The Night of the Swarm

For thirty years they had waited here, in exile. Thirty years of fever and snakebite; thirty years of raids by tribals with gauntlets of leopard claws, who ripped their victims open, chin to groin; thirty years dreaming of revenge. But not just dreaming. With Arqual’s help, the Nessarim had also built ships.

Now the vessels stood crowded together on the sluggish river, bows pointing seaward. Forty ships — all armed to the teeth, at monstrous expense, by the heretic Emperor of Arqual. What of it? The worst heretics were the Mzithrin kings themselves, who had slaughtered their families, and denied the divinity of the Shaggat Ness. Even now those kings ruled over the Shaggat’s rightful empire. Now, when all the prophecies bespoke His return; now, when his Glorious Son walked among them once more.

The Shaggat’s son. Five months ago, Pazel himself had been present when Sandor Ott brought Erthalon Ness back to the Nessarim. The man was clearly insane. He had spent his life tormented by the Arqualis, by Arunis, and above all by his lunatic father. He could not grasp his present circumstances. Pazel had tried to tell him the truth: that Sandor Ott had nurtured the whole colony merely as one gear in the machine that would topple the Mzithrin. That all their ‘prophecies’ had been composed in the chambers of the Secret Fist, and spread by infiltrators. at their small fleet was meant only to discredit and demoralize the enemy before it was pulverised.

Erthalon Ness had listened to Pazel, but in the end he had gone to his father’s worshippers all the same. And now he was leading that throng — shouting, screaming that the time of victory had come. The clipper’s message was greeted with a war-chant that frightened the tribal people in the hills. The Nessarim were raised for martyrdom, and martyrdom can only so long be delayed.

By the time the clipper reached Bramian, Maisa’s forces had liberated Ormael, and her partisans had spread her message over the whole of Arqual. Suddenly the news was everywhere. The Empress lived. Admiral Isiq lived. They had married, condemned the war, declared Emperor Magad an usurper. Some claimed that part of the Western Fleet had already gone over to her side. If the true scale of the rebellion was minimal, the people’s imagination was not. And with every traveller who landed or set sail from Arqual the story grew.

The Secret Fist rounded up a great number of Maisa’s allies (together with many who knew nothing of her), and what became of those unfortunates hardly needs to be told. But they did not catch everyone. The next placards to appear in the streets denounced the spy guild itself as ‘an empire with the Empire, ruled by a depraved cadre of professional killers’. This was not a revelation; everyone knew the Fist was depraved. But very few had heard the next claim: that the organisation

. . FOR REASONS OF BASE INTRIGUE, ENGINEERED THE GREAT SHAME AND BETRAYAL OF TREATY DAY, WHEREUPON THEY SOWED THE SEEDS OF THIS, THEIR LATEST, VILE WAR.

The spy guild panicked. Sandor Ott had never trusted his underlings: not since Hercol Stanapeth’s defection, at any rate. Since then he had concentrated power in his own hands, with the result that when the Chathrand sailed he had felt that no one could be trusted aboard her but himself. Etherhorde, consequently, was left in the hands of spies who were technically capable but unprepared to address a calamity. And the rebellion was a calamity, now: the daily harvest of hearsay was too enormous to be fought by propaganda alone. Ambassadors were grumbling. Youths were tossing stones through barracks windows. Emperor Magad using more deathsmoke by the day, and screaming for someone’s, everyone’s, head.

Those who live in shadows are not immune to striking at them. Soon loyal ministers began to disappear, rock-solid generals were clumsily vilified, a Turach commander was snatched before the eyes of his troops in Ulsprit, who later received an anonymous tip as to his location, stormed the safe house, and found their leader dead from torture.

None of this directly hobbled the armed forces. They knew their duty, and right now duty saw them being redirected in vast numbers to the Crownless Lands, with orders to eradicate the rebels and leave no living trace. But on 19 Halar a bomb changed everything.

The Lord Admiral answered only to the crown. He had never warmed personally to Isiq, but his respect for the Fleet Admiral, second in command of Arqual’s maritime forces, was boundless. Isiq had never lost a campaign, never questioned a deployment, never received orders from the Admiralty with anything but resolve to see them through. It was the Lord Admiral’s misfortune to have reminded Etherhorde of these facts, somewhat publically, when the rumours began. He did not believe the rumours for an instant. Admiral Isiq was dead. Maisa was surely dead, or else confined to some shelter for the aged in Tholjassa. All this was hogwash, and he’d be damned if he’d vilify a hero of Arqual because of hogwash. This too he declared rather too loudly, and too often.

