The Night of the Swarm

23

12 Halar 942

A silent canyon, blanketed in early snow. The chilly Parsua dances, gurgling, between cliffs that soar above two thousand feet. Black boulders stand in the river, pines struggle along the shore; further from the water rise old oaks and ironwoods. Upriver there are waterfalls, where the gorge descends in jagged steps. High overhead, wisps of cloud scud across a narrow slab of sky the colour of a robin’s egg.

Stillness, sunlight, cold. A finch alights and vanishes again; a pinch of snow tumbles from a branch. The wind above the Parsua can scarcely be heard. Straining, one might fancy it carries sounds of violence, of horror, from some unthinkably distant land: sounds all but dissolved in the vast, consoling indifference of the air.

Then a noise cuts through the morning: a desperate, clumsy sound like rough shears through wool. It grows nearer, louder. It is the sound of feet in snow.

From upriver he appears: a youth, bloodied and in rags, his white breath puffing like smoke through his lips. He is running for his life, tumbling over snow-hidden rocks, careening through drifts. His gaze swings left and right, studying the cliffs that offer no cave or crevice, no place to hide. When he glances back over his shoulder it is with naked fear.

He passes the tree where the finch rested, catching his sleeve on a branch. Two or three steps later he has blundered onto the thin ice that girds the riverbanks, and falls on hands and knees into the water. He bites back a howl. As he drags himself onto solid ground his pursuer erupts into view.

It is an eguar. Black, burning, elephantine. It roars at him from atop the last set of falls, over a mile back along the canyon. Then it hurls itself from the cliff into the river below.

Flailing, the youth doubles his speed. He cannot see the eguar now, but the vapour above it forms a white flag, racing towards him along the bottom of the gorge. Trees crack; steam hisses where the burning flanks of the creature slide through snow. Before it has closed half the distance the youth knows he will not escape.

He turns. His body is shaking uncontrollably; his eyes have a sheen like fogged glass. Suddenly he throws back his head and screeches at the sky. As it was on the Water Bridge, the transformation is swift: the head flattens into the neck; the neck elongates; the limbs become massive; the jaw stretches to reveal enormous fangs. But the maukslar has paid a cost for returning to its natural form: between the shoulder blades, its fleshy wings hang broken and torn. Dark blood pours from them, staining the snow.

The maukslar shields its lamp-like eyes. Born in the infernal regions, it does not care for snow, and less for naked sunlight. When its foe thrashes into view, it spits blindly in the creature’s direction. A great viscous mass of fire blossoms from its mouth and flies up the canyon, exploding spectacularly before the eguar. Pines go up like torches; snow vaporises; the edges of the river boil. The eguar rushes straight on, unscathed, shaking off the fire like globs of mud.

The demon turns to run. But what has happened? In that brief moment of stillness, ice has closed around its ankles. Spellcraft. The demon wrenches, claws at the glassy ice. When it finally breaks free it has bloodied both feet, and allowed the eguar to close half the distance.

Now the gorge jackknifes to the left. Once around the bend the demon wrenches a barrel-sized stone from the frozen earth, and screeches with delight when the blow connects. Stunned, the eguar drops on its side. Once again the demon flees.

And once again meets with a strange barrier: this time the very trees have somehow thickened around it, and their criss-crossed branches thwart it at every step. The more it fights, the more entangling they become, until at last in desperation it vomits more fire, scouring out a path through which to flee.

Hard ground beneath its feet: the fire has burned all the way to bedrock. And there, there ahead is the split in the Parsua that means the gorge is near its end. Beyond that, open fields and forests. And beyond the latter, Macadra’s forces in their thousands, waiting only for someone to tell them where to strike.

‘Hold!’

The demon stops dead. Before it, on the branch of a tall pine, sits a large, black owl. It is this creature who has spoken. The maukslar knows this new enemy at a glance, and screams in terror and rage. Then its nostrils catch that telltale reek of sulphur, and it whirls about: the eguar stands twenty feet upstream, its body a hot iron, its great tail thrashing among the stones.

‘You are bleeding to death,’ says the owl. ‘Moreover you are cornered by two foes greater than yourself. Behind you waits Sitroth, the Ancient, who killed the hound of Toltirek. I am Ramachni, servant of Erithusme and ward of the selk. You have felt my grip once; if you feel it again it will be too late to beg for mercy. Depart this world if you would live.’

