Antoine limped toward the ruined edge of the terrace. His right pant leg was shiny with fresh blood. "The man is slipping away," he said. "Couldn't you feel it? Spiertz had moved his soul into the rock, but it's too foreign a substance. His soul can't be sustained; it is going to break up and become nothing more than an appetite."
I stood next to Antoine and looked down the hill. The giant was in the village below, thrashing its way through the buildings. Heading for the wall surrounding the base of the mount. Beyond that lay the shallow water of the bay, and then the mainland. From there, straight toward the sun until it reached Paris.
I remembered a bit of trivia that Lafoutain had offered. "Les Michelettes." I pointed them out to Antoine.
"Medieval technology," he said. "It lasts forever, doesn't it?"
"Let's hope so."
Antoine did the heavy lifting while I prepped the projectile. A bombard was one of those medieval inventions that was simple in design, cumbersome in construction, and devastating in effect. The bombard was nothing more than a very heavy tube that, when filled with powder and a projectile, hurled a heavy object very far and very hard. They were very good at bringing walls down without the need of putting men within arrow range, and when engineers discovered that stone balls tended to shatter due to their velocity, they opted to make bigger guns. The supergun arms race went on-bigger is better! — until someone discovered how to mass produce iron balls, at which time the need for large-bore guns dropped.
The downside of a big gun was that it was heavy, and not so easily transported, as the English realized during the fifteenth century when they were getting the shit kicked out of them by a bunch of French knights. The two guns left behind were hauled back to the walls of Mont-Saint-Michel and mounted there, like trophies, so everyone would know the English had not only been beaten, but they had left their cool toys behind. At some point, an officious bureaucrat had ordered the cannons filled, but as they had opted to use fairly cheap cement, it didn't take us long to clean out one of the cannons.
Having positioned the re-bored cannon, Antoine sighted down the length of his good arm and took a distance reading on the retreating giant. It had started on the causeway, but by the time we reached the lower wall of the island, it had reached the first breach. The pavement had collapsed under its weight and it had fallen into the sea, where it had run afoul of an old law of alchemy: salt water and stone don't mix well. It had been slowed by the ocean's touch, and it had climbed back up to the road once more, but the next break had confounded it again, and the second time it had stayed in the water. Sluggish in the grip of the salty sea, it forged toward the shore, but it was moving slowly so there was little danger of it being out of range.
I packed the throat of one of the Michelettes with glass, sand, a car battery and gasoline, a bunch of scrap metal torn from the same car that I had taken the battery and gas from, and a ragged block of rusted iron I had scavenged from the ornamental gate. Submerged in several inches of blood-tinged gasoline, the armament was a solidifying mass of Chorus-tinged intent, waiting for the trigger of my Will.
"Make it count," Antoine said, squinting at the giant.
I bit my tongue, hard enough to taste blood, and nodded.
He closed his eyes, exhaled slowly, and raised his arm a few inches. His magick moved the cannon sympathetically, lifting the barrel off the shelf of the wall. Veins in his neck stood out as he held the cannon in place, and I gave him a few more seconds to dig his anchors in. Pointing the bombard in the right direction was only half the trick, the other half was making sure it stayed on target as the projectile fired. His forehead creased with exertion as his finger quivered for a second, and then he found his center. The jitter in his finger stopped and the skin of his forehead smoothed out.
"Ignis," I whispered, and the cannon fired.
For the brief seconds of the projectile's flight, my perception was bound to it. The wind burned my hard skin, and I screamed as I tore through the morning air. I knew where I was going; I saw my target, and my focus never wavered. The shape of the giant grew quickly in my field of vision, too quickly, and then there was nothing but the shuddering blankness of impact. I gasped, hurled back into my own frame of reference, and the Chorus melted from my skin.
"You missed," Antoine pronounced. The cannon lay behind us, knocked askew by the force of the blast.
Shading my eyes, I stared out at the foundering giant. It couldn't get up, the sea's poisonous touch was too great on it now, and it thrashed about in the surf like it was caught in quicksand. "I guess that depends on what I had been aiming for," I said, glancing over at Antoine.
The giant's left shoulder and stump were gone, torn off by the impact of my improvised projectile. Somewhere near the water's edge was a piece of rock with the Spear imbedded in it.
"We have to destroy him," I reminded Antoine. "The tide'll go out enough for him to crawl to shore, and then he's going to repair that shoulder and start marching on Paris again."
Antoine nodded. "I suppose you have a plan?"
I did. While gathering materials for the cannon shot, I had realized something about stone. Mountains weren't permanent. They lasted thousands of millennia, but eventually, through erosion by wind and water, they could be reduced to a flat spot on the terrain. Given time and temperament, a mountain could be worn done, one grain of sand at a time. The trick was speeding that process up. Spiertz's soul was in the rock, diffused so widely that the Chorus couldn't find him, but what if the area and mass of rock were reduced to a smaller amount? If the statue was hacked up into pieces, could I find the piece that held Spiertz and break him?
"First," I said, "we're going to need the Spear. And then, well, you're going to have to trust me."
"Can you do it without the ominous theatrics?"
"I need a conduit."
Antoine grimaced, understanding the nature of my plan. "No. That's not going to work."
"You can ground yourself better than I can, and I know how to siphon energy from a living source. I'm going to need a lot of power, and your feeding it to me is the easiest way." I glanced at his shortened sleeve. "Besides, this plan requires two hands. You're missing one. It's like drawing the short straw."
XXVII
One of the skills taught young Watchers was how to channel energy. Building and executing a spell took a certain amount of concentration, as well as a source of ready fuel, and if the magus had to draw and convert power from the leys, then the effectiveness of his magick was diminished accordingly. Magi like Antoine strained that distinction with their ability to draw power almost effortlessly, but the rule still held: one part to feed, one to transform, and one to execute. The trinity of doing magick. Channeling meant you could offload two-thirds of the effort on to others, and depending on the number of conduits you could manage, it meant your available pool of energy could be much larger than you could draw on your own.
This is how armies are built. Singular in focus, endless in power. The sum of the group is greater than the individual.
We were two, and had to settle for a single stream. Antoine gathered the leys and bound their streams into a single point in his chest; I-very carefully-attached a Chorus leech, and opened the conduit between us. There was a little bleed, as much as Antoine kept himself hidden, the Chorus could still taste him in the flow.
The tide had gone out another foot by the time we reached the shore. Invigorated by the heady flow of energy from Antoine, I swept through the mass of slippery rocks and wet sand along the water's edge with the Chorus. My senses were engorged with data: the hard light off the water, the laughing sound of the waves as they pulled at the giant, the smell of brine and decaying plant matter, the groaning thunder of stone under siege as Spiertz fought to overcome the cloying grip of the ocean, the stale scent of blood and sweat coming off Antoine and me. Somewhere in all that data was the cold hunger of the Spear.