The Night of the Swarm (Chathrand Voyage 4)

by Robert V. S. Redick

  Ott did not walk to starboard, or look at the reefs. He stared up at the high, broken clifftop. ‘A bombardment like that could finish us in minutes,’ he said.

  ‘Less, if a couple of those big bastards found their mark,’ said Fiffengurt. ‘I think the first time was a warning.’

  ‘Quartermaster, that cliff is half a mile long. The enemy could get off dozens of shots before we cleared it.’

  Fiffengurt nodded. ‘You’re getting the idea. We’re trapped in this bay.’

  ‘That is correct,’ shouted a voice from above them.

  They jumped, searching, shading their eyes. Twenty feet overhead, seated at his ease on the main spankermast yard, was Lord Talag.

  ‘Crawly, crawly aloft!’ shouted someone, causing a general stir. Lord Talag paid no attention. The swallow-suit hung loose upon his shoulders.

  ‘You are trapped again,’ he said, ‘but not by us, this time. We took some of you prisoner once, by necessity. The deed gave us no joy. To cage any living creature is a deed that sickens the heart. We struggled to keep you alive and comfortable. When you escaped you killed as many of us as you could.’

  ‘And we’re not done yet,’ said Sandor Ott.

  ‘Be silent, you wretched man!’ hissed Fiffengurt.

  Captain Rose appeared on the quarterdeck ladder. He climbed up stiffly and walked up to the wheelhouse, his eyes never leaving the ixchel.

  ‘On this day,’ Talag continued, ‘my island brethren have made prisoners of you all. Be glad that you did not kill me in Masalym, Sandor Ott. If I had not flown ashore and greeted them, they would have sunk you as you tried to enter this bay.’

  ‘How do they move the rocks?’ asked Fiffengurt.

  Lord Talag smiled strangely. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’

  ‘Your brethren kept it to themselves, did they?’

  Talag frowned at him. ‘We are not a sentimental race. We do not spill our secrets at a first encounter, not even with our long-lost kin.’

  ‘We’re a mile from shore,’ said Sandor Ott. ‘How do you plan to leave us, exactly?’

  ‘That is not your concern,’ said Lord Talag.

  ‘What if I make it my concern?’

  Talag got to his feet, eyes locked on the spymaster. ‘My people watched you for years, Sandor Ott. In the Keep of Five Domes, in the tunnels under Etherhorde, in the blue chambers of Castle Maag. I myself heard you planning deaths, from Thasha Isiq’s mother to guards of the castle you deemed too inquisitive. I saw you mate with that whore, Syrarys, never guessing that years before you made her a spy in Isiq’s household, Arunis had picked her out to be a spy in yours. I saw you cackle with glee over the charts we forged. You are a failure, Ott. Like all giants, you confuse brute power with absolute power. And now it is time to pay for that mistake. Oppose our exodus, and we will wait you out. How long can you survive without fresh water? Two months? Three, if you kill off the sickly? But we can wait a year, Ott, or longer. We will not even be thirsty when the last of you falls dead.’

  ‘And if we do not oppose you?’ said Rose.

  Talag turned his burning eyes on the captain. ‘I would give a great deal to know what you truly expect of me,’ he said. ‘What does a crawly do with his eight hundred tormentors, when he has them at last beneath his heel? Eight hundred sadists, bigots, butchers? I know what a giant would do. Make the crawly beg. Increase the pressure, slowly. Watch him suffer, fascinated; pretend to consider his pleas. Then step down hard and crush his skull.’

  Talag’s body had gone rigid. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I saw it done to my father when I was ten. He was as close to me as you are now, but I was in hiding, I was safe, and even as the giant screamed at him, told him to beg for his life, my father was speaking to me in the tongue your kind cannot hear, ordering me to live, to fight on, to serve our people.

  ‘It was five years later that I first heard the legend of Stath Bálfyr, the island from whence you took us in jars and cages. I swore then and there that I would lead any of my father’s house who would follow me home to this place, and today I fulfill that oath. You ask what will I do with you?’

  He took a deep breath. ‘Nothing. Live out my life endeavouring to forget your very existence. And if you are cooperative, and do not hinder our departure from the Chathrand, I shall go one step further, and waive the right of vengeance.’

  ‘Meaning what?’ asked Rose.

