They Who from the Heavens Came (The Wisdom, #1)

Horace and Loki led their force of giants through the field, through empty country roads, past farmhouses, and gradually into civilisation. It had grown dark, but in a place like London, the night was still young.

People roamed the streets, gazing into the windows of closed shops. They were in the cinemas or restaurants or pubs. Teenagers laughed too loudly at private jokes, using vernacular others couldn’t understand. Twenty-somethings headed out, thinking maybe they’d get something to eat and then make their way to the clubs.

The aroma of mortality hung in the air. It trailed after the humans as they walked. Even the Halflings stank of it. Their faces looked so full of vitality, and yet they smelled like rotting meat. Horace was mortal himself, but not like them. Humans, in particular, were so frighteningly fragile, so easy to kill. It took much more to destroy someone like Horace.

The giants’ great feet slammed on the ground and made the earth quiver. At last, the Earthlings looked up. They stood frozen, unable to run, unable to scream – yet.

Then Horace lifted one of his thick golden hands, a signal that meant, Let chaos reign.

The giants let out great growls of fury and tore forward, hurling themselves at the buildings that lay before them like dolls’ houses before brutal children. One giant heaved a lamppost right out of the pavement, the red bulbous veins in his bare arms only just straining. He flung it like a javelin into the window of a shop selling overpriced fruit and vegetables alongside a staggering array of newspapers and cigarettes.

The glass exploded and rained onto the ground. A small crowd of people stupidly came outside, rather than hiding within. Every one of them screamed. Some of them were decorated in broken shards of reflection. They clutched their heads, their necks, their arms, realising with horror that what they felt oozing over their bodies was their own blood.

Another giant lifted a car with her bare hands, while the driver was still in it. Inside, he spun the steering wheel frantically, as if he could somehow drive right out of the giantess’ grasp. But the movement of the wheels only seemed to tickle her, and she laughed. It was an ugly laugh, not appropriate for a girl. Not appropriate for anyone.

She launched the vehicle at yet another car hurrying away from the scene, sending them both into a pinwheel of disaster. They careened into the brick wall of a tall office building proudly covered in glass. It shivered upon impact. At its top, people hung out of open windows, shrieking with fear. One fell and clung to the windowsill, while others leaned over and reached down to save him.

It was too late. He flailed his gangly legs too much, banging them against the wall of the building before slipping sweatily from the sill and dropping seven storeys to his sudden end. The giant who had set the wheels in motion laughed harder. It was a painful bellow reminiscent of the beginnings of an earthquake.

There was a dreadful splitting sound as Ymir, the largest of them all, pounded the ground so hard with his fist that it cracked open. He dug his meaty hands in the crack and yanked it apart. Then he pressed the divided sides of the earth so they formed steep slides, pointed inward, into the unknown. People ran, but gravity tugged at them – momentum pulled them into the depths.

Ymir’s giants jumped up and down like excited children, forcing the humans to slip further. Some of them tried to crawl their way back, but it was as if invisible hands were dragging them into the darkness. They screamed as they dropped into the crevice, soon to be buried alive.

Ymir slammed the two halves of the ground back together and flattened his victims within.

‘Excellent!’ Horace cried, delighted for the first time since he had descended to that ridiculous little planet.

Quetzal could keep his intrigues and quests and infatuations with Halfling girls who had lived but a fraction of the time they had. Horace was going to give the Earth a little history lesson.

This was just the beginning of it.

Loki stood beside Horace, his hands clasped behind his back and his expression stern. He looked disarmingly unassuming, like an eccentric genius who just happened to be eight feet tall but meant no harm, really. But Horace knew better.

‘Amusing,’ he said in a flat voice. ‘What now?’

‘Now we take a residential tour,’ Horace said to his new companion. ‘It’s time for you to perform a little magic.’

* * *

Itzy stared around her room. It had gone still, and now she thought perhaps she’d imagined the motion.

A moment later, she felt it again. No, her room was definitely shaking.

Is it an earthquake? she wondered.

Such a thing wasn’t unheard of, in England, though the quake would be relatively weak. Considering the subtlety of the tremors in her room, this explanation seemed to fit. What didn’t add up was the inconsistency of the shakes.

When the next one hit, it was accompanied by a sound. It was a low boom far in the distance. You had to listen for it to catch it, but it was there.

She scrambled across her bed and threw open the curtains. Hers was the last street in a grid of roads, which meant that from her second-storey window, she had a clear view of the neighbourhood. People were coming out of their houses and looking around. They clearly felt the shake, too. Itzy could see nothing that might have caused the quakes – but that didn’t mean something wasn’t out there.

The room shook once more, this time stronger than before. Again, there was a sound, this time louder. Somehow, Itzy didn’t think it was natural.

Her phone rang. It was Aidan.

‘Itzy? Are ye hearing that?’ he asked without greeting.

‘Yes. Are you feeling that?’ she returned.

‘Aye. I don’t like it.’

Itzy continued to look out the window. ‘How far do you think it goes?’

‘At least 40 miles,’ he answered. ‘Melody rang and said they had it in Enfield.’

Itzy’s eyes grew. ‘So it is an earthquake.’

