The Night of the Swarm

by Robert V. S. Redick

  Mereldín Island had some eight thousand inhabitants, and most of them appeared to owe money to Theimat Rose, including the Imperial governor and the Templar monks. His estate sprawled over a quarter of the island; his web of trade stretched over the whole of the Narrow Sea. Those who did not fear him found him useful. For the daughters there was simply nowhere to turn.

  Nor did he soften with the years. Once he beat Yelinda for setting his evening rum on his desk without a coaster. After Nilus was born the man found the child’s eating habits revolting, saying that he did not properly chew his food. But the more Rose attempted to focus on the task the less he managed to please his father, who grew infuriated by the boy’s cowed expression and stolid, terrified chewing.

  One morning, when his son was four, the captain set a fist-sized mass of raw xhila-tree rubber in a dish in front of Nilus and told him to put it in his mouth. The boy obeyed, with some difficulty. The rubber was acrid and burned his gums. “Now,” said the captain, “you may practice chewing to your heart’s content. But it will go very badly for you, Nilus, if you dribble or spit before I give you leave.”

  He emphasized the point by placing a claw hammer on the table. Nilus began to chew, and found at once that the evil taste was mostly beneath the rubber’s surface; very soon his mouth was aflame. His father sat at the far end of the table, doing his weekly accounts. The rubber stiffened the harder Nilus bit down, but if he stopped chewing for a moment his father looked up with fire in his eyes. Nilus knew that weeping would bring greater punishment than dribbling or spitting, and so he chewed, and swallowed when he could no longer avoid it, and sat very straight in his chair.

  When the sisters noticed the boy’s distress Theimat ordered them all to the outdoor kitchen, which is where they were usually banished when he did not wish to see them. After twenty minutes the boy’s stomach began to hurt and his thoughts became wild and confused. After sixty his jaw hurt so badly that he tried to distract himself by driving a fork into his leg. Sometime thereafter he began to fight down vomit. That was when his father’s looks began to show some interest. At length the man put down his pencil, lifted the hammer, and drew near. He watched Nilus begin to choke, raised the hammer when it appeared he might spit. Nilus did not spit but tried to swallow the whole mass of rubber, and failed. He fell to the ground, the world darkening around him, and then his father took another fork and pried the sticky mass out of his throat.

  “You will henceforth confine yourself to proper etiquette,” said the captain, wiping his hands on a linen napkin and departing.

  When he was gone the middle sister burst into the chamber and carried the boy away. She alone had disobeyed Theimat and snuck back into the house. This was not her first rebellion. Indeed for over a year she had been defying him in two respects: by attempting to get pregnant by one of the farmworkers, lest he sell them off as defective childbearers;15 and by studying witchcraft with the same man’s mother, crippled and nearly blind but still famous for what went by the name of the Devil’s Calling among the island folk. Whenever Theimat was away at sea, this middle sister would make her way through the plantation to that verminous shack among the fever trees, where a nearly hairless monkey crouched in the shadows munching sugarcane, and the wind that sighed through the cracked walls and rotting floorboards spoke now and again in words. Sometimes she would bring Nilus, and ask the blind woman to speak about his future, which she learned by feeling the contours of his skull. To this day Rose could close his eyes and feel those rough hands, smell the woodsmoke and rancid butter on them, wince as they squeezed his temples.

  The middle sister learned very quickly, and became very strange. Her name was Gosmel. Three marriages and as many decades later she would become Lady Gosmeíl Pothrena Oggosk, Eighteenth Duchess of Tirsoshi.

  The day Nilus was tortured at the dinner-table, Gosmel resolved to murder Theimat Rose. She confided first in Biyatra (the Baby), the youngest sister of the three. Biyatra too wished him dead, but she was fearful by nature and demurred. And when Gosmel went to Yelinda, the eldest daughter not only refused to participate but swore to denounce them if they ever again hinted at such an act. Yelinda had played the part of “wife” in public a very long time, and as Theimat’s fortunes grew her own stature in the society of the island had increased as well. It grew awkward to beat her or terrorize her into perfect incoherence; he had even to dance with her at the Governor’s Ball. In the end Yelinda had come to believe in the lie herself, and to treat her sisters more like the impoverished cousins they were supposed to be.

