The Night of the Swarm

It was very cold, now: frost was spreading lacework fingers over porthole glass. The moon had set, but dawn had not yet come. Most of the crew had gone ashore. Pazel had heard more than one man say he preferred to die anywhere but on that ship. Thasha, however, had boarded her again, and Pazel had followed. If he was to die he would do it beside her — even if, as it seemed now, she was barely aware of his presence.

For her old distance had suddenly returned. He had watched it come over her, there on the beach, when Ramachni said with finality that there was no help he could give. Pazel knew he should feel for her: she thought the world was perishing on her account, through some moral cavity in her heart, some perverse defeat it meant to deliver to Erithusme. But that absent look made him furious. He wanted to strike her, cause her pain until she noticed him, until her eyes moved to his with recognition. He couldn’t bear the thought that when the end came she might glance at him for the last time with the indifference of a stranger.

They were crossing the lower gun deck, rounding the cold galley (where Teggatz still worked by candlelight, banging pots and blubbering), tripping over wreckage, over bodies, smelling deathsmoke in corners where addicts had gathered, waiting for the end.

‘Where are we going?’ he demanded.

He had to repeat the question twice before she deigned to answer. ‘I don’t know about you,’ she said. ‘I’m going to sickbay.’

‘What for?’

‘Chadfallow’s papers. That table he made, to help him find the Green Door.’

‘Thasha!’

‘I’m going to let Macadra out. She thinks she can use the Stone: who are we to say she’s wrong?’

‘Don’t be a mucking fool. She’s a lunatic. She won’t use its power just to toss it away. And she can’t use it to fight off the Swarm. Ramachni said so. Pitfire, Erithusme told me that herself. Anyway, Chadfallow’s papers aren’t in sickbay anymore. Felthrup wanted them. I brought them back to the stateroom.’

Thasha turned so suddenly that they collided. She shoved past him. He turned to follow.

‘Let’s go back to the others,’ he pleaded, ‘maybe Hercol has thought of something.’

‘We’d know. There’d be shouting.’ Thasha stalked on, not looking back.

They passed out of the compartment, around the entrance to the Silver Stair and down the long corridor. Dust and soot coated the magic wall, rendering it visible. Thasha stepped through it and turned to him. The dirt had come off on her face and clothes, leaving a vaguely Thasha-shaped window through which they faced each other.

‘Macadra’s our last hope,’ said Thasha. ‘Sometimes lunatics come to their senses, when things get dark enough. Look at Rose, for instance.’

‘Sometimes the darkness just makes them crazier. Look at Ott.’

‘Do you have a better idea? Do you have any ideas at all?’

His cold breath fogged the wall between them. ‘No,’ he admitted, ‘not yet.’

‘Then you can’t come in.’

‘What?’

She turned away, marching for the stateroom door. He moved to follow — and for the first time in almost a year, the wall stopped him dead. It answered to her even now. She had withdrawn her permission; she was shutting him out.

‘Don’t do it,’ he heard himself say. ‘Don’t leave me before we die. Neeps is right, Thasha, I am a one-note whistle. Nothing matters to me anymore but being with you.’

She stopped with her hand on the doorknob. She turned and struck the passage wall with her fist. She was weeping. He called to her, begging, and the third time he did so her shoulder slumped, and the wall let him through. He ran to her and tried her tears away.

‘Stop it,’ she said.

‘Why?’

Thasha shook her head. When he touched her hair again she started, then took his hand and dragged him brutally into the stateroom and kicked the door shut. She put her hands beneath his clothes, kissed him wildly, avoiding his eyes. She pressed her body against his own.

‘What are you doing?’ he said, appalled.

‘Make love to me.’

‘Thasha, stop. What in the Pits is wrong with you?’

She tripped him, threw him down upon the floor. In Pazel’s mind instinct took over, and he pulled her down with him as he fell. They grappled, smashing against the admiral’s reading chair, the samovar, the tea-table from which he’d snatched a piece of cake on his first visit to the stateroom. The time he’d nearly walked out of her life. He did not know if this was a real fight or something else altogether, if she was angry or aroused. Whatever it was, he didn’t want it: not this way. He stopped resisting, letting her win. Glaring, she pinned his back to the floor.

‘You still don’t trust me,’ he said. ‘After everything, you’re still not sure I’m on your side.’

‘What mucking rubbish.’

‘If you trusted me, you’d just tell me what was wrong.’

Thasha’s slapped the floor beside his head. ‘Would I? Would that help? Will anything help us now?’

‘You’re giving up?’

‘I’m going to pick up the Stone myself. Erithusme created me. She made my mother conceive. It won’t kill me as fast as it kills other people. I might have a minute or two.’

‘Oh, Thasha-’

‘But you have to stay away. If you’re there I won’t be able to make myself do it.’

‘It took you five minutes to get the ship out of the bay at Stath Balfyr, with that wine in your stomach. And you only had to move the ship a mile.’

‘I know that, bastard. I was there.’

Then the words began to spill from her, a wild, almost delirious plan for moving the Nilstone down that canyon, an idea so ludicrous it made him ache to hear the desperate hope she placed in it; a fantasy, a dream.

‘In two minutes?’ he said.

‘Maybe I’ll have longer. I could fight the Stone. Fight back.’

‘Do you think you can do it, Thasha? Just tell me the simple truth.’

Her eyes were furious. She was going to hit him, bite him, burn him with her hate. She laid her head down on his shoulder. One hand found his cheek and rested there, gently. It grew quiet. He could hear the waves breaking softly against the stern.

‘No,’ she said.

He put his arms around her, and they both lay still. Through the tilted windows he could see the Swarm boiling out towards the horizon, growing before his eyes.

‘In the mountains,’ she said, ‘when you lifted Bolutu’s pack by the cliff, I didn’t think you were going to throw it over the edge. I thought you were going to jump.’

‘I considered it,’ he said. ‘That bastard with the Plazic Knife might have had a harder time lifting me and the Stone together.’

Thasha began to cry — not hysterically, this time, but with a deep, despairing release. ‘I wanted to stop you,’ she said. ‘I reached deep into my mind and called to her, begged her to break down the wall and stop you. I gave her my blessing, my permission. And nothing happened. Even to save your life I couldn’t bring Erithusme back. That’s when I knew I never would.’

‘You will,’ he said, ‘somehow.’

‘The wall’s too strong, Pazel. I take a hammer to it in my dreams. There’s a crack, but it closes before I can lift the hammer again. It heals stronger than before.’

‘What’s it made of?’

‘Stone. Steel. Diamond.’

He shook his head. ‘Thasha, what is it made of?’

She fell silent, her hand still resting on his face. At last she said, ‘Greed. My greed, for a life of my own. No matter what Erithusme told you there’s a part of me that thinks I’ll die when she returns. The woken part of me is