‘It’s not,’ he said. ‘Not unless the earthquake is caused by giants.’

Itzy wasn’t sure she’d heard him right. ‘Sorry, did you say –’

The ground rumbled again. This time, it was so strong that Itzy lost her balance and toppled backward on her bed. She heard a roll of unnatural thunder both outside and down the phone line.

She crawled off the bed and chewed her lip. ‘Aidan…do you think this could have anything to do with –’

Before she could finish her thought, her door flew open. It was Myra, her eyes wide with panic. ‘Itzy, are you alright?’ she asked. She rushed across the room and threw her arms around her daughter.

‘I’m fine, Mum,’ she spoke into Myra’s chest. Her phone was squashed between their stomachs. From that space, Itzy faintly heard Aidan repeating her name.

She pulled out of her mother’s embrace and said down the phone, ‘I’m here. My mum just came in.’

‘Who is that?’ Myra asked.

‘Aidan.’ A new message buzzed through – from Oz. She put the phone back up to her ear. ‘I should go. I need to ring Oz.’

Aidan made a noise. ‘I don’t like the idea of ye being on yer own, not knowing yer alright, like.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ she started to say, but Aidan wouldn’t hear it.

‘I’m coming round,’ he said.

‘I’d like that,’ she admitted. ‘See you soon.’

‘Aye, and Itzy – I love ye.’

Itzy glanced at her mother, who was on the bed, staring out the window at the confused neighbours milling in the streets. ‘Me too,’ Itzy said quickly. ‘Bye.’

She ended the call just as another message came through. It was from Devon:

Did you just feel that earthquake???

Her brother’s message was more insistent:

Been trying to get through. RING ME.

Itzy shook her head and made to ring him back, when Devon’s picture appeared on the screen. She was smiling brightly in the photo, but when Itzy answered the call, her friend’s normally airy voice was constrained with fear. She sounded like she’d been crying.

‘Itzy, thank God!’ she cried.

‘What’s wrong?’ Itzy asked. ‘Devon, are you alright?’

‘They were everywhere!’ Devon sobbed down the line. ‘I was watching telly and these things just appeared. There were four of them – and they were huge! They were tearing everything up. I even…Itz, I saw someone die,’ she said in a hushed voice. ‘They were driving and the car got flung thirty feet and landed upside down. Then one of those things jumped on top of it over and over again until it was almost…flat.’ She let out another sob before pulling herself together again. ‘Mum fainted. She couldn’t take it.’

At Itzy’s side, Myra’s face had gone ashen. She could obviously hear Devon through the phone.

There was a loud banging noise down the line.

‘Devon?’ Itzy called in alarm.

‘It’s Ash,’ she explained. ‘Hang on.’

There was a rustling sound. Itzy guessed the phone was in her hand as she ran to get the door. There was a click as the door opened, and then a rush of jubilant and relieved verbal exchanges.

‘Who is that?’ Itzy heard Ash say.

‘Itzy,’ she told him.

The phone buzzed with another message from Oz.

‘Devon, I need to go,’ Itzy told her. ‘Oz keeps ringing. I think I need to take it. Just…don’t go anywhere, alright?’

‘As if I’d set foot outside with those things on the street!’ Devon shrieked.

When the call ended, Itzy stared at the phone in bewilderment. Then she rang her brother.

On the third ring, the ground shook again, and she was flung backwards onto the floor. Her mother let out a cry as she fell on the bed.

On the fifth ring, Oz answered. ‘Itzy?’ he said, his tone clipped. ‘Are you at home?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you see them?’

Itzy collected herself off the floor and looked out the window. ‘See who?’

‘The giants!’ he cried. It took her aback to hear him so rattled. More than that, it was the second time in as many minutes that someone had mentioned giants.

‘Oz, I don’t under –’

‘Itzy, I know how this sounds, but you have to believe me. There are giants. Right outside our house. Terrorising the neighbourhood.’

‘That’s –’

‘Crazy, I know – but –’ There was a noise, and he cursed down the line.

‘Oz,’ she tried again. ‘What is going on? Why would there be giants on the streets of London?’

‘Because,’ a deep voice came from behind her, ‘it seems my travelling companion has decided to go on a mission of his own.’

Itzy and her mother slowly faced the source of the voice. He was so tall, he had to stoop so he didn’t bang his elongated head against the ceiling. His hair was long, black and wild, and his eyes were long slits full of fire and rimmed in charcoal. He reminded Itzy of old Egyptian paintings of Ra – but he had Aidan’s unusual skin tone, and structurally his face belonged to another land. Somewhere in Central America, perhaps.

She could imagine him hooded in a feathered headdress and perhaps flying. It was his nose that gave that impression, so much like the beak of an eagle. He was dressed in black, but sheathed in a vast velvet cloak of gold, threaded with symbols Itzy didn’t recognise. They spoke of things that were too old to understand, things from a different generation, things which were….

‘Ancient,’ she breathed.

The Ancient tilted his head to the side. He looked like he was studying her – just as he had in her dreams.

Quetzal has the answers, she thought.

She was about to find out what those answers were.

‘Oz,’ she choked down the phone. ‘I’ll have to ring you back.’