The Night of the Swarm
( The Chathrand Voyage - 4 )
Robert V S Redick
Robert V S Redick
The Night of the Swarm
To those who still read with wonder
There cannot be, confusion of our sound forgot,
A single soul that lacks a sweet crystalline cry.
W.B. Yeats, ‘Paudeen’
And they’re only going to change this place
By killing everybody in the human race.
The Police, ‘Invisible Sun’
Prologue
A battle is ending in the heart of a black wood. From the surrounding treetops it is all oddly peaceful: the late moonlight, the curve of the river, the grassy clearing on its banks, the ruined tower like a broken bottleneck thrust against the sky. No shouts from the combatants, no clashing of steel. One can even hear the crows across the water, rejoicing in the almost-dawn.
But distance deceives. A little closer, and we find the grass is scorched, the river furious, the stairs of the ruined tower slick with blood. And at the foot of the stairs a dozen figures crouch: all wounded, all contemplating death; in a minute’s time they will be slain by sorcery. They bend low, squeeze tightly together. They are surrounded by a ring-shaped pit, and the inner edge of the pit is crumbling toward their feet.
Above their heads shimmers a dull halo, resembling a mist or cloud of insects. It is neither; it is the whirling of enchanted blades. They have cut someone already; a fine haze of blood thickens the air. The blades, as may be expected, are descending. The ring-shaped pit bristles with spikes.
Crude horrors, these; but so is the confluence of powers that has willed them into being. High on the tower wall stands a mage: skeletal, staring, hideous at a glance. He is gripping the hair of another, a ragged beast of a man, and gesturing at the unfortunates below. The ragged man is drooling, his gaze empty of all comprehension. Tight to his chest he holds a little sphere of darkness, so black it devours the moonlight, so black it troubles the eye.
Movement, suddenly: a third figure has crawled up from behind. A youth, dripping wet, bleeding, his look of fury rivaling the mage’s own. Unseen, he staggers closer, holding what can only be a blackjack. With a spasm of regret he strikes down the ragged man. There is a crack of breaking bone.
The whirling blades vanish, and the pit. The ragged man falls dead, and the sphere slips from his grasp. Among the crouching figures, a young woman closes her hand upon a sword hilt. Above, the sphere of darkness is rolling towards the wall’s sheer edge. The mage lunges, catches the sphere at the last instant, and with it clutched in both hands, he falls. Before he is halfway to the ground, the future of Alifros takes shape.
The touch of the sphere is death, even to one as powerful as this. Death consumes him, hands to wrists to elbows. Thirty feet from the ground his arms are dead. And yet he smiles. He is speaking an incantation. Beside the tower, the surface of the river convulses, and something thin and dark leaps out of it, skyward. The mage tries for a glimpse, but at that instant the young woman strikes with rare perfection. Her blade sings. The body lands headless on the earth.
The dark splinter, however, continues its ascent, like a fish that leaps and forgets to fall. Up through mist and cloud it stabs, above the paths of hawks and falcons, above the spirit highways of the murths, until at last it touches the shores of that greater ocean, the void from whence we came. But no further: it has work to do in Alifros, tireless work.
Northwards it passes, turning and tumbling like a shard of glass, over the mountains, the dew-damp woods, the lowlands where villagers are waking, muttering, hitching oxen to the plough. By the time it reaches the ocean it has doubled in size.
1
The Victors
11 Modobrin 941
240th day from Etherhorde
No sunrise in his life — and he has watched hundreds, being a tarboy — has ever made him sentimental, but now the tears flow fast and silent. He is standing in the river with the water to his knees. Voices from the clearing warn him not to take another step, and he knows the danger better than they. Still he cannot believe that anything will harm him now. The sun on his brown, bruised face declares him a survivor, one of the lucky ones, in fact so lucky it staggers the mind.
He can hear someone singing, haunted words about remembered mornings, fallen friends. He lifts a hand as though to touch the sun. Tears of gratitude, these. By rights they should be dead, all of them. Drowned in darkness, smothering darkness, the darkness of a tomb.
