The Night of the Swarm

again she thought of the odds of ever returning to the North, seeing him again, kissing his bright bald forehead. What was he doing now? Pazel’s mother had said only that he lived, in her single dream-visit with her son. Was he still in Simja, playing the part of Arqual’s ambassador to that island nation? Or was he back in Etherhorde, under the thumb of Emperor Magad, and Sandor Ott’s network of spies?

She dipped a hand in the river, splashed tepid water on her face. No use dwelling on the bad possibilities. Then Neeps groped towards her and took her hand. He was trembling. Thasha found his cheek and kissed it, tasting lemon sweat, and steeled herself not to cry. No use, no use. She wished for somebody to fight. He embraced her, clumsily. ‘Don’t worry,’ he whispered, ‘I know what’s going to happen to me.’

Neeps stayed close to her after that. She sensed the fear in him and tried not to return it. ‘Nothing’s going to happen,’ she told him, much later. ‘You’re tired, and you’re a fool. Stop thinking that way.’ When her next shift came she stole glances at him: awake, alert, casting his blind eyes about as if searching for something. Each time she spoke, Neeps lifted his head in her direction.

The hours passed, her shift ended; she was exhausted and filthy and bruised. She wanted to go to Pazel and hold him, but he was still sleeping peacefully, and Neeps looked cornered, lost. As the seeing-charm faded and the darkness flooded back, she went to him and knelt.

‘You need a shave,’ she said, as brightly as she could manage. ‘Marila wouldn’t know her husband.’

Neeps smiled, touching his woolly chin. Then he raised his hand to his temples and the smile disappeared. ‘I can feel it already,’ he said. ‘Like an empty spot inside me, a place I can’t go any more.’

‘Just go to sleep, you donkey. When was the last time you slept?’

This time he didn’t smile. Thasha took his hand. As her blindness gathered she watched his face disappear.

She slept, Neeps’ arm over her shoulder and the world’s horrors forgotten, and the woman that was part of her and yet a stranger walked the catacombs of her mind, seeking egress, seeking light. She would fail of course. Thasha’s mind was a salt cavern beneath a desert, no mouth, no tunnel to the surface, no way in or out. The woman knew this better than Thasha herself; she knew every inch of the place, could have drawn it from memory, walked it in the dark. She had lived there seventeen years.

‘Light! Light!’

Was she dreaming? Was that Ensyl, tugging at a lock of her hair? Someone whistled, bodies were stirring on the raft. Neeps just groaned and pulled her closer.

Ensyl tugged at her again. ‘Wake up! Look around you!’

Thasha raised her head, wincing. There was light, natural light, gleaming along one side of the trees ahead.

‘It stings at first, doesn’t it?’ said Lunja.

‘I don’t care if it stings for a week,’ answered the Turach.

The river had narrowed; the raft was tumbling around a curve. All at once something dazzling spun into view. After a few painful blinks, Thasha realised she was looking up at high cliff walls, glowing in the midday sun.

Neeps twitched, and Thasha looked at him again. He was awake, still holding her. Their faces were inches apart.

Then Pazel said, ‘We did it.’

He extended a hand to each of them. If he was disturbed to find them nesting like two spoons, his face showed no sign. They rose awkwardly, and Pazel threw his arms over their shoulders. They had reached the forest’s edge. Before them, the Ansyndra flowed out through a great crack in the crater and into a canyon of grey-blue stone.

‘Chins up, you dolts, we’re alive,’ said Pazel. Thasha gripped him tightly, felt Hercol’s hand squeeze her shoulder, and brushed it with her cheek. Gratitude was all she felt, so fierce and pure that it was almost pain.

‘Rin’s eyes, I never thought we’d make it,’ said Big Skip.

‘Some of us did not,’ said Hercol.

