The Night of the Swarm

by Robert V. S. Redick

  It came. The hrathmogs were returning, now that the ogress was slain. The party outnumbered them, but the creatures were tall and ox-strong, and they were better with both axes and teeth than they had been with their bows. Still Pazel felt no fear. And as he attacked he felt the rage and grief diminish also. There was no room for them; in his mind there could only be deeds. He danced through axes, judging, voracious, calm, and then he feinted left and whirled about to the right beneath an axe-blow and cut a hrathmog’s throat to the bone.

  He did not kill again that day, although he helped Corporal Mandric do so, distracting one of the creatures with his charge long enough for the Turach to drive his blade through the creature’s back. Pazel was not tired, he was not cold. Through his mind all the practice and the forms and the earlier battles of the voyage danced like lightning, and he followed without a conscious thought. Hercól had said it: In the battle you make choices; when it is over you find out what they were.

  A time came at last when there were no more hrathmogs to kill. Pazel turned in a circle. A selk was hacking the last of the creatures to the ground. One dlömic soldier lay twitching feebly. Another selk had died upon a heap of snow, an axe still buried in his chest.

  Then Pazel saw Thaulinin.

  The selk leader was near the edge of the clearing; the two remaining athymars had him in their teeth. One dog had sunk its fangs into his thigh, the other his opposite forearm. Behind them, the dlömic commander stood with his back to a tree and his ghost-knife pointing skyward. Thaulinin was awake but not resisting. Within two yards of him, Valgrif lay still.

  Lunja was racing to Thaulinin’s aid, and Hercól was not far behind. Pazel sprinted after them, but even as he ran he saw Lunja fall forward, helpless and stunned. Hercól tried to stop as well, but it was too late: he dropped beside Lunja and lay still.

  Pazel skidded to a halt. All three warriors had rushed into a trap, a spell-field created by the Plazic Blade. Valgrif was another victim: Pazel saw now that the wolf was awake.

  “Disarm!” screamed the commander. “Throw your weapons into the gorge, or I will kill him here and now!”

  “You muckin’ bastard!” cried Mandric. “We’ll chuck you over that cliff, one little piece at a time.”

  The dlömu shouted a word of command. At once the dogs released Thaulinin’s limbs and pounced on his unguarded face and throat. Pazel closed his eyes—too late; he had seen it and could not unsee. He turned away and vomited. Thaulinin was dead.

  When he looked again the dogs were standing over Lunja. The dlömic commander pointed at the gorge. “Every last weapon!” he shouted. “Or do you wish her to die next?”

  There were no taunts this time. Thasha had thrown her arms around Neeps, who was staring at Lunja like a man deranged. Everyone was still. Pazel heard the distant cry of some mountain bird. He noted with a stab of disappointment that Prince Olik had fled somewhere; indeed he realized now that the monarch had skipped the fight altogether.

  The dlömic leader, calmer suddenly, turned them a ghastly smile.

  “I will not be counting to three,” he said.

  Deep inside, Pazel felt his decision: the decision he would understand only when it was over; when everyone who was going to die had died. He walked to the cliff and threw his sword into the depths. Then he went to Bolutu and took his sword, and asked for his backpack as well.

  Bolutu shed his pack, dumbfounded. Pazel tried to lift it from the ground, and failed. The pack was suddenly unnaturally heavy. Since the fight with the hrathmogs began Pazel had thought his strength inexhaustible, but it was deserting him quickly.

  Not yet, he told himself. But he had to settle for dragging the backpack to the cliff.

  When he was as close as he dared, he tossed Bolutu’s sword over the edge. The commander watched him, increasingly confused. “Why is the boy the only one who obeys? You wish the dogs to kill her? Very well, watch them, if you have the stomach for it.”

  With great difficulty Pazel lifted the pack from the ground. “All the weapons, Commander?” he said.

  “All of them! Is your whole company deaf?”

  Pazel heaved the pack over the cliff.

  “What did you have in there, boy? Stones?”

  Pazel gazed at him, winded. “Just one,” he said.

