The Night of the Swarm

by Robert V. S. Redick

  “They found me, Your Highness,” said the commodore.

  The Mzithrinis were wonder-struck. “You really are Thasha Isiq,” said the officer. “Is the rest of your mad story true?”

  Isiq was looking straight at Pazel. Uncertainly, he extended a hand. Pazel stepped forward and gripped it, not a handshake but a tight, fierce clasp.

  “You gave me your promise,” said the admiral. “In Simja, on the road from the shrine. I asked you to protect her—”

  “I remember,” said Pazel.

  “I meant her body. I thought it was a dead girl you were carrying away.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’ve stayed with her. You all have. You’ve kept my angel safe.”

  “Oh, Prahba,” said Thasha, laughing through her tears.

  “We’ve helped one another, sir,” said Pazel, “and Thasha’s done more than anyone.”

  “We feared for your life as well, Admiral,” said Hercól. “For a time, Neda and Pazel’s dreams brought us glimpses of you, or at least of their mother’s thoughts of you.”

  “Many thoughts,” said Neda, in her broken Arquali. “Always good thoughts, loving.”

  Isiq looked at her, and seemed astonished both by her words and by the fact of her existence. “If Rin takes me today, I will die a happy man,” he said.

  Then the distant explosions reached his ears. For the first time he raised his eyes to the battle, and Pazel watched horror change the admiral’s face. His lips trembled. He shook his head, imperious, helpless; this thing must not be.

  “Now he knows why I kept him away in the palms,” said the officer, not without sympathy.

  Isiq looked at the officer, then at Pazel. “He must stop this. Tell him, Pathkendle. If Maisa’s navy is destroyed she will never recover, never take the throne of Arqual. Emperor Magad will be stronger than ever, and so will his will to destroy the Mzithrin. Tell him I’m begging, begging him to signal his fleet.”

  Pazel took a deep breath, and repeated the admiral’s words in Mzithrini. The officer shook his head. “I have lived to see things beyond the visions of the seers,” he said. “Admiral Isiq himself, begging the White Fleet to destroy the Arquali navy. Tell him not to worry: destroy it we will. But as for his rebellion: too late, too late. Even if I lit that beacon now, there would be little left of Maisa’s forces by the time they arrived.”

  “You wouldn’t have to arrive,” said Pazel. “Just bring your fleet close enough for Magad’s forces to notice. They’ll have to break off fighting the rebels and sail north to face you. Or turn and run.”

  The officer smiled. “Ah, but we don’t want that, do we? You are forgetting the hammer and the anvil. Magad’s forces have your rebels where they want them: we will engage Magad in the same place.”

  “There is more at stake here than one victory at sea!” said Hercól. “If Empress Maisa fails, so too does the best chance for peace between the Empires. Maisa has sworn to end the conflict, to make peace once and for all.”

  “The famous Arquali hunger for peace,” said the officer. “Perhaps she will suggest another treaty-signing on Simja. Enough! You will tell the rest of your story to my lieutenant. Your presence here changes very little—although I grant you have made this day … stranger.”

  “Things are even stranger than you suppose,” said Ramachni.

  The soldiers whirled; blades whistled from sheaths. The mage was seated on a rock some ten feet away. The red rays of sunset glowed in his eyes. “Hold your fire,” he said. “I make a much better friend than foe.”

  “A woken animal,” said the officer. “What next? Come down from there, little circus-freak, before we put a shaft through your heart.”

  Ramachni stood up slowly, eyes locked on the commander. “If you think that you will slaughter me as you did our harmless companion, you are mistaken,” he said.

  Nothing obvious had changed, but somehow Ramachni seemed larger, and in his stillness there was something of a threat. The Mzithrinis glanced nervously at their commander. He too looked shaken, but he stood his ground.

  “If you’re not a woken animal, what in the Black Pits are you?”

  “An ally, if you will permit it,” said Ramachni. “Our tale is true, Commander, and the Chathrand has returned. You must have heard of the conspiracy that sent her forth. But you cannot possibly grasp the doom that calls her back. The Swarm of Night has been unleashed on Alifros. To defeat it we must make a landing on Gurishal, at a place marked by a sea-rock called the Arrowhead.”