The Secret Fist only wanted him to close his mouth. They might have achieved this in any number of ways, but chose the expedient of a black-powder bomb. The device was planted in the outdoor kitchen of the Lord Admiral’s residence on Maj Hill. The agents involved used the very finest of materials, including a smokeless fuse of Sandor Ott’s own invention, and a timer set for well after midnight. But in their haste to frighten the Lord Admiral, the agents overlooked the fact that his fifteen-year-old son and certain friends met in the kitchen many nights with cigars and brandy and other forbidden things. Four boys (all from military families) were present when the bomb exploded. The building filled with fire, and the Lord Admiral, hearing the screams, lost his mind and ran into the blaze himself. Thirty seconds later he emerged, carrying the still-burning corpse of his son.

None of the youths survived, and the Lord Admiral himself succumbed to his burns within the hour. But as he staggered from the inferno, his screams of grief and hatred, his denunciations, were heard all over Maj Hill. By dawn they had become the chisel that would split the greatest navy in the Northern world.

On the Island of Simja, King Oshiram II had spent the month flirting secretly with suicide.

He put on a brave face, for it was vital that no one suspect. His people knew what mattered already: that he was the great royal fool of his times. He had been used shamelessly by Arqual, an Empire that any son of the Crownless Lands should have known better than to trust. Like a fish, like a mindless tuna, he had swallowed the Arquali bait. An end to war. A marriage to tie enemies together. A treaty to unfang Arqual and the Mzithrin alike, before they could send their armies raging again over the bloodied soil of the Crownless Lands.

Oshiram had wanted to believe it, and in his eagerness he’d made others believe. He had summoned them, his peers from twenty lands. He had committed the unforgivable sin of making fools of them as well. Some of them had travelled months. Who could resist? Who didn’t dream of an end to war? And all Oshiram had shown them was another fiasco, a new upwelling of hatred between the Empires, and a young girl strangled before their royal eyes.

No, they would never forgive him. Indeed the other six rulers of the Crownless Lands had just met on Talturi: Oshiram still had enough gossips in his pay to keep him aware of such momentous gatherings. Even if his fellow princes no longer wanted him joining the conversation.

Then again, perhaps he was the subject of conversation. Perhaps they’d agreed to censure him, to dump Simjan goods into the Nelu Rekere, to punish his people along with their naive king. Those parting looks at the gates of Simjalla City, those heads shaking in disbelief, the long silence when the last ships had left the harbour. .

Oshiram had come through all that. He had found a new purpose in the rescue and healing of Eberzam Isiq. And shortly thereafter had come a miracle: he was in love, for the first time in his stilted, ceremony-clogged life. A former slave, a dancer, a beauty to stop the heart. She watched him like a frightened child, at first; no doubt she’d heard that all kings gobbled their women like sweets from a platter. She’d expected to be raped. Oshiram had treated her with gentleness and dignity, assigned her light chores and spacious rooms, sent her flowers and invitations — not summonses — to dine with him quietly if she would. He had wooed her: that was what it was called. And when at last she came to him, and loved him, he knew a joy beyond all telling. He forgot about intrigues and rat infestations and the duplicity of Arqual. He lived for this woman, lay awake longing for the morrow beside her, or slept and dreamed of her voice. He gave her rings, dresses, dogs, excursions to the hills, mad promises. His heart.

Isiq had broken that heart with a word.

The woman’s real name was Syrarys — formerly Syrarys Isiq — and she had been sent to him by none other than the Arquali spymaster, Sandor Ott. Years earlier, Ott had dispatched her to Isiq’s own household, and Isiq’s bed. Syrarys had poisoned the admiral for years, plotted both his death and his daughter’s, who she had helped to raise. And if Isiq could be believed, she had even betrayed that serpent of a spymaster. Her true allegiance, he insisted, was to the Blood Mage, Arunis.

If he killed himself, he would do it cleverly. He was not so selfish as to add a monarch’s self-inflicted death to the woes of his people. He must go sailing and fall overboard, or go riding and be thrown into a ravine. Yes, that