The Night of the Swarm Page 15

  “Alas for Arqual, that is merely a squadron.”

  Suthinia’s eyes danced with fire. “You spent your life among those people. You must know something about them—something beyond how to make them tear defenseless cities apart.”

  Isiq raised the telescope. Rin’s heart, that’s much woman. A few hours in her presence and he’d stopped craving deathsmoke. And who knew? A few days, if they lived that long, and the witch might cure him of missing Syrarys as well. Just as well that she despised him and all he stood for. There was no room for love in his plans.

  So: northward. Three impossibilities to choose from. You could tack west for hours, in plain sight, and hope the Mzithrinis gave you the freedom of the waters they held. You could run between the opposing forces and be pulverized. Or you try to slip east of the action, between the Arquali line and Cape Córistel. And that option was at least as mad as the others. Yes, there was a fair mile between the battle-line and the sawtooth rocks of the cape. But the wind was onshore and would contend with the Dancer league by league, trying to drive her onto those rocks. Such a wind called for prodigious leeway: a good skipper would sail another eight or ten miles west, before starting his northward tack. Of course that wasn’t going to happen today: that whole Arquali squadron would have been better off eight miles west. The Black Rags were not letting it happen.

  Gregory had them on a beam reach, sailing right into the slaughter. It was tactical, of course: you needn’t chase a boat that was coming straight for you. But soon enough he’d have to show his hand. They had to round Cape Córistel: Isiq knew no more than that. What cove or uncharted island or waiting boat they were making for neither Gregory nor Suthinia would reveal. Beyond the cape lay the Chereste Sands, a long flat dunescape separating the Gulf of Thól from the vast, steaming Crab Fens. Isiq had guessed at first that they would make a landing there and trudge into the interior—but King Oshiram had heard that Arqualis were holding the cape, with great guns hauled from Ormael, ready to blast any Mzithrinis who broke through the line. They would not put ashore on the Chereste Sands.

  Could they be bound for Tholjassa? Maisa had indeed fled to that mountainous land, decades ago, with her two young sons. Naval gossip had confirmed it, along with the fact that Sandor Ott had pursued them, assassinated the children, brought them back to Etherhorde on slabs of ice as warnings to any future foes, royal or otherwise, of His Supremacy Magad V. Isiq had always assumed Ott had killed the mother as well. Halfway measures were not to his liking.

  The cannon roared. They crept nearer the mayhem. Before them a Mzithrini ship dragged herself to shelter behind the line, trailing rigging, her foremast in pieces on the deck. Then Isiq saw what he’d been looking for. Behind the Arquali warships, lighter auxiliary craft were running the line, bringing fresh powder and replacements for fallen men. One of these, a sizable brig, was trimming her sails afresh. Isiq pointed to her with the telescope.

  “Break away, Captain. They’ve been ordered to pay us a visit, sure as Rin made rain.”

  “We’ll be ready.”

  “Is that certain?” asked Isiq. “You’ve never dealt with the navy until you’ve seen them on a war footing.”

  “What will they do to us?” asked Suthinia.

  Isiq looked at her. “Anything remotely useful in a fight they’ll appropriate,” he said, “water and provisions included. Then they’ll turn us back to Simjalla, and they won’t listen to a word we have to say.”

  The brig heeled round, and her sails began to fill. “They’re on intercept, true enough,” said Gregory. “Right, old man, we’ll have to make them listen, won’t we?”

  Isiq made no reply. It was of course quite possible that they were going nowhere, that Maisa was long dead, that Gregory and his wife were lunatics. More likely they were just fools, used to trickery and luck, and the successes available to the bold in a place as chaotic as the Crownless Lands. Gregory was known as a dogged fighter and a slippery eel. But his fame had been earned in peacetime, and this was war again, Gods forgive us, Imperial war.

  She might also be alive, but senile and hopeless. That would be a joke to Ott’s liking, to kill her sons before they could grow up and menace him, and leave the broken mother to rave and wither and divert the energies of those who might oppose the usurper—to concentrate them behind a single, hopeless symbol of what they had lost.

  Of course the woman they were rushing to meet might simply be an impostor. None of these people had seen Maisa before her fall, and the Empress had suffered few to paint her portrait: “That nonsense can wait,” she’d said in Isiq’s hearing, “until we finish this war.” The admiral smiled. An impostor, wasn’t that likely? Some cardsharp of an actress, washed up, nothing left to lose. What better role to play than that of long-lost Maisa, the answer to the dreams of desperate men?

