The Night of the Swarm

by Robert V. S. Redick

  “Longer than this ship has to live,” said Niriviel. “I will scout ahead.”

  “I would feel better if his master were still in a cage,” said Bolutu, as the falcon climbed into the night.

  “The clan will find him,” said Ensyl. “Isn’t that right, Lord Talag?”

  The old lord glanced at her and nodded briefly. His face was careworn; he had barely spoken since the death of his son. Beside him, Myett’s expression was even more distant. Her eyes were glassy; her hands hung limp at her sides. Pazel’s heart went out to her. She had expected her lover to survive his burns. It made no sense, except in the language of the heart.

  Neda touched Hercól on the elbow. In the Mzithrini tongue, she said, “We can test Marila’s theory, Asprodel. Just put on the gauntlets and move the Nilstone to another part of the ship.”

  Hercól blinked at her. “You’re a genius, Neda Pathkendle.”

  A small crowd descended to Thasha’s cabin; Bolutu carried one of the last lamps with oil left to burn. Thasha donned the gauntlets from Uláramyth as Pazel opened the cabinet. But he could not budge the iron slab. Hercól stepped up beside him. Together, muscles straining, they just managed to move it.

  The Nilstone slid into the chamber. Everyone flinched and moved back a step. It had not grown, and Pazel could feel no heat or other force that he could have given a name. But he could feel its power, and its utter wrongness. Looking at it was like gazing down into a bottomless pit.

  “The slab wasn’t stuck like before,” said Pazel. “The Nilstone’s gotten heavier, somehow. Much heavier.”

  Thasha put her gauntleted hand on the Nilstone. “Credek,” she swore, “I can’t move it an inch.”

  “Give me those things,” said Hercól.

  When both gauntlets covered his hands he squeezed the Nilstone between them, bent low at the knees, and lifted. He groaned with effort. Veins stood out on his neck and forearms. At last he stopped and shook his head.

  “Now we know why Erithusmé made that slab as strong as a ship’s anchor.”

  “And why the stern’s riding so low,” said Marila.

  “Can’t you make up your mind?” said Neeps. “A few minutes ago you told us the Stone was pulling us deeper into the canyon. Now you say it’s pulling down.”

  Again, Marila directed her reply to the others, never glancing at Neeps. “It’s pulling toward this ‘door to death’s kingdom.’ Which is somewhere ahead of us and down. That’s what I think, anyway.”

  “So do I,” said Hercól, “for if the Stone is truly so heavy that it can alter the balance of the Chathrand, we should not have been able to move that slab with any effort. So why could we? Because the Stone’s own forward pull was helping us.”

  Neeps was blushing. “Marila,” he said, “you’re one smart woman.”

  Marila pinned him with a glance. “I’m not sure about that,” she said, and walked out of the room.

  An awkward silence. Neeps, defiant and ashamed at once, could not meet anyone’s eye. “Let’s just get out of here,” said Thasha at last. She left the cabin, and the others, relieved, filed after her. But at the stateroom door Pazel seized his friend by the elbow.

  “I want a word with you.”

  Thasha stayed as well. Neeps looked from one to the other. “Save your breath,” he said. “You’re not going to take my side, I can tell that already.”

  “Gods damn it, I don’t know what your side is,” said Pazel.

  “You wouldn’t, would you?”

  “What’s that crack mean, then?”

  “It means you’re a one-note whistle,” said Neeps. “You have Thasha. You don’t need anything else. You’ve got it all worked out. But then nothing’s ever mucked with your head, has it?”

  “Oh no, mate, never,” said Pazel acidly.

  “You know what I mean!”

  “There’s no time for this,” said Thasha. “Listen, Neeps, everything mucks with our heads. Living, dying, magic, hunger, falling in love, falling out of it—”

  “Who says I have? Who in the Pits do you think you are?”

  Crash.

  The deck lurched, and they crashed to the floor. Howls erupted from above and below. The ship had struck, and struck badly. She was rolling, twisting on whatever rock was grinding beneath her keel. The noise! Cracking, splintering, groaning of the ancient wood. Pazel could almost feel it, like a mutilation with a dull instrument of torture.

