The Night of the Swarm tcv-4

by Robert V. S. Redick

  Thasha raved: ‘Pazel, help me. Oh Gods. Oh Gods.’

  Pazel turned over her hand, and stifled a cry: Thasha’s palm was a mass of blisters, white and oozing. ‘Get some bandages, Neeps! She’s scalded!’

  Thasha spoke through her gasps. ‘Doesn’t matter. . I have to kill them, Pazel. . bring the wine.’

  No one moved to obey her; no one was even tempted. Hercol raised his eyes. ‘Look, girl! We’re going to make it, thanks to you.’

  They were in the mouth of the gap. It was undulating, and rafts of red light drifted across it like icebergs, but it was wide enough, and the wind they had ridden was pouring through it into the North. For a moment Hercol saw the world beyond: their own world, their own time. Then he felt Thasha’s fingers tighten on his arm. Her fury had rekindled. ‘Bring the wine, Pazel,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ said Pazel. ‘No more, not for a while, anyway. You held the Stone much too long, Thasha. You can’t just pick it up again.’

  ‘Can’t I?’

  Thasha straightened, pushing away from Hercol, and began to stalk across the quarterdeck. His foot was still upon the Nilstone; he could not follow her. When Pazel did she turned him a glare so vicious that Hercol could scarcely blame the lad for hesitating.

  But Fiffengurt did not see the look. Passing the wheel to Elkstem, he ran to intercept her.

  ‘Miss Thasha, enough! You don’t need to strike them again; they’re barely afloat! And that foul wine’s gone to your head-’

  Thasha threw her shoulder against him, brutally. Fiffengurt was knocked off his feet, and Thasha crossed to the ladder, shouting: ‘Damn you all! Hercol, don’t you dare move the Nilstone!’

  She threw herself down the ladder, onto the main level of the topdeck, and began to march towards the Silver Stair. But after just a few steps, something changed. Her feet slowed; her shoulders drooped. She cursed and stumbled. By the time she reached the Silver Stair the fight was over. She knelt, leaning heavily against the hatch coaming. She raised her eyes with effort, scanned the frightened faces. Then she toppled gently on her side.

  Ramachni gazed down at her from the edge of the quarterdeck. ‘Sleep and heal,’ he said.

  Pain flared suddenly in Hercol’s foot: the Nilstone was burning him, straight through his boot. He switched feet, staring into the impossible darkness. ‘Pathkendle,’ he said, ‘fetch me those gauntlets, before I kick this thrice-damned thing into the sea.’

  The tarboy did not move. ‘Pathkendle! For Rin’s sake-’

  Pazel had gone rigid, his face full of wonder and fear. All around them, pale, nearly invisible particles of light were swirling, drifting like a fine scarlet snow. A silence engulfed them, like the closing of a vault. Hercol raised his hand and saw the particles adhering to his skin. Unlike snow they did not melt.

  The gap was imperfect. The substance of the Storm was thin here, but not gone. Only the world was gone. Behind them, ahead of them, North and South, Hercol could see nothing but a featureless glow. The veil of Erithusme’s spell had fallen. And when it rose again, how much of their world, their time, would it have stolen away?

  The light began to coat the topdeck, the surviving rigging, the dead men sheathed in tar. Pazel was on his knees, beating the deck with both fists, unable to make a sound. Hercol longed for an enemy, for a reason to pull Ildraquin from its scabbard and whirl into battle with all his strength and skill. He closed his eyes but it made no difference; the light was inside.

  31

  The Editor’s Companions

  I see them sometimes, in the lanes and gardens of this academical village, this haven untouched by war. Among the lecture halls in red brick and green marble, the rose beds and Buriav lilacs, there suddenly will shamble Fiffengurt, scowling, kindly, pushing a pram with a burbling daughter, studying the path before him with his one true eye. A little further, and there is Big Skip Sunderling carving meat in the butcher’s shop, up to his elbows in the job as always, happily a mess. Neda Pathkendle I have seen at the archery range, a strong, straight-backed woman of forty, teaching students to use a killing tool as a kind of diversion, a means of disciplining hand and eye, a game. I have seen Teggatz in a doctor’s coat, Bolutu pushing a broom, Lady Oggosk in the tavern where the fire is never lit, cloudy eyes on the window, eating alone.

