The Night of the Swarm

hundred feet above the deck. What had they seen, though? I heard ‘shiny’ and ‘spinning’ on a few lips, but nothing I could make sense of.

I ran as far the forecastle house and back again, and in that time all but a few dozen sailors had made it safely to the deck. But there was trouble at the hatches. The previous attack had brought men to the topdeck in their hundreds — perhaps twice as many as could be sensibly used to fight the fires — and now they’d been joined by two hundred more from the rigging. Many were wounded; some were in stretchers. Add to this the hoses, buckets, fire brooms, fallen cables, scorched canvas and other debris in and around the hatches and it made for awful bottlenecks. Rose was nearby again, howling and kicking men down the ladderways. Somehow, in a solid shoving mass, they went. But it was not fast enough for Rose. He drew his sword and jabbed the descending men with the point, between the shoulders. A few more seconds and the last men were squeezing down.

‘Back from the hatches! Stand clear!’ Rose whirled around and looked at the sky once more. ‘Great flaming Gods!’ he howled. ‘Fiffengurt, you mucking fool!’

I caught a glimpse of the missile — a cube of glass the size of a house, plummeting from above. Then Rose slammed into me like a stampeding rhino, and he bore me backwards into the tonnage hatch.

There was battle-netting over it, of course, but the nets were scorched, and we narrowly missed a hole that would have meant the death of us both. The captain seized me in a bear hug and rolled, three or four times, and when we stopped he was above me, and the dark mass of the longboat on its sling loomed over us like an umbrella. And then came the blast.

It was not as loud as I expected and no conflagration followed. Instead I heard a sound like fine furious hail, and the sky around the longboat filled with glass. The cube had exploded in mid-air, showering the Chathrand in a million needle-thin slivers of death. Screams erupted from the ladderways: not everyone had made it safely below.

‘Gods, what a weapon!’ Ott’s voiced echoed up through the tonnage shaft. I turned my head: there he was, one deck below, displaying a handful of sharp, shattered crystals. ‘It could kill an entire ship’s company, and leave the vessel perfectly sound!’ he cried, delighted.

‘Captain,’ I said, ‘you saved my life.’

Rose looked at me somewhat hatefully, as if I’d accused him of a crime. Then he heaved himself over so that we lay side by side. ‘Bedour spoke the truth,’ he said. ‘Captain Bedour. He’d seen it used, that weapon. He knew what was coming at us out of the sky.’ Rose stared up at the belly of the longboat. ‘I was dead, Fiffengurt. The ghosts were thick over the water, clawing at me, biting.’ He raised a hand to his face, remembering. ‘They were trying to tear my soul away from this flesh. Your time’s come, they said. You’re one of us now. Let go. Give in.’

‘You were lifeless on the deck,’ I said. ‘We did everything we could to revive you. Chadfallow finally gave up.’

‘Yes,’ said Rose, ‘but I didn’t. They were going to have to rip me away. And they were getting down to it too. Oggosk’s threats scared them off at first. They need this ship to carry them to their final rest, and don’t fancy being cast to the winds. But the eldest ghosts are so tired of being trapped aboard Chathrand that they have ceased to care. They kept at me, even on the deck. My grip on this flesh was breaking. In the end it was the bird that saved me.’

‘The b-b-?’

‘Ott’s falcon. It spoke of that cube, and Bedour overheard. He recognised the cube, somehow, and knew it would be the end of the Chathrand.¹² And there was only one man aboard who could do something about it. That was when they understood that they had no choice. The ghosts shocked my heart back into service, so that I could save this ship.’

His eyes drifted skyward. ‘You see, Fiffengurt? Everyone, even the dead, ultimately depend on Nilus Rose.’ Then he looked at me and barked: ‘Off your back, Quartermaster! Did some other commander grant you a holiday? Get the men to their blary stations! We shall tack west, a close reach around that island! Now, Fiffengurt. I want immediate headway, is that clear?’