  Another lurch. The Chathrand had twisted free of the rock and righted herself. But Pazel knew what he had heard. Not damage, but a death-blow. From the lower decks men were screaming already:

  “She’s breached! She’s staved! Abandon ship, abandon ship!”

  “Marila!” shouted Neeps. He flew from the stateroom and into the dark passageway. “Be careful, damn it!” Pazel shouted, following as fast as he could.

  On the Silver Stair it was pitch-black. Men were streaming upward, groping, shoving from behind. Pazel heard Mr. Teggatz sob in the darkness: “Lost, lost, my home is—”

  Crash.

  A second strike. The ladderway became a chute of bodies. Pazel was hurled backward onto the landing, and five or six men fell atop him. Somewhere above Neeps was still shouting Marila’s name.

  “Out, out or drown!” men were screaming. The sweaty mass of men groped upward, toward the weak starlight, the slanting deck. Many helped one another. Others trampled and fought. Pazel at last found Neeps, pushing against the tide, and shouting for Marila with rising fear.

  “Oh, Gods, sweetheart—”

  Pazel joined the blind search. Thasha was here as well, but all they found were more sailors, dazed and bleeding, trying to drag themselves up the ladderway. Then Hercól’s voice reached them faintly over the din.

  “It’s all right, Undrabust. She’s up here, on the topdeck. She’s unharmed.”

  Pazel was glad of the darkness, for his friend’s sake. Neeps had burst into tears.

  The youths crawled out through the hatch. It was very dark: the Swarm’s mouth had closed even tighter; the disc of starlight above them had shrunk. They were careening between the cliff walls, thumping over one submerged rock after another, still with remarkable speed. Most of the crew had already reached the topdeck, and were clinging for dear life to the rails, davits, hatch coaming, anything fixed and solid. The captain and Mr, Elkstem remained on the quarterdeck, but no one was at the wheel. The last vestige of control was gone.

  The ship rolled, and Pazel found himself sliding back and forth like a shuffle-puck from port to starboard. He saw Lady Oggosk clinging to Thasha, wailing; Hercól with one arm hooked over a cleat and the other around Neda, who clung to him, arms about his waist. He clawed his way to where Felthrup was holding on by his teeth to the remains of a halyard, and seized him by the scruff of the neck.

  “Hold still! I’ve got you.”

  Felthrup did not hold still, but he let Pazel lift him up against his chest. “Thank you! But you’re utterly filthy, you know, and you are bleeding from the chin. Did I ever tell you of my fondness for soda bread?”

  “Oh, Felthrup, please shut up.” Pazel flung himself over heaps of wreckage that shifted beneath his feet. The rat squirmed up to his shoulder.

  “For you I will, Pazel Pathkendle. Yes, soda bread, and the pumpkin fritters they make in Sorrophran. And higher education. I think I shall try to become a professor of history.”

  “Do that.”

  “Ah, but now you are flippant, when I am only motivated by a wish to share some last intimacies with you, before the voyage ends. And it has almost ended, Pazel. As you would know if you looked over your shoulder. In fact it is ending n—”

  CRASH.

  Pazel fell, and managed to curl into a ball with Felthrup at the center. He rolled wildly across the deck, alongside countless others. This third collision was not like the first two. It was soft, but massive, affecting the whole ship at once. Pazel came to rest on the stomach of one of the augrongs, who was in turn sprawled atop his brot
her, who was flat against the wall of Rose’s cabin. A few feet away Neeps lay holding Marila, like a man who would never let go.

  For an instant no one moved on the Chathrand. Then out of the pile of bodies, Sandor Ott rose and dusted himself off. “Well, traitors,” he said cheerfully, “welcome to Gurishal.”

  It was a narrow beach, filling the canyon wall to wall, as the sea had done up to this point. The ship lay wrecked with massive dignity, leaning only slightly to starboard, not fifty feet from shore.

  Pazel stood in the shallows with his hand on the hull, watching the evacuation. Four accordion-ladders snaked down to the water’s edge, and the midship portal, sealed since Bramian, had been thrown open. Sailors were leaping into the water, splashing and sputtering; the frail and the wounded crossed the fifty feet on makeshift rafts. When they touched ground, the Arqualis knelt and kissed it, intoning the ritual words:

  “Hail Cora, Proud and Beautiful. Hail Cora, Earth-Goddess, embracing us at journey’s end. Hail, hail …”

  Sergeant Haddismal had taken it upon himself to save at least part of the Imperial treasure. The Turachs labored by candlelight, prying open boards in the inner hull, wrenching out thin iron cabinets, hauling them jingling ashore. Sandor Ott, leaning against the mainmast, watched him through narrowed eyes.

