The Night of the Swarm tcv-4

by Robert V. S. Redick

  ‘The reason?’ Darabik’s voice was suddenly bitter. ‘Does there have to be one, Eberzam? Officially, the Emperor and the Lord Admiral decided they had to know how serious the Black Rags were about holding the Gulf of Thol. Well, here’s a shocker: they’re mucking serious indeed. They’ll throw blodmels into the effort, they’ll launch waves of ships from the Jomm. You don’t have to be an old relic like me to guess that. You don’t need to have been in the last war personally. You could talk to old boys in Etherhorde; there are plenty of us around. I suppose you could even cross the street from the club to the naval library and read a Gods-damned mucking book. The Admiralty Review of the last war, for instance. Or the one before that. Of course there’s another way, Isiq — much grander, much more exciting. You can throw your advance squadron at the enemy like a fistful of dirt.’

  ‘Now you had better lower your voice.’

  Embarrassed, Darabik collected himself. ‘I’m presuming a lot, aren’t I? Literacy in Naval Command. A disinclination to get your boys carved up. Arqual standing for more than bloody-mindedness and greed.’

  This is why he’s still a commodore, thought Isiq.

  ‘You’ll be reprimanded if word gets back to Etherhorde. Letting a freebooter past your line of control. Even a well-known neutral, like Gregory Pathkendle.’

  ‘I’ll give it some thought,’ said Darabik, ‘after I save as much of my squadron as I can.’ He grew still a moment, looking hard at the admiral.

  ‘We wiped our plates with ’em, didn’t we?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘That gang from Hurlix Street.’

  Isiq nodded. ‘That we did, Commodore. It was a strong alliance we made.’

  Darabik pressed his forehead hard against Isiq’s. ‘Gods above, let you be all that you appear. Let Maisa be strong and healthy; let others rally to her side. Because we can’t stay long in the shadows; sooner or later they’ll find us out. We’ve gone too far already, Isiq. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Isiq, ‘we’ve declared war on the Secret Fist.’

  The commodore declared them non-combatants, bound for Tholjassa on a mercy mission, and the reconnaissance brig escorted them along the rest of the line. For ten miles they sailed untroubled, but at the northern edge of the engagement the Mzithrinis opened up with long-range fire. The brig shielded them, and lost a mast for her troubles. She slowed, and before Gregory could reduce speed to match her a lucky 32-pound ball skipped over the waves and split the Dancer’s port rail and crushed her only tarboy dead against the mainmast. Isiq had just shed his disguise, and climbed to the topdeck to find Gregory on his knees, head bowed, the youth’s bloody corpse in his arms.

  By sunset the captain was telling jokes again, but his voice and face had changed. The whole crew felt it, and they sailed into darkness without banter or songs. At dinner Isiq sat alone with his bowl of rice and cod, until Suthinia appeared and sat across from him, stone-faced, with a bowl of her own.

  ‘That tarboy could not make conversation to save his life,’ she said, chewing. ‘But he was Gregory’s favourite all the same.’

  ‘In this little crew, you mean?’

  Suthinia shook her head. ‘At sea Gregory has no favourites; he’s marvellous that way. The boy was his favourite child. Of some twelve or more. This one’s mother is with Maisa; she’ll be waiting for us when we arrive.’

  7

  On Sirafstoran Torr

  14 Modobrin 941

  243rd day from Etherhorde

  When he woke, Pazel could hear only ringing, as though a bell that never faded had been struck inside his head. He could feel the water sloshing in his ears, and imagined what Ignus Chadfallow would say. Three near-drownings in a single week. You’ll be lucky if your hearing ever returns.

  It was dusk. Pazel was being carried up a steep hillside; the surrounding pines were low and dense, and the sharp smell of resin filled the air. He was clinging to the back of a slender being with olive-green skin and black feathers for eyebrows. A selk. Pazel had met one only the week before, in the temple of Vasparhaven, the first and only such encounter in his life.

  The selk who carried him was a woman. She was strangely beautiful, though it was a severe kind of beauty, and quite unlike that of any human or dlomu. The other two were men. All three wore plain grey tunics. No shoes, no helms or armour. But on their belts they wore swords, long straight blades that glistened red in the dying sunlight, as though made not of steel but coloured glass.

