The Night of the Swarm

by Robert V. S. Redick

From the Final Journal of G. Starling Fiffengurt

  Wednesday, 20 Halar 942

  The wolves have finally pounced.

  As I write this, I feel how lucky we are to be alive. Whether luck & life will still be with us much longer is uncertain. For now all credit goes to Captain Rose. People change; ships grow faster, arms more diabolical. But nothing beats a seasoned skipper, no matter his moods or eccentricities.

  Five bells. Lunch still heavy in my stomach. A shout from the crow’s nest: Ship dead astern! I happened to be right there at the wheel with Elkstem, & we rushed to the spankermast speaking-tube to hear the man properly.

  “She was hid by the island, it’s not my fault!” he shouts. That told us next to nothing: there were islands all about us: great & small, settled & unsettled (though with each day north we saw fewer signs of habitation), sandy & stony, lush & bone-dry. We’d been winding among them for a week.

  “A monster of a boat!” the lookout’s shouting. “Ugly, huge! She’s five times our measure if she’s a yard.”

  “Five times our blary length?” cries the sailmaster. “Gather your wits, man, that’s impossible! Distance! Heading!”

  “Maybe longer, Mr. Elkstem! I can’t be sure; she’s forty miles astern. And Rin slay me if she don’t have a halo of fire above her. Devil-fire, I mean! Something foul beyond foul.”

  “What heading is she on, damn you?” I bellow.

  “East, Mr. Fiffengurt, or east-by-southeast. They’re under full sail, sir, and—”

  Silence. We both scream at the poor lad, & then he answers shrilly: “Correction, correction! Vessel tacking northward! They’ve spied us, they’ve spied us!”

  Not just spied, but fingered us for dinner, it appeared. I blew the whistle; the lieutenants started bellowing like hounds; in seconds we were preparing for war.

  From the hatches men were spilling like ants, the dlömu answering the call as quickly as the humans, if not more so. Mr. Leef finally brought me a telescope. I raised it, but shut my eyes before I looked. Don’t show the lads any fear; they’re watching, I thought.

  The vessel was a horror. It was a Plazic invention to be sure, one of the foul things sustained by the magic the dlömu had drawn from the bones of the lizard-creatures called eguar. Prince Olik had told us a little, & the dlömic sailors a little more. Eguar-magic was the power behind the Bali Adro throne, & its doom. It had made her armies invincible—but their commanders depraved & self-destroying. It is a frightful state of affairs, & one that reminds me uncomfortably of dear old Arqual.

  We’d seen monster-vessels before, in the terrible Armada that passed so close to us just after we reached the Southern main. But this was something else altogether. Impossibly large & shapeless, it was like a giant, shabby fortress or cluster of warehouses that had somehow gone to sea. How did it move? There were sails, but they were preposterous: ribbed things that jutted out like the fins of a spiny rockfish. It should have been dead in the water, but the blue gap between it & the island was growing. It was under way.

  Captain Rose bounded up the Silver Stair. Without a glance at me he climbed the quarterdeck ladder, & kept going to the mizzen yard, where he trained his own scope on the vessel. He held still a long time (what’s a long time when your heart’s in your throat?) as Elkstem & I gazed up at him. When he turned to us, his look was sober & direct.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, “you are distinguished seamen: use your skills. This foe we cannot fight. We must elude it until nightfall or we shall lose the Chathrand.”

  The captain’s rages are frightful, but his compliments simply terrify: he saves them for the worst of moments. In such times a mysterious calm descends on him; it is deeply unsettling to observe. He hung there, face unreadable within that red beard, one elbow hitched around a backstay. He examined the skies: blue above us, thick clouds to windward. Islands on all sides, of course. Rose looked over each of them in turn.

  His eyes narrowed suddenly. He pointed at a dark, mountainous island, some forty miles off the starboard bow. “That one. What is it called?”

  Elkstem, who knew Prince Olik’s map better than I, told him that it was Phyreis, one of the last charted islands in the Wilderness. “And a big one, Captain. Half the size of Bramian, maybe,” he said.

  “It appears to sharpen to a point.”

  “The chart attests to it, sir: a long southwest headland.”