  Nilus believed as well. He had long since begun to call Yelinda “Mother,” and firmly believed that he had sprung from her womb. This certainty lasted well up into his fifties, when Oggosk punctured it with her usual tact:

  “She was supposed to be your mother, wasn’t she? Because you were the firstborn, and she was the eldest. Theimat wanted things that way: orderly, shipshape. He took each of us whenever he liked, but he intended to dispose of us in order of age. Therefore Yelinda had a job to do. Therefore she’s your mother.”

  “But he was there, Oggosk,” Rose had protested. “You all were.”

  “Pah. Your father left on a sea voyage before the pregnancy was two months old, and barely made it home by your first birthday. He never saw anyone’s belly grow fat, except his own. As for the rest of us, we let the story stand. If Theimat believed one of us had coughed up a son, out of order—well, poor Yelinda would have been shown up as useless, and sold in a fortnight.”

  “Then who was it, damn you? Which of you is my mother?”

  Oggosk had cackled. “All of us. None of us. You’ll never find out from me.”

  Whether or not Yelinda was truly Nilus’ mother, she had grown obsessed with being his father’s wife, and would never agree to murder. The standoff lasted for years. In that time Gosmel’s powers as a witch increased. Very early she learned to hoard that power, rarely casting so much as a spell to keep the milk from turning. All the while, however, she was plotting another end for Theimat Rose.

  By the time Nilus was ten, Gosmel was almost ready to act on her plan. Then a day came when Theimat raped the bride-to-be of a peasant who worked his land. The captain pronounced himself within his rights, claiming that the (illiterate) man had signed an agreement stating that his debts could be collected in a variety of forms, one of them being carnal. Biyatra had been friendly with the girl, and that evening she herself went to the barn for rat poison. Her courage began to desert her before she reached the house again, but Gosmel was ready for that. “I’ll do it,” she said, taking the jar of lethal powder. “Just keep Yelinda out of the way.”

  But the Baby failed even in this. She did send for her eldest sister at the appropriate time, but when confronted by Yelinda she froze in terror at her own complicity, and could not make conversation or explain why she had called. Yelinda presently laughed and went her way—which happened to be to the liquor cabinet in the den. She poured Theimat’s evening cup of rum and took it to him in the library. Then, exercising the privilege of a wife, she returned to the den and poured a second glass for herself. Moments later Gosmel heard the violent choking sounds she had wanted to hear—but from two chambers, and two throats. She ran screaming for the den, and arrived just in time to watch Yelinda die with foamy spittle on her lips.

  It was at this point that Nilus himself heard the noises and raced down the stairs in his pajamas. His first sight was his father, in the hall outside the library, lying in an odd position with a hand on his throat. Frightened by this apparition, he turned away from the corpse and ran toward the other voices in the den. There lay his dead aunt Yelinda, better known to him simply as Mother. Over her stood Aunt Gosmel, howling with tears. Then Biyatra appeared in the doorway behind Nilus, and Gosmel pointed at her and screamed that she had killed their sister.

  “I?” shot back the Baby. “You bloody-minded witch! The only murderer in this house is you!”

  Aunt Gosmel’s face had twisted in a
spasm of hate. She raised her hand as though gathering some force, and then flung it at Biyatra, and with it the curse she had saved six years for their tormentor.

  Rose laid the portrait flat. He heard Oggosk’s screaming long before she reached his outer door. There was little hope that the steward would turn her aside, and he did not. The greater surprise was that Fiffengurt and the girl Marila entered with her. No surprise at all of course was the red animal that snuck in with them: Sniraga, whose name meant “cowardly.” Sniraga, who had once been Biyatra, the Baby. Who had become a cat three feet away from him, the worst fright so far in the life of a child who had already suffered fears aplenty. Who was first a sister, then a pet to this unbearable banshee of a woman standing before his desk and screaming ixchel, ixchel, of all absurdities. This repugnant crone who was as likely to be his mother as the one she had cursed, or the one they poisoned alongside his father.

