The Night of the Swarm tcv-4

by Robert V. S. Redick

  ‘You were with a dlomic woman,’ she said, hoping she didn’t sound accusatory.

  ‘No!’ said Pazel. ‘I mean, yes. But not with her, not like this. I can’t explain.’

  She did not like the change in his voice, or the way his eyes stared past her as he spoke. ‘Anyway,’ he added, ‘I’m not sure she was a dlomu.’

  ‘What else could she have been?’

  Pazel hesitated. ‘A spider,’ he said at last.

  ‘You’re insane,’ said Thasha. ‘Or I am. Oh credek. Pazel, listen: we can’t do this any more. Not until we’re safe somewhere. You know that, don’t you?’

  His answer was a kiss. She returned it, not caring if the kiss meant yes or no, for the blackness was flickering in his brown eyes again, and her youth was her own and not Erithusme’s, that was as certain as his beauty, his urgency, the rising of the sun.

  She turned from him again.

  ‘It’s too dangerous,’ she said. ‘This time I wouldn’t have stopped.’

  ‘I didn’t stop,’ he said. ‘I just — it was just-’

  ‘Oh, Pitfire.’ Thasha stepped back, lowering her shirt. ‘That’s it. I can’t end up like Marila. You have to promise me you’ll stay away.’

  He laughed, reached to touch her again. Glaring, she caught his hands.

  ‘Night Gods, Thasha,’ he said. ‘A few minutes ago you wanted to kill me because I was keeping away. Listen, stop worrying-’

  ‘Oh, why should I worry? You listen, you blary ass. This time we got lucky. The first time I kept my head. No more.’

  He was fumbling with his trousers, which were literally held up with string. Loving him desperately, she gripped his chin and raised it.

  ‘Promise.’

  She was quite certain about what she was doing. Pazel, however, managed to surprise her again: he turned and rushed down the hill in the direction of the raft. Suddenly she realised that he was limping. You idiot! she thought. Why did you let him climb the hill?

  She closed her eyes. His stubbornness had left her shaking with rage. When she looked again Pazel had vanished in the fog.

  Once more she bolted after him. She had no clear idea of what would happen when she caught up — tears, apologies, violence? Aya Rin, don’t let him fall on that leg.

  She reached level ground. The fog was now so thick that she could see just a few trees ahead of her, and only realised she was nearing the shore when the earth grew sandy among their roots. Where had he gone? She drew a breath to shout, but some instinct for caution made her hesitate. She rushed forward to the river’s edge. There was no one in sight. Had they descended the wrong side of the island? Of course not, there was the raft, and-

  Pitfire!

  Thasha drew her knife, whirled into a defensive stance. The raft was destroyed. The vines cut, the bladder-mushroom slashed — and the Nilstone gone. The ropes that had secured its sacking trailed in the water. Footprints surrounded the raft, a confusion of footprints, radiating in all directions from the shore. She could see no other sign of the party.

  As ever in a crisis, she thought of Hercol, his wisdom and severity. Her mind became clear. She bent low beside the nearest footprints. River water was trickling into the heels, softening them even as she watched. The prints were only seconds old.

  She turned at bay. Now she heard it: a wide, dispersed sound, as of many persons or creatures moving in near-silence. The heart of the sound was at too great a distance to be coming from the island itself. The shore, then. Or other boats. Whatever it was, the party was no longer alone.

  Thasha stepped carefully away from the raft, then turned and darted along the shore, putting distance between herself and that unseen host. She had taken no more than ten steps when Pazel materialised out of the fog.

  ‘Don’t move, Thasha,’ he hissed.

  Pazel was stock-still. And the next instant she saw why. A hrathmog stood facing him, gripping a huge, double-bladed axe. Water dripped from its black fur; long white fangs showed in its mouth. The shoulders beneath the crude leather jerkin were enormous.

  The creature’s eyes were fixed on her, now. It stood head and shoulders taller than either of them. She held her breath, muscles twitching with apprehension. The hrathmog fingered its axe.

  Then Pazel spoke: a single word in a hard, guttural tongue such as Thasha had never heard. The creature gave an uncertain reply, its voice like the growl of a bear.

  ‘It’s afraid of us — afraid of humans,’ Pazel murmured in Arquali. ‘It said it didn’t know this island belonged to the Lost People. That it was ordered here by its chief on the far shore. That it’s sorry for disturbing our rest.’