  ‘That you shall be dealt with as my island brethren see fit. They would surely extend me the courtesy of deciding your fate: that is fitting and customary. But vengeance was never the purpose of this mission – and today that purpose is all but achieved. I will not seek your executions.’

  ‘But you will not ask for clemency?’

  Talag turned to him, bristling. ‘You kept one of us in a birdcage, in filth, and made him taste your food for poison. Your command triggered the massacre. Your first bosun wore a necklace of our skulls. Blood-red monster! This is clemency, beyond anything you giants deserve.’

  With a sharp motion he turned away, smoothing the feathers of his coat. ‘You are trespassers in Stath Bálfyr,’ he said. ‘The island’s rulers will make their own decisions. For myself the end has finally come. I shall grow old here, among my people and my books. You no longer matter.’

  Dr Chadfallow had just reached Uskins’ door when the bombardment commenced. He stumbled when the ship lurched, half expecting the passage to explode in a swarm of attacking ixchel. But none came. Whatever had just happened, the clan was still lying low. He considered putting off his investigation, then reprimanded himself: Put off until when? Until how many more succumb? He cleared his throat, straightened his sleeves with their silver cufflinks, and knocked.

  The door rattled, as though Uskins was struggling with it. At last the first mate shouldered it open. ‘The latch,’ he explained with a smile. ‘I tried to fix it and have only made things worse. Do come in, Doctor.’

  Chadfallow stepped into the little cabin. ‘I was napping,’ said Uskins. ‘Did something happen above?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Chadfallow quietly. ‘Nothing important, in any case.’

  ‘I tire more easily now that my duties are so light,’ said Uskins. ‘Is that not strange? I wash dishes, carry messages, feed the men in the brig, and suddenly I am fatigued. May I ask if you have made any progress?’

  ‘Not really,’ Chadfallow admitted, studying him. The man’s shirt was buttoned to the neck. It was, thought the doctor, always buttoned to the neck.

  Uskins had begun to notice the doctor’s peculiar manner. ‘You have an idea, though, don’t you? Something to build on?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Chadfallow, barely conscious of his words. ‘But it’s … rather complicated. I’m afraid I need to examine you once more. ’

  ‘Anything to help, Doctor. But I can tell you right now that I’m unchanged.’

  ‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ said Chadfallow, trying to evoke his usual, peremptory tone. ‘Sit down, sir. Take off your shirt and breathe deep.’

  Uskins consented amiably enough for someone who had been examined almost ceaselessly for a fortnight. He sat in the room’s one chair with his back to Chadfallow, unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt, and pulled it over his head. There it was: the tail end of the scarf. Uskins had removed it along with the shirt, and was now holding both in his hands.

  As he did each time before, thought Chadfallow. How under Heaven’s Tree did I fail to notice?

  He placed the stethoscope on Uskins’ back, went through the motions of listening.

  ‘I’m feeling truly fine today,’ said Uskins. ‘My appetite is immense.’

  ‘Arms out to either side, if you please,’ said Chadfallow.

  Uskins tucked the shirt under his leg before he obeyed. Now Chadfallow could see the scarf ’s tasseled edge: just two inches, but that was enough. His skin went cold. His hand trembled on the stethoscope.

  Captain Rose had named himself a slave to anger. He, Chadfallow, h
ad been a slave to pride. He was intelligent; he knew that. But for the first time in his life he understood with perfect clarity that he was also a fool.

  ‘I must … step out,’ he heard himself say. ‘I left an instrument in the surgery.’

  ‘What instrument?’ asked Uskins. His voice was abruptly cold.

  Chadfallow’s mind seized. ‘A spirometer,’ he managed to blurt. ‘Also known as a plethysmograph. It measures a patient’s lung capacity.’

  ‘I don’t think you care about my lung capacity,’ said Uskins.

  ‘Now you’re being foolish,’ said the doctor, all but lunging for the door.

  But the door would not open. Chadfallow heaved at it, wrenching at the knob. The door held fast. Slowly he turned to face Uskins. The first mate had put the white scarf back around his neck.

  ‘No more games,’ said Chadfallow.

  ‘Oh no,’ said the other, ‘I quite tire of them myself.’

  ‘What happened to you, Uskins?’

  The man smiled: a wide, toothy, ear-to-ear grin, unlike any smile the doctor had ever seen on his face. ‘Your first mate is not available for questioning,’ he said.