Thasha squeezed her eyes shut. The image of Greysan Fulbreech, paralysed and mad, had suddenly risen before them. The Simjan youth had betrayed them, but he had betrayed himself long before. She had tried to fall in love with Fulbreech: had hoped, maybe, that his charm and handsome body would save her from the frightening, foolish immensity of what she felt for Pazel. Then, at Hercol’s insistence, she had used him: played the infatuated young woman, dazzled by his attentions, hungry for his touch. All with the aim of ferreting his master, Arunis, from his hiding place on the Chathrand. It had worked; they had found the sorcerer, kept him from killing anyone else on the ship.

But in the end they could do nothing for Fulbreech.

They were small matters, of course: his death, the soldiers’ deaths, the death of Ott’s agent Mr Alyash. The death of Jalantri, the young sfvantskor who had fallen in love with Pazel’s sister. The disappearance of Ibjen, the dlomic boy, into the River of Shadows. The deaths of the hunting dogs who had followed them under the trees.

Small change, trivial losses, compared with the gigantic horror they were trying to prevent. Thasha knew this, and knew also that she would never believe it in her heart.

When she opened her eyes the raft had cleared the forest’s shadow, and they were free.

‘Can you guess how I got this one, Thasha?’ asked Neeps.

‘No,’ Thasha mumbled. She did not particularly want to learn, either, or to see another of his scars. Both he and Pazel looked barbaric in the sun. Thasha glanced at their ten-day beards and thought of pig bristles, and wondered that she’d managed to kiss Pazel without scratching herself raw. No denying how strong they’d become, though. The tarboys matched her in muscle, now, and that was shocking. If she wrestled either of them she’d have to rely on skill alone.

They had floated for several hours through the silent canyon, the sun playing hide-and-seek in a white fog that was gathering near the clifftops. The walls of the canyon were sheer to about a hundred feet, then broke into forbidding crags and boulders. The company squirmed and shifted. Holding still on the jittery raft was becoming a kind of torment.

‘My little sister bit me, that’s how,’ said Neeps.

‘You must have deserved it.’

Neeps laughed aloud, as though she had said something very clever. Thasha smiled to hide her unease. Since that unexpected embrace in the forest Neeps had not left her side. Thasha had never seen him like this: so soft- spoken, so confiding. He talked of his brother Raffa’s treachery, those two pounds of Sollochi pearls chosen instead of Neeps’ life — and how his desire to kill Raffa had turned slowly into a desire to convince him, ‘intellectually, like’, that he had chosen wrong. He talked of his grandmother’s battles with crocodiles, the whistle his grandfather invented that could call catfish, the girl at the docks in Etherhorde who’d fancied him, and her gangster uncles who had made sure that they never exchanged more than burning looks. Neeps did not speak once of Marila.

Now the canyon’s heights were lost in the mist. ‘We’re still trapped,’ said Corporal Mandric, staring up into the haze. ‘Mind you, I’m glad to be out of that mucking forest. But sooner or later we’ve got to find a way to scramble out of here.’

‘And what then?’ said Big Skip. ‘Getting out of the Forest alive was all I could think about, but there are hard choices waiting for us now. The road back to Masalym will be a dark one.’

‘Only if you take it,’ said Ramachni.

‘If?’ said Cayer Vispek. ‘Great mage, how could we do otherwise? We have no notion of what lies ahead. We know nothing of this peninsula except that it is vast and desolate, and that the sea lies much further to the west than we have travelled thus far. We must go back.’

‘There’s the small matter of the flame-trolls to consider,’ said Corporal Mandric.

‘Not to mention that iron ladder that came loose from the cliffs under Ilvaspar,’ said Pazel, ‘and that cliff was much higher than these. Without that ladder there’s no way up.’

‘A sfvantskor takes such hurdles as gifts from the Unseen.’

‘Gods of death, he’s serious,’ said the Turach, amiably enough.

‘It is true that we know little of the trail ahead,’ said Ramachni, ‘but we know a great deal about what awaits us back in Masalym.’

‘Our ship is there, maybe?’ said Neda.

Ramachni sighed. ‘Hercol, it is time you settled that particular question.’