The Night of the Swarm tcv-4 Read online

  ‘Go rot in the Pits.’

  Not a flicker of response passed over Ott’s face. He waited, looking out over the sea.

  ‘You can’t sail this vessel,’ said Rose. ‘Elkstem can choose a heading, and Fiffengurt trim the sails, but neither can manage eight hundred men. Who’s going to keep them working as a team, as a family? Haddismal, at spear point? Uskins, who nearly put the ship at the bottom of the sea? You?’

  ‘What is the danger you haven’t spoken of, Captain?’

  ‘You know the danger,’ said Rose. ‘There’s a she-devil of a sorceress bearing down on Masalym, in a vessel packed with dlomic warriors. Macadra, she’s called. Arunis’ rival, the one who stayed behind when he crossed the Ruling Sea and set about teaching us to destroy each other. With your expert help, of course.’

  ‘Stick to the point,’ said Ott.

  ‘The point, bastard, is that she wants the mucking Nilstone, and we can’t assume she’ll believe it when they tell her Arunis took it away over the mountains. And even if she does believe, she may still want this ship. Pitfire, she may want us: human beings, to torture or take apart. Or breed. We were their slaves, once, and could be again.’

  ‘What is the danger, Rose?’

  ‘Gods below, man! Isn’t that enough?’

  ‘We stand a fine chance of evading pursuit,’ said Ott. ‘Something else weighs against our chances. Something so terrible you’d rather abandon this family, and run away in shame.’

  Rose lowered his chin, glowering. His mouth was tightly closed.

  ‘You are asking yourself what kind of force I mean to apply,’ said Sandor Ott. ‘It does not involve pain — unless things go very wrong, that is. It will be worse than pain. But you should know that I never discuss my techniques. Some things are better demonstrated than described.’

  ‘The trouble,’ said Rose, ‘is that you won’t believe me.’

  ‘That is not your concern. Speak the truth. What were you running from?’

  Rose looked the assassin in the eye. ‘Not running from,’ he said. ‘I was running to. The worst danger’s not the one that’s chasing us. Stanapeth and the tarboys and Thasha Gods-damned Isiq: they’re in the right. You don’t like it; nor do I. But it happens to be true. We’re going to be slow-roasted, all of us, the whole Rinforsaken world, if Arunis finds a way to use the Stone in battle.’

  As Rose was speaking, Ott had once more grown still. Now he walked to the cabin door and opened it an inch. A Turach was stationed there, barring entry. Ott gestured, and the Turach passed him a pair of objects. A small glass pitcher and a shallow bowl.

  Ott closed the door and returned, and Rose saw that the pitcher held a few ounces of milk. Ott knelt beside the captain’s desk, not far from where Sniraga crouched, tail twitching, watchful. He poured the milk into the bowl and set the bowl on the floor. Then he stood and walked to the gallery window. He picked up the bow and notched the arrow to the string.

  ‘You hate this animal,’ he said.

  Sniraga raised her head, considering the proffered milk. Rose’s eyes widened. ‘Lower that bow, Spymaster,’ he said.

  ‘In killing her I’ll be doing you a favour, no doubt. You’ve thought of doing this so many times, but something has always stopped you from acting on the impulse.’

  ‘Nothing will stop me from avenging myself on you, if you harm the creature.’

  For the first time, Ott smiled. ‘Halfwit. If only I could let you try.’

  Sniraga nosed forward. It had been many weeks since she had tasted milk.

  ‘Speak the truth, Rose. Otherwise you may consider this a foretaste of something much slower and crueller I’ll be doing to your beloved witch. Is she your aunt or your mother, incidentally? Or are you still unsure?’

  ‘I can state my motives,’ said Rose, ‘but I can’t make you hear. Put the bow down. That’s an order.’

  ‘You are right in one respect,’ Ott continued. ‘I won’t be killing you. Not until the mission is completed, and Arqual’s victory achieved.’

  ‘That day will never come!’ Rose exploded from his chair, prompting Ott to bend the bow. ‘Damn you to the blackest hole! Forget the mission! It’s a fever dream. A lie you hawked to that deathsmoke-addled Emperor of yours.’

  ‘I will not tolerate slander of Magad the Fifth,’ said Ott, taking aim.

