The Night of the Swarm

‘Choose!’ said Saturyk. ‘You mad little squealer! You’ve got no more choice than a fly on a frog’s tongue!’

‘Silence!’ cried Talag. He bent his head close to Felthrup, nearly whispering. ‘A leader, you call me? Witless animal. Look where I have led them. To ruin, to exile on this sand hill, or a hopeless return to a ship full of murderers. I pushed my son until he snapped and took on the role of a messiah. A role in which he killed my sister, and came close to killing everyone aboard, and fled at last into a living death himself. I drove him to those acts of despair, and then condemned him for his choices. A leader! You are preaching to a dead man, Master Felthrup. But this dead man will kill you all the same.’

Saturyk and the others closed in, swords and spears lowered in a deadly ring. Felthrup squeezed his eyes shut. How had he failed to understand? Talag was the one in despair. The man was too wise to deny the truth for ever; now it had caught up to him with crushing weight. But in one thing at least, Talag was still gravely mistaken.

‘Your son has not given up the struggle,’ Felthrup said. ‘Nor did he go ashore in Masalym to die.’

A new fury contorted Talag’s features. ‘You know something of Taliktrum? Tell me. But breathe a false word and I will puncture your skull.’

‘Will you let me return to the Chathrand?’

‘No bargaining. Speak.’

‘I do not bargain, I was merely curious,’ said Felthrup. ‘And anxious, I might add, in the spirit of full confession. Anxious that you not puncture my skull, Lord Talag, nor indeed my eardrum, which is more imminent, . but never mind, I digress. The fact is that your son has taken sides, Lord. Indeed he saved the life of Prince Olik in the Masalym shipyard, and that act has made all the difference. For it was Olik who then took the throne of Masalym, however briefly, and dispatched the expedition to slay Arunis and recover the Stone.’

‘You know it was Taliktrum?’

‘Unless there was another ixchel with a swallow-suit on the Masalym docks. Hercol was there; he witnessed it. Taliktrum swept down and slew the assassins before they could slit the prince’s throat.’

Talag’s eyes filled with wonder. ‘My son. He saved the Bali Adro prince?’

‘Far more than that. He stopped Arunis that night; he stopped the triumph of the death-force Arunis serves. Not for the sake of humans or dlomu or even ixchel. He did it for Alifros, my lord.’

Felthrup did not add that Sandor Ott had been present as well, nor that Taliktrum had vanished before the fight was through. Let him think the best of his son. For all I know it might even be true.

‘Your noble sister,’ he said carefully, ‘used to speak of idrolos, the courage to see. That is what will keep your people alive. Nothing else will do, I think.’

Talag did not move for several seconds. Then he straightened, withdrawing the sword from Felthrup’s ear, the foot from his neck. Felthrup rolled onto his feet, still encircled by weaponry. Talag gestured to Saturyk.

‘Assist me.’

Together the two men walked to the square shape against the far wall, and tugged the oilskin aside. Beneath it were two stacks of human-sized books. All were battered, and most had water-damage. With great care Talag and Saturyk removed one from the stack and carried it nearer the window. It was a thin, attractive leather volume. Talag opened it and began turning pages almost the length of his body. Finding the desired page at last, he stepped up gingerly onto the book, knelt, and read aloud:

‘It is just as well Ratty left us, after tasting the blood of the keel. He did not want to, of course. We had to convince him he was doing it for us — that he might find a way to send a ship here, a rescue party. But he was doing it for us, anyway, by all the Gods. Someone has to remember all this. Someone has to heal. And why should it not be Felthrup, who loves reading more than any human I have ever known?’

He looked across the room at Felthrup. ‘You can guess who wrote those words, can you not?’

Felthrup nodded, weeping inside. Only one person had ever called him Ratty, and that was Fiffengurt. The quartermaster himself had written these lines. In the future.

No, he thought furiously, in one future. Someone else’s. This end is not inevitable. It cannot be.

‘He was still alive when we first passed through the doorway and found the wreck,’ said Talag, ‘but he did not live long. He had been alone for three years already. The others had perished one by one.’

‘But what is he talking about?’ Felthrup whispered. ‘How, how did I leave? And the blood of the keel?’

Talag shrugged. ‘A mystery, that. Where the wreck’s keel is split you can see the heartwood, and it is indeed a rich, dark red — but we have not ventured to taste it. But as for how you left, that is easy. You used the clock, of course. You crawled through it to safety in another world.’

‘It is here? Thasha’s magic clock is here?

Talag nodded. ‘And today it is but an ordinary clock. We forced opened the hinged face, and saw only gears. Your escape seems to have exhausted its power at last.’ Talag closed the book. ‘You may earn the right to read any of these, Felthrup, with time and good behaviour.’

‘My lord, I do not know when I shall have such a luxury.’

Saturyk smiled, but hid it quickly when his leader frowned. Talag glanced at Felthrup again.

‘You tried to warn us of the Shaggat, and later of the sorcerer. I doubted you then, but time has shown which of us was in the right.’

Felthrup bowed his head.

‘All the same, you have tried to keep faith with too many. You have tried to pick and choose, allying yourself with these giants and not others; these ixchel rather than those. Such efforts were doomed from the start. You have ended up on no one’s side.’

‘No one’s mindlessly, Lord Talag. Of that fault I am happy to be accused.’

‘I cannot permit you to return to the Chathrand,’ said Talag. ‘You are incautious by nature, and might well reveal our secret doorway to the giants. If they should ever find it we will be trapped here, marooned. I’m afraid you must be our guest until the end.’

Felthrup had foreseen this, and had readied half a dozen arguments. But the resolve in Talag’s voice made him suddenly quail. He was about to gush nonsense. He bit his own foot, holding it in. Babble not! Babble won’t do, darling Felthrup. You must reach him some other way.

Talag, no doubt shocked by Felthrup’s silence, came forward and placed his hand on the rat’s bowed forehead. ‘ “Unhappy the man must ever be who confuseth love and loyalty,” ’ he said, clearly reciting from memory. ‘That is from one of our greatest poems.’

‘In whose translation?’

‘Mine,’ said Talag. ‘Come, rat; I have a last thing to show you.’

Ordering his guards to follow, he led Felthrup down from the loft and out of the building. There he paused and spoke to the clan in the ixchel tongue. The crowd began to disperse, studying Felthrup as they went. Talag marched through them, leading Felthrup back among the trees.

They started off in the direction of the wreck, but at a certain point Talag left the trail and began to climb a steep ridge. Felthrup climbed easily enough, but the ixchel struggled, for there was as much loose sand as soil underfoot, and the wind grew stronger at each step.

As they neared the crest of the ridge, Talag glanced back over his shoulder. ‘The expedition was never heard from again,’ he said. ‘On that point Fiffengurt’s journals are quite clear. Pathkendle, Thasha Isiq and the others never rejoined the crew, and thus were saved the horror of the wreck.’

‘Why do you tell me this?’ asked Felthrup.

Talag was silent. But a moment later Felthrup saw the beginnings of an answer. They had reached the edge of the trees, and before them lay the burial yard.

It had been laid out so neatly: thirty or forty graves marked with little rock cairns, each with a square ballast brick at its foot. And there were not one but two walls against the wind: the failed wooden fence and a lower rock wall, still standing but half-buried in sand. The graves too were vanishing: some of the cairns barely poked above the drifts.

With his heart in his mouth, Felthrup crept into the yard. He did not want to be here. These deaths were not his shipmates’. This Alifros was not his own. When he departed it would close behind him like an evil eye, and he