The Night of the Swarm

by Robert V. S. Redick

  He stopped, nostrils flaring. They had stood here, the ixchel, not thirty minutes before. And then they had disappeared.

  Rin’s eyes, not again.

  Felthrup circled, listening, feeling, tasting the air. The scent was gone; it led to this spot and vanished without a trace. When it came to hiding, rats were experts, but the ixchel were master magicians. He rolled over, pressed an ear to the boards. Nothing but men’s distant footfalls, and the slosh of the sea. He hissed: “Come out! It’s only Felthrup! I’m a friend, today and evermore!” No sound, not even an echo.

  “Don’t do this! Suspicious ninnies! I won’t betray your hiding place!”

  The silence mocked him. They could be somewhere close at hand, smiling. Even fondling their spear-tips, circling, tightening the noose.

  He blew one nostril and then another, inhaled deeply, struggling for even the most distant ghost of a scent. Nothing. He pressed his mangled paw against the boards, drew the tender flesh back and forth. What was he thinking? That he would find a hinge, a hairline crack, the outline of an ixchel door? But such doors were never found. What a dreamer he was. Rose had torn the ship apart and found nothing. The ixchel would be seen again when they wished to be, and not before.

  “We’re stronger together,” he told the darkness. “We have to stand together, with the humans as well, mind you. Or we’re doomed.”

  Felthrup put his head down on his paws. He was lying to himself. He didn’t fear the ixchel closing in silently to spear him. No, what he dreaded was their absence, their refusal of his peace overtures, their continued loathing for the giants and anyone tainted by their favor. He was not much thinking about where that loathing could lead. He was only feeling the waste: the colossal, shameful waste. You were right, Marila. You can love language and its promise of a straight sunny boulevard, a common currency of the heart. But that’s your faith only, and it moves not mountains. They’re not listening, those mountains. They’re happy where they stand.

  He blinked.

  Something had happened. A finger of cold had touched his stubby tail. He turned about, feeling: there was a large droplet on the plank. He touched his tongue to the water. It was salty—and what was far stranger, clean. This was no seepage, no condensation. This was a splash of fresh seawater, fallen from above, and yet somehow deep in the bowels of the Chathrand.

  He turned away, crawled a few feet, stopped to think again. He touched the board six inches overhead. Then he turned and nosed his way back to where the trail disappeared. The wet spot was still there. He reached up again. This time his paw met with nothing.

  Felthrup stared upward. There was clearly another hole, larger than the one he’d squeezed through. By why was there no light from the gun deck, with all those open ports? Nervously, he rose on his haunches. There! He felt the edge of the opening, ran his paws about its perimeter. It was about ten inches square.

  He rose higher—and light stabbed his eyes. By sheer instinct he ducked down again, and the light turned once more to blackness. Felthrup was shaken. It had been no lamp, but sunlight: the bright, cold glow of the sun through mist. And what else? The wind: he’d heard a moaning wind, and something that sounded very much like surf.

  He stood mystified. Then, with a gasp, he saw the whole thing, what had become of the ixchel, why Rose had never found a trace.

  “Felthrup?”

  Marila’s voice, faint and distant. She was still waiting for him. But no, he couldn’t go back to her, now. He stood on his hind legs again, and the sunlight poured over him, and the wind and surf resumed. He pulled himself through the gap, onto chilly boards. He looked around. He was right where he expected to be, upon the lower gun deck, some fifty yards from where he’d left Marila. And at the same time he was somewhere utterly alien. Somewhere he had never hoped to see.

  The deck was severely tilted, as if the ship stood almost on her beam-ends. And it was still, perfectly still; and not a soul was to be seen. The cold sunlight flooded in through the gunports and, farther off, the tonnage shaft, which was cluttered with hanging debris. Felthrup climbed for the gunports, shining above him like skylights. Afraid that his body would betray him, that he might panic and run, dive for the square hole behind him. And even more afraid that if he did so, he would find that the hole had disappeared.

  This is not a dream. Not a night journey from which I will wake safe and sound in my hatbox. So why does it draw me like a dream?

