- Soonmot
- Dec 19, 2002
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Entrapta fucking loves robots
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Grimey Drawer
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quote:
Chapter
XXI
I literally sat on the edge of my chair as LeMieux told us his story. Only Senna seemed carefully uninterested but I knew better.
"It was the early 1960s, maybe sixty-two, maybe sixty-three, I cannot now remember exactly. I was, at that time, how do you say..." The old man gave a slight shrug. "I was involved in activities that would not have been sanctioned by my government or that of the United States."
"You were a spy," Jalil said, brain working rapid-fire, as usual. "For who? Had to be the Russians, back then. Cold War."
"Yes, yes, the Russians. You see, I had been operating a somewhat small and only marginally lucrative smuggling operation in the South Seas. Certain illegal substances. On the rare occasion, weapons. However, before long it became clear to me that my business was not growing and perhaps in danger of being subsumed by more powerful men than me, groups of men, organized groups with more money, better boats, more connections."
"So, you decided to betray your country?" I said.
LeMieux wasn't offended. "What was my country doing for me, at that moment? Nothing." He smiled at me in a way that reminded me of one of my dad's older Navy buddies, a guy who whenever I was around him always made me feel impossibly young and ignorant but, strangely, not too bad about it. Like, it wasn't a crime to be young. Like, I would be old soon enough and wise.
"Besides, the LeMieux you see here today is not one hundred percent the LeMieux of yesteryear. Much has happened since that time. Much has changed."
"So, what went down?" Christopher said. "How did you get to bizarro-world? I'm not going to believe you came willingly."
LeMieux shook his head. "No, no, not willingly. One of my first assignments for the Russians was to observe various preliminary activities and collect information regarding an above-ground nuclear test. Planned and scheduled by the Americans."
The old man paused.
"Is it difficult to talk about what happened?" April asked sympathetically. I saw Senna roll her eyes.
"Not any longer," LeMieux replied. “I believed seems so long ago, so part of a far-off world, as if it all happened to another LeMieux, not the man you see before you. Here is what I recall. A particular night, the sea was rough. I prided myself on being a good and seasoned sailor, but accidents happen, eh? Sometimes, one is simply a victim of circumstance."
He wasn't speaking to me personally, but I nodded. Yeah, accidents happened. Yeah, circumstances could make you a victim.
"Perhaps I was at fault, perhaps not, perhaps it was the bad weather. Perhaps God had other plans for me than being a petty smuggler and spy. Regardless, my boat capsized. Vaguely now I recall being trapped beneath the hull, freezing, no doubt dying, drifting slowly but certainly closer to the site of the scheduled blast. And then —" LeMieux raised his hands together and then spread them in two arcs.
"An explosion of light unlike anything I could have imagined. I thought I was dead, at the gates of heaven. But I was not dead." Again, LeMieux paused. Shook his head. "What happened next," he went on slowly, "was extraordinary. It was as if... as if the world had been turned inside out, its skin, what we ordinarily see, ripped open, flipped over to expose the dark underside. I had been under the boat, but now, somehow, I was free of it floating free, in or above the water I could not tell. And that is how I saw the sky peel apart and the clouds twist and churn. And my own body." LeMieux frowned.
"My own body also wrong. I looked at my hand and saw not flesh but bone and muscle and veins. I could not bear to look anymore, after that one horrible sight."
We all knew. Christopher, April, Jalil, and I knew. We all remembered that early gray morning at the lake. The old man's words had brought it all alive, brutally alive again for us, the universe opening, inverting, turning inside out, sky boiling, the monstrous wolf rising from the water. Christopher looked ready to blurt something out. I shook my head. I'm not sure why, except that something made me not want the old man to know we'd experienced the same sort of passage. His coming across had been, it seemed, an accident.
Ours, I think we all believed, had not. It occurred to me then that I wasn't even sure if Senna knew what had happened to us, exactly. I didn't even know what it had been like for her, crossing. Had never thought to ask. I looked at her now. Her face was still carefully expressionless. For a split second, a fraction of a second, I wished she would look at me and smile. But I knew that wouldn't change anything.
