The Night of the Swarm tcv-4

by Robert V. S. Redick

  ‘Felthrup, be still,’ said Talag, startling the rat with the plainness of his speech. ‘You will not persuade me, you know. We should never have paid attention to the squabbling of giants, their wars and sorceries and deceits. We use them, manipulate them. We are artists in that way. But we do not take sides in their intrigues. The ixchel know better, as a race, and have known for centuries. You should let me recount some of our legends, one day. They are nobler than anything you will find in giants’ books. And they warn us, rat: never collaborate, never lower your guard. If you do so, the giants will step on you. Every time.’

  ‘This is a new day, my lord. Ancient tales cannot show us the way forward. We must seek it ourselves.’

  ‘You want me to intervene, do you not? To force the ship about, oblige Rose to sail back and look for your allies on the Bali Adro mainland?’

  Lord Rin above! thought Felthrup. Is he saying that he could?

  Talag raised his eyes to the window. ‘I do not hate your Pazel Pathkendle, your Thasha Isiq,’ he said. ‘They saved twenty of my people from their own, on the day of slaughter in Masalym. But we are nearing Stath Balfyr at long last. I will not sacrifice the dream of our clan for their sake — even if there were hope of finding them alive. My sister became a partisan in their factional wars, and the results were catastrophic.’

  Felthrup squirmed. Impatience was making him short of breath. ‘The catastrophe was brewing already,’ he said. ‘The choices of your noble sister prevented it from becoming absolute.’

  ‘My escape from captivity prevented that.’

  Lies, always lies. And worst of all, lies told to persuade no one but the man himself. Turn and look at me! he felt like screaming. Stop talking to yourself! But all he managed to say was, ‘The Nilstone, the Nilstone is the danger.’

  ‘We are not a superstitious lot,’ said Talag, as if Felthrup had not spoken. ‘We do not worship idols, or gather in temples to praise beings none can see. And yet we are a people of faith. It is our faith that has kept us alive.’

  ‘Faith?’ cried the rat. ‘Gracious lord, what could possibly be more dangerous than faith? Did you not see enough of faith when you were held by Master Mugstur? Faith is for his kind, for the Shaggats and Sandor Otts of this world. Faith will kill you, if you let it.’

  ‘The word means something else to us.’

  ‘No, it does not,’ said Felthrup. ‘It means turning from what is plain to see. It means preferring stories to evidence — and this voyage has spread a banquet of evidence before you. I did not come to beg your aid for my friends’ sake, Talag! I came because we must help their cause or be killed. The Nilstone-’

  ‘Do not speak to me of the Nilstone!’ roared Talag, spinning on his heel. ‘I know its history as well as you! Giants use it to kill giants! And they will go on doing so, with or without it, as they have done through all the carrion-heap of their history! But there is a place in Alifros where they do not rule, and have not despoiled, and I am sworn to take my people there!’

  ‘Then proceed!’ squeaked Felthrup, hopping in place. ‘Carry on, advance! Be firm and exalted!’

  ‘Quit my presence, filth.’

  ‘But Stath Balfyr will be no refuge! There is no lasting refuge, here or anywhere. And we are filth, all of us, even you. You’re living filth!’

  ‘Saturyk!’

  ‘That is how they think of us — the powers who set Arunis and Macadra to work on this world! Can’t you see anything? Alifros is to be scrubbed! Sterilised like a ward before surgery! Aya!’

  He leaped, and something whizzed past his head. Saturyk had flown through the curtain, wielding a heavy chain. Felthrup began to run, hysterical, and the ixchel man sprinted behind him. They made a wide circle around the room. Talag stood impassive by his chair.

  ‘Great Talag!’ shrilled Felthrup. ‘Such a wise, brave lordship! The true leader of his clan!’

  More ixchel surged into the loft, shouting in their sibilant tongue. Felthrup leaped over one spearpoint and sprinted past another — why didn’t they just skewer him, a voice inside him wondered — and then the chair itself attacked him, or seemed to. He flipped over it, striking his head on the floor. He came to rest with his bad leg under him, agonisingly twisted.

  Talag himself had thrown the chair. His foot was on Felthrup’s neck, and the tip of his sword was pricking the tender flesh of the rat’s inner ear. He leaned low, elbow bent for a downward thrust.

