The Night of the Swarm

‘You’re talking nonsense,’ said Neda. ‘The spell didn’t kill me. Probably it saved my life a few times. Pazel has it worse. I can pretend to be normal, but he can’t hide those fits.’

‘You sound so. .’

‘Foreign?’ said Neda. ‘Religious?’

‘Old, I was going to say. Much older than twenty-two.’

‘The last six years were longer than the first sixteen. They were my second life.’

‘The first one ended when you took your vows?’

Neda didn’t know how to respond. It was certainly what she’d told her masters, and herself.

The sunlight flickered: shapes were passing the windows. Suthinia got to her feet.

‘Come with me,’ she said.

‘Where are we going?’

‘I can’t say exactly. Shopping?’

‘Mother, I’m a sfvantskor. I don’t want to go shopping.’

Suthinia bent and pulled on her shoes. ‘Neither do I, love, but don’t you know how this works? You’re still dreaming. What happens here is not under my control, or yours. And if you don’t keep moving the dream changes the world around you. Radically, sometimes. Trust me, it’s better just to take to your feet.’

In the garden, Chadfallow was sitting alone with drooping shoulders. ‘Where is Pazel?’ Suthinia asked.

‘Gone swimming,’ said the doctor. ‘A murth-girl came and took his hand, and they went off together to the Haunted Coast.’

‘Well then,’ said Suthinia. ‘Why don’t you stop moping and come with us?’

Chadfallow shook his head sadly. ‘Because that is not my fate.’

They left him there in the garden, and stared downhill towards the city. The houses rippled in the blazing sun. ‘Ormael is so much better with ixchel about,’ Suthinia declared. ‘Once we passed the sanctuary law they started coming here on any boat with a hold to hide in. You wouldn’t believe how quickly they’ve rid us of rats.’

‘Mother,’ said Neda, ‘we have to concentrate. Is there any way you can get a message to the Chathrand for us? They don’t even know that we’re alive.’

‘A message to the Chathrand! I don’t know if I have the power, darling. Yes, I warned Pazel about Macadra, but I played only a small part in that chain. The message began with your ally Felthrup, who has apparently learned to swim the River of Shadows better than most beings alive. He passed the message to my old teacher, Pazel Doldur, for whom your brother is named. Doldur is long dead; he visited me as a ghost. All I had to do was pass the warning on to Pazel, the same way I’m speaking to you today. I can’t summon the dead.’

‘Then go into the River yourself. Don’t you know how to swim?’

Suthinia laughed. ‘I’m from Bali Adro, Neda. Half my school mates were dlomu.’ She waved her hand over Ormael. ‘I can swim rings around these people. But that’s hardly the point. Look, I’ll show you.’

At their feet there was a sewer drain set in the road. It had not been there a moment before. The two women crouched beside it, and Suthinia placed her hand upon the iron grille. Neda could hear water flowing beneath them. But as she listened the sound grew strange: deeper, wilder, and less like water than a roaring wind. As with certain moments during their journey on the Ansyndra, she had a terrifying sensation of bottomless depths under their feet. But this was much more close and fierce. Whatever fell into that raging torrent would be swept away like a leaf.

Suthinia pulled. The grille rose on creaking hinges. Neda gripped her arm and leaned away.

‘Felthrup Stargraven,’ said her mother. ‘Maybe he’s down there, somewhere, in one of the public houses on the riverbanks. I could climb in and search.’

Neda shook her head vehemently. ‘Let’s go,’ she said. ‘Don’t make that sort of thing happen again.’

They passed the crossroads where one could turn east to the Cinderling, or west towards the flikkermen’s hovels on the edges of the Crab Fens. On their left, men were cutting hay with fluid sweeps of their scythes.

‘I’ve cast just two major spells in my lifetime,’ said Suthinia. ‘The first let me collect your dream-essence, which I’m still using to this day. That was a success; neither of you suffered, or even noticed what I’d done. The second-’

‘Created our Gifts,’ said Neda.

Suthinia looked at her. ‘It’s kind of you not to call them curses. But remember, darling: your Gifts were already there. The charm only strengthened them. You had a splendid memory to begin with, just as Pazel had a way with languages.’

There was a market just inside the gate. They milled quickly through the familiar Ormali crowds, buying bread, wine, candles, matches, flowers.

‘I wish we could have brought Pazel along,’ said Neda. ‘But that wasn’t really him I saw, was it? Just a fake, a dream-dummy.’

‘That boy was no fake,’ said her mother, squeezing a pear, ‘but he was not the whole boy, either. That was the part of Pazel who lives in your mind. He might have come along with us, I suppose, but he couldn’t tell us anything we don’t already know.’

‘I must do some telling,’ said Neda, ‘before one of us wakes.’

‘Please do,’ said Suthinia. ‘For the past two weeks neither of you has done much dreaming. And when you do it’s never about where you are at the moment. Normally a few things appear in your dreams and Pazel’s, more or less the same. A face, a river, the shape of a hill. Those things, I guess, are what you’re really seeing. But lately you’ve been almost invisible. I could feel that you were safe and sleeping deeply, but no more. Where are you?’

Neda stopped short. Confused, she raised a hand and touched her lips. She had been about to say the word Ularamyth, but could not. Her mouth simply disobeyed her, refused to form the words.

‘What’s wrong, my dear?’ said her mother.

‘There something-’

Once again she got no further. She had meant to say something about the place where we are, but the words would not come. The Secret Vale was not to be spoken of, apparently. Not even in dreams.

‘Never mind,’ said Suthinia, touching her arm. ‘Tell me what you want your friends on the Chathrand to know.’

‘We have the Nilstone,’ said Neda.

Suthinia nodded. ‘Yes, I could sense that. Oh Neda, I’m so proud of you, and afraid for you. I hope you don’t have to keep it long.’

‘We’re with the selk,’ said Neda.

Her mother beamed. ‘I thought so. I heard their music in your heads. And I saw Ramachni speaking to one of them, from a tree. Hold these flowers for me, while I pay the man.’

‘And Arunis is dead.’

As soon as Neda spoke, the world went mad. Suthinia turned, screaming like a banshee, letting her purchases fall from her arms. The crowd drew away from her, then fell away, the market melting and swirling like a kaleidoscope, with only the two of them still and clear. Suthinia grabbed Neda’s shoulders, her nails biting through the robe, and several seconds passed before Neda understood that her mother had not lost her mind.

‘You!’ she was screaming. ‘You, you!’

Or had she? Neda had lost her faith and it felt like dying. Suthinia had crossed the Ruling Sea and lost everything. Her family, her people, her language, the whole Southern world. She had even lost her century: the Red Storm had taken that. All to fight a mage who had slipped through their fingers. A mage who had hunted down and killed nearly everyone who came with her from the South. Arunis had been the torture of her life. And the reason, the cause. ‘My children!’ she screamed for the whole world’s hearing. ‘My children got you, you horror, you walking piece of hell!’

Suddenly her mother’s eyes darted. Neda tried to hold her but could not. Suthinia made a quick, unnatural lunge past Neda’s shoulder, and when Neda turned she found herself alone by the city gate.

She shook her head. Suthinia had woken herself up.