“That at some point I lost consciousness, my boat had been righted. Quickly I climbed aboard, only to be almost immediately surrounded by what I recognized as sailing ships of the ancient world."
"Who were they?" April asked.
"Atlantean surface sailors," LeMieux explained. "They carried me down to Atlantis in a diving bell that runs along a great rope suspended from a floating platform." LeMieux turned to me. "This was almost forty years ago, but the diving bell is still in use today."
"You were taken prisoner?" Jalil said.
LeMieux seemed to consider his answer before speaking. "No, not really," he said. "Atlantean society was too fractured for anything so civilized as a fully functioning judicial and penal system. You see, at that time, the fair city of Atlantis was in a dreadful, sorry state, on the brink of civil war, in fact. The people were divided into two main factions, though small splinter
groups, fanatics mostly, also wielded some influence over the people's thinking. One major group claimed loyalty to Neptune,
Roman god. The other, to Neptune's archrival, the Greek Poseidon. Here were the residents of this independent city begging to be ruled by one of two despotic gods. This made no sense to me."
I nodded, it made no sense to me either, or, I'm sure, to the others. Except maybe to Senna. Possibly she would welcome a group of willing slaves.
LeMieux went on. "Poseidon was demanding extortionate tribute. Neptune was threatening to destroy the city unless it paid tribute to him. And the citizens of Atlantis were killing one another for the privilege of being slave to one god and victim to the other. No one had the time to bother with a stranded sailor from the old world. So..." LeMieux smiled, a wise, self-satisfied smile. "So I decided to seize the opportunity I saw before me. I decided to end the internal strife. I decided to remake myself in the image of a leader far more democratic than either already on the ballot, to prove to the people of my new home that I was the man they wanted to lead their city. Not Neptune or Poseidon, not some other despotic god. But a true politician, something the
Atlanteans had never known or encountered. Someone they could not defend against."
Christopher leaned forward. "How did you do it?"
"The details are boring," LeMieux said, with a small show of false humility. "Suffice it to say that by establishing myself first as a hardworking citizen, and then by putting into effect the time-honored politician's skills of bribery cajolery manipulation..."
"Bad press on the opponent, baby kissing, smear campaigns, unfounded accusations, the art of the deal, lying," Jalil added.
LeMieux bowed his head. "As you wish. But over time I became the most respected man in the city, trusted by all factions, given the responsibility through a general election — at the suggestion of one of my most loyal supporters — of heading up a central government intent upon keeping troublemaking immortals at bay,"
"It's what we've seen all over Everworld," I said. "Plenty of violence and lunacy, but very little skepticism, hardly any cynicism.
No one questioned your motives in taking power, did they?"
LeMieux admitted this was so. "My rise to power was uncontested. At least by the Atlanteans. Neptune and Poseidon were, at first, puzzled by my tactics, by my audacity. However, the same innocence, if it can be called that, exists in the gods as in the mortals, and before long I was forging a treaty with Poseidon while playing Neptune off the Greek god to keep his demands from becoming unreasonable. With the two gods more occupied in the checking and balancing of each other's power, I was free to establish for the first time in remembered Atlantean history a healthy economy based on the harvesting of fish, shellfish, and even a quantity of gold for sale to surface-dwellers. And thus you find us today, a well-ordered, economically strong society."
"What happens..." April stopped, her face flushed. "I mean, do you have a son or a daughter? A protege?"
LeMieux chuckled. "Death is not something one can avoid, or something one should not talk about in polite conversation," he
said. "It is not a taboo subject. My death is a reality I admit each and every day. And," he said, looking from face to face, "it does
worry me to think what will happen to my Atlantis when I am gone. I have tried to train one or two men, native Atlanteans, Everworlders, over the years, yet whatever strengths they possessed were overshadowed by their profound and seemingly unchangeable naivete."
