The Night of the Swarm

one day follow Maisa to the throne.

Yes, he’d had to marry. And Suthinia Pathkendle had to go on being a mage, in love with nothing but the mysteries of her calling. She did not have to keep watching him in that maddening way, though, or smiling furtively when he and Maisa departed for the same chambers at night.

Like the marriage itself, those departures were for show. Her tiny army, her foetal court: apparently they thought quite a lot about the old woman’s need for a mate. ‘ They must think us conjugal,’ Maisa had told him, that first evening in the Fens. ‘ They must never for an instant fancy that we might be divided. Be ready to perform, Isiq. A show of love inspires men like nothing else.’

But they were not in love, and they never removed more than a coat or shawl in each other’s presence, and within their chambers they had separate bedrooms, always.

‘Sleep with no one for half a year,’ the Empress had said, ‘and then confine yourself to servants until the war is won. And see that they’re gone before daybreak, always. That’s family tradition.’

His knee was aching. Suthinia helped him down the stairs onto the docks.

Now, in a fit of recklessness, Isiq shared those words with Suthinia. She gaped at him, then stopped to lean against a wall, shaking with silent laughter. ‘What’s so blary amusing?’ he’d demanded. But Suthinia just shook her head, and dried the tears before they wet her veil.

That afternoon she slipped away into the city, alone. Maisa raged, and Isiq too was fearful: Suthinia’s disguise was hardly foolproof. But she returned before nightfall, and bowed her head while Maisa shouted that no one in her company was to run off like a wayward child. When Isiq caught up with her on the deck of the Nighthawk, she told him merely that she had visted her old house above the city, and that the plum trees were budding in the snow.

He heard the misery in her voice. What had she found there, he wondered? A ruin, a burned-out shell of the house she called the Orch’dury? It was, after all, where her happiest years of exile had been spent. The years when exile had become belonging, when lead had transmuted into gold awhile, for this lonely woman from across the Ruling Sea.

Suthinia had looked him up and down. ‘You’re exhausted,’ she said. He rubbed his face, wondering why she had to state the obvious.

‘I defied your Empress today,’ she said. ‘If you wish to defy her too I can meet you below. It would be an act of the body only, not an act of love. You know my limits.’

‘But you do not know mine,’ he snapped. ‘Out of the question.’

To imagine touching her when she did not want it. A kind of charity. Not in this lifetime, witch. But to his surprise he saw her eyes were moist. She was nodding, head lowered, accepting his rebuke. ‘I meant no insult, Eberzam,’ she said.

What did it mean to befriend a woman? Could he ever hope to understand?

Suddenly she looked up at him, challenge in her gaze. ‘Is this lunacy? Is Arqual going to massacre us, and everyone who fights at our side? Don’t tell me what you say to the men. Tell me the blary truth.’

Now he was the one who had to look away. ‘We’re vulnerable,’ he said. ‘By my count we have twenty-eight ships, including Maisa’s hidden half-dozen. Arqual has five hundred.’

‘And they’ll chase us.’

‘Pitfire, they’ll live for nothing else. They’ll pull ships in from the Rekere, they’ll dispatch forces that would have sailed on the Mzithrin. And they’ll never quit while a single boat lofts Maisa’s flag.’

‘She has a plan, though? And alliances? All those dignitaries she smuggled into the Fens throughout the years? Some of them will help us, won’t they?’ When Isiq said nothing, Suthinia leaned closer, her face suddenly alarmed. ‘Hasn’t she confided in you yet? Pitfire, you’re her mucking husband!’

‘Lower your voice,’ he growled. And of course she’s confided in me, witch. But if she hasn’t told you, what in Alifros makes you think I’d dare?

‘It would be safer to disperse,’ he said, just to fill the silence. ‘Make them struggle to guess where our commanders are. To say nothing of Maisa herself. But if we disperse it may be impossible to regroup.’

‘And if we don’t?’

