The Night of the Swarm tcv-4

by Robert V. S. Redick

  Of course that is in awful taste. One should not make a joke of murder, not on this ship at any rate. When I told the captain about the Burnscove Boy who had nearly drowned, I expected a detonation: something on the order of what had happened the day he assaulted Burnscove himself. To my surprise Rose’s reaction was quite the opposite. He listened in perfect stillness, then walked slowly to his desk, where he sat down and played with a pencil. Finally, almost sorrowfully, he told me to start naming members of the Plapp gang — just off the top of my head. I didn’t know them all, I told him.

  ‘Never mind,’ said Rose heavily. ‘Name all that you can.’

  I complied. The names rolled off my tongue, and he sat there with eyes closed, so still that I began to wonder if he was asleep. I must have named thirty or forty when his eyes suddenly snapped open. ‘Him,’ he said. ‘Bring him to me at once.’

  ‘Skipper, with my utmost respect-’

  ‘Bring him,’ said Rose quietly. Then he looked up at me, his face strained and sad. ‘Or send the Turachs for him, if you prefer.’

  Of course I went myself. The man I’d named was a tall, skinny, red-nosed Etherhorder who’d been with us from the start. He was also a personal favourite of Darius Plapp. He delivered the ganglord’s messages, brought food to his bedside and for aught I know tasted it for poison. I found him seated next to Plapp on the berth deck, grinning and whispering in his ear. He came along with a shrug, snickering at me behind my back.

  ‘Did you know, sir, there’s men call you Old Fool Fiffengurt, and Rat-Fancier Fiffengurt, and nastier things? Much as we try to keep ’em in line, of course.’

  I did not even glance back at him. This was an old game, insulting officers with a veneer of respect. The lad was playing it crudely. On another day I’d have put him in the stocks.

  ‘Personally,’ he said, ‘I don’t hold with makin’ sport of a man’s life back in Arqual — do you, sir? I mean, say a dry old geezer falls in love with a brewer’s lass and wants to give up the sailing life-’

  I stopped dead.

  ‘No one should laugh at ’im. Good luck to the geezer! Maybe he will keep her satisfied, keep her cute little eyes from roaming. There’s odder things in this world — not many, but some.’

  It went on like this all the way to the captain’s door. I thought the man’s nastiness would make what was to come a little easier, but it did not. When we arrived, Rose was on his knees, unfolding a dusty oilskin over the polished floor.

  ‘Come here,’ he said immediately. ‘Not you, Fiffengurt.’

  The man stepped uncertainly onto the tarp. ‘Shall I help you up, Captain?’ he said. There was no hint of a snicker any more.

  Rose raised his busy head and stared at the man. ‘You are close to Darius Plapp?’ he asked.

  ‘Mr Plapp’s been very good to me, sir, yes indeed! I try to do what’s expected of me — that is, always assumin’ it don’t get in the way of orders — of my duties, I mean, sir, my duties.’

  Rose climbed laboriously to his feet. ‘Do not be alarmed,’ he said. ‘I am going to feel your muscles.’

  ‘What for, sir?’ asked the Plapp, as Rose squeezed his arms experimentally.

  ‘To be certain I do not need a blade,’ said Rose. He walked back to his deck and picked up a coiled leather cord. Turning, he held it out, as though for the man’s inspection.

  The man shot me a beseeching glance. ‘What’s this all about, Captain?’

  ‘Order,’ said Rose, and struck him hard in the stomach. The man bent double, and Rose whipped the cord around his neck. It was over quickly. The steward and I wrapped the oilskin around the body and carried it below.

  Darius Plapp went berserk, and had to be restrained by his own thugs, lest he hurt himself. Kruno Burnscove too was shocked at Rose’s escalation. He issued a startling order from the brig: not one of his men was to gloat, or laugh, or be anything short of professional seamen, until further notice. Rose himself carried on as if nothing had changed.

  Druffle is correct: the gangs dare not touch him while their leaders are aboard. Besides, since the day we faced the Behemoth, there is a new air of mystery and fear about the captain. Fifty men saw him laid out on the topdeck, pronounced dead by Chadfallow, grey and motionless for a quarter-hour. And fifty men had seen him bolt to his feet and resume command. Even Sandor Ott has been put in his place, they are saying, because Nilus Rose simply cannot be killed.

