The Night of the Swarm

by Robert V. S. Redick

  She walked to the back door and opened it. At the table in the garden sat her brother, just nine or ten years old, and Dr. Chadfallow. They were puzzling out a text in Mzithrini together.

  “That’s Father’s shirt,” said Neda. “Your mucking lover is wearing his shirt.”

  Suthinia poked at the fire in the stove.

  Neda stepped outside. The sun was fierce; the colors bled to white. She stood right next to the boy and the man and wondered if anyone could sense her presence at all. Bees were buzzing in the orange tree she’d planted as a small girl. Dr. Chadfallow was conjugating the verb kethak: to forgive.

  “There is no passive voice in the Mzithrini tongue,” he told Pazel. “You cannot say, The sin was forgiven. You must declare who is doing the forgiving, see? You cannot play fast and loose.”

  He went on talking, pointing at lines in the weighty tome. Through the garden gate Neda could see the edge of the plum orchard. It was harvesttime; there were the harvesters with their hoop-baskets tied to their waists. But instead of the old procedure where someone would climb a rickety ladder and try not to fall, the men also had smaller baskets on poles that they were hoisting high into the trees. Shielding her eyes, Neda saw that there were ixchel in the treetops, selecting the ripest fruit and dropping them into these baskets as they passed.

  “Deketha, I forgive. Troketha, you forgive—”

  Suddenly Pazel looked straight up into her eyes.

  “This is your dream,” he said. “You have to give Mother permission to enter it. She’s afraid to interfere.”

  “But she’s already here!”

  “That’s what you think,” said her brother, and lowered his eyes again to the book.

  Neda returned to the kitchen. Her mother was mincing onion, blinking back tears. Neda watched her work. Sometimes her hands closed on objects that had not been there a moment before.

  “Mother?”

  “Hmm-hmm …”

  “Stop that and look at me. I want you to. I want you to come into this dream.”

  Her mother cried out. Neda was sure she had cut herself. But no, she had dropped the knife and pressed both hands to her face. She was looking straight at Neda and weeping with joy.

  Dream-tears are like nothing else in human experience: a plunge into total feeling, a ripping away of words, lies, excuses, of the bandages we have been winding about ourselves since we first learned to speak. Holding Suthinia, Neda wept for the years wasted, for the pain she had both caused and received, for the distance that had suddenly been bridged and the vast distance that would not be.

  We must stop, said her mother, pressing Neda’s head to her breast. The tears will wake us if we don’t.

  But neither woke. When the tears ended Neda felt herself changed, and knew the change would persist when she emerged from the dream.

  “I don’t believe anymore,” she said, wiping her eyes. “It’s like dying. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  Suthinia just looked at her and held her hand.

  “Cayer Vispek is going to kill me.”

  “You mean this never happens to sfvantskors?”

  “If it does no one admits it. The elders probably kill them, quickly and quietly. And blame the death on Arquali spies, or the Shaggat, or devils. Who knows.”

  “We’re almost strangers, aren’t we?” said Suthinia.

  Neda said nothing. Her mother squeezed her hand tighter.

  “I will never ask you to forgive me,” she said, “for failing to protect you, for harming you with that spell.”

  “You’re talking nonsense,” said Neda. “The spell didn’t kill me. Probably it saved my life a few times. Pazel has it worse. I can pretend to be normal, but he can’t hide those fits.”

  “You sound so …”

  “Foreign?” said Neda. “Religious?”

  “Old, I was going to say. Much older than twenty-two.”

  “The last six years were longer than the first sixteen. They were my second life.”

  “The first one ended when you took your vows?”

  Neda didn’t know how to respond. It was certainly what she’d told her masters, and herself.

  The sunlight flickered: shapes were passing the windows. Suthinia got to her feet.

  “Come with me,” she said.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I can’t say exactly. Shopping?”

  “Mother, I’m a sfvantskor. I don’t want to go shopping.”

