struggled for balance jared was risin

struggled for balance on its wobbling,

semisolid surface. Across the eye from
him, Jared was also rising, laughing
maniacally. Before the frost giant could
regain his feet, Eric cocked his pistol once
more and fired. The eye rolled beneath him
as he squeezed the trigger, however, throwing
off his aim and making him stumble into the
shattering the last of the giant into millions of pieces

wall. He didn’t miss altogether this time, but the

shot he’d been aiming at Jared’s heart only hit the
giant’s left arm. The thunderclap shattered the limb
at the elbow, spraying frozen fragments on the walls
and ground behind him. Staggering off balance anyway,
the giant clutched his icy stump and fell over. This irritation
proved too much for the buried beast’s eye, and it blinked,
slamming its enormous lids together. The lid nearest Eric
hit him in the heel, knocking him onto his back and rolling him
in place. Jared tried to stand up and leap out of the way, but the
lid snagged his right foot and jerked him backward. When the lids
met, the force shattered Jared’s ankle between them. The giant flopped
backward yowling in pain, and the opposite lid pulled him away to the far
side of the hole.
Eric grabbed one of the handholds the dwarves had hacked into the wall and
pulled himself upward. Below him, the eye blinked once more then stayed half
open and began to water. The swampy odor intensified, and the eye began to roll
faster and more wildly than before. Its horrid pupil rolled out of hiding at last,
and Eric saw that it was milky and scabrous with tarpaulin-sized cataracts. The pupil
swiveled in every direction, blindly seeking the source of the irritation.
Meanwhile, Jared had made it back to his knees and had plunged the stump of his left
arm into the rheumy water welling up at the edge of the monstrous eyelid. With a touch,
he froze a measure of that salty liquid into the crude shape of a new arm. As he flexed life
into his newly created fingers, he stuck his destroyed ankle into the water and repaired it as
well. It took only a moment, and when he was done, he turned to Eric and glared at him with
murder in his eyes.
awful spray of matter.

“I’ll kill you!” the giant shouted, expelling a plume of white mist. “I’ll feed your bones to
your father in his own burning hall!”
Eric had climbed half again his own height on the crude stone ladder, and he knew that if
Jared jumped from the base of it, he could easily tear Eric down. All the giant had to do was
run across the open space and leap. Eric just hoped Jared realized this too.
“Come and get me then!” he shouted, waving with the barrel of his gun.
Enraged, Jared took the bait. He dashed back onto the surface of the hideous, buried eye
toward the base of the ladder, billowing white breath like steam from a locomotive. Eric leaned
out from the ladder and took aim with his pistol, but Jared wasn’t foolish enough to run in a
straight line. Yet even though he zigzagged irregularly across the intervening distance, it didn’t
matter. Eric wasn’t aiming for him.
Just before Jared got to the farthest spot from which he could leap and grab Eric’s boot down from
rang out

the ladder, Eric took aim at that spot and fired. One more peal of thunder rang out, and the bullet
peal of thunder and fired eric took aim billowing white breath bait