LeMieux sighed. "In the meantime, it is good the gods should be fighting, Neptune warring with his rival Poseidon. For in this
way, their attention is focused away from Atlantis and on each other. And I can still hope to find among the city council staff a
worthy successor to my position as mayor of Atlantis."
This is not looking good. How desperate is he for an heir? Also, he was nuked into Everworld? That's loving metal!
quote:
Chapter
XXII
"Monsieur LeMieux, have other people from the real world, the old world, crossed into Everworld?" April asked.
The old man shook his head. "I do not know," he admitted. "Perhaps. It is no longer of great concern to me, to seek out such people. I have made a life here, in Atlantis."
"Would you like to know about our world, as it is now?" April asked. "I mean, I'm not a historian or scholar or anything, but I
could tell you some things."
The old man smiled. It was a kind smile, almost pitying, too. "No," he said, placing his hand over April's. "I do not wish to know anything. It has been too long. But I thank you, young lady, for your offer."
"Well, what about the opposite?" Christopher pressed. "like, have you ever tried to get back to the real world? To your old life?"
"Yes, long ago, I tried, thinking perhaps there was a physical path somewhere, somehow, leading to the surface and then..."
LeMieux shrugged. "There was not."
"You say you don't want to know what's happens?” his voice sharp. "That means you haven't been back, ever. That you don't cross when you sleep. That you don't cross over to the real world. You have no presence there. You're just not there anymore. Or, maybe, you are there, still, and here."
"No." LeMieux sounded surprised. Interested. "No, I have never gone back. I have always assumed I was dead to that world, a
missing person. But I do not know for certain, of course. Why do you ask this?"
"We cross," I said. "When we sleep here, we sort of wake up back there. I mean, all the while we're awake here, we're living our normal lives back there, eating, going to school, sleeping, going to work. There are two of us, or one in two parts, or something like that. But when we go to sleep here, it's like the us back in the real world gets this sudden update. The two of us merge. We suddenly know or remember, our brains or memories suddenly tell us what's been going on over here. To us. In Everworld."
"That must be very disturbing," the old man commented. "I am glad I do not experience such a thing. If there is another... another LeMieux back there, on the other side, I do not think I want to know about him."
"Yeah, well, schizophrenics are us." Christopher said.
All of a sudden Brigid came to mind. Brigid the shape-shifting Celtic no-longer-god, not-quite-human I'd met twice now in the real world. A god didn't necessarily need a physical pathway to travel from one world to the next. I knew that much. Was Brigid an Everworlder who had crossed back to the real world? A god who had taken up residence, if it could be called that, in Everworld only to leave, to cross the barrier back to the real world — forever? Is that what she meant by being trapped between two worlds? Had she ever crossed to Everworld at all? She'd said she'd made a decision. Had she refused to leave the old world? Why?
"Monsieur LeMieux," I said. "You tried to escape Everworld and failed. Do you know of anyone else who has successfully escaped? Who maybe has traveled back and forth?"
"Do I know of one who has accomplished such a feat?" he repeated. "No. But, of course, there is talk, there are rumors. It is said that from time to time, when, no one can predict, a person of unique powers is born. A person who is a passageway, a gateway. Through that special person, one can travel back and forth, from one world to the other." Again, the old man shrugged.
Don't look at Senna David don't give her away. I said to myself and silently willed the others not to give Senna away, not to say, Well, Mr. LeMieux, this is your lucky day, meet Senna Wales.
Nobody spoke. The old man went on. "However, such an occasion, such a person is rare. Failing his — or her — presence, it is said that the only way it is possible for one to accomplish such travel is to rewrite the Great Scroll of the Gods."
"The what?" Christopher asked.
"The Great Scroll of the Gods. Again, there are rumors. It is said that this document is a plan devised long ago by the chief or father gods. In it they charted a map of Everworld, detailed its substance, stated its laws."
"The software!" Jalil said excitedly. "I knew it. I knew it all along."
I flashed a look at Senna. Her face was pinched with curiosity; she couldn't hide her interest any longer. And I thought of Brigid again. And the enlist of what she'd said: Close the gateway, David. Kill her if you have to. The dark ones are close.