  The brig fired a warning shot. “They outgun you, Captain,” said Isiq.

  “As we have no guns, that’s sure to be true.”

  Isiq shook his head. Luck was like deathsmoke: start relying on it, and your soul gets lazy, until you can’t recall how you ever did without it. Then one day it’s snatched from you. Prayer stops working; the Gods tire of your flattery. The scales tilt; you slide into the abyss.

  But not today, Gregory Pathkendle. Madman or gambler, you’ll not lead us to our deaths. His eyes slid surreptitiously about the deck. It was true; the men had all stowed their arms elsewhere. But he, Isiq, still had the dagger from King Oshiram, and the stiletto he’d killed a man with the week before. I don’t wish to, Gregory. I like you and your people. But I’ll do it, by all the Gods. I’ll put my hand on the scales.

  “Have you seen Tholjassa in winter?” asked Gregory suddenly. “Horrific place. The sea fog blows in and freezes, inches thick. You take a chisel to your doors to get them open. I saw a monk pull the bell for morning service and his blary hand froze to the chain, Rin blast me if I lie.”

  “Of course it’s a lie,” said Suthinia. “You’re never up in time for morning temple.”

  “Just for that I might really take you there, Suthee. How about it, Isiq?”

  The admiral just shook his head. Gregory was bluffing: the Dancer would never reach Tholjassa, not with the light provisions they had aboard. Nor had Gregory made any hint that such a three-week voyage lay before them. Where in Alifros were they going, then? Some river north of Córistel, winding back into the Fens? Some island cave? Or could Gregory possibly mean to sail farther along the shore?

  Isiq started at the thought. Farther along meant the Haunted Coast, a three-hundred-mile nautical graveyard, the place ships went to die. No law held sway there, and no naval commander would dare take his boats among those shifting sandbars, those rip currents and sudden, enveloping fogs. Smugglers braved its waters, and pirates certainly, but the Haunted Coast harvested its share of those maniacs as well. Treasure seekers simply never left alive.

  With one infamous exception, that is. Arunis had pulled the Nilstone from those waters, and escaped with his life.

  And the sad truth was that the tarboys had helped him—unwillingly of course. Pazel and Neeps Undrabust had been Arunis’ captives, and the mage had dropped them into those waters to seek the Stone or drown in the attempt. Pazel, amazingly, had succeeded. Isiq had questioned the tarboys about the affair, but found them both (and his daughter, for that matter) strangely averse to talking of that particular day. “Pazel had help,” Thasha had told him when pressed, and Isiq knew somehow that she was not referring to the other divers, or the mage.

  The Haunted Coast. It made a horrid kind of sense. Isiq knew for a fact that Gregory sailed there: it was the only place on the mainland still open to freebooters, the only place not yet beneath the heel of Arqual or the Mzithrin. Hardly surprising, that: it was the devil’s own shoreline. Like many naval commanders Isiq had seen it from a respectful distance. He never wished to see it again.

  “New colors on the Arquali ship, Captain,” shouted the bald man with the hoop earrings, snapping.
“Three diamonds—and a red stripe below, by the Tree!”

  Three diamonds: Strike sail and hold position. One red stripe: Obey or expect to be fired on. He glanced at the bald man. What had he expected in the middle of a firefight? Sail on, and Rin speed your journey?

  Captain Gregory was laughing. “Take in one reef, boys; let’s not make it too easy for them. Now tell me, Admiral: where’s the man in charge of this fleet?”

  “Squadron, sir. And I’d imagine he’s in the vanguard, third or fourth position. If I had to guess, I’d try for that great bear of a cruiser with the gilded stern.”

  “The Nighthawk,” said Gregory. “Fine and dandy! That’s our new heading, Bosun. Now get below with you, Isiq. Tull here will tell you what’s what.”

  He gestured at the bald sailor with the earrings. The man stepped forward, sour-faced, and subjected Isiq to an insolent examination. “Can he keep his mouth shut, Captain?” he demanded.

  “I can if I’m given a reason,” said Isiq.