The demon speaks in a voice like boiling pitch. ‘I beg no mage’s mercy. I dwell in those places where you scarcely dare to wet your feet. One alone dared call me forth. I serve the White Raven, while it pleases me to do so. The White Raven, who outlived your Northern hag.’

‘Erithusme the Great is alive,’ says the owl. ‘Macadra fears her, and with good reason. But I warn you, try no spell of your own. If you do we shall kill you swiftly. Where is Dastu, the boy whose shape you mimic?’

‘In the stomach of the ogress,’ says the demon. ‘The hrathmogs live in fear of her appetite.’

The owl falls silent. When it speaks again its voice has hardened. ‘Go, demon. Return to the Duirmaulc while you can. Your days in Alifros are through.’

The maukslar ’s yellow eyes are fixed on the owl. ‘We shall see whose time is through, when Macadra takes the Nilstone in her hand.’

‘There is a pattern jewel in the creature’s gut,’ says the eguar suddenly. The maukslar jumps, glancing at the beast with scalding hate.

‘A pattern jewel?’ says the owl. ‘That is a crime in itself. Why do you carry such a thing, maukslar, when you know it belongs with others?’

‘My mistress gave it me,’ hisses the demon.

‘Then she took it from a murdered selk,’ says the owl. ‘You must cough it out before you leave this world. It would prevent your departure anyway.’

The maukslar ’s eyes dart, scanning the ground for a weapon.

‘If you refuse,’ says the owl, ‘we will simply wait for you to die, and then remove it from your corpse. Hear me for the last time: go back to the Nine Pits, back among the damned. If you do so we will prevent Macadra from binding you to service again. If you will not go, we will scatter your ashes when you die and prevent your resurrection. The choice remains yours, for a moment longer.’

The maukslar looks from one to the other. It stands now in a pool of its own blood.

‘Do not slay me,’ it says at last. ‘I yield. Take the jewel, and let me take my leave.’

The creature drops on all fours. It retches, back arching like a dog’s. Four or five times its body heaves. Then, painfully, it crawls to a fallen pine and lies over it. At last its snake-like neck convulses, and a great red ruby drops from its mouth into its waiting palm.

‘Leave it there!’ screeches the owl. But the maukslar pays no heed. On its forehead the fell runes blaze. ‘Magic! Beware!’ bellows the eguar. But as it rears up, the fallen pine tree rises, flies with all the force of the demon’s curse, and pierces the eguar’s chest like a stake.

The eguar falls without a sound. But the demon howls in agony. On the high branch, the owl has become a small black mink. Its jaws flex, biting hard at empty air. In the body of the maukslar, bones begin to crack.

Then the maukslar vanishes, so suddenly that drops of its spilling blood seem for a moment to hang suspended in the air. Thrown by his own spell’s sudden release of power, the mage nearly falls from the tree. Exhausted, he flies down the trunk and races towards the eguar.

‘Stay!’

The eguar’s warning comes out like thunder, but it is followed by a rattling wheeze. The mink stops in his tracks. The tree has shattered the creature’s chest.

‘I spew poisons enough when my skin is whole,’ says the eguar. ‘Now that I bleed even you dare not approach.’

‘I may help you,’ says the mage.

‘My body is beyond help,’ says Sitroth. ‘But we may still speak; the eguar are slow even in death. Tell me, Arpathwin, is honour restored?’

‘Yours was never truly lost,’ says the mage, bowing his head. ‘Only wisdom deserted you, briefly. And whom has it not, at some point in life’s long march? The two princes look alike, they say. And since Olik the father passed through the Red Storm, he is no older than his grandson.’

‘No hatchling would err as I did,’ says the eguar. ‘The selk gave me sanctuary and purpose and a feast of bright thoughts, wafting nectar-scented from Ularamyth. I betrayed them. I killed one of their number, and left the North Door without a guard.’

‘You sought vengeance against a murderer of your people,’ says Ramachni. ‘The wisest of us all still have our passions, Sitroth, and as long as living blood runs in our veins they will sometimes prevail. Not even the Gods are immune.’

‘The maukslar has departed?’

Ramachni nods. ‘It has fled Alifros, and cannot return without some aid.’

‘It cast the pattern jewel away into the river,’ the eguar wheezes. ‘I am sorry we did not recover that stone. I would have liked to lay it at Lord Arim’s feet.’

‘One day I shall bring the selk here to find it, and take it home to Ularamyth,’ says Ramachni. ‘There is time.’

