The Night of the Swarm Read online

  Five bells. I’m on the berth deck (routine inspection, no whimpering tarboys anymore) when from the orlop below comes a howl such as man gives only when running for his life. I’m down the ladderway in seconds, with Teggatz & the tarboy Jervik Lank on my heels & Mr. Bindhammer racing ahead. Rin save us, who do we see but the purser, Old Gangrüne, running like a lad of twenty, & just behind him a mountain of red muscle & white tusks & slobber. It’s the Red River hog—the same mucking animal that disappeared in the rat war—fat & huge & furious, & before we can do more than gawk they’re both around the bend in the corridor.

  Alas for Gangrüne it was a dead-end passage. We charged in, screaming, but the beast was already goring the man, waving him about on its tusks like a dishrag. We attacked & a horrid melee it was. No boar in Alifros compares with a Red River either in size or in sheer mean mordaciousness. Bindhammer was trampled. Jervik stabbed the beast in the jaw but his little knife broke off at the hilt. Teggatz had brought a meat cleaver & lopped a slab of pork from one fatty shoulder. The hog turned screaming & caught his arm near the elbow, & you could see his arm would not long inconvenience those bolt-cutter jaws, so I drove my knife into the neck of the beast, once twice thrice, & the third time it screamed again & backed off Teggatz & smashed me up against the wall. I lost my knife. I locked my hands on those tusks but they were slippery with blood & then it chomped me. Gods of Death, it’s a wonder this left hand ain’t in its belly right now.

  I have Jervik to thank for that. He picked up the cleaver & proceeded to carve his way into the hog’s right buttock, deranged & deadly he looked, & the hog whirled & trampled him worse than Bindhammer, & Pitfire if all four of us weren’t down, bleeding, beaten flat & the hog not remotely tired of thrashing us, & a few men I’d like to vivisect just gazing meekly around the corner, & then a huge shadow & a roar & Refeg the augrong lifted the beast off Jervik, smashed it left & right, shattering the walls & then his brother Rer caught up from behind & bit down on one huge kicking hog-leg. A crack, a squeal. The thing kept fighting. They had to tear it apart.

  Tonight we are all still alive, though Bindhammer’s lung is collapsed & he fights for breath, & Jervik is so bruised & battered he can scarcely move. But the hog! I know its history: that fool Latzlo meant to sell it to the highest bidder, for the feasts after Thasha’s wedding. He’d fattened it out of his own purse, all the way to Simjalla City. Of course neither he nor his prize pig ever made it ashore.

  Where can the beast have hidden, all this time? The answer is nowhere. We run a tight ship; nothing half its size could be overlooked for long. I think back to the ixchel’s accusations, when they were still in charge: that we were hiding cattle & goats somewhere aboard. They claimed they’d heard the creatures, a moo-moo here, a bleat-bleat there, & we just laughed in their faces. No one is laughing anymore.

  Jervik lies in sickbay. I brought him a new knife: a fine blade with a walrus-ivory handle & a locking hinge. It had belonged to Swellows, the first bosun on this voyage, but in this case I didn’t mind raiding the locker of a dead man. Swellows had bragged about winning it in a tavern by cheating at spenk, & had made other, fouler remarks about how it was just the tool for a necklace-fancier.7 Jervik was pleased & didn’t ask where the knife had come from. What he did ask, to my surprise, was when we’d be turning back for Pazel & Co.

  I stumbled a bit. “That … ain’t quite clear.”

  He lifted his black & blue face from the pillow. “Wha?”

  “The captain … hasn’t made me privy to the plan.”

  Jervik squinted at me. “Yer leaving ’em behind, ain’t ye?”

  I expected a grin. If he’d given one I think I might have snatched that knife back from him & stabbed him in the ribs. Instead I saw the same distress in his face as I was feeling myself. I was floored. I bent down in the chair & fiddled with my shoe.

  “Mr. Lank,” I whispered, “what am I missing, here? Did you all become friends, before they left?”

  He scowled. “I ain’t good enough to be their friend. Not after wha I done. But I’m on your side, all right. Them others, Rose, Ott, they can all bite my—”

  “Hush! They’ll kill you.” I ran a hand through my hair. “You can’t shoot your mouth off about this, d’ye hear? But you’re perfectly right: Ott means to sail North & abandon them all. I don’t think the captain wants to, although with Rose it’s blary hard to tell. But Ott has the Turachs behind him, so what he wants, he gets.”