  ‘It thinks. . we’re dead?’

  Pazel nodded, then spoke again in the hrathmog’s tongue. The creature shuffled back a step. ‘Where are the others?’ Thasha whispered.

  Pazel shook his head: no idea. The hrathmog lowered its axe. Thasha imagined it was breathing easier. She was not.

  ‘The raft’s destroyed,’ she said.

  Pazel shot her a look of dismay. Then his eyes snapped back to the creature. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘we’re ghosts, see? And we’re just. . going to. . back away.’

  They began a slow retreat, foot by careful foot. ‘Into the river,’ he said, ‘just until we’re out of sight. Then we’ll swim.’

  ‘Not too deep, though,’ she said. ‘Ramachni warned us-’

  ‘I know.’

  They backed offshore until the water reached their knees. The hrathmog watched, unmoving. Already its form was dimming in the fog. Pazel murmured a last word to the creature, and Thasha silently exhaled. His Gift had just saved them again.

  Then her legs collided with something in the water. She whirled. A second hrathmog was floating beside her, face up. An arrow protruded from its throat. Although quite dead, the creature still gripped the arrow shaft with one hand.

  Whose arrow? Their party had no bows.

  Suddenly the hrathmog on the island rushed forward, narrowing its eyes. When it saw the body it threw back its head and gave a monstrous howl. From the far shore, dozens of voices rose in answer. But the hrathmog did not wait for its comrades. The two hairless creatures were not ghosts but tricksters, murderers. It raised its axe and charged.

  Thasha grabbed Pazel by the shirt and flung him behind her. They stumbled backwards, flailing for deeper water, but then the hrathmog raised the great axe over its head, preparing to hurl it, and Thasha saw her death. The water had slowed her. She was offering the blade her chest.

  The beast hurled the axe. But as it stepped into the throw, a second arrow pierced its calf. The hrathmog stumbled, the blow struck the water a foot from her chest. As the creature charged, Thasha groped for the weapon, pulled it from the river bottom, and swung.

  How weak, how feeble, but somehow she’d cut the creature’s hand. She kicked backwards, swimming now, screaming at Pazel to Go go go! The hrathmog snatched at the weapon; Thasha flung it away. Chase it, chase it please! The hrathmog lunged and caught her by the leg.

  Thasha’s knife flashed: now both its hands were bloody. Then those maimed hands caught her by the throat.

  It tried to close, to bite. She forced an arm under its chin. They fell back into deeper water, the current whirling them downstream. Her knife was gone; Pazel groped for her and was gone; hairy thumbs dug into her windpipe. She twisted, clawed at its eyes. She was failing, the thing was killing her, it was just too strong.

  All at once a spasm shook the creature. Pazel was on its back, his head over its shoulder. The creature screamed; its hands released Thasha and seized Pazel and hurled him away, and in the half-light she saw that Pazel had most of its ear in his teeth.

  In a killing frenzy the hrathmog dived after Pazel. She clung to it, knowing it would tear her lover to pieces. The creature dragged her on, heedless — and then, suddenly, it was dead. Other beings surrounded them. Knives flashed. Dark blood billowed from the hrathmog’s neck.

  She was choking: she must finally have gas
ped. Her vision dimmed and a roaring filled her ears. Her last sensation was of the veins of darkness in the river’s depths, coiling about her ankles, pulling her down.

  5

  From the final journal of G. Starling Fiffengurt

  Monday, 21 Modobrin 941.

  A dlomic woman spat a seed into the waves today amp; made me cry. She never saw me watching her. First her lips worked round and round, then her face lifted amp; she made kissing-lips amp; when the seed flew her eyes tracked it like a gunner his cannonball. At first I couldn’t account for my tears; then I knew I was seeing my Annabel on a picnic, with a sweet green mush-melon, spitting seeds in Lake Larre, the juice runnin’ down her lovely chin.

  Nine days since the Shaggat’s waking, the torture of Chadfallow, the proof that Rose has ceded his captaincy in all but name to Sandor Ott. We are blazing west by northwest under topgallants and triple-jibs, over waves like rounded hills, putting mile after mile between us and our abandoned shipmates. Coward, traitor, fair-weather friend: at night the accusations churn my stomach, though no one makes them but me.