As if to belie his words, the twin points of seering light that are the eguar’s eyes wink out. But the creature still draws breath. ‘Arpathwin,’ it says, ‘could you truly name me friend?’

‘What else could I name you?’ says Ramachni. ‘Have we not both seen the centuries pass, the plagues and rebirths, the wonders forgotten in a fleeting year by men? Besides, you are beloved of the selk, and I am their ward and kinsman.’

‘Then you must come near after all. For not all my wisdom is gone. I have remembered something. I have remembered the nature of your Gift.’

The creature’s blood is pooling, sizzling on the stone.

‘Ramachni Fremken,’ it murmurs. ‘ “He who steals the form of his friends.” Arim himself mentioned it once, so many centuries ago. You can take many shapes-’

‘Not so many,’ says Ramachni quickly.

‘-but only the shapes of those you have befriended, and slain. An orphaned owl. A mink caught in a hunter’s trap. A great bear rescued from a life of torment in the arena.’

‘They were woken animals,’ says Ramachni. ‘And they were all ill, or hopelessly wounded. They understood what they gave. Yes, that is my Gift-curse. I add their shapes to my collection as I kill them, kill my friends.’

‘Then let me give the same gift, while I can.’

‘Sitroth!’

‘Your fight goes on. With an eguar’s strength few enemies will stand against you.’

‘My change is not like that of the maukslar, not a mockery of the host. You do not know what you offer, Sitroth.’

‘Would you deny me this?’ snaps the eguar, suddenly fierce, its blind eyes swinging towards the mage. ‘Step close; you will need great strength. Use the charm you placed on the demon, but use it to still my heart. And when you assume my form in future years, think of me.’

‘Your own body will turn to dust. There will be no burial-pit, no bones to honour.’

‘Or to carve into Plazic blades. Arpathwin, hurry. I am near the end of my strength.’

Ramachni looks into the blind black eyes. He does not tell the eguar that to assimilate his body will be as hard a deed as the fight they have just waged. Nor does he explain the deeper price his Gift exacts: how each new form he collects pushes a little more of his original self aside, erases another page of memory of what he was, before magic, before the shadow-war that never ends. He only thanks Sitroth, and draws on his power, and stops the eguar’s heart.

The feeling is familiar. As with the mink, the owl, the bear, the Dafvni gardener: there is that sense of a mirror flipped, a mirror stepped through; now the reflection is looking at its source. But the source — the body of a great primordial monster — is already gone. Even the vapours, even the acidic blood. Upon the stone and shattered tree is a patina of fine silver dust.

Afterwards he lies stunned, nearly comatose, his body flickering through its forms. He cannot remember the one he feels at home in, here in Alifros. The birds creep back. A fox sniffs at him, but cannot understand why it has smelled a bird and found a bear, and flees unsettled. Fresh snow falls and covers him. Each time he becomes an eguar it turns to steam.

Late in the night his head clears a little, and he rises, man-shaped, to drink from the Parsua — but the water burns his lips. Sitroth’s acids are in the river, the snow. Sitroth’s, or his own. At dawn, still aching, he takes weary flight as the owl.

Once more peace reigns in the canyon. The day passes like any other; except for a few scorched trees there is no sign of what has happened here. The next day is warmer; rain falls instead of snow.

Late on the third day the silence breaks again. This time hoofbeats echo in the canyon: iron shoes on stone. The riders come in force, fifty dlomu on swift chargers, their shields emblazoned with the sun-and-leopard ensign of Bali Adro. At the heart of the band are two dlomu with the red sashes and aiguillettes of generals. And behind this pair rides an apparition of a woman, tall and gaunt and bone-white, with spectral eyes that rake the canyon as though hunting for food. She wears a dark riding coat, but from beneath it trail the ends of ancient satin and lace. Her dry lips are parted; her hands seem poised to snatch something from the air.

As they reach the shattered pine the woman screams the band to a halt, and slides to the ground before the generals can offer their aid. Four strides bring her to the river’s edge. Twitching, she looks upstream and down.

‘It was here. I can smell its stench. It reached this point and fell.’

‘Fell, my lady?’ says one of the generals. ‘What enemy do we face that could kill a maukslar?’

The sorceress looks up at him sharply. The general cringes, begs her pardon in abject terms.

‘Stand back from me, and keep your bastards silent,’ shouts the woman. ‘I must think.’

the dlomu turn their steeds quickly away. They know too well what happens when Macadra declares that she must think. The mage stalks along the riverbank, first upstream, then down. Several times she pauses, holding very still. Then she curses aloud and plunges into the river.

