The Night of the Swarm

by Robert V. S. Redick

  “I proved only that they are making for the Island Wilderness—currently,” said Hercól. “But come, tonight is spent. Let us cast about no more for answers. By daylight we may find our path clearer than we think.”

  No words could have been more welcome. Still Pazel felt that Hercól was merely putting the best face he could on terrible circumstances. The selk were kind to offer help, but for all their age and wisdom, they were just twenty nomads, living by what they carried on their backs. And what about Neeps? If the selk could do nothing for him, Pazel would beg Ramachni to try deeper magic. He could not just watch and wait.

  The selk led them into the ancient fort. The dim lamplight flickered over pale marble columns, and alcoves and doorways intricately carved with figures of men and beasts. The chambers were many and mostly dark, and Pazel thought an air of sadness hung about them. But the eyes of the selk gleamed in the lamplight, and their voices were bright and clear.

  The ruin clearly served as a way station, not a permanent home. Still, their hosts had made it clean and comfortable; in the room where the company was to sleep, deerskins had been spread over beds of pine needles. “Rest well, and fear nothing,” said Thaulinin. “Tonight at least you will be as safe as ever you were aboard your ship.”

  “That is less comforting than you intend,” said Hercól with a smile, “but we thank you all the same.”

  “I would speak with you awhile longer, Thaulinin,” said Ramachni.

  “Then go elsewhere, Rin love you,” Big Skip implored. “Mages and selk may be able to do without sleep, but I’m staved through, and my hold’s filling fast.”

  The selk leader laughed. “Come, wizard. You have many years to account for.”

  He took a lamp from one of his men and led Ramachni from the chamber. The other selk departed, and the company settled down on the deerskins. Most slept like the dead, but Pazel tossed and turned, helplessly awake. Like feral cats, the dark possibilities of what lay ahead prowled through his mind, scratching, spitting, clawing him further from sleep.

  The whole coast in the hands of the Ravens. No way out, tentacles closing in. And the Swarm of Night growing larger, like a tumor, like a shroud. Better to have stayed on the Chathrand. Better a hrathmog spear through the gut.

  Someone in the room was whispering, praying; or had he dreamed that, just moments ago?

  Arunis reached back into this world to frighten us, to try to break our nerve: You killed me but you didn’t; Thasha cut off my head but she failed. Erithusmé is dying, dying inside her. And without Erithusmé you have no hope.

  Lies, hatred. Poison spewed from a dead man’s lips.

  Try this one, then: Arunis would have died weeks ago on the Chathrand, if you hadn’t interfered. All your fault: his escape, this exile, the deaths in the Infernal Forest, the loosing of the Swarm.

  This is what it felt like to go crazy, to be whittled down to madness by your guilt.

  Pazel tried to turn his thoughts in a sunnier direction. Thasha. He could still feel her touch. It did not long cheer him to think of her, though. She’d wanted him to promise to keep his distance. Would she ever understand that he had refused out of fear for her? That it was their lovemaking, more than anything else he’d found, that drove the haunted look from her eyes?

  Pazel rubbed his face in the darkness. He was haunted too, in an entirely different way. When Thasha kissed him, undressed him, nothing else mattered under Heaven’s Tree. But afterward … afterward, he thought of Klyst, the murth-girl. Which was weird in the extreme.

  Murths were a kind of half spirit, as best Pazel could understand. Klyst, a sea-murth, had appeared to him twice in the flesh, and vanished both times with the suddenness of a candle flame. Since the crossing of the Ruling Sea he never saw her at all. But now and then he could feel her longing for him rise out of nowhere. It was an accident, that longing: her people used infatuation-charms to lure humans to their deaths, and killing Pazel was all she’d had in mind at first. But Pazel’s Gift had made her spell backfire. She thought she loved him. She tried to persuade him to abandon everything, humanity included, and live with her beneath the sea. And she had placed a tiny shell beneath the skin of his collarbone and called it her heart. He could feel the shell with his fingers, that unmistakable bulge. It was sleeping; Klyst could not find him at this distance, apparently. But why was it so hard not to think of her? Was it guilt, that she should be suffering for his sake? Was it fear for her and her people, if they should fail in their quest?

