The Night of the Swarm

ending, and the day had been fair, and there appeared to be plenty to eat.

‘Where’d you find the fish-head?’ shouted a portly man nibbling a sausage, looking down on Isiq.

‘He’s a friend of Captain Gregory,’ shouted the Talturin. ‘Be civil, you! He’s here for some peace and relaxation.’

‘So naturally Gregory sends his witch along,’ quipped another.

Suthinia’s glance cut the laughter short, but even in her eyes there was a flicker of amusement. ‘Nobody sends me anywhere, as you people know well,’ she said, ‘but if Old Lumpy has any crab cakes left, tell him to send them to our chambers, with some bread and ale.’

‘Lots of ale, lots of bread!’ bellowed their guides. ‘And cheese, and butter, and marmalade!’

It was all arranged by shouting, here, apparently. The paddlers shouted to their sweethearts; the children shouted questions about the murths; the old women shouted to Suthinia, complaining of their toothaches and gout. Pure anarchy, thought the admiral. Maisa can’t possibly be here.

When they docked, the mob pressed close around them, and Isiq feared they would be trapped and chattering until dawn. But somehow in short order he found himself in a damp, plain, utterly delightful cabin on the east side of the enclosure, slicing bread with his dagger while Suthinia bathed in the washroom at the end of the hall.

The bird pecked at fallen crumbs. ‘Bread is good,’ he said, ‘but insects are better. I will go to the roof and feed properly.’

‘Go then, but be careful,’ said Isiq. ‘I will leave the window open.’

The bird vanished into the night. When Suthinia returned they pounced on the food, and talked easily of their children. They even laughed a bit — though surely that was a mask for fear. Isiq was flabbergasted when she told him that Neda had become a sfvantskor. But Suthinia only shrugged.

‘It makes a kind of sense. Neda used to scorn me for not committing. “You’re half-mage, half-mother. Who wins, if you’re living half a life?” Well, she’s found something to commit to, that’s certain.’

She looked at him very seriously. ‘You must stay close, Eberzam. These are good people overall. As Gregory’s friend you’ll not be harmed or robbed. But they are wild, and not always wise. They will try to sell you ten thousand things, and to borrow money; they will offer services you don’t need. They will send girls to your bedchamber, and failing that, boys. They will try to sell you deathsmoke.’

He nodded. ‘I expected that. But the drug is everywhere, Suthinia. I can’t avoid it unless you keep me in a cage.’

‘Turn to me when the craving starts. I may be able to stop you in time.’

‘A bull elephant could not stop me, if I am ever brought so low as to reach for deathsmoke again.’

‘Will you let me try?’

He sat there, trembling with the memory of pain. ‘I will,’ he said at last.

She smiled and squeezed his hand. Then a strange look came over her face.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

She blinked at him. ‘In the South, there is a thing called the nuhzat. A kind of dream-state in which we lose our minds a little, but gain something else — insight, second-sight, other powers now and again. Few humans experience the nuhzat, but I used to. It happened even after I came north, even after Neda and Pazel were born. They were frightened of me. It can be terrifying, the nuhzat. In my case it usually was.

‘But in one of those nuhzat-visions I saw this moment. A strange, hard man, a former enemy, alone with me in a small room, eating crab cakes, laughing with me about our children. I knew that I had long hated him; that I blamed him for the course of my latter life — at least for all the parts that went wrong. And I knew that just the night before I had refused him as a lover.’

Isiq dropped his eyes, colouring.

‘I knew also,’ she said, ‘that I would have to hurry to tell him, even before the meal was over, that he must believe in himself as never before. That he must trust not only in his wisdom and martial skills, but in his heart. Trust your own heart, Eberzam, remember. I am glad the memory came back to me in time.’

‘In time for what?’

She turned and looked at the door. Isiq put down his plate. There were footsteps, then a loud, impatient knock.

When Suthinia opened the door Isiq thought for a moment that he had lost his mind. Before him stood a man slightly older than the admiral himself, with a face that was intensely, eerily familiar. Two younger men with light halberds stood behind him.

‘Leave your weapons,’ said the older man. ‘Wipe the crumbs from your beard. Close your mouth. Leave the hat.’

Military.

‘Stand up; you’re expected at once.’ The man glanced briefly at Suthinia. ‘He’s to go alone, Mrs Pathkendle.’

Not just a soldier, but an Arquali soldier. His Dremland accent was a giveaway.

‘Don’t I know you?’ asked Isiq.

The man hesitated, biting back some retort. ‘Irrelevant,’ he said at last, and turned on his heel.

Isiq looked at Suthinia; she nodded. Impulsively he took her hand and kissed it. Then he followed the old soldier down the corridor, with the guards walking behind. They passed the washroom, a busy kitchen, open doorways where cards and wrestling matches were underway, a little booth where a cobbler sat hammering nails into a well-worn sole. The old soldier rocked a little to the left as he walked, and that too was somehow familiar. Who in the Nine Pits is he?

At last they came to a temple chamber where a few elders were bent at evening prayers. They slipped around the dais into the sacristy, and a young monk stood up from his desk and welcomed them, smiling. He shut the door, then turned to a heavy rack of vestments and parted them like curtains. Beyond it was a plain wooden wall, but when the monk pressed the wall it swung inward. The old soldier stepped through the gap without a word.

Now they were climbing a staircase, very narrow and dark. Isiq was perplexed by the heavy carpet. Then he thought: To deaden our footfalls. Good, very good.

After three flights the staircase ended before another door, this one heavily padded. The old soldier gave a precise series of taps, and Isiq heard the sliding of bolts.

They stepped directly into a barracks. Forty soldiers in varying states of dress turned and stared at Isiq. ‘That’s him!’ they murmured. ‘By the hairy devils below, that’s him!’

Isiq was looking at a medley of Imperial faces. There were some Etherhorders and other men of inner Arqual, but many more Ipulians, Opaltines, and folk of the Outer Isles. All of them decades his junior. There were also a great number of Tholjassans — their slender features were unmistakable. All of them stared in fascination.

The old soldier shut the door. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘This is Admiral Isiq. Now stop staring like a gopher pack.’

But the one who was staring now was Isiq. A gopher pack. The phrase unlocked his memory at last. This old man, incredibly, had been his drill sergeant on his first deployment. Gods of death, that was fifty years ago! When he has just a midshipman, not yet eighteen.

When Maisa was still on the throne.

‘Bachari!’ he cried, astonished. ‘Sergeant Bachari! You went with her into exile!’

‘And you,’ said the old man, unsmiling, ‘did not.’

The complex occupied the entire northern third of the Hermitage: a great warren sealed off from the freebooter’s floating village, except for a few well-hidden passages like the one they had just used. ‘Of course they all know something strange is afoot here,’ said Bachari gruffly, ‘and a few have perhaps guessed its nature. But only a very few. It is the best compromise we have been able to manage, but I do not like it, not at all. I am in charge of her personal security.’

The men looked fit and well fed, but their bearing worried Isiq: the salutes they gave Bachari came too slowly for his liking. They wore uniforms of a sort — plain trousers and ill-fitting shirts, canvas jackets stained at the wrists, patched at the elbows. Only the officers wore proper Arquali attire, and even theirs was faded.

‘We have three hundred men within these walls,’ Bachari told him, ‘and twice that many on vessels secreted