  A queer dark spot in the sky this morning. It moved closer amp; we saw it was a solid mass, very low in the sky. We beat to quarters, ran out our guns. The object bobbed amp; turned. It seemed adrift in the air, and with indescribable horror we saw that it was the bow of a sailing ship, fifty feet of hull and deck and shattered framewood, the stump of a foremast, the whole bowsprit thrusting upwards like a narwhal’s tusk. Rin as my witness, the thing looked torn, like a heel of bread from a loaf. Two cables reached skyward from the anchor ports, a quarter-mile maybe, and at the end of ’em we could now see one of those weird sky-sails used by the dlomic armada: half kite, half balloon, kept aloft by some power none of us could explain. The wreck blew right over us, some hundred feet above our forecastle. There were flames inside her, and dlomu, living dlomu, holding fast to the rigging and rails. They looked down at us and I expected to hear calls for help, but they were silent. Maybe they thought us phantoms, heralds of doom, as their cousins did that first night in the port in Masalym.

  No one spoke, no one could. One of those poor devils jumped for our rigging but of course at that speed it just tore through his hands like razors and then his foot grazed something and he turned and reached the deck headfirst and Heaven’s Tree, how I wish I’d shut my eyes.

  If only someone up there had thought to drop a rope. We might have reeled them down with the capstan, spread combat netting between the yards. They could have jumped and lived. As it was the wreck drifted northwards, gaining height. For hours we watched it dwindle against the sky.

  I am done with journal-keeping. Let oblivion take these memories. Anni will have had the child by now; Rin knows how she’ll care for the little thing, or who she’ll turn to for comfort. Goodbye to you, journal. You’re a womanish weakness I’ve indulged and that is the true reason I kept you a secret. No more entries, no more pain. Goodbye I say. The end. Let me be an animal that labours for his food bag, a dumb brute who does as he’s told.

  Wednesday, 23 Modobrin 941. But what I’m told — the miracle that Rose would have me work — is to keep their spirits up. ‘Make them hope a little longer, Quartermaster,’ he says. ‘You’re honest, and you’re an ally of Pathkendle and Company. It falls to you.’

  Make them hope. I close the door to his cabin, walk ten paces. Before me is a man I recruited off the streets of Etherhorde, a pious youth as I recall. He’s in a deathsmoke trance. I remember what I said to him, in that tavern doorway on a cool summer’s eve: ‘Finest run you’ll ever make, and the easiest. Due west to Simja, feasting and carousing at a festival that’ll be the envy of your grandkids, the pomp and splendour when we give away the Treaty Bride. Then due east to Etherhorde again, and ninety cockles in your purse by midwinter.’ I believed all that myself — wanted to believe it, needed to. My own pay for that easy run would have let me clear Anni’s parents’ debts, with maybe a bit left for a humble wedding.

  Now here the fellow stands, reeking, mouth agape, so fogged he doesn’t know me, or his peril should he draw the captain’s eye. He is a Plapp, and when I alert his brother gangsters they whisk him down to the hold to sleep it off — or to look for his stash, or both.

  That was midday. At three bells there’s a tarboy before me, horrified, whispering that a group of thugs is working the berth deck, snatching boys from their hammocks at night, clapping hands over their mouths and bungin’ ’em in the lockers until they bleed. At five bells another deathsmoker appears in the galley, in worse shape than the first. He’s a Plapp as well, but this time the Burnscove Boys get to him first, and turn him in. I suppose his execution will follow.

  Someone is knocking at my door: more bad news, or else Uskins, drooling and vague, with a word from the captain. I should have married her in secret. I should have told her old dad to get stuffed.

  Thursday, 23 Modobrin 941.

  There is heat in Rose’s innards yet. I went straight to him with the tarboys’ problem, having some inkling that the crime would touch a nerve. That it did: hardly had I spoken when he exploded out of his stuporous slouch and thundered to the cabin door, bellowing for the nearest lieutenant. A moment later he was back, questioning me furiously about the incident. He was taking it very hard by the look on his face, and then he shook my hand. I did not dream that: Captain Nilus Rotheby Rose shook my hand, and did not bite it either. A knock at the door. He scowled and shoved me, but I didn’t mind. The boys would be safe. As I left I saw who was waiting to enter: Sergeant Haddismal and the Bloody Son.