  The commander froze. A look of terror came over his face. He sprinted for the bridge and dashed up the stairs, bounding onto the corpse of the ogress. Looking down into the chasm, he lowered his knife and shouted: “Valixra!”

  The magic was evidently something unpracticed, for he tried again and again, stabbing at the abyss and screaming “Valixra! Eidic! Rise, rise!”

  At last he held still, and it appeared to Pazel that a painful energy was coursing through him. Pazel sighed and turned his back, staggering away from the cliff. He was feeling every wound now. At least every wound to the body.

  The commander was shaking. His free hand made a grasping motion at the air. Then his eyes lit with triumph. Seconds later Bolutu’s pack shot past the clearing and high into the air. The commander guided it with the point of his blade, in a long descending arc toward the clearing, where it landed with a resounding boom.

  Then Pazel hurled the axe.

  The hrathmog weapon was long for him, and very heavy, but he had swung it like a mallet, both hands over his head. It flew straight, and struck the commander squarely in the chest. The Plazic Knife flew from his hand, and the commander fell backward off the bridge, never crying out, and was gone.

  Snarling erupted behind him: the paralysis spell had broken. Lunja had stabbed the athymar nearest her face, and the others attacked it from the sides. The last dog turned and fled, and Valgrif, his face already scarlet, pursued it into the trees.

  Pazel knelt in the bloodied snow. The survivors crowded to him, praising him; Mandric called him a genius, but Neeps and Thasha just held his arms and said nothing, and Pazel was grateful for that. No hiding behind the danger now. The real pain was just beginning.

  But there are kind fates as well as cruel in Alifros. Even as his friends embraced him, a shout came from the direction of the chasm. It was Olik. He was on the footbridge beneath the main structure, one hand braced against the chute above him, and the other holding a body to his chest.

  “Help me, damn you all!”

  It was Neda. She was drenched, and her skin was a ghastly blue, and her open eyes did not see them. But she was breathing, and in her mouth they found the shattered remains of a fire beetle. And when ten minutes later a fire blazed (dry wood in the tower, matches on their foes) she woke and asked for Cayer Vispek, and then remembered, and broke into loud, un-sfvantskor-like sobs.

  “My coat snagged on the ice,” she told Pazel in their mother tongue, when she could speak again. “I was hanging there in the falling water. He came through and caught one of the struts, but the force of it dislocated his arm. He was bleeding too, but with his good arm he pulled me out of the water and onto the footbridge. Then—” She put a hand to her lips. She could not go on.

  “He kissed you?” said Pazel.

  “No. Yes.” Neda stared helplessly at her brother. “He gave me his fire beetle. He pulled it from his coat pocket with his teeth. I tried to share it with him, but he shut his mouth and turned away. Then he held me against him, gave me all the warmth he had left in his body. Why would he do that, Pazel? For a damned soul? I was dead to him, wasn’t I? Wasn’t I?”

  Cayer Vispek’s body remained beneath the Water Bridge, and with great care they extracted it and brought it to solid ground. An hour later Valgrif emerged limping from the forest. He had chased the dog far across Urakán, but slain it at last, then stanched his bleeding foot in the snow. On the way back he had found Ensyl and Myett upon the trail. Neither woman was scratched. They had jumped the eagle together, and killed it with their swords, and when it had crashed into the pines they had leaped together and fallen through a lattice of needles and thin branches, which had slowed them so gradually that they had a
ctually come to rest a yard above the earth. They had dropped lightly to their feet, and Myett had sheathed her sword and remarked how good it was to be alive.

  19

  Forgotten Prisoners

  1 Fuinar 942

  289th day from Etherhorde

  Captain Rose looked at the body of the man he had killed.

  Darius Plapp was hanging by a rope strung over the main yard. There was a fair swell this morning: the body swung like a pendulum, and the cloud of flies about him kept getting left behind.

  “Fetch a boathook, Mr. Uskins,” Rose said to the first mate, who was loitering behind him.

  “Oppo, sir. Justice is done.”