"Where is it?" I demanded. "Where is the scroll? Who has it?"
"No one knows," LeMieux admitted. "At least, if there is someone who knows the whereabouts of this scroll, his — or her — identity is a secret. You see, the Great Scroll was hidden from all even from its creators, so that no one could ever attempt either to destroy or to own it. To manipulate it to his own selfish ends. Because you see, of course, that whoever is in possession of the Great Scroll could alter it in such a way as to change its very essence, could rewrite it to serve his own will. Could even rewrite the very existence of Everworld. Now you see why it is so important that the document be well hidden and protected."
Christopher ran a hand through his hair. "Holy crap. That just might be the best news I've heard all day. All day? What am I saying? Since I landed in this looney bin."
"The best news assuming we can find the Great Scroll," April added. Then shut her mouth when she saw LeMieux's worried frown.
"We're not after the scroll," I said quickly. "What we want to do is get back to Olympus."
And what I want to do, I thought, is hope the others weren't thinking what I was thinking. That the best place to hide a document so dangerous, so potentially world-altering, universe-shattering, would be beyond the bounds of that world, that universe. In the real world.
With Brigid?
Trying to look like I wasn't, I glanced at Jalil. He was the one I had to be most wary of. He was the thinker, the server, probably my friend, yes, but Senna's tolerant enemy. I had mentioned Brigid to him. Once. I hadn't told him everything, nothing about my second encounter with her, but what would it take for Jalil to deduce the location of the scroll, enlist the others, find the scroll, maybe Brigid would help him, use it to kill Senna, destroy Everworld... where would I be then?
Who would I be then?
I met Jalil's eyes. I hadn't meant to. They were narrowed, snake-slitted, knowing.
The member of the mayor's staff who'd accompanied the mayor into the room approached with a sheaf of papers and asked for a moment of his time. LeMieux turned away to speak to the man.
"Do you know what this means?" Senna grabbed my arm, squeezed, her eyes glittery with excitement.
"What?" I knew, was pretty sure I knew what her answer would be, but I asked anyway.
"The scroll, it's what I've been hoping for. It would give me total, complete, absolute power over this place, over Everworld." She bared her teeth.
"Now, that is a surprise, those words coming from Senna's mouth. You really should shoot higher in life. Senna. Dictator, is that all you want to be? You're just not meeting your potential," Christopher said.
"I'm thinking something different", Jalil said now, quietly. "I'm thinking that scroll could be used for a good cause. Nothing to do with Senna's personal desire for domination. Hey, magic software, no problem. I can handle it. Software is software."
"Okay look, no one's going after the scroll. The goal here, right now, the immediate goal, is to get back to Olympus. To help Zeus and his pitiful little army of humans fight off the Hetwan."
"Isn't this secret piece of paper of any interest to you, oh mighty Davideus?" Christopher asked, eyes wide.
"Of course." If he only knew of how much interest. I could save Everworld. I could save Senna. We could go home. It could be done. We had been told so. "All I'm saying is that first things first, we get back to Athena."
"Your protectress." Senna, sneering. I acted like I didn't care.
"Quiet. Here comes LeMieux."
The old man had finished with whatever business he'd had to attend to and rejoined us.
"Sir, Monsieur LeMieux," I said, "can you help us escape Atlantis? Get past Neptune and Poseidon and back to Olympus?"
The mayor hesitated. Maybe our enthusiasm wary of our real intentions. Probably.
"If we succeed and Olympus is saved," I went on, "we'll demand that Zeus intervene to protect your city, Atlantis, in the future."
LeMieux smiled wryly. "You have the ear of mighty Zeus? From what I understand, he is not much more, shall we say, reasonable, than his brother."
"We have the ear of Athena," I said. I could easily imagine what sort of comment Christopher was struggling not to make. Yeah, and he'd like another part, too....