  “I am not listening to you, Oggosk,” he said wearily.

  “You mucking well should! You think their claim is so fantastic, so impossible?”

  “I think nothing one way or the other.”

  “It fits, Nilus, can’t you see? They came aboard for a reason. They’re not ignorant, and they don’t ride any ship without a purpose. I told them—Glaya, I ordered this ugly swamp-rat of a girl to bring me the book! Stath Bálfyr! It’s certain to be in the thirteenth Polylex! We needn’t ever have gotten ourselves into this unforgivable fix! And your afflicted quartermaster has kept the secret for months!”

  “I am the one who is afflicted.”

  “Hang them, Nilus! Give them to Ott!”

  “Snakes and devils, woman, can’t you be quiet!”

  Oggosk struck the desk with her walking stick. The captain shot to his feet and leaned toward her, and the bellowing began to look dangerous. Fiffengurt and Marila backed away.

  Then the adversaries stopped together, gaping.

  “What did you say, hag?”

  “I said that anyone who sets foot on shore will be killed. By crawlies, or some crawly trap. What did you say?”

  “That I have the plague,” said Rose. “Chadfallow has confirmed the symptoms. In a matter of weeks my mind will be gone.”

  Oggosk’s screams began again, but they were short-lived. She collapsed, and the two men carried her to Rose’s bed, while Marila ran for Chadfallow.

  The creature in the cell was still looking at Felthrup, still waiting. Its head was round and pudgy as a newborn baby’s, and from the fat cheeks two small, deep-set eyes twinkled in sudden flashes of gold. Large ears like withered yams stuck out from its head. The creature wore nothing but a winding-cloth belted at the waist and tossed over one shoulder: that and many rings with enormous, multicolored stones on its pudgy fingers. The body too was fat, but powerful, like some wrestler who has endlessly indulged. But below its knees the creature’s legs became those of a monstrous bird, and ended in talons that rasped against the floorboards. Upon its back a pair of great black wings lay folded.

  “You are a demon,” said Felthrup.

  “And what is a demon, pray?”

  Felthrup said nothing. More than ever he wished to run, to leap out among the friendly chickens and ducks and wattle-swans, to slam the Green Door and never look for it again. The creature smiled. “Come here, and I shall tell you how you will die.”

  “No, thank you,” said Felthrup.

  “Your ship may well be sunk here at Stath Bálfyr, and all of you drowned or murdered. If that does not come to pass you must either sail south into the death-throes of Bali Adro and the clutches of the White Raven, whom you call Macadra. Or you must continue north into the Red Storm, and be hurled into the future.”

  “But the storm is weak,” said Felthrup.

  “Oh, very weak, compared with the maelstrom it was,” said the creature. “But you are forgetting something far more powerful. You are forgetting the Swarm of Night. I cannot forget it, however. I was here when last it burst into Alifros. I saw it, fled from it, barely outraced it with my lungs bursting and my wings so strained I feared they would be torn from my back. That was at the height of a war more terrible than you can imagine, and the Swarm had grown monstrous, bloated with death. Today it is still an infant, no larger than the Chathrand. If you had lingered in the open sea another day or two you would have seen it.”

  “Again?”

  “It is prowling along the edge of the Red Storm,” said the creature. “There is more killing in the Northern world than the Southern, currently, and like a moth the Swarm flies to the brightest candle. But it cannot yet cross the Storm without great harm to itself. And so it prowls, impatient, waiting for a gap to open. When that happens it will speed to the battlefields of the North, and feed, and grow enormous, blotting out the sun, and plunging the world beneath it into a perpetual, starless night. There will be no stopping it then.”

  “There is no stopping it at all, unless we get rid of the Nilstone!” wailed Felthrup, throwing himself on the ground. His fear of the creature was subsiding as he thought of the greater doom facing them all. “We do not even have the Stone, and if we did we should not know what to do with it, and Macadra is using all that remains of her Empire’s might to find it. She may already have found it. She may have killed Lady Thasha and Pazel and all my friends! What do you say to that, you lying thing? What hope can you possibly give me?”

