The Night of the Swarm

cheeks. Sandor Ott let himself into Rose’s sleeping cabin, and returned with a pillow, fluffing it in his hands.

‘Credek, he’s in for it now,’ said Captain Maulle.

Ott tossed the pillow to Haddismal, then knelt and tore open Chadfallow’s jacket, sending buttons flying. He drew his long white knife, slipped it under the doctor’s shirt, and cut the fabric from collar to waist. He did the same with each leg of the doctor’s trousers. The doctor’s skin was very pale. His limbs were muscular but the joints looked stiff and swollen.

‘Be gentle with his hands, we need them,’ said Ott to the marines. Then he nodded to Haddismal, who lumbered forward and knelt by the doctor’s head. Using both hands, the sergeant held the pillow down over Chadfallow’s face, leaning into it with the whole of his bulk. The doctor kicked and thrashed, but the Turachs held him firmly. A muffled howl escaped the pillow, but it did not carry far.

Fiffengurt tried to lunge and was brought down with a second blow. The ghosts were backing away. Death, for some reason, could always be counted on to unnerve them.

Ott pinched the doctor’s skin appraisingly, as a tailor might a jacket he was preparing to trim. Then his knife-hand moved in a blur, and an arc of scarlet appeared on the doctor’s breast. Chadfallow’s writhing did not change: he was suffocating; the pain of the cut passed unnoticed.

Ott studied the wound a moment. His hand flicked again. The second cut, three inches lower, was exactly the same shape and length as the first. Rose found himself admiring the man’s concentration. Two more strokes followed, curling this time, bisecting the lines in a graceful pattern.

Captain Kurlstaff moved away from his ghostly companions. He flowed through the crowd, through the table, and solidified again by Rose’s chair. ‘You whore’s bastard! Make him stop! You’re the captain of this ship!’ Rose sat as if turned to stone.

The doctor’s movements grew erratic. Ott picked up speed, moving from chest to stomach to legs, violating the doctor’s body with the precise but impulsive movements of a painter surrendering to inspiration. Blood ran in stripes over Chadfallow’s limbs, trickling into the remains of his clothes.

At last Ott gestured to Haddismal, and the sergeant removed the pillow. Dr Chadfallow was barely conscious. Blood foamed about his lips. He had bitten his tongue.

‘In Magad’s name,’ said Sandor Ott.

Thumping footsteps outside the cabin. Mr Uskins, the disgraced first mate, pushed open the door. He was terribly dishevelled, his hair untrimmed and greasy, his uniform lumpy and stained. He gaped at the scene before him, then broke into a smile of glee.

‘Look at the Imperial Surgeon! How the mighty are fallen, eh, Captain Rose? How the highborn are brought to heel!’

Fiffengurt was sobbing. Chadfallow moved feebly, leaving smears of blood. Captain Kurlstaff stared at Uskins with vague apprehension. There was a white scarf knotted at his neck.

Ott cleaned his knife in Chadfallow’s hair, then stood and stretched his back, wincing with pleasure. ‘Spread him out,’ he said.

The Turachs pulled at Chadfallow’s wrists and ankles until the doctor lay spreadeagled on his back. Unbuttoning his fly, Ott began to urinate on the man, methodically, face to feet and back again.

‘The trust we put in you,’ he said, ‘makes your defection all the more base. It is not only treasonous but hurtful to His Supremacy. It is a crime against — what did you call it, Doctor? — the soul.’

The room grew rank. Chadfallow groaned and spat but could not move. Ott paused, chose a new position, began again, soaking the doctor’s wounds and shreds of clothing. When he finished, he went to the table and gathered the linen napkins and tossed them at the doctor. ‘Clean yourself,’ he said. ‘Rose, I am sorry this occurred in your cabin. Tell the steward to clean it with vinegar and lye. I believe this concludes our business, gentlemen. Let us hope for favourable winds, and a swift departure for the North.’

3

A Leopard Hunt

13 Modobrin 941

He heard the dogs behind him at midday, while he rested near the mountain’s peak. He had the telescope out and trained on the inlet. When the baying started he swung the instrument back down the mountain in the direction of the city, and swore.

‘Are they hers, Prince?’ asked the ixchel man on his shoulder.

‘Oh yes, they’re Macadra’s.’

That ancient sound, the war-bay, the summons to their masters: here is the blood you want. He could see five dogs on the mountain, huge and lean and red. They were racing up the dry ridge like furies, cutting the switchbacks, tearing through brush. Their deep chests heaved like bellows. Their wide paws gripped and pulled. Athymar eight-fangs, bred for murder, the dogs that bit and never let go.

‘They have our scent,’ said the ixchel.

‘My scent, Lord Taliktrum,’ said the prince. ‘I doubt they would know what to make of your own.’

Prince Olik Bali Adro, rebel and fugitive and distant cousin to the Emperor, allowed himself a last glance at Masalym below the mountain: her layer-cake loveliness, her waterfalls, the River Mai winding through her like a sapphire braid. City of marvels, and of fear, with its wealthy households squeezed together like a rosebud at the apex, and the poor adrift in the crumbling labyrinth below. He had ruled Masalym for something less than a week. This morning, he had barely escaped it with his life.

Five dogs, five athymars. He did not want to fight them. He did not, in truth, want them to exist. Dogs had a beauty and a purity no dlomu ever matched. They would work or fight as their keepers required, go through battle and flames and savage landscapes that bloodied their paws. They would serve until their bodies broke, or their hearts. And they would kill him regardless of Imperial law.

‘She has branded them on their hindquarters,’ he said. ‘That seems a senseless act. Who would be fool enough to try to steal those monsters, I ask you?’

‘Prince?’ said Taliktrum.

‘Hmm, yes?’

‘Put that scope away and run.’

The prince lowered the telescope, considered the dogs without it, the distance they had travelled in the last few minutes alone. ‘Quite right,’ he said, and let the instrument fall from his hands.

He ran west along the summit trail, through the hyssop and giant rosettes. No cover, nothing to climb. He saw his own dogs loping parallel to him, dispersed as he’d ordered them to be. The nearest were keeping him in sight; those further out watched their companions. All nine could be called in with a gesture to help him fight. But his dogs were smaller creatures, a mixed pack of hunters and scouts. They could fight, certainly: they had been trained by the Masalym Watch. But the slaughter, the maimed animals — no, this was not the place to make a stand. What he needed now was distance from Masalym, and the servants of Macadra Hyndrascorm that streamed from it in all directions.

Prince Olik had already killed once that morning. Barely an hour up the Rim Trail, with the huge cliffs called the Jaws of Masalym open beneath him and the thunder of the great falls reverberating in his bones, a pair of riders had suddenly rounded a bend and spotted him, and the one in the lead had charged. The prince could not help but feel a moment’s fright. He had lived so long in safety, protected by his face and name: a face it was every citizen’s duty to know; a name that meant death to anyone who touched him. When he fled beyond the Empire they had made him a target, but here, all his life, they had accustomed him to invulnerability. Each time he met a citizen who feared Macadra more than the ancient law, it was as if a crack had opened in the bedrock of the earth.

Still, the prince had not hesitated. He had killed them, those men who had been his subjects only the day before: the first as he tried to run Olik down with his spear, the second as he raised a bugle that would have sealed his fate. Lucky kills, both of them. Yet he had no luck with the horses, which bolted riderless back down the ridge.