The Night of the Swarm

and his friends neared the bridge over the Parsua, Empress Maisa of Arqual declared herself to the world.

She did it through simultaneous letters to her peers on fourteen thrones, from the Crownless Lands to Noonfirth, from Tholjassa to Bodendell and Auxlei City. She did it also through anonymous placards erected overnight in every town and city of the Empire she meant to reclaim. The announcements were explicit, describing the circumstances of her overthrow, the defamation of her character, the purging of her loyal subjects, the murder of her sons. And very significantly, it announced her marriage to ‘Arqual’s proudest native son’, Fleet Admiral Eberzam Isiq.

But Maisa declared herself most clearly in the cries of the two thousand lean fighters who coalesced out of the still-snowy Highlands and swept down into Ormael City, and in the cannon-fire of the twenty ships that took the harbour at dawn.

She had timed the attack with exceptional care. Arqual had held little Ormael for almost six years, and its forces were entrenched. But in early spring the Empire found it necessary, or perhaps merely comfortable, to adjust its grip on the city-state. The new war with the Mzithrin was going its way: Commodore Darabik had led a second incursion into the Gulf of Thol — far larger than the one Isiq had witnessed on his way to the Crab Fens — and had lost far fewer ships and men than anticipated. In Etherhorde this was seen as proof of Mzithrini weakness¹⁶ and a reason to accelerate their plans for conquest.

Thus, late in the month of Modobrin, six thousand Turachs were withdrawn from Ormael to Ipulia for training in mountain warfare. Most were soon dispatched for hidden bases in the Tsordons, on the very margin of the Mzithrini heartland. Others were placed on war vessels and sent south to the Baerrid Archipelago. The White Fleet had been spotted conducting exercises north of the angry volcanic island called Serpent’s Head. There were even reports of Mzithrini vessels slipping east into the Nelu Rekere. Arqual feared nothing so much as an assault from the Rekere, which was too long and rough to guard completely. It was in the Rekere that the White Fleet had crushed Arqual’s navy in the last war. Never again would Emperor Magad be caught unprepared.

But the first assault came from the mountains, not the sea. Maisa’s foot soldiers, trained over a decade in the Crab Fens, had been moving into the sparsely patrolled Chereste Highlands for more than three years. They looked like peasants, not soldiers; and they had entered the Highlands by the rudest of Highland paths. Threadbare and shuffling, they had taken up not arms but agriculture, blending in with the mountain folk. Year after year Maisa’s emissaries had moved among these villagers: boys in rags, girls leading scrawny goats, women bent under bundles of sticks. Every one an operative, passing the Arquali checkpoints with blank faces, fearful stares. Every one with a message for the dormant fighting-force: The lake is filling, but it is not yet full. When the lake is full the dam will burst. Some will drown in the flood, but we will ride it. Listen, listen, for the bursting of the dam.

On that decisive morning, Maisa’s forces swarmed over the city’s northern wall. Ormael had faced no Highland enemies in three hundred years, and the occupiers had gradually relaxed their guard on the sleepy northern quarter. Even when the attack came the Imperial governor felt more embarrassed than afraid. Two thousand peasants? What sense did it make? Even after the redeployments of the previous month, he still had three thousand trained Arquali soldiers, including several hundred Turachs, who were each as good as five. The simpletons had not even slowed down to contest the wall itself, but had pushed deep into the northern quarter — looking for meat pies and brandy, no doubt. They were trapped. They would be slaughtered. Why had Emperor Magad condemned him to rule a land of dunces and suicides?

But the dunces fared better than expected. They were not seeking meat pies but the northern armoury, which they seized and raided; and the gates between the city’s third and fourth quarters, which they lowered and jammed, thus delaying the arrival of reinforcements. They were also joined by a number of regular Ormalis, labourers from the tanneries and the docks. This was not quite, the governor conceded, a spontaneous raid. But surely it did not amount to a revolt?