Another moment passed before the mayor answered. "I will help you, my new friends, but I cannot guarantee your safety. The gods, Neptune and Poseidon, are angrier than ever before. Their might is great. They have many creatures and other, less obvious powers of destruction under their command. Now, come with me. We will dine first, then I will send you on your way."
"So, we're looking at what, a dinner of Oysters Rockefeller, Lobster Newburg, Clams Casino? Maybe a little champagne to start, a dry white wine to finish?"
LeMieux looked at Christopher with amusement. "I am afraid we survive on more simple fare. But the quality of the fish is superb. It far surpasses anything to be found in the common fish markets of the old world."
Christopher made a face. "I knew it. Sushi."
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Chapter
XXIII
After dinner, the first decent meal we'd had since the food we'd been given by thankful villagers on our trip down the Nile, LeMieux led us out of the city council building and through the streets of Atlantis.
While we walked, April and the others chatting with the mayor, Senna walking silently beside me, my thoughts wandered. Went back to the strange moment of silence that had followed LeMieux's mention of his frustration at being unable to find a worthy successor. Went back to everyone's eyes on me. In expectation? Suspicion?
Someday, LeMieux would be unable to govern. He knew that, acknowledged that someday soon he would fall sick and die. Atlantis would need a new mayor, a man of wisdom and courage, a wise warrior. Could that man be me? It could be me. Or not.
I'll try to be worthy of your sword.
I'll try.
I'd said that, promised that to Sir Galahad, the perfect knight, as he lay under a pile of stones we'd pulled together. And right now, it seemed, the job in front of me was to learn how to operate a rickety old diving bell. If you even operated a diving bell and didn't just sit in one waiting to die.
Christopher barked a laugh. "Okay, I'm just saying no."
It was laughable. It looked like something out of an old black-and-white silent film about the nineteenth century, a thing without any reference to twentieth-century technology, something from The Perils of Pauline, something a helpless heroine in a frilly
pink dress might find herself trapped in by an elegantly thin, mustache-twirling villain bent on compromising her virtue.
April cleared her throat. "Well, it is kind of... pretty."
Okay, the diving bell was beautiful, in a very, very old- fashioned way. It was made of a shiny metal, which I seriously hoped was steel, and decorated all over with lacy gold patterns. Each stud that connected each sheet of shiny metal to another was inlaid with mother-of-pearl. But....
"It's just so small," Jalil muttered. "Like a Porta Potti. Like a little elevator but..." He peered through one of the small windows.
"But with no controls. It's a dumbwaiter. It probably leaks. I don't understand..."
I turned to LeMieux. "Not that we're not grateful," I said, "but are you sure this, er, thing, is going to get us to the surface? It looks kind of, well, old."
LeMieux shrugged. "There are risks, as I have told you. But there is no other way I can help you reach the light of day."
I looked at the others, one by one. Saw the resignation on their faces, even on Senna's. "Then, let's go."
We took our leave of the mayor of Atlantis. Promised again that we would try to enlist Zeus's help as protector of the underwater city. Unspoken caveat: If we survived. We crammed ourselves into the diving bell. An Atlantean soldier closed the door behind us. And slowly, slowly the chamber began to rise along the thick, coiled rope that extended from Atlantis to the surface of the ocean.
We ascended, April watching the beautiful underwater city disappear below us, Jalil's mouth set in a tight line, Christopher, unbelievably, humming "Row, row, row your boat," Senna — silent.
Approximately ten minutes had passed when I felt the first, small tug. Then the diving bell lurched to one side and we tumbled with it, arms outstretched to break falls, knees slamming against the floor the five of us now piled into one lump too shocked, too caught off guard even to scream.
Jalil craned his neck toward one of the small windows. "Oh man, oh man, it's a shark!" he cried. "It's biting through the ropes..."
"We're going to sink!" Christopher yelled.
"No, we're not, we're going to shoot to the surface!"
And then — it was like being on one of those amusement park rides that yank you straight straight up only to drop you straight straight down just as suddenly. But we weren't going to drop, just continue to shoot wildly to the surface like a rocket. I braced myself against the wall of the diving bell as best I could. Fought the panic. "Decompression!" I said. "We're going to get the bends."
