The Night of the Swarm tcv-4

by Robert V. S. Redick

  Some hours later a different sort of cry — Niriviel’s — woke Pazel for the second time that night. He tried to rouse Thasha, but she only groaned, so he left her sleeping and ran barefoot to the topdeck, pausing only to grab his coat. Hercol and Ramachni were there already, along with most of the dog watch. They were clustered around the ship’s bell, and atop the latter stood Niriviel, exhausted, his cream-yellow chest heaving. When he could speak he confirmed the worst.

  ‘I was far from both vessels, but I saw the Death’s Head giving chase, and the Promise leading her away to the southwest. The Promise was faster, and drawing away. Then a shot from Macadra’s vessel brought down her mainsail, and the Death’s Head closed very fast. When she was within a half-mile, she fired again. But it was not a cannon she fired, this time. It was a ball of red fire, spit out from some foul weapon on her quarterdeck. It struck the Promise square on her hull.’

  Pazel felt as though he himself had been struck, very hard in the stomach. This, of course, was what Kirishgan had felt. Lunja. Prince Olik. Nolcindar. They had led Macadra astray, given Chathrand time to flee. And for their courage they’d been killed.

  ‘Macadra carries Plazic weapons, then,’ said Hercol.

  ‘Like the Behemoth’s,’ said Pazel, ‘but why in the Pits didn’t she use them before?’

  ‘Perhaps because she feared to sink the Nilstone to the seabed,’ said Ramachni, ‘and this time, drawing near enough to sense its absence on the Promise, she did not hesitate to strike a lethal blow.’

  ‘Do not think of aiding her,’ said Niriviel. ‘She is too far away, and the Death’s Head would catch you first. Where is my master? Wake him! Macadra is still racing towards us.’

  Pazel cast an involuntary glance over his shoulder. It was a good question: where was Sandor Ott? Why hadn’t he shown his face even once since their return to the Chathrand?

  ‘There is something else,’ said Niriviel. ‘The Red Storm is weaker ahead: with each mile it shone less brightly. I saw no gap, but I did not fly so far as I hoped. When the Death’s Head turned in your direction, so did I.’

  ‘And the Swarm?’

  ‘That horror I did not see. I never wish to see it again.’

  ‘Pazel,’ said Hercol, ‘go and wake the captain. And you, brother Niriviel-’

  ‘Do not call me that.’

  ‘Your pardon. Whatever else you wish to be called, I hope strong and valiant are permissible. Come, I will tell you of your master while you rest.’

  Captain Fiffengurt had ordered a thorough cleaning and straightening of Rose’s cabin, and conducted business there, but he still slept in his old quarters. Who could blame him? The stink of blood might be gone, but the memory of that carnage would take years to fade, if it ever did.

  He woke like a startled cat at Pazel’s knock, and dressed while Pazel related all that they had learned. ‘Tree of Heaven, the Promise burned — and for our sake! And here we are running away from her. But we cannot help her, not from this distance. She’ll have beaten that fire or succumbed to it long before we could arrive.’

  Then Pazel asked him about the spymaster. ‘Niriviel keeps asking for him. Wherever he is, can’t someone take the bird there, even for a short visit?’

  Fiffengurt stopped buttoning his uniform. ‘No,’ he said, ‘the bird blary well cannot pay Ott a visit. Hasn’t anyone told you?’

  ‘Told me what?’

  Fiffengurt leaned close to Pazel and lowered his voice. ‘That monster’s locked away.’

  ‘In the brig?’ said Pazel. ‘You locked Sandor Ott in the brig?’

  ‘Hush!’ whispered Fiffengurt. ‘No, not the regular brig. We couldn’t do that; Ott has too much support among the Turachs, and a fight between soldiers and sailors would mean the end of this ship. No, Ott locked himself up. Do you mean Ratty hasn’t told you about his great adventure? About what he found behind the Green Door?’

  ‘Yes, yes, but I thought he was raving. He said there was a demon on the other side.’

  ‘Not any more there ain’t. Someone let it escape — probably Ott himself, though he swears otherwise. I say he’s lying. Why else did he run straight there after he killed the captain?’

  Pazel had to steady himself on the door frame. ‘Sandor Ott killed Rose?’