  Monday, 25 Halar.

  Maybe not. But if he is immortal, Rose is alone in that distinction. The whole ship is rising; there is talk of a gang war. Kruno Burnscove has been stabbed to death in his cell.

  15

  The Editor Takes Certain Precautions

  I am sorry to have denied you the pleasure of my insights. There has been a spot of difficulty with the chancellor, and it became needful to barricade myself in the library, and to write without pause. I scarcely need to mention that doing so is harder with each passing day. My hands are changing shape, my thumb resists bending like a thumb. I have broken two quills, spoiled countless sheets of linen paper. I have experimented with other arrangements, tying the quill to an outstretched finger. It works, after a fashion: I scratch fitfully at the page, like the cat who begs at my kitchen door.

  I must send someone around to feed that animal, for I have not been home in a week. The day before my tactical relocation, the chancellor sent a messenger to my door. Reading from a scroll, the boy declared that I was to visit the head office ‘without hesitation’ (did he mean delay?) and to account for the ‘irregular conduct’ of which I had ‘made an unfortunate habit’.

  Naturally I laughed. But I could not coax so much as a smile from the flat-faced boy. ‘Irregular conduct cannot be habitual — surely you see that?’ The lad only fidgeted, trying not to stare at me. I tipped him. He fled for his life.

  That night I received a second message — this time from the Greysan Fulbreech Self-Improvement Society (of Delusional Imbeciles) — and tied to a brick that shattered a window. I slept through the assault (face down on my manuscript). The geniuses had chosen to attack my bathroom, and the brick landed squarely in the tub, and yesterday’s bathwater. Finding it the next morning, I dried the threatening note, and read what I could: PROFESSOR: IF YOU DO NOT ………WE WILL……WITH A MIGHTY…..OF TRUTH AND JUSTICE!

  Not much of a narrative, to be sure, but far better than the alternate endings they continued to send me for The Chathrand Voyage.

  I packed my notes, stuffed a bag with clothes, whistled up Jorl. The Young Scholars were waiting in the library tower, as on any morning, and we worked in peace for two days. Then I caught one of them — my favourite, as it happened — stuffing a copy of chapter sixteen into his underwear. An interrogation followed, and the sobbing Scholar at last confessed that the Fulbreech freaks were paying him handsomely for every page he smuggled out.

  I dismissed them all. The next day I sent out messengers of my own, and interviewed several copyists from the village. The one I have retained is a mendicant preacher, whose faith decrees that he wear nothing but a loincloth. He stinks, but then so do I.

  I have hired guards, too, and had no end of trouble with them. They are flikkermen, you understand. They took a week to find my residence, and then demanded payment in advance. We came to terms in the end, but they are disgruntled, and like to revisit the argument between themselves, with peevishness and poor diction, just outside my chamber. Nor were they happy to promise not to subject the library patrons to electrical shocks. They wish to see the long hair of the girl students standing up like quills on a porcupine.

  No matter. Their weird physiognomy had the desired effect: I am free of visitors at last. The terrified cook leaves my meals on the staircase. The flikkermen bring them to me, and empty my chamber pots. I think my food offends their nostrils more than my bodily wastes, and given the declining standards at this Academy I begin to concur.

  Since taking to the tower I have had no visits from the Fulbreech Society.
I can see them from the window, though: huddling, conspiring. For a day they pressed leaflets into the hands of students, professors, groundskeepers, but the confused indifference these evoked must have demoralised them; now they sit and sulk. But they are not harmless. A few come from wealth. The society’s president, Mr My-Name-is-Not-Important, is one such child: his mother gave the school a courtyard full of statuary. Great marble heroes, chests jutting, weapons raised, regal faces spangled with sparrow droppings. The wretch’s passion runs in the family.

