The Night of the Swarm

by Robert V. S. Redick

  “Yes,” said Pazel. “The one who built that scepter. The founder of the Mzithrin, although they hate him now. Arunis called up his spirit when we were docked in Simja Bay.”

  Her eyes widened. “Did he indeed? That is interesting … But what you may not know is that Sathek and Arunis were after the same prize.”

  “Godhood,” said Pazel.

  Erithusmé nodded. “So Ramachni has told you something. Godhood, yes. And it is our great misfortune that the Night Gods, the high lords of annihilation, long ago chose Alifros as a kind of proving ground for their students.”

  “Then that part’s true as well,” said Pazel. “Arunis was a student. He didn’t care about Alifros, he just had to destroy it—”

  “As an examination, a test. Sathek too tried to pass that test. It is the Night Gods’ standing challenge: scour Alifros of life, and we will make you one of us, deathless and divine. But after Sathek’s failure they made a concession. If one of their students sets the holocaust in motion but dies before it is complete, he may linger in Agaroth, death’s Border-Kingdom, and still take the prize if the world perishes within a century. That is what Arunis is doing: sitting in escrow, watching the growth of the Swarm he unleashed, praying that it kills us all.

  “Sathek’s approach was somewhat less efficient: he thought to start by eliminating animal life—all animal life, including rational beasts like humans and dlömu. To that end he launched a series of Plague Ships from his fastness in the Mang-Mzn. The Book of the Old Faith tells the story well: how those vessels dispersed across Alifros, loaded with hides and woolen goods and cured meat and grains; and how embedded like a tasteless venom in each of them was the germ of a pestilence. Each of those ships was a kind of black-powder bomb of disease, and many did their work quite well. Some lands have never recovered. But the most insidious cargo of the Plague Ships was its living animals. Rats, bats, birds, feral dogs. These were simply released in port after port—and Sathek in his cunning had crafted their disease not to start killing its hosts for several years: not until they had multiplied, and passed the dormant seed of the plague down to their offspring. Had that seed ever sprouted, it would have spread like a lethal, wildfire rabies—and no creature would have been immune. The whole web of life in Alifros could have been destroyed in a summer. Indeed it almost was.

  “By providence, I detected the plague in time—barely in time. There was no hope of a medical response. I had to fight it magically, with a single, monstrous spell: the greatest I ever attempted.”

  “The Waking Spell?”

  “Of course. Sathek’s disease attacked the mind, so my spell had to reach those minds first—thousands of them, across the whole of Alifros, without a single exception.” She looked at him with sudden ferocity. “I am a great mage in my own right—greater than Arunis, greater than Macadra—but such a spell was beyond me. Or would have been, without the Nilstone. I had to use it, though I knew better than anyone how it twists all good intentions. That is just what happened, of course. Every infected animal was changed. Total ruin was averted, and the birth of woken animals was a side effect. So was the destruction of every human mind in the South.”

  “And it’s still going on.”

  “Obviously. The spell does not answer to me. Until someone casts the Nilstone from Alifros, it will continue.”

  Pazel sat down on the bench. It was a struggle to find his voice. “You saved the world … and killed half the human beings in the world.”

  Erithusmé nodded. “It was a single act.”

  Wonder, horror, vertigo. Pazel thought of the tol-chenni in their cages in Masalym, their huddled forest packs, the stinking mob in the village by the sea. The last Southern humans, mindless and doomed. How could he be talking to the woman responsible for that?

  How could he possibly condemn her?

  “I thought you were just mucking about,” he said. “Experimenting. Ramachni could have blary mentioned why you cast the spell.”

  “Not without breaking his promise. I swore him to secrecy on that point.”

  “Well, what in Pitfire did you do that for?”

