The Night of the Swarm (Chathrand Voyage 4)

by Robert V. S. Redick

  Then Pazel hurled the axe.

  The hrathmog weapon was long for him, and very heavy, but he had swung it like a mallet, both hands over his head. It flew straight, and struck the commander squarely in the chest. The Plazic knife flew from his hand, and the commander fell backwards off the bridge, never crying out, and was gone.

  Snarling erupted behind him: the paralysis spell had broken. Lunja had stabbed the athymar nearest her face, and the others attacked it from the sides. The last dog turned and fled, and Valgrif, his face already scarlet, pursued it into the trees.

  Pazel knelt in the bloodied snow. The survivors crowded to him, praising him; Mandric called him a genius, but Neeps and Thasha just held his arms and said nothing, and Pazel was grateful for that. No hiding behind the danger now. The real pain was just beginning.

  But there are kind fates as well as cruel in Alifros. Even as his friends embraced him, a shout came from the direction of the chasm. It was Olik. He was on the footbridge beneath the main structure, one hand braced against the chute above him, and the other holding a body to his chest.

  ‘Help me, damn you all!’

  It was Neda. She was drenched, and her skin was a ghastly blue, and her open eyes did not see them. But she was breathing, and in her mouth they found the shattered remains of a fire beetle. And when ten minutes later a fire blazed (dry wood in the tower, matches on their foes) she woke and asked for Cayer Vispek, and then remembered, and broke into loud, un-sfvantskor-like tears.

  ‘My coat snagged on the ice,’ she told Pazel in their mother tongue, when she could speak again. ‘I was hanging there in the falling water. He came through and caught one of the struts, but the force of it dislocated his arm. He was bleeding too, but with his good arm he pulled me out of the water and onto the footbridge. Then—’ She put a hand to her lips. She could not go on.

  ‘He kissed you?’ said Pazel.

  ‘No. Yes.’ Neda stared helplessly at her brother. ‘He gave me his fire beetle. He pulled it from his coat pocket with his teeth. I tried to share it with him, but he shut his mouth and turned away. Then he held me against him, gave me all the warmth he had left in his body. Why would he do that, Pazel? For a damned soul? I was dead to him, wasn’t I? Wasn’t I?’

  Cayer Vispek’s body remained beneath the Water Bridge, and with great care they extracted it and brought it to solid ground. An hour later Valgrif emerged limping from the forest. He had chased the dog far across Urakán, but slain it at last, then staunched his bleeding foot in the snow. On the way back he had found Ensyl and Myett upon the trail. Neither woman was scratched. They had jumped the eagle together, and killed it with their swords, and when it had crashed into the pines they had leaped together and fallen through a lattice of needles and thin branches, which had slowed them so gradually that they had actually come to rest a yard above the earth. They had dropped lightly to their feet, and Myett had sheathed her sword and remarked how good it was to be alive.

  19

  Forgotten Prisoners

  1 Fuinar 942

  289th day from Etherhorde

  Captain Rose looked at the body of the man he had killed.

  Darius Plapp was hanging by a rope strung over the main yard. There was a fair swell this morning: the body swung like a pendulum, and the cloud of flies about him kept getting left behind.

  ‘Fetch a boathook, Mr Uskins,’ Rose said to the first mate, who was loitering behind him.

  ‘Oppo, sir. Justice is done.’

  As he fell, Darius Plapp had jammed his fingers into the noose. The deed ran contrary to Rose’s frank advice to the man. It had delayed his death, of course, but only prolonged his suffering thereby. The hands were still there, tucked under the rope, as though Plapp were trying to button his collar. His mouth was wide open, as it had been during his final week of life, tirelessly proclaiming his innocence in the death of Kruno Burnscove.

  The hapless fool. As though his fate had hinged on the question of innocence or guilt. All that had mattered here was prejudice, the story the crew could bring itself to believe. That, and the swift elimination of any possible rival to Rose himself. As rivals, the ganglords had neutralised each other. Alone, either one could have grown into a threat.

  Uskins returned with the boathook, and Rose fished the hanged man near. Then he drew his sword with his free hand and raised it high. ‘Thus do we bury murderers and rebels,’ he shouted to the tense little crowd. ‘No prayers, no ceremony for a man who wished evil on us all.’