  Rose nodded. “Listen well, then. We must be fifteen miles off that point at nightfall. That will be at seven bells plus twenty minutes. Until then we are to stay as far as possible ahead of the enemy, without ever allowing him to cut us off from Phyreis. Is that perfectly clear?”

  “By nightfall—” I began.

  “Fiffengurt.” He cut me off, suddenly wrathful. “You have just disgraced your very uniform. Did I say by nightfall? No, Quartermaster: my command was at nightfall. Earlier is unacceptable, later equally so. If these orders are beyond your comprehension I will appoint someone fit to carry them out.”

  “Oppo, sir,” I said hastily. “At nightfall, fifteen miles off the point.”

  Rose nodded, his eyes still on me. “The precise course I leave to your combined discretion. The canvas likewise. That is all.”

  And that was all. Rose sent word that he required Tarsel the blacksmith & six carpenters to join him on the upper gun deck, & lumbered off toward the No. 3 hatch, shouting at his ghosts: “Clear out, stand aside. Don’t touch me, you stinking shade! I know what a barometer is. Damn you all, stop talking and let me think!”

  Elkstem & I put the men to spreading all the canvas we could think of; the winds were that sluggish. I even sent a team down to the orlop, digging for the moonrakers that hadn’t been touched since Arunis calmed the winds off the Straits of Simja. Then we dived into our assignment: plotting, calculating, fighting over the math. It is no easy job to ensure that one arrives at a distant spot neither early nor late, above all when one must seem to be fleeing. And to make matters worse, we were fleeing. There was the open question of just how fast that unnatural behemoth could move. One thing was clear, though: far more than wind propelled it over the seas.

  The Chathrand, however, remains a beauty of a sailing ship. Despite the torpid day she was making thirteen knots by the time we ran out the studding sails. I was proud of her: she’d weathered a great deal & come through. But the Behemoth was still gaining. As it crept nearer I studied it again. A monstrosity. Great furnaces along her length, belching fire & soot. Black towers & catapults & cannon in unimaginable numbers; giving the whole thing the look of a sick, spiny animal. Hundreds, maybe a few thousand, crowded onto her topdeck. What possible use for so many?

  “Traitor!”

  I ducked with a curse. It was Ott’s falcon, Niriviel. The bird screamed low over my head, shrieking, & alighted on the roof of the wheelhouse. It was the fourth time this week.

  “Bird!” I sputtered. “I swear on the Blessed Tree, if you ever come at me like that again—”

  “My master orders me to announce my mission!” it shrilled. “I go on reconnaissance. My master requires you to inform me of the distance between the ships.”

  “The distance? About thirty miles, currently, but see here—”

  “I hate you. You’re a mutineer, a friend of Pathkendle and the Isiq girl. Why aren’t you in chains?”

  On the deck below, Darius Plapp looked up & grinned. The ganglord was working the mizzen halyards, along with twenty of his lackeys. The dispirited Burnscovers were far forward at the jiggermast. I had separated the gangs after a warning from Sergeant Haddismal that they were itching for a fight.

  “Captain Rose finds me more useful here than in the brig,” I told the falcon. “Now listen, bird, stay well above that ship, we don’t know what sort of weapons they—”

  “Some enemies sail over the horizon, coveting our land and gold,” cried the falcon, “but worse are the sons of Arqual whom the Emperor has showered with love, and who do not love him in return.”

  “Sho
wered with love! Oh, flap off, you blary simpleton!”

  Niriviel stepped from the roof, beat his wings, & shot away southward. The bird’s abuses make me livid, but I can’t manage to hate him for long. The poor beast was lost for a month after the Red Storm, & Ott seemed almost human in the way he nursed him back to strength—feeding him bite after bite of raw, fresh chicken, along with ample fibs about the greatness of Arqual & the vileness of her enemies. I think often of Hercól’s assessment: “Niriviel is a child soldier: trained in fanaticism, more a believer than those who taught him to believe.” In other words, a simpleton. But a useful one: he might well come back with knowledge that would save the ship.

  “Why in Pitfire are we still tackin’ North?” grunted Darius Plapp. “This is blary suicide. We should be runnin’ downwind.”

  “If we need tactical advice we’ll inform you, Plapp,” I said.

  “Oppo, Mr. Fiffengurt, sir.”