  The man’s eyes pouted. He turned and led Isiq down the ladderway, past the galley and the lightless berths. The door at the end of the passage was narrow as a cupboard. When Tull opened it a rank smell leaped out at them.

  “Terrible,” he said. “There’s flies, too. Step in there and give me your pants.”

  “My …?”

  “You heard me, strip ’em off. And be quick, old man, I’m not here to make merry.”

  He tugged irritably at Isiq’s arm. Isiq whirled, slammed him hard against the wall, set his elbow to the grubby neck.

  “Explain yourself,” he said.

  Tull was suddenly meek. “It was the skipper’s idea. He says you’re to play a wounded man, a goner. I’m to strap the blubber on your leg is all. And to bandage your head and neck. And you’re not to talk, nor sit up, nor do nothing but point at your throat and gurgle.”

  Isiq hesitated. He was a guest on Gregory’s ship, and the instinct to respect another captain’s authority ran deep. But he had come to doubt his instincts, the “standards of the service,” his lifelong crutch.

  There was no help for it, though. He was in these smugglers’ hands. He released Tull and unbuckled his belt.

  The “blubber” was a hideous masterpiece: a thick, stinking sleeve of boar flesh, rotting in places, bloody everywhere, and clearly the source of the stench that filled the Dancer’s tiny sickbay. When Tull slid it over his naked leg, Isiq feared he might vomit. The thing mimicked the swelling of a diseased limb. Mid-thigh it bore a ragged wound, clotted with dry black blood. Tull provided him a coat as well—filthy, partly burned—then helped him to lie back on the boat’s one sickbed. He dressed the false leg in soiled bandages, then moved on to Isiq’s head and neck. When he was finished only the admiral’s mouth and left eye remained uncovered.

  “Your captain’s a whorespawn,” said Isiq. “Why didn’t he tell me this was the plan?”

  No comment from Tull; but when Isiq had lain still awhile Gregory himself ducked into sickbay and made a brief inspection.

  “Perfect! You stink like a butcher’s privy.”

  “You rotter.”

  “Suthinia made a joke, can you believe it? ‘He shouldn’t gripe; when they snuck him out of the King’s residence he played a corpse in a coffin. He’s moving up in the world.’ Not bad, eh? Here’s a bloody rag for you.”

  “How thoughtful.”

  “Cough into it when they ask you to speak. But perhaps they’ll only ask you to nod and the like. Remember, you’re one Lieutenant Vancz of the IMS Rajna, sunk three days ago by the Mzithrinis.”

  Isiq started. “There was such an attack. Oshiram spoke of the Rajna; he said her sinking was the talk of the island.”

  “And well beyond. The real Vancz died, but they’re not to know that.”

  “Who was he?”

  “No one important. That’s the beauty of it, you see?”

  A great volley of explosions shook the Dancer. This time Isiq heard the distant screams that followed. “I do not see, Pathkendle. How will all these shenanigans get you past the fighting?”

  “No time to go into it. Just lie still and keep quiet, and remember that you’re supposed to be at death’s door. This will all be over soon.”

  He turned on his heel to go, then looked back sharply at Isiq. “And show Tull a little courtesy, won’t you? He’s good at what he does.”

  The door closed. Isiq lay still, feeling his age, listening to Gregory bellow: Strike the mains, all hands assemble, no arms on your person if you please. Flies buzzed his ears. Suthinia opened the door and looked at him, amused. Then the smell of the place hit her; she gagged and fled. Isiq’s face burned. He felt as though she’d caught him at something naughty.

  Not long thereafter Tull rushed in with a handbag, wearing some sort of gown, and proceeded to sit beside the bed with his eyes closed.

  “What in the nine putrid Pits—”

  “Hush,” said Tull, swaying slightly.

  “Is that blary perfume?”

  “Burn ointment. For your leg, old fool. Now don’t distract me—I’m in character, like. Also, they’re here.”

  It wasn’t a gown; it was a surgical bib, and the bag was a doctor’s. The man had removed his earrings, too. I’m out of my depth, thought Isiq.

  His countrymen were abusive when they drew alongside the Dancer. They howled at Gregory: did he know how mucking fortunate he was they hadn’t blown his hull out from under him?

  “When Arqual tells you to strike sail, you strike it, dog! What were you blary thinking?”

  Isiq did not catch Gregory’s answer, but the Arquali reaction was plain.