Footsteps in the shallows, then a hand touches his elbow. ‘That’s far enough, mate,’ says a beloved voice.
Pazel Pathkendle gives a silent nod.
‘Come on, will you? Ramachni has something to tell us. I don’t think it can wait.’
Pazel bends and splashes water on his face. Better not to show these tears. He is not ashamed; he could not care less about shame or valour or looking brave for Neeps Undrabust, as good a friend as he could ever hope for. But tears would make Neeps want to help, and Pazel the survivor is learning not to ask for help. Friends have just so much to give; when that is gone there’s no hand on your elbow, no one left to pull you ashore.
He turned to Neeps and forced a smile. ‘You’re a mess.’
‘Go to the Pits,’ said the smaller tarboy. ‘You didn’t come through this any better. You look like a drowned raccoon.’
‘Wish I felt that good.’
Neeps glanced down at Pazel’s leg. ‘Credek, it’s worse than ever, isn’t it?’
‘The cold water helps,’ said Pazel. But in fact his leg felt terrible. It wasn’t the burn; that pain he could tolerate, or at least understand. But the incisions from the flame troll’s fangs had begun to throb, and itch, and the skin around them was an unhealthy green.
‘Listen, mate, the fighting’s over,’ said Neeps. ‘You show that leg to Ramachni. Not in an hour or two. Now.’
‘Who’s that singing? Bolutu?’
Neeps sniffed; Pazel’s dodge had not escaped him. ‘Bolutu and Lunja both,’ he said. ‘A praise song to the daylight, they told us. I think the dlomu are all sun worshippers, deep down.’
‘I’m joining them,’ said Pazel, his smile now sincere.
‘Rin’s truth!’ said Neeps. ‘But right now I just wish I could thank the builders of the tower, whoever they were.’
Pazel looked again at the massive ruin, and struggled as before to picture it intact. He could not do it; what he imagined was just too big. The absurdly gradual curve of the wall, the fitted stones large as carriages, the seven-hundred-foot fragment jutting into the sky: the tower would have dwarfed the greatest palaces of Arqual in the Northern world, along with everything he had yet seen in the South. And Neeps was right: it was the tower, as much as Ramachni’s magic or Thasha’s brilliance with a sword, that had saved their lives.
For they were still within the tomb — a living tomb, a tomb made of trees. Days ago, hunting the sorcerer Arunis, they had found themselves standing above it: a crater so vast it would have taken them days to walk around, if they had not known that Arunis waited somewhere in its depths. A crater which they at first mistook for an enormous, weed-covered lake. But it was no lake. What they had at first taken for the scummed-over surface was in fact a lid of leaves: the huge, flat, rubbery leaves of the Infernal Forest. Pazel had been reminded of lily pads blanketing a mill pond, but these pads were fused, branch to branch, tree to tree, all the way to the crater’s edge.
The entire forest lay sealed beneath this skin. Beneath four such skins, as they had found on descending: for there were older leaf-layers beneath the topmost, all supported by the straight, stony pillars of the trees. Like the dec
ks of a ship, each layer was darker than that above. Below the fourth level their descent had continued for several hundred feet, until at last they reached the forest floor.
Not a drop of rain or beam of sunlight could ever touch that floor. It was a hell of darkness they had wandered into. Seven of their party had fallen in that hot, dripping maze, where giant fungi exhaled mind-attacking spores, and bats smothered torches, and the trees themselves lowered tendrils, stealthy as pythons, strong enough to tear a man limb from limb.
The Infernal Forest. Did any place in Alifros better deserve its name?
But here in the forest’s very heart was a refuge, an oasis of light. The ruins held the trees at bay, and the standing wall cut through the leaf-layers to open sky. Moonlight had been dazzling enough after so much blindness. The sun was pure, exquisite joy.
