The Night of the Swarm

‘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