  ‘’Course he did. You don’t think that woman murdered our huge captain, and his steward, and very nearly Ott himself, all with her bare hands? And why was Ott there at all, before sunrise? And there was no blood on the steward — just a broken neck. A very precisely broken neck. No, Sandor Ott went to Rose’s cabin with murder in mind, and found more than he bargained for in our skipper. There’s one last proof, too: what else d’ye suppose is in the cell with the spymaster? Captain Rose’s foot locker, that’s what. Ott says he just found it there, and stepped into the cell to examine it, and the cell door slammed behind him. I’ve no doubt that last bit’s true. But there’s the Green Door too. You know it was wedged open with a metal plate.’

  ‘Was?’

  ‘I’m comin’ to that. As it happened, Mr Druffle sauntered by, and saw that the chains had been loosed around the Green Door. He poked his head inside and saw Ott, fouled with dry blood and trapped in a cage with no lock. And the best bit of luck is that Druffle came to me straight away. I swore him to secrecy, and we’d all best hope he keeps his word. Then I paid Ott a courtesy call.

  ‘He took one look at my face and knew I wasn’t there to free him. He spat out all sorts of threats, but he was powerless, and I think the fact shocked him deeply. He tried to appeal to my love of Arqual. I told him no one could have done more to harm my love of Arqual than he. I’d brought a sack full of food and water and some medical supplies, and I tossed them all in through the bars of the cell. Then I just walked out. Back in the passage, I pried loose the metal plate with a crowbar and shut the Green Door. It vanished at once. Sandor Ott’s in a cage he can’t open, in a brig no one can find.’

  Pazel shuddered. He was glad, relieved — but behind his loathing he felt a pity for the horrible old man. Pazel alone knew the bleak, savage story of Ott’s life: the eguar on Bramian had shown it to him. Compared to Ott’s, Pazel’s own childhood had been a romp through fields of clover. Still it angered him, that pity. He wondered if the lack of it was what allowed beasts like Ott to rule the world.

  ‘I won’t breathe a word, Captain Fiffengurt,’ he said.

  Fiffengurt put a hand on Pazel’s shoulder. ‘You don’t have to say “Captain” when we’re alone, lad. Not to me.’ Pazel grinned at him. ‘Oppo, sir,’ he said.

  It was the hour before dawn when he returned to the stateroom. The chamber was still; Jorl and Suzyt rose to greet him without barking; Felthrup twitched in his sleep upon the bearskin rug. Neeps, to his surprise, lay wrapped in a blanket in the corner, alone. Pazel winced. From the moment he saw Neeps and Lunja together on the Nine Peaks Road he had known pain lay ahead for both of them, and Marila. It will fade, he thought. His heart’s full of her now, but she’s gone and not coming back. It will fade, and Marila will still be there.

  He crossed to the master bedroom and slipped inside. The air was close, stuffy. They had removed the bed’s broken legs and nailed the frame directly to the floor. He smiled. Thasha had kicked away the blanket. She wore her father’s shirt like a nightgown; there must have been twenty of them in the wardrobe. Pazel sat on the edge of the bed and touched her hand.

  ‘Thasha? Oh Pitfire — Thasha!’

  She was burning with fever. The shirt was soaked through, the sheet beneath her damp.

  ‘Where were you?’ she said, waking. But her voice was strained, and when he touched her face he found her teeth were chattering.

  ‘Why didn’t you answer me, Pazel?’

  ‘Answer you? When?’

  ‘I saw you, but you wouldn’t speak. I heard Marila crying, but that was — I don’t know when. And the birds. Thousands and thousands, all flying east.’

  He was terrified. He made her sit up. Her skin like
something fresh from an oven. He groped for her water flask and wrenched it open.

  ‘Drink!’

  She stared at him in the moonlight. ‘Are you really here?’

  She was looking right at him, but she wasn’t sure. He stood and opened the door and shouted for Neeps and Marila. When he looked at her again she had dropped on her side.

  ‘If that’s you, Pazel, give me a blanket. I’m freezing to death.’

  She had saved them; she was leaving them. She loathed this world that had made her part of its destiny. Idiotic choice. Look what it’s earned you. Now I’m dying and taking your saviour Erithusme along for the ride.

  The pain grew. A cold pain from deep in her gut, moving outward. As a child Thasha had once been struck by a galloping illness: sweats and vomiting that felled her in an hour and made her imagine death. What she felt now was quite different. It was more like blane, though the ixchel’s poison was merciful compared to this. Blane had hurt for a heartbeat or two. This pain went on and on.