  “The only worthwhile kind,” said the creature. “The kind that comes with knowledge. And here is some knowledge I will give you for nothing, as a token of my good faith. Macadra does not have the Stone. Your beloved Erithusmé has it—or someone she travels with.”

  “My Erithusmé?”

  “You call her Thasha Isiq.”

  Felthrup sat up slowly, blinking. “Thasha is a girl of seventeen years.”

  “She is a mage of twenty centuries. The girl is a mere façade, like the one I showed you. But it is true that she has lost her powers. Otherwise she surely would have used the Nilstone, while she and it were still aboard.”

  “How is it you know of Thasha’s deeds? How do you know my name, and which island we have reached, and so much else?”

  The creature gazed at him for a moment. Then he looked up, sweeping his golden eyes across the ceiling, and at the same time spreading his corpulent arms. The lamp darkened, but the walls grew bright—and then, with a brief shimmer, they became glass. Felthrup crouched in fear and astonishment: the floor beneath him was transparent, and the walls of the chamber, and all the walls beyond as well. The Chathrand surrounded them, but it was a Chathrand of flawless crystal. He could see through deck after deck, right up to the topdeck and the glass spiderwebs of the rigging, the gleaming spires of the masts. He could look down all the way to the hold, and gaze through the crystal cargo and ballast into the waters of the bay. Only the people remained unchanged. He could see them in their hundreds, figures displayed in a jeweler’s shop: crossing invisible floors, climbing transparent ladderways, lifting glass spoons to their mouths in the dining hall.

  The creature lowered his hands. The vision was gone. “You are correct, Felthrup Stargraven. I am a demon, though maukslar is a fairer term. And although I am a prisoner here, I am not helpless. Indeed I have powers that could be of great use to you.”

  “I know what comes of that sort of help,” said Felthrup.

  “No, you know only what comes of helping sorcerers, though of course you never meant to help Arunis. But consider what will come of refusing help, when it is offered: of standing on purity to the bitterest, bleak end. Not only death. Not only a lost world—and what a jewel is Alifros yet, despite the wounds she has suffered—not just these, I say, but the knowledge that you might have acted, but chose fear instead.”

  “Was it Erithusmé who imprisoned you?” asked Felthrup.

  The demon held very still. “Some things you will not learn for nothing,” he said.

  “Can you strike others from that cell? If I turned to go, could you stop me?”

  No ans
wer. The creature was no longer smiling, but his eyes still twinkled gold.

  “If I were to bring you an egg from the chicken coop and roll it through the bars, could you make it float in the air?”

  “I could make it float, or hatch, or turn to silver, or glow like the sun. But none of those would help you.”

  “How would you help us, then?”

  “Free me from this cage, and I will tell you where the Nilstone must be taken, if you would expel it from Alifros.”

  “But we do not have the Stone. Can you bring it to us across the seas?”

  “Certainly I could. Let me out and I will fetch it.”

  “Along with all our friends?”

  The demon laughed. “What do you imagine, rat? That I will fly here all the way from the Efaroc Peninsula with that party dangling beneath me in a blanket? No, you must finish the task without them. Hold them in your memory, but go on while you still may.”

  “So that is your counsel,” said Felthrup. “To trust you, and abandon my friends.”

  The demon shook his head. “You abandoned them when you sailed from Masalym,” he said. “My counsel is that you face the truth. You are outmatched. Upon this ship you are a tiny minority, protected from execution by the whim of that lunatic Rose. You need new allies, for the old will not be returning.”

  “Liar!” cried the rat. “You tell me that Thasha lives, that they have recovered the Stone from Arunis, and that after this miracle, a smaller one cannot be achieved? I will not abandon them! I will not set you free to steal it from them! I have sound reason to doubt you and none at all to give you my trust! I do not even know your name!”

  Resolved this time, he raced away down the passage. He could almost feel the glittering eyes upon the back of his head. At the threshold he nudged the Green Door open and smelled the blessed, natural stink from the coops. Then the demon shouted behind him:

  “Tulor.”