The Night of the Swarm

by Robert V. S. Redick

  “We’re flying the Bali Adro flag. Won’t that help?”

  Only to a point, he says. When they run out of enemies, they fire on one another, ram one another, close & grapple & kill. The eguar gave them indescribable power, but it also made them frenzied & fearful, almost rabid. “And a rabid dog must bite something, after all.”

  He is a good fellow, Spoon-Ears, but he never cheers me up.

  So we run & run, with many a backward glance. Lady Oggosk crouches topside day after day, like a gargoyle, staring in the direction of the Sandwall, which most days one needs a telescope to see. Felthrup, of all Rin’s creatures, has taken to chatting with her, & even sits in the old crone’s lap. The vicious Sniraga, who used to kill rats by the score for food & pleasure, wails & flicks her ruined tail but will not touch him. When the hag wants Felthrup’s company she sends Sniraga to howl outside the stateroom, & the cat leads Felthrup to her door like a bodyguard. Mr. Teggatz watched them walk by & cracked his knuckles & burbled cryptically:

  “Cat takes rat, bah ha! Quite enough, quite enough. Cat takes orders from rat? Topsy-turvy. It’s the end of the world.”

  Monday, 28 Modobrin 941

  If Teggatz is right about the approach of doomsday we could well be the last to know it. There is no one & nothing out here. We could be launched already into the heart of the Ruling Sea, save for those brief glimpses of the Sandwall, & the meekness of the waves, which have not topped 50 feet. Some landmass ahead must be taming them, unless the lions of the deep have all turned lambs.

  Rose navigates by Ott’s ancient map & a fine dlömic chart provided by Prince Olik, but the former is a faded scrap & the latter only depicts the margins of the Island Wilderness. Our immediate goal: Stath Bálfyr, that last bit of Southern land, from which place Ott’s sniffing about in books & archives back home produced detailed course headings for our run across the Ruling Sea. We stand a fair chance of locating the island, too: Prince Olik ventured there in his youth & has penciled in his best guess at its location.

  And what a great black joke if we succeed.

  For we’ve kept the secret so far—we being just myself & Marila & Felthrup, now the others have departed. Alone on the Chathrand we know that those course headings are a perfect crock. They don’t point to Gurishal, that blighted kingdom of the Shaggat Ness. I doubt they point to any safe, sound path across the Nelluroq at all. Ott’s chart is a forgery, but this time he was not the forger. The ixchel have used us, used us like the great oafs we are, used this ship to ferry them back to Stath Bálfyr, their homeland, from whence we stole them centuries ago. Now all the little people have gone, vanished into thin air.

  That is nonsense, of course: they are flesh & blood, not pixies. They are also a brave & decent people, no more vicious or deluded than we ourselves, & more committed to one another by far. Probably they slipped ashore in Masalym, to try their luck on some less lethal ship. Rin save us, if men will rape tarboys half their size, what will they not have done to tiny ixchel, in the silence of attics, laboratories, holds?

  But now that the ixchel are gone, should I tell? Should I try to persuade Ott that his whole mad circumnavigation of Alifros is based on a lie? Soon enough I’ll have no choice, for he means to start our northward run the minute Stath Bálfyr gives us our bearings. For the moment I see nothing to be gained by speaking up: Ott would insist on attempting the crossing anyway, & sooner, probably. Stath Bálfyr will not help us get home, but so long as we are searching for it we are at least on the same side of the world as our friends.

  Tuesday, 29 Modobrin 941

  Felthrup is sleepwalking. This is preferable, he declares, to not sleeping at all, by which malady he nearly perished on the Ruling Sea. Yet any sleep disorder in the rat should set alarm bells ringing throughout the Chathrand. His insomnia proved to be his way of fighting Arunis, who was attacking the minds of who-knows-how-many crew members as he tried to master the Nilstone.

  He has come a long way as a dreamer, Felthrup declares. Time was that Arunis had infiltrated his dreams, & placed a lock on them, so that he could torture & interrogate the rat all night, & be certain Felthrup would be none the wiser by day. Now that lock is broken (another result of the sorcerer’s death, maybe?) & Ratty can remember his dreams like anyone else: imperfectly, that is, & through the veil that falls with the opening of the eyes. I ask what he thinks he’s searching for, when he roams the passageways, or bumps along the edges of the stateroom chambers in his sleep. “The doors of a club,” he tells me cryptically. “I have a friend there who might help us, if I can only find him.”