  Rose was bellowing. ‘Greater Arqual, the defeat of the Mzithrin — rubbish and rot. One of these sorcerers is going to clap hands on the Stone and make sausage out of us. Out of your precious Emperor, out of Arqual and the Sizzies and the whole Rinforsaken North. Blind fool! You’re a soldier in an ant war, and the mucking anteater’s coming down the trail.’

  ‘Rose,’ said Ott, ‘do you recall that you’d become a disgrace? Removed from command by the Chathrand Trading Family, wanted in twenty ports, living off the last spongings from your creditors? Do you know what a boon of trust His Supremacy gave you, when he restored you to the captaincy of the Chathrand, and gave you nominal command of this mission you advise me to forget?’

  ‘We will see how nominal it is when the waves hit eighty feet,’ shouted Rose. ‘As for that boon: rubbish again. Put the bow down, Ott. The game was never winnable, but without me you couldn’t even play. You didn’t dare attempt the Ruling Sea — put the bow down, I say — without Nilus Rose at the helm. I alone know the soul of this vessel. I alone have the sanction of the ghosts.’

  ‘You alone see them.’

  Rose’s body was rigid. ‘I am the captain of this ship. You are an adjunct, a supernumerary. If you challenge me openly you will bring anarchy down upon us all. That’s as clear today as it was when your mucking Emperor-’

  Ott’s bow sang. There was a caterwaul (horrid, held) and Sniraga became a red tornado of fur and fangs and blood. The arrow had pinned her tail to the floor.

  Rose leaped on the hysterical creature. He was bloodied instantly from hands to shoulders, but he wrenched the arrow free. Sniraga flew from beneath him, crashing against furniture, painting the room with the red brush of her tail. Ott leaned on his bow and laughed.

  Then the wailing changed. Rose turned, bewildered; Ott snuffed his laughter. A second cry, a human cry, was drowning out Sniraga. It rose through the floorboards, a voice they had not heard in months. The only voice as deep as the captain’s, or as cruel as Ott’s.

  ‘WHERE IS IT? WHO TOOK IT? FAITHLESS VERMIN, PARASITES, OFFAL WORMS! UNCHAIN ME! BRING IT BACK TO ME NOW!’

  Alongside the screamer, other voices began to rise, shouting in fear and wonder. Then commotion at the door. Ott dashed to it, flung it wide. A gnarled stick poked him in the chest, and Lady Oggosk, tiny and raging, hobbled into the room.

  ‘He’s dead, Nilus, get up! He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s alive!’

  ‘Duchess-’ began Rose.

  ‘Is she mad, Rose?’ Ott demanded. ‘Who is dead? Who is shouting below?’

  ‘Nilus, your arms are soaked in blood!’ shrieked the witch. ‘Get yourselves together, you pair of fools. The sorcerer’s been killed, and Pathkendle’s charm is broken. The spell-keeper was Arunis, all along. Do you understand now, Sandor Ott?’

  A wild gleam lit the spymaster’s eye. He flew from the cabin, shouting at the Turachs to clear a path. Rose looked at Oggosk, but there was no hope under Heaven’s Tree of explaining, so before she noticed Sniraga he charged after Ott. He had a presentiment of disaster. It grew with each roar from below.

  Sailors thronged the topdeck; some of them already knew. The captain waved them off, needing to see it before he heard them speak, needing to mark the disaster with his eyes. Down the broad ladderway called the Silver Stair he plunged, bashing aside Teggatz and his tea service, bellowing at dolts who froze at the sight of him, walking right over a topman who had fallen flat in his haste to get out of the way. Everyone below was shouting. He could hear the panic in their throats. He plunged out onto the orlop deck, raced through the fire-scarred compartments, and stepped at last into the manger.

  G
reat devils, there he was.

  A huge, hideous man, seventy if he was a day, raged into the centre of the chamber, his bare feet stamping in an effluvium of grime, straw and fresh blood. In his eyes was more mad viciousness than Rose had glimpsed in any living soul. The Shaggat Ness, the lunatic king, the most hated man in Mzithrini history. He was tangled in chains looped around an indestructible wooden stanchion. But the chains had been placed to secure a statue, a lifeless thing of stone, for that is what the man had been for five months.

  No longer. The mink-mage had told Arunis he could only reverse the spell when someone aboard the Chathrand died. If Lady Oggosk was correct, that someone was Arunis himself. What happened? Did he die trying to master the Stone? Could that gang of children and mutineers possibly have killed him?

