The Night of the Swarm

by Robert V. S. Redick

  Isiq did not breathe. The commodore was his own age exactly, but look at him: old, severe, impossibly eminent and gray. He flicked a hand at Tull. Wordlessly, the smuggler fled the room, and Darabik closed the door behind him. His turquoise eyes drilled into Isiq, and there was no doubt whatsoever. He was not deceived by Gregory’s flimflam, nor the false leg, nor the room’s withering stench. He knew who lay before him. His hand rested on his sword.

  They had not always been friends. As boys in Etherhorde they had built rival forts in Gallows Park, and the raids with slingshots and clods of mud had been fierce, until they’d united against a larger gang from Hurlix Street. At the academy, when Darabik learned that Isiq was courting his sister, he’d taken his prospective brother-in-law out for a brandy. “Take your time with the decision,” he’d said, “but if you wound her honor I’ll knock your teeth out the back of your skull.”

  Darabik crossed and uncrossed his arms. His eyes grew thoughtful; he rubbed his face. “Oh,” he said, rather loudly. “Oh, Vancz, dear fellow. So be it, if that is truly what you want.”

  Then, as Isiq lay dumbfounded, the commodore knelt beside the bed. His face had changed; a new light gleamed in the bright blue eyes. Leaning very close to Isiq’s ear, he whispered, “Admiral Isiq. You’re a blary magician. You’re alive.”

  “Purcy.”

  “Don’t move, sir. Don’t speak above a whisper. I dare not reveal your presence, not even to my closest aides. The Turachs would kill us in a heartbeat. I don’t know who’ll stand with us, yet. Not many. Not enough.”

  “What do you mean, stand with us?”

  “Admiral—”

  “Call me Eberzam, for Rin’s sake.”

  Darabik nodded slowly. Eminence notwithstanding, he was nervous in the extreme.

  “I saw her, Eberzam. With my own eyes. Gregory’s her transport, and her go-between. I gather he has been for a decade.”

  Isiq felt a tingling in his limbs. “Maisa,” he said. “But Purcy, where is she, and what does she hope for? Has she an army, has she ships?”

  “Of course not! She’s in deep hiding, with her loyalists. And they are not many. Magad’s forces could snuff her like a match. The fact is, this is suicide. That she’s survived all these years is a blary miracle, but it can’t go further. We’re simply too few.”

  Isiq studied him. Then he raised himself to one elbow, pulled the bandages away from his face, staring hard into the commodore’s eyes.

  “It will go further,” he said. “You and I will see to that, when Her Majesty calls us to the task. It will go as far as Etherhorde, and the Chamber of Ametrine, and that chair that belongs to our Empress alone.”

  Darabik met his gaze. A fierce delight shone in them suddenly. “You’re a mad bastard, Eberzam.”

  “You have no idea.”

  Darabik glanced quickly at the skylight. “I can’t stay; it looks odd enough that I came at all.” He looked down sharply at Isiq. “You’ve lost three fine women, Eberzam. I’m very sorry.”

  Isiq shook his head. “Just one, just my dear wife. Thasha lives, Purcy. And Syrarys was a traitor. It was Sandor Ott who sent her to my household. She was poisoning me for years.” Isiq hesitated. “With deathsmoke.”

  “Lord Rin above!”

  “I have beaten the drug.” Isiq saw doubt in the commodore’s face, and added quickly, “How did Gregory convince your men to let me through? Who did he claim I was?”

  Darabik’s mouth twisted slightly. “Who you should have been, Isiq. My brother-in-law. Only the way Gregory’s playing it, you’re mortally wounded, and desperate to get home to Tholjassa to see my sister one last time.”

  “Which of them went to Tholjassa, by damn?”

  “No one did. But I stopped telling the men about my sisters years ago. They only mixed the stories up.”

  It was a grim effort at levity. Isiq smiled anyway, wondering why Darabik had never made admiral. The man had iron strength; his men both feared and loved him, and that was the navy ideal. He’d won more fights than the Lord Admiral, almost as many as Isiq himself.

  “Purcy, you’re losing ships out there. What’s the reason for this engagement?”

  “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 Thól. 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 noncombatants, 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 thirty-two-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 favorite all the same.”

  “In this little crew, you mean?”

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

  7

  On Sirafstöran Tor

  14 Modobrin 941

  243rd day from Etherhorde

  When he woke, Pazel could hear only a 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 bein
g 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 dlömu. The other two were men. All three wore plain gray tunics. No shoes, no helms or armor. But on their belts they wore swords, long straight blades that glistened red in the dying sunlight, as though made not of steel but colored glass.

  “Thasha—”

  The selk woman looked back over her shoulder. “The golden-haired one is alive and well, friend human,” she said, “and far more precious to you than gold, to judge by how often you call out her name. Your other friends escaped as well. Be still now; it is not much farther.”

  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 Kirishgán, the selk friend he had made in Vasparhaven, had treated him with kindness. Theirs was an ancient people, Kirishgán 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 Kirishgán 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 Kirishgán’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 dlömu for traveling 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, Nólcindar. 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 Nólcindar carried you, or they will think me lazy.”

  She sounded youthful, but Pazel knew better than to trust impressions. Kirishgán had sounded youthful too—even when remembering a time before the founding of Bali Adro itself. Pazel looked up and down the trail. “Where are my friends?”

  “Waiting above,” said the selk who had carried him. 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 farther 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 Hercól. “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 Hercól.

  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 travelers 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 favorite,” 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 dlömu, 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 farther 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-gray 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 Sirafstöran Tor, where once stood a palace belonging to Valridith, a dlömic 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 neighboring 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.