  “I’ll cut him open. And Rose too.”

  I looked at him. “That was my promise to Lady Thasha. That I’d stab Rose dead if he tried to sail away & leave them here. But who would it help, lad? Are we going to seize the Chathrand & sail it back to Masalym? And what if they’re not waiting for us in Masalym? What if they’re making for some other port?”

  “Then it’s hopeless. Bastards, whoresons—”

  “It’s not hopeless. You know what they’re made of, Pathkendle & Thasha & Hercól. And there’s Turachs with ’em too, & eight dlömic soldiers. But if we’re going to see ’em again I think they will have to come to us.”

  “Come to us! On what boat, Mr. Fiffengurt? And how would they know where to look?”

  I toyed with mentioning Stath Bálfyr, & the master plot of the ixchel. I considered trusting him with the knowledge of Hercól’s sword. What could be gained by either confidence, however, save further danger for us all? “They’ll know” was all I managed to say.

  He nodded, & I left him to his rest. A new ally, in the person of Jervik Lank. There’s no end to wonders under Heaven’s Tree.

  Teggatz reassembled the hog (Refeg & Rer did not eat it; they live on a diet of fish meal & grains) & roasted it in the galley stove, with cooking sherry & dlömic onions & snakeberries & yams. Everyone aboard got a bite of that beast, & it was sumptuous beyond all telling. I was wrong: Latzlo is no fool. For such a splendid pig the royals on Simja would have showered him with gold. I took him a plate. He nibbled with tears in his eyes.

  As for the officers, we ate in the wardroom. Uskins joined us for the first time in days, looking like something a dog had tired of chewing, as Sergeant Haddismal informed him to general delight. Rose & Ott were elsewhere, which made for looser tongues, & I dare say the rich food made us wild. Fegin told us about one such hog that got loose in a slaughterhouse in Ballytween & killed every man in the place, & seven delivery boys one after another, & the foreman who came to see why the packing was so slow.

  “And they all knew about the hog. It didn’t just appear like a fairy.”

  “This weren’t no mucking fairy,” said Haddismal.

  Mr. Thyne speculated that the hog might have gotten into a dark corner of the hold & gone to sleep—hibernated, in a word. The notion brought jeers. “Listen to the company man! Telling us about pigs!”

  “The Red River is on Kushal,” I explained. Seeing his blank look, I added: “Where it’s warm all the time. No need to hibernate if you’re a tropical pig.”

  “Latzlo hid the creature,” said Haddismal, matter-of-fact, “and I hope Rose hangs him from the yards by his thumbs. No worse money-grubber alive than that man. You heard him in the passageway: ‘My property, my investment.’ Gangrüne & Bindhammer lying at his feet, half killed, & he’s got eyes only for this.” He waved at the platter of bones. “He’s the guilty party, no doubt about it. Still thought he could sell it, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  “Sell it to whom?” asked Mr. Elkstem.

  “To us, of course. Later on, when the fresh food ran out, & we got hungry again.”

  “Brainless twit,” said Uskins, through a mouthful.

  Haddismal looked at him with contempt. “That depends on who he’s compared with,” he said, & chuckled at his own jest.

  “I wasn’t speaking of Latzlo,” said Uskins.

  Our busy jaws stopped dead. Haddismal stared in amazement. Uskins normally flinched at the very sight of the marine, who smacked him about with some regularity. But now he just went on eating.


  “I didn’t quite catch that remark,” said Haddismal, low & deadly.

  Uskins shrugged, chewed faster. Haddismal kept drilling him with those eyes, then slowly shook his head, as if he’d decided Uskins wasn’t quite worth interrupting his dinner for. The rest of us exchanged glances, started breathing again. Thyne hiccuped. Haddismal took another rib from the platter.

  “This hog was smarter than you on a good day,” said Uskins.

  The Turach exploded from his chair. Thyne & Elkstem dived out of his path as he rounded the table.

  “Because nobody kept it, you see,” said Uskins, the only one of us still seated. “It was woken, intelligent, & we’re eating it anyway, how d’ye like that, Sergeant, hmm? The Sizzies always did call us cannibals.”