  Did he truly wish to kill me, with that knife? I think not. If he wished for anything besides a release of fury, it was to punish me with a scratch. He and his fellow cuckoos need me to finish the tale — to their liking, of course. And they need my singular credentials to see that it is taken seriously. My name on their version of The Chathrand Voyage: that is how they think all this will end.

  Irritatingly enough, I need them too.

  The society, after all, detests one figure above myself — and I am not speaking of Passive Pathkendle. I mean the chancellor, the man who quipped that he would burn the Voyage if it contained any affront to ‘national pride’ (ask him what the phrase means; you will come away bewildered). He is a cowardly soul in almost every respect, but cowards with authority are more dangerous than crocodiles. Above all he fears embarrassment. Certainly a mad (not to say lycanthropic) professor emeritus who seizes a library tower and defends it with the humanoid equivalent of electric eels could prove embarrassing. Especially if said professor remained in said tower during a Donors’ Conference, such as the one that begins next week.

  What could be worse? Many things occur to the imagination. The professor leaping from the tower in broad daylight. Or setting it ablaze. Or a siege by the Academy Police, and the chancellor’s name tied evermore to visions of slaughtered flikkermen, their bloody hands still sparking, their frog tongues lolling on the stairs; and the weird old prof curled in death around his manuscript.

  Or worse yet: forbearance. The chancellor waits the madman out. The madman finishes his book and sees it published, and the incontrovertible verity of its claims is recognised by all thinking creatures. The donors, falling largely outside this category, rise up in savage denial. Talking rats! Dlomic atrocities! The towers of Bali Adro built by slaves! It will never do! Flag-fondling simpletons, they would prefer no history at all to one that complicates Our Glorious Past.

  You see the chancellor’s dilemma. I have laid a banquet of embarrassments before him, and he must choose his seat and dine.

  But I do not wish him to choose assault — not yet. I need eight days and nights. By the eve of the Donors’ Conference my book will be complete, and the allies to whom I wrote in desperation will have come in force — if they are coming at all. Until then I need my guards to protect me from the Fulbreech freaks, and the freaks and their rich mums to hold off the chancellor.

  And so today I have lied. I sent the mendicant with a message for the freaks under my window:

  Dear Sirs: Perhaps I have, indeed, been unfair in my treatment of Greysan Fulbreech. I am reading your proposed endings with an open mind, and find much to my liking. I will give them full and favourable consideration — provided, of course, that the chancellor does not put an UNTIMELY END to this MOST SACRED EFFORT to recount the HEROIC STORY OF OUR FOREFATHERS.

  Merely a precaution: I shall of course give their scribbles no consideration at all. How loathsome, this manoeuvre. And how fitting. The survivors of the voyage were saved as often by enemies as loved ones. We needed them, they needed us; we stained our hands scarlet together. The chancellor is quite right to fear for his school; when my book is published many donors will abandon us, and weeds will grow high about these halls. But I am right to fight him, to not let him falsify the past. On my desk at home, Sandor Ott’s skull grins in the shadows; I can almost hear his taunts: We cannot help it, we ambitious men. We make common cause with fiends.

  16

  Nine Matches

  6 Halar 942

  265th day from Etherhorde

  Neda sat cross-legged in the unfurnished room. Upon her lap a smooth board, and on the board a sheet of linen paper. In her hand the most exquisite pen she had ever touched, with a nib of pure gold and a body carved from the deep red root of a mountain cypress.

  It was a gift of the selk. They hoped she would keep it; they hoped a love for Alifros would imbue the words she wrote with it and that those words would touch many hearts.

  On the floor in front of her were two smooth stones. One weighed down the stack of blank sheets the selk had given her. The other lay atop the pages she had already filled with transcriptions from the Book of the Old Faith. Over the three days she had been writing, the second stack had grown to nearly five inches. The stack of empty pages shrank each day but the selk always brought more.

  Cayer Vispek had not yet seen the marvellous pen. Neda had found a simpler one in the common room and used that when he came near. If he saw the pen he would tell her to leave it behind.

  She wrung the stiffness from her hand and started again. Her arm raced across the sheet, the words spilling out in a shape that declared her mongrel heart: angular Mzithrini characters ever so slightly distorted by the rounded, flowing style of an Ormali schoolgirl.