  I could have had him sent to the brig for that sneering tone, but instead I pretended not to notice. Lately I am tempted to indulge the ganglords (the one who walks free, and the other who controls his little kingdom from the brig) so long as they don’t set the lads on one another like so many dogs.

  Once again there is peace between them: a seething, hate-heavy peace. Rose too has taken certain steps to foster it, despite making a savage example of Kruno Burnscove. A month ago, when the Burnscove Boys turned in that deathsmoke-addicted Plapp, I’d expected the poor wretch to be hanged. Rose had promised no less, & Rin knows he’s bloody-minded enough. But instead he shackled the man to the rail near the left-handed stinkpots.11 Four times a day, a Turach lit a deathsmoke cigar & left it burning in a steel bowl some five yards away. It was clearly torture. Plapp could catch whiffs of the drug when the wind allowed: just enough to whet the knife of his craving. His howls were like those of a man awake during the amputation of his legs. What’s more, every last hand saw the wretch when they came to void their bladders: saw how he pulled at the shackles until his wrists bled, thrashed against the deck until his face was one black bruise. It may even have scared a few lads away from the drug. Whether this one will survive the ordeal I cannot guess.

  We went on tacking north. Clouds rolled in, their gray bellies heavy with rain, although for now it refused to fall. The wind freshened as well: soon we were at fifteen knots. Elkstem & I watched the Behemoth, & after a bit we exchanged a smile. The gap between us was no longer shrinking: indeed it was, ever so slightly, growing. The Behemoth was falling behind.

  “Give me an honest wind over magecraft any day of the week,” said Elkstem. In a voice meant just for me, he added: “Tree of Heaven, Graff, I thought we were dead.”

  Marila, bless her, brought tea & biscuits to the quarterdeck. Her own belly is showing now, a little fruit bowl tucked under her shirt. In her arms was Felthrup, squirming with impatience to move: it was his first venture beyond the stateroom since the attempt on his life. As soon as his feet touched the boards he raced the length of the quarterdeck and back again, then dashed excitedly about our heels.

  “Prince Olik spoke the truth!” he squeaked. “That ship is a mutant thing, a mishmash held together by spells alone! The Plazic forces are in decline. The power they seized has devoured them like termites from within, and turned them senseless and savage. But not for long! Olik said they were melting, those Plazic weapons, and that Bali Adro cannot make any more.”

  “Not without the bones of them croco-demons, is it?” said Elkstem.

  “Very good, Mr. Elkstem! Not without the bones of the eguar—and they have no more, for they have plundered the last of the eguar Grave-Pits. They are drunkards, taking the last sips from the bottle of power, and reeling already from withdrawal.”

  “Godsforsaken rat on the quarterdeck,” muttered Darius Plapp.

  “I believe you, Ratty,” I said, “but it’s no real comfort at the moment. Their last sips of power may blary well kill us.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  As if the Behemoth wished greatly to convince one little rat, something massive boomed on her deck. I snapped my scope up, hoping that one of those furnaces had exploded & torn her apart. No luck: it was rather the opening of a tremendous metal door. At first I couldn’t see what lay beyond that door. But after several minutes I made out what looked like a bowsprit, & then a battery of guns. Something was detaching itself from the Behemoth & gliding out upon the waves.

  “Graff,” Elkstem murmured to me, gazing through his more powerful scope. “Do you know what that is? A sailing vessel, that’s what. I mean a regular ship like our own. And blast me if she ain’t got four masts!”

  “You must be wrong,” I said. “The monster can’t be that big.”

  But it was not long before I saw for myself that it was true. My hands went icy. “That colossus,” I said, “it’s a naval base. A movable naval base. We’re being pursued by a mucking shipyard.”

  “It’s the daughter-ship that worries me,” said Elkstem.

  The daughter-ship, the four-master, was narrow & sleek. She might have been a pretty vessel, once, but now her lines were ruined by great sheets of armor welded to her hull. All the same she would be faster than the Behemoth.

  Her crew began spreading canvas. Elkstem growled. “They’re clever bastards. That four-master will catch us, sooner or later, unless the wind decides to double. We could outfight her, maybe—but so what? All she needs to do is nip our heels, hobble us with a few shots to the rigging. Once we’re slowed, the monster can catch up and finish us.”