  Pazel was kissing her cheeks, asking questions: yes, he was really here. She tried to sit up a second time, at his urging. She drank a little water but it scalded her tongue. Then a stabbing light: Neeps and Marila in the doorway, staring, one of them bearing a lamp. Pazel shouted and waved his hands.

  ‘Get Ramachni! Get Hercol!’

  Neeps sprinted away. Felthrup was on the bed, flying in circles, sniffing. ‘There is no infection about her. No bile, no blood. What is it, Thasha? Who did this, my dearest darling girl?’

  ‘I can’t feel you,’ she said. ‘Felthrup, why can’t I feel you with my hands?’

  Marila brought a moist cloth and Pazel drew it over her face. If only he would drop it, caress her with his hands alone. He was talking to the others: ‘. . just fine when I went topside. . weaker by the minute. . doesn’t know where she is.’

  Thasha screamed. Some organ inside her had turned to glass, then shattered, exploded. Or else it was fire, or acid, or teeth.

  ‘She’s too cold!’

  ‘Her shirt’s blary dripping, mate.’

  ‘Get some dry clothes. Get a towel-’

  Time blurred. People spoke and then disappeared. Hercol and Bolutu were on either side of her; Bolutu’s webbed fingers probed her stomach, her abdomen.

  ‘There is no hard mass, and no swelling. Thasha, did you eat something strange?’

  ‘Not me,’ she said. ‘It was still breathing. I couldn’t just eat it alive.’

  ‘Delirious,’ said Bolutu.

  She could have told them that.

  They were fighting panic. Thasha watched them tearing through books, fumbling pills, arguing, turning away when their eyes grew moist. The cold advanced into her chest. She saw Ramachni by her shoulder, felt his paw touch her cheek. Dimly, she was aware that he was shocked.

  At a distance, in the shadows, an ixchel woman stood watching her. ‘Diadrelu?’ she said.

  But no, Dri was dead. The woman had to be Ensyl, or Myett.

  Pazel was looking at Ramachni with a rage she’d never known was in him. ‘I didn’t hear you say that. You didn’t just say that. Erithusme’s own Gods-damned spell?’

  A blackness descended, and when it lifted there was daylight through the porthole, but the cold was even worse. Her friends were fighting. Pazel was kneeling by the bed. Thasha tried to reach for him but could barely lift her hand.

  ‘Then she is our enemy, and has betrayed us from the start,’ said Hercol.

  ‘No,’ said Ramachni.

  ‘Yes,’ said Pazel. ‘Credek, Ramachni, if the wine’s to blame, and she poisoned it-’

  ‘Then it needed to be poisoned.’

  ‘How do you mucking know?’ Neeps had joined the shouting match; that was bad. ‘You haven’t seen Erithusme in what, seventeen years! Pazel talked with her five weeks ago! People change.’

  ‘She did not change the wine of Agaroth from her hiding place in Thasha’s mind,’ said Ramachni. ‘That was done long ago, and for a good purpose, even if we cannot now guess what it was.’

  Pazel was seething. ‘Erithusme told me to give Thasha the wine.’

  ‘As a last resort. And she warned you that the consequences would be dire.’

  ‘She hinted. Why did she hint? Why couldn’t she just say, “Give her the wine if the world’s ending. Marvel at my cleverness. Let Thasha save you one last time, and then watch her-” ’

  ‘Pazel, be quiet!’ Marila shouted.

  Tears, and more darkness. This time it did not lift when Thasha opened her eyes. Her legs were useless, two frozen logs. She swung her eyes left and right. The porthole still glowed dimly. The opposite wall, behind Hercol and Mr Fiffengurt, was simply gone. Black shapes rose in the distance: barren trees. Above them, the birds, that endless flock racing east. Her friends’ voices faded. Neeps had pulled Pazel lower, wrapped his arms about his head. They were waiting, weren’t they? They had tried everything they knew.

  ‘Keep fighting, Thasha,’ Myett whispered in her ear. ‘Don’t go, don’t let it take you. I almost did. I was wrong.’

  Now the bed lay in a forest. A terrible place: the forest she’d seen in blane-sleep. The trees with eyes, oily and cruel. The steam and whispers from holes in the earth, the cold that hurt her lungs. She could see her own breath, but not that of her friends. They were becoming shadows, and she was leaving them, leaving with her work undone.

  ‘The wine,’ said Myett. ‘Do you hear me, Thasha? The wine.’