  Then will you know thy calling: for the Dragon seeketh naught but the Dragon’s prey, and never dines on base creatures of the barnyard, in their own filth confined.

  Memory was a weapon, memory was a curse. As Neda wrote the phrase she could see the face of her first master, the high priest known as the Babqri Father, reciting it on the day of her induction. The Father had rarely smiled, but that day he had glowed. Neda was his discovery. He had plucked her from a bleak life of concubinage and made her an aspirant to the order of the sfvantskors, the first non-Mzithrini ever to receive such a singular honour. That day she would begin the training, renounce her former life, devote herself for ever to the Gods. She remembered the mischief in his eyes: the choice of her had already become a scandal. Being Neda, she could also recall his smells (green onions, sweat), his silk robe (a long thread had trailed down his back from the golden collar, as though he were being unravelled by imps), his ailments (a toothache, a wheeze when he rose from a chair, a fresh scratch on his left wrist given to him by his favourite alley cat, whom he called Shadow and the village boys called Smoky and the half-blind cook in the refectory called Dirty Thief).

  So will thy purpose seize you: in jaws of iron and enduring flame.

  Being Neda, memory-blessed, she could hold up that long-lost day for inspection as a jeweller might a ring. There was the colossal edifice of the shrine, its dark interior still cold though the city itself was steaming. There was the pitcher of sacramental milk (small chip in base of handle), the golden cups (two dented, but the dents had noble histories), the basin where the aspirants would wash their hands. There were the lonely candles (twenty-four green and burning two green and not burning sixteen white and burning five white and not burning one white fallen sideways abandoned dust-covered forgotten for ever by everyone but Neda, mongrel monster prodigy freak).

  The way of the sfvantskor is perfection. Thy soul will make a slave of the flesh, whereas in lesser men the flesh takes mastery of the soul.

  And there were the other youths come for training (Sparro Suridin Adel Ommet Ingri Jalantri Tujinor Kat’jil Perek Fynn Ushatai Mendhur Malabron), all but six of whom would fail the initial tests. All but six of whom would go home to devastated families, to start the long, loud complaint that a foreign girl had been given what they themselves were denied.

  The way of the sfvantskor is perfection.

  Weapon, curse. Neda had understood the connection between the two for a very long time. Memory (the weapon) gave her power over others, reminded her of their weaknesses, the word or notion or name that brought them to tears, to fury, to a readiness to do as she wished. Memory (the curse) flooded her with proof that she was stumbling on her chosen path.

  The yo
ung sfvantskor’s mind had to be nurtured by the elders, cleansed of distraction, pruned of idle curiosity, disciplined in the service of the Unseen. Above all, it had to be equipped with a vision of Alifros and its heavens, its hells, its mystic byways; a vision that told the sfvantskors where they stood and why they were suffered to live and breathe and consume the bounty of the world.

  It was a beautiful vision. The world was one family: rocks, trees, people, white monkeys, black crocodiles, birds, bacteria, dust. All one. The wind its breath, the waters its blood. The night simply the closing of one great, shared, polyfaceted eye. But Alifros was also a family adrift, a ragtag entity wandering a savage universe. The sfvantskors were its defenders, the guards who passed the night awake.

  And she, Neda, meant to abandon her post.

  A spasm went through her, making her ruin a word. You don’t just mean to, she thought, you’ve done it already. For belief did not end with a public renunciation, a moment when one’s brethren called one a heretic, and damned. Belief ended in solitude and silence, the same way it began.

  She had opened her eyes this morning and known it was over. The room was still dark; Ularamyth was quiet and still. A bird was singing outside the window, each phrase like an urgent but reasonable question, which hung unanswered in the silence until the bird could no longer stand it, and asked the question again. Finished, gone. She no longer believed. She lay there in stark terror between Lunja and Thasha, afraid to move, afraid to think. When the tears came she did not understand them. She thought: I love the Book, I love the Book more than ever. She loved her master and the Father who had trained her, and her brother sfvantskors who had fallen in battle. And she had no doubt that the Old Faith had been a gift to this world from the divine.