  The Turach was reaching for Uskins’ collar, but he froze there, agog. Now we were all shouting at the first mate, in rage & disgust. Woken? What in the brimstone Pits did he mean?

  Uskins swallowed a large gristly bite. “Of course woken,” he said. “How do you think it got away from the rats? Day after day in that wooden crate. Thinking, knowing its circumstances. Knowing it was traveling to its death. What did piggy do? It watched & waited. And when the rats came it kicked that crate to pieces & fled into a vanishing compartment. Just like mages have done for hundreds of years. Just as Miss Thasha used to do, in olden times, when the ship was hers. The cows & goats went that way also.”

  He pushed more flesh into his mouth. “Stukey,” I said, “the hog never talked.”

  “Neither do I, most days,” he said. “Why talk when nobody listens? You’re a bilge-brain, too.” He gave me a meaty grin. “What would it say? Hello, Mr. Latzlo! It’s your thousand-pound piggy, let me out & I’ll play nice with you, I’ll fetch your slippers, I’ll never bite off your head.”

  “Raving lunatic,” said Haddismal.

  Uskins lurched forward & dragged the whole platter to himself, knocking his plate to the floor. He began to eat with both hands, chin low, making slobbery sounds like a dog. Yet somehow he managed to keep talking.

  “Vanishing compartment. Vanishing compartment. The same trick the crawlies pulled to escape us—they never went ashore, they’ll be back to fight us yet—the same trick that let Arunis hide so long in the—”

  Smack. His face went right into the pile of meat, as though shoved by an unseen hand. He began to squeal & writhe, in terrible fear, & it took all of us to restrain him, & hours for him to wear himself out. He is in his cabin now, strapped to his bed lest he hurt himself. A few of us are taking turns watching over him; I am writing this by his bedside in fact. I’ve tried to talk with him, to tell him that whatever’s happening is not his fault. When I raise the candle he stares at me with the blank eyes of an ape.

  3. The quartermaster’s first journal was stolen and partly destroyed by Mr. Uskins. The second was locked in the secret wall cabinet in Thasha Isiq’s cabin in the stateroom of the Chathrand. These journals filled two of the opulent blank books left on board by Admiral Isiq. The third and final journal, however, was written in a slender notebook that Fiffengurt kept in his breast pocket. He claimed that it was a gift from Prince Olik before the ship departed the city of Masalym. —EDITOR

  4. A Turach, one of the original Etherhorde hundred. The marine earned his nickname at the age of twelve, when he killed his father with a maul after learning that the man had raped his younger brother. Fiffengurt’s intervention probably led to the surprise Turach patrols of the berth deck that began at this time, as well as the threats posted in the ladderways, promising castration on the blacksmith’s anvil. —EDITOR

  5. Fiffengurt refers to the escape of twenty-six crew and passengers into the streets of Masalym. These men and women could not be found before the Chathrand’s desperate flight. —EDITOR

  6. Here Fiffengurt has rubbed out the word crawly in favor of ixchel. The racial slur never appears in his journals again. —EDITOR

  7. A collector of ixchel skulls, which some men wore about their necks in the odd belief that it would improve their virility, especially if the wearer himself had beheaded the corpses. —EDITOR

  6

  Schoolmates

  14 Modobrin 941

  243rd day from Etherhorde

  “Barley and rye,” shouted Captain Gregory Pathkendle, stretching his arms up the halyard.

  “And a fair lady’s thigh.”

  The five men hauled as one. They shouted the refrain philosophically, without a hint of arousal or mirth. Admiral Eberzam Isiq hauled too, sandwiched between the bald man with hoop earrings and the white-haired giant. For Isiq the work was agony: needles of pain danced from his heels to his spotted, shaking hands. And yet he hauled, and knew he bore a share (a paltry, old-man’s share) of the weight. The yard rose. The sail billowed out. Forty years, forty years since he’d worked a boat that eight men could handle alone.

  “Brandy and tea.”

  “And a fair lady’s knee.”

