The Night of the Swarm

arm. He was bleeding too, but with his good arm he pulled me out of the water and onto the footbridge. Then-’ She put a hand to her lips. She could not go on.

‘He kissed you?’ said Pazel.

‘No. Yes.’ Neda stared helplessly at her brother. ‘He gave me his fire beetle. He pulled it from his coat pocket with his teeth. I tried to share it with him, but he shut his mouth and turned away. Then he held me against him, gave me all the warmth he had left in his body. Why would he do that, Pazel? For a damned soul? I was dead to him, wasn’t I? Wasn’t I?’

Cayer Vispek’s body remained beneath the Water Bridge, and with great care they extracted it and brought it to solid ground. An hour later Valgrif emerged limping from the forest. He had chased the dog far across Urakan, but slain it at last, then staunched his bleeding foot in the snow. On the way back he had found Ensyl and Myett upon the trail. Neither woman was scratched. They had jumped the eagle together, and killed it with their swords, and when it had crashed into the pines they had leaped together and fallen through a lattice of needles and thin branches, which had slowed them so gradually that they had actually come to rest a yard above the earth. They had dropped lightly to their feet, and Myett had sheathed her sword and remarked how good it was to be alive.

19

Forgotten Prisoners

1 Fuinar 942

289th day from Etherhorde

Captain Rose looked at the body of the man he had killed.

Darius Plapp was hanging by a rope strung over the main yard. There was a fair swell this morning: the body swung like a pendulum, and the cloud of flies about him kept getting left behind.

‘Fetch a boathook, Mr Uskins,’ Rose said to the first mate, who was loitering behind him.

‘Oppo, sir. Justice is done.’

As he fell, Darius Plapp had jammed his fingers into the noose. The deed ran contrary to Rose’s frank advice to the man. It had delayed his death, of course, but only prolonged his suffering thereby. The hands were still there, tucked under the rope, as though Plapp were trying to button his collar. His mouth was wide open, as it had been during his final week of life, tirelessly proclaiming his innocence in the death of Kruno Burnscove.

The hapless fool. As though his fate had hinged on the question of innocence or guilt. All that had mattered here was prejudice, the story the crew could bring itself to believe. That, and the swift elimination of any possible rival to Rose himself. As rivals, the ganglords had neutralised each other. Alone, either one could have grown into a threat.

Uskins returned with the boathook, and Rose fished the hanged man near. Then he drew his sword with his free hand and raised it high. ‘Thus do we bury murderers and rebels,’ he shouted to the tense little crowd. ‘No prayers, no ceremony for a man who wished evil on us all.’

The rope parted at the first swing, and one more Etherhorder departed the Chathrand, far from home.

‘Have this line down from the yardarm, Uskins.’

‘I shall do it with my own hands, sir,’ said the first mate.

Rose turned and looked at him squarely, for the first time in a week. Uskins stood contrite, calm, well- groomed. He had not looked so well since Sorrophran, before his conflict with Pazel Pathkendle brought about his first disgrace.

Rose detested Uskins, counterfeit seaman and transparent bootlicker that he was. But what to make of this picture of health? Chadfallow could not explain it, though he literally followed Uskins about with a notebook, hoping for some clue, any clue, to help him fight the plague. Since their escape from the Behemoth nine men and two women had succumbed.

Eleven tol-chenni lunatics, eleven reasons for panic and revolt. The brig was half full of gibbering ape-men, and every time a messenger approached, the captain feared that someone else had succumbed.

Uskins might just hold the key to their survival; therefore Uskins would be tolerated.

‘Stay out of the rigging,’ he said, turning his back on the man. ‘Just have the mucking thing removed. Tell Fiffengurt to meet me portside. And send a boy with my telescope.’

Rose crossed the ship to the portside rail. When the telescope came he studied the island again. Dark, lush, horsehead-shaped. Some highlands, some sand, and plenty of fresh water giving life to those trees. More than that he did not know, although they had been in the island’s orbit for two days: it was extraordinarily difficult to approach. On its southern flank there were reefs within reefs; on the north there were offshore rocks, and rollers that began in shallows eight miles out.

The waves: Rose could hear the long thunder of their breaking even here, twenty miles away. That sound told Rose everything he needed to know. The waves were monsters. Beyond those rocks there were no more islands — only the endless, pitiless Ruling Sea, all the way home to Arqual, that fading memory, that dream. Stath Balfyr marked the end of the South.

There was but one possible landing: a bay on the eastern side. From a distance it appeared promising. The mouth of the bay might be rather narrow, but the colour suggested depth enough, at least along the southern cliffs. And once inside they could tack close to the south shore, and be hidden from the sea while the smaller craft went ashore. They could also put a lookout on the clifftops, where the view would be immense and unobstructed. If a vessel approached from almost any direction, save out of the Ruling Sea itself, they would have a minimum of eight hours’ warning.

All very straightforward. Yet something made Rose hesitate to send the Chathrand into that bay. He ordered a longitudinal run along the island’s southern shore, with every telescope in their possession trained on the island. The survey yielded few surprises. The woods were dense. The birds were many. A small shipwreck on a western beach might have been any two-master out of Bali Adro or Karysk or some other land; it was clearly ancient. There were no other signs of visitation.

Sandor Ott had been enraged by the delay, which came to nearly twenty hours. But when they at last returned to the mouth of the bay and Rose ordered a second, closer pass, the spymaster exploded. He barged into Rose’s quarters without knocking, and even appeared on the verge of lifting a hand against him, a thing that for all his bluster and threats he had never done.

‘It is Stath Balfyr, Rose!’ Ott roared. ‘The location is precisely as we expected, and Prince Olik confirmed. The shape of the bay is perfect. We have arrived. What is there to do but plot the course and set sail?’

Idiotic question. They would have to land, if only to cut silage for the animals and refill their water casks. And they needed to take a compass ashore to calibrate the binnacles,¹³ a task they had put off far too long.

‘Binnacles be damned!’ cried Ott. ‘You’re making excuses. You’re conspiring with Chadfallow and your treasonous quartermaster to keep us here as long as possible.’

Rose had taken offence. He could delay perfectly well without the aid of any man.

‘We found this island as much by chart and dead-reckoning as by the compass,’ he had conceded to explain (how his father would have raged: explanations, to a non-sailor and a spy!). ‘But there are neither charts nor landmarks on the Ruling Sea. If something we took on in Masalym has altered the pull of the compass needle by a mere half-degree, we could arrive many hundreds of miles off course — in the ice of the Nelu Ghila, for example, or in the centre of the Mzithrini naval exclusion zone. That would complicate your plans for the Shaggat rather more than an extra day or two of preparations.’

Ott had been right on a few counts, however. The island was Stath Balfyt, and Rose did wish to delay. But it would never do to admit to that wish, to Ott or anyone else aboard. For even if the spymaster were blind to it, the fact remained that the Chathrand was more imperilled now than when the Behemoth attacked.