  A shroud, a pall, a black smoke filling room after room …

  No good; he was more exhausted than when he first closed his eyes. He sat up and quietly pulled on his boots. He was longing for fresh air.

  The passage outside the chamber was deserted and still. He moved left, feeling his way along the passage. Somewhere ahead there was a glimmer of light. As he walked it brightened, until at last the passage opened on a broad stone patio, built against the back of the hill. It overlooked a long valley, awash in the light of both moons, and rimmed on the far side by the jagged mountains he had glimpsed a week ago, before their descent into the forest. He was high enough to see them again, and marveled at their sheer number, and how their white peaks gleamed like mother-of-pearl.

  Just beyond the patio, a narrow track wound down the side of the hill. And there with a start Pazel saw a lone figure, walking swiftly away. He was tall and moved with grace, despite a certain urgency to his step, and on his belt hung a long straight sword: one of the weapons of the selk.

  Even as Pazel reached the balustrade, the figure slowed, as though sensing someone behind him. Without stopping he glanced over his shoulder.

  “Kirishgán!”

  Pazel did not shout, but he called out loud enough for the other to hear. It was unmistakably Kirishgán, his friend from Vasparhaven, the only selk he had ever seen before that day. As he looked up at Pazel, Kirishgán did stop—but only for a moment, as though ceasing to move required some great effort on his part. Then he turned and hurried on, down into the shadow of the hill.

  Pazel called out a second time. The selk was gone, but he had looked at Pazel, recognized him. Was he dreaming? No, impossible: he was perfectly wide awake. Then he turned and looked again at the rocky hill above the patio. Thaulinin’s troop was sleeping there, under the open sky, curled like deer in the high brittle grass. Some few slept together, limbs entwined, but whether for love or simple warmth he could not guess. As Pazel watched, a blue selk eye opened here and there—single eyes, not pairs—and glowed briefly, firefly-bright, before drifting shut again.

  Keeping watch in their sleep.

  Then more than ever, Pazel understood that they were among beings unlike themselves, far stranger than dlömu or flikkermen, or any other race he had encountered.

  Dawn brought driving rain. The selk were awake and afoot, and they fed the company and brought them cups of steaming tea—and yet something in their eyes had changed. The hostility had not returned, but in its place had come caution and amazement, and perhaps a hint of fear. Pazel was unsettled. Had they unwrapped the Nilstone? Had one of them, Rin forbid, been so mad as to touch it? Or was his glimpse of Kirishgán somehow known to them, and for some reason forbidden?

  Ramachni and Thaulinin arrived just after breakfast, and the mage looked pleased, but Thaulinin’s face was drawn like that of all his people. “We have ranged the hills all night, Arpathwin and I,” he said, “and we have traveled even further in our speech, and into darker realms. I know the task you are about, and repeat my offer of help.”

  “And I repeat: we ain’t fit to march,” said Mandric. “Twenty days! I’d give us two, before someone goes lame outright—provided you let us rob you of all the food in your larder, Mr. Thaulinin.”

  “I can see your wounds for myself,” said Thaulinin, “and they are not to the flesh alone. No, you cannot march to the sea—not yet. And you cannot wait here for the hrathmogs or the Ravens to find you. But there is a third choice, if you will tak
e it.”

  “What choice is that?” asked Thasha.

  “Shelter and healing, until you are fit for travel, and your scent goes cold,” said Thaulinin. “More than that I cannot say. But I think you will be satisfied, if you place yourselves entirely in my hands.”

  The party stirred uneasily. “What would you require of us?” asked Hercól.

  “Sleep,” said Thaulinin. “A profound sleep, aided by a plant I have gathered this evening with Ramachni. It will not harm you, but it will allow us to do a thing we may not do in the waking presence of any non-selk, ever, by an oath as old as these very hills.”

  Now there were open grumbles. “Last night you drew swords against us,” said Cayer Vispek. “Now you ask for blind trust.”

  “I do not ask for it,” said Thaulinin. “I merely name it as a condition of my greater help.”