  The officer shook his head in disbelief. “That is a declaration of lunacy.”

  “I am quite the sanest person you are likely to meet,” said Ramachni.

  “You’re not a person at all,” said the officer, “and Gurishal is sovereign territory of the Pentarchy, despite its occupation by the Shaggat heretics. We do not let enemies parade through our waters.”

  “You could help us,” said Pazel.

  “Certainly,” said the officer, “if I were a traitor, and in want of a swift execution.”

  “They could help us, you know,” said Pazel, glancing at Ramachni. “They must have a vessel hidden somewhere. They could escort the Chathrand.”

  The soldiers laughed again, and even the officer smiled as he turned away. “No more,” he said. “I have a battle to observe.”

  “The carnage below means nothing,” said Ramachni.

  The officer glanced at him again. “Nothing, eh? You jabbering freak. By dawn tomorrow, the balance of power in this world will have shifted forever.”

  “Yes, I fear so,” said Ramachni.

  His unblinking eyes remained fixed on the Mzithrini commander. On the next hill, a spark leaped to sudden life, and with a whoosh the oil-soaked mound of brush went up in flames.

  The officer’s response was commendable, Pazel had to admit. He did not kill anyone. Indeed he ordered no reprisals, although it was clear that his prisoners were somehow to blame. His only command was to attack the beacon-fire, to smother it, drown it, snuff it out. The task proved impossible, however. The “special chemicals” were everything the man had claimed. The fire roared like a blast furnace; the soldiers could do nothing but watch. From out at sea it might have appeared that a new and tiny volcano had erupted in this quiet end of Serpent’s Head.

  Kirishgán looked into the distance. “The White Fleet is setting sail,” he said. “Already the vanguard is heading this way.”

  “They were prepared,” muttered the officer, snapping open his telescope. As he studied the horizon, he ordered his men to break camp. “The Arqualis will see the fire too, and mark the spot. No sense waiting for them to come ashore and investigate. We’ll sleep tonight at Yellow Cliff.” He turned to Ramachni. “Well, mage, you’ve proved you can light a match at fifty paces. Any other tricks at your disposal?”

  Ramachni just showed his teeth.

  “Do you intend to fight eighty soldiers of the Pentarchy? For that is the only way we will give your prisoners up.”

  “I will not hold you to that boast,” said Ramachni, “but I will not fight you either—yet.”

  The officer shrugged, then gestured at the prisoners. “Get some food in their mouths, unless you want to carry these lunatics.”

  Once more Pazel was amazed by his calm. The soldiers brought them meat and bread, and then marched them, at the center of the battalion, down the hill and back into the maze of rocks and lava flows and gullies. The soldiers walked in single file. Ramachni scrambled alongside the column, always safely out of reach.

  Darkness came quickly. Hands still tied, the prisoners stumbled often on the rugged ground. They were marching generally uphill, but avoided peaks or vantage points of any kind, and Pazel soon lost all sense of where they were. He slogged on, footsore and anxious. He thought the commander had probably ordered Druffle’s killing in the same casual way with which he had called for his telescope. The only passion the man had shown was his contempt for Neda, whom he had looked ready to kill.

/>   Hours passed. Pazel’s wrists and shoulders went from painful to numb. The moon rose but vanished at once into dense clouds. Occasionally, by the light of particularly powerful lava-bursts, Pazel saw that they had indeed climbed much higher into the volcanic foothills. He never once glimpsed the sea, but at some point late in the night Ramachni called out to them softly in the tongue of Arqual:

  “Do not give up! Magad’s forces spotted the White Fleet before darkness fell, as I hoped. They have ended their attack on Maisa’s ships, and are regrouping to face the new threat. Alas, most of their work was done. Many lives have been saved, but the Empress has lost her navy, or the bulk of it.”

  “What about the Chathrand?” Pazel whispered. But the soldiers hissed for silence, and Ramachni said no more.

  One more weary hour, and they reached a stand of tall pines, and pitched camp. It could not have been more than an hour before dawn, but the darkness was nearly absolute, and the Mzithrinis did not so much as strike a match. The prisoners were chained together by the ankles, and the ankle-chains secured to the trees. Only then were their wrists untied. Pazel collapsed among his friends, and thought the pine needles beneath him the most perfect bed he had ever known. He heard the soldiers murmuring, something about the war’s approaching end, but before he could consider just what they meant he was asleep.

