The Night of the Swarm

show the lads any fear; they’re watching, I thought.

The vessel was a horror. It was a Plazic invention to be sure, one of the foul things sustained by the magic the dlomu had drawn from the bones of the lizard-creatures called eguar. Prince Olik had told us a little, and the dlomic sailors a little more. Eguar-magic was the power behind the Bali Adro throne, and its doom. It had made her armies invincible — but their commanders depraved and self-destroying. It is a frightful state of affairs, and one that reminds me uncomfortably of dear old Arqual.

We’d seen monster-vessels before, in the terrible armada that passed so close to us just after we reached the Southern main. But this was something else altogether. Impossibly large and shapeless, it was like a giant, shabby fortress or cluster of warehouses that had somehow gone to sea. How did it move? There were sails, but they were preposterous: ribbed things that jutted out like the fins of a spiny rockfish. It should have been dead in the water, but the blue gap between it and the island was growing. It was under way.

Captain Rose bounded up the Silver Stair. Without a glance at me he climbed the quarterdeck ladder, and kept going to the mizzen yard, where he trained his own scope on the vessel. He held still a long time (what’s a long time when your heart’s in your throat?) as Elkstem and I gazed up at him. When he turned to us, his look was sober and direct.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘you are distinguished seamen: use your skills. This foe we cannot fight. We must elude it until nightfall or we shall lose the Chathrand.’

The captain’s rages are frightful, but his compliments simply terrify: he saves them for the worst of moments. In such times a mysterious calm descends on him; it is deeply unsettling to observe. He hung there, face unreadable within that red beard, one elbow hitched around a backstay. He examined the skies: blue above us, thick clouds to windward. Islands on all sides, of course. Rose looked over each of them in turn.

His eyes narrowed suddenly. He pointed at a dark, mountainous island, some forty miles off the starboard bow. ‘That one. What is it called?’

Elkstem, who knew Prince Olik’s map better than I, told him that it was Phyreis, one of the last charted islands in the Wilderness. ‘And a big one, Captain. Half the size of Bramian, maybe,’ he said.

‘It appears to sharpen to a point.’

‘The chart attests to it, sir: a long southwest headland.’

Rose nodded. ‘Listen well, then. We must be fifteen miles off that point at nightfall. That will be at seven bells plus twenty minutes. Until then we are to stay as far as possible ahead of the enemy, without ever allowing him to cut us off from Phyreis. Is that perfectly clear?’

‘By nightfall-’ I began.

‘Fiffengurt.’ He cut me off, suddenly wrathful. ‘You have just disgraced your very uniform. Did I say by nightfall? No, Quartermaster: my command was at nightfall. Earlier is unacceptable, later equally so. If these orders are beyond your comprehension I will appoint someone fit to carry them out.’

‘Oppo, sir,’ I said hastily. ‘At nightfall, fifteen miles off the point.’

Rose nodded, his eyes still on me. ‘The precise course I leave to your combined discretion. The canvas likewise. That is all.’

And that was all. Rose sent word that he required Tarsel the blacksmith and six carpenters to join him on the upper gun deck, and lumbered off towards the No. 3 hatch, shouting at his ghosts: ‘Clear out, stand aside. Don’t touch me, you stinking shade! I know what a barometer is. Damn you all, stop talking and let me think!’

Elkstem and I put the men to spreading all the canvas we could think of; the winds were that sluggish. I even sent a team down to the orlop, digging for the moonrakers that hadn’t been touched since Arunis calmed the winds off the Straits of Simja. Then we dived into our assignment: plotting, calculating, fighting over the maths. It is no easy job to ensure that one arrives at a distant spot neither early nor late, above all when one must seem to be fleeing. And to make matters worse, we were fleeing. There was the open question of just how fast that unnatural behemoth could move. One thing was clear, though: far more than wind propelled it over the seas.