  ‘Thasha-’

  The selk woman looked back over her shoulder. ‘The golden-haired one is alive and well, friend human,’ she said. ‘Your other friends escaped as well. Be still now; it is not much further.’

  The mist had disappeared. Pazel saw they had carried him right out of the canyon, up some narrow crevasse. He was stiff and cold, but immensely relieved. Everyone had survived, and who had come to their aid but the selk. The selk! Pazel had reason to think that they were both wise and good: certainly Kirishgan, the selk friend he had made in Vasparhaven, had treated him with kindness. Theirs was an ancient people, Kirishgan had claimed: nomads, wanderers, philosophers of a sort. And they had suffered terribly in Bali Adro, whose maddened warlords had blamed them for the decay of their enchanted Plazic weaponry, and tried to exterminate the race. They had come harrowingly close to success.

  Where had these selk come from? Were they the ‘hope’ of which Kirishgan had written, in his cryptic message? He had been strangely elusive on certain questions, saying that there were subjects he was forbidden to discuss. Still, Pazel found it hard to imagine that Kirishgan’s people could mean them anything but good.

  Pazel’s head began to clear. He remembered selk hands raising him from the river’s depths. He’d seen Thasha vanishing below, lost his head, tried to shout, and nearly swallowed the hrathmog’s bloody ear.

  He touched his jaw, found it tender and swollen. I tore off its ear with my teeth. Like an animal. And he wondered if the scent of lemons was in his sweat.

  What had happened next was a blur in his memory, though he recalled a fist thumping his back, and crawling from the river onto a warm, flat rock — and Ensyl appearing from somewhere, pulling his eyelid open with her hands, sighing with relief when he managed to focus.

  There came a sudden pop, and his hearing returned. He swallowed: his ears hurt, but the ringing noise was gone. And at the same moment Pazel’s Gift surged to life. The selk were conversing quietly, and their tongue had a soft, swift music like rain on leaves. Sabdel, he thought. Their native tongue. Pazel had never heard the language before, but his Gift pounced, and in a heartbeat it was his.

  ‘They really are human beings,’ said the one who carried him. ‘Surely that proves they came out of the River? What else could they be but castaways?’

  ‘With two dlomu for travelling companions?’ said the other. ‘And an ixchel woman, and a mink?’

  ‘All very strange,’ agreed the selk bearing Pazel. ‘Their wounds are recent, also, and not the work of hrathmogs. And this boy has a spell under his tongue.’

  ‘The girl has another sort of wound, Nolcindar. Could you feel it? A fracture, a broken soul.’

  ‘I did not touch her,’ said the first selk. ‘But the smallest — he is far along with the mind-plague. Poor boy! I wonder if he knows.’

  ‘I wonder if the others have it. And what about that bundle, that the tall one feared so much to lose? No, they are not simple castaways. Something about them troubles me.’

  Pazel coughed. The selk looked back over her shoulder. Switching to Imperial Common, she said, ‘How is it with you, friend human?’

  ‘I’m just fine,’ said Pazel. ‘I can walk.’

  The selk lowered him gently to his feet. ‘Walk this last stretch, then,’ she said, ‘but tell my brothers and sisters how Nolcindar carried you, or they will think me lazy.’

  She sounded youthful, but Pazel knew better than to trust impressions. Kirishgan had sounded youthful too — even wh
en remembering a time before the founding of Bali Adro itself. Pazel looked up and down the trail. ‘Thasha — the girl, did you see what happened to the girl?’

  ‘The golden-haired one is alive and well,’ said the selk who had carried him. ‘And far more precious to you than gold, to judge by how often you have called her name.’

  ‘And the others?’

  ‘They await you. Come, we are almost there.’

  As soon as he began to climb, Pazel felt the weakness in his leg. The pain that Ramachni’s spell had eased was returning, creeping outward from the wound. It had not been wise to blunder about on that foggy island, either. But soon the slope grew gentler, the trees taller and further apart. Voices reached him: the voices of his friends. Pazel almost broke into a run. There sat all his party, save Thasha and Ramachni, along with many selk. They were drinking from small silver cups, among the ruins of some ancient structure, now overgrown with trees. Big Skip saw Pazel first: ‘There he is, the boy who wouldn’t sink!’

  They all greeted him warmly — even Dastu gave him an uncertain smile. But Neeps stared anxiously down the trail. ‘Where is she, mate?’ he said. ‘How could you leave her behind?’

