The Night of the Swarm

by Robert V. S. Redick

  “Where has the Swarm gone, Ramachni?” asked Hercól.

  “Away in search of death,” said the mage. “Like water flowing downhill, it will go where death is strongest—to some unhappy corner of Alifros beset by plague or famine—or war.”

  “War,” said Thasha. “It all fits, doesn’t it? Arunis did everything he could to start a war between Arqual and the Mzithrin. And we made it easy for him, both sides did, with all our greed and hate and holy nonsense.”

  She looked pointedly at the sfvantskors. Silence fell. The North, the humans’ battered homeland, was briefly, painfully present.

  “I think war is getting now,” said Neda.

  “There you go again,” said the marine.

  Pazel lay on his stomach on a wide, flat stone, and Ramachni jumped up beside him and licked his ankle. A cool painlessness flowed from the mage’s touch into his wounded leg; soon the whole limb felt heavy and remote. Then Bolutu came toward him with a knife, and they made him look away. Pazel could not feel the touch of the blade, but he heard a faint slicing sound as Bolutu cut out the dying flesh. Afraid he might be sick, he forced his thoughts elsewhere.

  “Where is Myett?”

  Bolutu frowned and glanced upward. “She has scaled the tower anew. Ensyl plans to go looking for her. Be still now, let me work.”

  He bandaged Pazel’s leg with scraps of cloth washed clean in the river, and Ramachni set a paw on the wound and spoke a few soft words. The delightful coolness grew stronger, but Ramachni warned him that the pain would return. “I would fear for your leg if it did not,” added Bolutu.

  “The bite will heal,” said Ramachni, “but the damage may be of more than one kind. The jaws of the flame-trolls are ghastly pits, and just what foulness lurked in the one that gnawed you I cannot tell. Of course you were not the only one bitten—Mandric and Lunja both need tending—but the fang that pierced your leg went especially deep. You must keep your eye on that leg for years.”

  “If I live to have such problems, I’ll be glad,” said Pazel.

  But his words touched a deeper fear, resting like a stone in the pit of his stomach. “Ramachni,” he said, very low, “Neeps is the one I’m worried about.”

  “He fears for his Marila, and their child,” said Bolutu.

  “It’s not just that, Bolutu,” said Pazel, glancing nervously at the rest of the party. “It’s the mind-plague.”

  Bolutu started. “Jathod, I smelled it! The sharp smell of his sweat, like lemon peel. I had forgotten what it was like.”

  “For Rin’s sake, don’t tell anyone,” said Pazel. “Thasha knows, but no one else does. Not even Neeps has guessed.”

  “I know of his condition,” said Ramachni. “We can discuss it further after you sleep.”

  “Can you cure him?”

  Ramachni sighed. “Pazel, your friend is succumbing to one of the most powerful spells ever cast in Alifros. It has already destroyed the minds of every human south of the Ruling Sea. The spell’s caster herself proved powerless to stop it. Before I try to do what my mistress could not, I must have help. You know where I hope to find that help, I think.”

  Pazel glanced at Thasha. He took a deep breath. “I know,” he said, “but you’ve made a mistake. There isn’t going to be any help from Erithusmé.”

  “We shall see,” said Ramachni gently.

  “I don’t think you understand,” said Pazel. “It didn’t work, she hasn’t come back. Thasha is still just Thasha.”

  “She was never just Thasha, my lad,” said Ramachni. “And now I must insist that you sleep.”

  The last word was like a finger snuffing a flame. Pazel barely had time to lay his head on the stone before sleep engulfed him, blissful and profound. In the stillness of the clearing he dreamed of a typhoon, and the Chathrand running north again, racing on madcap winds, chasing or giving chase. The whole crew was reunited, the dead and the living alike, and Captain Rose was on his quarterdeck, raging and gesturing, shouting orders, cursing ghosts. Pazel stood in the lashing rain, and Thasha was near him, her eyes bright as sparks, her pale skin luminous, as on the night when they had made love beneath the cedar tree. And somewhere in the darkness of the ship Pazel could feel the Nilstone, throbbing, pumping death through the vessel and the storm and the world like a malignant spirit, like a great black heart.

  Myett had climbed three hundred feet before she realized that she did not wish to die.

