The Night of the Swarm

they were paying more attention to what they sensed with their fingertips than what they saw. The effect was unsettling.

‘You’ve, er, never treated our kind, naturally,’ grumbled Corporal Mandric.

The selk paused in their work, looking at him.

‘Turachs, you mean?’

‘Humans, human beings.’

‘But of course we have,’ said the doctor. ‘All our lives — except for the last hundred years. Come in, strip off those rags.’

Inside, they found a series of airy rooms, furnished with beds, wardrobes, dressing tables, shelves of books. Other selk were at work here, and from a back room came the a sound of water gushing into a basin, and a puff of steam.

‘Your home, citizens, for as long as you stay with us,’ said Valgrif. ‘You can dine here, or in the great hall, or anywhere else you like. Of course you have the freedom of Ularamyth.’

Pazel stood in the centre of the large common room. His leg was throbbing so badly that he had broken out into a sweat, but the glad, dreamlike feeling was stronger than ever. He was thinking of Ormael. And as he glanced around he suddenly knew why. The chambers were uncannily like the house of his birth: the same simplicity, the same brightness and warmth. He turned to his sister, and she nodded, speechless. The dining table was the size of their old dining table, and pushed close to the window, just as their mother had liked. There was even a courtyard at the back with a small, spreading tree.

‘It’s not an orange tree,’ said Neda.

In Ormael the soldiers had mutilated her tree, broken its limbs, hurled oranges through the windows of the house. Before they moved on to Neda. Pazel took her hand, expecting her to snatch it away. But she didn’t. She even squeezed his hand in reply. Then Cayer Vispek said, ‘Why should it be an orange tree, sfvantskor?’ and Neda dropped Pazel’s hand as though it burned.

Hercol set the Nilstone down beside Ramachni. He unstrapped Ildraquin, bent and tore off his ruined boots. Then he slid down against the wall. He sighed — and Pazel thought he had never heard a sound remotely like it from the warrior. Rin’s eyes, he’s let his guard down. For the first time since they’d met on the far side of Alifros, Hercol was not protecting anyone. His eyes closed, gentle and serene. He was off-duty. It made him look like another man.

The women moved to the back chambers to undress. One of the doctors was cutting away the left leg of Pazel’s trousers. He stood thinking of Dastu in the mountains, where the hrathmogs hunted and the maukslar raged. Do not forget the world outside.

11

From the final journal of G. Starling Fiffengurt

Monday, 11 Halar 942.

The great and deadly Empire of Bali Adro — where has it gone? To this day we have seen no ships but that flying fragment, no forts or garrisons on the islands but a few burned and abandoned. We expected to be fighting our way into the Island Wilderness; instead we are gliding through it without so much as a sighting of Imperial forces. Only far to the south and west, on the edge of the horizon, do we still see those flashes, and later hear a great slow boom like a rolling wave. Sometimes too there is an eerie shimmer that makes the dlomu point and whisper among themselves. I tell Spoon-Ears that his men are sounding more frightened than my own. He agrees. ‘Their fear has a face,’ he says. ‘A woman’s face, staring out at them from a white hood.’ I know who he means, but can she be the force behind those great discharges? Is she mightier than Arunis ever was?

While I have him, I pop another question that’s been haunting me, but this one I can only whisper: ‘You worked on the Chathrand ’s repairs, when she was in drydock?’

‘I was present,’ he says with a nod.

‘Then tell me: is our keel cracked, by damn? Are we sailing with a broken spine?’

He shakes his head, and I breathe a great sigh of relief. ‘But it was cracked, to be sure,’ he adds. ‘I saw the damage myself. Amidships, it was, close to her lowest draft.’

‘You patched a mucking keel?’

His eyes glance left and right. ‘Not at all,’ he murmurs finally. ‘That is what is so strange. The crack closed of its own accord. When we came back it was gone — totally self-sealed, as if the wood were living flesh — but better even then flesh, for it healed with no scar. Not even the master shipwrights could find the spot again. But do you know what else is strange? That crack. . bled.’

‘Bled?’

‘For the short time it was open, yes. Like young sapwood. I saw it myself: a thin, red-gold nectar. There were still drops of it about the keel when the crack disappeared.’

Nectar from six-hundred-year wood. Cracks that heal themselves. If I needed more convincing that the Grey Lady was like no ship afloat, I have it now.

The Island Wilderness is vast and varied, like a big plate dropped on stone and shattered into thousands of pieces. Those pieces lie flung over a greater expanse of sea than all the waters claimed by Arqual, where many a doughty sailor has passed his whole career. Only the southern third of the Wilderness is charted, and we are nearing the end of that region. Afterwards we will depend on what Prince Olik sketched back in Masalym, and the remarks he made to our sailmaster.

All this effort to find Stath Balfyr, from which island we have course headings leading precisely nowhere: course headings fabricated years ago by one Lord Talag, for no other reason than to lure us there. And now Ratty’s learned that Talag and his clan are still aboard, still waiting for us to reach their homeland, waiting for their moment to strike again. How will they do it? What will they try? Ratty thinks there is good in Talag yet, and that our best hope is to appeal to it. For myself I’m not interested in the mix of good or bad in the fellow. But I know this: a man who could shape his entire life around such a deranged and brilliant scheme as Talag’s is capable of anything, mass murder included. If it is part of that scheme to poison us all on landing, he will do it.

Simply to wait for that moment would be lunacy. We must warn Rose, somehow, and hope he is calm enough to believe us — and then sane enough to turn back. That this would require defiance of Sandor Ott is a given, and not on Rose’s part alone. Haddismal will be forced to choose between them, and heretofore whenever a choice has arisen he has stood with Ott.

Yet we must turn back. Without knowledge of the currents, we might wander in the Nelluroq until we die of thirst. And even if we managed to cross in safety, where would we emerge? We have no knowledge of our position relative to the Northern lands. We could arrive in the heart of the Mzithrin, and be sunk by the White Fleet. Or in Arquali territory, where our own dear Emperor has promised to kill us and our families should we return without completing the mission. We might get lucky and scuttle into some port in the Crownless Lands. But even if they granted us sanctuary, the news of the Chathrand ’s resurrection would soon escape, and both would descend on our poor hosts in fury.

No, we must return to Bali Adro sooner or later, and seek better information from some quarter. So why haven’t I told Rose yet, before we ran northwards for weeks? Do I fear that he too will take Ott’s side? Am I that much a coward, after seeing what the spymaster did to Chadfallow?

Each day we creep nearer. The whole crew is yearning for Stath Balfyr; you can hear it in their voices, see it in their darting eyes. They are dreaming of home, and in their morally weakened state they forget, for moments, all the heartless immensities of Alifros that lie between.

I am not immune from temptation. Our bow points north; my heart pulls north like a lodestone, and pays no heed to reason. Some nights I think of Anni and me together, keeping house, raising our little one, making sweet love. That is when I feel most evil: when I catch myself imagining such an end, without regard for the ones we’re leaving behind.

Against such gloom Felthrup is my strange defender. He cannot say why, but he believes our friends will