The Night of the Swarm

by Robert V. S. Redick

  Like the marriage itself, those departures were for show. Her tiny army, her fetal court: apparently they thought quite a lot about the old woman’s need for a mate. “They must think us conjugal,” Maisa had told him, that first evening in the fens. “They must never for an instant fancy that we might be divided. Be ready to perform, Isiq. A show of love inspires men like nothing else.”

  But they were not in love, and they never removed more than a coat or shawl in each other’s presence, and within their chambers they had separate bedrooms, always.

  “Sleep with no one for half a year,” the Empress had said, “and then confine yourself to servants until the war is won. And see that they’re gone before daybreak, always. That’s family tradition.”

  His knee was aching. Suthinia helped him down the stairs onto the docks.

  Now, in a fit of recklessness, Isiq shared those words with Suthinia. She gaped at him, then stopped to lean against a wall, shaking with silent laughter. “What’s so blary amusing?” he’d demanded. But Suthinia just shook her head, and dried the tears before they wet her veil.

  That afternoon she slipped away into the city, alone. Maisa raged, and Isiq too was fearful: Suthinia’s disguise was hardly foolproof. But she returned before nightfall, and bowed her head while Maisa shouted that no one in her company was to run off like a wayward child. When Isiq caught up with her on the deck of the Nighthawk she told him merely that she had visited her old house above the city, and that the plum trees were budding in the snow.

  He heard the misery in her voice. What had she found there? he wondered. A ruin, a burned-out shell of the house she called the Orch’dury? It was, after all, where her happiest years of exile had been spent. The years when exile had become belonging, when lead had transmuted into gold awhile, for this lonely woman from across the Ruling Sea.

  Suthinia had looked him up and down. “You’re exhausted,” she said. He rubbed his face, wondering why she had to state the obvious.

  “I defied your Empress today,” she said. “If you wish to defy her too I can meet you below. It would be an act of the body only, not an act of love. You know my limits.”

  “But you do not know mine,” he snapped. “Out of the question.”

  To imagine touching her when she did not want it. A kind of charity. Not in this lifetime, witch. But to his surprise he saw her eyes were moist. She was nodding, head lowered, accepting his rebuke. “I meant no insult, Eberzam,” she said.

  What did it mean to befriend a woman? Could he ever hope to understand?

  Suddenly she looked up at him, challenge in her gaze. “Is this lunacy? Is Arqual going to massacre us, and everyone who fights at our side? Don’t tell me what you say to the men. Tell me the blary truth.”

  Now he was the one who had to look away. “We’re vulnerable,” he said. “By my count we have twenty-eight ships, including Maisa’s hidden half dozen. Arqual has five hundred.”

  “And they’ll chase us.”

  “Pitfire, they’ll live for nothing else. They’ll pull ships in from the Rekere, they’ll dispatch forces that would have sailed on the Mzithrin. And they’ll never quit while a single boat lofts Maisa’s flag.”

  “She has a plan, though? And alliances? All those dignitaries she smuggled into the Fens throughout the years? Some of them will help us, won’t they?” When Isiq said nothing, Suthinia leaned closer, her face suddenly alarmed. “Hasn’t she confided in you yet? Pitfire, you’re her mucking husband!”

  “Lower your voice,” he growled. And of course she’s confided in me, witch. But if she hasn’t told you, what in Alifros makes you think I’d dare?

  “It would be safer to disperse,” he said, just to fill the silence. “Make them struggle to guess where our commanders are. To say nothing of Maisa herself. But if we disperse it may be impossible to regroup.”

  “And if we don’t?”

  “They may box us in—sometime, somewhere—and crush us with a single, massive blow. It’s as I said before: nip and run, nip and run, forever.”

  “Forever?”

  “Are you deaf, woman? Those were my words.”

  She turned on her heel, leaving him alone on the forecastle. Angry at her for nothing. For making him face the truth.

  Isiq was shaking. Across the bay Ormael glowed in the red light of dusk. Some will abandon him and join us. Most will not. Freedom had returned to the city under the shadow of a second death. He turned away. The deck was in shadow; Suthinia was gone. Darkness had crept up behind him like a cutthroat. Darkness was coming for them all.