  She knew the difference between flirting with death and hungering for it, wanting it with her soul. She had known the latter condition, and once, very nearly, succumbed. This was different. The impulse to destroy herself weakened with every yard she ascended.

  She’d been in earnest that other time, however. Sealed in the Chathrand’s flooding hold, blind drunk, heartbroken. It was luck that had saved her: luck and the Masalym shipwrights. If the draining of the ship had been delayed another quarter hour they’d have found her body clogging the pumps.

  Three hundred feet brought her to the level of the bottommost leaf-layer, where the wind began. She held tight, feeling the still-pleasant burning in her muscles, the strength in arms, fingers, ankles no giant could ever attain. She was wedged in a crack that ran like inverse lightning up the tower wall. The strange birds wheeled around her, crying. Afraid she’d come for what was left of their brood.

  The alternative to death had been this expedition, this crossing of battle-lines. She had spent most of the voyage fighting Ensyl and Diadrelu and their giant friends. Myett had been as committed as any ixchel to the hatred of human beings, and heaven knew there were reasons enough. But loyalty to her lover had been the bedrock of that hate. She had cleaved to Taliktrum, Diadrelu’s nephew, before and after his rise to power. After he became a visionary, Myett had argued with the doubters, rabidly insistent that he was all he claimed. Too funny. All along the debate had been with herself.

  She could not pinpoint when the change had come. After the flame-trolls, surely, and before the catastrophe in the forest. Was it the night she dreamed her grandfather’s death, and woke sobbing, bewildered, unable to recall for nearly half a minute that she’d left him safe and sound on the Chathrand? Was it when the giants wept for their dead, and she had nowhere to be but right there beside them, witnessing grief that looked and sounded for all the world like ixchel grief? Or the night she saw Thasha and Pazel Pathkendle slip away to make love, and followed them, unseen of course, and vaguely disappointed to learn that this, too, was not a thing her people did better than giants.

  Four hundred feet, and the rim of the crater was in sight. A tearing wind broke around her, trying her grip. The crack had narrowed, too: Myett found fewer places to wedge her body, rest her weight. She could see the large, shaggy nests atop the pinnacle now, and one gray wing, spread wide to bask in the sun.

  Whenever it had happened, the change was real. She stood with Ensyl now—and heaven help her, the giants. The humans. She would have to remember to hate them, secretly, remind herself of what they were. Or else become one. That was Diadrelu’s choice, and Ensyl’s. Myett would never go that far, never risk becoming a mascot. But the quest was hers now, and she would give more than they did, more than they ever could. It had become a cause to live for, rather than a slower, grander way to die.

  She stopped. Her muscles twitching, her fingers raw. She was a hundred feet above the highest leaf-layer, seeing the wider world for the first time in days. She knew that the descent would take all her strength, if indeed she had not gone too far already. The wind tore at her, but she would not retreat without the view she’d come for. Aching, she leaned out from the wall.

  The ruins stood almost exactly at the forest’s center. To the south, dark hills pressed close to the crater’s rim. A shimmer of reflected sunlight marked the place where the mighty Angungra cut through the crater wall and swept away, into a deepening gorge. A mist hung over that gorge, and beyond it there were mountains, lower than the cold peaks they had passed through, but tight and forbidding a
ll the same. And endless, too: if they somehow escaped this forest they would have little choice but to brave those mountains—with no guide who had ever set foot there, no notion of what lay beyond.

  Or almost none.

  There is hope downriver, between the mountains and the sea. The strange message from Vasparhaven, the Spider Temple, came back to her with sudden irony. Hope. Maybe it was out there, somewhere, hidden in this great arbitrary maze of a world. But what of it? The notion seemed cruel, like showing a coin to a beggar, then tossing it away into a field.

  Carefully, she turned to face the north. The snowcapped range through which they had come loomed dark and massive. Astonishing to think that a footpath snaked through those peaks, and down again, to the city where they’d left their ship, their one real hope of any life save the life of castaways. To say nothing of kinfolk, clan-brothers and -sisters, her grandfather … and Taliktrum.

  He was back there in Masalym. The only ixchel in that vast city of dlömu. Her lover, exiled by his own choosing. And by the impossible, the suffocating neediness of their clan.

