The Night of the Swarm

by Robert V. S. Redick

  “You’ll see them.” Rose walked to the chest and tipped it on its side, holding the lid ajar. “Hurry, damn you,” he whispered.

  The crawlies flowed like ants into the chest. When they were all inside Rose slowly tipped the chest upright and closed the lid. Then he tested the weight.

  Bile of Rin.

  Two hundred crawlies—and what, two pounds apiece? He flexed his hands, his shoulders. He walked to his cabin door and listened: no one about. He propped open the door and walked back to the chest, glaring at it like an enemy. In his youth he had carried a five-hundred-pound whiskey barrel up a gangway on a dare. But his youth was a memory, a visitor who had come with dreams and promises. A visitor whose face he could no longer recall.

  He lifted the chest. The crawlies shifted. He moved to the door, stagger-stepping like a draft animal. He pictured himself collapsing, spilling crawlies down the ladderway, found by Turachs with the stark evidence of madness and treason in his arms.

  How he managed the descent he could not begin to say. Did the ghosts aid him; could they lend him bodily strength? Or was it merely his conviction that a path once chosen must be walked to the end?

  On the threshold of the orlop deck he braced the chest against the wall and slid it to the ground. Pain like a knife in his back. Torn muscle. He raised the lid. Lord Talag, and the bleeding remnants of Ixphir House, looked up without a sound.

  “Run, you little bastards,” he gasped. “Run for your lives, and don’t let me ever see your faces again.”

  They vanished across the orlop, quiet as a sigh of wind through reeds. Not one of them failed to bow before they fled. Why had he done it? How had Talag compelled him to care?

  Too late for such questions. Rose lifted the chest (so nearly weightless now) and continued down to the mercy deck. His work was not done. The greater test was waiting somewhere in the dark.

  “Kurlstaff,” he whispered. “Come along, you old pervert. Spengler. Levirac, Maulle. Why are you hiding, tonight of all mucking nights? Come out, I say. I need your witness.”

  They came, stumping along in the darkness. They were reluctant, gazing at him with uneasy respect. Only Kurlstaff, with his lipstick and his bangles and his battle-axe, dared to speak. “You’re the maddest of us all,” he said.

  Rose moved on, and the ghost-captains trailed in his wake. At last he stood before the Green Door, padlocked as he had ordered. He set down the chest and fumbled in his pocket. From the start of his career Rose had never once dispensed a key without retaining duplicates himself. He freed the locks and let the chains fall away.

  The dangling lamp sputtered to life as he approached. Kazizarag stood as before in the center of the room, his gold eyes seeking Rose. This time the demon was silent, as though he knew (and perhaps he did) that taunts were the last thing he needed tonight. But he grinned at the captain, a wide sly grin full of teeth.

  Rose dropped the chest and stared him down.

  “You can have the gold,” he said. “All of it, and the other treasure as well. As Final Offshore Authority it is mine to dispense with. I give it to you.”

  “If.”

  “If you will swear not to seek it until the ship meets its death. A death you will not hasten.”

  “You are not much of a bargainer tonight,” said the maukslar. “I cannot leave the vessel until the Chathrand’s keel is cracked, and her blood spills, along with all the magic that courses through her. Only then will this prison release me.”

  Rose glanced back at Kurlstaff, who stood uneasily at the threshold. The other ghosts had not dared to enter. “What about our prison, Rose?” demanded Kurlstaff. “When the ship sinks, will we go to our rest? Or will we rot forever along with the carcass of the ship? Ask him, ask him!”

  Rose faced the maukslar again. “The woken rat,” he said, “tells me you can look through the walls of this ship as though they were glass.”

  The demon just waited, gazing at him.

  “Everywhere, that is, save the stateroom. The latter, I assume, is guarded by a magic stronger than your own. Arunis could not pierce it either. The chamber is off-limits to magical probes. We could even be hiding the Nilstone within it, could we not?”

  “You could, but I know better.”

  “The question is, does she?”

  “What are you driving at, Captain?”

  Rose ignored the question. “The rat also said you claimed you could make a hen’s egg glow like the sun.”