  Thasha wished she would be quiet. She knew it was the wine. But Myett was still there beside her pillow. Dimly, Thasha felt the touch of her hand.

  ‘Look at me.’

  She looked. The ixchel woman beside her was not Myett but Diadrelu, their murdered friend. She was clearer than the others. Her face brightened when Thasha turned.

  ‘Mother Sky, I thought you’d never hear me! Thasha, the wine is the poison and the cure. You must drink it again, immediately. Where is it, girl? Where is the wine of Agaroth?’

  ‘Too late,’ whispered Thasha.

  A voice laughed, high with delight. There he was, Arunis. Crouched on the limb of a tree, sharply visible like Diadrelu, and leering.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘far too late. Never mind the crawly, little whore: your battle is done. Agaroth surrounds you, and Death’s border is but a short walk from where you lie. But we must settle our accounts first.’

  He sat back on the limb. Grinning, he opened his robe at the collar and showed Thasha his neck. A thin diagonal gash ran all the way across it. No, all the way through it. The gash was the one she herself had cut, with Ildraquin, when she beheaded him by the ruined tower.

  ‘I scarred you with a necklace, once,’ said Arunis. ‘You returned the favour with a sword. But it is my turn again, and three is the charm.’

  Thasha tried to move, but only managed to roll her face skyward. They were not birds, those shapes overhead. They were the souls of the fallen, racing above this Border-Kingdom and into death’s own country. As every soul flew in time. As she would, at any moment: a little death among the millions, a leaf in a hurricane, a speck.

  ‘No!’

  Diadrelu slapped her with the full force of her arm. ‘Thasha Isiq! Warrior! Raise yourself, raise yourself and call to your friends before they vanish! The wine, girl, the wine!’

  Nothing she had ever attempted was half so difficult. Her lips were all but dead, her voice was a fingernail rasping on a door. No one turned; they were weeping. She tried again. They didn’t hear a thing.

  But Arunis did, and the fact that she could manage even this much scared him, evidently. He leaped down from the tree and advanced — and Diadrelu whirled like a tiger to face him, drawing her ixchel sword.

  ‘Now we come to it! Can you hurl death-spells in Death’s antechamber, mage? Is your soul stronger than mine? Take her from me, then! Come, come and take her!’

  With that Diadrelu leaped from the bed, and when her feet touched the forest floor she was suddenly the size of Arunis
, raging and deadly. Thasha gasped — and in that other world, the shadow that was Ramachni heard her.

  ‘Silence, everyone!’ he roared. ‘Thasha, did you speak?’

  Arunis began to circle the bed, hunched low, a shadow among the trees. Diadrelu matched him step for step, keeping herself between Thasha and the mage. She taunted him, whirling her sword.

  ‘You could not defeat them in life. You will never do so in death. You will not touch this girl.’

  Thasha forced the last of her energy into her voice. She found it, wheezed a single, barely intelligible word. Again and again.

  ‘Wine!’ cried the shadow-Felthrup. ‘She is asking for the wine! Run, run and fetch it!’

  A figure turned and vanished into the dark.

  Suddenly Arunis dropped to his knees and plunged his arm into one of the steaming holes. A voice from underground gave a cry. Arunis jerked his arm free. In his hand was a war-axe, double-bladed and cruel, but a skeleton-arm came with it. The arm was moving, fighting him for the weapon. Arunis tore the arm away and flung it into the trees.

  Then he charged, and the battle joined. It seemed that Diadrelu was right: Arunis could not attack with spellcraft.Yet he was a terrible opponent, fast and vicious and strong. He swung the axe in two-handed arcs at shoulder height, or flashing down from above. Thasha was appalled by his skill. But Diadrelu was an ixchel battle-dancer: a fighter who would have shamed Turach or sfvantskor or Tholjassan war-master, if they had ever faced such a foe of human size. Whirling, spinning, her blade like a solid ring about her, she moved at twice the mage’s speed. The trouble was that her spectacular movements were better at evading an enemy than holding ground against him. From childhood, ixchel learned to weave and dodge and slip through human fingers. They did not hold ground. Diadrelu had to fight her very instincts to keep Arunis from reaching Thasha’s bed.

  Except that there was no bed any longer. Thasha lay on bare earth, head propped on a stone, the roots of the evil trees wriggling beneath her. Alifros was nearly gone: nothing of it was visible save the porthole, a slight discolouration of the darkness. Her friends’ shadows lacked definite shape; their voices had dwindled to meaningless sounds.