  She ignored his tone, this time. A strangely gentle look had come over her. “I got to know a few of them, the woken animals I’d created. I called a falcon down from the clouds once, sensing the mind awake in him, and he befriended me, and traveled with me until he died. There were others, too: a spiny anteater, a snake.” She looked at him sharply. “I was almost perfectly fearless: a freak of nature in my own way, like them. But they lived with a vast, gnawing fear, a fear in the souls. Who had made them? Why were they here, scattered minds in random bodies, hunted and abused and exhibited in circuses by the humans and the dlömu who surrounded them? It was hard enough for them to stay alive, and stay sane. They needed to believe there might be a purpose behind it, a grand design. I couldn’t give them that purpose, but I let them hope. I wasn’t about to steal that away.”

  Pazel looked off into the night, and thought of Felthrup. That choice, at least, was something he could understand.

  Erithusmé sighed. “The Red Storm, incidentally, has stopped the mind-plague from spreading north. That is the Storm’s whole purpose, as perhaps you’ve surmised. If your ship should eventually pass through it, you will all be cleansed.”

  “And propelled into the future. Another unfortunate side effect.”

  She nodded.

  “Better to lose all our friends and loved ones than to lose everything. That’s how you see it.”

  The mage appeared puzzled. “Is there another way to see it?”

  Pazel looked at her with immense dislike. “Anyway,” he said, “the Red Storm is dying. Or so Prince Olik told us.”

  “Your prince is quite right. Not all spells are forever. Within a decade or two it will give no protection at all. But it doesn’t matter. The Swarm of Night will kill us all long before the mind-plague reaches any Northern land. And listen to me, boy: we cannot fight the Swarm.”

  She seized his hand with her cold, thin fingers. “All our effort must be to rid the world of the Stone. Nothing else. Take the Nilstone from this world, and all the forces it compels—the Red Storm, the mind-plague, above all the Swarm of Night—will falter and die. The Nilstone is the air that feeds those fires. To snuff the fires we must cut off the air. Nothing else we do will long matter if we fail in that.”

  He nodded, leaning back heavily against the bench. He had understood the power of the Nilstone for a long time, but getting rid of it felt more impossible than ever.

  “Tomorrow we’ll do the impossible again,” he murmured.

  “What’s that?”

  “Something Ramachni said. Just before we burned Arunis.” He turned to face her, nose to nose. “If we win,” he said, “Thasha gets to go on living—just like that? No tricks, no complications? You’ll depart and leave her in peace?”

  “I stand amazed,” she said, “at the ill luck of your desire for that girl. You bear my mark. You were chosen. And here you sit brooding, like a child who doesn’t want to share his candy.”

  Another silence. Her avoidance of his question dangled between them like a corpse. Erithusmé glanced up at the moons. “Well,” she said at last. “I’m going to tell you. And Rin save Alifros if I err in doing so.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “How to use the Nilstone.”

  Pazel’s breath caught in his throat. The mage nodded at him solemnly. “Any of you can do it. Any who bear my mark. You need only be touching one another—six of you at least—and concentrate on fearlessness. Then one of you may set his hand on the Stone, and whatever fear is in that one will flow out into the others. The one emptied of fear can command the stone as I did—very briefly, perhaps only for a matter of seconds, but it might be long enough to kill Macadra, say, or blast a hole in a pursuing ship. You should try it here in Uláramyth, first, with the guidance of the selk.”

  Pazel’s mind was reeling. “Six of us?” he said.

  “Yes, six. T
he Red Wolf marked seven, in case one of you should be killed. Whatever’s the matter now, boy? I know that the ixchel woman died—but six of you still breathe, I think?”

  He nodded, wondering if he’d be ill.

  “Out with it!”

  “Five of us are here,” he said. “The sixth is Captain Rose.”

  “Rose?”

  “He talked about coming with us.”

  “Nilus Rose?”

  “I almost believed him, but when it came time to leave the Chathrand he went into his cabin and didn’t come out.”

  “Get up. Move away from me.”

  “What?”

  She shot to her feet. The light around her changed. She clenched her fists, muscles straining, face contorting, and then she screamed with a fury that grew and grew and the sound was like the breaking of a mountain. Pazel crouched behind the stone bench. Light was pouring from her; the air convulsed with shock waves like the recoil of a cannon; his chest was imploding; the stone of the bench began to crack.