  “And you should agree,” said Ramachni, “for I guess already what it is that our host offers but cannot name, and it is a distinction offered to few in the history of this world. And what Thaulinin has not mentioned is the grave risk that he would take on our behalf. By helping us he will face the judgment of his own people, and should they find him in the wrong he will be imprisoned to the end of his days. For a selk such punishment is worse than death. Indeed many take their own lives rather than be kept from walking freely over Alifros.”

  Pazel looked sharply at the crowd of selk. That was it; that was the reason for those chilly, fearful eyes. It’s not just Thaulinin. All of them will be held responsible, all of them will be judged.

  Thaulinin looked down at Ensyl. “The plant does not work on the little folk,” he said. “You will not sleep, but must be kept from seeing us, and confined.”

  “Caged?” Ensyl bristled, backing toward the wall. “For an ixchel that is a vile proposal. Few of us who enter cages have ever left alive.”

  “Didn’t stop you from caging us,” growled Mandric.

  Dastu crossed his arms. “I say, no thanks. I say we’ll take our chances on the trail.”

  “Then you getting die,” said Neda, “like stupid Alyash, like so much crew on Chathrand ship.”

  “Don’t lecture me, girl,” snapped Dastu. “How many Black Rags getting die when Rose blew your fancy ship out of the water?”

  “Peace, Dastu!” said Hercól, stepping between them. “Thaulinin, we must speak apart before we answer you. Be patient with us, pray.”

  “Go and speak, then,” said Thaulinin, “but it is your fate that begs a swift decision, not the selk.”

  The party withdrew to their sleeping-chamber to debate, and soon their voices rose in argument. Dastu did not wish to have anything more to do with the selk, and Mandric and Lunja rejected the leap of faith Thaulinin demanded. Big Skip and Ensyl seemed torn. The shouts grew heated. Only Ramachni stood silent. Pazel looked at him in frustration. Why doesn’t he say anything?

  “I do not like blind choices either,” said Hercól, “but we will not heal our wounds on a death march, nor fill our stomachs crouching here underground.” He looked at Mandric and Lunja. “You are both soldiers, trained to trust in weapons more than words. So are Neda and Cayer Vispek. But self-reliance is not always the wisest path. When they surrendered to us—to their archenemies—it was an act of courage.”

  “It was the only choice, save starvation and exile,” said Vispek.

  “And that is exactly where we stand today,” said Bolutu.

  “Nonsense!” said Mandric. “You might as well say that them two were fools to surrender—they’ve ended up starved and exiled anyway, and in a worse fix than if they’d stayed on the Sandwall.”

  “Worse?” said Vispek. “You did not see the shipwreck near our camp, full of dlömu with their throats slit, and the word Platazcra scrawled in blood across the deck.”

  “And you’re exaggerating anyway, Corporal Mandric,” said Thasha. “The selk have already fed us, and given us shelter.”

  “And played pretty music,” scoffed Dastu.

  Lunja glanced at him curiously. “We have a saying in Bali Adro: The singer is more truthful than the talker, and the harp more truthful still.”

  “Very nice,” said Mandric, “but I still don’t fancy getting poisoned.”

  “I’m with you there,” said Big Skip. “We’d wake up confused, he says? Pitfire, we went through that with the mushroom-spores in the forest! It was blary unnatural.”

  “These creatures aren’t natural either,” said Dastu, “and they’re shifty as midges, by damn. Anyone who trusts them is a blary fool.”

  “I’ll trust them,” said Neeps.

  Everyone stopped talking and looked at him. “They know a lot,” he said. “Maybe they can help me. And maybe some of you have the mind-plague too, and don’t know it yet. I doubt they have a cure, or they’d have used it before the humans died out. All the same I’ll stay with them. I’m no use to anyone if I turn into an animal, and—” He looked at Pazel and Thasha, blinking. “—it’s getting harder to think.”

  His friends rushed to embrace him. Pazel had to turn his face away, lest Neeps see his tears. Hercól said, “Trust is dangerous, but less dangerous than acting in fear. Come, we must decide. Will you not take the hand extended?”

  “No!” said Dastu. “Have you all gone soft? They want the Nilstone! Last night they were on the verge of gutting us over it, like so many fish. They found out we had a mage and decided the fighting-odds weren’t as good as they’d figured. Now they’re counting on desperation to make us walk into their trap.”