  As he neared the gunports the surf grew louder. The cannon and their carriages were gone—no, there they lay below him, in a heap against the starboard hull. Some of the gunport doors lay with them; others dangled from their hinges, rusted and cracked. And there was another sound, a low, violent booming, reverberating in the planks beneath his feet.

  He felt a cold sea-spray. He was almost blinded by the sun. Not a dream, he thought again, and crawled out through the port.

  The wind swallowed his cry of horror. This was the Chathrand, all right—but only her carcass, beached and broken, utterly destroyed. She lay half embedded in sand, and waves the height of houses were thrashing against her. Below, her keel was split, her frame-timbers shattered. A good third of her hull was simply lost, devoured by the sea.

  Felthrup turned in place. Her mainmast still stood, absurdly proud, jabbing at the scudding clouds. The other masts were gone. Likewise the bowsprit, the forecastle house, and every trace of rigging save a few blackened strands still knotted to the rusted cleats. Her bell was gone; her paint was gone. The deck cannon were filled with twigs and seaweed. Bird nests. This Chathrand had been here for decades.

  But where was here? An island. A low and empty place, not more than a mile long, and tortured by those thundering rollers. Beach grasses, terns and plovers, white bleached shells. No trees, unless those growths at the island’s center were stunted trees. And no other land, anywhere. The Chathrand had died quite alone.

  A feeling like intoxication boiled up in the rat. He knew the legends about magical doorways on the Great Ship, and the “vanishing compartments” they led to. Marila and Thasha had stumbled through one such door themselves, and ended up on a Chathrand from long ago, crewed by barbarous men. But he, Felthrup—he was seeing the future, obviously. Decades or centuries from now, this would be the Great Ship’s end: beached and ruined on this nothing of an island, lost in the Ruling Sea. The ixchel had hidden not in space, but in time.

  Then Felthrup saw the burial yard.

  It stood above the beach, where the grasses were thick and the land looked almost stable, almost safe from being washed away in a storm. Rock cairns, the marooned sailors’ grave markers, surrounded by the rotted posts of what had once been a fence, a wall against the wind and sand.

  Felthrup thought his heart would burst. At least some of the crew of this other-Chathrand had made it ashore, and lived here for a time, and perished. Who were they? In his own time the Great Ship was six hundred years old, and had changed hands, owners, nations countless times. How many more had she known, before this lonely end?

  “You can still read the inscriptions,” said a voice above him.

  He jumped—and nearly became the next one to die. The hull was wet and slick with algae. He tore at it, digging in with his claws, jabbing with his incisors, and just managed to regain his balance. Above him, on the broken topdeck rail, crouched an ixchel he had never seen before. He had a broad face and small bright eyes, a black sash around his upper arm, a spear crossed over his knees. The man was smiling, but Felthrup did not much like the smile.

  “Three inscriptions, anyway, etched in stone. The others are gone, or unreadable. Come up now, rat.”

  “Cousin!” cried Felthrup, “I must assure you that I am not here to spy out your secrets.”

  “You’ve done that already.”

  “My purpose is to give knowledge, not extract it.”

  “Climb. You’re not safe where you are.”

  At that moment half a dozen ixchel appeared on either side of the man with the
sash. They were armed and muscular, with shaved heads, and they looked down at Felthrup with the hungry eyes of hawks. Felthrup recognized their faces, but he did not know their names. He doubted that they were concerned for his safety.

  “I know what you mean to do,” he shrilled. “You would wait for us to reach your homeland, and then swarm back through that hole and attack.”

  “Roast me, lads, he’s seen right through us,” said the man, as those around him laughed. “We give up a good home in Etherhorde. Fight giants and rats, storms and starvation, lose a fifth of our clan. And then, just as we near Stath Bálfyr, we attack. Sinking the ship, maybe, in typical crawly fashion. Or whispering a bad heading into Rose’s ear. So that we can all drown together within sight of dear old Sanctuary-Beyond-the-Sea.”

  He made an impatient gesture. “I won’t waste a weapon on you, beastie. If you will not climb, we will throw refuse down until we knock you into the waves.”

  Felthrup turned to leap back through the gunport—but of course they had closed in behind him, five more shaved-headed spearmen. They did not want him returning just yet.

  You dug this burrow, Felthrup. Stop squirming and dig your way out.