  No time to wonder. The Shaggat was gesturing, flailing with both hands: the unharmed right, and the dead, scarecrow-stick left, the hand that had seized the Nilstone. His jaws were wide, his screams insufferable, a bomb that kept going off, Where is it, who stole it, bring it to me, you lice.

  His eyes found Rose. He lunged, and the stanchion shook.

  Sandor Ott rubbed his chin. He stood with Sergeant Haddismal and several other Turachs, conferring quickly, eyeing the Shaggat like a rabid dog. Ignus Chadfallow, the Imperial Surgeon, was in the room as well, bending down to talk to old, befuddled Dr Rain, whose gape of horror made him look like an eel. The captain stepped towards them — then leaped sideways with a curse. The Shaggat had lunged at him again.

  ‘BRING ME THE NILSTONE! BRING IT! BRING IT!’

  ‘Monster-’ said Sandor Ott.

  ‘I WILL PACK YOUR MOUTH WITH SCORPIONS AND GLASS!’

  ‘Listen-’

  ‘I WILL TEAR OFF YOUR MANHOOD AND THROW IT TO MY HOUNDS!’

  ‘Your toe.’

  ‘BRING ME THE — WHAT?’

  ‘Your toe.’

  The Shaggat looked down. And dropped in his chains, howling, seizing his foot with his one living hand. The foot was gushing blood: where the big toe should have been was an open wound.

  Undrabust!

  It came back to Rose in a flash: how Neeps Undrabust had pulverised the Shaggat-statue’s toe with a lump of iron. Arunis had managed to heal the other damage, the long cracks in the Shaggat’s stone arm: wounds that would have killed a living man. But he had forgotten the toe.

  A sailor appeared in the doorway, clutching Dr Chadfallow’s medical bag. The surgeon and Sandor Ott rushed to the man. Chadfallow seized the bag and withdrew a folded cloth and small blue bottle. He glanced dubiously at the Shaggat.

  ‘This will suffice, but how exactly-’

  Ott snatched both items, uncorked the bottle and sniffed. He coughed, then doused the rag with the contents of the bottle. The doctor retreated as a cloying smell of spirits filled the room. The Shaggat raised his head too late. Ott threw himself on the huge man, and caught his chin in the crook of an elbow. The mad king erupted, clawing at him, crushing him against the stanchion, rolling atop him on the bloody floor. The Turachs surged forward, weapons drawn.

  ‘Hold!’

  Ott’s voice, loud in the sudden silence. The Shaggat’s bellowing had ceased. His arms went limp, and he toppled over in his chains.

  Sandor Ott hurled the rag away. ‘Stop the bleeding, fools!’ he said. Then he too collapsed. During the struggle his face had been only inches from the rag.

  A cold claw touched Rose’s elbow. Lady Oggosk was there, suddenly, her shawl splashed with blood and fur, staring up at him with her milk-blue eyes. ‘They will press you harder than ever, now that he’s returned,’ she said. ‘Do not yield to them, Nilus. You know what must be done.’

  Rose studied the two men at his feet. He felt a bottomless disgust. The mastermind of Arqual and his tool. Better for everyone if they had strangled each other, if that sleep were the sleep of death.

  But what of Nilus Rose? He had sworn to his father that he would bend these creatures to his will. But that was only hubris — the kind of talk his father wanted to hear, demanded to hear. Over and over, decade after decade. The long, daft proof of their power. The family epic. Rose had never stopped writing it, even though a fool could tell you that the premise was absurd.

  ‘He was unhinged before, or partly so. Now I fear his derangement is complete.’

  Dr Chadfallow lowered himself stiffly into a chair, scanning the other faces around the table. The wardroom was cool, bathed in grey-blue light from the glass planks in the ceiling. Old Dr Rain took the chair to his right, glancing at Chadfallow with a mixture of jealousy and gratitude; it was only through Chadfallow’s courtesy that he’d been included at all.

  Fiffengurt, the quartermaster, sat down as well, glancing at the other faces as though tensed for a fight. That one will take it badly, thought Rose, studying him.

  Fiffengurt was almost old. He had white whiskers and a rogue eye that spun randomly in its socket. He looked anxious, and more than a little guilty. Chadfallow, Rose saw now, was much the same. Allies of Pathkendle and company — even the doctor has at last chosen sides. I must expect the worst from both of them.

