Chapter 359: War Is Coming

"Coalition."

The Stone-Mother’s eyes narrowed.

"Coalition? You want us to cross the seas? Us Giants?"

Kane nodded once.

"Yes. Maybe not all of you. But enough. There’s a war coming."

The weather in the hall changed.

Murmurs rolled along the slab: low at first, then denser, ten-foot bodies shifting on benches that didn’t creak so much as complain.

A Giant further down the table barked a laugh that had no humour in it.

Another set his cup down hard, making the fermented drink jump.

"Is that why our sea god’s been behaving like that?" someone called from the left rank.

Kane didn’t look away from the Stone-Mother.

"A part of it. The other part is whoever brought the stone inside this place."

The murmur jumped in volume.

"He’s talking about Givan—"

"But he’s dead—"

"The ridge-runner—"

The Stone-Mother raised her head.

Silence fell as if someone had cut a rope.

The hall held its breath the way it had when she first sat.

Her tiredness didn’t lessen.

It simply became the only weather allowed.

"He’s dead," she said.

"We killed him."

No one contradicted her.

A few gazes dropped to boards and meat.

Kane kept his voice level.

"That doesn’t stop the corruption. Where’s the stone?"

"It’s in the ridge."

Misha’s fingers tightened on the brief.

"You didn’t destroy it?"

The Stone-Mother’s mouth twitched, not quite a smile.

"We tried. We couldn’t. So we threw it out. Into the primary shaft. Into the same dark Root-Binder walked into when he still thought a door could be shut from the inside."

"It won’t stop the corruption like that," Misha said.

The administrative calm was still there; under it, something sharper.

"A carrier thrown into an open tap is not containment. It’s fuel with better access. Soon your whole island is prone to fall to it, if it hasn’t already started."

The Stone-Mother drank from her cup.

It smelled of fermented liquor, a green scent that cut the air between them.

"Even if that were true, why do you think we would agree to your proposal? We can defend ourselves. We have defended ourselves. The lower halls still stand. The sight lines are still manned. Stone-Watcher has not come down because the posts still matter, not because we are waiting for land-walkers to invent our courage for us."

Kane let the hall hear the answer without decoration.

"You can try. I won’t force anything. But if you help me—enough bodies for a southern line when the sky cracks, enough word that this island is not a hole in the map—I will get rid of the corruption in this place."

"How?"

He turned slightly and pointed at the lower-tier fighter from the night path, the one who had spoken about Root-Binder and stopgaps and disposable scouts.

The Giant’s eyes widened a fraction, then held.

"I heard you last night," Kane said, not unkindly.

"The previous Elder died in a cave at the ridge. That’s where the stone is. I will go down and clear it."

The hall’s weather broke into noise again.

Stone-mother only set the cup down and the noise folded back.

"You will go down," she repeated.

"Into the primary shaft. Where Root-Binder went with a warm stone and a sentence about shutting doors. Where we threw Givan’s remaining carriers when fire and hammer both failed. You are one land-walker with an axe and a mixed household, and you are offering to walk into the thing that is scaring our warriors?"

"I’m offering to cut the tap," Kane said.

"Not to give speeches about it. Secondary first if you want proof on a smaller wound. Primary if you decide the smaller wound is a waste of the time you have left. I don’t need your whole people on boats tomorrow. I need enough of a yes that when the sky breaks, this island is not still pretending the sea and the ridge are someone else’s problem."

Kessa leaned forward, ears flat, the banquet’s joy temporarily replaced by the hunt-focus.

"We have seen this method on land. Stones. Charms. Turned bodies. A gate that learned yellow eyes in a morning. If your primary shaft is still feeding, sitting on the lower halls and calling it defence is just slower losing."

Thora’s voice came out rough from her careful posture.

"He is not asking you to die for a southern map. He is asking you to let him finish a job your own Elder already started and did not walk out of. That is either arrogance or the only practical sentence left in this room. I have watched him be both. Today I am betting on practical."

Griselda’s yellow eyes stayed on the Stone-Mother.

"The case at my feet resonates with what you threw into the dark. I will not open it in this hall. I will open it under control at a secondary site, or at the primary mouth if you insist, and I will tell you whether the family is the same. If it is, land-walker methods and Giant strength in the same shaft are better arithmetic than Giant strength alone against a door that has already learned to open from the inside."

Firlia hadn’t spoken. She did now, quiet and precise.

"If the stone is still active in the ridge, every day of banquet and sight-line watching is another day of gradient. I keep lists. Lists do not care about pride. They care about what is still standing when the count is done. Help him clear it, or prepare the count for a smaller island."

The lower-tier fighter Kane had pointed at cleared his throat.

"Stone-Mother. He is the one who came out of the Hydra’s water. He walked the lower tier at night and did not follow the covered loads. If we are going to use outsiders, better the ones who admit the primary shaft is the problem than the ones who only want our shoulders on a foreign beach."

A grumble of agreement from one side of the slab.

The Stone-Mother looked at Kane for a long time.

Then the whole ground shook.