  Illusion?

  Then it was gone. Erithusmé stood there, breathless. The fury still throbbed in her, but it had changed, transmuted into something soundless and cold.

  “With six of you, and the Nilstone’s aid,” she said, “you could have removed that wall in Thasha Isiq, no matter what its origin. You could have let me return.”

  Pazel stared at her. That’s why she gave us the power to use the Stone.

  Erithusmé looked at the motionless trees, bending in an arrested gust of wind. “The Chathrand has sailed without you, hasn’t she?”

  “They had no choice,” said Pazel. “Macadra was bearing down on them. But we can still catch up. They haven’t crossed the Ruling Sea.”

  Erithusmé nodded distantly. Then she said, “The fire is nearly out. Goodbye, Mr. Pathkendle. In spite of everything, we will meet again. On that you may bet your precious little life.”

  Pazel jumped. He had been holding in his own questions, overwhelmed by her nonstop talk. “Wait,” he said, “Ramachni told me something else I’ll never forget: ‘The world is not a music box, built to grind out the same song forever. Any song may come from this world—and any future.’ ”

  The mage turned him a faint, ironic smile. “Ramachni was ever the romantic.”

  She moved toward the fire cauldron. Pazel ran to her and seized her arm. He was more afraid of her departure now than anything she might do to him.

  “Diadrelu wasn’t supposed to die,” he said. “Rose wasn’t meant to stay with the ship. And Thasha wasn’t supposed to have a wall inside her to stop you from—trading places. But those things happened. Nothing’s guaranteed. And if nothing’s guaranteed, maybe you won’t be able to return after all. What then?”

  “What if the sun explodes?”

  “Oh, stop that. You must have thought about it at least. What if this is the end? What if it’s your last chance to do anything to help us win the fight?”

  “Then we are doomed.”

  “That’s not blary good enough!”

  “It’s how things stand. Now take your hand off my arm, tarboy, or I will set it afire.”

  Pazel tightened his grip. “You want it to be true,” he said. “You want to believe that you’re the only one who matters. That there’s no point even trying, unless we bring you back to save us all. But be honest, for Rin’s sake! You’re twelve hundred years old. Isn’t there anything else in that mind of yours that we should know about, that could help us do this thing without you, if we must?”

  Erithusmé flung her arm, and there was a Turach’s strength behind the gesture. Pazel reeled and fell. When he looked up the mage was bending over the cauldron.

  “Arrogant brat!” she said. “I did not stumble unprepared into this Court! Seventeen years I have been preparing for nothing else but this battle, this last task of my life. You could sit here thinking for a decade and not come up with a question I have failed to consider. I am on top of things, boy. I have determined how to rid Alifros of the Stone! I set thousands laboring at the task, though none of them ever knew the cause they truly served. The drug-addled Emperor of Arqual reunited me with my ship. Sandor Ott devised a scheme to take that ship to Gurishal, to the very door of the kingdom of death. And you and Arunis, together: you raised the Stone from the seabed and brought it onto the Chathrand, where I waited in disguise. I left out nothing. It is a master plan.”

  “It’s failing,” said Pazel.

  For a moment her look was so deadly that he feared she would attack him. But Erithusmé was gripping the cauldron, now, and did not appear to want to release it. “Destroy that wall!” she snarled. “You can’t beat them without me. You’ll die under Plazic cannon, or the knives of Macadra’s torturers. You’ll die the first time the Swarm descends from the clouds, and in that black hell you’ll curse your own stupid waywardness that has cost Alifros its life.”

  “Erithusmé,” said Pazel, “I can see right through you.”

  “The Pits you can, you imp.”

  “I mean literally,” said Pazel.

  The mage raised a hand before her eyes: it was transparent. She sighed. But it was not only the mage whose time had come. The entire Court was fading. He could see the hillside through the ruins, the dry earth through Erithusmé’s chest. The mage growled and plunged a hand into the cauldron, digging furiously. At last she straightened, and in her soot-covered hand lay a last, softly glowing coal.