‘She is mad, isn’t she?’

The words are spoken in a whisper, by one dlomu at the rear of the band. Only his nearest comrades hear a word. His comrades, that is, and Lord Taliktrum, looking out through the slit his knife has opened in a saddlebag, where he has ridden for a day and a night. He smiles grimly. He knows what will come next.

‘Quiet, fool!’ hisses another rider. ‘She hears everything, don’t you know that yet?’

They are both right, Taliktrum thinks: Macadra does have an uncanny ability to know when her officers breathe a word against her. In the month that he has hidden in her entourage, Taliktrum has seen her pluck half a dozen men from the ranks and send them to the noose. It might well be enchanted hearing. But it could just as well be natural intuition. Many leaders have it. A few (his father springs to mind) come to trust in nothing else.

She is, however, unquestionably mad. Look at her, plunging waist-deep in that ice water, eager as a bear after fish. The sight makes Taliktrum boil with frustration. When he lost Prince Olik in the wilds above Masalym, Taliktrum had known exactly what to do. It was what his people had always done: stay close to the enemy, infiltrate their strongholds, ride their ships. He had smuggled himself back to Istolym, riding one of the dogs Prince Olik had been forced to abandon (it took two days, for its feet were very sore), and then, with great care, rode a cargo shipment out to the Death’s Head.

Taliktrum does not think much of his own intuition. Not after his disastrous spell as clan leader, and his unforgivable abandonment of them all. Not after spurning Myett, torturing her heart, failing to notice that she loved him, alone of all beings alive.

But while he stands self-condemned, he cannot deny that his choices have been better since coming ashore. Helping the prince: that was well done. Olik Bali Adro is both a thinker and a barb in the side of the slaughtering Empire that bears his name.

Or was. Odds are the prince is dead, now — drowned in that river, or starved in the sprawling wilds he spoke of. Still, Taliktrum has chosen the right friend, the right alliegiances at last.

Boarding the Death’s Head: even better. He’d known the sorceress craved the Nilstone, and was deploying every surviving asset of Bali Adro in the hunt for it. What he’d only suspected, though, was that she trusted none of her lackeys — these Plazic generals with their stumps of eguar-bone weaponry, diseased and desperate men — to bring her the Stone. No, she had to chase it herself, follow every lead, swoop down on whichever of her servants found it before they knew what they held.

Stowing away was horribly dangerous at first. Macadra had not travelled in decades, and despite her ferocity, feared almost everything — magical assault, treason, seepage in the hold, foul weather, flies. Her vessel crawled with every manner of guard and inspector. Her cabin was a fortress, and those who entered were searched like criminals brought to plead before a queen.

Which is, he supposes, precisely how she sees the matter.

But she was not on guard against ixchel. The prince had told him bluntly: there were no ixchel, not on the mainland at any rate. Not even the rats aboard knew his smell. He was utterly alone: a tactical advantage, certainly. Also a sentence of living death.

Once they sailed from Masalym he discovered his second advantage: knowledge of the Chathrand. For it was exactly as he had thought on the headland, when he and Olik first glimpsed Macadra’s vessel: except for the armour and ghastly weapons of the Death’s Head, the ships were twins. Seven decks. Five masts. An inner hull and sealed forepeak. And the ladderways, hatches, light shafts, speaking tubes, pumps and drains: so familiar he had nearly laughed aloud. Before the first day was out he had found not one but two refuges, places he could sleep without the least fear of discovery. By the third day he was crawling under Macadra’s floorboards, and catching some of her words.

‘Watchers Above, she’s soaked to her elbows!’ says the first dlomu. ‘She’ll freeze to death!’

‘Don’t count on it,’ says the other.

After a fortnight the Death’s Head had rendezvoused with a small Bali Adro sloop, fresh from the Island Wilderness. It was then that he (and Macadra) learned of the Chathrand’s escape from Imperial waters, despite a spectacular bombardment. Macadra’s wrath had certainly been spectacular, but she’d had no one to punish: the sloop had not even been present for the engagement. And she had brightened considerably when the vessel’s commander reported that the Chathrand had used no magic of any kind.

‘No spells at all? Then they are not my quarry. Our prey has fled inland, as I always suspected.’

She believes they’d have used the Nilstone against her if they had it, Taliktrum had realised. Why? Not even Arunis could control that deadly thing.

