The Night of the Swarm

pummelling, burning, and hurling every manner of deadly ordnance at each other. The Arquali loyalists had no intention of being pinned against the anvil of Serpent’s Head. They had sailed out into the Nelu Rekere, engaged the Mzithrinis head-on. The scale of it. There was so much fire, so much flung iron and splintered wood, that Pazel wondered that the clash did not end instantly, each side torn to pieces by the other’s onslaught. But in truth neither was prevailing. The Mzithrinis were more numerous, and the wind was still at their backs. The Arqualis had heavier armour, longer guns. Their attack formations had crossed, splintering. Masts had toppled; rigging burned in sheets.

‘Commander, the mage is here!’ said the soldier with the keys. Still the Mzithrini officer only stared into the Swarm.

‘Mage,’ said the soldier, ‘did you summon this cloud? Banish it; banish it and name your price!’

Ramachni looked sorrowfully at the man. ‘I did not bring it here,’ he said, ‘and nothing I can do will prevent what is to occur.’

The Swarm passed over Maisa’s forces. It was accelerating as it neared the battle-front. Pazel felt its cold in his bones. He wondered how many of the sailors had noticed it, through that pall of cannon-smoke.

‘Turn away, soldiers,’ said Ramachni. ‘Do not force yourselves to see this thing.’

Pazel reached out instinctively, pulling Neeps and Thasha close. He would not shut his eyes. How could they fight something they could not bear even to see?

The soldiers had forgotten them. They stood in a line along the cliff’s edge, staring. The edge of the Swarm reached the first of the warships.

‘No,’ said the commander, suddenly coming to life. He gave a sharp gesture, then shouted: ‘No! Men, men! This isn’t going to happen, what you think is going to happen cannot possibly-’

The Swarm dropped.

It was a river pouring over a cataract, a curtain of gore, a great formless limb of the floating mass above. It fell to sea level, swallowing forty or fifty miles in an instant — and the battle was gone. No light or sound escaped. From the edge of the mass, dark tentacles groped across the waters, snatching at the few boats that had fallen outside the initial onslaught, dragging them within. Pazel couldn’t move. He’d thought he was hardened to horror but this, but this. Someone was laughing, a sick sound like the whinny of a goat. Their commander buckled at the knees. A man was violently sick. The blackness throbbed and quivered; it was a diseased muscle, it was clotted death. Pazel heard his friends swearing, weeping, almost choking him with their arms, and he was doing the same, bleeding inside; was it over, was he allowed to look away? The Swarm twisted, writhed, and fragments of ship began to leak from it like crumbs through teeth. Make it stop. Make it end. From the men around him came sounds of lunacy and damnation; a soldier was eating gravel, a soldier flung himself over the cliff; others were crawling, fighting, shouting blasphemies, their faces twisted like masks.

The Swarm rose again into the sky.

Beneath it sprawled the remains of the warring fleets. Gigantic, mingled, dead. Some vessels were crushed and sinking; others were intact but drifting like corks. Not a gun sounded. The pall of smoke had disappeared. Every fire had been extinguished, and every life.

The commander had curled into a ball. He was pale and utterly still; perhaps he too was dead. Perhaps you, Pazel, are dead. No, no. Your mouth is bleeding, you’ve bitten your tongue and the blood is warm and trickling. You can taste it. You can kiss your friends and see your blood on their foreheads. You’re alive.

The commander turned to look at Ramachni. ‘Tell me exactly what you need,’ he said.

34

From the final journal of G. Starling Fiffengurt

Monday, 22 Teala 947.

Surely this is how men feel on the Redemption Path through the Tsordons, at the end of six months afoot, looking up at the last, steep slope of the Holy Mountain. I can’t climb that. I must climb that. If I climb another foot something in me will shatter. If I don’t climb, Rin’s light will never again warm my soul.