  Suthinia bent and pulled on her shoes. “Neither do I, love, but don’t you know how this works? You’re still dreaming. What happens here is not under my control, or yours. And if you don’t keep moving, the dream changes the world around you. Radically, sometimes. Trust me, it’s better just to take to your feet.”

  In the garden Chadfallow was sitting alone with drooping shoulders. “Where is Pazel?” Suthinia asked.

  “Gone swimming,” said the doctor. “A murth-girl came and took his hand, and they went off together to the Haunted Coast.”

  “Well, then,” said Suthinia. “Why don’t you stop moping and come with us?”

  Chadfallow shook his head sadly. “Because that is not my fate.”

  They left him there in the garden, and started downhill toward the city. The houses rippled in the blazing sun. “Ormael is so much better with ixchel about,” Suthinia declared. “Once we passed the sanctuary law they started coming here on any boat with a hold to hide in. You wouldn’t believe how quickly they’ve rid us of rats.”

  “Mother,” said Neda, “we have to concentrate. Is there any way you can get a message to the Chathrand for us? They don’t even know that we’re alive.”

  “A message to the Chathrand! I don’t know if I have the power, darling. Yes, I warned Pazel about Macadra, but I played only a small part in that chain. The message began with your ally Felthrup, who has apparently learned to swim the River of Shadows better than most beings alive. He passed the message to my old teacher, Pazel Doldur, for whom your brother is named. Doldur is long dead; he visited me as a ghost. All I had to do was pass the warning on to Pazel, the same way I’m speaking to you today. I can’t summon the dead.”

  “Then go into the River yourself. Don’t you know how to swim?”

  Suthinia laughed. “I’m from Bali Adro, Neda. Half my schoolmates were dlömu.” She waved her hand over Ormael. “I can swim rings around these people. But that’s hardly the point. Look, I’ll show you.”

  At their feet there was a sewer drain set in the road. It had not been there a moment before. The two women crouched beside it, and Suthinia placed her hand upon the iron grille. Neda could hear water flowing beneath them. But as she listened the sound grew strange: deeper, wilder, and less like water than a roaring wind. As with certain moments during their journey on the fungus-raft, she had a terrifying sensation of bottomless depths under their feet. But this was much more close and fierce. Whatever fell into that raging torrent would be swept away like a leaf.

  Suthinia pulled. The grille rose on creaking hinges. Neda gripped her arm and leaned away.

  “Felthrup Stargraven,” said her mother. “Maybe he’s down there, somewhere, in one of the public houses on the riverbanks. I could climb in and search.”

  Neda shook her head vehemently. “Let’s go,” she said. “Don’t make that sort of thing happen again.”

  They passed the crossroads where one could turn east to the Cinderling, or west toward the flikkermen’s hovels on the edges of the Crab Fens. On their left men were cutting hay with fluid sweeps of their scythes.

  “I’ve cast just two major spells in my lifetime,” said Suthinia. “The first let me collect your dream-essence, which I’m still using to this day. That was a success; neither of you suffered, or even noticed what I’d done. The second—”

  “Created our gifts,” said Neda.

  Suthinia looked at her. “It’s kind of you not to call them curses. But remember, darling: your gifts were already there. The charm only strengthe
ned them. You had a splendid memory to begin with, just as Pazel had a way with languages.”

  There was a market just inside the gate. They milled quickly through the familiar Ormali crowds, buying bread, wine, candles, matches, flowers.

  “I wish we could have brought Pazel along,” said Neda. “But that wasn’t really him I saw, was it? Just a fake, a dream-dummy.”

  “That boy was no fake,” said her mother, squeezing a pear, “but he was not the whole boy, either. That was the part of Pazel who lives in your mind. He might have come along with us, I suppose, but he couldn’t tell us anything we don’t already know.”

  “I must do some telling,” said Neda, “before one of us wakes.”

  “Please do,” said Suthinia. “For the past two weeks neither of you has done much dreaming. And when you do it’s never about where you are at the moment. Normally a few things appear in your dreams and Pazel’s, more or less the same. A face, a river, the shape of a hill. Those things, I guess, are what you’re really seeing. But lately you’ve been almost invisible. I could feel that you were safe and sleeping deeply, but no more. Where are you?”