  As he fell, Darius Plapp had jammed his fingers into the noose. The deed ran contrary to Rose’s frank advice to the man. It had delayed his death, of course, but only prolonged his suffering thereby. The hands were still there, tucked under the rope, as though Plapp were trying to button his collar. His mouth was wide open, as it had been during his final week of life, tirelessly proclaiming his innocence in the death of Kruno Burnscove.

  The hapless fool. As though his fate had hinged on the question of innocence or guilt. All that had mattered here was prejudice, the story the crew could bring itself to believe. That, and the swift elimination of any possible challenge to Rose himself. As rivals, the ganglords had neutralized each other. Alone, either one could have grown into a threat.

  Uskins returned with the boathook, and Rose fished the hanged man near. Then he drew his sword with his free hand and raised it high. “Thus do we bury murderers and rebels,” he shouted to the tense little crowd. “No prayers, no ceremony for a man who wished evil on us all.”

  The rope parted at the first swing, and one more Etherhorder departed the Chathrand, far from home.

  “Have this line down from the yardarm, Uskins.”

  “I shall do it with my own hands, sir,” said the first mate.

  Rose turned and looked at him squarely, for the first time in a week. Uskins stood contrite, calm, well groomed. He had not looked so well since Sorrophran, before his conflict with Pazel Pathkendle brought about his first disgrace.

  Rose detested Uskins, counterfeit seaman and transparent bootlicker that he was. But what to make of this picture of health? Chadfallow could not explain it, though he literally followed Uskins about with a notebook, hoping for some clue, any clue, to help him fight the plague. Since their escape from the Behemoth nine men and two women had succumbed.

  Eleven tol-chenni lunatics, eleven reasons for panic and revolt. The brig was half full of gibbering ape-men, and every time a messenger approached, the captain feared that someone else had succumbed.

  Uskins might just hold the key to their survival; therefore Uskins would be tolerated.

  “Stay out of the rigging,” he said, turning his back on the man. “Just have the mucking thing removed. Tell Fiffengurt to meet me portside. And send a boy with my telescope.”

  Rose crossed the ship to the portside rail. When the telescope came he studied the island again. Dark, lush, horsehead-shaped. Some highlands, some sand, and plenty of fresh water giving life to those trees. More than that he did not know, although they had been in the island’s orbit for two days: it was extraordinarily difficult to approach. On its southern flank there were reefs within reefs; on the north there were offshore rocks, and rollers that began in shallows eight miles out.

  The waves: Rose could hear the long thunder of their breaking even here, twenty miles away. That sound told Rose everything he needed to know. The waves were monsters. Beyond those rocks there were no more islands—only the endless, pitiless Ruling Sea, all the way home to Arqual, that fading memory, that dream. Stath Bálfyr marked the end of the South.

  There was but one possible landing: a bay on the eastern side. From a distance it appeared promising. The mouth of the bay might be rather narrow, but the color suggested depth enough, at least along the southern cliffs. And once inside they could tack close to the south shore, and be hidden from the sea while the smaller craft went ashore. They could also put a lookout on the clifftops, where the view would be immense and unobstructed. If a vessel approached from almost any direction, save out of the Ruling Sea itself, they would have a minimum of eight hours’ warning.

  All very straightforward. Yet something made Rose hesitate to send the Chathrand into that bay. He ordered a longitudinal run along the island’s southern shore, with every telescope in their possession trained on the island. The survey yielded few surprises. The woods were dense. The birds were many. A small shipwreck on a western beach might have been any two-master out of Bali Adro or Karysk or some other land; it was clearly ancient. There were no other signs of visitation.

  Sandor Ott had been enraged by the delay, which came to nearly twenty hours. But when they at last returned to the mouth of the bay and Rose ordered a second, closer pass, the spymaster exploded. He barged into Rose’s quarters without knocking, and even appeared on the verge of lifting a hand against him, a thing that for all his bluster and threats he had never done.

  “It is Stath Bálfyr, Rose!” Ott roared. “The location is precisely as we expected, and Prince Olik confirmed. The shape of the bay is perfect. We have arrived. What is there to do but plot the course and set sail?”

  Idiotic question. They would have to land, if only to cut silage for the animals and refill their water casks. And they needed to take a compass ashore to calibrate the binnacles,13 a task they had put off far too long.

