” he thundered, swinging his fist, now nearly as large as the king’s throne, through a section of wall.

Stangmar, visibly frightened, started backing away. Following his lead, the ghouliants also retreated. The two Fincayran men, who had been cowering by the throne, dashed madly for the stairs, tripping over each other in their haste.

I ran to join Rhia, pausing only to retrieve Deepercut, which lay near the stairwell. Together we huddled in a far corner that seemed safe—for the moment, at least—from falling stones.

Then, for the first time in his life, Shim had a very giantlike experience. He saw his attackers running
away
from him. And the gleam in his enormous pink eyes made it clear that the experience was one he just might enjoy.

“I is bigger than you,” he bellowed. “Muchly bigger!”

Shim, whose hairy feet alone had swelled bigger than boulders, stood up. He stretched his body to its fullest height, bringing down another piece of the ceiling. With a vengeful grin spreading over his gargantuan face, he began stomping on the ghouliants. Each of his stomps shook the entire castle, and sections of the floor itself began to give way.

But the deathless soldiers survived even these crushing blows. After each attack, they merely stood, shook themselves, and resumed slashing at Shim’s feet with their swords. Shim’s eyes flamed with rage. He stomped harder than ever. The more the ghouliants scurried beneath him, the more weight he threw into every step.

As I sat with Rhia in the corner, fervently hoping that Shim would not move to our end of the hall, I watched crumbling pieces of the ceiling crash around him. He was clearly angry—and clearly enjoying himself.

Then, beyond the sound of splintering stones and stomping feet, I began to hear a strange, rhythmic sound coming from somewhere beyond the castle. Distant at first, then closer, the sound swelled steadily. I suddenly realized that it was the sound of voices, the deepest voices I had ever heard. They were singing a simple chant, consisting of three profoundly low notes. And there was something else about the chant, something familiar, that stirred in me a feeling I could not quite identify.

Then an enormous face, craggy as a cliff and wearing a shaggy red beard, appeared in the gap in the ceiling. It was followed by another, with curly gray hair and full lips. And another, with skin as dark as a shadow, a long braid, and earrings made from chariot wheels. Each of them nodded in greeting to Shim, but remained outside the castle walls.

“Giants,” said Rhia in wonderment. “They have come.”

Indeed, rising from their secret hiding places all across Fincayra, the giants had come. Responding to some long-awaited call, perhaps the explosion from the Cauldron of Death, they had lumbered out of the darkened canyons, remote forests, and unknown ridges of this land. Bearing huge, flaming torches, they arrived from many directions. Some wore heavy nets of stones, which would have allowed them to rest unnoticed in fields of boulders. Others still carried branches, even whole trees, on their flowing manes. And others, perhaps because they were too foolish or too proud to disguise themselves at all, wore vests and hats and capes as colorful as the fruited trees of Druma Wood.

Swiftly, the giants arranged themselves in a circle around the castle. Following Shim’s example, they began stomping the ground together, with the combined force of an earthquake. All the while, they lifted their voices in the rhythmic chant, singing in their most ancient language, the language of Fincayra’s first people:

Hy gododin catann hue
Hud a lledrith mal wyddan
Gaunce ae bellawn wen cabri
Varigal don Fincayra
Dravia, dravia Fincayra.

In a flash, I recalled hearing my mother sing the very same chant. But was that memory from our time in Gwynedd, or from sometime before? Had I, perhaps, even heard it as a baby? I could not quite tell.

Somehow I caught the feeling, perhaps from that vague, uncertain memory, that the meaning of this chant had something to do with’ the timeless bond between the giants and Fincayra. With the notion that as long as one lasted, so would the other.
Dravia, dravia Fincayra. Live long, live long Fincayra.

The more the giants danced by the light of their great torches, the more the castle crumbled. While the stones behind Rhia and me continued to hold, other sections of the wall were buckling. And as the castle’s walls weakened, so did its enchantment. The spinning started to slow, the rumbling to fade. Then, with a grinding scrape of stone against stone, the castle came to a wrenching halt. Pillars and arches collapsed, filling the air with dust and debris.

At that moment, the ghouliants, whose power had sprung from the turning castle itself, released a unified shout—more of surprise than of anguish—and dropped wherever they stood. I could not help but think, as I viewed their bodies sprawled among the stones, that their faces at last showed a touch of emotion. And that the emotion was something akin to gratitude.

With the death of the ghouliants, Shim climbed through a missing section of wall and joined the rest of the giants outside. As I listened to the pounding of their heavy feet all around the castle, I remembered more ancient words. Words that had foretold this Dance of the Giants:

Where in the darkness a castle doth spin,
Small will be large, ends will begin.
Only when giants make dance in the hall
Shall every barrier crumble and fall.

Shim, I realized, had been saved by an older form of magic. Older than the Shrouded Castle, older than the Cauldron of Death, older perhaps than the giants themselves. For even as his act of courage had destroyed the Cauldron, his very footsteps in running across the stone floor of the hall had begun the dance that would destroy the castle in its entirety.
Small will be large, ends will begin.
The Grand Elusa had told Shim that bigness meant more than the size of his bones. And now, through the bigness of his own actions, he towered above the battlements of this crumbling castle.

