The Night of the Swarm

and in the changeless dark she soon lost track of time as well. There were very few clues: a laugh, a soft command, the noise of a waterfall, a whiff of cool spray penetrating the sack.

‘Ramachni,’ she asked, ‘have you been there before? The place they’re taking us?’

‘I cannot answer you,’ he said. ‘Indeed, you had better ask me nothing about our destination, for what binds the selk tongue binds mine also. But perhaps we should speak of other matters, while we may.’

‘If you mean to ask me where my clan-brethren on the Chathrand disappeared to-’

‘Dear me, lass! Nothing could have been further from my mind. No, I had quite another concern. I am thinking of your mistress, Diadrelu.’

Ensyl froze. ‘What about her?’ she managed to ask.

‘She is in Agaroth, the halfway-land, the Border-Kingdom through which the dead must journey, before they gain their final rest. Nearly all pass through it in a heartbeat or two — like birds, or shadows of birds, they flit over its twilight hills, and are gone. Your mistress descended, seized a branch, stilled the natural flight of her soul. To do this requires magnificent strength, which Diadrelu Tammariken had in abundance.’

‘Yes.’

‘And it requires something further, Ensyl. I think you know what I shall say. It requires love.’

Ensyl hugged herself in the darkness. She hoped Ramachni could not see the way he had in the Infernal Forest. She hoped he was as blind as she was herself.

‘My mistress loved well,’ she said. ‘Hercol was a strange choice, a choice that would have brought her suffering, even in peacetime, if she had lived. But you know how it happens.’

‘Do I?’

‘There’s a song,’ said Ensyl, and recited:

One path through endless pathways, one string unwound from birth,

Through the mountains or the marshlands, over blest or barren earth,

One lover from the multitude, one seedling on the plain,

It is the heart that chooses for us, and who may ask it to explain?

‘That is a human song. My mother heard me sing it once, and slapped me. But it made no difference; I sang it to myself all the more. And that’s the point, you see. The heart goes its own way. You can reason with it a little. Not very much.’

‘That is true of human beings generally,’ said the mage.

Ensyl laughed aloud. ‘We ixchel are exactly the same. My mistress used to call me headstrong, but who in Alifros was more headstrong than she? No one could turn her from a task. She would drive herself past all exhaustion, past the time when even the strongest of the young folk had gone to their rest, and then look at me suddenly and say, “Very well, I have dawdled long enough; it is time to start working.” Do you know, I had to stand with my back to the door to make her eat? At day’s end, when she bathed, I’d hide her trousers, offer her nightclothes only, or she would go out for a third or fourth patrol. Limits were for other people, not for Dri. I begged her to stay clear of Taliktrum, I warned her that he would strike-’

Ensyl broke off, or rather her voice quit of its own accord. There was a wall inside her, solid bricks in the back of her mind.

‘Diadrelu loved you like a daughter, Ensyl,’ said Ramachni.

‘That’s not what I wanted,’ Ensyl heard herself say. ‘I had a mother, she was a wine drunkard; she left us to join another clan when I was ten. I didn’t need more mothering, Ramachni. I wanted Dri to love me as a mate.’

Ramachni lay still. No tears, no tears, thought Ensyl wildly. But how had he done it? How had he pulled those words out of her — those thoughts, forbidden and precious, the ones she never allowed out of her own stifling little cave? How had he made her know?

‘Of all. . curious things to tell a mage,’ said Ramachni at last.

‘You broke his rule,’ said Ensyl. ‘No magic, Thaulinin told you. But you did some anyway. You breathed a spell onto me.’

‘You’re wrong there, lass. I only listened. There is a greater magic at work here than my own, and that too we may call by the name of love. But why this shame? Does your kind condemn this kind of longing?’

‘Yes. Oh, they’d not admit it — that would make us no better than most giants, and worse than some. For every human shortcoming you’ll find an ixchel ready to swear that we have no such problem. But in this case no one would breathe a word about it.’

‘I have heard it said that ixchel do not speak of love.’

‘Rarely the feeling,’ said Ensyl, ‘and never the act. Some things aren’t for telling — that is all an ixchel will tell you. And I’m no different. I don’t want to speak of what happens in the dark. Yes, I am ashamed. There is an order to our lives that the giants cannot comprehend; there are bonds between us that cannot be broken or changed. Dri took me as a student. I wanted more. That is greed, and unforgivable. Because we are different from humans in one way. The heart chooses, yes — but our heart is shared.’

‘The clan above the self, is it?’

‘Always.’

Ramachni sighed. Ensyl waited for him to say more, to reveal why he had felt it necessary to torture her thus with thoughts of Diadrelu. But the silence held, and the pain lay heavy on her, and fleeing it she tumbled into sleep.

How long that sleep lasted she did not know. Dreams assaulted her in fragments, waking moments came and went. She felt like a smooth stone rolled along a riverbed by a stream without end, without pity, over the rounded, polished details of her life. The palanquin swayed, the selk laughed faintly; the warm fur became Dri’s hair as she scrubbed it, in the little herring-tin bathing tub on the Chathrand. Her mistress reached up and grasped her hand, soap-slippery fingers interlaced, she could have died of bliss in that moment. The palanquin shifted. Diadrelu was gone.

‘A shared heart,’ said Ramachni, as if no time had passed at all. ‘That is a lovely idea, whether fact or communal fancy. But now I must tell you what I fear is occurring. Dri has stopped in Agaroth of her own free will. And Arunis is there with her, and they are fighting.’

‘Fighting over what?’

‘Over the fate of Alifros, and the outcome of our struggle. It is an unequal fight, of course. A mage has certain powers even in death. But take heart, for in Agaroth they are closer to equals than they ever were in life. And Diadrelu arrived long before Arunis, and has had time to prepare.’

‘Prepare for what?’

‘I do not know, Ensyl. I have journeyed through many worlds, but none so strange as the Border-Kingdom. Time and thought are different there. One comes to know things suddenly, and to find things merely by thinking of them, and yet losing and forgetting come just as quickly. And always one senses the nearness of that terrible wall at the edge of the kingdom, the seething wall, beyond which is death.

‘As for Diadrelu, she is no slave to the sorcerer, though clearly it was through his power that she appeared beside our bonfire in the clearing. He offered her that chance, meaning to appal and sicken us with her agony — and in that he succeeded, of course. But he never counted on her strength. Even impaled, Dri spoke to us, warned us that Arunis is once more being aided by Sathek the Vile. Well, Arunis will not make that mistake again. Dri, however, will keep on trying to help us, to reach out to us. I do not know if she will find another means — but if she does, it will be through those she loved the best. So I must ask you, as I have asked Hercol, to be watchful. Look for her, listen for her. She might come at any time.’

‘Or-’

‘Never. That is possible too.’

Ensyl lay down on the pelt, curling on her side like an infant. Which was worse: to see her mistress as before, knowing she was dead and suffering or never to see her again? Ensyl felt a sudden, gut-twisting desire for the Nilstone: to touch it, to be obliterated, reduced to an absence, a negative, something that could not feel or think. Look for her, listen for her. The mage’s request merely changed her curse into an obligation. She was already haunted by Dri; now she had to welcome that haunting, pry the wound open whenever