  But hours later Empress Maisa asked permission (permission!) to set foot on the sovereign territory of Ormael, and when it was granted she took Isiq and Suthinia with her and went ashore. She left her guards at the docks, over the sputtering objections of Sergeant Bachari, and walked out into the throng unguarded, holding the elbows of her admiral-husband and her witch. The crowd swallowed them. It surged and grumbled, stinking of blood and alcohol and sweat. There were some hisses, no cheers. Maisa plowed forward like a soldier through a swamp.

  She took a cup of plum wine in a waterfront tavern, for that is Ormael’s drink; and dabbed a little on her forehead, and her ankle above her satin shoe, for that (who had told her? Suthinia?) was the region’s beloved pagan prayer: Let this sweetness anoint me, head to foot; let me age not as vinegar but as wine.

  Word of Maisa’s gesture rippled out from the tavern into the growing throng. Then she asked which neighborhood was the roughest in the city. When they replied that it was surely Tanners’ Row, Maisa set out for it afoot. Laughing and amazed, the crowd moved with her. Block by block Isiq watched it grow, fast as word and feet could travel, until it seemed there could hardly be anyone in Ormael who was not making for the Row.

  The squalor here was frightful. Blocks of rubble, homes built of scrap. Children watching from broken windows, thinner than castaways. Ashamed of what the Empress was seeing, the crowd kicked garbage out of her path, broomed away puddles of filth that nonetheless rushed back and soaked her shoes. Isiq looked at Suthinia, who walked a pace behind Maisa. There was fear in her eyes.

  When they reached the poorest, shabbiest street corner, Maisa asked for a platform. A crate was produced from somewhere, and she let herself be helped atop it. When she was certain she had her balance, she gazed around sadly and shook her head.

  “Tomorrow it will be six years,” she said suddenly, in a voice that shocked them with its power. “Six years that you have lived under the boot of the Usurper. You know what has happened to Ormael in that time. Slavery for some of you, starvation for others. A lean, bare, scraping survival for the lucky ones. Your wine stolen, your fisheries plundered, your shops strangled for want of goods. In just six years. Now here’s an ugly thought: what will it be like in sixty?”

  Then she looked over the mob and declared that if anyone thought Ormael would gain more by her death than by the war she had declared on the Usurper, that man should strike her dead. Here. Tonight. A chance to do what was right for your homeland, she shouted, taunting them. Perhaps the best chance you’ll have.

  The throng shifted nervously. Isiq gazed out at the harbor. The woman was mad to provoke them; she didn’t know the depth of their pain. He experienced a frigid stab of premonition: not fear, but awareness that this moment, like that one on the deck of the Nighthawk, was a fulcrum. They might well kill her, and thrust all Alifros onto a trail of blood and ashes. But if they did not: what new lands, what strange vistas would open before them, sweeping away into the future from this place of despair?

  The silence deepened. The city of Ormael stood transfixed, a single mind contemplating an old, gray woman on a crate. Finally, slowly, Maisa raised her arm, as if to grasp a piece of the night. Her voice rang out in the darkness like a siren’s call.

  “Ormael does not choose to slay me, because Ormael is rightly named. The people of the Womb of Morning cannot be kept forever cowering in the dark. I will have my throne. I will see a world whe
re thieves and murderers are brought to heel—and you, and this night, will never in a thousand years be forgotten.”

  By the next morning, her forces from the mountains had doubled in size, and there were more volunteers ready to join the rebel fleet than boats to carry them.

  16. A low standard of proof to be sure. In fact Darabik called for cease-fire after cease-fire during the second incursion, and the warring fleets spent more time studying one another through telescopes than pressing the attack. For the troops, who had faced horrors in the first incursion, this restraint may have cemented his popularity. —EDITOR

  21

  Out of the High Country

  12 Halar 942

  The soil of Mount Urakán was frozen hard as oak; the travelers could not bury their dead. They took the bodies to a level place south of the Water Bridge, and there built rock cairns over Cayer Vispek, Thaulinin, and the three other fallen selk.

