Troy Denning - The Titan of Twilight

“I’m sure he would understand.” Brianna motioned toward the fireplace. “You’d better get busy. After the titan stops, I’ll feign an escape. It won’t work, but Lanaxis will get suspicious if I don’t try.”

“Good-but be careful.”

Avner scrambled up the floor and climbed into the fireplace. He hoisted himself past the smoke shelf, then entered the flue and started his descent to the first floor. Once he had disappeared, Brianna tore a woolen cloak into strips and began to braid it into a rope. Kaedlaw was suckling hungrily now, and she could not help wincing at his enthusiasm. The blue tint had vanished from his skin, which now felt warm and pleasant against hers, but his head remained plump and ugly. The queen could not help wishing that it was Kaedlaw’s other face she saw.

Brianna was still making her rope when Lanaxis stopped and kicked his heel into the frozen ground. The strike sent such a jolt through the floor that the queen’s teeth clacked together. A few moments later, the shocks ceased and her stomach suddenly rose into her throat. A weary groan reverberated from the tower foundations, then the building tipped toward the fireplace and steadied itself.

Brianna stuffed her half-finished rope beneath her cloak and went across the room to the smashed arrow loop. The air outside was so crisp it sparkled and so cold it stung like a wyvern’s breath. At the base of the tower lay a short expanse of virgin snow, gleaming blue in the pale morning light. At the edge of the field rose an enormous drift, the stubs of three battered chimneys poking above the wind-crusted surface. Dozens of smaller mounds lay beyond the largest hillock, some with smaller chimneys or splintered beams showing above the snow. Beyond the buried village rose the black wall of a dense conifer forest, where the barbed tips of spearhead spruce and bloody tamarack scraped at the cloudless belly of a violet sky. In the center of the wood, the sun was poking its yellow crown above the horizon, kindling embers of golden fire in a small crescent of dark boughs.

Brianna placed their location somewhere near Hartsvale’s northern border, for the forest was typical of the groves in the Cold Marches. The village itself was certainly one of the many manors that had fallen earlier this year when a tribe of frost giants had slipped across the frontier and gone on a month-long rampage.

A long boom, deeper and louder than any sound Brianna had ever heard, rose from the other side of the tower. Stones began to rattle in the walls. The snow lifted off the field outside, whirling around the building in a whistling white funnel. Kaedlaw howled in protest, but the queen could not hear him. She merely felt his body quivering with the effort.

Brianna rushed across the chamber and peered through an arrow loop, where she found her view blocked by Lanaxis’s gloom-shrouded form. As the sun rose behind the tower, a tide of yellow light slowly crept down his robe. The purple murk rose from the cloth like steam, exposing the dingy, tattered linen that lay beneath. Though she could not see past the loop’s upper sill to examine the titan’s face, one hand dangled within her view. The skin was slack and wrinkled, and covered with scaly liver spots the size of platters.

Lanaxis fell to his knees beside the queen’s tower, and the floor jumped so hard that Brianna nearly fell. She found herself staring at the titan’s profile. His white-bearded chin was tipped up, with his mouth open and bellowing at the sky. His eyelid, still pinned shut by a crossbow quarrel, was baggy and wrinkled. The crow’s-feet at the corner of his eye were as deep as planting furrows, and all that remained of his hair was a sparse fringe of coarse gray strands.

As the growing daylight swam over his body, Lanaxis dropped his head and fell silent. At first, Brianna thought the pain of his first sunrise in three thousand years had caused the howl, but then the titan’s voice came crashing down as though it had echoed off the sky itself.

“Sons of Vilmos, I summon thee!” it boomed. “Answer the call of your ancient uncle, I command it!”

A southerly wind came howling out of the still air and tore across the field, driving before it a blinding wall of snow. The pounding gale hammered the foyer door against its jamb. Tongues of ice whipped through the arrow loops, lashing at Brianna like the strands of a torturer’s flail. Distant peals of thunder erupted in the south. The tower shuddered so violently that it would have toppled had Lanaxis not thrust out a hand to hold it steady.

Brianna pulled up her hood and fastened her cloak tight, then retreated across the chamber to look through the arrow loop Lanaxis had shattered the night before. A line of snow clouds had appeared on the southern horizon. They were racing northward so fast it looked as though the gods were drawing a curtain across the sky. Inside the churning mass flashed a constant flicker of silver lightning, and the howling wind carried a musty, rainlike scent.

Storm giants.

It had been centuries since their last visit to Hartsvale, but Brianna knew the signs well enough. As a young girl, she had listened in heartbroken captivation to the tales of their gloomy visits, when rivers spilled over with tears and mountains thundered with grief. Simon, her father’s high priest, had once told her they were the noblest of all giants, but also the most dangerous because even their huge hearts could not contain all of their ancient sorrows.

With a makeshift sling, Brianna fastened Kaedlaw to her chest, then tied her rope to one of the crossbar brackets on the foyer doorjamb. She opened the door and ran the line across the small hall to the gaping hole that had once connected the queen’s tower to its stair turret. She dropped the end over the side. The wind caught it and whipped the long cord against the tower wall.

Brianna sat down and dangled her legs over the doorjamb, then took the homemade rope in hand. The clouds already covered half the sky, and the thunder was so loud she felt it in her bones. In the dark forest, the trees either bowed to the wind or snapped. Great white plumes of snow billowed off the drifts where the village lay buried, and the field below was concealed beneath a raging ground blizzard. The queen hoped Lanaxis would catch her soon, for she did not relish the thought of struggling through a thunder-snow with a heavy baby tied to her chest.

Brianna slipped off the doorsill and slid down the rope. The distant village and forest vanished behind a curtain of wind-driven snow. When the titan did not immediately recapture her, she uttered a prayer beseeching Hiatea’s protection and struck out in the approximate direction of the hamlet. The snow was so deep she sank to her hips, and she had to swim more than wade to make progress through the powdery stuff. Her face quickly went as numb as a rock, and her breath came in gasping wheezes. The queen struggled onward. For Avner’s plan to work, she had to convince Lanaxis this was her only hope. She would not accomplish that by turning back.

It took only a few minutes for the tower to vanish behind the driving snow. For a while, Brianna kept her bearings by traveling parallel to the advancing line of clouds, but it was not long before they had drawn a formless gray shroud across the entire sky. The thunder grew deafening, and graupel-hard pellets of rain quick-frozen into snow-hammered down on the ground. Silvery flashes of lightning danced all around the field. The queen struggled blindly onward, cringing in terror and shivering with bone-aching cold, praying Lanaxis would catch her soon.

The thought occurred to Brianna that perhaps dawn had weakened the titan more than she knew. Certainly, after thousands of years of constant twilight, full daylight would be excruciatingly painful. But the queen saw no reason it would paralyze or cripple her captor. Even after the sun had seared away his gloomy cloak, Lanaxis’s ancient body had looked healthy enough to hobble after her.