The Night of the Swarm

would never let go.

For an instant no one moved on the Chathrand. Then out of the pile of bodies, Sandor Ott rose and dusted himself off ‘Well, traitors,’ he said cheerfully, ‘welcome to Gurishal.’

It was a narrow beach, filling the canyon wall to wall, as the sea had done up to this point. The ship lay wrecked with massive dignity, leaning only slightly to starboard, not fifty feet from shore.

Pazel stood in the shallows with his hand on the hull, watching the evacuation. Four accordion-ladders snaked down to the water’s edge, and the midship portal, sealed since Bramian, had been thrown open. Sailors were leaping into the water, splashing and sputtering; the frail and the wounded crossed the fifty feet on makeshift rafts. When they touched ground, the Arqualis knelt and kissed it, intoning the ritual words:

‘Hail Cora, Proud and Beautiful. Hail Cora, Earth-Goddess, embracing us at journey’s end. Hail, hail. .’

Sergeant Haddismal had taken it upon himself to save at least part of the Imperial treasure. The Turachs laboured by candlelight, prying open boards in the inner hull, wrenching out thin iron cabinets, hauling them jingling ashore. Sandor Ott, leaning against the mainmast, watched him through narrowed eyes.

There was moonlight, now: a pale search-beam through that last, closing aperture of the Swarm. By its glow they could see that the beach climbed into dunes, and the dunes in turn gave way to small, rugged trees. But the selk could see farther.

‘The cliff walls draw very close together, about a mile from where we stand,’ said Kirishgan, ‘and between them, a vast wall rises, sealing off the canyon. It is sheer and mighty, like a cliff unto itself. But there is a staircase carved into the cliff on one side. Or rather, many staircases, one above another.’

‘Twenty, by my count,’ said NN. ‘They climb all the way to the top of the wall. And above the wall one may scramble up the bare mountain to a high table-land. There are meadows in that place, and a gentleness to the earth.’

‘Twenty staircases?’ said Pazel. It was not much, beside all that they had come through to reach this place. But just now it felt like a death-sentence.

‘And long, each one of them,’ said Nolcindar. ‘I think this wall is the work of the First People.’

‘First at what?’ asked Fiffengurt.

‘She means the Auru, Captain,’ said Ramachni, ‘who built the tower at whose foot we killed Arunis, and who stood guard for centuries wherever the River of Shadows surfaced in this world. That wall is no surprise. Indeed it would be strange if they had not built some edifice on Gurishal.’

‘And if Dri had it right, death’s kingdom is entered by an abyss, somewhere beyond that wall,’ said Hercol.

Nolcindar raised her sapphire eyes. ‘The falcon returns,’ she said.

At her words, Sandor Ott started to his feet. He had been sitting apart from everyone, refusing to help with the evacuation, or to take part in any discussion of their next move. They had killed the Shaggat, and with it his savage dream. Their cause be damned, he’d said. He would not end his life aiding traitors to the Crown.

Ott raised his eyes. He’d wrapped one arm in sailcloth, and Pazel had thought him wounded there. Now he knew better: the thick cloth was to serve as his falcon-glove. Niriviel was his last, loyal servant, and he had yet to see the bird since his escape from the brig. From the darkness, the bird gave a shrill, fierce cry.

Ott lifted his arm and cried out, ‘Niriviel, my champion!’

The bird swooped past him, alighting on the sand near Hercol. Ott turned and gaped. He looked like a man whose child had just left him to die.

‘We are in the right place,’ Niriviel said to the others. ‘Our goal lies straight ahead.’

‘Our goal?’ cried Sandor Ott.

The falcon trained one eye on the spymaster. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘ours. All my life I let you guide me, Master. But your teachings were selfish, and your conspiracies have brought us only death. I would face death clothed in something better than your lies.’

‘I created you.’

‘You caged me,’ said Niriviel, ‘first in body, then in mind.’

Ott was shaking with fury. ‘Service to one’s rightful lord is no cage. And I am your lord, Nirviel. I speak for Arqual. I act by writ of His Supremacy.’

The bird gazed at him in silence. ‘That is nothing to me any longer,’ he said at last. ‘I renounce you, old man.’

He turned back to the others. ‘I saw it,’ he said. ‘A black funnel sloping down into the earth, with a pit of darkness at its heart no light will ever pierce, and a river vanishing into it, like a trickle of rain down the side of a well.’

‘Thank all the Gods,’ said Prince Olik.

‘Do not thank them,’ said the bird. ‘You will never reach that abyss. It lies beyond the wall at the top of those long stairs. Fifty miles beyond, at the minimum.’

A horrified silence fell: once more the specter of defeat stood among them. ‘The canyon runs on beyond the wall,’ said Niriviel, ‘but there is no path, nor even level ground. There are only endless rocks, crevasses, slides and scrambles. You will not reach it in one day, or three.’

‘Well, let’s blary try,’ said Neeps. ‘There’ll be daylight soon enough. Maybe we have longer than we think‘

Hercol shook his head. ‘Look at the Swarm, Undrabust. In the last six hours, the gap above us has shrunk by half. We might have another six hours, perhaps even eight. But we do not have days.’

‘And to judge by the way our stern was wallowing,’ added Fiffengurt, ‘that blary Stone weighs more than all the cannon on the ship put together. How are we to carry it up those stairs, let alone over fifty pathless miles?’

Despite himself Pazel glanced at Ramachni. ‘No, Pazel,’ said the mage, ‘I have tapped the wellspring of my power until the water turned to salt, and then I tapped again, and yet again. There is not even salt water now. It may well be a year or two before I can so much as change the colour of my eyes.’

This is why Erithusme believed we’d fail without her, Pazel thought. This is why Thasha’s got to come through.

Bolutu started at a sudden thought. ‘Pazel, your power is not all gone. You still have a Master-Word.’

‘Right, and some of us have wolf-shaped scars,’ said Pazel, ‘but what does that matter now, Bolutu? Dri and Rose are dead. There was a moment when those scars could have given us the answer, but the moment’s come and gone. It’s the same with my Master-Word: I missed the chance, somehow. If the chance ever came.’

‘You don’t know that,’ said Neeps.

‘Fine, mate,’ said Pazel. ‘The last word is one that blinds to give new sight. Go on, tell me who I’m supposed to blind, and what mucking good it will do.’

‘What about that magic clock of yours, then?’ said Fiffengurt. ‘Ain’t there nobody on the other side you could call on, Ramachni?’

‘If I could summon such help, would I not have done so already?’ said Ramachni. ‘There is no one left, Captain Fiffengurt. We are alone.’

‘Then we’ve had it,’ said the tarboy Saroo, from the edge of the circle. ‘Face facts, why don’t you? This is where we make peace with our Gods, and commend ourselves to their care.’

‘You sound like a fool,’ snapped his brother Swift. ‘And anyway, just yesterday you said that the Gods don’t exist.’

‘They exist, all right,’ said Marila. ‘At least the Night Gods do. Arunis made a deal with them, remember?’

Thasha looked up at the black lips of the Swarm, so close above them now, closing in from all sides. ‘The Night Gods,’ she said. ‘They’re coming, aren’t they?’

‘Lower your gaze, Thasha Isiq,’ said Ramachni. ‘And hear me, all of you: however else we spend the time that remains to us, we will not spend it fighting one another. We have six hours. Let us plumb our minds and hearts for an answer. We are not defeated yet.’

Her spine was cracked, her hull giving way, her seaworthiness ended after six hundred years, but the Chathrand still had a duty officer committed to ringing the hour. Whoever it was gave the old bell two strikes. One hour had slipped away already.