The Night of the Swarm

by Robert V. S. Redick

  Neeps led him up the ladderway, with that half-awake stumble Pazel knew so well.

  “Hey, stop.”

  Startled, Neeps looked back over his shoulder.

  “I need to ask you a question. About Marila. How did you … come to be sure?”

  “Sure of what? That I loved her? That’s kind of a personal question, mate.”

  “Right,” said Pazel, furious with himself. “Just forget it. I’m sorry.”

  Neeps came back down the ladderway. “No, I’m sorry. You’re not much of a talker, and I reckon you wouldn’t ask unless it mattered a lot. You have a woman, then?”

  Pazel just looked at him. “I’m not sure,” he said at last.

  “Well, that’s common enough.” Neeps took a deep breath. “I was forced to dive once, into a shipwreck. We got into some trouble with sea-murths. The girls touch you, and suddenly you can breathe water. But the same spell makes you fall in love with the one you touched. And that one lures you away from the others and kills you. They got half a dozen of us that way.” He looked at Pazel for a moment, then plunged on. “It happened to me again, you see, with another sort of woman. Just one touch. Only she didn’t want to kill me. She was saving my life. And the love was real. I mean, Pitfire, I don’t know that there’s any other sort of love.”

  “What about the murth-girl? Do you still think about her?”

  “Oh, not at all. That was just a charm, just a little confusion. Magic can’t change the heart, Pazel. They told me that in—well, in a place where they know about such things. And I found it out myself, the hard way. Trust me: if it lasts more than an hour, it’s real.”

  He looked over his shoulder, then leaned close to Pazel and said, “You remember Thasha, don’t you? Thasha Isiq? The one who stayed on the ship?”

  Pazel spoke very carefully. “I remember her just fine.”

  “They say she’ll come back one day. From the land of the dead.” Neeps’ eyes were moist. “Lunja, my woman Lunja, won’t be coming back. But if she did—”

  He broke off. Pazel wanted to embrace him. They looked away from each other, suddenly abashed. “I have no idea why I’m talking to you,” said Neeps.

  “Because you’re a good bloke, that’s why.”

  “Lunja made me a better one. She made me larger, you see. She made room in my heart. And that’s better for everyone, I guess.”

  Marila stood wrapped in a blanket under the starlight, bedraggled and enormously pregnant. “Hello, tarboys,” she said sleepily, as Neeps pulled her close. “What took you so long? They got tired of waiting. They’re running a loop out there somewhere, and coming back for you, Pazel.” She yawned. “I don’t know why they’re crossing in the middle of the night.”

  “You didn’t have to get up,” Pazel said.

  “I wanted to,” she said simply. “Oh, and Ramachni sent you a package; it’s already aboard.” She looked at him, thoughtful. “He cares a lot about you. Why is that, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “We have friends in common.”

  It was too vague an answer for Marila, but this time she merely shrugged. “Be careful out there, will you? The world is stranger than you think.”

  “That’s hardly possible,” he said. “All right, then. Good luck with that school.”

  They smiled. Long ago Marila had admitted that she wanted to start a school for the deaf. The dream was still with her, and Neeps, it appeared, had begun to see the possibilities as well.

  Pazel looked at Marila’s round belly. “What about a name?” he asked. “Have you chosen one yet?”

  They hesitated, glancing sidelong at each other. “It’s strange, really,” said Neeps. “We’re agreed that if it’s a girl we’ll call her Diadrelu, after a friend who died. But if it’s a boy—well, that’s the odd part. We chose one. We both remember making a decision, and being very sure. But we can’t for the life of us remember what it was.”

  “It was such a good name,” said Marila, looking at him earnestly. “So good we don’t want to talk about any others, just yet. We’re still hoping we remember.”

  Pazel looked at her with wonder. “I hope so too,” he said at last.

  “Well, here’s your boat,” said Neeps, a bit relieved, as a sleek little clipper drew alongside. “Goodbye, Pazel. If you ever make it out Sollochstal way, you’ve got friends.”

  “I’ll remember,” he said. Then he took their hands and held them a long while, until he knew he had made them uncomfortable. On the clipper, a man was shouting. All aboard who’s coming aboard.

  “Thank you for everything,” said Pazel, and let them go.