  Before she covered her master’s face, Neda set her finger in the blood that still oozed from his forehead, then dabbed the finger with her tongue. Pazel stood near her, helpless to ease her pain. If Vispek had died at home, there would have been a cup of milk in which to mix that drop of blood, and any Mzithrini present would have tasted it.

  A hand on his arm: Hercól. The swordsman beckoned, then crouched beside Neda, who looked up astonished. Hercól pressed his thumb to the bleeding spot on Vispek’s forehead, then licked his thumb clean. He glanced at Pazel expectantly.

  Pazel made himself do it. He was disgusted, but then it came to him that he was honoring the man who had given him back his sister, and gratitude welled up in him anew. For this the Arqualis called them savages, he thought. For this the Arqualis said they should be killed. Pazel looked up to find that Thasha and Neeps had joined them. Without hesitation they tasted Vispek’s blood, and Neda said calmly that she would die for any of them, and then they rose and finished building the cairn.

  At the cliffside, Bolutu knelt and said a prayer to Lord Rin for the safekeeping of his friend Big Skip Sunderling, and the selk sang for the comrade that the maukslar had slain. Pazel looked down into the gorge a last time. Ramachni, what’s happened to you? It had been hours since he took owl-form and went in pursuit of the maukslar. Had he slain the demon, or been slain? Had he prevented the creature from sounding the alarm?

  Thasha and Hercól were looking at the body of the ogress, still lying in the aqueduct’s flowing water.

  “She was a miserable creature,” Thasha said. “You could see it in her eyes.”

  “Nothing but pain has ever issued from the Thrandaal,” said one of the selk. “But the ogres had a hand in their own misery. I have heard it said that their leaders found fear and murder so useful in conquest that they came to think of little else, and at last fell into a strange worship of pain, even inflicting it on themselves. In time this practice dulled their senses and their minds, until they were left with nothing but an impulse to do harm, and a few gray memories of elder times.”

  “Let us try to move the body,” said Prince Olik. “It is too foul a thing to leave rotting in the aqueduct.”

  Working together, the six humans, three dlömu and four selk just managed to heave the vast corpse onto the rim of the bridge, where it balanced for a moment before toppling into the gorge. As it fell, the cruel iron crown slipped from the creature’s head and caught upon a jagged spire thirty feet below, where it hung like a sinister wreath.

  “There’s a message for the sorceress, when next she sends her creatures here,” said Lunja.

  “Yes,” said Hercól, “but we must be far away before she does. If Ramachni prevailed against the maukslar we may yet be undetected, but other enemies will be waiting for these dead ones to report, and sooner or later their silence will be noticed.”

  He turned to the four selk. “Which of you will guide us now? For to my eyes the mountains are still a labyrinth, and the sea is still far off.”

  One of the selk, darker-haired than his comrades, shook his head. “It is not so far off now. But Thaulinin knew the roads best, and Tomid, whom the ogress killed, was second to him in that lore. I myself have been as far as the Weeping Glen, but that was centuries ago in my youth. All the same we may set out: there is but one trail that leads away from the Parsua.”

  They rose and pulled their equipment together; Pazel and Bolutu armed themselves with the swords of the fallen. Then they turned their backs on the Water Bridge and started west, following the narrow path among the trees.

  The sun blazed fiercely on the white mass of Urakán, rising above them like a great blunt horn. The cold was retreating; drops of meltwater glistened on the pine needles.

  “I hate to mention this,” said Neeps, “but we’ve lost our tent. Big Skip was carrying it.”

  The dark-haired selk turned and looked at Neeps with concern. “In that case we should make for the Urakán Caverns,” he said. “There are supplies hidden in their depths, and we need only turn aside for a few miles to reach them.”

  “Any detour worries me now,” said Bolutu. “Hercól is right: we dare not linger in this place. Is there no shelter along the downward trek?”

  “I have never heard of any,” said the selk, “but I can tell you this much: if you hope to escape the high country today, you must move faster than you have done since we left the Secret Vale. Urakán is the last of the Nine, but even the lesser peaks beyond her are severe. We have no tent, and no fire beetles—and bad weather is coming; don’t you feel it?”

