The Night of the Swarm (Chathrand Voyage 4)

by Robert V. S. Redick

  CRASH.

  Pazel fell, and managed to curl into a ball with Felthrup at the centre. 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 brother, 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 laboured 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 NN. ‘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 colour of my eyes.’

  This is why Erithusme 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. ‘T
he 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: frost was spreading lacework fingers 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 her 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.’

  Thasha turned so suddenly that they collided. She shoved past him. He turned to follow.

  ‘Let’s go back to the others,’ he pleaded, ‘maybe Hercól has thought of something.’

  ‘We’d know. There’d be shouting.’ Thasha stalked on, not looking back.

  They passed out of the compartment, around the entrance to the Silver Stair and down the long corridor. Dust and soot coated the magic wall, rendering it visible. Thasha stepped through it and turned to him. The dirt had come off on her face and clothes, leaving a vaguely Thasha-shaped window through which they faced each other.

  ‘Macadra’s our last hope,’ said Thasha. ‘Sometimes lunatics come to their senses, when things get dark enough. Look at Rose, for instance.’

  ‘Sometimes the darkness just makes them crazier. Look at Ott.’

  ‘Do you have a better idea? Do you have any ideas at all?’

  His cold breath fogged the wall between them. ‘No,’ he admitted, ‘not yet.’

  ‘Then you can’t come in.’

  ‘What?’

  She turned away, marching for the stateroom door. He moved to follow – and for the first time in almost a year, the wall stopped him dead. It answered to her even now. She had withdrawn her permission; she was shutting him out.

  ‘Don’t do it,’ he heard himself say. ‘Don’t leave me before we die. Neeps is right, Thasha, I am a one-note whistle. Nothing matters to me anymore but being with you.’

  She stopped with her hand on the doorknob. She turned and struck the passage wall with her fist. She was weeping. He called to her, begging, and the third time he did so her shoulder slumped, and the wall let him through. He ran to her and tried her tears away.

  ‘Stop it,’ she said.

  ‘Why?’

  Thasha shook her head. When he touched her hair again she started, then took his hand and dragged him brutally into the stateroom and kicked the door shut. She put her hands beneath his clothes, kissed him wildly, avoiding his eyes. She pressed her body against his own.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he said, appalled.

  ‘Make love to me.’

  ‘Thasha, stop. What in the Pits is wrong with you?’

  She tripped him, threw him down upon the floor. In Pazel’s mind instinct took over, and he pulled her down with him as he fell. They grappled, smashing against the admiral’s reading chair, the samovar, the tea-table from which he’d snatched a piece of cake on his first visit to the stateroom. The time he’d nearly walked out of her life. He did not know if this was a real fight or something else altogether, if she was angry or aroused. Whatever it was, he didn’t want it: not this way. He stopped resisting, letting her win. Glaring, she pinned his back to the floor.

  ‘You still don’t trust me,’ he said. ‘After everything, you’re still not sure I’m on your side.’

  ‘What mucking rubbish.’

  ‘If you trusted me, you’d just tell me what was wrong.’

  Thasha’s slapped the floor beside his head. ‘Would I? Would that help? Will anything help us now?’

  ‘You’re giving up?’

  ‘I’m going to pick up the Stone myself. Erithusmé created me. She made my mother conceive. It won’t kill me as fast as it kills other people. I might have a minute or two.’

  ‘Oh, Thasha—’

  ‘But you have to stay away. If you’re there I won’t be able to make myself do it.’

  ‘It took you five minutes to get the ship out of the bay at Stath Bàlfyr, with that wine in your stomach. And you only had to move the ship a mile.’

  ‘I know that, bastard. I was there.’

  Then the words began to spill from her, a wild, almost delirious plan for moving the Nilstone down that canyon, an idea so ludicrous it made him ache to hear the desperate hope she placed in it; a fantasy, a dream.

  ‘In two minutes?’ he said.

  ‘Maybe I’ll have longer. I could fight the Stone. Fight back.’

  ‘Do you think you can do it, Thasha? Just tell me the simple truth.’

  Her eyes were furious. She was going to hit him, bite him, burn him with her hate. She laid her head down on his shoulder. One hand found his cheek and rested there, gently. It grew quiet. He could hear the waves breaking softly against the stern.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  He put his arms around her, and they both lay still. Through the tilted windows he could see the Swarm boiling out towards the horizon, growing before his eyes.

  ‘In the mountains,’ she said, ‘when you lifted Bolutu’s pack by the cliff, I didn’t think you were going to throw it over the edge. I thought you were going to jump.’

  ‘I considered it,’ he said. ‘That bastard with the Plazic Knife might have had a harder time lifting me and the Stone together.’

  Thasha began to cry – not hysterically, this time, but with a deep, despairing release. ‘I wanted to stop you,’ she said. ‘I reached deep into my mind and called to her, begged her to break down the wall and stop you. I gave her my blessing, my permission. And nothing happened. Even to save your life I couldn’t bring Erithusmé back. That’s when I knew I never would.’

  ‘You will,’ he said, ‘somehow.’

  ‘The wall’s too strong, Pazel. I take a hammer to it in my dreams. There’s a crack, but it closes before I can lift the hammer again. It heals stronger than before.’

  ‘What’s it made of?’

  ‘Stone. Steel. Diamond.’

  He shook his
head. ‘Thasha, what is it made of?’

  She fell silent, her hand still resting on his face. At last she said, ‘Greed. My greed, for a life of my own. No matter what Erithusmé told you there’s a part of me that thinks I’ll die when she returns. The woken part of me is brave enough to face that. But there’s another part I can’t control, and it takes over. Every time. Once in a while I just throw myself at the wall like a madwoman, and Erithusmé feels it, and does the same on the other side, raging and smashing, and I start to think we might just do it, might just tear the wall to pieces. That’s when the other part of me begins crying out, crying out, and it doesn’t stop until every crack is sealed.’

  ‘Crying out to whom?’

  Thasha froze, as if deeply shocked by the question. ‘Who do you mucking think?’ she said.

  Her tears grew stronger, racking her body. The loyal officer struck three bells. Pazel held her tighter, heartbroken and deeply afraid. Was he supposed to save her, sacrifice her? Was there any reason to keep trying, to torture her with hope in these final, blessed moments before the end?

  As he lay there facing the ceiling, blinking his own tears from his eyes, Pazel felt something small tickle the back of his neck. He shifted his gaze and saw a hint of blue and gold. Thasha’s Blessing-Band. The embroidered ribbon from the Lorg School, meant for the wedding ceremony on Simja. He lifted it: the silk was partly torn, but he could still read the ambiguous words:

  YE DEPART FOR A WORLD UNKNOWN,

  AND LOVE ALONE SHALL KEEP THEE

  Within him, something changed. Thasha felt it. Still weeping uncontrollably, she moved her hand to his face, probing.

  ‘What happened?’ she said. ‘Have you started hating me?’

  ‘Oh, Thasha—’

  ‘You don’t have to hide it. I wouldn’t. I’d tell you the truth.’

  Then he told her to stop crying, kissed her hand, her hair, and promised her he wasn’t crazy, that he loved her now and had done so since the day she first pinned him to the floor in the adjoining cabin, that they must get up and call the others together, that they must hurry, because at long last he knew.