  He spoke as little as possible to the men on the clipper. He did not look back to see if Neeps and Marila were still standing by the rail. They were bound for the Outer Isles, and it seemed likely that he would never see them again. At the moment the thought was more than he could bear.

  The package was heavy. Inside, he found a purse of gold: fine gold cockles from the wreck of the Chathrand, a bit of the fortune that Sergeant Haddismal had saved. The purse did not a fortune make, but it was enough to live on, frugally, for a few years at least. There was also a sharp knife, and some clothing. At the bottom of the crate, wrapped carefully in oilskin, lay Thasha’s copy of the thirteenth Merchant’s Polylex.

  When he did begin to speak to the men, he learned at once why they were crossing by night. They were freebooters, smugglers, dodging the new tariff collectors of the Crownless Lands. “These upstarts have got nothin’ on the old Arquali Inspectorate,” said one of the men, cheerfully. “We’ll have some good years here, before they learn our tricks.”

  “And there must be scarcity, too?” said Pazel.

  “Oh, aye, lad, scarcity!”

  “So higher prices, higher profits for you.”

  “Right on the kisser!” laughed the man. “You talk like you know the trade. Do you drink as well?”

  He took a drink. They were the happiest people he had seen since Uláramyth. Pazel was almost beginning to enjoy himself when his mind-fit struck.

  The freebooters scratched their chins. They set him up on the fife-rail, where everyone could watch him babble and moan. Pazel could not tell whether they thought him possessed, but if so, they worried less about having a devil aboard than the attention it might bring in Ormaelport. They conferred awhile, then gave him a wineskin and locked him in the hold. Pazel wished he could thank them. When he drank, his legs gave out, and he knew he had been drugged.

  Days later, when he came to his senses, he was far from the city of his birth. The clipper was running north along a foggy coastline. New freebooters were aboard, and one of them evidently outranked the captain, for he had taken over the man’s cabin, and could be heard inside, with a woman. Each time the man laughed Pazel found himself staring at the door.

  Later that morning, the man sent for him. Pazel was shown right into the bedchamber. There in blue pajamas, beside a rosy-cheeked woman Pazel had never seen, was Gregory Pathkendle.

  He was older—so much older! All the hair that remained to him was gray. Still his eyes were bright with mischief as he beckoned Pazel to take a seat.

  “Pazel Chadfallow, is it?” he said, making a face, as though the name tickled the back of his throat. “Afflicted with some permanent magic, they tell me? Well, never mind, my daughter’s just the same.”

  “Which daughter’s that, love?” said the woman.

  “I don’t mind a man with problems he owns up to,” said Captain Gregory, “but there’s one thing I can’t abide. Can you guess what it is?”

  “Domesticity?” said Pazel.

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “No, sir, I can’t guess.”

  “Boasting, that’s what,” said Gregory. “So I have in mind to find out if you were boasting when you told my boys you knew your way around a ship.”

  He drilled Pazel for some ten minutes concerning sails and rigging and the standard etiquette of the sea. Then he asked Pazel about his surname. />
  “I knew a Chadfallow. He was a doctor, and a great man, although he was too close to the Usurper in Etherhorde. He was one of the most powerful men in Alifros, in his time. Do you know the man I’m speaking of?”

  “Ignus Chadfallow,” said Pazel uneasily. “I knew him. I’m his son.”

  The woman burst out laughing. But Captain Gregory just looked him up and down. Pazel found himself remembering certain mornings when the woman beside Gregory had been his mother, and the window behind the bed had looked out on plum orchards. There had been mornings when this man made griddle-cakes, or took Pazel out to the edge of the Highlands to spot foxes and deer. A small, sweet life. A life he’d never thought would end.

  “Hush your cackling,” Gregory told the woman. “The lad didn’t lie about his sailing smarts; why should he lie about his father? And even the noblest among us may sow a few wild seeds.”

  “You’re proof of that.”

  Gregory kissed her. “Even dry old Chadfallow had a passionate side. I happen to know that for a fact.” He winked at Pazel. “There’s a past behind every man, ain’t there, my boy?”