  He climbed. It was not as slippery as he feared: the curve of the hull worked in his favor. He reached the rail, and the ixchel roughly pulled him up. Oh, the wasteland of the topdeck! Holes, cracks, chasms. Splinters, rotting spars, rusted chains. Felthrup struggled to contain his tears.

  “Well,” said their leader, “we’re not dead yet. Now you know.”

  “You won’t believe me, sirs, but I am glad of it—overjoyed.”

  “You’re damn right I don’t. I am Saturyk, His Lordship’s chief counsel.”

  A twitch passed over Felthrup, one he hoped the man could not read. Saturyk. He’d heard the name many times; Ensyl had called him “the one whose hands go everywhere.” After the ixchel’s seizure of the Chathrand most of the little people had come out into the open, some gloating, some quiet and thoughtful. Not Saturyk: he had remained in the shadows, rarely seen, never lured into conversation. Felthrup studied the man, and felt himself studied in return, with cold exactitude. I know who you are, he told the man silently. You’re their Sandor Ott.

  “I wish to speak to Lord Talag,” he said.

  “No doubt,” said Saturyk, “but your wishes hold no currency with His Lordship. You’ve shown us who your friends are. One of them likes to dine on our brethren.”

  “You mean Sniraga? I am no friend of that cat! She is merely the familiar of Lady Oggosk.”

  “Aye,” said Saturyk, “and you’re another. For your sake, I hope she doesn’t try to use you against us. We keep a fine edge on our spears.”

  Felthrup was confused, frightened, exasperated with himself and them. “We are wasting time,” he said.

  “There’s a bit of truth at last. You came to talk, you claim? Talk, then, we’re listening. For the moment.”

  “Talag and I are better acquainted.”

  Once again Saturyk’s mouth formed that unpleasant smile. “Only because you’re not giving me a chance,” he said.

  “Master Saturyk,” said Felthrup, “I would kindly ask you not to favor me with a display of wit, or irony, or your rudimentary teeth. You have no order to kill me, or you should have done so already. You are presumably required to defer to your commander in anything so unlikely as a visit from the other ship. I will speak to Talag, none other. And put away your pricking tools. Only a fool points out that spears are sharp.”

  He was shaking as he spoke, but he forced himself to look Saturyk in the face. The guards were enraged. “He mocks you,” hissed one, passing his spear to another and drawing a knife. “Give the word, and I will take another inch off his tail.”

  Saturyk gazed at Felthrup, expressionless, his eyes like two copper nail-heads in the sun. “Put the knife away,” he told his man at last. Then he turned and started across the topdeck, one hand beckoning Felthrup to follow.

  They walked a practiced path through the jagged timbers, the drifted sand. Felthrup’s gaze slid down into the chasm of the tonnage shaft. There was light in the ship’s depths: sidelong light from the hull breach; and the waves moved through her, pulsing, as through the chambers of a heart.

  At the starboard rail, a thin rope had been fastened to a cleat. It ran inland, taut above the surf, to a point some thirty yards up the beach. “Can you walk a rope, Mr. Stargraven?” asked Saturyk.

  “Hmph,” said Felthrup. He had been walking ropes since he was weaned. Indeed he was swifter than the ixchel, as they made their way ashore. Sometimes it was good to be a belly-dragger.

  But the blowing sand became a torment as they descended, and by the time they reached the ground it was almost intolerable. Saturyk urged him quickly forward, and Felthrup saw that they were making for a narrow tunnel. Soon they were all inside: a buried length of bilge-pipe, leading uphill toward the vegetation at the island’s center.

  “You placed this here?” said Felthrup, amazed. “Such industry! How long have your people been passing through that door?”

  No one answered. They crawled, single-file. When the pipe ended they dashed again through the blowing sand and dived into another. This one was longer, narrower. At length it brought them to the very edge of the brush. There were trees, after all: tortured and shrunken, but still a bulwark against the howling wind.

  They were marching on a footpath, now. Looking left and right, Felthrup saw other ixchel moving with them, half hidden, gliding through the patchwork of light and shadow. He knew many by sight, a few by name. He thought of the three hours’ peace in Masalym, when the dlömu had lavished food on them all. How different it could have been. And perhaps it can be yet. Watch your words, my dear Felthrup, watch your manners.