  Marila has a little bulge at her beltline already, as though her stomach aspired to catch up with those round cheeks of hers. Felthrup tells me that she is “miserable, weak, sickly, ill-humored, dolorous,” but he is distressed whenever one of us suffers a hangnail. What is certain is that Mrs. Undrabust has no patience with the indignities of her condition. She storms about looking for work & grows irritated when the women steerage passengers—old spinsters to the last, since the desertions in Masalym5—coo & cluck at her & tell her she should be abed. Mr. Teggatz lives in fear of her: she is usually famished but gags on his offerings. The tarboys are sniggering over a rumor that she begged the cook for a salted pig’s ear, claiming it was for Thasha’s dogs, & then was seen gnawing it herself on the No. 3 ladderway.

  Dr. Chadfallow, for his part, is healing—Ott knows just how far to torture a man—but he is broken in spirit, & does not hide the fact. “I have chosen all the wrong paths in life,” he said this evening, as Marila & I changed his bandages. “I should never have set foot in the Keep of Five Domes. I grew to like it there, among the jewels & courtesans. I thought I could stand beside Magad & nudge his empire toward the good. I thought reason would prevail. Self-delusion, nothing more. The emperor gelded me the day he called me to court.”

  At that Felthrup began to leap up & down. “The villain! The wretch! Was the operation terribly painful?”

  “Hush, Ratty, it was a figure of speech,” I said. And to Chadfallow: “All you could do was try, man. Nobody steers a ship but the captain.”

  The doctor was having none of that. “When a captain will not turn, you must place another boat across his way. I should have fought Magad sooner, while there was still time.”

  “You’d have made a lousy rebel,” put in Marila, who has a knack for getting to the heart of things. “You’d have just been hanged or stabbed or something. And then you’d never have invented your parasite pills, & I’d have died when I was eight.”

  Chadfallow snorted, then winced with pain, but for a moment I saw pleasure in his eyes.

  He is not alone in his melancholy, of course. Rose is still hermited in his cabin; Uskins still shuffles about like the walking dead. The men are grim, the tarboys witless with fear, the dlömu simply astonished. They hang together, these dlömu. Rin knows they must need the comfort of familiar faces, when all they see are pale humans, ghost faces to them, their country’s exterminated slaves come back to life. They sleep on the boards, play a game with dice & chalk lines, exercise at dawn. Teggatz says they don’t eat much—not more than half what a human eats—but after labor how they will gobble mül. I’ve watched ’em knead those sticky globs like bread dough, then chew & chew till a peaceful look steals over them, & they sleep. I’ve eaten the stuff myself (bland & vaguely foul it is) but still haven’t a clue what’s in it.

  As I say, they’re close. Still, the ganglords smell fresh blood & are trying their luck at recruiting. This evening I heard Kruno Burnscove make a pitch to three of the youngest dlömu. Protection, he kept saying. “At the darkest hour, you’ll need more than forty brothers & sisters, won’t ye now? Human beings are wicked, you have no muckin’ idea. If we get lost out there, & the food gets low? You think them Plapps will settle for that dlömic putty you live on? Why, they’ll kill you & cut out your fat & boil it up into a stew. They’ve done it on other ships, lads. There’s witnesses aboard.”

  He noticed me
listening, then, but only smiled. What was I going to do about it?

  “All lies,” I told the dlömu. “Pay no attention, lads. There’s strychnine on certain tongues.”

  “He would say that,” Burnscove countered, pointing at me with a blackened nail. “Let me tell you about the neighborhood this one comes from—”

  We bickered, but I could tell who had their ears. So could Kruno Burnscove, whose twinkle kept on brightening. Rose still needs the gangs; their hatred of each other protects him from any serious threat of mutiny. Otherwise he’d long ago have cut the heads off those twin snakes.

  Thursday, 31 Modobrin 941

  A ghastly night. Marila came weeping to my door. Sharp pains in her gut, & vomiting too: the poor girl was a sight. I put her in my bunk & ran to Chadfallow, hating to think of him rising & tearing all his stitches. But Felthrup was there ahead of me (he is Marila’s constant guardian in the stateroom), nipping at his ankles, chiding him to be careful.

