The Night of the Swarm

by Robert V. S. Redick

  “It’s a blary crime, love,” he said, “a peach like you, sittin’ there all neglected-like. Tuck that gold away, now, and come upstairs. I’ll tickle your sweet spot. Might even make you laugh a bit.”

  The room fell sudden silent. Plapp went on leering at her, a tomcat watching a bird. At last the girl did indeed tuck his gold away, gazing at him with disbelief. And then he found out why she was “all neglected-like,” when Sergeant Drellarek (“the Throatcutter”) returned from the privy. Plapp’s departure was so fast it was almost a magic trick. I expect he gave her more laughs than he’d counted on.

  As I say, no titan of intellect. Yet lately Kruno Burnscove’s been vying for his dullard’s crown. Tonight he & two of his heavies caught a Plapp sailor on the No. 4 ladderway. With the thugs keeping an eye out for officers above & below, Kruno backed the lad up against the wall & set his knife casually to his throat. He wanted to know what Darius Plapp had in mind once we were back safely north of the Nelluroq. Did Plapp mean to go on cooperating with Rose & Sandor Ott, even though they were leading us to Gurishal on a mission of no return? Or was he maybe thinking someone other than Rose might be better suited to taking the wheel?

  I have this on good authority: Kruno Burnscove wanted to know if his rival was plotting mutiny. But did he truly imagine he’d get an answer? Of course the lad swore his ignorance backward & forward. Burnscove pressed the knife harder against his flesh.

  “I know there’s an endgame coming, boy. What’s more, Darius knows I know. He expects someone to spill the gravy sooner or later, see? By talking now you’ll just be living up to his expectations.”

  No use: the Plapp boy had no gravy to spill. His resistance must have irritated Burnscove. “You think I’m fooling with you?” he said. “You suppose I’d think twice about gutting you like a fish? Don’t throw your life away, lad. Nothing old Darius might do to you compares with what you’re risking here and now.”

  At that moment his goon on the lower stair gave a whistle that meant “officer approaching.” Kruno sheathed his knife, but he struck the lad a parting blow to the stomach that left him writhing on the stair. “You know what I think, boys?” he said, as they hurried away. “I think that if these Plapps keep turning into monkeys, we’re going to have to chain the bastards up and keep ’em as pets!”

  The second warning, from his man above, came too late. Burnscove rounded the corner, laughing at his own witticism. There, with folded arms, stood Captain Rose. For a moment no one moved, & in the silence Rose heard the wheezing of the injured man.

  Burnscove is the captain’s equal in size & ten years younger, but that did not stop Rose from charging down the stairs at him with a roar. The ganglord should have committed decisively to some action: running like a coward, say, or fighting for his very life. I suppose he did neither, for when I arrived moments later (I was the “officer approaching” from below) the captain was beating him with fists like wooden mallets, the blows knocking Burnscove against the wall with such force that he toppled forward again into the next piece of punishment, & the next. In desperation Burnscove pulled his knife again. Seeing it, Rose hit a new threshold of rage. Most men put distance from a knife by sheer (sane) instinct. Rose just smacked it from Burnscove’s hand. Then he seized the ganglord’s forearm near wrist & elbow & snapped the arm like a stick over his knee.

  Burnscove fainted dead away. One of his underlings had fled already; the other vomited on the stairs. I was close to doing the same: Burnscove’s forearm made a right angle halfway down its length, & from the torn skin a bone protruded obscenely.

  Still swearing like a Volpek, Rose dragged the man by his hair onto the lower deck & ordered the Turachs to throw his “worthless carcass” in the brig. That is where Chadfallow straightened & splinted his arm, & that is where he remains. It is the first time either ganglord has been harmed or jailed since the journey began (save by the ixchel, who locked them up together, sensibly), & it is a deep humiliation for the Burnscove Boys. That, I suppose, is why Rose attacked the man himself. He, Ott & Haddismal are the only men aboard the ganglords fear. And blast me if Druffle’s “suppository” isn’t turning out to be true. However maimed, Kruno Burnscove is still alive. He is trapped here, with nothing but thin cabin doors between him & a hundred Turach spear-points. He cannot act against the captain, & neither can Darius Plapp. While the ganglords live Rose has nothing to fear from the gangs.