  Neda stopped short. Confused, she raised a hand and touched her lips. She had been about to say the word Uláramyth, but could not. Her mouth simply disobeyed her, refused to form the words.

  “What’s wrong, my dear?” said her mother.

  “There something—”

  Once again she got no further. She had meant to say, Something about the place where we are, but the words would not come. The Secret Vale was not to be spoken of, apparently. Not even in dreams.

  “Never mind,” said Suthinia, touching her arm. “Tell me what you want your friends on the Chathrand to know.”

  “We have the Nilstone,” said Neda.

  Suthinia nodded. “Yes, I could sense that. Oh, Neda, I’m so proud of you, and afraid for you. I hope you don’t have to keep it long.”

  “We’re with the selk,” said Neda.

  Her mother beamed. “I thought so. I heard their music in your heads. And I saw Ramachni speaking to one of them, from a tree. Hold these flowers for me, while I pay the man.”

  “And Arunis is dead.”

  As soon as Neda spoke the world went mad. Suthinia turned, screaming like a banshee, letting her purchases fall from her arms. The crowd drew back from her, then fell away, the market melting and swirling like a kaleidoscope, with only the two of them still and clear. Suthinia grabbed Neda’s shoulders, her nails biting through the robe, and several seconds passed before Neda understood that her mother had not lost her mind.

  “You!” she was screaming, “You, you!”

  Or had she? Neda had lost her faith and it felt like dying. Suthinia had crossed the Ruling Sea and lost everything. Her family, her people, her language, the whole Southern world. She had even lost her century: the Red Storm had taken that. All to fight a mage who had slipped through their fingers. A mage who had hunted down and killed nearly everyone who came with her from the South. Arunis had been the torture of her life. And the reason, the cause. “My children!” she screamed for the whole world’s hearing. “My children got you, you horror, you worm out of hell!”

  Suddenly her mother’s eyes darted. Neda tried to hold her but could not. Suthinia made a quick, unnatural lunge past Neda’s shoulder, and when Neda turned she found herself alone by the city gate.

  She shook her head. Suthinia had woken herself up.

  For Neda, however, it remained the most lucid dream of her life. “Are you still able to listen?” she said aloud, thinking of her mother with her dream-vials. “If I talk to you, can you hear?”

  She started walking—her mother was right, you had to move or bad things would happen, Neda could somehow feel it in her bones. She entered by the gate and walked the upper city, past Pazel’s school, the textile mill, the humble museum closed for lack of funds.

  She told her mother about the Swarm of Night. When she spoke the name all twenty or thirty people around her fell silent and glanced upward: but nothing passed in the sky except a crow.

  Neda left the city by the same gate and started the climb back to their house. Something kept forcing her to the right, however, and as the light faded (too quick for any sunset) Neda decided she knew what it was. Something had to explain why she still carried one of their purchases.

  The barn belonged to a neighbor called Cranz. One of many who hadn’t helped her. Not that she could truly blame them: if any had tried to free a girl from the hands of the Arquali marines they would simply have been killed. She understood that now, but she hadn’t at the time. The absence of those people who had always smiled at her, of Farmer Cranz with his big square fists and his son who used to carve wooden figurines and the strapping farmhands who made eyes at her when no one was watching: it had been part of the horror of that day, Invasion Day, when she was barely seventeen.

  Neda slid open the door. There had been horses. She went forward until she found them: two old plow-pullers, gray and brown, their long tails swishing flies. Neda led them outside and well away from the barn, then stepped back inside. She walked the length of the building, tall and straight, a sfvantskor disbeliever, a new creature on the face of Alifros. A native come home.

  The last time she had passed this way they had been dragging her, screaming.

  She stood awhile looking at the hay mound, which was broad and tall and dry. She dropped her cloak and stood naked, then stepped into it, wading, until the hay reached her thighs.

  “No,” she told her mother, “my first life didn’t end with my vows. I believed that when I said it, but I was wrong. I hope you’re listening. I never did blame you.”