  I should be with you. I should have sought you out.

  Nonsense, of course. Taliktrum had spurned her, called her an entertainment. If Myett had abandoned both the ship and this expedition, if she somehow found him in that huge dark hive of a city, Taliktrum would only have called her a fool. And been right in doing so. Myett was done with foolishness: she too had made decisions, chosen sides. It was a strange fate, to be fighting alongside giants, sworn enemies, for an abstraction called the world. But Myett knew what she and Ensyl could give them, how ixchel skills might help them all survive, and that certainty of being needed was what one felt in a clan.

  It was not passion, not starlight in the blood as the poets had it, not the bliss she had felt when Taliktrum was at his best, when he managed to be loving and kind. But it was good, they were good; even Hercól had forgiven and embraced her. She looked down, mapping out her descent.

  Then her brow furrowed. What was blocking the sun?

  Instinct came too late. Myett’s hand flew to her knife, but the hawk was already on her, gray wings filling her vision, shrill cry rending the air. Talons longer than her arm bit into her flesh.

  She was crushed, barely able to breathe. But as the hawk wheeled away from the tower she managed to pass the knife from her half-pinned arm to her teeth. Her thoughts exploding. She would fall. She would die. She would work the arm free, stab the bird, master it, make it land. No quitting. No quitting. The talons moved. Her arm slid free.

  At once she buried the knife in the bird’s leg. Its reaction was swift and violent, a sharp jerking stall, and Myett was thrown, whirling, falling, falling to her death. The sun whirled, the earth flashed in circles around her, the tower wall surged by faster and faster, she was dead, she was surely dead, a life of lust and bitterness and rage—

  The hawk snatched her from the air. Myett felt its black beak tighten as it pulled out of the fall, straining, the tug of the earth so strong she thought her ears must be bleeding. Then they rose above the top leaf-layer and shot away to the south, and the hawk passed her back into his claw, slick now with the blood she had drawn. One eye, coral-red and brilliant, fixed upon her.

  “If you fight me,” said the hawk distinctly, “I will pinch that arm until it dies.”

  1. The notion is of ancient standing. In the oldest dlömic tales, the figure doomed to some pride-provoked catastrophe frequently begins his errors with a meal of eggs. —EDITOR

  2

  Flesh, Stone and Spirit

  The mighty are beggars, child. They rattle silver cups by the roadside, pleading for love.

  —Dlömic folk song

  11 Modobrin 941

  240th day from Etherhorde

  Sandor Ott paced the cabin in a circle. His movements as always were fluid, measured, utterly precise. He spoke no offhand words, made no careless sounds, revealed nothing but what he chose to in the cast of his old, scarred face. His hands hung loose; his knife was visible but sheathed. As he walked his eyes remained fixed on the circle’s center: the spot where Captain Nilus Rotheby Rose sat scowling, fidgeting, in a chair barely large enough to accommodate his bulk.

  The captain’s eyes were bloodshot; his red beard was a fright. It was his own day-cabin he sat in, under the assassin’s gaze. The chair was the one he usually gave to the least favored guest at his dinner-table.

  Rose crossed his burly arms. Sandor Ott continued circling. For some reason he had also brought his longbow—huge, stained, savage—and propped it near the stern galleries, along with several arrows. Target practice? Shooting gulls from the window? Rose scratched the back of his neck, trying to keep the old killer in sight.

  Maybe Ott would never speak. It was even possible that his thoughts were not with the captain at all, no matter how much he drilled with his eyes. Some people whittled sticks when they were concentrating. Sandor Ott tormented people, stripped their certainties away, needled them with doubts.

  There was a small table within the captain’s reach, and a flagon of wine atop it. Rose snatched it up and pulled the stopper. His grip weaker than a year ago: he had lost two fingers in a fight with Arunis. Rose had trod on one of them, heard the knuckle crack beneath his boot. Horrible the things that came back to him, the sensations one was powerless to forget.

