The Night of the Swarm

tin cups from the galley and are passing them quickly. Rose breaks the sealing wax and pours a thimbleful. Before a silent ship, he drinks, swallows, considers. Then he nods and looks at us.

‘No better idzu could I obtain in the capital,’ he said softly, ‘and I would have you know two things. First, neither I nor anyone aboard has partaken of this store, until this moment. Second, that I am a fair judge of liquor-’ there are chuckles at the understatement ‘-and this drink is fine. Truth be told, it surpasses the drink they plied me with in the Keep of Five Domes, when I dined with the Emperor’s sons. If it were possible, I should declare it fit for you — fit for the most capable and dauntless men ever born beneath the arc of heaven, born to make mockery of hardship, born to crack an old, bedevilled skipper’s heart with pride. I should like to declare it that good — but nothing is that good. It is all I have to give you this New Year’s Day. A drink, and my promise to fight for our lives, hard as it may be to find the path to their salvation. Drink now to its finding, men of the Chathrand. That is all.’

The crew roared. Staggered, I looked out over that throng of wretches. Plapps and Burnscovers, sailors and Turachs, even some of the folk we’d blary kidnapped on Simja: all cheering. They hadn’t even tasted the drink, but what did it matter? The Red Beast had praised them to heaven, and they loved him, suddenly. The drink went round; it was ambrosial and strong as the devil’s mead. ‘He’s not just our captain, he’s our father!’ shouted a young midshipman, and seconds later I heard a song we used to sing in Temple School, on the lips of hundreds of overgrown boys:

Father dauntless, we’re your lads, through cold and darkness wending.

Climb we will that blasted hill,

Lonely, sad but marching still

Father fearless, lead us on, the night is surely ending.

They pressed close to him. Rose never did smile: that would have diluted the effect. He only nodded, urging them to drink, and the idzu was gone before anyone could get too afflicted. They went singing to their stations, those wretches. I turned and slipped through a crowd of bewildered dlomu, making faces at the strange stuff in their cups and stranger joy in the humans around them, and then I saw Sandor Ott at the No. 4 hatch, looking over the scene with a certain abhorrence. I could have laughed. This is why you need him, killer. This is why you don’t dare make a final enemy of the man.

Saturday, 2 Halar 942. The second day of any year is a disappointment. This one was marked by weird and hideous events. The predawn watch came off their shift wild-eyed and swearing: one of them had heard music in the darkness, flutes, but no players could they find, aloft or below. Already the talk is of ghosts. Did you see ghosts, I enquire? Well no, Mr F, not as such. But who made that music, eh? A fevered imagination, that’s who, I told ’em, but I wasn’t getting through. Ghosts, they insisted. Of course Rose’s endless mutterings on the subject have made it hard for even the natural sceptics among them to hold steady.

At two bells, the expected cry finally comes: land ahead, a mist-fuzzed shadow, and another spotted minutes later, further west. They are the Sparrows, the dlomu aboard tell us: little no-count islands, but for any ship with business in the Island Wilderness the sight of them marks the moment for turning away from the continent once and for all. With double hands on the braces we’re soon tacking northwards. I look back and cannot see the Sandwall. But when I close my eyes I see their faces, plain as my hand: Thasha and Pathkendle, Undrabust and Hercol. I don’t believe in prayer, and yet I pray.

Five bells. I’m on the berth deck (routine inspection, no whimpering tarboys any more) when from the orlop below comes a howl such as man gives only when running for his life. I’m down the ladderway in seconds, with Teggatz and the tarboy Jervik Lank on my heels and Mr Bindhammer racing ahead. Rin save us, who do we see but the purser, Old Gangrune, running like a lad of twenty, and just behind him a mountain of red muscle and white tusks and slobber. It’s the Red River hog — the same mucking animal that disappeared in the rat war — fat and huge and furious, and before we can do more than gawk they’re both around the bend in the corridor.