  The rope parted at the first swing, and one more Etherhorder departed the Chathrand, far from home.

  ‘Have this line down from the yardarm, Uskins.’

  ‘I shall do it with my own hands, sir,’ said the first mate.

  Rose turned and looked at him squarely, for the first time in a week. Uskins stood contrite, calm, well-groomed. He had not looked so well since Sorrophran, before his conflict with Pazel Pathkendle brought about his first disgrace.

  Rose detested Uskins, counterfeit seaman and transparent bootlicker that he was. But what to make of this picture of health? Chadfallow could not explain it, though he literally followed Uskins about with a notebook, hoping for some clue, any clue, to help him fight the plague. Since their escape from the Behemoth nine men and two women had succumbed.

  Eleven tol-chenni lunatics, eleven reasons for panic and revolt. The brig was half full of gibbering ape-men, and every time a messenger approached, the captain feared that someone else had succumbed.

  Uskins might just hold the key to their survival; therefore Uskins would be tolerated.

  ‘Stay out of the rigging,’ he said, turning his back on the man. ‘Just have the mucking thing removed. Tell Fiffengurt to meet me portside. And send a boy with my telescope.’

  Rose crossed the ship to the portside rail. When the telescope came he studied the island again. Dark, lush, horsehead-shaped. Some highlands, some sand, and plenty of fresh water giving life to those trees. More than that he did not know, although they had been in the island’s orbit for two days: it was extraordinarily difficult to approach. On its southern flank there were reefs within reefs; on the north there were offshore rocks, and rollers that began in shallows eight miles out.

  The waves: Rose could hear the long thunder of their breaking even here, twenty miles away. That sound told Rose everything he needed to know. The waves were monsters. Beyond those rocks there were no more islands – only the endless, pitiless Ruling Sea, all the way home to Arqual, that fading memory, that dream. Stath Bálfyr marked the end of the South.

  There was but one possible landing: a bay on the eastern side. From a distance it appeared promising. The mouth of the bay might be rather narrow, but the colour suggested depth enough, at least along the southern cliffs. And once inside they could tack close to the south shore, and be hidden from the sea while the smaller craft went ashore. They could also put a lookout on the clifftops, where the view would be immense and unobstructed. If a vessel approached from almost any direction, save out of the Ruling Sea itself, they would have a minimum of eight hours’ warning.

  All very straightforward. Yet something made Rose hesitate to send the Chathrand into that bay. He ordered a longitudinal run along the island’s southern shore, with every telescope in their possession trained on the island. The survey yielded few surprises. The woods were dense. The birds were many. A small shipwreck on a western beach might have been any two-master out of Bali Adro or Karysk or some other land; it was clearly ancient. There were no other signs of visitation.

  Sandor Ott had been enraged by the delay, which came to nearly twenty hours. But when they at last returned to the mouth of the bay and Rose ordered a second, closer pass, the spymaster exploded. He barged into Rose’s quarters without knocking, and even appeared on the verge of lifting a hand against him, a thing that for all his bluster and threats he had never done.

  ‘It is Stath Bálfyr, Rose!’ Ott roared. ‘The location is precisely as we expected, and Prince Olik confi
rmed. The shape of the bay is perfect. We have arrived. What is there to do but plot the course and set sail?’

  Idiotic question. They would have to land, if only to cut silage for the animals and refill their water casks. And they needed to take a compass ashore to calibrate the binnacles,13 a task they had put off far too long.

  ‘Binnacles be damned!’ cried Ott. ‘You’re making excuses. You’re conspiring with Chadfallow and your treasonous quartermaster to keep us here as long as possible.’

  Rose had taken offence. He could delay perfectly well without the aid of any man.

  ‘We found this island as much by chart and dead-reckoning as by the compass,’ he had conceded to explain (how his father would have raged: explanations, to a non-sailor and a spy!). ‘But there are neither charts nor landmarks on the Ruling Sea. If something we took on in Masalym has altered the pull of the compass needle by a mere half-degree, we could arrive many hundreds of miles off course – in the ice of the Nelu Ghila, for example, or in the centre of the Mzithrini naval exclusion zone. That would complicate your plans for the Shaggat rather more than an extra day or two of preparations.’