  Drowning. Sinking. Buried alive.

  Pazel woke with a gasp. A dream, horrible and vague, a sense of being crushed beneath some monstrous weight. He sat up. There was daylight, but it was dim and strangely sidelong. In the trees, birds sang uncertainly. Was it morning or not?

  The air was distinctly cold. His friends were waking, moving slowly in their chains. All the soldiers were on their feet. Something was very wrong. They were peering up at the sky, and even by the faint light Pazel could see that they were afraid. He stood, felt a cold claw in his stomach. The weight of the air. The pressure, the chill.

  Neeps rose beside him, steadying himself on a tree. He gave Pazel a look of knowing dread. Beside them, Thasha’s father was fumbling on hands and knees. “What is it, boys, tell me!” Not a prince or an admiral in this moment, just an old man in chains.

  “The Swarm is here,” whispered Pazel. “I think it’s just above our heads.”

  “The what?”

  Ramachni crept from the shadows. “Death has come between us and the mountain,” he said, looking up. And Pazel realized it was true: he could no longer hear the volcano. Only birdsong—that, and the pines, which were bending and creaking, although there was no wind.

  The others were all awake, now, and struggling to rise. Murmurs of terror were spreading among the troops. Pazel could see their breath, white and ragged in the unnatural cold.

  Suddenly all the birds fell silent. The Mzithrinis were whispering prayers. Then came a curious sound: a soft thumping, as if small purses were raining down on them by the score. It lasted just seconds. Pazel stretched out a foot, felt the tiny body, and knew: the birds had fallen dead from the trees.

  A soldier bolted. Seconds later dozens of others followed his example, their comrades cursing and shouting Come back, come back, you whimpering dogs! Then the ones who had been shouting began to run.

  For a terrible moment the prisoners were left alone, still shackled to the bending trees. Then a pair of soldiers came crashing out of the gloom, and one of them began to unlock their leg-irons. “You must go to the commander,” he shouted. “This way, near the overlook. Run!”

  Soldiers and captives blundered through the pines. Ahead the light was a little stronger—and the hideous underbelly of the Swarm more plain to see. It was combing the treetops, flowing north like a suspended tide. A black tide, pulsing, animate, a tide of worms and flesh.

  “Don’t look, Admiral!” shouted Hercól, as he and Thasha supported Isiq by the arms.

  The trees ended, and they stumbled out into a barren stretch of earth scarred with ashes and yellow, sulphurous stones. Pazel saw that they were on much higher ground than yesterday’s hill. Just ahead, the commander and some twenty of his men were crouching near the top of a cliff.

  In their eyes, naked horror. The hideous mass stretched for miles in every direction, over land and sea. It had flowed around the volcanoes to the west of them. South and east Pazel could see no clear border, just a pale glow near the horizon to prove it did end, somewhere. Only the Swarm’s northern edge was plain to see, and this too was growing swiftly away from them.

  “Now do you believe us, Commander?” asked Pazel.

  The officer just stared up into the Swarm. He appeared to have lost the power of speech.

  “Gods above, it’s as big as the whole Rekere!” said Darabik.

  “It has feasted on death, since last we saw it,” said Ramachni, “and it will soon do so again.”

  They reached the cliff where the soldiers stood. Pazel looked north, in the direction the Swarm was growing: dark island, dark coast. The limping remains of Maisa’s forces. Ten or fifteen miles of empty sea—

  And there it was: the Swarm’s prey.

  Under vast clouds of cannon-smoke, the two greatest navies in the Northern world were blasting, pummeling, burning, and hurling every manner of deadly ordnance at each other. The Arquali loyalists had no intention of being pinned against the anvil of Serpent’s Head. They had sailed out into the Nelu Rekere, engaged the Mzithrinis head-on. The scale of it. There was so much fire, so much flung iron and splintered wood, that Pazel wondered that the clash did not end instantly, each side torn to pieces by the other’s onslaught. But in truth neither was prevailing. The Mzithrinis were more numerous, and the wind was still at their backs. The Arqualis had heavier armor, longer guns. Their attack formations had crossed, splintering. Masts had toppled; rigging burned in sheets.