  They do not know me, of course; or if they do they know the professor whose reputation is so odd and dubious that all familiarity is feigned, A very good day to you, sir, and how are you enjoying this fine summer morn? I don’t like it when they speak to me. Not their fault, of course, but whoever could have guessed that in telling their story I should also be al icted with their faces, that a girl in her first student year would glance up from her book and pierce me with Thasha’s beauty, those questing eyes, that hunger for experience, for change?

  Nilus Rose teaches physics in the Advanced Science Building; Marila storms by in a barrister’s robes; Ignus Chadfallow haunts the faculty club in the guise of the eldest waiter, who will tell you softly that food is not an entertainment but a sacrament, that the rice dishes are superior to the soups. Pazel has made but one appearance, at twilight on the wooded path behind the graveyard, hand in hand with an ethereal beauty whose face was not familiar at all.

  They are here until they speak, or until I look a second time, until I summon the memories that sweep phantoms away. Sometimes I will look for them, when I am grumpy and tired of solitude, when living for the past seems less noble than cowardly, a betrayal of the warm blood still in me, a waste. The old spook at the faculty club, who is almost a friend, asked once if I didn’t also see myself about the school? Oh yes, frequently, I answered, and let it go at that. He is a gentleman; he assumes that I am sane. What would become of that charity, if he knew where my own doppelgangers appeared? The flash in the alley, the desperate little life, always hungry, always hunted, with senses too sharp for his own happiness, addicted to dreams that call him, nearer, ever nearer, dreams that terrify when they seem most true.

  32

  Men in the Waves

  The world lurched, and Thasha woke in the sling they had fashioned to keep her from being tossed from her bed, and for a time she could not be made to understand.

  It was Neda’s turn at her bedside, and their lack of a strong common language made things harder. Bright spots danced before Thasha’s eyes, and her fingertips were numb.

  ‘We’re out of the Storm, then?’

  Neda mumbled something. Thasha repeated her question, louder.

  ‘No, no, Thasha. You are not feeling it?’

  What she felt was the Chathrand heaving violently beneath her — climbing mountainous waves, clawing over the crests, rushing like a landslide into the troughs — and the soreness of muscles flung too many times against the canvas sling. What she saw was her old cabin, swept clean of any objects that could fall or fly; and Neda, balancing with sfvantskor grace, barely touching the bolted bedframe; and the sea foaming grey and furious over the porthole glass.

  The bright spots were shrinking. Thasha breathed in warm, wet air.

  ‘I mean that we’re out of the Red Storm,’ said Thasha.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And smack in the middle of a blary gale. A killer.’

  ‘Not middle. Ending, maybe. I wish you sleep through it, sister.’

  Thasha reached for Neda’s hand. Sister. To wake and find one watching over you. A sister, something new under the sun. The voyage had brought her far more than loss.

  ‘How long has it been?’ she said.

  The ship rolled and heaved. The noise of the storm was strangely distant. Neda looked at her and said nothing.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘You’re awake. I am calling Pazel; he is exciting for you.’

  Thasha didn’t release her hand. ‘Just tell me, Neda.’

  ‘Five years.’

  ‘FIVE YEARS! RAMACHNI PUT ME TO SLEEP FOR FIVE GODS-DAMNED YEARS?’

  ‘No, no.’

  Thasha freed herself from
the sling and was thrown at once upon the floor. Her balance gone, her limbs sleep-clumsy. Neda helped her to her feet. ‘You sleeping fifty-three days,’ she said.

  ‘Then what’s this rubbish about — Oh. The Red Storm.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Neda.

  ‘It threw us forward in time after all. But how in Pitfire do you know?

  Have we made landfall?’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Neda. ‘We knowing by stars. Some stars turning like wheel, over and over the same. But the special stars — they are drifting, tachai? Little bit each year. Old sailors know. Captain Fiffengurt checking Rose’s book, also Ramachni knows, also Lady Oggosk. Is the truth, Thasha. We lose five years for ever. Or six, if counting travel.’

  ‘But the war-’

  ‘Maybe over. Or very big, or huge.’

  Thasha was shaking. ‘The Swarm, Neda. I. . pushed it out of the gap, into a deeper part of the Red Storm.’

  ‘More in future. You saving us, giving us time. These fifty-days we not seeing the Swarm.’

  ‘Neda, what about your dreams, yours and Pazel’s? The ones where your mother speaks to you?’