  Sunday, 17 Halar

  Felthrup has been stabbed. It was a light wound to his shoulder & he will certainly live; already he is hobbling around the stateroom, reminding us all that he has been through worse. More troubling is that his attackers were ixchel. They had secreted themselves inside a cannon on the lower gun deck. When Felthrup passed this evening they leaped down, crushing Felthrup to the deck & pinning him there beneath their swords.

  “Who have you told of our whereabouts, vermin?” they demanded. “Speak quickly or die on our blades!”

  Felthrup’s first response was to cover his eyes with his paws & beg the men to leave. “You’re in terrible danger,” he said. “Trust me, run away!” When this tactic failed, he began to chatter wildly about the difference between telling & implying. Still they pressed him, leaning into their swords. Felthrup then announced that he had come to the conclusion that time was ephemeral, & that no one could predict the shape tomorrow would take, or even the shape one would take on the morrow, by which he referred not only to one’s physical body (“lest we forget the lesson of the caterpillar”) but also the values that define us, the ideas that will outlive us, the philosophies that pass like a germ from one mind to another, didn’t they think so, & how he had read incidentally that the philosopher who first argued that moral conviction was the signature of the soul had also called for an end to the persecution of ixchel, as well as a vegetarian diet, though he did in fact ask for pork on the night of his execution, but had to settle for lamb chops as a certain parasite had decimated the local hogs, & then one of the ixchel stabbed Ratty in the haunches just to make him shut up.

  That was when Sniraga pounced. The great red creature had been trailing Felthrup at a distance, slinking in & out of shadows as cats will. Lady Oggosk has made her Felthrup’s guardian, & she never shirks that duty. But Felthrup too has made his wishes known these many weeks, talking to the red cat, scolding her, imploring her to be “peaceful and loving.” It’s a wonder the beast has not gone mad trying to square that circle. Fortunately for Ratty his request only delayed her but so long.

  The attack was lethally precise. The ixchel who had used his sword was bitten through the head & neck & died at once. The other one stabbed at her bravely. He was a better fighter by half than his kinsman, but all the same Sniraga hooked him with a claw & flung him high into the air. He came down fighting, but she rolled on her back & met him with four paws this time & and mauled him badly. He only just managed to fight out of her grasp. Then he must have realized that his kinsman was dead, for he began to fight a blazing retreat. Sniraga let him go, crouching & hissing beside Felthrup, looking for further attackers.

  None came, but Marila did. She had been expecting Felthrup, & came out at last to look for him. She took one look at rat, cat & ixchel body & let out a cry. Felthrup squealed that she must hurry & hide the corpse, but it was too late. Sniraga, knowing her guardianship was done for the time, took the ixchel in her jaws & and sprang away.

  What will she do with the body? Deliver it to Oggosk? Devour it? Toy with it awhile & leave the remains in plain sight? If the latter occurs there will be a new fear stalking the Chathrand, & Marila & I will be questioned savagely, perhaps even by Ott.

  As for Felthrup, he has promised us that he will not budge from the stateroom. “They meant to kill me as soon as I complied with their demands,” he said, “and then they’d have tried to kill the ones I named—kill you, Mr. Fiffengurt, and dear Marila, expectant mother though she is! So terrible, so mean! And we do not even know what they will do when we reach Stath Bálfyr.” />
  “You were brave, there, Ratty,” I said. “And brave to go to them, in their stronghold, on a mission of peace.”

  He gazed up at me from his little basket, puzzled. “They have never believed me,” he said. “All I ever wanted was a good conversation.”

  12

  Loyalty Tests

  15 Modobrin 941

  Eberzam Isiq awoke to the laughter of the witch. She was in the next cabin, Gregory’s cabin, and so was Gregory himself. Isiq could hear them plainly; the interior walls on the Dancer were as flimsy as the rest of the boat.

  Twilight, the Gulf flat and still. They stood becalmed off the Haunted Coast; the last stage in their journey to the Empress would happen in the dark. Isiq was obeying an old navy dictum: When there is no task before you, your task is sleep. He’d been a champion napper since his tarboy days; he could sleep through combat drills. So why had Suthinia Pathkendle’s laugh woken him so easily, cutting through his sleep like a knife through muslin? She was laughing at her husband’s yarn, something about a dog and a dairy maid. At Isiq’s bedside, the dog from Simjalla City gave a low, offended growl.