  They had not walked five minutes when the brush opened into a clearing, framed by half a dozen crumbling, human-sized buildings. As Felthrup watched, the clan came out into the open, soundlessly. And it was the full clan: still hundreds strong. Never before had he seen ixchel children, wide-eyed, thoughtful; or the greatly aged, skinny and round-shouldered, but never bent like human elders.

  How careworn they all were! It shocked Felthrup profoundly, this defeated look: they might have been castaways themselves. And they were angry, too: furiously angry. They stared at him as though unable to quite believe that he had come here, and Felthrup turned in a circle, meeting their eyes. No, they were not all furious. Some looked at him with fear, or simple bewilderment, and a very few with hope.

  The buildings were mere shacks. They listed, nearly ready to topple. Every one of them built, of course, with salvage from the Chathrand. Here was a bench from the officers’ mess. Here a wheelblock mounted on a post: one end of a laundry-line, perhaps. And Rin’s eyes! There was the ship’s bell, set upon a great flat stone like a monument in a village square.

  But this had never been a village. Only three of the buildings looked as if they had ever been suitable for living in. Another might have been a barn, the last a storehouse. There was a well, a rusty anvil, the ghost of fence. “They brought a great deal ashore,” said Saturyk. “At low tide the Chathrand is fully beached, and you can simply walk aboard.”

  Felthrup could not find his voice. He knew these things. He knew the people who had touched them. Or at least their doubles, their shadow-selves.

  They must have dreamed of rescue. Even here they did not give up. He looked at the bell: it would have taken eight men to carry it inland. Even here they fought for dignity.

  Saturyk led him to the least dilapidated of the houses. The human door was shut fast, but at its foot the ixchel had carved one of their own. Saturyk gestured to one of his men, who opened the door and slipped inside.

  “How long?” Felthrup asked.

  “Since the wreck, you mean?” said Saturyk. “Thirty-four years, if you trust the giants’ memory.”

  “You found written records?”

  “Among other things.”

  They wai
ted. It was almost warm, here at midday and out of the wind. Almost. Felthrup tried to keep himself from imagining the island in a typhoon.

  A sudden noise came from the woods, or beyond them perhaps. Felthrup turned in amazement. It was the lowing of a cow.

  Saturyk gestured, and a number of the ixchel darted off in the direction of the noise. “There are not many,” he told Felthrup. “They must have been brought ashore and released.”

  “And bred?” said Felthrup. “Or is that the voice of a thirty-four-year-old cow?”

  Saturyk looked at him with vague hostility. Neither, thought Felthrup. That is one of the beasts that disappeared on the Nelluroq. They came here, those cows and goats and other creatures. There’s another doorway on the ship!

  The man returned from within the shack and whispered in his leader’s ear. Saturyk, clearly surprised, looked at Felthrup in annoyance. “You’re to be admitted,” he said. “Follow me, and ask no questions.”

  Inside it was dim rather than dark, for there were windows. The shack’s single room was clean and ixchel-orderly: tiny crates lined up along one wall, dried foodstuffs hanging in garlands overhead. Along the opposite wall stood racks of weapons. Most of the chamber, however, resembled a military drill yard. There were lines chalked on the floor, and tightropes, net ladders, high jumps, a cat-shaped archery dummy bristling with arrows.

  They never rest, thought Felthrup.

  “Stop gaping,” growled Saturyk. Then he lowered his voice and added, “His Lordship has a long list of worries, see? A great deal on his mind. So none of your chatter when you’re in his presence. That’s a friendly suggestion, believe it or not.”

  “I shall be on my best behavior,” said Felthrup.

  Saturyk frowned; he was not reassured. Then he raised his eyes. Above them was a storage loft, its interior concealed by a tattered curtain. There was no ladder, but the ixchel had made a kind of staircase from a taut rope with many knots. Up they went, leaping and scrabbling. When they stood at last on the edge of the loft, Saturyk told him once more to wait. He slipped inside, and Felthrup stood staring at the ancient curtain. It had once been blue. And hand-embroidered: leaf designs of some sort. And from the hem dangled a few limp threads, the remains of some decorative tassel.