Fortune smiled on him, then: twenty ships, the bulk of Commodore Darabik’s squadron, were entering the bay in splendour — unexpected, but more than welcome under the circumstances. They were cheered by the nine other Arquali vessels still in port, and urged to land as many men as could be spared to aid in the city’s defence.

The vessels did indeed land a great number of men — but they did not leave the port. Rather, they seized the cannon placements along the waterfront, and trained them on the vessels not under their command. At the same time, Darabik’s vessels ran out their guns.

The resistance was bloody but short-lived. Of the nine vessels, seven were at anchor, with no chance whatsoever of running. The Glave and the Vengeance, two proud Arquali sloops on manoeuvres in the bay, prepared to fire on the new arrivals and were buried in ordnance.

The Vengeance sank outright; the Glave listed, her stern filling fast. Out of the palls of smoke men came swimming for their lives, and the rebels were as fierce in their rescue efforts as they had been moments before in their attack. Nearly two hundred perished in that horrible exchange, the first time Arquali had fired on Arquali in forty years. But twice as many lived, and the other vessels surrendered without a fight.

In the city, men were rising, joining the tanners and stevedores. There was some hesitation: six years earlier, Turachs had swarmed into the streets like bees, wave after killing wave, and those who had resisted were summarily executed. But when word reached the city that Arquali rebels held the bay and all its ships, doors flew open by the hundreds, and soon nearly every able-bodied Ormali fell in with Maisa’s troops. Here too the Empress had her partisans; here too there were those who stood ready to create diversions, wave the Arqualis into ambushes, lead Maisa’s forces to the jails, which were bursting with political prisoners. By midday the governor knew that the half-restored Palace of Ormael would fall, and sent out emissaries to arrange for a peaceful surrender. By mid-afternoon the last Arquali soldiers laid down their arms.

It was a cool spring day. At the old Slave Terrace (where Pazel had begun his life as a tarboy six years before) the defeated soldiers were herded together in a mob. They had a look of desperation, although only the Turachs were chained. Some had heard that they would handed over to the Mzithrinis, others that they would be run through with spears.

All that followed for good or ill (Admiral Isiq would later muse) had hinged upon a confrontation on Commodore Darabik’s flagship, the Nighthawk, two evenings before the raid.

Darabik had spent the last six years gathering his most trusted officers into his squadron. Patiently, he had probed them, learned their gripes and sympathies, and slowly stacked the deck in his favour. To a very few of these men, his soul-brothers, he had even spoken of Maisa, and the rebellion to come.

Then a fortnight ago he had taken the boldest step of all, dismissing the officers he knew would never side with Maisa, on trumped-up charges of malfeasance and graft. The charges would never survive review by the Lord Admiral; indeed, they would explode in Darabik’s face, and very likely end his career. But for the present it was ideal: the officers were recalled to Etherhorde, and their commands passed to underlings promoted by Darabik himself.

The present was all that mattered now.

On the evening in question, the Nighthawk had veered a little away from the squadron, edging closer than was strictly necessary to the perils of the Haunted Coast. There the commodore had made them linger an hour, until at last a little skiff had tacked out of the darkness and come alongside. They hoisted up the tiny vessel. She was sailed by a crew of three ruffians, but there were two passengers aboard as well: an old warrior, whose face was immediately familiar to most of Darabik’s crew; and an even older woman, whose profile struck a disturbing, dreamlike note in their recollections. Forbidden portraits, fading memories of picture-books too dangerous not to burn.

The warrior, of course, was Isiq himself. He swung down from the skiff onto the deck, and scores of men cried his name — amazed, frightened, confused. Then he and Darabik helped the lady descend.

Silence fell, though no one called for it. The oldest sailors made the sign of the Tree. The woman freed her hands from the two men and looked the crew over sharply, carefully, before she spoke.

‘You are not deceived,’ she said. ‘Your Empress has returned, and she will fight for you. Not for your glory — that is a chalice filled with brine — but for your well-being, and your children’s. And for justice, which alone can bring them to you. You do not understand me yet: never mind, you will. For now, you must think on one matter alone, and try to face it.