39:
H
OME

The wall behind us started to groan. I turned to Rhia, whose tattered suit of vines still smelled of the forest. “We must go! Before the whole castle collapses.”

She shook some chips of stone from her hair. “The stairs are blocked. Should we try to climb down somehow?”

“That would take too long,” I replied, leaping to my feet. “I know a better way.” Cupping my hands around my mouth, I shouted above the din. “Shim!”

Even as a crack split the wall, a face appeared through a hole in the ceiling. The face would have been familiar if only it had been many, many times smaller.

“I is big now,” boomed Shim with, pride.

“You got your wish!
To be as big as the highlyest tree
.” I waved to him to bend closer. “Now put your hand through that hole, will you? We need a ride out of here.”

Shim grunted, then thrust his immense hand through the hole in the ceiling. The hand came to rest on the floor beside Us, though so near to a chasm that only one of us at a time could squeeze past to climb into Shim’s palm. Rhia chose to go first.

While she carefully worked her way around the chasm, I hefted Deepercut in my hand. Although its silver hilt still felt cold from the clutch of Rhita Gawr, the twin edges gleamed with a luster that reminded me of moonlight on the rolling surface of the sea.

Suddenly I remembered the Treasures of Fincayra. They too must be saved! Whatever time remained before the final collapse of the castle, I must use it to find the Treasures that had not already been destroyed by falling debris.

“Come on!” called Rhia, holding onto Shim’s thumb.

“You go first,” I answered! “Send Shim back for me.” As she watched me worriedly, I cupped my hands and shouted toward the ceiling. “All right, Shim. Lift!”

As Rhia rose through the ceiling, I placed Deepercut on the safest looking slab of stone I could find. Immediately, I began prowling around the remains of the once-cavernous hall. Crawling over tumbled columns and the corpses of ghouliants, dodging falling chunks of stone, stepping over fissures snaking across the floor, I moved as swiftly and carefully as possible. All the while, beyond the groans and crashes of the castle, I could hear the ongoing pounding of the Dance of the Giants.

In short order, I found the Flowering Harp, with all but a few strings intact, and a glittering orange sphere that I guessed must be the Orb of Fire. Quickly, I carried them over to Deepercut and returned for more. Near the toppled red throne, I discovered my own staff, a treasure at least to myself. At the far end of the hall, I uncovered the half-buried Caller of Dreams, as well as the hoe that Honn had said could nurture its own seeds.

All in all, I found only six of the Seven Wise Tools. After the hoe, I located the plow that tills its own field, although it proved almost too heavy for me to lift. Then I discovered a hammer, a shovel, and a bucket, whose powers I could only guess. Last of all I turned up the saw that I knew from Honn’s description would cut only as much wood as needed. Although part of the handle had been crushed by a huge chunk of stone, the tool remained usable.

I had just deposited the saw with the other Treasures when Shim’s face reappeared through the hole in the ceiling.

“You must comes!” he thundered. “This castle is readily to fall in.”

I nodded, though I still wished that I had been able to locate the missing one of the Seven Wise Tools. Not knowing what it might look like had only made my task of finding it more difficult. Even so, as Shim lowered his great hand and I began loading it with the Treasures, I occasionally paused to scan the hall for any sign of the seventh Wise Tool.

“Is you done yet?” Shim bellowed impatiently.

“Almost.” I hurled the last of the objects, my staff, onto his palm. “Just one more minute while I climb on.”

“Quickerly!” called Shim. “You might not haves another minute.”

Indeed, as he spoke, I felt the stones of the floor under my feet shift drastically. I started to climb onto his hand, giving a final glance to the hall.

Just then I spotted, in the shadows behind a smashed pillar, something that made my whole body tense. It was not the missing Wise Tool. It was a hand, groping helplessly. The hand of Stangmar.

“Comes on!” Shim implored. “I can sees the ceiling about to fall.”

For an instant I hesitated. Then, even as a section of the ceiling came crashing down beside me, I turned and raced across the floor of the foundering castle. The crumbling of the walls, floor, and ceiling seemed to accelerate, as did the chanting and stomping of the giants outside.

When I reached Stangmar, I bent over him. He lay chest down on the floor, the gold circlet still on his brow. A large slab of stone had fallen across his lower back and one of his arms. His hand, now clenched into a fist, had ceased groping. Only his half-open eyes revealed that he was still alive.

“You?” he moaned hoarsely. “Have you come to watch us die? Or do you plan to kill us yourself?”

I gave my answer by reaching over and gripping the slab. With all my strength, I tried to lift it. Legs trembling, lungs bursting, I felt not even the slightest movement in the stone.

As the king realized what I was doing, he eyed me with scorn. “So you would save us now to kill us later?”

“I would save you now so you might live,” I declared, though the floor beneath us started to sway.

“Bah! Do you expect us to believe that?”