  “Easily.”

  “Could you make it burn, though? Burn with death-energy, throb with curses like an altar of the damned? Could you make it so black that it swallows light the way you swallow gold?”

  The maukslar stared at him, fascinated and appalled. “Lunatic. You are asking for a second Nilstone. Of course I cannot make such a thing, any more than I could lay new foundations under this world. And if I had such power, I should never offer the Nilstone as a gift. Not to you, not to Macadra. Not even to my mortal father, the Firelord who spawned me in his house of fear.”

  Rose shook his head. “I do not want another Nilstone. Only a counterfeit copy. Something Macadra will sense at a distance, and take for the real item.”

  Once more the demon grinned. “A decoy, you old wolf?”

  “A lure,” said Captain Rose.

  “For her, eh? For the White Raven. Nilus Rose, you are unpredictable, and that is the highest compliment I can give. A counterfeit: why not? But you would have to provide some solid artifact. I cannot anchor such a spell on thin air.”

  Rose nodded. He put a hand into his coat and withdrew a small object that glittered in the lamplight. It was the glass eye of the Leopard of Masalym, the good-luck charm on which he’d nearly choked.

  The demon studied it appraisingly. “That will serve,” he said. “But now we come to it: what will you give me?”

  “The gold is not enough?”

  “I have answered that question already.”

  “Your freedom, then,” said Rose.

  “My freedom!” spat the creature, enraged. “And what truth-telling oath will you take, king of swindlers? Do you know how many have come here through the ages—sailors, officers, tarboys, third-rate wizards, lovers seeking a trysting-place, assassins with bodies to hide? Do you know how many have promised me my freedom, Captain—sworn they would open the cell, right away, never fear—if only. If only I will grant them this, cure them of that, spread the secrets of eternity before their nibbling little minds. You are all the same. You strike poses. And when you have taken much from me, you walk out that door, and spend the rest of your lives not thinking about the prisoner you left in the dark.”

  Still Rose’s gaze was implacable. “Do I look like them? Do I look as though I have time to waste?”

  The maukslar blinked, conceding the point.

  “I will free you, Avarice,” said Rose. “The world is rife with demons, chained and unchained. The mischief you add will not be decisive.”

  He waited. The maukslar gazed at him with the focus of a tiger watching its prey.

  “Give me the bauble.”

  “I will not accept a poor imitation,” said Rose. “Do not forget that I have seen the Nilstone close at hand.”

  “My arts will not disappoint you. Give it here.”

  Rose held the eye closer, but not close enough. He asked several further, pointed questions, and the maukslar, hungry in an entirely new way, spat out the answers like seeds. Then he made the demon recite his oath, and his name, just as Felthrup had done. Kurlstaff was still here, death’s witness: the bond would presumably hold. Rose tossed the glass eye through the bars—

  The maukslar leaped like a dog, caught the glass eye in its teeth, and swallowed it.

  “You stinking fiend!” cried Rose.

  The maukslar threw its head back and moaned. Gnarled hands clawed at its stomach. Its body twisted like taffy; its head spun around upon its neck. Then the neck unwound with a snap, the belly heaved, and the monster vomited something onto
the floor of the cell.

  Rose hissed. Even Kurlstaff shielded his ghostly eyes. It was the Nilstone. Perfect in its blackness, horrible in the waves of power it flung out in all directions. It lay there, silently throbbing, an exact duplicate of that shard of death on which the fate of Alifros so strangely hung.

  The maukslar nudged it with a taloned foot. “It will not fool her, or any mage, if they summon the courage to touch it. Nor will it do anyone grievous harm. You may lift it and take it away.”

  “But from a distance?”

  “It would fool its very maker. And when Macadra draws near—within a few miles, say—it will call to her.”

  “A few miles! Is that all?”

  The demon shrugged. “You did not ask me to improve on the Nilstone.”

  Rose ran his fingers through his beard. “No, I did not. And it is better this way. For perhaps she knows the true stone well.”

  “She saw it wielded by Erithusmé,” said the maukslar, “and since that day it has haunted her dreams.” Then the creature gripped the bars of the cell, and its voice grew soft and deadly.