  Ott had been right on a few counts, however. The island was Stath Bálfyt, and Rose did wish to delay. But it would never do to admit to that wish, to Ott or anyone else aboard. For even if the spymaster were blind to it, the fact remained that the Chathrand was more imperilled now than when the Behemoth attacked.

  The unthinkable had happened: both ganglords dead within a fortnight. Rose had played his only card in hanging Darius Plapp. Although they did not realise it yet, the gesture marked the end of his control of either gang. They could run riot, slaughter each other, take revenge for generations of bloodshed on other vessels, on this vessel, on the Etherhorde waterfront. And then there was the plague, from which no one could deliver them, and the fear that their enemies might yet catch up. The one thing that still could generate hope and cooperation was the prospect of a journey home. If the idea ever took hold that Rose was delaying that journey, not only his captaincy but his very life would be in danger.

  Rose jumped. Sniraga was rubbing at his ankles. He bellowed at her, and the cat shot a few yards away and began to lick. That sound. How he hated it. Aloud, to no one, certainly not to the cat, he said, ‘Where the devil is Mr Fiffengurt?’

  But of course the cat had nothing to do with the quartermaster. Her job was to escort the rodent, Felthrup, who even now was sidling up to Rose.

  ‘A delightful morning to you, Captain,’ he said, ‘and if I may, the Lady Oggosk entreats you to call on her at your earliest convenience.’

  ‘Call on her? In her cabin?’

  ‘She begs leave to inform you that she is hoping for a family communiqué.’

  The rat was often nervous in his presence. Rose had no idea why, but it upset him like anything unreasonable. ‘Speak plainly or be gone,’ he said.

  The rat squirmed. ‘She is pregnant—’

  ‘You’re deranged.’

  ‘Pregnant with anticipation, sir. Concerning the aforementioned epistle.’

  Rose’s hands became fists. ‘I still have no idea what you are saying, and I forbid you to say it again. We are about to enter the port of Stath Bálfyr. Tell Oggosk I am unavailable before this evening, six bells at the earliest.’

  ‘As you please, Captain. It is curious, however, that Lady Oggosk could be so grossly mistaken.’

  ‘Mistaken?’

  ‘She was certain you would take interest in this … how shall I put it … this necropaternal missive. But I shall not speak, I shall not! For it’s quite likely that I should fail to capture the ardour with which the duchess spoke. The exigency, in a word. Yes, the exigency.’

  ‘I would like to stomp you flat,’ said Rose.

  Felthrup discovered an urgent need to be elsewhere. Rose watched him flee, thinking: necropaternal missive. A letter. From his father. Another lashing from beyond the grave.

  ‘Fiffengurt!’ he bellowed. ‘By the black Pits, where can the man be hiding?’

  In fact the quartermaster stood just a yard to his left, waiting to be recognised. By his doleful expression Rose knew he brought bad news. ‘What has happened?’ he demanded. ‘Tell me at once!’

  Fiffengurt took a slip of paper from his vest pocket, and passed it to the captain. Upon it were written three names. Two were sailors, Burnscove Boys. The third was a tarboy by the name of Durst. From the Kepperies, like Rose himself. He knew of that family, the Dursts. Utter indigents, for generations. Rose’s father had owned the land where they built their shanties.

  ‘The men were strangled,’ muttered Fiffengurt under his breath. ‘The lad’s still with us … in a manner of speaking.’

  Another plague victim. Rose crushed the paper in his hand. ‘Where were the murders done?’

  ‘No telling, sir. The bodies were stuffed in the forepeak. Old Gangrüne found blood seeping under the door.’

  Rose stood very still. Something else was the matter with Fiffengurt, but he had yet to grasp it. The man was normally transparent. During their first crossing of the Nelluroq, this quality had made Fiffengurt’s stab at organising a mutiny as obvious as a sandwich board hung about his neck. But there was a certain duplicity about him now. Something he was both itching to reveal and frightened even to think about.

  Rose determined to have it out of him. He stared mercilessly, until Fiffengurt began to fidget and blink. Every one of his officers produced a background hum just by standing and thinking; they were the telltale noises of inferior minds. Rose leaned closer, cocked his ear. Fiffengurt leaned ever so slightly away.

  ‘Which is it?’ asked Rose.

  ‘Which is what, Captain!’ Fiffengurt all but screamed.