Jalil shook his head, like the mad racing of this chamber of horrors wasn't enough for him, he had to further shake it up. "No. Think, David. Unless the chief gods wrote something in the Great Scroll, it doesn't exist in Everworld. You ask me, I think they
know diddly-squat about atmospheric pressure, any rules of science."
"You'd so better be right," Christopher wailed. And then vomited. "Sorry, man, can't help it."
And then, the diving bell lurched to a stop. Not a complete stop, now we seemed to be rolling. Light flooded through one of the small, water-spattered windows. Dimmed, then shone through again. We'd broken through to the surface. The diving bell continued to bob like a cork on the waves, but at least the mad ascent had stopped. We could see sky for a second, then water, then sky again. Maybe it was all right, maybe we'd make it out of this alive. The question now: How to steer this thing to land. The more important prequestion: Could it even be steered?
"Oh, no," April whispered. "Listen!"
I did. And heard through the walls of the diving bell the familiar roar of Neptune's enraged voice. Close. Closer. Then... another voice, deeper but just as enraged. Neptune and Poseidon. A contest of vocal wills. Trading insults. Bellowing wordlessly.
"The boys are at it again," Christopher said weakly, still looking a little green. "If they see us, we're goners."
Jalil lifted his face to a window. "I'm betting Neptune's forgotten all about us already. Which doesn't mean we aren't going to be in the way. Which doesn't mean we aren't going to die."
It started. A hurricane, two hurricanes, whipped up instantaneously by the competing gods of the sea Gale-force winds, twenty-foot waves. And our diving bell was just a random piece of flotsam caught in the mother of all macho displays of immortal testosterone.
We were in a washing machine on the spin cycle. We were battered and bruised and bloody. Fingers poked into eyes and feet pounded into guts. I clutched my sword as tightly to my body as I could to prevent anyone but myself from being sliced apart. Jalil's head slammed into one of the windows and left a smear of blood. Senna's pale face was gray. One of her hands hung strangely from her wrist. Probably broken. April's bottom lip was torn open where she'd bit down on it. A line of blood trickled from Christopher's left temple.
We wouldn't last much longer, injuries mounting, stomachs emptying. And when the gods stopped raging, when the sea calmed down again... what then? Would we simply float, bob peacefully along the surface of the ocean, a pretty antique diving bell with five dead bodies inside? Five teenagers dead of internal injuries, dehydration, starvation, take your pick. And then, like magic the violent heaving of the waters stopped, just stopped. And with it, the mad motion of the diving bell. The chamber was filled with groans and sobs and Christopher's favorite mantra, holy crap holy crap holy crap.
Now that we'd stopped being thrown around like an old beach ball, we had time to cry and wail. Just enough time to cry and wail, for April to whisper and pray, for Christopher to curse, for Jalil to mutter to himself, think his way calm, for Senna to close herself off completely from me, jerk away from my touch, wrap her arms around her frail battered body.
Just enough time before the diving bell, our pretty little prison, was shoved up on the shore.
quote:
Chapter
XXIV
We climbed out, pushing, tumbling, everyone crawling to a space of sand all to his or her self. Glad not to be up close and personal with one another, glad to be alone for a minute or two, to retch, lay a warm cheek on the cool sand, close eyes too weary to stay open.
After a moment I sat up. Looked around. This was not Egypt. And it wasn't anywhere near flat-topped Mount Olympus, either.
No mountains of any sort in sight. The others, struggling to sit up, Jalil to stand, stretch. Senna on her back, eyes open, arms widespread, looking too like an offering to a god, like she'd looked in the mouths of Sobek's crocodiles, staring at the sun.
I used my sword to help me stand, leaned on it, grateful for it. We'd find shelter, take some time to rest before...
"David!"
I whirled. April, she was to my left, now backing away slowly toward the ocean, her eyes wide, her face upturned.
"Holy..." Christopher scrambled on all fours, sand spraying up behind him, then leaped to his feet, turned his back to the water.