  Pazel signed on with Gregory’s freebooters that very day, and in the two years that followed he saw more of the Northern world than he had in all his years on merchant vessels. With his new shipmates he camped in bogs and salt marshes, danced with Noonfirth courtesans, smuggled arms, liquor, and living men across the battle-lines. He was aware that he had realized his oldest dream: to sail with the man he’d always believed to be his father. But that had been a childish dream. Gregory’s passion for ribald jokes, for helping orphans, for bedding women whose languages he didn’t speak and whose very names he confused: all that had been carefully hidden. Pazel only now began to know the man.

  Gregory’s friendship with the Empress was something more than strategic: he had despised Arqual even before it invaded his homeland. He took countless risks for Maisa’s rebels, whether by sharing intelligence in secret letters or hiding swords in sacks of meal. “I’m no idealist, Pazel,” he confided once. “I just know how to pick the winning team.”

  Pazel hoped Gregory was right, but doubted anyone could be sure. Maisa’s rebels had yet to launch a single raid on Etherhorde. Still, defectors continued to join her ranks, and the noose about the capital was tightening. After one bloody week in springtime, Ulsprit fell. Pazel was there in the city when Maisa rode through as a liberator, waving from an open carriage beside Prince Eberzam Isiq. Pazel was surprised to see a little bird swoop down and land on Isiq’s shoulder. Prince Eberzam turned it a blazing smile.

  But if Gregory had aged, Thasha’s father was actually venerable, and Maisa was almost ancient. Her iron will was apparent in every glance, but her frame was skin and bone, and her hands shook as she waved. And for the first time Pazel wondered who, if anyone, these two were grooming as an heir.

  That night Gregory did not come back to the ship, and the next day they sailed for Dremland without him. As Ulsprit dwindled on the horizon, the bosun let it slip that Gregory had stayed behind for a woman.

  “Of course he did,” said Pazel. It had happened before: Gregory leaving his ship in other hands, arranging passage with friends or fellow schemers, rejoining them in some distant port. But the bosun said that this woman was a special case. “They were married once, you see. She was his wife.”

  “His wife? His wife Suthinia?”

  “Aye, the witch. So he’s told you about her, has he?”

  Pazel looked back at Ulsprit. It was hard to find the words. “I know about her,” he said at last.

  In Dremland, late at night, he wrote a letter to Gregory and slipped it under his door. Then he bundled his things into his hammock and slipped onto the dock. He had forged papers and fine seamanship, and thirty languages to his name. He’d spent less money than he’d earned in Gregory’s service. He knew how to get along. How was never likely to be a problem, he decided. The harder questions were where, and why.

  He went on wandering. Now and then he took a drink. There were times when his loneliness rose up and seemed to smother him, and other times when he recalled Ramachni’s words on Gurishal, and felt glad, and was determined to hold on.

  He bribed his own way across the battle-lines and walked the streets of Etherhorde, and stood in front of the old Isiq mansion on Maj Hill. That upper window, her bedroom. That garden, where Hercól taught her to fight. Then he found his way to Reka Street, and was admitted to the Physicians’ Temple, and lit a candle for Dr. Ignus Chadfallow, and stayed there in silence for a time.

  By evening he was anxious to be gone: too many women in Etherhorde looked like Thasha Isiq. He fled to Uturphe, and grew drunk on Uturphan brandy, and stumbled into the flikkermen’s quarter in a daze. The flikkermen chased him, cracking their whips, until they realized he was cursing them in their own language, flawlessly. At once they grew affectionate, and fed him raw river eel, and never wanted him to leave.

  The next month he stopped in Simja, and visited the taverns there, and listened to the sailors’ gossip. To his amazement, he heard them speaking of the Shaggat Ness.

  “What’s that?” he said, breaking in. “You have that wrong, surely? The Shaggat’s dead.”

  “Oh, the father, aye, on Gurishal. But this is his son, lad. On Bramian. Ain’t you heard? The Usurper raised him like a pet snake, with thousands of his crazies, up a big river in the jungle. He even built them a fleet. And the Shaggat’s boy sailed off just like they wanted, to make war on the Mzithrinis. It was all according to plan.”

  “Somebody’s ugly plan,” his friend added, with a belch.