  “Did you hear that? ‘Lazy cur,’ indeed! Lazy notions about all things canine, more like.”

  Suthinia laughed again, and Isiq experienced a moment of ridiculous jealousy. They were sounding very much like a couple, that former couple. And now they had apparently retreated to the captain’s tiny chamber to wait for nightfall.

  The dog stared in the direction of the voices. “Every time he speaks of someone low or despicable, it’s ‘The dog!’ or ‘That stinking dog!’ Well, you’re no rose garden yourself, Captain. You smell like old socks, dead fish and someone’s nappy shaken together in a bag.”

  “He doesn’t mean it,” said the little tailor bird, standing in the open porthole. “In fact I think he’s fond of you. He beamed when you told him you wanted to come aboard. Only don’t expect too much of him. He’s not an educated man like our friend Isiq.”

  The dog scratched behind an ear. “If he says ‘lazy cur’ once more I’ll give him a mouthful of education.”

  Isiq sat up and groped for his boots. “Dog,” he said quietly, “you know human nature, and how to survive on human streets. That is fine knowledge, and hard earned to be sure. But you know nothing of life at sea. There is a code we must keep here, because it governs our own survival. Respect the captain, even a captain you hate—and never speak idly of rebellion. It will be no idle day if ever you are forced to stand by such words. Now let’s get above.”

  Nothing had changed on the topdeck save the light, which was failing fast. The clipper was surrounded, as before, by mist: great rafts of white mist, so thick in places that one could imagine parting them like curtains. They were famous, these mists of the Haunted Coast: ambulatory mists, Gregory had called them. And it was true that they seemed to wander this part of the Gulf like flocks of sheep, independent of the winds and one another, capricious in what they obscured or revealed.

  Just as well that they had anchored six miles out. For when the mists did part, one could catch a glimpse of the sprawling graveyard between the Dancer and the shore. Men had perished here in untold numbers—upon the jagged reefs, the shifting sandbars, the countless rocky islets that loomed suddenly out of the mists. The rumors were many and fantastical: rip tides so powerful they could tear a ship free of its chains. A black mold in the seaweed that turned one’s flesh to gray slime that sloughed off the bone. And sea-murths, naturally, directing all these calamities, and more.

  He looked down at the gray-green waters. Sea-murths, right below them? Half spirits, elementals, a people of the depths? Could they have provided the help Thasha had spoken of, when Pazel and the other tarboys probed these waters for the Nilstone? Were they the guardians of the Coast?

  Isiq believed in murths, but only in the way he believed in the monstrous sloths and lizards whose skeletons graced the museums of Etherhorde: creatures from long ago, creatures who had made way for the advance of humankind. Yes, strange beasts remained in Alifros; he had seen a few in the service, in the more distant stretches of sea. But here, sandwiched between the Empires, so close to the world’s busy heart? He didn’t like to think so. It made civilization appear fragile, like a scrim that might fall at any time. But something kept sinking those ships. Something more than wide reefs and poor seamanship.

  He stood and watched the dying light. He could still hear the booming of guns, distant and sporadic; the massive engagement had concluded one way or another. He thought of the wreckage and the death behind them, the corpses in the water, the poor sod or two (or ten or twenty) lost overboard, still breathing at this minute, still clutching at a fragment of his ship.

  So familiar, so shamefully comforting. War was a state of affairs he understood—a state he liked, admit it, for the razor it took to social pretense: minced words, delicate non-promises, games of maybe and speak-with-me-tomorrow. Not in wartime, not for soldiers. You lived or died by your good word, by the trust you generated, by aspects of character that could not easily be faked.

  But did he have the character of a peacemaker? When this righteous fire burned out, would he be emptied, useless as an old gunner, the kind who retired with weak eyes and weaker hearing and any number of fingers blown off over the years? Before the Chathrand sailed he had told Thasha that even old men could change. That he had become an ambassador and would work for a better Alifros. That he had, once and forever, hung up his sword. He had underscored the point by thumping the table and turning red in the face.

  “Peaceful out here, ain’t it?”