  ‘I choose to yield,’ said Felthrup.

  ‘Choose!’ said Saturyk. ‘You mad little squealer! You’ve got no more choice than a fly on a frog’s tongue!’

  ‘Silence!’ cried Talag. He bent his head close to Felthrup, nearly whispering. ‘A leader, you call me? Witless animal. Look where I have led them. To ruin, to exile on this sand hill, or a hopeless return to a ship full of murderers. I pushed my son until he snapped and took on the role of a messiah. A role in which he killed my sister, and came close to killing everyone aboard, and fled at last into a living death himself. I drove him to those acts of despair, and then condemned him for his choices. A leader! You are preaching to a dead man, Master Felthrup. But this dead man will kill you all the same.’

  Saturyk and the others closed in, swords and spears lowered in a deadly ring. Felthrup squeezed his eyes shut. How had he failed to understand? Talag was the one in despair. The man was too wise to deny the truth for ever; now it had caught up to him with crushing weight. But in one thing at least, Talag was still gravely mistaken.

  ‘Your son has not given up the struggle,’ Felthrup said. ‘Nor did he go ashore in Masalym to die.’

  A new fury contorted Talag’s features. ‘You know something of Taliktrum? Tell me. But breathe a false word and I will puncture your skull.’

  ‘Will you let me return to the Chathrand?’

  ‘No bargaining. Speak.’

  ‘I do not bargain, I was merely curious,’ said Felthrup. ‘And anxious, I might add, in the spirit of full confession. Anxious that you not puncture my skull, Lord Talag, nor indeed my eardrum, which is more imminent, . but never mind, I digress. The fact is that your son has taken sides, Lord. Indeed he saved the life of Prince Olik in the Masalym shipyard, and that act has made all the difference. For it was Olik who then took the throne of Masalym, however briefly, and dispatched the expedition to slay Arunis and recover the Stone.’

  ‘You know it was Taliktrum?’

  ‘Unless there was another ixchel with a swallow-suit on the Masalym docks. Hercol was there; he witnessed it. Taliktrum swept down and slew the assassins before they could slit the prince’s throat.’

  Talag’s eyes filled with wonder. ‘My son. He saved the Bali Adro prince?’

  ‘Far more than that. He stopped Arunis that night; he stopped the triumph of the death-force Arunis serves. Not for the sake of humans or dlomu or even ixchel. He did it for Alifros, my lord.’

  Felthrup did not add that Sandor Ott had been present as well, nor that Taliktrum had vanished before the fight was through. Let him think the best of his son. For all I know it might even be true.

  ‘Your noble sister,’ he said carefully, ‘used to speak of idrolos, the courage to see. That is what will keep your people alive. Nothing else will do, I think.’

  Talag did not move for several seconds. Then he straightened, withdrawing the sword from Felthrup’s ear, the foot from his neck. Felthrup rolled onto his feet, still encircled by weaponry. Talag gestured to Saturyk.

  ‘Assist me.’

  Together the two men walked to the square shape against the far wall, and tugged the oilskin aside. Beneath it were two stacks of human-sized books. All were battered, and most had water-damage. With great care Talag and Saturyk removed one from the stack and carried it nearer the window. It was a thin, attractive leather volume. Talag opened it and began turning pages almost the length of his body. Finding the desired page at last, he stepped up gingerly onto the book, knelt, and read aloud:

  ‘It is just as well Ratty left us, after
tasting the blood of the keel. He did not want to, of course. We had to convince him he was doing it for us — that he might find a way to send a ship here, a rescue party. But he was doing it for us, anyway, by all the Gods. Someone has to remember all this. Someone has to heal. And why should it not be Felthrup, who loves reading more than any human I have ever known?’

  He looked across the room at Felthrup. ‘You can guess who wrote those words, can you not?’

  Felthrup nodded, weeping inside. Only one person had ever called him Ratty, and that was Fiffengurt. The quartermaster himself had written these lines. In the future.

  No, he thought furiously, in one future. Someone else’s. This end is not inevitable. It cannot be.

  ‘He was still alive when we first passed through the doorway and found the wreck,’ said Talag, ‘but he did not live long. He had been alone for three years already. The others had perished one by one.’

  ‘But what is he talking about?’ Felthrup whispered. ‘How, how did I leave? And the blood of the keel?’