  Chadfallow did not even see the knife, but by the force of the blow, the white blaze of pain-beyond-pain, the rich smell in his nostrils and the dysfunctional lurch of the organ in his chest, he had his diagnosis at once. So fascinating. The left ventricle. If only he had time to make some notes.

  These thoughts were lightning-flashes. Others followed. He had a son; his son might yet be alive; his son would never embrace him and say Father. He should have been more reckless in love. He should have noticed that life was but a heartbeat, maybe two heartbeats, nothing guaranteed.

  ‘Arunis?’ he whispered.

  ‘Of course.’

  Show him no fear. He could manage that much; he always cut a good figure; he was dying without Suthinia; everything he loved he misplaced.

  ‘Dead … ?’ he whispered.

  The man raised his eyebrows. ‘Who do you mean? You, me, Uskins? Never mind; the answer is yes.’

  ‘How.’

  ‘How did I win control of this body? Just as you’d go about such a task. I reasoned with Uskins. He had the plague. I reminded him that a continent full of doctors had failed to cure it, and persuaded him that his one chance was to let me into his mind. To sign over the house, as it were, and let me see what I could do about the termites. He hated the idea, but saw the logic in the end.’

  The doctor’s strength was gone, his vision going. Arunis lowered him quietly to the floor. ‘Our Imperial surgeon,’ he said. ‘A scientist, a practical man. It was you who ended the stand off that day in the Straits of Simja. You threw me the rope ladder, let me climb aboard. I might have failed that day, but you couldn’t bear to let me strangle Admiral Isiq’s little bitch. Astonishing weakness, I thought. And do you know, nothing angers me so much as weakness? Even here in Agaroth, on death’s doorstep, it enrages me. I had hoped to keep you alive. I wanted you there on the night of the Swarm, so that you would know what your weakness had made possible. You will have to use your imagination instead. The nothingness before you, the blackness closing in: that is the future of Alifros, Doctor. That is the world that you shall never see.’

  23

  Gifts and Curses

  12 Halar 942

  A silent canyon, blanketed in early snow. The chilly Parsua dances, gurgling, between cliffs that soar above two thousand feet. Black boulders stand in the river, pines struggle along the shore; further from the water rise old oaks and ironwoods. Upriver there are waterfalls, where the gorge descends in jagged steps. High overhead, wisps of cloud scud across a narrow slab of sky the colour of a robin’s egg.

  Stillness, sunlight, cold. A finch alights and vanishes again; a pinch of snow tumbles from a branch. The wind above the Parsua can scarcely be heard. Straining, one might fancy it carries sounds of violence, of horror, from some unthinkably distant land: sounds all but dissolved in the vast, consoling indifference of the air.

  Then a noise cuts through the morning: a desperate, clumsy sound like rough shears through wool. It grows nearer, louder. It is the sound of feet in snow.

  From upriver he appears: a youth, bloodied and in rags, his white breath puffing like smoke through his lips. He is running for his life, tumbling over snow-hidden rocks, careening through drifts. His gaze swings left and right, studying the cliffs that offer no cave or crevice, no place to hide. When he glances back over his shoulder it is with naked fear.

  He passes the tree where the finch rested, catching his sleeve on a branch. Two or three steps later he has blundered onto the thin ice that girds the riverbanks, and falls on hands and knees into the water. He bites back a howl. As he drags himself onto solid ground his pursuer erupts into view.

  It is an eguar. Black, burning, elephantine. It roars at him from atop the last set of falls, over a mile back along the canyon. Then it hurls itself from the cliff into the river below.

  Flailing, the youth doubles his speed. He cannot see the eguar now, but the vapour above it forms a white flag, racing towards him along the bottom of the gorge. Trees crack; steam hisses where the burning flanks of the creature slide through snow. Before it has closed half the distance the youth knows he will not escape.

  He turns. His body is shaking uncontrollably; his eyes have a sheen like fogged glass. Suddenly he throws back his head and screeches at the sky. As it was on the Water Bridge, the transformation is swift: the head flattens into the neck; the neck elongates; the limbs become massive; the jaw stretches to reveal enormous fangs. But the maukslar has paid a cost for returning to its natural form: between the shoulder blades, its fleshy wings hang broken and torn. Dark blood pours from them, staining the snow.