  There was moonlight, now: a pale search-beam through that last, closing aperture of the Swarm. By its glow they could see that the beach climbed into dunes, and the dunes in turn gave way to small, rugged trees. But the selk could see farther.

  “The cliff walls draw very close together, about a mile from where we stand,” said Kirishgán, “and between them, a vast wall rises, sealing off the canyon. It is sheer and mighty, like a cliff unto itself. But there is a staircase carved into the cliff on one side. Or rather, many staircases, one above another.”

  “Twenty, by my count,” said Nólcindar. “They climb all the way to the top of the wall. And above the wall one may scramble up the bare mountain to a high table land. There are meadows in that place, and a gentleness to the earth.”

  “Twenty staircases?” said Pazel. It was not much, beside all that they had come through to reach this place. But just now it felt like a death sentence.

  “And long, each one of them,” said Nólcindar. “I think this wall is the work of the First People.”

  “First at what?” asked Fiffengurt.

  “She means the Auru, Captain,” said Ramachni, “who built the tower at whose foot we killed Arunis, and who stood guard for centuries wherever the River of Shadows surfaced in this world. That wall is no surprise. Indeed it would be strange if they had not built some edifice on Gurishal.”

  “And if Dri had it right, death’s kingdom is entered by an abyss, somewhere beyond that wall,” said Hercól.

  Nólcindar raised her sapphire eyes. “The falcon returns,” she said.

  At her words, Sandor Ott started to his feet. He had been sitting apart from everyone, refusing to help with the evacuation, or to take part in any discussion of their next move. They had killed the Shaggat, and with it his savage dream. Their cause be damned, he’d said. He would not end his life aiding traitors to the Crown.

  Ott raised his eyes. He’d wrapped one arm in sailcloth, and Pazel had thought him wounded there. Now he knew better: the thick cloth was to serve as his falcon-glove. Niriviel was his last, loyal servant, and he had yet to see the bird since his escape from the brig. From the darkness, the bird gave a shrill, fierce cry.

  Ott lifted his arm and cried out, “Niriviel, my champion!”

  The bird swooped past him, alighting on the sand near Hercól. Ott turned and gaped. He looked like a man whose child had just left him to die.

  “We are in the right place,” Niriviel said to the others. “Our goal lies straight ahead.”

  “Our goal?” cried Sandor Ott.

  The falcon trained one eye on the spymaster. “Yes,” he said, “ours. All my life I let you guide me, Master. But your teachings were selfish, and your conspiracies have brought us only death. I would face death clothed in something better than your lies.”

  “I created you.”

  “You caged me,” said Niriviel, “first in body, then in mind.”

  Ott was shaking with fury. “Service to one’s rightful lord is no cage. And I am your lord, Nirviel. I speak for Arqual. I act by writ of His Supremacy.”

  The bird gazed at him in silence. “That is nothing to me any longer,” he said at last. “I renounce you, old man.”

  He turned back to the others. “I saw it,” he said. “A black funnel sloping down into the earth, with a pit of darkness at its heart no light will ever pierce, and a river vanishing into it, like a trickle of rain down the side of a well.”

  “Thank all the Gods,” said Prince Olik.

  “Do not thank them,” said the bird. “You will never reach that abyss. It lies beyond the wall at the top of those long stairs. Fifty miles beyond, at the minimum.”

  A horrified silence fell: once more the specter of defeat stood among them. “The canyon runs on beyond the wall,” said Niriviel, “but there is no path, nor even level ground. There are only endless rocks, crevasses, slides and scrambles. You will not reach it in one day, or three.”

  “Well, let’s blary try,” said Neeps. “There’ll be daylight soon enough. Maybe we have longer than we think.”

  Hercól shook his head. “Look at the Swarm, Undrabust. In the last six hours, the gap above us has shrunk by half. We might have another six hours, perhaps even eight. But we do not have days.”