The Chathrand, however, remains a beauty of a sailing ship. Despite the torpid day she was making thirteen knots by the time we ran out the studding sails. I was proud of her: she’d weathered a great deal and come through. But the Behemoth was still gaining. As it crept nearer I studied it again. A monstrosity. Great furnaces along her length, belching fire and soot. Black towers and catapults and cannon in unimaginable numbers, giving the whole thing the look of a sick, spiny animal. Hundreds, maybe a few thousand, crowded onto her topdeck. What possible use for so many?

‘Traitor!’

I ducked with a curse. It was Ott’s falcon, Niriviel. The bird screamed low over my head, shrieking, and alighted on the roof of the wheelhouse. It was the fourth time this week.

‘Bird!’ I sputtered. ‘I swear on the Blessed Tree, if you ever come at me like that again-’

‘My master orders me to announce my mission!’ it shrilled. ‘I go on reconnaissance. My master requires you to inform me of the distance between the ships.’

‘The distance? About thirty miles, currently, but see here-’

‘I hate you. You’re a mutineer, a friend of Pathkendle and the Isiq girl. Why aren’t you in chains?’

On the deck below, Darius Plapp looked up and grinned. The ganglord was working the mizzen halyards, along with twenty of his lackeys. The dispirited Burnscovers were far forward at the jiggermast. I had separated the gangs after a warning from Sergeant Haddismal that they were itching for a fight.

‘Captain Rose finds me more useful here than in the brig,’ I told the falcon. ‘Now listen, bird, stay well above that ship, we don’t know what sort of weapons they-’

‘Some enemies sail over the horizon, coveting our land and gold,’ cried the falcon, ‘but worse are the sons of Arqual whom the Emperor has showered with love, and who do not love him in return.’

‘Showered with love! Oh flap off, you blary simpleton!’

Niriviel stepped from the roof, beat his wings, and shot away southwards. The bird’s abuses make me livid, but I can’t manage to hate him for long. The poor beast was lost for a month after the Red Storm, and Ott seemed almost human in the way he nursed him back to strength — feeding him bite after bite of raw, fresh chicken, along with ample fibs about the greatness of Arqual and the vileness of her enemies. I think often of Hercol’s assessment: ‘Niriviel is a child soldier: trained in fanaticism, more a believer than those who taught him to believe.’ In other words, a simpleton. But a useful one: he might well come back with knowledge that would save the ship.

‘Why in Pitfire are we still tackin’ north?’ grunted Darius Plapp. ‘This is blary suicide. We should be runnin’ downwind.’

‘If we need tactical advice we’ll inform you, Plapp,’ I said.

‘Oppo, Mr Fiffengurt, sir.’

I could have had him sent to the brig for that sneering tone, but instead I pretended not to notice. Lately I am tempted to indulge the ganglords (the one who walks free, and the other who controls his little kingdom from the brig) so long as they don’t set the lads on one another like so many dogs.

Once again there is peace between them: a seething, hate-heavy peace. Rose too has taken certain steps to foster it, despite making a savage example of Kruno Burnscove. A month ago, when the Burnscove Boys turned in that deathsmoke-addicted Plapp, I’d expected the poor wretch to be hanged. Rose had promised no less, and Rin knows he’s bloody-minded enough. But instead he shackled the man to the rail near the left-handed stinkpots.¹¹ Four times a day, a Turach lit a deathsmoke cigar and left it burning in a steel bowl some five yards away. It was clearly torture. He could catch whiffs of the drug when the wind allowed: just enough to whet the knife of his craving. His howls were like those of a man awake during the amputation of his legs. What’s more, every last hand saw the wretch when they came to void their bladders: saw how he pulled at the shackles until his wrists bled, thrashed against the deck until his face was one black bruise. It may even have scared a few lads away from the drug. Whether this one will survive the ordeal I cannot guess.

We went on tacking north. Clouds rolled in, their grey bellies heavy with rain, although for now it refused to fall. The wind freshened as well: soon we were at fifteen knots. Elkstem and I watched the Behemoth, and after a bit we exchanged a smile. The gap between us was no longer shrinking: indeed it was, ever so slightly, growing.