  “I tell you we should run downwind,” said Darius Plapp.

  “They would only do the same, Mr. Plapp,” cried Felthrup, through the rungs of the quarterdeck.

  “The blary rodent gimp wants to be a sailor, now,” muttered Plapp.

  “Wrong again,” said Felthrup, “and may I say that against that particular desire you, sir, provide a fine inoculation?”

  Plapp scowled. “I ain’t never provided you with nothin’,” he said.

  “Mr. Fiffengurt,” said Marila, who had taken my telescope, “what if they don’t catch us by nightfall?”

  “Why, then our chances improve,” I said, “so long as we keep the lights out on the Chathrand. They could very well lose us in the dark. Of course we won’t know until morning. We could even wake up & find ’em right on top of us.”

  Marila started. “Something’s happening on the big ship,” she said. “They’re moving something closer to the rail.”

  Before I could take back the telescope there came a new explosion. From the deck of the Behemoth a thing of flame was blasting skyward on a rooster-tail of orange sparks. A rocket, or a burning cannon-shot. Its banshee howl caught up with us, but the shot itself was not approaching, only climbing higher & higher. Suddenly it burst. Five lesser fireballs spread from the core like the spokes of a wheel: beautiful, terrible.

  “Maybe they’re trying to be friendly?” said a lad at the mizzen.

  Then, in unison, the fireballs swerved, came together again, & began to scream across the water in our direction.

  Terror gripped us all. I bolted from the wheelhouse, shouting: “Fire stations! Third and fourth watch to the pumps! Hoses to the topdeck! Run, lads, run to save the ship!”

  Marila had scooped up Felthrup & was racing for the ladderway. The fireballs had twenty miles to cover, & from the look of it they would do so in the next three minutes. But what sort of projectile could change course in midair?

  “Drop the mains, drop the topsails!” Elkstem was shouting. And that of course should have been my first command: those ten giant canvases made for a target twice the size of the hull, & they would burn far more easily too. Someone (Rose?) at the bow had given the same order; already the sails were slinking down the masts.

  By the grace of Rin we got the big sails down, & even furled the jibs & topgallants. All in about two minutes flat. I was by now down on deck & heading for the mainmast. I saw the first fire-team near the Holy Stair, w
restling with a hose that was already gushing salt water. But there were none close to me. I leaned over the tonnage hatch, screaming: “Where’s your team, Tanner, you boil-arsed dog?” When I turned the men on deck were staring skyward. I whirled. A fireball was plummeting straight for us.

  “Cover! Take cover!”

  Everyone ran. I threw myself behind the No. 4 hatch coaming. But I had to look—my ship was about to be massacred!—so at the last second I raised my eyes.

  What I saw was a nightmare from the Pits. The fireball was no shot, no chunk of phosphorous or glob of burning tar. It was a creature: vaguely wasp-like, its great segmented body blazing like a torch, & it struck the deck & splattered flame in all directions like a dog shaking water from its fur.

  I dropped, horrified. My hair caught fire but I snuffed it quick. A blizzard of sparks blew past me; without the hatch I’d have been roasted on the spot. When I looked up & down the length of the ship I thought our doom had come, for all I saw was fire. Get up, I thought, move and fight while you can! There were screams from fifty men, a gigantic howling & thumping from the creature itself. I don’t know how I made myself stand & face the thing, but I did.

  Heat struck me like a blow. The creature had smashed halfway through the deck & was lodged there, dying. It had made a suicide plunge, & when it struck its body had burst open like a melon. As it writhed & heaved, flame gushed from it like blood. Where was the rain? Where was our mucking skipper? I looked the ship up & down, & thought we were finished, doomed: for all I saw was flame. Right in front of me a man caught fire: who he was I could not tell. He was running, screaming, & the flames wrapped him like a flag.

  Then a mighty spray of water hit the man, knocking him clean off his feet. Rose & five Turachs were there behind me with a fire hose. They had wrestled it up the No. 4 & were blasting the poor wretch with all the force sixty men at the chain-pumps could deliver. Thank Rin, it worked: he was doused, & two mates seized him & bore him away. Then Rose turned the spray around to the creature. It screamed & twitched & vomited fire, but it could not flee the blast. Very soon it was sputtering out.