  “And to judge by the way our stern was wallowing,” added Fiffengurt, “that blary Stone weighs more than all the cannon on the ship put together. How are we to carry it up those stairs, let alone over fifty pathless miles?”

  Despite himself Pazel glanced at Ramachni. “No, Pazel,” said the mage. “I have tapped the wellspring of my power until the water turned to salt, and then I tapped again, and yet again. There is not even salt water now. It may well be a year or two before I can so much as change the color of my eyes.”

  This is why Erithusmé believed we’d fail without her, Pazel thought. This is why Thasha’s got to come through.

  Bolutu started at a sudden thought. “Pazel, your power is not all gone. You still have a Master-Word.”

  “Right, and some of us have wolf-shaped scars,” said Pazel, “but what does that matter now, Bolutu? Dri and Rose are dead. There was a moment when those scars could have given us the answer, but the moment’s come and gone. It’s the same with my Master-Word: I missed the chance, somehow. If the chance ever came.”

  “You don’t know that,” said Neeps.

  “Fine, mate,” said Pazel. “The last word is one that blinds to give new sight. Go on, tell me who I’m supposed to blind, and what mucking good it will do.”

  “What about that magic clock of yours, then?” said Fiffengurt. “Ain’t there nobody on the other side you could call on, Ramachni?”

  “If I could summon such help, would I not have done so already?” said Ramachni. “There is no one left, Captain Fiffengurt. We are alone.”

  “Then we’ve had it,” said the tarboy Saroo, from the edge of the circle. “Face facts, why don’t you? This is where we make peace with our Gods, and commend ourselves to their care.”

  “You sound like a fool,” snapped his brother Swift. “And anyway, just yesterday you said that the Gods don’t exist.”

  “They exist, all right,” said Marila. “At least the Night Gods do. Arunis made a deal with them, remember?”

  Thasha looked up at the black lips of the Swarm, so close above them now, closing in from all sides. “The Night Gods,” she said. “They’re coming, aren’t they?”

  “Lower your gaze, Thasha Isiq,” said Ramachni. “And hear me, all of you: however else we spend the time that remains to us, we will not spend it fighting one another. We have six hours. Let us plumb our minds and hearts for an answer. We are not defeated yet.”

  Her
spine was cracked, her hull giving way, her seaworthiness ended after six hundred years, but the Chathrand still had a duty officer committed to ringing the hour. Whoever it was gave the old bell two strikes. One hour had slipped away already.

  It was very cold, now: a frost was spreading lacework over porthole glass. The moon had set, but dawn had not yet come. Most of the crew had gone ashore. Pazel had heard more than one man say he preferred to die anywhere but on that ship. Thasha, however, had boarded again, and Pazel had followed. If he was to die he would do it beside her—even if, as it seemed now, she was barely aware of his presence.

  For her old distance had suddenly returned. He had watched it come over her, there on the beach, when Ramachni said with finality that there was no help he could give. Pazel knew he should feel for her: she thought the world was perishing on her account, through some moral cavity in her heart, some perverse defeat it meant to deliver to Erithusmé. But that absent look made him furious. He wanted to strike her, cause her pain until she noticed him, until her eyes moved to his with recognition. He couldn’t bear the thought that when the end came she might glance at him for the last time with the indifference of a stranger.

  They were crossing the lower gun deck, rounding the cold galley (where Teggatz still worked by candlelight, banging pots and blubbering), tripping over wreckage, over bodies, smelling deathsmoke in corners where addicts had gathered, waiting for the end.

  “Where are we going?” he demanded.

  He had to repeat the question twice before she deigned to answer. “I don’t know about you,” she said. “I’m going to sickbay.”

  “What for?”

  “Chadfallow’s papers. That table he made, to help him find the Green Door.”

  “Thasha!”

  “I’m going to let Macadra out. She thinks she can use the Stone: who are we to say she’s wrong?”

  “Don’t be a mucking fool. She’s a lunatic. She won’t use its power just to toss it away. And she can’t use it to fight off the Swarm. Ramachni said so. Pitfire, Erithusmé told me that herself. Anyway, Chadfallow’s papers aren’t in sickbay anymore. Felthrup wanted them. I brought them back to the stateroom.”