‘Of course, there’s plenty of thanks to go around,’ said Neeps. ‘Old Fiffengurt, to start with, for giving you the blackjack. And Hercol for the fighting lessons.’
‘You fought like a tiger, mate,’ said Pazel.
‘Rubbish, I didn’t. I meant the lessons he gave Thasha, all those years. Did you see her, Pazel? The timing of it? The way she pivoted under Arunis, the way she swung?’
‘I didn’t see her kill him.’
‘It was beautiful,’ said Neeps. ‘That’s an ugly thing to say, maybe. But Pitfire! It was like she was born for that moment.’
‘She wasn’t, though, was she?’
Neeps shot him a dark look. ‘That’s enough about that, for Rin’s sake.’
They walked in silence to the foot of the broken stairs where the others were clustered, listening to the dlomu sing. Thasha, who had made love to him for the first time just days ago — a lifetime ago — stood before him in rags. Her skin a portrait of all they’d passed through. Bites and gashes from the summoned creatures they’d fought here at the tower’s foot. Scars where she’d torn off leeches as big around as his arm. Blisters from the touch of flame-trolls. And blood (dry, half-dry, oozing, rust-red, black) mixed with every foul substance imaginable, smeared and splattered from her feet to her golden hair. She caught his eye. She was smiling, happy. You’re beautiful, he thought, feeling a fool.
This was love, all right: wondrous, intoxicating. And at the same time harrowing, a torment more severe than any wound. For Pazel knew that Thasha, in a sense quite different from the others, should no longer be standing before him.
Fourteen left alive: just half of those who had set out from the city of Masalym and stormed into the heart of this deadly peninsula in a single furious week. Pazel looked at them, the victors, the sorcerer-slayers. It would have been hard to imagine a more crushed and beaten company. Split lips, bloodshot eyes. Ferocious grins bordering on the deranged. Most had lost their weapons; some had lost their shoes. Yet the victory was real; the great enemy lay dead. And given what the fight had taken from them, it was a wonder that madness only flickered in their smiles.
Hercol Stanapeth had almost literally been crushed, beneath an enormous stone hurled by Arunis. He was on his feet, though: crouching over a pile of tinder, whirling a stick in an effort to start a fire. Pazel’s sister Neda was helping, scraping bark and twigs together with her bloodied hands. Beside them, the two black-skinned, silver-eyed dlomu were bringing their song to an end.
Another hour, another day, let our unworthy kind
Feel Thy returning light and say that yet within the mind
We guard the long-remembered joys, too sudden then for song
The fire of youth that time destroys: in Thee it blazes on.
‘Well sung indeed,’ said Ramachni. ‘And fitting words for a day of healing.’
‘Is it to be such a day?’ asked Bolutu.
‘That is more than I can promise,’ said Ramachni, ‘but not more than I hope for.’
Ramachni was a mink. Slender, coal black, with very white fangs, and eyes that seemed to grow when they fixed on you. Like all of them he carried fresh wounds. A red welt crossed his chest like a sash, where the fur had been singed away.
It was a borrowed body: Ramachni was in fact a great mage from another world altogether, a world he declined to name. Arunis had been his mortal enemy, and yet it was Arunis who had clumsily opened the door between worlds that let Ramachni return, just hours ago, at the moment of their greatest need. He had taken bear-form during the fight, and matched Arunis spell for spell. But Arunis’ power, though crude, was also infinite, for he had had the Nilstone to draw upon. In the end Ramachni had been reduced to shielding them from the other’s attacks, and the shield had nearly broken. What was left of his strength? He had told them he would return more powerful than ever before, and so he clearly had. But he had not come to do battle with the Nilstone. Had this battle drained him, like the fight on the deck of the Chathrand? Would he have to leave them again?
‘There,’ said Hercol, as a wisp of smoke rose from the grass.
‘What good is a fire,’ said Lunja, the dlomic soldier, her face still turned to the sun, ‘unless we have something to cook on it?’