  She took a match from the box in her hand and struck it, and tossed it burning into the hay.

  “It ended here,” she said.

  An eager crackling began at her feet. She struck another match, and another. Nine in all, one for each of the soldiers. Thanks to her gift she could remember them quite well. She had never lain with a man before that day. Afterward it was unthinkable. The sfvantskor order with its law of total abstinence had brought her a welcome safety. But the Book also warned the faithful that to live was to hazard something, “for only the dead are safe from all harm.”

  The flames raged, tall as men. She lifted her arms above her head and dared them to touch her.

  Time accelerated, as it had been wanting to, and the barn became a torch, and all Ormael saw it blazing over the city, and even a few eyes on boats in the Straits of Simja caught the glow.

  The roof collapsed, and the walls followed, and then she walked forward naked among her people, common Ormalis come to gawk and stare, to wonder at this apparition stepping unharmed from the fire.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she told them. “I’m one of you. My name is Neda Pathkendle, and now I think I can wake up.”

  17

  At the Temple of the Wolves

  On their last day in Uláramyth the summer warmth still held.

  At least it did here, low in the crater on a sunny morning. Clover and phlox and mistflower were blooming; a dragonfly landed on Thasha’s arm. But when she raised her eyes to the mountains, she saw fresh snow on the peaks. Autumn was advancing; the Swarm was loose and growing by the day, and the Chathrand was still sailing northward, leaving them ever farther behind.

  For several days Lord Arim’s scouts had been returning to Uláramyth, and all their talk was of enemies: hrathmogs, Plazic soldiers, worse creatures they were reluctant to name. Thasha had a feeling that the path to the sea would be hacked through the bodies of many foes.

  Hercól had asked Corporal Mandric to oversee their physical readiness, and he’d been at it as only a Turach could: inspecting their limbs, the digits of their hands, the soles of their feet. He’d made them get haircuts and start the day with sprints. He’d forced them to double their meal size and sleep ten hours a night and climb the crater walls twice daily with heavy packs. Whatever lay ahead they would face it strong.

>   But Thasha had a more immediate concern. She was in the northeast quarter of Uláramyth, a mile or two from the shores of Osir Delhin. She had climbed a little ridge overlooking a forest of bamboo, which seethed in the wind like an emerald surf. From where she stood the path snaked down the ridge to a shady clearing. There on the moist grass lay Neeps and Sergeant Lunja, asleep.

  The small boy was curled like a child. Shirtless, he lay with his back to Lunja and his head on her arm. His face serene, his skin unearthly pale against her midnight black. Lunja’s other arm held him close, her half-webbed hand spread open on his chest. She was a magnificent soldier, muscled like Neda, tall as Hercól.

  Thasha had been sent to find them. She’d been warned what to expect. This was the heart of the treatment, Neeps’ only chance. To hold off the mind-plague he had to pass into nuhzat at least once. Mr. Bolutu said that only one human in a thousand had been able to enter nuhzat in the old days. The selk doctors agreed. “It was not the yearnings of the body that mattered,” one of them had explained. “Dlömic prostitutes never brought their human clients to nuhzat, however much they pleased them otherwise. Bali Adro investigations of the plague made that much very clear. Only trust could occasion the nuhzat. The deepest trust, the most intimate.”

  He’d meant love, of course. Neeps had to feel love for a dlömu. And how could anyone make that happen? Spells and potions were useless, Ramachni had told them: infatuation could be generated, and certainly lust. But the nuhzat was mysterious and very personal. It could not be induced like a reaction of the nerves. If it came at all, it came with sincere emotion, a thing no spell could force.

  Pazel had objected. “I happen to know that love can be … induced. By magic. I’ve seen it happen.”

  “You are speaking of murths,” said Ramachni, “but the divers enchanted by murth-girls are not really in love, only confused long enough for the murths to kill them.”

  Pazel had shaken his head, blushing, and Thasha had come to his aid. “He’s not talking about the divers, Ramachni. He means Klyst, the murth-girl whose spell backfired, so that she fell in love with him.”