The Death’s Head had touched land at the naval bases called Fandural Edge and Sibar Light, where Macadra had dispatched more teams to the interior. Finally, three weeks out of Masalym, they had docked at the great smoke-lidded, soot-blackened city of Orbilesc.

He’d flown ashore that first night under cover of darkness. But there was no true darkness in Orbilesc, only shadows and blinding smoke. The city stretched on and on, over hills and around the slopes of mountains, along both banks of a river the colour of diluted blood. Parts of it appeared to be on fire: they throbbed in the distance like open sores, their orange glow reflecting dully on the filth-laden sky. The city was a point of convergence for great roads leading deep into the continent, to Bali Adro City and Kistav and other centres of Imperial might. Dlomu by the thousands thronged its squares, encamped in its denuded gardens and gutted shops. They were mostly poor and filthy, huddling with their scrawny dogs beside illicit fires that the rain was always putting out. It appeared that they had come to work the hellish factories, but whether voluntarily or at spearpoint he could not ascertain. There were other races too in those shabby streets, mystifying creatures that fascinated and repelled him. All of these strange beings, dlomu included, spoke Imperial Common, but in such a variety of forms and accents that Taliktrum doubted everything he heard.

Worst of all were the shipyards. He hardly dared approach those grim towers and black belching mills, from which great plumes of fire erupted, and cold shimmerings of yellow light, and noises loud as the maiming of Gods. Carrion birds wheeled above them; titantic sea-serpents of the sort that had threatened the Chathrand off Naribyr writhed in the polluted bay, flailing at their chains. Huge gears and moving cables brought steel and lumber and lead and brass into the open jaws of the shipworks. Taliktrum flew nearer, alighting on one of the countless outbuildings surrounding the mill. Creeping to the edge of the roof, he found himself looking down on corpses, mangled corpses impaled on hooks, being cabled away towards a mountain of smoking rubbish to the south. Prisoners? Criminals? Aghast, he realised that they were neither: they were workers, slain and discarded by the monstrous industry they served. And for every dlomu killed there were surely five or six lined up at the doors.

The city generated a kind of fear Taliktrum had never before imagined. Great Mother, he’d thought, don’t let me die in such a place. Send me to sea again quickly, far from this nightmare world.

But the ship had lingered, day after day. Macadra kept to herself, awaiting word from her inland scouts. For five days she did not stir from her cabin. Then one morning she had stormed out on deck, screaming for horses. A vision had come to her in the night: battle in a wintry gorge, the maukslar killed or driven from Alifros, and another creature of great power slain as well. Macadra had been certain that the Nilstone was involved.

Taliktrum frowns at the sorceress, wading like a rapacious bird. He still does not know what a maukslar is. But he knows somehow that he must stay near this vile mage. If he is to fight her, that is. If he is to have any chance of mattering in this world, after so much error and cowardice.

‘Look at her now!’ hisses someone. The riders grow still. Macadra has drawn a knife, and bared her bone-white arm to the elbow. With a swift motion she slices her own forearm: a deep, cruel cut. But she does not bleed: the wound gapes red, but dry.

The sight is too much for the dlomu. ‘No blood!’ they whisper. ‘Macadra has no blood in her veins!’ Cursing, Macadra works her hand, in a motion like squeezing a ball. At last Taliktrum sees it: a slow, dark trickle on the too-white flesh. She lets it drip into the river: five drops, and then the wound runs dry.

From out of the Parsua, something leaps into her palm: a red ruby, glittering in the sun. Macadra encloses it in her wounded hand.

Her eyes shut. Then she screeches, with more lunacy and rage then ever Taliktrum has heard on giant’s tongue.

‘Mina Scaraba Urifica! We ride, we ride! They have passed over the Water Bridge and descended Urakan! They are west of us and making for the sea!’

She is flailing for shore, knife still in hand, snarling: ‘Assist me, you dogs!’

One of the generals plunges in and wades towards her, extending his hand. ‘My lady,’ he shouts, ‘the horses are nearly spent.’

‘Did you not hear me? We ride at once!’

‘Yes, lady,’ says the general, ‘but what of your demon? Is that not why we came here?’

Macadra grasps his hand, pulls hard, and with a speed that even Taliktrum finds startling, cuts the general’s throat. The man’s mouth opens with hideous silence. He drops face-first; his coat balloons with trapped air. The sorceress presses down upon his neck as though feeding him to the river.

‘It lives, dog,’ she says. ‘It will heal, with time and blood.’