  “Binnacles be damned!” cried Ott. “You’re making excuses. You’re conspiring with Chadfallow and your treasonous quartermaster to keep us here as long as possible.”

  Rose had taken offense. He could delay perfectly well without the aid of any man.

  “We found this island as much by chart and dead reckoning as by the compass,” he had conceded to explain (how his father would have raged: explanations, to a non-sailor and a spy!). “But there are neither charts nor landmarks on the Ruling Sea. If something we took on in Masalym has altered the pull of the compass needle by a mere half degree we could arrive many hundreds of miles off-course—in the ice of the Nelu Gila, for example, or in the center of the Mzithrini naval exclusion zone. That would complicate your plans for the Shaggat rather more than an extra day or two of preparations.”

  Ott had been right on a few counts, however. The island was Stath Bálfyr, and Rose did wish to delay. But it would never do to admit to that wish, to Ott or anyone else aboard. For even if the spymaster were blind to it, the fact remained that the Chathrand was more imperiled now than when the Behemoth attacked.

  The unthinkable had happened: both ganglords dead within a fortnight. Rose had played his only card in hanging Darius Plapp. Although they did not realize it yet, the gesture marked the end of his control of either gang. They could run riot, slaughter each other, take revenge for generations of bloodshed on other vessels, on this vessel, on the Etherhorde waterfront. And then there was the plague, from which no one could deliver them, and the fear that their enemies might yet catch up. The one thing that still could generate hope and cooperation was the prospect of a journey home. If the idea ever took hold that Rose was delaying that journey, not only his captaincy but his very life would be in danger.

  Rose jumped. Sniraga was rubbing at his ankles. He bellowed at her, and the cat shot a few yards away and began to lick. That sound. How he hated it. Aloud, to no one, certainly not to the cat, he said, “Where the devil is Mr. Fiffengurt?”

  But of course the cat had nothing to do with the quartermaster. Her job was to escort the rodent, Felthrup, who even now was sidling up to Rose.

  “A delightful morning to you, Captain,” he said, “and if I may, the Lady Oggosk entreats you to call on her at your earliest convenience.”

  “Call on her? In her cabin?”

  “She begs leave to inform you that she is hoping for a family communiqué.”

  The rat was often nervous in his presence. Rose had no idea why, bu
t it upset him like anything unreasonable. “Speak plainly or be gone,” he said.

  The rat squirmed. “She is pregnant—”

  “You’re deranged.”

  “Pregnant with anticipation, sir. Concerning the aforementioned epistle.”

  Rose’s hands became fists. “I still have no idea what you are saying, and I forbid you to say it again. We are about to enter the port of Stath Bálfyr. Tell Oggosk I am unavailable before this evening, six bells at the earliest.”

  “As you please, Captain. It is curious, however, that Lady Oggosk could be so grossly mistaken.”

  “Mistaken?”

  “She was certain you would take interest in this … how shall I put it … this necropaternal missive. But I shall not speak, I shall not! For it’s quite likely that I should fail to capture the ardor with which the duchess spoke. The exigency, in a word. Yes, the exigency.”

  “I would like to stomp you flat,” said Rose.

  Felthrup discovered an urgent need to be elsewhere. Rose watched him flee, thinking: necropaternal missive. A letter. From his father. Another lashing from beyond the grave.

  “Fiffengurt!” he bellowed. “By the black Pits, where can the man be hiding?”

  In fact the quartermaster stood just a yard to his left, waiting to be recognized. By his doleful expression Rose knew he brought bad news. “What has happened?” he demanded. “Tell me at once!”

  Fiffengurt took a slip of paper from his vest pocket and passed it to the captain. Upon it were written three names. Two were sailors, Burnscove Boys. The third was a tarboy by the name of Durst. From the Kepperies, like Rose himself. He knew of that family, the Dursts. Utter indigents, for generations. Rose’s father had owned the land where they built their shanties.

  “The men were strangled,” muttered Fiffengurt under his breath. “The lad’s still with us … in a manner of speaking.”