  “Rose …”

  The captain felt an unfamiliar kick inside his rib cage. His own heart. His tongue, too: all wrong, the way it cowered against the roof of his mouth. He looked for Kurlstaff. The ghost was fleeing down the passage with a swish of tattered skirt. The maukslar’s teeth were showing. Rose pulled open the door.

  Not everyone heard it, and most who did thought that they dreamed. A strange dream, a dream that was pure sound. A whoop, a wild cry that made eyes snap open all over the ship. Was it man, dog, steam-whistle? No one could be sure, for in the very act of opening their eyes the sound had gone. No one was moved to investigate. A few men whispered prayers, curled in their hammocks like babes in the womb.

  In the secret brig, Rose climbed painfully to his feet. The maukslar was gone. It had become a whirlwind, knocked him flat on his back. The cell stood open. The false Nilstone lay in the center of the floor.

  Bastard. You might have kicked the mucking thing out of the cell.

  Captain Kurlstaff had warned him about the cell doors, and Rose believed every word: the man had died here, after all. Rose walked to the cluttered passage, and combed through the detritus on hands and knees until he found a battered pike. He carried the weapon back into the brig, carefully avoiding the door, and teased the false Nilstone out through the bars, never letting so much as a finger cross the threshold.

  So black! he thought. You told the truth, creature: I am not disappointed. The leopard’s eye had become a well into which one could pour all the light in the world. It hurt to look at it: he struggled to focus on a thing that was all absence, a thing that was not there.

  And this is just an imitation.

  He picked it up. No, it did not kill at a touch. But it dizzied him, throbbing with enchantment, and it weighed a great deal. Once in his pocket, however, both weight and dizziness abated. He kicked the empty sea chest toward the cell, then finished the job with the pike, nudging it as far inside as he dared.

  Outside the Green Door, he replaced the chains and padlocks. All was quiet: at least the maukslar had not roused the ship. He crossed the deck in darkness. Who needed a lamp? The Chathrand’s lines were etched forever on his soul.

  On the topdeck, a warm rain was starting, and a wind that gusted and died. He asked the duty officer for the status book, and scanned the entries as he had done four times a day for most of his life. When he was done he turned and saw that Fiffengurt had crept up behind him.

  “You again,” he snapped. “What is it? Have you something to report?”

  “No, Captain,” said Fiffengurt. “I … couldn’t sleep, sir. Just taking some air.”

  Rose dismissed the duty officer, then turned and glared at Fiffengurt. In a low growl, he said, “Your previous assignment: abandon it. That matter is closed.”

  “Closed?”

  “Thasha Isiq is alive. She is very near to the Nilstone, and they are both moving quickly.”

  “Captain! Captain!”

  “Do not shout, Fiffengurt. The creature knew no more than that.”

  “You went to see that thing? Alone?”

  “Listen to me,” said Rose. “This is not a warship—not a proper warship—and the crew will never be as sharp as it was. They are weak in body and in spirit, and some of the best men with a cannon are dead.”

  Fiffengurt began to mouth some reply, but Rose cut him off. “A man is lost in the forest.”

  “Who, sir?”

  “It’s a fable, you dullard. He is lost, and a tiger has his scent. He may be days, even weeks from the forest’s edge. He has only a little knife; the tiger has claws and strength and cunning. It is circling him. It knows the forest better and can see in the dark. How does he escape the tiger?”

  “I know!” said a voice from inside Fiffengurt’s coat.

  It was the rodent. Fiffengurt blushed, and squeezed the animal a little against his side. He had evidently told it to keep quiet.

  “I’d say you take to a stream, sir. Hide your scent, and wait for the beasty to move off on his own.”

  Rose shook his head. “You’re on the right track. But you cannot stay submerged for long in a chilly stream.”

  “Carve a spear with that knife, then.”

  “And trust your life to one jab with a crooked stick? This is a master killer, Fiffengurt. It will come at you out of the dark like a living cannonball. It will tear you to shreds.”