  Gods of death, there was a boat alongside! A slender thing shaped like a bean pod. A canoe. Just two men aboard her, large ruffians, grinning like boys. They had glided out of the fog in perfect silence.

  “Bosun!” snapped Isiq.

  “Don’t shout, Uncle,” said the second man. “Didn’t Captain Gregory make that clear?”

  He had, of course: no shouting, no loud noises of any kind. In short order Gregory himself appeared, still buttoning his shirt. The newcomers touched their caps, and Gregory answered with a nod and his wolfish grin.

  “You rascals. Not dead yet?”

  “Can’t die when we owe you forty cockles, can we, sir?” said the man in front.

  “Forty-two,” said Gregory. “Interest.”

  “What’s moving today, Captain?” asked the other.

  “No goods,” said Gregory, “but there’s a package for you about here somewhere, I expect.” He twinkled at them, then turned to Isiq. “Get your things, old man, and be quick. You’re going with Fishy and Swishy here.” He pointed at the men. “Fishy here’s a Simjan, rescued from a felonious past by our brotherhood. Swishy’s a half-wit from Talturi.”

  “Those aren’t our real names,” said the Simjan.

  “And your passenger here has no name, see, so don’t ask him,” said Gregory. “Keep calling him ‘Uncle,’ that will do. And see that he stays out of trouble all the way to the Hermitage. Your word as gentlemen, if you please.”

  Hermitage? thought Isiq.

  The newcomers looked him over dubiously, but they gave their word. Then Gregory smiled and declared that their “Uncle” had just paid off their debt, and Mr. Tull came forward with a bundle of tobacco for each.

  Isiq turned aside and muttered in Gregory’s ear: “Are we truly to visit the Empress in a hollow log, like savages?”

  “Savages!” said Gregory. “That’s blary perfect. We depend on such ignorance from Arqualis, don’t we lads? Now grab your things, duffer! I won’t tell you again.”

  Isiq had few things to grab. His weapons from Oshiram, his boots and jacket, the purse of gold that was presumably forty-two cockles lighter than when he came aboard. The dog and the bird watched him anxiously.

  “I would welcome your companionship,” he told them, “but I do not know what is to come. If you go with me now, there may be no chance of your returning to Simja for a very long time. Nor can I be sure t
hat the ones who will receive me are—how did you put it, Tinder?—educated. They may not know how to relate to woken beasts.”

  His words added greatly to their distress. “I will go with you regardless, friend Isiq,” said the tailor bird at last. “My brainless darling has forgotten me, as she does every spring. Let her nest with someone else, someone better suited to matrimony. I have other things on my mind.”

  “And I will stay on the Dancer,” said the dog, “if you will ask Captain Foulmouth to return me to the city at his earliest convenience. The witch has said enough about your cause to make me want to help. But Simjalla is the place I know. Her streets, her smells, her gossip. That is where I can be of use to you, if anywhere.”

  “Then go well,” said Isiq, scratching his muzzle, “and see that you don’t bite the captain.”

  “No promises,” said the dog.

  On deck again, Isiq faced the great indignity of needing to be helped into the canoe. His knee did not want to support him on the rope ladder, and the crew had to improvise a sling and ease him down the Dancer’s side. Isiq knew he was scarlet. He thanked the Gods that Suthinia had stayed below, and then felt perfectly desolate because she had. Apparently he was unworthy of a goodbye.

  Gregory leaned down the side, trying not to smile. “You’re a force of nature, Uncle,” he said. “We’ll meet again, I’m sure of it.”

  “On the battlefield,” said Isiq, “if we live that long. Today I can only thank you for your deeds. They were strange but well executed.”

  Gregory humbly dipped his head. “Need a job done, call a freebooter,” he said.

  On an impulse, Isiq tossed the purse of gold back up onto the Dancer. “Take what you need to rebuild your house,” he said.

  Gregory looked abruptly chagrined. “Oh, as for that—”

  “He took it already.”

  Suthinia was there, bending to snatch the purse from the deck. She was wearing her sea-cloak, and a headscarf of fine black lace, and before Isiq’s startled eyes she threw one leg over the rail. Astride it like a jockey, she looked her husband in the eye. Isiq knew he should turn away, but didn’t. Suthinia moistened her lips.