  “Until one day the son wakes up and says, ‘It’s over. My father the Shaggat is dead. I am going home to set the white monkeys free.’ And he turns his fleet around and sails back to Bramian, and sets up a kingdom on that riverbank, and starts to bring the tribals into his fold. The island’s full of savages, you know. And the poor old Secret Fist! They can’t take Bramian back from him. They don’t have the manpower these days.”

  Seaside taverns were better than the Polylex, Pazel decided. A day later he heard an even stranger rumor, concerning Gurishal. As planned, the Mzithrinis had paraded the body of the Shaggat Ness before his worshippers, and that had crushed their spirits, all but destroying the faith. But on Gurishal too a new cult had arisen: the Shaggat Malabron. A scepter-wielding madman with the powers of a sorcerer, who was quickly taking control of the great island. At his side he was said to keep a strange, foreign counselor, an old man with scars and a wolfish grin.

  Pazel sighed, and drank up. They had killed one Shaggat, but two had taken his place.

  At long last he made his way home to Ormael. The city was rank, crowded, penniless, beautiful. He saw his own home, with kindly looking strangers behind the windows and mewling cats in the yard. He walked up into the plum orchards and helped himself to a plum. He sat in the late afternoon sun and closed his eyes and knew an hour’s peace. He thought that love had nearly killed them all but love had also saved them, more times than he could count.

  Later that year he bought a passage to Opalt. He had no clear purpose in going there, except to lose himself in bustling Ballytween, one of the greatest cities of the North. In the flood of strangers’ voices, he thought he might not hear the one voice that followed him everywhere. And that would bring relief, of a kind.

  Things did not go as planned. On his first walk through the port district, he saw a public house called Annabel’s. The place was large and crowded, and he walked right by. But at the corner he paused, looking back at the bright doorway. Then he walked back and stepped inside and bought himself some ale and fritters at the bar. He was finishing his second pint when he saw Fiffengurt at a corner table, playing chess with Felthrup.

  He took the table beside them, and started chatting when the opportunity arose. Captain Fiffengurt was the brother of the bar’s owner; he was also very drunk. Felthrup drank only water; he was intent on winning the game. But they seemed to like talking
to him. They stayed, even as the crowd grew thinner, and Pazel bought them ale and food and asked them to tell their stories, and they obliged. By midnight they had forgotten the chess match, and were telling Pazel of the great waterworks of Masalym. By closing time they had brought him to the wreck on Gurishal.

  “I ran her clean aground,” put in Fiffengurt. “But that wasn’t the end, was it, Ratty? Oh, no. We watched her from the meadows on the clifftops. Watched her swept away to perdition, and Lady Thasha still aboard. I still, still dream—”

  He staggered away from the table, looking sick. “Why does he drink so much?” Pazel asked.

  “You might too, Pazel, if you had lost five years of your life, and come back to find everything changed.”

  Pazel looked down into his tankard: nearly empty. The rat had a point.

  “And Captain Fiffengurt has his sorrows,” Felthrup continued. “Oh, he calls himself lucky, very lucky, to be here again with his beloved Annabel, and to know his dear daughter. They fled here from Etherhorde, during the worst part of the fighting. And it has been good for everyone: there are no beer-wars on Opalt, no breweries torched by rivals.”

  “What’s his worry, then?” asked Pazel.

  “Anni married his brother, Pazel. Years before our return. She is quite fond of him; the man is a good husband and father. But the child is Fiffengurt’s. You must keep that last fact to yourself.”

  Pazel rested his chin on his hand, and sighed. “I won’t tell a soul.”

  “Good,” said Felthrup. “I have a feeling I can trust you. In fact, I will now share a secret of my own. I mean to become a historian.”

  “Do that!” Pazel slapped the table and laughed.

  “Ah, you are flippant, but I spend every day in the archives, here in Ballytween; it has become a second home. But there is something more. Where that voyage is concerned I have a special advantage. Do you know what I did, when the Great Ship lay smashed on the beach?”

  Pazel thought about it. “No, I don’t.”

  “I drank the blood of the keel. They brought me to shore on a raft, and while the others were boarding I caught a strange, warm, resinous smell, and then I saw it dripping, dripping from a crack in the good ship’s spine, where it arched overhead. I licked the spot. It tasted like nothing I have ever experienced. And the next day the memories began.”