  Fiffengurt closed his mouth and waited. Rose gave a snort of dismay. “It is a wonder that you’re still among the living,” he said. “Well, that is your new assignment: save the man from the tiger. Now go to sleep. There is fighting ahead.”

  With that Rose made for his cabin. Fiffengurt watched him go, bewildered as ever. Felthrup’s head emerged from the fold of his coat.

  “He should have asked me,” said Felthrup. “I’d have told him: climb a tree.”

  Rose slipped into his cabin, closed the door, leaned on it heavily—a gesture of fatigue he had not allowed himself in forty years. He was ready for that brandy now. Ready for this hellish night to end.

  He had left the window open. The rain was gusting in from starboard. Rose stripped off his own coat and hung it by the door. The papers waited on his desk; the untouched dinner setting waited on the table. He closed the windows. From this one, here, he’d thrown a man to his death. A company tattletale, not one of his crew. Still, just another lost simpleton, another pawn. It was no good being the pawn of any man, king or commoner, living or dead.

  He whirled.

  The papers, yes: they were still there. But the glass of brandy was not.

  Across the large room, in the corner reserved for informal visits, Sandor Ott was tipped back in a chair with his feet upon a small round table. His left hand cupped Rose’s drink. His long white knife lay on the table, unsheathed.

  “I think,” he said softly, “that you had better give an account of yourself.”

  Rose moved to the dining-table, breath short, mind churning. Do not hurry. Ott was always ready for violence, never for superior calm. This was how you fought him: by making sure he needed you, and by drowning him in calm. Rose struck a match and held it to the fengas lamp, but the fuel was nearly gone, and the weak flame barely lit the room. He found the brandy and poured a half shot. His favorite, this one. But tonight it was foul, bile and bathwater. What had become of his will to drink?

  When he faced Ott again the spy had risen, and was moving toward the door. Rose was shamed by his own relief, the cold sweat he was drenched in, the smack of his heart. Then he glanced at the little table and heard himself say, “You’ve forgotten your knife.”

  “Have I?” said Ott. “Well, then, I suppose I’d better not leave, just yet.”

  He hesitated, fiddling with the doorknob it appeared. Then he turned and put his hands in his coat pockets and walked to Rose. For a moment, despite his scars, he looked like an old homebody, some
frail Arquali blue-blood about to whistle up a dog. Rose waited for the inevitable grin to break out across his face. But Ott was not grinning. He was waiting for Rose to speak.

  “Did you pick the lock?”

  “No need. You’d left the windows open. An easy climb from the wardroom below. Why did you open them, in the rain?”

  “It wasn’t raining when I left.”

  “Then you’ve been a long time wandering your ship.”

  “That is my prerogative. Now get out.”

  “But Rose, I have suggested something better. Something decidedly better for you. If only you will heed me.”

  Ott was staring up at him, and standing too close. Rose gazed at the white knife still lying on the table. He had his own, of course. Right there on his belt, just inches from his hand.

  “I will receive you on the morrow,” he said. “Come back then if you would speak.”

  “The morrow is here, Captain Rose.”

  As if to prove his point, the duty officer gave the bell seven strokes. A dark, wet dawn was breaking somewhere. Rose scowled and brushed past the spymaster, forcing himself to make contact with the man. Ott let himself be moved. Rose lumbered toward his bedchamber.

  “Did the crawlies threaten you, or pay a bribe?”

  Rose missed a step, and glanced back sharply. There, he’d botched it. He might as well have written a confession in scarlet ink.

  “You let them reboard,” said Ott. “You aided them. The creatures who poisoned our water supply, who took both you and me hostage. Who have imprisoned us all in this bay.”

  “The crawlies are no longer our problem, Ott.”

  “Indeed. They do not control Stath Bálfyr?”

  “Not our crawlies, no.”

  A knock at the door. Rose started, but Sandor Ott called without turning: “Enter.”

  The steward crept in, with Rose’s morning papers and tea service. Ott turned and walked past the man and nudged the door shut with his toe. Then he slid the dead bolt. The steward glanced up, startled. Ott shrugged and smiled, as though he were improvising a game. The steward placed the tray on the dining-table.