  Before Pazel could answer, a selk called out from deeper among the trees. ‘Patience, Mr Undrabust,’ he said. ‘She will be here, as I promised. She has only made a kind of. . detour.’

  The selk who had spoken came nearer. He was not the tallest of the group, but there was a firmness to his voice and a fluid ease to his movements that made one think of great strength. He looked at Pazel for a moment in silence, but with a lively warmth.

  ‘You are a fighter to be reckoned with,’ he said, ‘even weaponless and drowning. I have seen nine thousand years of bloodshed, alas. But never have I seen a human bite the ear from a hrathmog.’

  The others turned to stare at him. ‘You did. . what?’ said Neeps.

  Pazel nodded, feeling his jaw.

  ‘He has been cruelly tested,’ said Hercol. ‘All of us have been, on this journey.’

  ‘Few come this way of whom that could not be said,’ replied the selk. ‘But where has your weasel gone? Did it run away?’

  ‘It is a mink,’ said Hercol.

  Pazel looked at him, baffled. It? Then Cayer Vispek, standing near him, gave his arm a surreptitious squeeze. All at once he understood: Ramachni had not announced himself. He was pretending to be a mascot, a normal animal tagging along in their wake. Pazel was abruptly on his guard. Did the selk threaten them after all?

  ‘The creature is not quite tame,’ said Bolutu, ‘but it will not stray far from us.’

  The selk leader smiled. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘here is a companion of yours who did stray, though I doubt that will happen again.’

  He clapped his hands, and a dog raced out from among the selk. The travellers shouted with astonished joy: it was the same white hunting-hound that had journeyed with them from Masalym, one of three that had followed them into the Infernal Forest. Lunja fell on her knees and embraced the animal: Pazel had never seen the stoic warrior closer to tears. Bali Adrons and their dogs, he thought, but there was a lump in his own throat as well. He bent, and the dog licked his hand. The animal had followed him and Thasha to the riverside where they had first made love.

  ‘He swam out of the Forest, close to death,’ said the selk. ‘Tooth-fishes were gnawing at a wound in his side. But he is a sturdy animal with a great will to live.’

  ‘He was Commander Vadu’s favourite,’ said Lunja. ‘I never learned his name, but from now on I will call him Shilu, Survivor.’

  Bolutu turned and bowed deeply to the selk leader. ‘We are in your debt, alpurbehn,’ he said.

  Once more Pazel’s Gift went to work: alpurbehn was elder brother in Nemmocian, another graceful Southern tongue. Bolutu had used the word as an honorific, a formal endearment.

  The gesture was not lost on the selk. Their leader nodded cordially to Bolutu. ‘I am Thaulinin, of the line of Tul,’ he said. ‘I have led these walkers since the fall of the Mountain Kings. However cruel your trials, they have not robbed you of courtesy — nor of all good luck. We were making to ford the Ansyndra not far from the island where we found you. If we had chosen any other crossing we would never have seen you at all. We knew there were hrathmogs afoot, but we sought no fight with them.’

  ‘I still don’t understand how you rescued me,’ said Pazel.

  ‘We are strong swimmers,’ said Thaulinin, ‘almost the equal of dlomu, in fact. You were choking; we drew the water from your chest and pulled you to safety. Your companions we helped away before the hrathmogs sent their scouts to the island. And we destroyed your raft, fascinating vessel though it was. You could have ridden it no further in any case: the hrathmogs have a camp on the riverbanks, two miles downstream. Come and rest now, Pazel Pathkendle. Our wine is somewhat fairer than river water, as you will learn.’

  Something in the selk’s account of their rescue struck Pazel as incomplete. He could not quite put his finger on it: the dense fog, the extraordinary coincidence of their discovery. . Thaulinin, meanwhile, was leading them deeper into the glade. Pazel saw that the fallen stones marked the outline of a small keep or fortress. Most of the walls had toppled to knee-height, and moss grew over them. But soon they reached a spot where the hillside opened in an arch of fine workmanship, bricks of red stones alternating with others cut from the blue-grey rock of the canyon walls, and the keystone was engraved with the figure of a running fox. At the threshold a fire danced within a ring of stones, and two selk were roasting a hare upon a spit. Torches shown deeper within the ruin.

  ‘Where have you brought us, elder?’ asked Lunja.