  Hercól shook his head. “At home in the Tsördons I might be able to read clues in the wind, but not here. Lead on; the rest of us will try to match your speed. But remember that we must aim for stealth also. The foe that sees us is a foe that must be killed.”

  They set off through the twisted pines, jogging along the narrow westward trail where Valgrif had pursued the athymar. The snow was deeper here, but it had clearly melted and refrozen many times, so that now it bound the land in a smooth crust that snapped like eggshells underfoot. Their slain enemies had broken a path, but their footprints were hard and icy. For several hours they struggled west, rounding Urakán, and in all that time they descended no more than a hundred yards. Pazel grew frustrated: the day was passing, and they were still almost as high in the mountains as they had been on waking that morning. But whenever there was a break in the trees he saw the reason for this roundabout course: the vast gorge was still beneath them, and until it diverged they could not dream of descending.

  The divergence came in late afternoon, when from a rock outcropping they saw the gorge twisting away to the south. “This is good news and bad,” said the dark-haired selk. “The trail will soon start its descent into the valley, but we have not been fast enough. Tonight we must dig a snow-shelter, unless we chance upon some ruin or cave.”

  They carried on another hour, with the lowering sun in their eyes. Then, a short distance ahead, they saw that the pine forest ended, and that the snow was mounded high.

  “That’s a funny sort of drift,” said Neeps.

  “There speaks a son of the tropics,” said Hercól. “That is no drift, Undrabust. It is the remains of an avalanche.”

  They approached, and Pazel gasped at the spectacle. Across the trail, and stretching up and down the mountain for as far as he could see, lay a huge battlement of snow. It had obliterated the trees, and was indeed several yards taller than their highest tips. Looking up at the peak, he could see the vast hollow cavity from which the snow had collapsed.

  “Our enemies scampered right up,” said Corporal Mandric, pointing out a line of footprints on the slope. “I guess we’ll be doin’ the same then, won’t we?”

  “No trees to hide behind, up there,” said Ensyl.

  “And no other path,” said Hercól. “We must cross quickly and hope for the best. Keep your hoods up, and your blades out of the sun.”

  They donned their white hoods and climbed the rugged snowbank. At the top they could see that the avalanche was at least a m
ile wide, and ran straight down the mountain for many miles. It was like the line a finger leaves when dragged across a dusty chalkboard. Nothing stood in its path.

  “Look there, in the next valley,” said the selk, pointing. “Can you see two roads converging, and four standingstones? That is the Isima Crossroads, where we are bound.”

  Pazel could just make out the four stones, which were grouped together in a square. Then the selk hissed and drew everyone down. “Soldiers!” they said. “Dlömic soldiers! They were hidden by the stones.”

  “I cannot see them,” said Lunja. “I can barely see the stones themselves.”

  “Selk eyes are sharper than our own,” said Bolutu, “and that is a good thing today, if it means that our enemys will not be able to spot us either.”

  “Unless one of them produces a telescope,” said Hercól. “Move along.”

  “Just a moment,” said Thasha. She pointed down the length of the avalanche. “Is that our trail, by any luck?”

  Pazel shielded his eyes. Far down the slope, a second line of footprints crossed the ribbon of snow. The dark-haired selk shielded his eyes. “Yes,” he said at last, “that is the second switchback, and there is a third below it, much farther, which perhaps you cannot see. Eventually there must be a fourth.”

  “A shortcut?” said Lunja dubiously.

  “It would be that,” said the selk, studying the slope. “There are some small snow-ledges, eight-or ten-foot drops at the most. That is probably why our enemies did not climb it themselves. But they would not hinder our descent. We could save a day’s march by that path.”

  “And get spotted, and killed,” said Pazel. “Nice idea, Thasha, but we’re better off under the trees.”

  “Some days you’re thick as cold porridge, mate,” said Neeps. He pointed back down the slope they had just ascended. “We can walk along the edge of the avalanche, and stay hidden from anyone in that valley. And after sunset we can climb up here and carry on.”