The Night of the Swarm

‘Gregory taught them. He taught Arquali to the mucking sea-murths, that man.’

She fell briefly silent, then added, ‘I never believed him, until tonight. I thought this sea-murth business was another lie, one he invented because he knows I fear them. It kept me out of his hair, kept me away from his real family here in the Fens.’

‘But why such extraordinary fear?’ asked Isiq. ‘Courage blazes from you like heat from a bonfire.’

‘Very pretty. I’ll tell you why. It was during our crossing of the Nelluroq, twenty years ago. One freezing night we lay becalmed, and they surrounded us and swept aboard, and all our lamps went out together. They moved among us silently, inspecting us, touching our clothes and faces, and no one on deck breathed a word. And there was a lord among them, a very ancient murth. When the moon sailed out from behind the clouds I found him staring at me. He hobbled near and touched my hand, and it burned. Then all of them slipped back into the sea.’

‘A bad burn, was it?’

‘Not at all,’ said Suthinia. ‘But when we had the lamps burning again I saw that there were faint lines on my palm. Symbols. They were already fading, so I copied them out on paper before they disappeared. And years later Gregory showed them to these murths, here at the Haunted Coast.’

To Isiq’s almost unbearable joy, Suthinia reached back and took his hand tight in her own. ‘I’d garbled the words a bit,’ she said, ‘but the murths took a guess at their meaning. It seems they meant, “This one will descend among us and remain.” ’

‘Oh, rubbish,’ said Isiq.

‘Yes, well. That’s what most everyone says about their blary existence. And Gregory, he grinned when he brought me the translation. Like I said, I thought he was lying, just trying to scare me. He loves my weaknesses, the cur.’

‘Do you truly hate him?’

‘I hate most men, most of the time. When I dream of a better world it has no room for you. The horrid mess you make of everything, the wars.’

‘I was born into war,’ said Isiq. ‘I could have walked away from the Service, pretended that Arqual was not threatened with annihilation. But that would not have made the threat disappear.’

For the first time he heard amusement in her voice. ‘Walked away like me? Gregory told you, didn’t he? How he charmed me right into his bedroom? How I quit magecraft to be with him?’

‘He hinted,’ said Isiq.

‘Well it’s true: you can have magic, or a life and family. Not both, never both. But it’s also true that if I hadn’t walked away from magecraft, Arunis would have found me, and killed me, as he did almost all of us. So I burned my spell-scrolls, poured my potions into the sea. And I managed to be a mother and a wife. Until a certain doctor came to Ormael, that is.’

Isiq had wondered if she would ever mention the doctor. ‘Chadfallow reveres you above all women in Alifros,’ he heard himself say.

‘We were lovers for years,’ she said. ‘Pazel always talks about the day Gregory introduced us. But that only happened because Ignus had finally struck up a friendship with Gregory, down on the waterfront. By then, credek, I’d been with him almost seven years. I was trying to leave him, not for the first time. I could have killed him for approaching Gregory like that.’

‘Why did he?’

‘Why do you think? So that he could cross my threshold. I’d never brought Ignus around the Orch’dury. I didn’t want the children to know about him, although Neda suspected I had someone. A lot of sailors’ wives do, you know.’

‘You can’t mean it.’

‘Go ahead and laugh, but Neda was furious; she wanted me dead.’ Suthinia paused. ‘And then there was Pazel. He idolised Gregory, the man who tossed him in the air when he came home, who tossed gold around like a sultan; the man who captained a ship. Of course Gregory forgot about him as soon as he walked out the door, but I couldn’t tell Pazel that. Any more than I could tell him who his real father was.’

‘Chadfallow.’

‘What if he’d known?’ asked Suthinia defiantly. ‘He’d only have begun to doubt Gregory’s love for him, and Rin knows there was reason to doubt. He’d have learned that Neda was only his half-sister. And Ignus — he could have been recalled to Etherhorde at any time. He threatened to go often enough. To wash his hands of the whole “sordid Ormali chapter in my life”, as he put it. To go back to something familiar and safe.’

Suthinia drew a long breath. ‘I was fighting for a normal life, too. For Pazel, Neda, myself. I should have known it would come apart in my hands.’

‘Because of me,’ said Isiq gruly. Then, correcting himself: ‘Because of the invasion.’

‘And because the choice was never truly before me. I was still a mage in my heart.’

‘And now?’

‘Now it’s not just my heart. It’s everything. I’ll never be much of a mage, probably. But while this fight continues I can’t be anything else. I was saying goodbye to Gregory, tonight on the Dancer. It was the first time I had touched him in years. And the last.’

She withdrew her hand, and they both lay still and silent. There was, finally, perfect understanding between them. He could not argue with her, could not tell her she was killing him with her beauty, with her flood of simple trust. He would not chatter, would not remark on her honesty, or his amazement (face to face with honesty now) that he could have failed to notice the honesty’s absence during all his years with Syrarys. They would never be lovers, that dream was gone. But as he lay there he sensed with awe that a new being had appeared beside him, a sister maybe, even though she came from the far side of the world.

‘Our children,’ he said at last, ‘my daughter, your son-’

‘Yes,’ said the witch, ‘isn’t that the strangest thing?’

Twenty hours later the Simjan toed him gently in the ribs. ‘Wake up, Uncle,’ he said.

He rose stiffly, blinking. The sun was once more going down, but now it was setting over a vast lake, dotted with hummocks of greenery and flocks of waterbirds, and bordered on all sides by the Fens.

In the centre of the lake was an enormous building made entirely of logs. At first Isiq thought that it stood on giant stilts. But no, it was afloat, built atop a number of conjoined barges. It was square and plain and four stories tall, with rows of windows on the two upper floors. It reminded Isiq of a warehouse in Etherhorde, complete with the look-out towers at the corners by which the bosses could keep an eye on the stevedores. A number of vessels — sailboats, rowboats, pole barges, canoes — milled about it; others were scattered over the lake.

Suthinia was kneeling; the wind tossed her sable hair. ‘The Hermitage,’ she said. ‘It’s been two years for me.’

‘How did you manage to visit, without ever laying eyes on a murth?’ asked Isiq.

She smiled at him. ‘There are many paths to this lake,’ she said, ‘though none is easy to find. I used to come here from the Trothe of Chereste, before my children were born.’

‘Was there a. . hermit in residence, even then?’

Suthinia raised an eyebrow. ‘We brought the Hermit here, Gregory and I. Fourteen years ago, that was.’

As they drew nearer, Isiq caught the sparkle of glass from one of the towers. A telescope lens. Someone’s taking a good look at us.

They rounded a corner. On the western side of the great structure a wide gate stood raised, its iron teeth catching the last of the evening sun. ‘I hear music!’ said the tailor bird. ‘It is coming from that arch!’

The structure was open at the centre, Isiq saw now: the barges formed a great floating square, like a villa with a watery courtyard. They neared the arch. Festive noises, a piano banging drunkenly, the scent of onion and frying fish. They passed under the iron gate, and the Talturin said, ‘We’re home.’

Sweet Tree of Heaven.

It was like stepping into a bustling town on market day. The inner walls were entirely made up of balconies: four unbroken balconies running around the structure, and crowded with people of all kinds. There were many rough-looking freebooter men and women, to be sure, but also children, mothers with babies on their hips, toothless elders leaning over the rails. The crowd spilled out onto docks and tethered boats. There were streamers of laundry, buckets raised and lowered for water; tankards lifted in welcome as the paddlers were recognised. Everyone was poor, that was certain: the children’s clothes were made of neatly stitched rags. But winter was