  “Dysentery, if she’s lucky,” said Chadfallow. “Nothing to do with the pregnancy—but I’ve seen it end a few. We must be ready for that.” He sent me dashing off to Teggatz with a fistful of herbs to brew into tea. By the time I got back to my cabin he & Ratty were there, & Marila was moaning. She threw up the first cup; the second gave her the runs. A crowd gathered in the passage, hushed & fearful. Of all forms of good luck that sailors believe in, a babe in a lawful, wedded womb is the most potent. Not the cruelest bastard aboard wanted her to lose the child.

  Marila sipped that brew for hours, Teggatz rushing back & forth from the galley with fresh kettles, Chadfallow taking her temperature, sniffing her sweat, making her blow up little balloons & Rin knows what else besides, & Ratty flying about my little cabin like blary ball lightning, insisting that everything be “perfect, please everyone, not good enough, passable, tolerable, tarboyish, rodent-grade—perfect!” & Marila herself moaning & squatting mortified on chamber pots behind a blanket. No blood, she’d say, & we’d all sigh & swear.

  Very late, the symptoms broke. Marila lay still, breathing easier, & the crowd drifted away, smiling like children. In time she persuaded Chadfallow to go to his rest, & I sent Felthrup along behind to see that he did so. Marila fell asleep gripping my sleeve. I lowered myself to the floor & closed my eyes. If anyone can bring us hope it will be young Mrs. Undrabust.

  I dreamed of the other youths. Pathkendle toppling from a bridge. Undrabust knuckle-walking like an ape. Thasha trapped in stone like a fly in amber. I had the power to save them from those calamities, to pull them together in my arms, & wonder of wonders, when I did so we had all become the same age, each of us in our bursting prime, unbent & exuberant & delivered from fear. They’re my kin, I thought, & why did it take so long to see it? For the journey was ended; someone was calling me away. And I only knew the place they had in my heart because I was leaving, because we’d never live beneath the same roof again. I woke stricken, on the point of blubbering tears.

  Then my eyes snapped open. An ixchel was crouched on my footlocker, gazing at me. I started to rise, & knocked over the little stand with the teakettle, waking Marila with a gasp.

  The ixchel was gone. Surely I’d had a dream within a dream? “What is it, what’s happened?” cried Marila. Nothing, dear, nothing. Old men will have nightmares, they talk to themselves, you should never spend the night in their company.

  But the vision troubled me throughout the day. For it was not just any ixchel6 I’d dreamed about. It was Talag, their lord & elder, the embodiment of the clan. A genius & a fanatic, & a man who’d not be pried away from his people by any power on earth.

  Friday, 1 Halar 942

  By our shipboard reckoning it is New Year’s Day. And thus the first day of spring in the North—though here the dlömu say that autumn has begun. And why should I expect anything comforting & familiar? Everything is backward here. There are mold spores on the biscuits of a color I’ve never seen in my life. There’s a second moon in the sky. Creatures with the skin of black eels & spun-silver hair rule an empire, & humans—what are they? Formerly slaves; today nothing at all, a bad memory, a handful of mindless scavengers dying of hunger in the wild. Rin’s mercy, what will happen to those we left behind?

  The new year. Start of the 29th in the reign of that crooked man I shall never again call His Supremacy. I once adored him, our Magad of Arqual. I knew he’d had a hand in driving Empress Maisa from the throne, but the fact never troubled me. She was corrupt & twisted, she had to be—my schoolteachers had told us so. Never mind that the Abbot’s Prayer we said every morning had included a plea to Rin for her safekeeping. One morning she was our Empress; the next her portrait came down, & we were told that she was a villainess, & had been “mercifully” allowed to flee into exile. They spoke of her with shame, that day. The following morning no one spoke of her at all. The last time I pronounced her name it was to my brother Gellin, & he hushed me angrily. “Don’t you ever pay attention, Graff? We’re not to mention that whore. She’s a stain on Arqual & best forgot.”

  I didn’t argue. He was right; I was certain of it. Our generation had rather too many certainties.

  Thirty years would pass before I heard another tale of Maisa’s overthrow. Hercól Stanapeth’s was a darker tale, but I didn’t have to be terrified or bullied into believing it. And we live (don’t we now?) in the hope that it may yet end well.

  Whatever the future holds, this New Year is starting off as dismal as the inside of a shark. The men’s feet drag, their eyes wear foggy veils of despair. They’re haunted by this day, of what it could be for them, what it has been. The work furloughs, the gifts of candy, the kids screaming & hugging your knees. The games & laughter. The wine gulped, the girls kissed, the marriages consummated or destroyed. So precious, even the bad memories, here on an alien sea.