He was alive, all right. And in the next few minutes, as the light failed, he showed us what he’d been building those many hours. It was a barge made of barrels, with a sturdy platform atop it, and a steel tripod mounted on the latter. Dangling from the tripod was a big emergency signal lantern: one of our spares. Coiled beneath it, in a kind of metal chimney, was a long braid of tobacco leaves. The end of the braid was tucked into the lamp’s ignition chamber.

‘A tobacco fuse,’ said Sandor Ott, inspecting the contraption with a smile. ‘Very good, Captain. How long do you imagine it will burn?’

‘Longer than my patience with your insolent questions.’ He picked up a fine hand-drill and set about boring a tiny hole near the top of one of the barrels. This action he repeated on every second barrel, until he had worked his way completely around the barge. Then he lifted an oil canister and soaked the lamp’s wick, but poured none at all into the tank beneath it.

Ott looked at me; his eyes said, Your skipper’s a madman. The lamp would light, sure enough, but with an empty tank it would not shine for more than a minute.

I had a prior worry, though. ‘Captain, you do realise that it’s only just gotten dark?’

‘Since I am neither blind nor witless, yes, I do.’

‘Oppo, Captain. What I mean is, they may have been able to see us, when we made our turn for westward.’

‘May have? Your imprecision wears on me today, Fiffengurt. They did see us; the point is not open to question. Tanner! Get this barge above, along with the deadweights. Fiffengurt, see that no one comes anywhere near us with a source of light — douse every light on the topdeck, in fact. And close the gunports. And see that the gallery windows stay dark. And bring me four cables, six fathoms long apiece. Use the fallen rigging, there is more than enough.’

We all scrambled. Tanner’s men hoisted the barge by cargo-crane to the topdeck, which was by now quite dark. The Chathrand was on her new heading already, drawing away west of the island’s rocky point. Behind us, the Behemoth glowed like a weird, pale gaslamp, and the daughter-ship had gained another several miles. At this rate it would catch us by morning.

Rose stood by his invention for some fifteen minutes in silence, as we dragged the four lines he wanted into position, and secured them to Mr Tarsel’s 200-pound deadweights. Then Rose ordered the barge lifted a few feet in the air. On her underside we found four iron rings, and to these we tied the other ends of the cables. Then Rose struck a match and eased it into the metal chimney. The odour of sweet tobacco wafted over us.

‘Get her afloat,’ he said.

We raised the barge and swung it over the rail. Deadweights dangling, the whole assemblage descended into the lightless sea. When it was safely afloat Rose gave the order to cut it loose.

‘Now, Officers,’ he said, looking at us all, ‘hard about, and brace up fore and aft. We are going east around that headland. As we did off Talturi: silent and invisible. Go to.’

It was vintage Rose. The turn was sharp but not perilous, and the wind from the south was as friendly to our new course as it had been to our old. The men stepped lively, too: they knew Rose was trying to bluff death once again, somehow, even if they couldn’t guess the particulars.

The daughter-ship, in no fear of us apparently, still had her running lights ablaze. She had not turned to intercept us, but was coming on straight at the point. For nearly two hours she kept that course, as we made east under the cover of those blessed clouds. Once the Behemoth fired another round of living fireballs, and we braced ourselves for the worst. Two went east, three west, but they all burned out well before they neared us, and no one was the wiser of our position, I’m sure.

Suddenly, miles behind us to the east, a light flared up bright and fitful. It was the signal-lamp, of course, and it sputtered and winked and died in thirty seconds, just as Rose had intended. And not three minutes later his gamble paid off: the daughter-ship broke westwards round the point.

What could I do but smile? The ruse was brilliant. We’d had to break left or right around sprawling Phyreis, and had waited to choose until the darkness was almost upon us. But under that barrage of hellish weapons we’d seemed to panic, turning west before the light was truly gone. A feint? Well maybe. The daughter-ship had taken no chances and kept straight on, hoping for some sign, some giveaway. And that’s what Rose’s decoy had provided. It would seem an accident: a carelessly opened gunport, a lamp carried above deck by some foolish lad and quickly