The Night of the Swarm

You see the chancellor’s dilemma. I have laid a banquet of embarrassments before him, and he must choose his seat and dine.

But I do not wish him to choose assault — not yet. I need eight days and nights. By the eve of the Donors’ Conference my book will be complete, and the allies to whom I wrote in desperation will have come in force — if they are coming at all. Until then I need my guards to protect me from the Fulbreech freaks, and the freaks and their rich mums to hold off the chancellor.

And so today I have lied. I sent the mendicant with a message for the freaks under my window:

Dear Sirs: Perhaps I have, indeed, been unfair in my treatment of Greysan Fulbreech. I am reading your proposed endings with an open mind, and find much to my liking. I will give them full and favourable consideration — provided, of course, that the chancellor does not put an UNTIMELY END to this MOST SACRED EFFORT to recount the HEROIC STORY OF OUR FOREFATHERS.

Merely a precaution: I shall of course give their scribbles no consideration at all. How loathsome, this manoeuvre. And how fitting. The survivors of the voyage were saved as often by enemies as loved ones. We needed them, they needed us; we stained our hands scarlet together. The chancellor is quite right to fear for his school; when my book is published many donors will abandon us, and weeds will grow high about these halls. But I am right to fight him, to not let him falsify the past. On my desk at home, Sandor Ott’s skull grins in the shadows; I can almost hear his taunts: We cannot help it, we ambitious men. We make common cause with fiends.

16

Nine Matches

6 Halar 942

265th day from Etherhorde

Neda sat cross-legged in the unfurnished room. Upon her lap a smooth board, and on the board a sheet of linen paper. In her hand the most exquisite pen she had ever touched, with a nib of pure gold and a body carved from the deep red root of a mountain cypress.

It was a gift of the selk. They hoped she would keep it; they hoped a love for Alifros would imbue the words she wrote with it and that those words would touch many hearts.

On the floor in front of her were two smooth stones. One weighed down the stack of blank sheets the selk had given her. The other lay atop the pages she had already filled with transcriptions from the Book of the Old Faith. Over the three days she had been writing, the second stack had grown to nearly five inches. The stack of empty pages shrank each day but the selk always brought more.

Cayer Vispek had not yet seen the marvellous pen. Neda had found a simpler one in the common room and used that when he came near. If he saw the pen he would tell her to leave it behind.

She wrung the stiffness from her hand and started again. Her arm raced across the sheet, the words spilling out in a shape that declared her mongrel heart: angular Mzithrini characters ever so slightly distorted by the rounded, flowing style of an Ormali schoolgirl.

Then will you know thy calling: for the Dragon seeketh naught but the Dragon’s prey, and never dines on base creatures of the barnyard, in their own filth confined.

Memory was a weapon, memory was a curse. As Neda wrote the phrase she could see the face of her first master, the high priest known as the Babqri Father, reciting it on the day of her induction. The Father had rarely smiled, but that day he had glowed. Neda was his discovery. He had plucked her from a bleak life of concubinage and made her an aspirant to the order of the sfvantskors, the first non-Mzithrini ever to receive such a singular honour. That day she would begin the training, renounce her former life, devote herself for ever to the Gods. She remembered the mischief in his eyes: the choice of her had already become a scandal. Being Neda, she could also recall his smells (green onions, sweat), his silk robe (a long thread had trailed down his back from the golden collar, as though he were being unravelled by imps), his ailments (a toothache, a wheeze when he rose from a chair, a fresh scratch on his left wrist given to him by his favourite alley cat, whom he called Shadow and the village boys called Smoky and the half-blind cook in the refectory called Dirty Thief).

So will thy purpose seize you: in jaws of iron and enduring flame.

Being Neda, memory-blessed, she could hold up that long-lost day for inspection as a jeweller might a ring. There was the colossal edifice of the shrine, its dark interior still cold though the city itself was steaming. There was the pitcher of sacramental milk (small chip in base of handle), the golden cups (two dented, but the dents had noble histories), the basin where the aspirants would wash their hands. There were the lonely candles (twenty-four green and burning two green and not burning sixteen white and burning five white and not burning one white fallen sideways abandoned dust-covered forgotten for ever by everyone but Neda, mongrel monster prodigy freak).

The way of the sfvantskor is perfection. Thy soul will make a slave of the flesh, whereas in lesser men the flesh takes mastery of the soul.

And there were the other youths come for training (Sparro Suridin Adel Ommet Ingri Jalantri Tujinor Kat’jil Perek Fynn Ushatai Mendhur Malabron), all but six of whom would fail the initial tests. All but six of whom would go home to devastated families, to start the long, loud complaint that a foreign girl had been given what they themselves were denied.

The way of the sfvantskor is perfection.

Weapon, curse. Neda had understood the connection between the two for a very long time. Memory (the weapon) gave her power over others, reminded her of their weaknesses, the word or notion or name that brought them to tears, to fury, to a readiness to do as she wished. Memory (the curse) flooded her with proof that she was stumbling on her chosen path.

The young sfvantskor’s mind had to be nurtured by the elders, cleansed of distraction, pruned of idle curiosity, disciplined in the service of the Unseen. Above all, it had to be equipped with a vision of Alifros and its heavens, its hells, its mystic byways; a vision that told the sfvantskors where they stood and why they were suffered to live and breathe and consume the bounty of the world.

It was a beautiful vision. The world was one family: rocks, trees, people, white monkeys, black crocodiles, birds, bacteria, dust. All one. The wind its breath, the waters its blood. The night simply the closing of one great, shared, polyfaceted eye. But Alifros was also a family adrift, a ragtag entity wandering a savage universe. The sfvantskors were its defenders, the guards who passed the night awake.

And she, Neda, meant to abandon her post.

A spasm went through her, making her ruin a word. You don’t just mean to, she thought, you’ve done it already. For belief did not end with a public renunciation, a moment when one’s brethren called one a heretic, and damned. Belief ended in solitude and silence, the same way it began.

She had opened her eyes this morning and known it was over. The room was still dark; Ularamyth was quiet and still. A bird was singing outside the window, each phrase like an urgent but reasonable question, which hung unanswered in the silence until the bird could no longer stand it, and asked the question again. Finished, gone. She no longer believed. She lay there in stark terror between Lunja and Thasha, afraid to move, afraid to think. When the tears came she did not understand them. She thought: I love the Book, I love the Book more than ever. She loved her master and the Father who had trained her, and her brother sfvantskors who had fallen in battle. And she had no doubt that the Old Faith had been a gift to this world from the divine.