  The maukslar shields its lamp-like eyes. Born in the infernal regions, it does not care for snow, and less for naked sunlight. When its foe thrashes into view, it spits blindly in the creature’s direction. A great viscous mass of fire blossoms from its mouth and flies up the canyon, exploding spectacularly before the eguar. Pines go up like torches; snow vaporises; the edges of the river boil. The eguar rushes straight on, unscathed, shaking off the fire like globs of mud.

  The demon turns to run. But what has happened? In that brief moment of stillness, ice has closed around its ankles. Spellcraft. The demon wrenches, claws at the glassy ice. When it finally breaks free it has bloodied both feet, and allowed the eguar to close half the distance.

  Now the gorge jackknifes to the left. Once around the bend the demon wrenches a barrel-sized stone from the frozen earth, and screeches with delight when the blow connects. Stunned, the eguar drops on its side. Once again the demon flees.

  And once again meets with a strange barrier: this time the very trees have somehow thickened around it, and their criss-crossed branches thwart it at every step. The more it fights, the more entangling they become, until at last in desperation it vomits more fire, scouring out a path through which to flee.

  Hard ground beneath its feet: the fire has burned all the way to bedrock. And there, there ahead is the split in the Parsua that means the gorge is near its end. Beyond that, open fields and forests. And beyond the latter, Macadra’s forces in their thousands, waiting only for someone to tell them where to strike.

  ‘Hold!’

  The demon stops dead. Before it, on the branch of a tall pine, sits a large, black owl. It is this creature who has spoken. The maukslar knows this new enemy at a glance, and screams in terror and rage. Then its nostrils catch that telltale reek of sulphur, and it whirls about: the eguar stands twenty feet upstream, its body a hot iron, its great tail thrashing among the stones.

  ‘You are bleeding to death,’ says the owl. ‘Moreover you are cornered by two foes greater than yourself. Behind you waits Sitroth, the Ancient, who killed the hound of Toltirek. I am Ramachni, servant of Erithusmé and ward of the selk. You have felt my grip once; if you feel it again it will be too late to beg for mercy. Depart this world if you wo
uld live.’

  The demon speaks in a voice like boiling pitch. ‘I beg no mage’s mercy. I dwell in those places where you scarcely dare to wet your feet. One alone dared call me forth. I serve the White Raven, while it pleases me to do so. The White Raven, who outlived your Northern hag.’

  ‘Erithusmé the Great is alive,’ says the owl. ‘Macadra fears her, and with good reason. But I warn you, try no spell of your own. If you do we shall kill you swiftly. Where is Dastu, the boy whose shape you mimic?’

  ‘In the stomach of the ogress,’ says the demon. ‘The hrathmogs live in fear of her appetite.’

  The owl falls silent. When it speaks again its voice has hardened. ‘Go, demon. Return to the Duirmaulc while you can. Your days in Alifros are through.’

  The maukslar ’s yellow eyes are fixed on the owl. ‘We shall see whose time is through, when Macadra takes the Nilstone in her hand.’

  ‘There is a pattern jewel in the creature’s gut,’ says the eguar suddenly. The maukslar jumps, glancing at the beast with scalding hate.

  ‘A pattern jewel?’ says the owl. ‘That is a crime in itself. Why do you carry such a thing, maukslar, when you know it belongs with others?’

  ‘My mistress gave it me,’ hisses the demon.

  ‘Then she took it from a murdered selk,’ says the owl. ‘You must cough it out before you leave this world. It would prevent your departure anyway.’

  The maukslar ’s eyes dart, scanning the ground for a weapon.

  ‘If you refuse,’ says the owl, ‘we will simply wait for you to die, and then remove it from your corpse. Hear me for the last time: go back to the Nine Pits, back among the damned. If you do so we will prevent Macadra from binding you to service again. If you will not go, we will scatter your ashes when you die and prevent your resurrection. The choice remains yours, for a moment longer.’

  The maukslar looks from one to the other. It stands now in a pool of its own blood.

  ‘Do not slay me,’ it says at last. ‘I yield. Take the jewel, and let me take my leave.’

  The creature drops on all fours. It retches, back arching like a dog’s. Four or five times its body heaves. Then, painfully, it crawls to a fallen pine and lies over it. At last its snake-like neck convulses, and a great red ruby drops from its mouth into its waiting palm.