‘Don’t even mention food,’ said Neeps. ‘I’m so hungry I’m starting to fancy those mushrooms.’
‘We must eat nothing spawned in that forest,’ said the other dlomu, Mr Bolutu, ‘yet I do need flame, Lunja, to sterilise our knives.’ He looked pointedly at Pazel’s leg. Bolutu was a veterinarian: the only sort of doctor they had.
‘We will have something to cook,’ said Hercol. ‘Cayer Vispek will see to that.’
The sfvantskor warrior-priest smiled. Neda, his disciple sfvantskor, did the same. ‘We eating goose,’ she said.
‘There you go again,’ said the old Turach marine. He frowned at Neda, his wide mouth indignant. ‘You call that Arquali? “We eating”, indeed. How do you expect us to understand you?’
‘Enough, Corporal Mandric,’ said Bolutu. But the Turach paid no attention.
‘Listen, girl: We will eat, someday. We ate, long ago. We would eat, if we had a blary morsel. Which one do you mean? In a civilised language you’ve got to specify.’
‘Yes,’ said Neda, ‘we eating goose.’
She pointed at the river. On the far side, eight or ten plump grey birds were drifting in the shallows. Cayer Vispek’s eyes narrowed, studying them. Neda glanced at Pazel. Switching to Mzithrini, she said, ‘Cayer Vispek can hit anything with a stone. I have seen him kill birds on the wing.’
In the same tongue, Pazel said, ‘You saw him almost kill me with a stone, remember?’
She looked at him as only a sister could. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’d forgotten all about it.’
Neda spoke with bitter sarcasm. Years ago their mother had changed them both with a great, flawed spell: the only one she had ever cast, to Pazel’s knowledge at least. It had nearly killed them, and had plagued them with side effects that persisted to this day. But it had also made Pazel a language savant, and given Neda a memory that appeared to have no bounds.
Pazel doubted that Neda could control her Gift any better than he could his own. But he was certain she recalled that night when they were at last reunited, and the violence that had erupted minutes later.
‘Did you expect my master to kill you?’ she asked suddenly.
‘I don’t know,’ said Pazel. ‘Yes, I suppose.’
‘Because we’re monsters?’
‘Oh, Neda-’
‘Heartless creatures with their barbaric language, barbaric ways. Your Arquali friends will tell you all about it.’
‘Next you’ll be calling me Arquali again,’ said Pazel.
To his surprise, Neda did not rise to the bait. She looked furtively at Thasha, as though ashamed of herself. ‘I have said too much already,’ she said. ‘We of the Faith do not speak against our betters, and this morning I swore kinship with her.’
‘That doesn’t make Thasha your better, does it?’
His question only made things worse. Neda flushed crimson. ‘I could not have struck that blow,’ she said.
Becoming a tarboy had been merely the best of the awful choices before him. It was not clear whether Neda understood that choice, or could forgive it. But something had changed in the last few days. Her glances, even the sharpest ones, had a little less of the sfvantskor in them, and a little more the elder sister.
‘When do we march, Hercol?’ asked Neeps abruptly. ‘Tell me it won’t be sooner than tomorrow.’
‘When’s just one of the questions,’ added Big Skip Sunderling, the blacksmith’s mate from the Chathrand. ‘I’m more worried about how. Some of us ain’t fit to march.’
‘We will do as Ramachni commands,’ said Hercol. ‘You have followed me thus far, but make no mistake: he is our leader now.’
‘I would be a poor leader if I drove you on without rest,’ said Ramachni. ‘We need food as well, and Bolutu and I must do what we can for the wounded. And for all of us there remains one grim task before we depart.’
‘Do not speak of it just yet, pray,’ said a high, clear voice.
It was Ensyl, with Myett close behind her, scrambling down the broken staircase. At eight inches, neither ixchel woman stood as tall as a single step, but they descended with catlike grace, copper skin bright in the sun, eyes of the same colour gleaming like coals. Each carried a bulging sack, fashioned from bits of cloth, over her shoulder.
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