  Later there are distant explosions in the south, and flashes like bubbles of fire — rising, bursting, gone. The War Furnaces, whisper the dlomu. Fed not with coal but lead and diamonds, and above all eguar bones. Machines so huge and hot the discharge can be seen these hundreds of miles. The lads just stand and stare, as if the Nine Pits were gaping open there on the horizon, as perhaps they are.

  ‘Do they threaten us, away out here?’ I ask the dlomic commander, a thick-chested fellow whose long, fleshy earlobes make me think of soup spoons.

  He shrugs. ‘When I saw the armada pass by Masalym, I thought, “They’ve emptied all the shipyards of Orbilesc and Bali Adro City; there mustn’t be a boat left to watch over the heartland.” I was wrong. Those sorts of flares, you see them only when a warship launches. Part of the fleet is still here. We’ll be in danger if they spot us.’

  ‘We’re flying the Bali Adro flag. Won’t that help?’

  Only to a point, he says. When they run out of enemies, they fire on one another, ram one another, close and grapple and kill. The eguar gave them indescribable power, but it also made them frenzied and fearful, almost rabid. ‘And a rabid dog must bite something, after all.’

  He is a good fellow, Spoon-Ears, but he never cheers me up.

  So we run and run, with many a backwards glance. Lady Oggosk crouches topside day after day, like a gargoyle, staring in the direction of the Sandwall, which most days one needs a telescope to see. Felthrup, of all Rin’s creatures, has taken to chatting with her, and even sits in the old crone’s lap. The vicious Sniraga, who used to kill rats by the score for food and pleasure, wails and flicks her ruined tail but will not touch him. When the hag wants Felthrup’s company she sends Sniraga to howl outside the stateroom, and the cat leads Felthrup to her door like a bodyguard. Mr Teggatz watched them walk by and cracked his knuckles and burbled cryptically:

  ‘Cat takes rat, bah ha! Quite enough, quite enough. Cat takes orders from rat? Topsy-turvy. It’s the end of the world.’

  Monday, 28 Modobrin 941.

  If Teggatz is right about the approach of doomsday we could well be the last to know it. There is no one and nothing out here. We could be launched already into the heart of the Ruling Sea, save for those brief glimpses of the Sandwall, and the meekness of the waves, which have not topped fifty feet. Some land mass ahead must be taming them, unless the lions of the deep have all turned lambs.

  Rose navigates
by Ott’s ancient map and a fine dlomic chart provided by Prince Olik, but the former is a faded scrap and the latter only depicts the margins of the Island Wilderness. Our immediate goal: Stath Balfyr, that last bit of Southern land, from which place Ott’s sniffing about in books and archives back home produced detailed course headings for our run across the Ruling Sea. We stand a fair chance of locating the island, too: Prince Olik ventured there in his youth and has pencilled in his best guess at its location.

  And what a great black joke if we succeed.

  For we’ve kept the secret so far — ‘we’ being just myself and Marila and Felthrup, now the others have departed. Alone on the Chathrand we know that those course headings are a perfect crock. They don’t point to Gurishal, that blighted kingdom of the Shaggat Ness. I doubt they point to any safe, sound path across the Nelluroq at all. Ott’s chart is a forgery, but this time he was not the forger. The ixchel have used us, used us like the great oafs we are, used this ship to ferry them back to Stath Balfyr, their homeland, from whence we stole them centuries ago. Now all the little people have gone, vanished into thin air.

  That is nonsense, of course: they are flesh and blood, not pixies. They are also a brave and decent people, no more vicious or deluded than we ourselves, and more committed to one another by far. Probably they slipped ashore in Masalym, to try their luck on some less lethal ship. Rin save us, if men will rape tarboys half their size, what will they not have done to tiny ixchel, in the silence of attics, laboratories, holds?

  But now that the ixchel are gone, should I tell? Should I try to persuade Ott that his whole mad circumnavigation of Alifros is based on a lie? Soon enough I’ll have no choice, for he means to start our northward run the minute Stath Balfyr gives us our bearings. For the moment I see nothing to be gained by speaking up: Ott would insist on attempting the crossing anyway, sooner, probably. Stath Balfyr will not help us get home, but so long as we are searching for it we are at least on the same side of the world as our friends.