  Neda turned a little away, looking angry or confused. ‘Nothing. Silence. Maybe she is getting dead. Or thinking us dead, giving up.’

  And her father: he’d surely have given up. ‘Oh Gods,’ said Thasha. ‘Where’s the Nilstone? What have they done with the wine? I’ve got to do something about all this-’

  ‘Foolish talk.’

  ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’

  Neda’s hand seized her chin. Thasha looked up into the fierce warrior eyes.

  ‘Kill that fear,’ said Neda. ‘You taking Swarm in your hands and throwing sideways. Then striking Macadra’s ship like toy. Now no whimper. Be quiet. Put the raincoat. We are going up into this storm.’

  It might have been noon. Or sunset, or dawn. The wind was monstrous, the light dull nickel; the globular thunderheads seemed low enough to touch. Thasha clung to the Silver Stair hatch coaming, appalled. The rain like fistfuls of tiny nails flung endlessly at her face. The Chathrand was the toy; and what did that make her crew? A towering wave seemed frozen above the portside bow, then the illusion shattered and the great wave pounced, and somehow, impossibly, they slithered up its flank and toppled over the crest. Then the sick plunge, the weightlessness, the vanishing horizon and the next wave looming like death.

  The gale had blown for seven days already, Neda shouted. ‘And you sleeping through first one.’The crew was thin, frantic, exhausted, grinning welcome-back smiles at Thasha like gap-toothed ghouls. The next wave pounced. They had been pouncing for seven days.

  Thasha frowned: something was definitely wrong with her hearing. The whole battle with the storm was occuring in cottony undertones. Even the mad wolf-howls of the wind through the rigging were subdued.

  Neda told her that Pazel and Neeps were aloft, somewhere, but in the maelstrom Thasha could hardly recognize a soul. She wanted to lend a hand on the ropes, but she was weak: she’d had no food in fifty-three days. Nor could she imagine swallowing a morsel in weather like this.

  She found a job passing flasks of fresh water to the men on the ropes. The officers had to scream at the men to drink: they were sweating away their life’s water despite the soaking and the chill. Hours passed. She met her friends, haphazardly. Bolutu sang out with joy and kissed her on both cheeks; Marila dropped the buckets she was hauling and hugged her, tight barrel-belly pressing Thasha’s own. Thasha touched it: three months to go. ‘Chew this!’ Marila told her, taking a somewhat dusty, leaf-wrapped ball of mul from her pocket. ‘Trust me, they don’t make you sick. Some days it’s the only thing I can eat.’

  ‘I still wish I knew what’s in those blary things.’

  ‘Eat it, Thasha. You’re paler than a cod.’

  They met Ramachni near the galley (he could venture nowhere near the topdeck). ‘What? Your ears?’ he said. ‘I save you from destroying yourself with the Nilstone, and you complain about your ears? I ask you, girl: has there ever been a better time to be deaf?’

  ‘I’m not laughing, Ramachni.’

  ‘No, you’re not. Well, Thasha, you will not be deaf for long. The healing sleep dulled all your senses; they return at different speeds. But you are still in mortal danger. The sleep cooled your hunger for the Stone, but it could do no more than slow the poison in your blood. The latter has been slowed a great deal: it may be weeks before the poison strikes you again.

  ‘But it will strike, Thasha, and when it does you must be ready. Hercol carries the silver key, and is never parted from it. The wine remains in your cabin. At the first sign of illness you must drink it all: down to the dregs, and the cure. Swear that you will obey me in this.’

  ‘Then I’ll never use the Stone again.’

  ‘You were never meant to, Thasha. Erithusme was. And use it she will, when you release her.’

  How can you still believe that? she wanted to ask. But she gave Ramachni her word.

  The storm raged on. Thasha kept working, biting off chunks of the rubbery mul, gnawing at them until they dissolved. A little of her strength returned. She began to carry heavier loads, and to broom water from the gun decks into the drains. After two hours she rested, gasping, flat on her back in the stateroom on the bearskin rug. Jorl and Suzyt curled up against her. Felthrup chattered about the days she had missed.