  Then at midday Rose proves once more his gift for shocking us (the man’s mind is a jungle; at any moment a bright bird may issue from it, or a gruesome snake). We’re assembled on deck, even the late watch rousted & dragged into daylight, & there from the quarterdeck he bids us believe in the future: “As I told you once before, lads: the future we can fight for, not be given.” He doesn’t elaborate, mercifully enough: we are none of us open to pretty speeches anymore. But he does bring forth the apple-cheeked Altymiran woman who helps out Teggatz in the galley. She’s well liked, & has regained a bit of her plumpness on the rations provided by Prince Olik. She also turns out to have the lungs of a choir mistress, & she sings us a naïve little melody about the lambing-time in Arqual, & blast me if she doesn’t turn us all to lambs for ninety seconds or so.

  Next comes his real trick: the old fox suddenly produces thirty bottles of aged juniper idzu, secured in his cabin since Etherhorde, he says—but in what rat-proof, wave-proof miracle of packing I should like very much to know. The men don’t care to ask: tarboys have brought our tin cups from the galley & are passing them quickly. Rose breaks the sealing wax & pours a thimbleful. Before a silent ship, he drinks, swallows, considers. Then he nods & looks at us.

  “No better idzu could I obtain in the capital,” he said softly, “and I would have you know two things. First, that neither I nor anyone aboard has partaken of this store, until this moment. Second, that I am a fair judge of liquor—” There are chuckles at the understatement. “—& this drink is fine. Truth be told, it surpasses the drink they plied me with in the Keep of Five Domes, when I dined with the Emperor’s sons. If it were possible, I should declare it fit for you—fit for the most capable & dauntless men ever born beneath the arc of heaven, born to make mockery of hardship, born to crack an old, bedeviled skipper’s heart with pride. I should like to declare it that good—but nothing is that good. It is all I have to give you this New Year’s Day. A drink, & my promise to fight for our lives, hard as it may be to find the path to their salvation. Drink now to its finding, men of the Chathrand. That is all.”

  The crew roared. Staggered, I looked out over that throng of wretches. Plapps & Burns
covers, sailors & Turachs, even some of the folk we’d blary kidnapped on Simja: all cheering. They hadn’t even tasted the drink, but what did it matter? The Red Beast had praised them to heaven, & they loved him, suddenly. The drink went round; it was ambrosial & strong as the devil’s mead. “He’s not just our captain, he’s our father!” shouted a young midshipman, & seconds later I heard a song we used to sing in Temple School, on the lips of hundreds of overgrown boys:

  Father dauntless, we’re your lads, through cold and darkness wending.

  Climb we will that blasted hill,

  Lonely, sad but marching still

  Father fearless, lead us on, the night is surely ending.

  They pressed close to him. Rose never did smile: that would have diluted the effect. He only nodded, urging them to drink, & the idzu was gone before anyone could get too afflicted. They went singing to their stations, those wretches. I turned & slipped through a crowd of bewildered dlömu, making faces at the strange stuff in their cups & stranger joy in the humans around them, & then I saw Sandor Ott at the No. 4 hatch, looking over the scene with a certain abhorrence. I could have laughed. This is why you need him, killer. This is why you don’t dare make a final enemy of the man.

  Saturday, 2 Halar 942

  The second day of any year is a disappointment. This one was marked by weird & hideous events. The predawn watch came off their shift wild-eyed & swearing: one of them had heard music in the darkness, flutes, but no players could they find, aloft or below. Already the talk is of ghosts. Did you see ghosts? I inquire. Well, no, Mr. F, not as such. But who made that music, eh? A fevered imagination, that’s who, I told ’em, but I wasn’t getting through. Ghosts, they insisted. Of course Rose’s endless mutterings on the subject have made it hard for even the natural skeptics among them to hold steady.

  At two bells, the expected cry finally comes: land ahead, a mist-fuzzed shadow, & another spotted minutes later, farther west. They are the Sparrows, the dlömu aboard tell us: little no-count islands, but for any ship with business in the Island Wilderness the sight of them marks the moment for turning away from the continent once & for all. With double hands on the braces we’re soon tacking northward. I look back & cannot see the Sandwall. But when I close my eyes I see their faces, plain as my hand: Thasha & Pathkendle, Undrabust & Hercól. I don’t believe in prayer, & yet I pray.