  No one looked healthy, in point of fact. No one but the ghosts. Three had slithered into the chamber when the door was ajar. Captain Kurlstaff was among them, his pink blouse faded, his painted lips the colour of a man’s intestines, his battleaxe huge and unwieldy in the crowded room. He watched the living with interest. He was the only one of the Chathrand’s former commanders with whom Rose deigned, at times, to consult, although today the old pervert merely stood and stared.

  At least Kurlstaff had the decency not to sabotage the meeting. Captain Spengler was rummaging in the chart locker behind Rose’s head. And Maulle, the pig, had actually taken a chair, in which he slouched and squirmed and bit his fingernails. The man had the worst facial tic Rose had ever seen; when it happened his face compressed like a sponge, and a puff of chalk powder lifted from his ancient wig.

  ‘Sir?’ said Chadfallow.

  Rose pivoted away from the ghosts. ‘So the Shaggat is mad,’ he said. ‘Is that news, Doctor? Have you nothing else to report?’

  Chadfallow took a careful breath. ‘The Shaggat is seventy-four years old. And he has just suffered traumas that would strain the faculties of any man. The touch of the Nilstone. The killing fire that ran up his arm. The transmutation into a dead statue, through Pazel’s Master-Word, and this morning’s reversal. But above all, he is disturbed by the loss of the Stone. To gain it was his lifelong obsession. He thinks the Gods themselves chose him to wield it, along with that lesser artefact, Sathek’s Sceptre. And because he cannot have had any sense of time’s passage while enchanted, he must perceive that the Stone has just been taken from him.’ Chadfallow shook his head. ‘His mind is warped beyond all healing, now. What you saw is likely all that remains.’

  Old Dr Rain cleared his throat. ‘He exhibits a certain unease, Captain Rose. That is to say, he is uneasy.’

  Rose turned him a choleric stare. The old medic looked quickly at Chadfallow.

  ‘I cut off the dead hand,’ said Chadfallow. ‘He felt nothing. Below the wrist the limb was dry and brittle. It’s a wonder it did not break during that wrestling match.’

  ‘It did not break, because I did not break it,’ said Ott. ‘What else?’

  Chadfallow shrugged. ‘His body is otherwise sound. The man is a war elephant. You’ve heard the legend about the arrow that broke off in his chest, the head of which was never extracted? I saw the scar, I felt the hard nub with my fingers. The wound was two inches above his heart. There are flecks of iron embedded in his left eyeball, too, and signs that his feet were blistered by walking through fire, or over coals. He is indestructible, in a word. Only his mind has failed, and that utterly.’

  Rain cleared his throat again. ‘In professional terms — that is, in proper language, medical language-’

  ‘Stop your fidgeting, dog!’ snapped Rose. He was addressing Captain Maulle, but Rain flinched as if struck.
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  Haddismal was scowling. ‘The Shaggat’s mad, but he ain’t an animal. The good doctor exaggerates.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Ott. ‘You’re distorting your own diagnosis, Chadfallow, because you wish our cause to fail. In violation of your medical oath, to say nothing of your oath to His Supremacy.’

  Chadfallow bristled. ‘You saw it yourselves,’ he said. ‘That man raged for six minutes without a glance at his own maimed foot. He might have bled to death without noticing the wound.’

  ‘And blary good riddance,’ said Mr Fiffengurt, the quartermaster, unable to contain himself.

  Sandor Ott turned his gaze on Fiffengurt. ‘Another proud son of Arqual,’ he said. ‘What has happened to all your friends, traitor?’

  Fiffengurt’s bad eye drifted. But the other was clear and sharp, and he trained it now on Sandor Ott.

  ‘My friends are right here,’ he said, thumping a fist to his chest. ‘Where are yours, exactly?’

  A frigid silence followed. Then Ott said, ‘Captain Rose may have his reasons for delaying your execution-’

  ‘He does,’ said Rose. ‘The word is seamanship, and it cannot be wasted.’

  Fiffengurt did not smile — Rose would get no smile out of him, not in this lifetime — but a certain grim pride showed in his face.

  ‘Seamanship,’ said Ott, ‘just so. Yet this voyage will end one day, Mr Fiffengurt. And when you step ashore, so shall I.’ He turned back to the others around the table. ‘As for the Shaggat: hysteria is rarely permanent. Through all the years of his ascendancy he was prone to fits. They form part of the legend of his greatness.’

  ‘They can’t have been like this,’ ventured Elkstem, the sailmaster. ‘He’d never have been able to lead no rebellion. He was screaming like a stuck pig.’