Jalil grabbed one of Senna's arms, pulled her roughly to her knees, dragged her until she got to her feet, spitting mad. Then she saw. We all did. How could we not have seen! Had we been that sick tumbling from the diving bell, or had this giant thing just appeared, taken one huge step from the other side of this place and boom! landed here?
I could say it was a giant but it was nothing like the few giants we'd seen in Neptune's arena. This thing dwarfed those giants, it dwarfed Loki in one of his expansive rages, made Zeus in his thunderous phase look as harmless and insignificant as a toy kids get at Burger King.
It was at least, I don't know, thirty, forty feet tall. I could see that its face, though far away above me, was hideous, both because
it was so big and because it was genuinely ugly, all out of proportion to be human, but still vaguely human, like the face of someone who'd been in a terrible car accident and patched back together by druggie freaks.
The nose was — not there. There were two cavernous, oval- shaped holes flat against the face. We were looking inside bone, at the place where the skeleton would join the cartilage and skin and whatever else makes up a human nose. Like the giant's nose had been neatly torn off and then tossed away. No plastic surgeons in Everworld to replace it.
The mouth was lipless, the gums partly eaten away, showing all the rotting teeth to their roots. The teeth seemed too big for the mouth, like a grizzly's teeth in a human baby's mouth, as if maybe even with lips the giant couldn't have closed them over the teeth.
One eye was sunken down below the cheekbone, as if the socket had simply melted and slid and taken the eye with it. The other eye, bright red where a human's would have been white, was where it should have been on a human face but lacked an upper lid. How? The eye couldn't blink, just bulged and stared and gave the impression it was going to fall, plop, right out onto my head. I couldn't see ears under the mop of greasy, matted hair, hair that also grew over most of the giant's neck, though not on his face.
Around his shoulders, the giant wore a cape of hundreds, maybe thousands of animal skins crudely sewn together with stitches big enough to be seen a mile away. His torso was bare, not a pleasant sight, because the giant's breasts hung loose and in folds, lay flat against his grizzled paunch of a stomach. Around his hips he wore another massive, pieced together wrap of animal skins For which I was seriously glad. I did not want to have to look at whatever was hiding underneath.
His feet were bare, hairy, and three-toed. It looked as if the two smaller toes on each foot had rotted off, leaving open, oozing sores. His hands looked no better, like the guy was suffering from leprosy. Which might have explained his missing nose and lips.
And did I mention that he could crush me between two of his existing fingers before I could say a word. In the time it took me to get the full horror of the giant he stood still, shifting his mismatched eyes slowly from one of us to the next. But he made no other move.
"Uh, David?" Christopher squeaked. "What do we do now?"
Up to me, always up to me. Okay, couldn't get back into the diving bell. Even if we all made it in we'd be trapped, plucked out of the water like a miniature beach ball. Couldn't run for the water, swim away. One step and the giant could make it miles out, away from shore. We'd drown one way or another and we'd had enough of that. Try to rush past him, scatter, five bugs skittering along the floor, too many for the guy to focus on one?
Assuming he was dumb. Assuming he wanted to focus on us. Assuming...
April screamed. With incredible speed for something so mammoth and deformed, the giant reached down with one disgusting hand for April.
I ran, holding the sword over my head with two hands, yelling at the top of my lungs, and brought the sword down on the giant's thumb as hard as I could, with as much fury as I could. The sword broke the skin, sliced into the bone, got stuck. Still the hand moved closer to April and I sawed and hacked and April, terrified, backed closer, closer to the lapping waves of the shore. I was vaguely aware of the fact that I was still roaring, that now Jalil and Christopher were roaring, too, and pelting the giant with stones and shells and basically doing nothing except pissing off the enemy.
Suddenly, the giant grunted and shook off me and my sword like the tiny nuisances we were. I fell on my butt, saw April charge down the beach.
And that's where we end? Huh. Huh.
Okay, maybe I'll be doing the next book tomorrow then, because what the gently caress
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