  They hauled a third time, and a fourth. The topman kept the sail knife-edged to the wind. Spray doused the men on the line (cold spray; it was late winter in the Northern world), and the tarboy tossed wood shavings under their feet for traction. Isiq smiled, his mind as clear as his body was tortured. Nothing had changed, everything had changed. One day you’re that tarboy, insolent and quick. The next you turn around and you’re old.

  “Honey and bread.”

  “And a fair lady’s bed.”

  “To us all, brave boys, they will come to us all,” sang Gregory, and made fast the halyard to the cleat. The men dropped the slack end; Isiq groaned and staggered away.

  Before he had gone three paces Captain Gregory was on him, seizing the admiral’s hands and turning them palms-upward for inspection. The hands were rooster red, the blisters already forming. Captain Gregory shot him an angry look.

  “Pace yourself,” he said. “Torn hands don’t earn their keep.”

  “Oppo, sir,” said Isiq, with just a hint of irony.

  Captain Gregory didn’t smile. His finger jabbed Isiq smartly in the chest. “Get fresh with me, you old walrus-gut, and you’ll—”

  Cannon fire. Both men snapped to attention, twin hounds on a scent. By old habit Isiq found himself counting: sixty, eighty explosions, double broadsides, two ships lacerating each other at close range, and chaser fire on the margins. Gregory ran forward, shouting for his telescope, though it was a bit too soon to see the fighting.

  They were near the mouth of the harbor, Simjalla City dwindling behind them, the western headland rising fast on the port bow. The little two-master creaked and wallowed. Dancer: her name seemed almost cruel. A light clipper, she might have had some simple beauty in her prime. Today she looked one storm away from the salvage yard. Her deck was bowed. Her mainsail had a stitched-up tear as long as Isiq’s leg.

  A blur of wings: the little red tailor bird was circling him, panic-stricken. “Is it war, Isiq, are we going to war?”

  He held up his hand, and the woken bird touched down for an instant, its wings still churning the air. “Not on this vessel,” said Isiq. “Through it, perhaps, but that is for the captain to decide. All the same you should stay below.”

  “But the sounds—”

  “Are nothing, as yet. Say that to yourself, each time the guns go off: it is nothing, it is nothing, it is still nothing. Let that be your task: to say it until it feels true. You must master that racing heart, Tinder, if you’re to help in days ahead.”

  The bird quieted a little. He was proud to be needed. Proud also of the name Isiq had given him: Tinder, fire-starter, the one whose patient friendship had fanned the dark stove of Isiq’s memories back into a blaze.

  “The dog is more frightened than I,” said Tinder.

  “Have him do the same,” said Isiq. “Go on; I’ll visit you presently.”

  Tinder flew below, and Isiq looked back over the stern, one final time, at the city of Simjalla. A laugh escaped him: a laugh of pain and amazement. The Dancer stood almost
exactly where the Chathrand had, six months ago, when Isiq first looked on that lovely city, her white seawall and hilltop groves, her modest spires and the lush green mountains behind. Isiq had looked out from his stateroom window, then. He had arrived as ambassador of Arqual, ended the next day as a prisoner of Arqual’s spy service. He had lain for nearly two months in a dungeon forgotten by the citizens above, in unspeakable darkness, worshipping a glow between the locked door and the door frame, a light so faint he could barely see it with his eye pressed to the crack. And the rats: he had beaten those bastards, a swarm of gigantic, thinking rats that had boiled out of that dungeon and nearly destroyed the city from within. He had fought them with his hands, his feet, his wounded mind; and he had lived because he had to. Because there were bigger rats to kill.

  Of course he had also lived because the King of Simja, Oshiram II, had not wished him to die. He had misjudged Oshiram: he knew that now. At their first encounter he had thought the young king a dandy, a spoiled child of the forty years’ peace Arquali soldiers had purchased with their blood. But a dandy would never have taken on the Secret Fist. A dandy would have shunted him into an asylum to die a quiet death. Or packed him onto the first boat out of Simja, heading anywhere, Good luck, Ambassador, don’t write, don’t remember us if you please. A dandy would not have obliged his own doctor to treat such a hazardous patient, nor given him a fat purse of gold, nor smuggled him out through the spy-infested streets to the cottage where Captain Gregory waited to receive him, along with his radiant ex-wife, Suthinia.

  Rin keep you, Oshiram of Simja.