  “I am coming back,” she said, “and you, Thasha’s lover: you are going to make it possible. I know this. I have known it since I first heard your name. But I said I would answer your question, and I shall. If all seems lost—and only if it does—then take Thasha to the berth deck. Show her where you used to sleep, where you first dreamed of her. When she is standing there she will know what to do.” A wry smile appeared on the ancient face. “And if that day comes, and you find new reasons to hate me—well, remember that you insisted.”

  Her hand closed. He saw smoke through her fingers.

  She was gone.

  Thaulinin beckoned to him from the hilltop: apparently he was still forbidden to descend. The Demon’s Court had vanished, and in its place lay nothing more than a barren slope. Pazel shivered as he climbed; the wind was unrelenting.

  Clouds had appeared, pursuing one another across the sky, swallowing and disgorging the moons. He was exhausted, suddenly. The dead earth, so unlike any other place in Uláramyth, spoke to him of the endless brutality of the road ahead. Do not forget the world outside, Thaulinin had warned them. As if one could, even in a land of dreams.

  The selk greeted him with a somber nod. “Were you successful?” he asked.

  Pazel leaned on the iron fence. “I don’t know. I’m not even sure what that means anymore.”

  Thaulinin looked at him strangely. “That is unfortunate. Your quest is bringing greater losses to my people than anyone foresaw. I hope they are not all in vain.”

  Pazel jerked upright. “What are you talking about, Thaulinin?”

  “Come, I will show you.” He led Pazel to the opposite side of the hilltop, facing the side of the lake they had crossed. “Wait for the cloud to pass … there.”

  As if a curtain had been thrown open, moonlight flooded over Uláramyth. And there on the lower slopes of the island, near the shore, a crowd was running fast. They were selk, sixty or eighty selk, and they ran like contestants in a race, bunched close together; but in their hands were spears and daggers and long selk swords. Over a small rise they passed, fluid as horses, then down onto the rocky beach and—

  “No!” Pazel shouted. “Oh, Pitfire, no!”

  —straight into the lake, one after another, without slowing or appearing to mind when the water closed greedily over their heads.

  “They will emerge again,” said Thaulinin softly, “but you are right to ache. I counted seventy-six. Tomorrow the tears will flow in Uláramyth: we are so few, and when those souls find their owners we will be fewer yet. If any doubted that battle lay
before us we have our proof tonight. Something was decided here that will also decide the fate of the selk.”

  Noises behind them: Thasha was racing up the slope. Ramachni and Lord Arim walked behind. Pazel dashed to meet her, caught her in his arms. She was tear-streaked and shaking, and her hands trembled violently.

  Like an old woman’s. Pazel pulled sharply back from her, studying her face.

  “Don’t,” said Thasha, flinching.

  “What happened? What did you do?”

  “I didn’t do anything,” she said. “I just fell through the rock, down and down and down. We never reached bottom, we just stopped and hung there. It was so black, Pazel, and so ancient. I thought we were dead, and then I thought we’d died a million years ago, and our souls were caught in the demon’s rock, caught like flies in honey. But then something burst out of me and flew off, and left me in pieces. I was broken, Pazel. Ramachni and Lord Arim held me together until I healed.”

  Pazel stared deep into those frightened eyes. You’re back in there, aren’t you? Back in your cave where you belong.

  “Pazel?”

  He pulled her close again. “I’m on your side,” he said. “No one else’s. Do you hear me?”

  She kissed his ear, weeping freely. “They broke me open. So that she could come out and talk to you. They had to, I know that—”

  “Did they?”

  She blinked at him, her look accusing—no, self-accusing. She swabbed her face with her sleeve.

  “I didn’t think I’d be so scared.”

  Her voice came out tiny, a little girl’s, a voice he knew gave her shame. He kissed her, undone by love; no force in Rin’s heaven could challenge this one; they could try anything they liked.

  “I’m with you, Thasha. I’ll always be with you. No matter what happens I’ll keep you safe.”

  Thasha shook her head, adamant, trembling like a leaf. “Promise,” she said, weeping again. “Promise you won’t.”

  14