  It seemed that every last soul had gone blind and senseless in the Red Storm, which poured its strange light even into their minds. When their senses returned, they found the ship adrift and heaving on great Nelluroq swells, and barely saved her from foundering. Nolcindar’s navigational advice was rendered useless, for there was no land in sight, and no telling just where the Red Storm had released them. ‘We’ve made fine speed north since the Red Storm,’ said Felthrup, ‘but north from where? That we cannot determine. We could be three months from landfall, Thasha. Or three days.’

  ‘Landfall where?’

  Felthrup just shook his head. How far east or west they had drifted was beyond all reckoning.

  When she ventured out again she met Hercol, who embraced her warmly, but somehow would not meet her eye. Thasha studied him, alarmed. Could he still be hurting from that kiss?

  The storm finally ebbed. The waves shrank to mere fifty-footers, and a pulsing behind the clouds suggested the existence of a sun. Down from the masts came Pazel and Neeps and fifty others: rope-whipped, spray-blinded, near-naked monkeys, all muscle and bone. The two tarboys waved and grinned from across the tonnage hatch. Beside her, Marila looked from Thasha to Pazel and back again. ‘Why aren’t you married yet?’ she asked.

  The sun peeked out. Captain Fiffengurt poured blessings on the crew. ‘You’re beautiful, my lads: you’re magnificence itself! You’ve got the blood of blary titans in your veins!’ But it was on Thasha that the most praise was heaped. Every man aboard knew how she’d saved them from the Death’s Head, and every man aboard wanted to kiss her or touch her fingers or kneel down and offer his service, or his life. Even Sergeant Haddismal snapped his heels together sharply and offered a salute — a gesture mimicked at once by every Turach in sight.

  ‘You’ve done it at last,’ said a voice in her ear, as Ensyl leaped nimbly to her shoulder.

  ‘Done what?’

  ‘Made the ship safe for crawlies, Thasha. Or at least for Myett and myself. Not that we’ve dared come near the topdeck since the storm began. Heridom, this ship is a mess.’

  ‘Ensyl,’ said Thasha with feeling, ‘we haven’t talked. You don’t know-’

  ‘That you saw Diadrelu, on the night you almost died?’

  ‘Hercol told you?’

  ‘No,’ said Ensyl, ‘he didn’t have to say a word. I saw your face, Thasha: I knew you were going to kiss him before we stepped out of your cabin. And I heard what you said: I have something for you. Something you were passing along from another.’

  Thasha bit her lips. Dri had sent the same words of hope to Ensyl and Hercol — bu
t the kiss, that had been meant for just one. She wished she could lie, could spare this woman’s feelings. ‘Dri loved you deeply,’ she said.

  Ensyl had the grace to smile. ‘I knew the fates would punish me, for unchaste dreams of my mistress.’

  ‘Oh, Ensyl — rubbish!’

  ‘Maybe. But the dreams were not.’

  Thasha caught up with Pazel and Neeps on the berthdeck, where they had collapsed against a wall among a dozen others fresh from the rigging, every one of them asleep. Pazel’s hand was closed around a half-empty cup of rum. Neeps lay with his head on Pazel’s shoulder, opened-mouthed and drooling.

  Thasha took the cup from Pazel’s hand, and he woke and reached for her. Neeps opened his eyes and sat up. ‘Hello, Thasha,’ he said. Then he rolled away and retched. Seconds later he was asleep against the man on his right.

  ‘He took a beating up there,’ said Pazel.

  ‘And you didn’t?’

  She dabbed at his cuts with her soggy sleeve, and felt quite married, and then recalled that that would never do. She might have to die; this boy had to live, unhitched, unentangled, free. He’d do the living for both of them.

  ‘Did you dream of me?’ asked Pazel.

  ‘Endlessly. Dragonflies and buttercups and little songbirds and you. For fifty-three days and nights.’

  ‘Come back to the stateroom with me, Thasha.’

  ‘Oh you fool.’

  ‘I want children. With your eyes. Don’t you want that at all?’

  She kissed him. ‘No.’

  Pazel went on smiling. He didn’t believe her, the egotist. She didn’t know if she believed herself.

  Then Pazel’s eyes darkened. ‘You don’t know, do you? About them.’

  ‘Who? Neeps and Marila? What are you talking about?’

  Pazel reached over and tugged up Neeps’ shirt. On the smaller boy’s chest, roughly over his heart, was a tattoo of a black and sinuous animal. ‘Mr Druffle did that for him. He’s a box of hidden talents, the old drunk.’