  “Did you hear nothing in the music?” asked Ramachni.

  Dastu turned to him, startled. “You too? What’s so special about that blary music?”

  “Almost everything,” said the mage. “It was a part of the Cando Teahtenca, the Creation-Song of the Auru, First People of Alifros. It was the Auru who built the tower where we fought Arunis, to guard the River and issue warnings; the Auru whose final charge in the Dawn War drove the Gorgonoths back into the Pits; the Auru whose spell of beauty still rings in certain hearts, like the note of an enchanted bell struck ages ago. They have all gone from the world, but it is said that among the most ancient selk there are a few who walked with them in their twilight, and heard their songs entire. Perhaps Thaulinin erred with us in the matter of the Nilstone. But the selk apologize with gifts, not words, and that rare music was a gift given to few.”

  Another silence fell. Then Lunja said, “I will trust them. To do otherwise is folly.”

  Mandric looked at her, wrathful. “You’re right, Otter, damn your sweet eyes.”

  Dastu laughed scornfully, but he knew he stood alone. “We’ll regret this,” he said. “If we’re lucky enough to do any regretting, that is. If those monsters let us wake up.”

  His eyes, or the black humor in his voice, reminded Pazel powerfully of something, but he could not say what. They filed back to the entrance hall and found Thaulinin’s people ready. One selk approached each traveler, holding a piece of something fleshy and brown. “We must watch you swallow,” said Thaulinin. “Fear not; we will catch you if you fall.”

  Pazel’s heart was racing. The selk who had carried him up the hill stepped forward with a peculiar smile, and immediately pressed the fleshy thing between his lips. It was tart and slimy. The selk looked at him, waiting. Pazel chewed.

  The rain froze motionless in the sky.

  “Swallow,” said the selk. But her voice was odd, and Pazel saw with a jolt that her upper and lower teeth were fused together, and stretching like toffee with the movement of her jaw.

  “Ramach-Ramachni,” Pazel sputtered, fearing suddenly for his own teeth.

  “Mushrooms!” howled Big Skip. “Rin’s eyes, these are straight from the Infernal Forest, ain’t they?”

  The air was gelatinous. The selk’s smile was a blur. Pazel dropped to his knees. Beside him, Dastu was laughing again, loud and bitter, and suddenly Pazel knew what he was reminded of. Dastu had never sounded so much like his master, Sandor Ott.
/>
  8

  The Hidden and the Dead

  A man cannot hide from the truth, outlaw the truth, spit in the face of truth, and then in good conscience punish those whom he discovers have given up trying to tell him the truth. Such behavior is indefensible in a king. He would do better to probe the reasons for their secrecy, which are most often grounded in despair at his rule. The wise king will reward these truth-tellers, as he would the doctor who arrests his blindness before it is complete.

  —Preface to the Life of Valridith

  by Thaulinin Tul Ambrimar

  4 Halar 942

  263rd day from Etherhorde

  “What happens if they separate?”

  Felthrup glanced up from the Merchant’s Polylex. Marila’s voice was trembling, although her face, as usual, remained impassive. She had paused with a Masalym fig halfway to her mouth.

  “Separate, my dear?”

  They were both on Thasha’s bed, Marila with her feet up, shoulders propped against the wall. Amber evening light fell on her round face and dark, salt-brittle hair. She bit down on the fruit and it ruptured with a squeak.

  “They’re all right together,” she said as she chewed. “Pazel has his fits, but the others protect him until they’re over. Thasha goes blank, like she’s sleepwalking, or very far away—but Pazel and Neeps coax her out of it. Neeps—” She drew a sharp breath. “—is a fool, of course, but the others can keep him from exploding. Sometimes. What if they get separated, though? Who will look after them?”

  Felthrup could smell the fear on her skin. Humans could not detect that smell, did not know they produced it; but rats knew. Many a colony owed its life to that particular scent. Humans had warning bells, drums, criers who ran through the streets. Rats had their noses. When enough humans began to exude the smell of fear, rats ceased their scavenging and dashed for the warren, and did not move until it faded.

  Marila shook her head. “Forget it,” she said. “I just can’t seem to quit imagining things. Blary waste of time.”