  ‘I want your opinion. Do we enter the bay at this time, or not?’

  The quartermaster swallowed. ‘We don’t know if there’s seaway, Captain. The reefs—’

  ‘Blast the reefs. Assume that an approach is possible. Should we enter, should we attempt a landing there?’

  Fiffengurt was sweating. He chewed his lips, preparing to mouth some idiocy. Rose lifted a warning finger.

  ‘I have you, sir. I do not wish to hear lies. You will come to a decision about what you wish to share with your captain, knowing his sacred responsibility to guard the life of this crew. No hiding, Fiffengurt. You will decide, and shortly. Agreed?’

  The man was flabbergasted. He had prepared himself to withstand threats or violence, but not this. ‘Agreed, agreed, Captain. Thank you, sir.’

  Rose nodded slowly. Then he passed Fiffengurt the telescope. ‘What are your thoughts on the Storm?’ he said.

  Far to the north, a band of scarlet ran along the ocean’s rim. It stood about three fingers’ widths high and was paler than an old wine-stain on a linen tablecloth. But it did not vanish with the sunset, and at night it grew starkly visible, and filled the crew with fear. They had faced it once before, except for the dlömic newcomers. It was the Red Storm, Erithusmé’s great spell of containment. A magic-dampening, curse-breaking barrier that had protected the North from the ravages of the plague for centuries, if Prince Olik was to be believed. It had not harmed them when they passed through it from the North: indeed it had saved them, by dispersing the Nelluroq Vortex, the whirlpool the size of a city. But now—

  ‘I’ve told you what I think, Captain,’ said Fiffengurt. ‘It’s still there. And that’s a wee problem for us.’

  ‘You trust Olik? Even in this preposterous business?’

  Fiffengurt took a deep breath. ‘I might not have,’ he said, ‘if what he claimed about the Storm didn’t match so well with Mr Bolutu’s … experience. They’d never met, Captain. They didn’t get together and conspire. Mad? Well certainly they could be. But neither one of them had a whiff of madness about ’em. And why would their stories match? Pitfire, they ain’t even two stories. They’re one.’

  Rose stared at the red ribbon. A single story, but mad all the same.

  ‘One more
thing’s clear to me, sir,’ said Fiffengurt. ‘The Storm’s much weaker than before.’

  Rose looked at him sharply. ‘You noticed as well,’ he said.

  Fiffengurt nodded. ‘Captain, you were still a prisoner when we came upon it the first time. But I watched it night and day. It burned like Rin’s own brushfire, sir. I tell you it’s a pale, frail thing compared to what it was.’

  ‘But not gone,’ said the captain.

  Fiffengurt stared at the distant light as if wishing he could blow it out, snuff it like a candle, disperse it like smoke with his hands. ‘No sir, not yet,’ he said.

  ‘I will tell you something, Fiffengurt,’ said Rose, gripping the rail, ‘and may the Pit Fiends roast me for eternity if I speak false. This is my last voyage, my last ship, my last foray into any water deeper than my testicles. Should I somehow live through this I will commission a home in the high desert, on the edge of the Slevran Steppe, of the kind the savages make of mud bricks and straw. I will dwell there with a peasant woman to cook for me until I die.’

  Fiffengurt nodded. ‘The desert will still be there, Captain.’

  But precious little else, he might have added. For if they sailed into the Red Storm they would be carried into the future: that was the spell’s unavoidable side effect, the cost of protecting the North from the plague. Bolutu and his shipmates had been hurled two centuries forward. Their fate might not be so extreme: just one century, perhaps. Or eighty years, or forty. Long enough for every last person who knew them to die.

  Rose glanced at Fiffengurt. Long enough for his Annabel to become a crone, if not a corpse. Long enough for their child to have passed through life without a father.

  And what evil, in forty or eighty or a hundred years, would the Nilstone have worked, in Macadra’s hands or someone else’s? What if, as the ghosts insinuated and Oggosk feared, some terrible process had already been set in motion by the power of that Stone? That horror that had passed overhead, the thing they were calling the Swarm: what if the talking rat was correct, and it grew over Alifros like mould upon an orange? Would the Red Storm propel them into a dead future, a murdered world? If he yielded to Ott, would they sail straight into the very apocalypse that he, Nilus Rose, had been chosen to prevent?