  Talag shrugged. ‘A mystery, that. Where the wreck’s keel is split you can see the heartwood, and it is indeed a rich, dark red — but we have not ventured to taste it. But as for how you left, that is easy. You used the clock, of course. You crawled through it to safety in another world.’

  ‘It is here? Thasha’s magic clock is here?

  Talag nodded. ‘And today it is but an ordinary clock. We forced opened the hinged face, and saw only gears. Your escape seems to have exhausted its power at last.’ Talag closed the book. ‘You may earn the right to read any of these, Felthrup, with time and good behaviour.’

  ‘My lord, I do not know when I shall have such a luxury.’

  Saturyk smiled, but hid it quickly when his leader frowned. Talag glanced at Felthrup again.

  ‘You tried to warn us of the Shaggat, and later of the sorcerer. I doubted you then, but time has shown which of us was in the right.’

  Felthrup bowed his head.

  ‘All the same, you have tried to keep faith with too many. You have tried to pick and choose, allying yourself with these giants and not others; these ixchel rather than those. Such efforts were doomed from the start. You have ended up on no one’s side.’

  ‘No one’s mindlessly, Lord Talag. Of that fault I am happy to be accused.’

  ‘I cannot permit you to return to the Chathrand,’ said Talag. ‘You are incautious by nature, and might well reveal our secret doorway to the giants. If they should ever find it we will be trapped here, marooned. I’m afraid you must be our guest until the end.’

  Felthrup had foreseen this, and had readied half a dozen arguments. But the resolve in Talag’s voice made him suddenly quail. He was about to gush nonsense. He bit his own foot, holding it in. Babble not! Babble won’t do, darling Felthrup. You must reach him some other way.

  Talag, no doubt shocked by Felthrup’s silence, came forward and placed his hand on the rat’s bowed forehead. ‘ “Unhappy the man must ever be who confuseth love and loyalty,” ’ he said, clearly reciting from memory. ‘That is from one of our greatest poems.’

  ‘In whose translation?’

  ‘Mine,’ said Talag. ‘Come, rat; I have a last thing to show you.’

  Ordering his guards to follow, he led Felthrup down from the loft and out of the building. There he paused and spoke to the clan in the ixchel tongue. The crowd began to disperse, studying Felthrup as they went. Talag marched through them, leading Felthrup back among the trees.

  They started off in the direction of the wreck, but at a certain point Talag left the trail and began to climb a steep ridge. Felthrup climbed easily enough, but the ixchel struggled, for there was as much loose sand as soil underfoot, and the wind grew stronger at each step.

  As they neared the crest of the ridge, Talag glanced back over his shoulder. ‘The expedition was never heard from again,’ he said. ‘On that point Fiffengurt’s journals are quite clear. Pathkendle, Thasha Isiq and the others never rejoined the crew, and thus were saved the horror of the wreck.’

  ‘Why do you tell me this?’ asked Felthrup.

  Talag was silent. But a moment later Felthrup saw the beginnings of an answer. They had reached the edge of the trees, and before them lay the burial yard.

  It had been laid out so neatly: thirty or forty graves marked with little rock cairns, each with a square ballast brick at its foot. And there were not one but two walls against the wind: the failed wooden fence and a lower rock wall, still standing but half-buried in sand. The graves too were vanishing: some of the cairns barely poked above the drifts.

  With his heart in his mouth, Felthrup crept into the yard. He did not want to be here. These deaths were not his shipmates’. This Alifros was not his own. When he departed it would close behind him like an evil eye, and he would not remember it — not think of it — not let it live in memory.

  ‘That’s old Druffle, straight ahead,’ said Saturyk.

  DOLLYWILLIAMS DRUFFLE. Felthrup could just read the letters carved in the soft stone of the ballast brick. Felthrup made the sign of the Tree, then shuffled quickly away. The ixchel, he saw, had not entered the burial yard: Talag was directing them to take up position around the perimeter. Death rites mattered enormously to the ixchel. Talag must have assumed that Felthrup would wish to pay his respects without delay. It was an honour, he supposed, that Talag had brought him here in person.

  At long last he treats me as a woken soul.