‘ They may box us in — sometime, somewhere — and crush us with a single, massive blow. It’s as I said before: nip and run, nip and run, for ever.’

‘For ever?’

‘Are you deaf, woman? Those were my words.’

She turned on her heel, leaving him alone on the forecastle. Angry at her for nothing. For making him face the truth.

Isiq was shaking. Across the bay Ormael glowed in the red light of dusk. Some will abandon him and join us. Most will not. Freedom had returned to the city under the shadow of a second death. He turned away. The deck was in shadow; Suthinia was gone. Darkness had crept up behind him like a cut-throat. Darkness was coming for them all.

But hours later Empress Maisa asked permission (permission!) to set foot on the sovereign territory of Ormael, and when it was granted she took Isiq and Suthinia with her and went ashore. She left her guards at the docks, over the sputtering objections of Sergeant Bachari, and walked out into the throng unguarded, holding the elbows of her admiral-husband and her witch. The crowd swallowed them. It surged and grumbled, stinking of blood and alcohol and sweat. There were some hisses, no cheers. Maisa ploughed forward like a soldier through a swamp.

She took a cup of plum wine in a waterfront tavern, for that is Ormael’s drink, and dabbed a little on her forehead, and her ankle above her satin shoe, for that (who had told her? Suthinia?) was the region’s beloved pagan prayer: Let this sweetness anoint me, head to foot; let me age not as vinegar but as wine.

Word of Maisa’s gesture rippled out from the tavern into the growing throng. Then she asked which neighborhood was the roughest in the city. When they replied that it was surely Tanners’ Row, Maisa set out for it afoot. Laughing and amazed, the crowd moved with her. Block by block Isiq watched it grow, fast as word and feet could travel, until it seemed there could hardly be anyone in Ormael who was not making for the Row.

The squalor here was frightful. Blocks of rubble, homes built of scrap. Children watching from broken windows, thinner than castaways. Ashamed of what the Empress was seeing, the crowd kicked garbage out of her path, broomed away puddles of filth that nonetheless rushed back and soaked her shoes. Isiq looked at Suthinia, who walked a pace behind Maisa. There was fear in her eyes.

When they reached the poorest, shabbiest streetcorner, Maisa asked for a platform. A crate was produced from somewhere, and she let herself be helped atop it. When she was certain she had her balance she gazed around her sadly, and shook her head.

‘Tomorrow it will be six years,’ she said suddenly, in a voice that shocked them with its power. ‘Six years that you have lived under the boot of the Usurper. You know what has happened to Ormael in that time. Slavery for some of you, starvation for others. A lean, bare, scraping survival for the lucky ones. Your wine stolen, your fisheries plundered, your shops strangled for want of goods. In just six years. Now here’s an ugly thought: what will it be like in sixty?’

Then she looked over the mob and declared that if anyone thought Ormael would gain more by her death than by the war she had declared on the Usurper, that man should strike her dead. Here. Tonight. A chance to do what was right for your homeland, she shouted, taunting them. Perhaps the best chance you’ll have.

The throng shifted nervously. Isiq gazed out at the harbour. The woman was mad to provoke them; she didn’t know the depth of their pain. He experienced a frigid stab of premonition: not fear, but awareness that this moment, like that one on the deck of the Nighthawk, was a fulcrum. They might well kill her, and thrust all Alifros onto a trail of blood and ashes. But if they did not: what new lands, what strange vistas would open before them, sweeping away into the future from this place of despair?

The silence deepened. The city of Ormael stood transfixed, a single mind contemplating an old, grey woman on a crate. Finally, slowly, Maisa raised her arm, as if to grasp a piece of the night. Her voice rang out in the darkness like a siren’s call.

‘Ormael does not choose to slay me, because Ormael is rightly named. The people of the Womb of Morning cannot be kept for ever cowering in the dark. I will have my throne. I will see a world where thieves and murderers are brought to heel — and you, and this night, will never in a thousand years be forgotten.’