  “The commodore? You lying, pig-faced, dung-eating smuggler! Take this boat, Sergeant! You curs get down on your knees. Now, damn you, or we’ll shorten your legs with our broadswords.”

  A great thumping and swearing followed. Men were leaping aboard the Dancer; the ladderways thundered with boots. The door flew open, and an armored Turach stood there, dagger drawn. He screamed at Tull to get above with the other sailors.

  “My patient’s dying,” said Tull.

  Holding his breath, the marine plunged into the sickbay and dragged Tull out by the collar. “Lie still, Vancz!” Tull cried as he went.

  The next time the door opened it was Gregory and the Arquali captain himself: as young as he’d sounded, and as fierce. “Gods of death, is that man even breathing?”

  “Not for long,” said Gregory. “I told you there was no time to waste. Darabik will skin us both if—”

  Despite himself, Isiq twitched. Darabik? Purston Darabik? He started to rise, then checked himself and fell back.

  “There, you see?” cried Gregory, making the best of Isiq’s blunder.

  “I see a half corpse who knows the commodore’s name,” said the Arquali. “We’ll need more proof than that, dog. Get me the letter you spoke of.”

  Mr. Tull wormed back into the chamber. He reached into Isiq’s bloody coat and removed an envelope. He held it up before the others. “Sir, he’s very poorly, very weak. I’ve done what I can, but that leg—”

  Heavy fire, and a cry from the Arquali vessel. The captain snatched the envelope and tore it open. He glanced from the letter to Isiq and back again. Then he stormed out, with Gregory on his heels. Tull leaned close to Isiq’s ear and whispered, “You scared me silly. I thought you were going to get up and dance.”

  He might have, too. Purston Darabik, Purcy! Was he commanding the squadron? They were old mates, same year at the academy; Isiq had even courted one of his sisters before Clorisuela entered his life. So had half the navy, went the joke. Darabik was one of nine children; the other eight were girls.

  There was a great deal more shouting, over the endless bombardment. The Arquali captain returned and asked if the patient could be moved. “Are ye trying to be funny?” said Tull. “The man is gangrenous. He nearly bled to death on the Rajna, he’s burned, his spleens are granulated; he’s half delirious with pain. Move him! You mi
ght as well just stick him a few times and be done with it, you nasty—”

  The commander slammed the door. Tull and Isiq sat rigid, listening. But they did not have to wait long for the orders to start to fly: Get up! Get this garbage scow under way! And stay in our lee, good and close, or we’ll put more holes in you than a blary bassoon—if the Mzithrinis don’t do it for us.

  Isiq turned his bandaged head. “Spleens?”

  “Everyone’s a critic,” muttered Tull.

  They were under way again. The blasting of the cannon grew almost intolerably loud, and now the screech of flying ordnance reached their ears as well. He could smell the powder-smoke. From the topdeck, Suthinia cried out at something she saw. Vividly he imagined his arms about her, protective; then the image changed to her clawing at his eyes. To fall for a witch: Rin forbid. She might end up like Lady Oggosk, a mad crone in bad lipstick and jewels.

  The flies lifted with each explosion. Tull mumbled about his “life as an actor.” Isiq reflected that it might do them no good whatsoever to find Darabik. His old mate was an Imperial officer at war. He, Isiq, was simply a mutineer, an enemy of Magad V, the man on the Ametrine Throne.

  Eventually he realized that the battle-noise had peaked and begun to fade. He waited; other Arqualis were hailing the brig, scandalized and doubtful: “You have the commodore’s what?”

  At last the Dancer slowed, and a great shadow darkened the skylight. Isiq heard the groan of huge timbers, the voices of sailors two hundred feet overhead. They were alongside one of the warships, perhaps the Nighthawk itself. He heard the faint rattle of davit-chains as a small craft was set afloat.

  “Concentrate,” whispered Tull.

  A new set of Turachs stormed through the Dancer. Gregory was questioned, insulted, abused; Tull was frisked, even Isiq briefly inspected. “You’re Vancz?” He answered with a croak. A soldier began to pluck at his bandages, and Tull flew into a convincing rage. Then a voice Isiq knew well—velvety, but somehow no less dangerous for that—spoke a single word, and the Turachs straightened and marched out. They thumped their spears in the passage, a formal salute. The door opened, and Purston Darabik stepped into the room.