The Night of the Swarm

‘Five years.’

‘FIVE YEARS! RAMACHNI PUT ME TO SLEEP FOR FIVE GODS-DAMNED YEARS?’

‘No, no.’

Thasha freed herself from the sling and was thrown at once upon the floor. Her balance gone, her limbs sleep-clumsy. Neda helped her to her feet. ‘You sleeping fifty-three days,’ she said.

‘Then what’s this rubbish about — Oh. The Red Storm.’

‘Yes,’ said Neda.

‘It threw us forward in time after all. But how in Pitfire do you know?

Have we made landfall?’

‘Not yet,’ said Neda. ‘We knowing by stars. Some stars turning like wheel, over and over the same. But the special stars — they are drifting, tachai? Little bit each year. Old sailors know. Captain Fiffengurt checking Rose’s book, also Ramachni knows, also Lady Oggosk. Is the truth, Thasha. We lose five years for ever. Or six, if counting travel.’

‘But the war-’

‘Maybe over. Or very big, or huge.’

Thasha was shaking. ‘The Swarm, Neda. I. . pushed it out of the gap, into a deeper part of the Red Storm.’

‘More in future. You saving us, giving us time. These fifty-days we not seeing the Swarm.’

‘Neda, what about your dreams, yours and Pazel’s? The ones where your mother speaks to you?’

Neda turned a little away, looking angry or confused. ‘Nothing. Silence. Maybe she is getting dead. Or thinking us dead, giving up.’

And her father: he’d surely have given up. ‘Oh Gods,’ said Thasha. ‘Where’s the Nilstone? What have they done with the wine? I’ve got to do something about all this-’

‘Foolish talk.’

‘I think I’m going to be sick.’

Neda’s hand seized her chin. Thasha looked up into the fierce warrior eyes.

‘Kill that fear,’ said Neda. ‘You taking Swarm in your hands and throwing sideways. Then striking Macadra’s ship like toy. Now no whimper. Be quiet. Put the raincoat. We are going up into this storm.’

It might have been noon. Or sunset, or dawn. The wind was monstrous, the light dull nickel; the globular thunderheads seemed low enough to touch. Thasha clung to the Silver Stair hatch coaming, appalled. The rain like fistfuls of tiny nails flung endlessly at her face. The Chathrand was the toy; and what did that make her crew? A towering wave seemed frozen above the portside bow, then the illusion shattered and the great wave pounced, and somehow, impossibly, they slithered up its flank and toppled over the crest. Then the sick plunge, the weightlessness, the vanishing horizon and the next wave looming like death.

The gale had blown for seven days already, Neda shouted. ‘And you sleeping through first one.’The crew was thin, frantic, exhausted, grinning welcome-back smiles at Thasha like gap-toothed ghouls. The next wave pounced. They had been pouncing for seven days.

Thasha frowned: something was definitely wrong with her hearing. The whole battle with the storm was occuring in cottony undertones. Even the mad wolf-howls of the wind through the rigging were subdued.

Neda told her that Pazel and Neeps were aloft, somewhere, but in the maelstrom Thasha could hardly recognize a soul. She wanted to lend a hand on the ropes, but she was weak: she’d had no food in fifty-three days. Nor could she imagine swallowing a morsel in weather like this.

She found a job passing flasks of fresh water to the men on the ropes. The officers had to scream at the men to drink: they were sweating away their life’s water despite the soaking and the chill. Hours passed. She met her friends, haphazardly. Bolutu sang out with joy and kissed her on both cheeks; Marila dropped the buckets she was hauling and hugged her, tight barrel-belly pressing Thasha’s own. Thasha touched it: three months to go. ‘Chew this!’ Marila told her, taking a somewhat dusty, leaf-wrapped ball of mul from her pocket. ‘Trust me, they don’t make you sick. Some days it’s the only thing I can eat.’

‘I still wish I knew what’s in those blary things.’

‘Eat it, Thasha. You’re paler than a cod.’

They met Ramachni near the galley (he could venture nowhere near the topdeck). ‘What? Your ears?’ he said. ‘I save you from destroying yourself with the Nilstone, and you complain about your ears? I ask you, girl: has there ever been a better time to be deaf?’

‘I’m not laughing, Ramachni.’

‘No, you’re not. Well, Thasha, you will not be deaf for long. The healing sleep dulled all your senses; they return at different speeds. But you are still in mortal danger. The sleep cooled your hunger for the Stone, but it could do no more than slow the poison in your blood. The latter has been slowed a great deal: it may be weeks before the poison strikes you again.

‘But it will strike, Thasha, and when it does you must be ready. Hercol carries the silver key, and is never parted from it. The wine remains in your cabin. At the first sign of illness you must drink it all: down to the dregs, and the cure. Swear that you will obey me in this.’

‘Then I’ll never use the Stone again.’

‘You were never meant to, Thasha. Erithusme was. And use it she will, when you release her.’

How can you still believe that? she wanted to ask. But she gave Ramachni her word.

The storm raged on. Thasha kept working, biting off chunks of the rubbery mul, gnawing at them until they dissolved. A little of her strength returned. She began to carry heavier loads, and to broom water from the gun decks into the drains. After two hours she rested, gasping, flat on her back in the stateroom on the bearskin rug. Jorl and Suzyt curled up against her. Felthrup chattered about the days she had missed.

It seemed that every last soul had gone blind and senseless in the Red Storm, which poured its strange light even into their minds. When their senses returned, they found the ship adrift and heaving on great Nelluroq swells, and barely saved her from foundering. Nolcindar’s navigational advice was rendered useless, for there was no land in sight, and no telling just where the Red Storm had released them. ‘We’ve made fine speed north since the Red Storm,’ said Felthrup, ‘but north from where? That we cannot determine. We could be three months from landfall, Thasha. Or three days.’

‘Landfall where?’

Felthrup just shook his head. How far east or west they had drifted was beyond all reckoning.

When she ventured out again she met Hercol, who embraced her warmly, but somehow would not meet her eye. Thasha studied him, alarmed. Could he still be hurting from that kiss?

The storm finally ebbed. The waves shrank to mere fifty-footers, and a pulsing behind the clouds suggested the existence of a sun. Down from the masts came Pazel and Neeps and fifty others: rope-whipped, spray-blinded, near-naked monkeys, all muscle and bone. The two tarboys waved and grinned from across the tonnage hatch. Beside her, Marila looked from Thasha to Pazel and back again. ‘Why aren’t you married yet?’ she asked.

The sun peeked out. Captain Fiffengurt poured blessings on the crew. ‘You’re beautiful, my lads: you’re magnificence itself! You’ve got the blood of blary titans in your veins!’ But it was on Thasha that the most praise was heaped. Every man aboard knew how she’d saved them from the Death’s Head, and every man aboard wanted to kiss her or touch her fingers or kneel down and offer his service, or his life. Even Sergeant Haddismal snapped his heels together sharply and offered a salute — a gesture mimicked at once by every Turach in sight.

‘You’ve done it at last,’ said a voice in her ear, as Ensyl leaped nimbly to her shoulder.

‘Done what?’

‘Made the ship safe for crawlies, Thasha. Or at least for Myett and myself. Not that we’ve dared come near the topdeck since the storm began. Heridom, this ship is a mess.’

‘Ensyl,’ said Thasha with feeling, ‘we haven’t talked. You don’t know-’

‘That you saw Diadrelu, on the night you almost died?’

‘Hercol told you?’

‘No,’ said Ensyl, ‘he didn’t have to say a word. I saw your face, Thasha: I knew you were going to kiss him