  ‘These are the remains of Sirafstoran Torr, where once stood a palace belonging to Valridith, a dlomic monarch, whose lands were easternmost of the Mountain Kingdoms of Efaroc. The outer walls enclosed the whole of the glade, but the keep was entered here, through the side of the hill. For most of his life Valridith governed this land with kindness, and wisdom enough. But in his last years he grew suspicious, obsessed with the power of neighbouring kingdoms, indignant at the smallest complaints brought by his people. ‘These are the hairline cracks in my kingdom,’ he used to say, ‘and through them I feel a wind blowing, the cold wind of the grave.’ His only comforts were his son and daughter, who were both fair and gentle. The young prince he sent west to Bali Adro, with orders to seek a marriage — any marriage — within the Imperial family. The lad never returned from the capital, and what happened there is a mystery to this day.

  ‘Whatever the truth, Valridith was heartbroken, and swore on the charnel-stone of his family that he would protect his daughter better, and choose a husband for her himself. It was a rash oath. For years he kept it merely by forbidding her to travel beyond his inner kingdom. Mitraya was her name, and she was full of love for her father, and all the people of the Torr. The joy of his autumn years, she was — until the day he promised her to a petty tyrant, whose aggressions he hoped to placate. But Mitraya would not oblige him, for she loved another. The king had never been crossed by one of his own, and he imprisoned her in this fortress, swearing he would not release her until she consented to the match. She took her own life, after four years of captivity.’

  ‘I recall her face in the window there,’ said another selk, gesturing at a heap of crumbled stone. ‘We would bring her wild grapes in autumn. She could smell them when the breeze was right.’

  ‘After she died, her father went mad with remorse,’ said Thaulinin. ‘He threw his crown into the Ansyndra, and ordered this palace destroyed. When the work was done he paid the labourers handsomely and cut his own throat.’

  Dastu shrugged. ‘Old tales,’ he murmured.

  But Thaulinin heard him, and shook his head. ‘Not very old. This spring it will be three hundred years. I came here the morning after; the king’s blood still stained the earth. About where you are standing, in fact.’

  A slight commotion made Pazel turn. Thasha, escorted by two s
elk, was marching towards them, shivering. He ran to her; she threw her arms around his neck. She was soaked with river water, cold as a fish.

  From the corner of his eye, Pazel saw Neeps, standing near them, his arms half-raised. He had been on the point of embracing her himself. Their eyes met; Neeps reddened suddenly and turned away.

  Thaulinin called for a blanket. Neeps, his face still averted, spoke in anguish: ‘Where were you?’

  Thasha winced. Letting go of Pazel, she went to Neeps and pulled him close, and whispered something consoling in his ear. Pazel felt his heart beating wildly. She’s doing the right thing. She’s making him feel better. Don’t be jealous, you fool.

  The blanket came, and Neeps spread it over her shoulders. ‘I sank,’ said Thasha, ‘through the river, and down to. . the other river.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Thaulinin. ‘You fell into the undercurrent of Shadow — faster than your friend here, much faster. As if the River were calling you. But Nolcindar dived in after, and brought you back when the current ebbed. She is best of all of us at Shadow-swimming.’

  ‘I was falling,’ said Thasha. ‘The water beneath me disappeared. There was nothing I could catch hold of — just wind and darkness — and some vines, I think.’

  ‘She behaved strangely there, Thaulinin,’ said the woman, Nolcindar. ‘We took shelter in a moth-cave, out of the wind, while I waited for her strength to return. She recovered more quickly than I expected — indeed she jumped to her feet, and it was all I could do to prevent her leaping into the shaft. She was not afraid in the least. She looked at me and said, “Unhand me. I must visit the Orfuin Club.”’

  Thaulinin glanced sternly at Hercol. ‘And yet you tell us you did not come here from the River of Shadows.’

  ‘I spoke the truth,’ said Hercol.

  ‘Nine humans, in a land where humans are extinct. An ixchel woman, thousands of miles from the nearest clan. And a package that reeks of sorcery. You do not wish to name this thing, but you tell us that if we so much as cut away the cloth, we may die. That Macadra craves it and will try to steal it. And that you carried it to Bali Adro in an ancient ship, over the Nelluroq, only to lose it to a thief in the city of Masalym. A thief who brought it here.