  “Commander, the mage is here!” said the soldier with the keys. Still the Mzithrini officer only stared into the Swarm.

  “Mage,” said the soldier, “did you summon this cloud? Banish it, banish it and name your price!”

  Ramachni looked sorrowfully at the man. “I did not bring it here,” he said, “and nothing I can do will prevent what is to occur.”

  The Swarm passed over Maisa’s forces. It was accelerating as it neared the battlefront. Pazel felt its cold in his bones. He wondered how many of the sailors had noticed it, through that pall of cannon-smoke.

  “Turn away, soldiers,” said Ramachni. “Do not force yourselves to see this thing.”

  Pazel reached out instinctively, pulling Neeps and Thasha close. He would not shut his eyes. How could they fight something they could not bear even to see?

  The soldiers had forgotten them. They stood in a line along the cliff’s edge, staring. The edge of the Swarm reached the first of the warships.

  “No,” said the commander, suddenly coming to life. He gave a sharp gesture, then shouted: “No! Men, men! This isn’t going to happen, what you think is going to happen cannot possibly—”

  The Swarm dropped.

  It was a river pouring over a cataract, a curtain of gore, a great formless limb of the floating mass above. It fell to sea level, swallowing forty or fifty miles in an instant—and the battle was gone. No light or sound escaped. From the edge of the mass, dark tentacles groped across the waters, snatching at the few boats that had fallen outside the initial onslaught, dragging them within. Pazel couldn’t move. He’d thought he was hardened to horror but this, but this. Someone was laughing, a sick sound like the whinny of a goat. Their commander buckled at the knees. A man was violently sick. The blackness throbbed and quivered; it was a diseased muscle, it was clotted death. Pazel heard his friends swearing, weeping, almost choking him with their arms, and he was doing the same, bleeding inside; was it over, was he allowed to look away? The Swarm twisted, writhed, and fragments of ship began to leak from it like crumbs through teeth. Make it stop. Make it end. From the men around him came sounds of lunacy and damnation; a soldier was eating gravel, a soldier flung himself over the cliff; others were cra
wling, fighting, shouting blasphemies, their faces twisted like masks.

  The Swarm rose again into the sky.

  Beneath it sprawled the remains of the warring fleets. Gigantic, mingled, dead. Some vessels were crushed and sinking; others were intact but drifting like corks. Not a gun sounded. The pall of smoke had disappeared. Every fire had been extinguished, and every life.

  The commander had curled into a ball. He was pale and utterly still; perhaps he too was dead. Perhaps you, Pazel, are dead. No, no. Your mouth is bleeding, you’ve bitten your tongue and the blood is warm and trickling. You can taste it. You can kiss your friends and see your blood on their foreheads. You’re alive.

  The commander turned to look at Ramachni. “Tell me exactly what you need,” he said.

  21. One year to the day (subjective ship time) from the Chathrand’s launch from Etherhorde. The anniversary passed unnoticed by all aboard. When we did take note, some days later, we struggled to believe that only twelve months had passed in our lives. Over time this became even harder to remember, as the five lost years became real for us. —EDITOR

  34

  From the Final Journal of G. Starling Fiffengurt

  Monday, 22 Teala 947

  Surely this is how men feel on the Redemption Path through the Tsördons, at the end of six months afoot, looking up at the last, steep slope of the Holy Mountain. I can’t climb that. I must climb that. If I climb another foot something in me will shatter. If I don’t climb, Rin’s light will never again warm my soul.

  We are that close, & that desperate. Sixteen days north from Serpent’s Head, most of them in the Swarm’s frigid shadow, fighting leaks we cannot locate, fighting scurvy, numb with fear. Who will remember for us? Not me, not good Captain Fiffengurt: I can’t remember last night’s dinner, though Teggatz has served the same three Gods-damned dishes for a month. A poor memory is one reason I fill these pages. Another is because the very hunt for words helps me stumble on through this fear. Toward what? An end to the Nilstone? A dream of Anni & our child, my seven-year-old boy or girl? Or the cold end of Alifros, the Swarm grown larger than the world it hovers over, the sun extinguished, the Chathrand crushed like an eggshell by the frozen sea.