The Night of the Swarm

‘It thinks. . we’re dead?’

Pazel nodded, then spoke again in the hrathmog’s tongue. The creature shuffled back a step. ‘Where are the others?’ Thasha whispered.

Pazel shook his head: no idea. The hrathmog lowered its axe. Thasha imagined it was breathing easier. She was not.

‘The raft’s destroyed,’ she said.

Pazel shot her a look of dismay. Then his eyes snapped back to the creature. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘we’re ghosts, see? And we’re just. . going to. . back away.’

They began a slow retreat, foot by careful foot. ‘Into the river,’ he said, ‘just until we’re out of sight. Then we’ll swim.’

‘Not too deep, though,’ she said. ‘Ramachni warned us-’

‘I know.’

They backed offshore until the water reached their knees. The hrathmog watched, unmoving. Already its form was dimming in the fog. Pazel murmured a last word to the creature, and Thasha silently exhaled. His Gift had just saved them again.

Then her legs collided with something in the water. She whirled. A second hrathmog was floating beside her, face up. An arrow protruded from its throat. Although quite dead, the creature still gripped the arrow shaft with one hand.

Whose arrow? Their party had no bows.

Suddenly the hrathmog on the island rushed forward, narrowing its eyes. When it saw the body it threw back its head and gave a monstrous howl. From the far shore, dozens of voices rose in answer. But the hrathmog did not wait for its comrades. The two hairless creatures were not ghosts but tricksters, murderers. It raised its axe and charged.

Thasha grabbed Pazel by the shirt and flung him behind her. They stumbled backwards, flailing for deeper water, but then the hrathmog raised the great axe over its head, preparing to hurl it, and Thasha saw her death. The water had slowed her. She was offering the blade her chest.

The beast hurled the axe. But as it stepped into the throw, a second arrow pierced its calf. The hrathmog stumbled, the blow struck the water a foot from her chest. As the creature charged, Thasha groped for the weapon, pulled it from the river bottom, and swung.

How weak, how feeble, but somehow she’d cut the creature’s hand. She kicked backwards, swimming now, screaming at Pazel to Go go go! The hrathmog snatched at the weapon; Thasha flung it away. Chase it, chase it please! The hrathmog lunged and caught her by the leg.

Thasha’s knife flashed: now both its hands were bloody. Then those maimed hands caught her by the throat.

It tried to close, to bite. She forced an arm under its chin. They fell back into deeper water, the current whirling them downstream. Her knife was gone; Pazel groped for her and was gone; hairy thumbs dug into her windpipe. She twisted, clawed at its eyes. She was failing, the thing was killing her, it was just too strong.

All at once a spasm shook the creature. Pazel was on its back, his head over its shoulder. The creature screamed; its hands released Thasha and seized Pazel and hurled him away, and in the half-light she saw that Pazel had most of its ear in his teeth.

In a killing frenzy the hrathmog dived after Pazel. She clung to it, knowing it would tear her lover to pieces. The creature dragged her on, heedless — and then, suddenly, it was dead. Other beings surrounded them. Knives flashed. Dark blood billowed from the hrathmog’s neck.

She was choking: she must finally have gasped. Her vision dimmed and a roaring filled her ears. Her last sensation was of the veins of darkness in the river’s depths, coiling about her ankles, pulling her down.

5

From the final journal of G. Starling Fiffengurt

Monday, 21 Modobrin 941.

A dlomic woman spat a seed into the waves today amp; made me cry. She never saw me watching her. First her lips worked round and round, then her face lifted amp; she made kissing-lips amp; when the seed flew her eyes tracked it like a gunner his cannonball. At first I couldn’t account for my tears; then I knew I was seeing my Annabel on a picnic, with a sweet green mush-melon, spitting seeds in Lake Larre, the juice runnin’ down her lovely chin.

Nine days since the Shaggat’s waking, the torture of Chadfallow, the proof that Rose has ceded his captaincy in all but name to Sandor Ott. We are blazing west by northwest under topgallants and triple-jibs, over waves like rounded hills, putting mile after mile between us and our abandoned shipmates. Coward, traitor, fair- weather friend: at night the accusations churn my stomach, though no one makes them but me.

A queer dark spot in the sky this morning. It moved closer amp; we saw it was a solid mass, very low in the sky. We beat to quarters, ran out our guns. The object bobbed amp; turned. It seemed adrift in the air, and with indescribable horror we saw that it was the bow of a sailing ship, fifty feet of hull and deck and shattered framewood, the stump of a foremast, the whole bowsprit thrusting upwards like a narwhal’s tusk. Rin as my witness, the thing looked torn, like a heel of bread from a loaf. Two cables reached skyward from the anchor ports, a quarter-mile maybe, and at the end of ’em we could now see one of those weird sky-sails used by the dlomic armada: half kite, half balloon, kept aloft by some power none of us could explain. The wreck blew right over us, some hundred feet above our forecastle. There were flames inside her, and dlomu, living dlomu, holding fast to the rigging and rails. They looked down at us and I expected to hear calls for help, but they were silent. Maybe they thought us phantoms, heralds of doom, as their cousins did that first night in the port in Masalym.

No one spoke, no one could. One of those poor devils jumped for our rigging but of course at that speed it just tore through his hands like razors and then his foot grazed something and he turned and reached the deck headfirst and Heaven’s Tree, how I wish I’d shut my eyes.

If only someone up there had thought to drop a rope. We might have reeled them down with the capstan, spread combat netting between the yards. They could have jumped and lived. As it was the wreck drifted northwards, gaining height. For hours we watched it dwindle against the sky.

I am done with journal-keeping. Let oblivion take these memories. Anni will have had the child by now; Rin knows how she’ll care for the little thing, or who she’ll turn to for comfort. Goodbye to you, journal. You’re a womanish weakness I’ve indulged and that is the true reason I kept you a secret. No more entries, no more pain. Goodbye I say. The end. Let me be an animal that labours for his food bag, a dumb brute who does as he’s told.

Wednesday, 23 Modobrin 941. But what I’m told — the miracle that Rose would have me work — is to keep their spirits up. ‘Make them hope a little longer, Quartermaster,’ he says. ‘You’re honest, and you’re an ally of Pathkendle and Company. It falls to you.’

Make them hope. I close the door to his cabin, walk ten paces. Before me is a man I recruited off the streets of Etherhorde, a pious youth as I recall. He’s in a deathsmoke trance. I remember what I said to him, in that tavern doorway on a cool summer’s eve: ‘Finest run you’ll ever make, and the easiest. Due west to Simja, feasting and carousing at a festival that’ll be the envy of your grandkids, the pomp and splendour when we give away the Treaty Bride. Then due east to Etherhorde again, and ninety cockles in your purse by midwinter.’ I believed all that myself — wanted to believe it, needed to. My own pay for that easy run would have let me clear Anni’s parents’ debts, with maybe a bit left for a humble wedding.

Now here the fellow stands, reeking, mouth agape, so fogged he doesn’t know me, or his peril should he draw the captain’s eye. He is a Plapp, and when I alert his brother gangsters they whisk him down to the hold to sleep it off — or to look for his stash, or both.

That was midday. At three bells there’s a tarboy before me, horrified, whispering that a group of thugs is