We are that close, and that desperate. Sixteen days north from Serpent’s Head, most of them in the Swarm’s frigid shadow, fighting leaks we cannot locate, fighting scurvy, numb with fear. Who will remember for us? Not me, not good Captain Fiffengurt: I can’t remember last night’s dinner, though Teggatz has served the same three Gods-damned dishes for a month. A poor memory is one reason I fill these pages. Another is because the very hunt for words helps me stumble on through this fear. Towards what? An end to the Nilstone? A dream of Anni and our child, my seven-year-old boy or girl? Or the cold end of Alifros, the Swarm grown larger than the world it hovers over, the sun extinguished, the Chathrand crushed like an eggshell by the frozen sea.

In the year 900 I went ashore in Uturphe and paid eight pennies for a peep show, as tarboys will. When I stepped out again my mate said there were Mzithrinis in the city trying to burn the docks. We were thrilled. We raced each other to the port. I was fast then and left him behind, but I didn’t know Uturphe and misjudged the distance. Before I knew it I was at the waterfront and there I saw a Mzithrini soldier gut a man like a mackerel. The victim was flat on his back and holding the killer’s forearm as though offering assistance and his face was like a mackerel’s too. The Sizzy glanced up at me and saw my abject horror and grinned. I ran and hid in a basement until Arqual retook the port. That was my first death. I thought I’d never recover, and in a sense I was right. The foolish, openhearted scamp who ran to those docks vanished there; it was a changed, colder boy who got away.

Now look at the sea of blood through which he’s passed. Hundreds slain on this voyage. The whole of humankind dead or mindless in the South. Dlomu killing dlomu, armadas burning cities, mages and generals wielding engines of death. In the North, a Third Sea War’s raging, the ‘Big One’ of which we’ve all lived in fear. Now this. A levitating horror. A shapeless mass that swallows fleets, that has grown so large we have spent the last nine days beneath it, never glimpsing its edge. We are freezing and afraid. Night brings infinite blackness. Dawn brings a feeble twilight that lasts all day.

The Chathrand is talking to me: she is full off odd shudders, unsettling creaks. And her stern is riding strangely low. We shift ballast forward; she levels off. But the next day there is a hint of the problem once again. I cannot account for it: we have sprung no leak, and no cargo or armaments have been shifted to the stern. This is no crisis, yet, but it is a mystery, and one more nail in the coffin of my hopes for sleep.

What solace I find is in the new faces. We are part of a flotilla, now: five warships, nine lesser gunboats, twenty ragtag service vessels. That is all that remains of Maisa’s great rebellion, or at any rate her navy. After the slaughter at Serpent’s Head, of course, her loyalist enemies back home are hardly better off.

Admiral Isiq spent five days with us on the Chathrand, days in which he and his dear girl were inseparable, of course. Now Isiq and Commodore Darabik have gone back to Nighthawk, the rebel flagship. Still with us, though, are some hundred rebels, the vast majority from Etherhorde. Our homesick lads must be driving them to distraction, begging for stories of home. The rebels for their part listen to our talk of Bali Adro and Floating Fortresses with a weird mix of terror and resignation. They can’t really doubt us, for just overhead is something stranger than any part of our tale. Something you could look at for a month and still think That just can’t be.

A less enjoyable passenger is a certain stiff-necked Mzithrini commander, who was camped on Serpent’s Head with a small battalion. I hate him: Bolutu tells me he shot Mr Druffle on a lark and tried to leave the rest of our people chained to trees. All the same, he had wisdom enough to hide his own ship (a sleek little gunboat with lovely lines) well out of the fighting, in a cove on the island’s NW quarter. That vessel is our escort, now, and I am glad to have a Mzithrini in the lead as we sail into enemy waters.

Stiff-Neck is blunt with us, all the same: ‘You are sailing to your deaths. The bulk of our navy has been destroyed, but what remains could still make a gruel of this little force. Around Gurishal we keep a wide perimeter guard, and a second patrol force near the island’s shores. They will destroy you easily — unless the Swarm has devoured them all.’