The Night of the Swarm

voyage fighting Ensyl and Diadrelu and their giant friends. Myett had been as committed as any ixchel to the hatred of human beings, and heaven knew there was reason for it. But loyalty to her lover had been the bedrock of that hate. She had cleaved to Taliktrum, Diadrelu’s nephew, before and after his rise to power. After he became a visionary, Myett had argued with the doubters, rabidly insistent that he was all that he claimed. Too funny. All along the debate had been with herself.

She could not pinpoint when the change had come. After the flame-trolls, surely, and before the catastrophe in the forest. Was it the night she dreamed her grandfather’s death, and woke sobbing, bewildered, unable to recall for nearly half a minute that she’d left him safe and sound on the Chathrand? Was it when the giants wept for their dead, and she had nowhere to be but right there beside them, witnessing grief that looked and sounded for all the world like ixchel grief? Or the night she saw Thasha and Pazel Pathkendle slip away to make love, and followed them, unseen of course, and vaguely disappointed to learn that this, too, was not a thing her people did better than giants.

Four hundred feet, and the rim of the crater was in sight. A tearing wind broke around her, trying her grip. The crack had narrowed, too: Myett found fewer places to wedge her body, rest her weight. She could see the large, shaggy nests atop the pinnacle, now, and one grey wing, spread wide to bask in the sun.

Whenever it had happened, the change was real. She stood with Ensyl, now — and heaven help her, the giants. The humans. She would have to remember to hate them, secretly, remind herself of what they were. Or else become one. That was Diadrelu’s choice, and Ensyl’s. Myett would never go that far, never risk becoming a mascot. But the quest was hers now, and she would give more than they did, more than they ever could. It had become a cause to live for, rather than a slower, grander way to die.

She stopped. Her muscles twitching, her fingers raw. She was a hundred feet above the highest leaf-layer, seeing the wider world for the first time in days. She knew that the descent would take all her strength, if indeed she had not gone too far already. The wind tore at her, but she would not retreat without the view she’d come for. Aching, she leaned out from the wall.

The ruins stood almost exactly at the Forest’s centre. To the south, dark hills pressed close to the crater’s rim. A shimmer of reflected sunlight marked the place where the mighty Angungra cut through the crater wall and swept away, into a deepening gorge. A mist hung over that gorge, and beyond it there were mountains, lower than the cold peaks they had passed through, but tight and forbidding all the same. And endless, too: if they somehow escaped this Forest they would have little choice but to brave those mountains — with no guide who had ever set foot there, no notion of what lay beyond.

Or almost none.

There is hope downriver, between the mountains and the sea. The strange message from Vasparhaven, the Spider Temple, came back to her with sudden irony. Hope. Maybe it was out there, somewhere, hidden in this great arbitrary maze of a world. But what of it? The notion seemed cruel, like showing a coin to a beggar, then tossing it away into a field.

Carefully, she turned to face the north. The snow-capped range through which they had come loomed dark and massive. Astonishing to think that a footpath snaked through those peaks, and down again, to the city where they’d left their ship, their one real hope of any life save the life of castaways. To say nothing of kinfolk, clan brothers and sisters, her grandfather. . and Taliktrum.

He was back there in Masalym. The only ixchel in that vast city of dlomu. Her lover, exiled by his own choosing. And by the impossible, the suffocating neediness of their clan.

I should be with you. I should have sought you out.

Nonsense, of course. Taliktrum had spurned her, called her an entertainment. If Myett had abandoned both the ship and this expedition, if she somehow found him in that huge dark hive of a city, Taliktrum would only have called her a fool. And been right in doing so. Myett was done with foolishness: she too had made decisions, chosen sides. It was a strange fate, to be fighting alongside giants, sworn enemies, for an abstraction called the world. But Myett knew what she and Ensyl could give them, how ixchel skills might help them all survive, and that certainty of being needed was what one felt in a clan.

It was not passion, not ‘starlight in the blood’ as the poets had it, not the bliss she had felt when Taliktrum was at his best, when he managed to be loving and kind. But it was good, they were good; even Hercol had forgiven and embraced her. She looked down, mapping out her descent.

Then her brow furrowed. What was blocking the sun?

Instinct came too late. Myett’s hand flew to her knife, but the hawk was already on her, grey wings filling her vision, shrill cry rending the air. Talons longer than her arm bit into her flesh.

She was crushed, barely able to breathe. But as the hawk wheeled away from the tower she managed to pass the knife from her half-pinned arm to her teeth. Her thoughts exploding. She would fall. She would die. She would work the arm free, stab the bird, master it, make it land. No quitting. No quitting. The talons moved. Her arm slid free.

At once she buried the knife in the bird’s leg. Its reaction was swift and violent, a sharp jerking stall, and Myett was thrown, whirling, falling, falling to her death. The sun whirled, the earth flashed in circles around her, the tower wall surged by faster and faster, she was dead, she was surely dead, a life of lust and bitterness and rage-

The hawk snatched her from the air. Myett felt its black beak tighten as it pulled out of the fall, straining, the tug of the earth so strong she thought her ears must be bleeding. Then they rose above the top leaf-layer and shot away to the south, and the hawk passed her back into his claw, slick now with the blood she had drawn. One eye, coral-red and brilliant, fixed upon her.

‘If you fight me,’ said the hawk distinctly, ‘I will pinch that arm until it dies.’

2

Flesh, Stone and Spirit

11 Modobrin 941

240th day from Etherhorde

The mighty are beggars, child. They rattle silver cups by the roadside, pleading for love.

Dlomic folk song

Sandor Ott paced the cabin in a circle. His movements as always were fluid, measured, utterly precise. He spoke no offhand words, made no careless sounds, revealed nothing but what he chose to in the cast of his old, scarred face. His hands hung loose; his knife was visible but sheathed. As he walked, his eyes remained fixed on the circle’s centre: the spot where Captain Nilus Rotheby Rose sat scowling, fidgeting, in a chair barely large enough to accommodate his bulk.

The captain’s eyes were bloodshot; his red beard was a fright. It was his own day cabin he sat in, under the assassin’s gaze. The chair was the one he usually gave to the least favoured guest at his dinner table.

Rose crossed his burly arms. Sandor Ott continued circling. For some reason he had also brought his longbow — huge, stained, savage — and propped it near the stern galleries, along with several arrows. Target practice? Shooting gulls from the window? Rose scratched the back of his neck, trying to keep the old killer in sight.

Maybe he would never speak. It was even possible that his thoughts were not with the captain at all, no matter how much he drilled with his eyes. Some people whittled sticks when they were concentrating. Sandor Ott tormented people, stripped their certainties away, needled them with doubts.

There was a small table within the captain’s reach, and a flagon of wine atop it. Rose snatched it up and pulled the stopper. His grip was weaker than a year ago: he had lost two fingers in a fight with Arunis. Rose had trod on one of them, heard the knuckle crack beneath his boot. Horrible the things that came back to him, the