  Felthrup moved among the cairns. He could read few of the inscriptions: three decades of exposure to the elements had blurred most of the letters beyond recognition. But some were clear enough. SWIFT DALE, a tarboy — and yes, that was his brother Saroo’s grave beside him. BANAR LEEF, the main-top man. JERVIK LANK, the tarboy who had bullied Pazel cruelly, but in the end proved brave enough to change. Felthrup was not surprised by the words that ran beneath Jervik’s name: A MAN TO TRUST.

  Then Saturyk caught his eye and beckoned. He was standing upon the stone wall, along the side of the yard facing the sea. Nervously, Felthrup leaped up upon the wall himself and began to approach. The ruined Chathrand sprawled below them, the single rope still stretched taut between the beach and the topdeck rail. But Saturyk was pointing to the grave at his feet.

  ‘I’ve swept it clean for you,’ he shouted over the wind.

  The cairn was tucked right into the corner of the yard. The brick was disappearing under sand again already: Saturyk’s efforts were being undone. Felthrup bent low and read:

  PAZEL UNDRABUST

  He looked at Saturyk, then back at the marker. The name was clearly carved. ‘What — who?’ he shouted, frightened and confused.

  ‘Marila’s child,’ said Saturyk. ‘Born at sea, died on this sand heap. It’s all in that journal, how she and Neeps chose names together, on their wedding night. Pazel, for a boy, and if it had been a girl-’

  ‘Don’t tell, don’t tell me please! No more!’ Felthrup cast himself down, giving way to his misery. Her child!

  Saturyk stood awkwardly above him. ‘Oh, buck up, now,’ he said. ‘That’s no way to honour the fallen — see here, I didn’t mean-’

  From across the burial yard, Talag shouted what could only have been a reprimand. Saturyk protested loudly, pointing at the grave, making sweeping motions with his hands. Felthrup could almost feel the little body, so close to him, floating face up beneath him in the sand. Pazel Undrabust. A miracle, snuffed out.

  Then Felthrup gasped. He was hearing it, small and imperious: the voice of the dead. Run, was all the child told him. And Felthrup obeyed.

  He was twenty feet down the dune-face before he heard Saturyk’s cry of rage. Then a hiss: the blurred shape of a spear bit the sand beside his paw. He ran as he had not done since the maiming of his paw, rolling when he fell, leaping when he recovered. Speed was everything, speed his one chance. He was faster than the little people on sand, on rope. But not on the deck, not ever. And two of the guards carried bows.

  The win
d brought snatches of their cries. He did not look back. Another spear flew past him, so close he had to swerve around it when it struck. Then he reached the broken anchor and began to scramble up the rope.

  The first gust of wind nearly threw him down. He flailed with claws and teeth, and just managed to scramble back atop the twisted cord. The ixchel were close behind him, the archers taking aim. Felthrup scrambled up the rope in a frenzy.

  A hand closed on his hind leg. Saturyk had leaped, six times his own height or more. Felthrup was pulled upside down. He whirled and bit, tasting ixchel blood, and Saturyk fell cursing to the sand.

  He climbed faster. Beneath him, sand gave way to breakers, seething around the Great Ship. A fall now would be lethal. But the wind that had nearly killed him was now saving his life: the archers’ shots were hopelessly astray.

  He was falling! They had cut the rope from below! Screaming, Felthrup plummeted towards the sea. For an instant he seemed to be racing above the surf, like a skimmer about to catch a fish. Then the black shape of the hull blocked out the sky. He struck: red agony. The waves boiled over him, and he cried out defiance of death.

  When the wave-surge passed he was against the hull, still gripping the rope, still in command of his limbs. He climbed. Nothing was broken, and even the pain was a distant thing. New shouts from ixchel: they had thought him dead for certain. Arrows fell around him, none too close.

  Saturyk was screaming at his archers, abusing them. Felthrup was forty feet above the water, then sixty, then over the rail.

  He looked back. The ixchel were milling at the surf’s edge, racing back when the foam advanced, trying for impossible shots. Only Talag remained on the hilltop, motionless on the rock wall, watching.

  ‘You see, Mr Saturyk, there are always choices,’ shouted Felthrup.

  ‘Palluskudge! Bastard!’ Saturyk howled. ‘You’re mucking dead!’

  ‘Not in this world,’ Felthrup shouted back. Then he turned and ran for home.