Alas for Gangrune it was a dead-end passage. We charged in, screaming, but the beast was already goring the man, waving him about on its tusks like a dishrag. We attacked and a horrid melee it was. No boar in Alifros compares to a Red River either in size or sheer mean mordaciousness. Bindhammer was trampled. Jervik stabbed the beast in the jaw but his little knife broke off at the hilt. Teggatz had brought a meat cleaver and lopped a slab of pork from one fatty shoulder. The hog turned screaming and caught his arm near the elbow, and you could see his arm would not long inconvenience those boltcutter jaws, so I drove my knife into the neck of the beast, once, twice, thrice, and the third time it screamed again and backed off Teggatz and smashed me up against the wall. I lost my knife. I locked my hands on those tusks but they were slippery with blood and then it chomped me, Gods of Death, it’s a wonder this left hand ain’t in its belly right now.

I have Jervik to thank for that. He picked up the cleaver and proceeded to carve his way into the hog’s right buttock, deranged and deadly he looked, and the hog whirled and trampled him worse than Bindhammer, and Pitfire if all four of us weren’t down, bleeding, beaten flat and the hog not remotely tired of thrashing us, and a few men I’d like to vivisect just gazing meekly around the corner, and then a huge shadow and a roar and Refeg the augrong lifted the beast off Jervik, smashed it left and right, shattering the walls, and then his brother Rer caught up from behind and bit down on one huge kicking hog-leg. A crack, a squeal. The thing kept fighting. They had to tear it apart.

Tonight we are all still alive, though Bindhammer’s lung is collapsed and he fights for breath, and Jervik is so bruised and battered he can scarcely move. But the hog! I know its history: that fool Latzlo meant to sell it to the highest bidder, for the feasts after Thasha’s wedding. He’d fattened it out of his own purse, all the way to Simjalla City. Of course neither he nor his prize pig ever made it ashore.

Where can the beast have hidden, all this time? The answer is nowhere. We run a tight ship; nothing half its size could be overlooked for long. I think back to the ixchels’ accusations, when they were still in charge: that we were hiding cattle and goats somewhere aboard. They claimed they’d heard the creatures, a moo-moo here, a bleat-bleat there, and we just laughed in their faces. No one is laughing any more.

Jervik lies in sickbay. I brought him a new knife: a fine blade with a walrus-ivory handle and a locking hinge. It had belonged to Swellows, the first bosun on this voyage, but in this case I didn’t mind raiding the locker of a dead man. Swellows had bragged about winning it in a tavern by cheating at spenk, and had made other, fouler remarks about how it was just the tool for a necklace-fancier.⁷ Jervik was pleased and didn’t ask where the knife had come from. What he did ask, to my surprise, was when we’d be turning back for Pazel and Co.

I stumbled a bit. ‘That. . ain’t quite clear.’

He lifted his black and blue face from the pillow. ‘Wha?’

‘The captain. . hasn’t made me privy to the plan.’

Jervik squinted at me. ‘Yer leaving ’em behind, ain’t ye?’

I expected a grin. If he’d given one I think I might have snatched that knife back from him and stabbed him in the ribs. Instead I saw the same distress in his face that I was feeling myself. I was floored. I bent down in the chair and fiddled with my shoe.

‘Lank,’ I whispered, ‘what am I missing, here? Did you all become friends before they left?’

He scowled. ‘I ain’t good enough to be their friend. Not after wha I done. But I’m on your side, all right. Them others, Rose, Ott, they can all bite my-’

‘Hush! They’ll kill you.’ I ran a hand through my hair. ‘You can’t shoot your mouth off about this, d’ye hear? But you’re perfectly right: Ott means to sail north and abandon them all. I don’t think the captain wants to, although with Rose it’s blary hard to tell. But Ott has the Turachs behind him, so what he wants, he gets.’

‘I’ll cut him open. And Rose too.’

I looked at him. ‘That was my promise to Lady Thasha. That I’d stab Rose dead if he tried to sail away and leave them here. But who would it help, lad? Are we going to seize the Chathrand and sail it back to Masalym? And what if they’re not waiting for us in Masalym? What if they’re making for some other port?’

‘Then it’s hopeless. Bastards, whoresons-’

‘It’s not hopeless. You know what they’re made of, Pathkendle and Thasha and Hercol. And there’s Turachs with ’em too, and eight dlomic soldiers. But if we’re going to see ’em again, I think they will have to come to us.’

‘Come to us! On what boat, Mr Fiffengurt? And how would they know where to look?’