The Night of the Swarm

the floorboards gleam. Beside the open gunports, black cannon waited, like coffins at the doors of some vast crematorium. It was very quiet: Felthrup could hear the island’s shore birds, smell the flat nickel-smell of the rocks. The few sailors at work here tried, as always, not to stare. ‘Evening, Mrs Undrabust,’ some murmured, while others considered them coldly. Felthrup was grateful for Jorl and Suzyt. Opinions about the four youths (Marila stood for all of them, now) ran from wary affection to hatred. Some blamed them for all the disasters of the voyage; others said that they were the only reason the ship was still afloat.

The dogs’ mouths watered when they passed the galley. Felthrup knew the cause, for he could smell it too, however faintly: the Red River hog. Mr Fiffengurt had promised to save an ounce of its fat for each mastiff, but the gift had never come. When Felthrup had mentioned it, the quartermaster had looked rather ill and changed the subject.

Suddenly the noses of both animals dropped to the floorboards, as though pulled by strings. Felthrup and Marila stared. The dogs’ great bodies quivered. ‘They’ve picked up a scent,’ said Marila, ‘but it’s nothing in the galley, is it? Look, they’re following it away.’

The dogs padded forward, entranced. Felthrup rushed after them, trying to rid his nostrils of their sweat and breath and dander. He sniffed, sneezed, sniffed again. Then he looked up at Marila, amazed.

‘Ixchel,’ he said.

Marila’s eyes went wide. ‘Two of them, probably,’ said Felthrup, ‘and not more than an hour ago.’

‘Ixchel!’ said Marila. ‘But they haven’t been seen in weeks! Are you sure?’

‘I spent a month sniffing them out when I first boarded the Chathrand, my dear. I hunted for them ceaselessly; I thought we might be friends. You know what became of that endeavour. Still I could no more mistake the smell of ixchel than I could the shape of my paw.’

The dogs had turned the corner at the cross-passage. When Felthrup and Marila caught up they found the animals whining and scratching at a rather decrepit length of floorboard. They were not unheard of, these points of decay. In Masalym the crew had been absorbed with major repairs; only now could they be spared for such smaller jobs, and Mr Fiffengurt’s checklist was immense. The plank before them had a two-inch gap at one corroded corner: more than enough room for an ixchel to pass through.

Felthrup tasted the air above the gap. ‘They passed through here, between the floorboards and the ceiling of the orlop deck, and then to portside.’ He looked up at the girl again, suddenly excited. ‘And I must follow! Quickly, while no one’s about! Raise that plank a little! Help me squeeze through!’

‘Squeeze through? Are you joking?’ said Marila.

‘Decidedly not! This is great good fortune! It could be weeks, months before we catch their scent again. Even now it is fading. I might have missed it without the aid of the dogs.’

‘You can’t just go down that hole.’

‘My dear, you know nothing of the art of the squirm! There have been studies, we rats can pass through any hole wider than our heads, as measured at the lower mandible-’

‘Felthrup-’

‘That is all one need verify, the mandibular axis, the yaw of the jaw-’

Felthrup jumped. Marila had just stamped her foot down over the gap.

‘Take a look at your foot, you silly ass.’

Felthrup swallowed. Marila had a point: his left forepaw had never recovered from his first encounter with the ixchel. Lord Talag and his men had sealed him in a bilge pipe. Only at the last second, by jamming his paw between the pipe and its lid, had he escaped suffocation.

‘Yes, yes, I fell into their trap,’ he admitted, ‘but Marila, you did not know the Chathrand in those days. Everything was different. We had not met Diadrelu, or heard of Arunis or the Nilstone, or guessed that we would all be fighting together to survive. When Lord Talag caught me he did not even believe I was a woken rat. But in time he came to respect me — even thanked me for my courage, and offered me the services of his cook. They have no reason to hate me now.’

‘Talag didn’t have a reason to start with.’

‘But he knows me; they all do. Diadrelu called me her beloved friend.’

‘They killed her too.’

Swift and certain logic. But Felthrup was not about to be turned. ‘Remove your foot!’ he hissed. ‘Someone is coming! Sweet friend, we must know how many ixchel are left alive, and reason with them, before they try something atrocious at Stath Balfyr.’

‘Something atrocious — you see? Not everything has changed.’

A man was coming; he could feel the thump of footfalls in the boards. ‘Oh dearest girl! Fond, caring, maternal Marila-’

‘Don’t call me that.’

No reaching her, no use! Felthrup spun in a circle. He could taste it, the burn of breaking faith, the horrid knowledge that even with loved ones, speech could be impotent, language something less than grace. ‘Why are you crying?’ said Marila, and then Felthrup bit her through the boot.

She screamed and danced away. The dogs howled. Mr Coote appeared at the corner, shouting, ‘What’s wrong, Miss Marila? The little baby? Is it time?’

‘No! Pitfire!’ She pointed, but it was too late already. Tufts of black fur edged the gap in the planks. Felthrup had done it; he was gone.

He was in darkness now, in the six-inch crawlspace between the floor of the lower gun deck and the ceiling of the orlop. The scent led straight to portside. He struggled to crawl in perfect silence, unscrambling the message from his nostrils, alert to the least movement of the air.

He ploughed forward through the velvety dust. When the scent trail reached the inner hull it veered right. Another scurry, his mind awash with thoughts of how to greet them, what he should say. Talag had ideas of honour: strange ideas, but no less powerful for their strangeness. The key was to access those ideas. We are comrades in arms, Lord Talag, never mind the arm you mangled, why kill me before we chat a little, why kill me period, spear in haste regret at leisure, my enemy’s enemy is my friend, and by obverse induction my friendly enemy is a, is-

He stopped, nostrils flaring. They had stood here, the ixchel, not thirty minutes before. And then they had disappeared.

Rin’s eyes, not again.

Felthrup circled, listening, feeling, tasting the air. The scent was gone; it led to this spot and vanished without a trace. When it came to hiding, rats were experts, but the ixchel were master magicians. He rolled over, pressed an ear to the boards. Nothing but men’s distant footfalls, and the slosh of the sea. He hissed: ‘Come out! It’s only Felthrup! I’m a friend, today and evermore!’ No sound, not even an echo.

‘Don’t do this! Suspicious ninnies! I won’t betray your hiding place!’

The silence mocked him. They could be somewhere close at hand, smiling. Even fondling their spear-tips, circling, tightening the noose.

He blew one nostril and then another, inhaled deeply, struggling for even the most distant ghost of a scent. Nothing. He pressed his mangled paw against the boards, drew the tender flesh back and forth. What was he thinking? That he would find a hinge, a hairline crack, the outline of an ixchel door? But such doors were never found. What a dreamer he was. Rose had torn the ship apart and found nothing. The ixchel would be seen again when they wished to be, and not before.

‘We’re stronger together,’ he told the darkness. ‘We have to stand together, with the humans as well, mind you. Or we’re doomed.’

Felthrup put his head down on his paws. He was lying to himself. He didn’t fear the ixchel closing in silently to spear him. No, what he dreaded was their absence, their refusal of his peace overtures, their continued loathing for the giants and anyone tainted by their favour. He was not much thinking about where that loathing could lead. He was only feeling the waste: the colossal, shameful waste. You were right, Marila. You can love language and its promise of a straight sunny boulevard, a common currency of the heart. But that’s your faith only, and it moves not mountains. They’re not listening, those mountains. They’re happy where they stand.

He blinked.

Something had happened. A finger of cold had touched his stubby tail. He turned about, feeling: there was a