  He raised the flagon, then paused and removed a small object from his mouth. It was a glass eyeball, beautifully rendered. Yellow and black, orpiment and ebony, arrow-slit iris of a jungle cat. A leopard, to be precise: the symbol of Bali Adro, this empire twice the size of Ott’s beloved Arqual, if the dlömic freaks told the truth. They’d handed Rose the taxidermied animal (sunbleached, moth-gnawed, deeply symbolic in some way he cared nothing about) just hours before the ship’s departure from Masalym. A gesture of goodwill to let a human captain hold the carcass, during those last hours in port. No matter the captain’s own concerns. No matter that he loathed all things feline, beginning with that vile Sniraga, purring even now beneath his bed.

  He drank; Ott circled. In Rose’s closet, Joss Odarth was snickering about modern naval uniforms.2

  Monster. Fool. You have blinded the Leopard of Masalym. So the freaks had shouted, and of course it was true. The first eye had come loose when he’d handled the carcass a bit too roughly, clubbed the topdeck with it in fact; the second he’d pried out with a spoon. Thinking all the while of the Tournament Grounds, where his crew had been imprisoned, and from whence twenty-three men had escaped one panicky night into that great warren of a city, and never returned.

  Damn your soul for all eternity, Ott! Whatever you mean to do, get on with it!

  Rose squeezed the eye in his sweaty fist. He had tossed the leopard ashore when the mooring-lines were freed, just as tradition demanded. And they’d caught it, those dlömic mariners. They’d even cheered a little: the tail had not brushed the ground, and that meant splendid luck. Then they’d noticed the missing eyes and stared in horror at the departing ship. Rose had grinned and popped the eye into his mouth. He had traditions of his own.

  He would keep it; there was power in a little theft. One day it would gather dust on his mantel, declaring with its stillness that this was a mantel, in a house without ladderways or a brine reek from the basement, a house that never rolled or pitched or pinwheeled; Gods, how he hated the sea.

  Nonsense, nonsense. A frog could not hate the mud that made him; a bird could not hate the medium of the air. He was fatigued; he needed protein; where in the Nine Pits was Teggatz with his tea? He put the eye back in his mouth. Better to keep it there, clicking against his molars, studying his tongue, watching his words before they left his—

  “Riding pants!” said Sandor Ott.

  Rose inhaled the eye. His face purpled, his vision dimmed. The old killer sighed and bent him double; then came a stunning blow between his shoulders. The eye shot from his mouth, and the hated cat, Sniraga, chased and batted it across the floor.

  “N
ow sit up.”

  Rose did not sit up. He was thinking of the augrongs, Refeg and Rer. It was just possible that he could oblige the huge anchor-lifters to kill Sandor Ott, battering through a wall of Turachs, lifting the spymaster, breaking him over a scaly knee. But what if the Turachs killed the augrongs instead?

  “Kindly look at me when I am talking,” said Ott. The captain stared hard at the floor. Vital to resist, vital to deny: if he caved in on small matters the larger would follow.

  “Boots,” Ott snarled. “Buckskin gloves. A spare belt buckle, a fifth of rum. Powdered sulphur in your socks. A little whetstone for your axe. But the pants, Captain: they tell the whole tale. They’d been altered that same afternoon: bits of leather trim were still in Oggosk’s sewing basket. The hag stitched them especially for you, with thick pads in the seat, lest your treacherous arse develop saddle sores. You truly meant to go through with it. To abandon your vessel, your crew. To run off with Hercól and Pathkendle and Thasha Isiq.”

  “Only to the city gate,” said Rose. “Only until I was sure we’d seen the last of them.”

  “And for this you kept the witch up all night sewing pants?”

  Rose sat up heavily. “They’re not idiots,” he said. “They had to believe I meant to join their daft crusade.”

  Sandor Ott stopped pacing, directly in front of Rose. He put his hand in his pocket and withdrew a small lead pillbox. He held it close to the captain’s face.

  “These?”

  “Sulphites,” said the captain, “for my gout.”

  Ott extracted a pill, crunched it in his mouth. He turned and spat on the polished floor.

  “Waspwort,” he said, “for altitude sickness.” The spymaster’s gaze was very cold. “You were going with them over the mountains. It was no bluff at all.”

  Rose dropped his eyes. “It was no bluff,” he said.

  “I am empowered by His Supremacy to punish you with death,” said Ott. “You were given command of the most crucial mission in the history of Arqual, and you tried to shrug it off and flee. That is criminal dereliction of duty. Your life is justly forfeit.”