The Night of the Swarm

— and shuffled on, half-frozen, dogged as the chain gang they resembled.

When the way was too steep, they walked; when the light was gone they lit torches. Hercol shouted at them over the wind: ‘Move you fingers, wiggle your toes inside your boots! Let them seize up and they’ll snap like carrots!’ Pazel felt the fire beetle in his coat, and fought the urge to put the thing into his mouth. Not yet. Somehow they kept going, right around the peak, and came at last to Isarak Tower.

It was a grander shelter than Pazel had expected: a soaring ruin two hundred feet tall, though its crown was shorn off like an old forest snag. The great doors were long gone, and snow had filled the bottom floor, but a stone staircase hugged the inner wall, and when they dragged themselves to the second floor they found it windowless and dry. By now the humans and the dlomu were so cold they could barely speak. They rushed about in the dark, swearing in many tongues, brushing the snow from the firewood. Aya Rin, please let it burn, Pazel thought, maniacally wiggling his toes.

Neda and Big Skip appeared with two more armloads of sticks: Pazel had no idea where they had come from. They mounded all the wood together, lit pine cones by the torches and nudged the cones under the pile. Hercol bent and blew. There was a glimmer, then a tongue of flame; then the dead wood roared to life. Soon everyone was crowding around the blaze, stripping off their wet clothes and putting on dry: men, women, human, ixchel, dlomu, selk. Only Cayer Vispek changed alone, far from light or warmth.

The selk passed a skin about, and they all took a sip of the smoky selk wine. For a few minutes even Pazel’s fingertips were warm. In the dimming light he looked around for his friends. There was Thasha, still dressing: her bare legs pale and strong, her wind-chapped lips finding his own for a haphazard kiss. There were Ensyl and Myett, laughing among the embers, drying each other frantically with Hercol’s gift-cloth from Ularamyth. And Neeps? Pazel turned in a circle. His friend was nowhere in sight. He asked the others: no one knew where he had gone.

‘He was acting a bit strange after we got out of the snow,’ said Thasha. ‘Holding his hands up in front of him as we went. I thought he was afraid of his fingers breaking off.’

‘Neeps!’ Pazel shouted. ‘Speak up, mate, where are you?’ Only his own voice, echoing; then a silence that chilled his blood.

And then, very faintly, a moan. Pazel froze. The sound came again: from somewhere overhead. With Thasha beside him he ran to the staircase and climbed headlong, feeling out the steps in the dark. The third floor was windowless like the first, but the voice — no, voices — were coming from higher still.

The fourth floor had a large pair of windows. Through one, the little Southern moon was shining on a snow- dusted floor; and Pazel saw fresh footprints, and clothes discarded in haste. Before the other, darker window, two figures were embracing, their voices low and urgent, their bodies a study in contrasts: tall and short, jet black and almost-white. Unaware of the intrusion, they moved together, holding on so tightly they seemed scarcely able to breathe; and yet their limbs struggled to tighten further, as though the lack of any distance between them were still too much distance, and must somehow be overcome.

Thasha tugged Pazel away.

On the third floor steps they sat in darkness, stunned. Neeps cried out. Thasha held Pazel’s hand, and he remembered what it felt like, when the hand was webbed, when the woman who touched you was not human but this other thing, this cousin-creature, with skin like a dolphin’s or a seal’s.

They were about to go down to the others when Lunja suddenly crashed into their midst, still fastening the buckle on her belt.

‘You!’ she snapped at them. ‘You keep him away from me now! Do you both hear me plainly? My work is done!’

She shoved past them, a hand covering her mouth. Thasha went after her, but Pazel climbed the stairs again to find Neeps standing barefoot in the snow, his trousers pulled on hastily — by Lunja? — and his hands in fists. He was staring vacantly at the floor, and singing under his breath: a weird, wordless tune. Pazel led him to the moonlit window and raised his chin: Neeps’ eyes were solid black.

‘You mucking impossible Gods-damned-’

Pazel broke off, glad that no one was there to see his own eyes stream with tears. Neeps stood insensate, like a deathsmoker, like a stump. But it was all right, all right at last. He was in nuhzat. Pazel embraced him, and smelled the sweat and grime of that endless day. There was no smell of lemons at all.

‘One down,’ said Thasha, gazing out through the gap in the wall, ‘and all those mountains still to go, by the Tree.’

‘Warmer air is coming from the east,’ said Thaulinin. ‘Winter does not yet reign supreme, last night’s cold notwithstanding.’

Pazel stepped up beside them. It was early, most of the others were just beginning to stir. He and Thasha had found Thaulinin here on the highest (remaining) floor of the tower. Warm air might be coming, but it was not here yet. The wind gnawed at any bit of Pazel’s skin it found uncovered. Beads of ice had formed in Thasha’s hair.

Thaulinin passed him a selk telescope, and showed him the slide-whistle manner of its focusing. ‘I saw hrathmogs at sunrise,’ he said. ‘A great host of the creatures, marching along a lesser road there in the south. And dlomic riders along that stretch of river, further yet. Neither of them was bound for the high country, however. And from this vantage I can see the road ahead in some dozen places. Not much of it, to be sure — a bend here, a short stretch there. I had hoped for better: when last I came this way, this tower had five more stories, and one could see all the way to the aqueduct on Mount Urakan, greatest of the Nine Peaks.’

‘How many centuries ago was that?’ asked Thasha.

Thaulinin smiled. ‘Just two. But there has been an earthquake since. We are fortunate: no man or beast appears to be moving on the Nine Peaks Road. The high country is empty, except for foxes and mountain goats. Perhaps Macadra has forgotten its existence altogether, or merely decided the way was too treacherous for anyone to use. If the latter, we must make haste to prove her wrong.’

Soon the party was back on the trail. At first it threaded a path between towering boulders, but Pazel could see bright sun ahead, and his spirits rose. Just before the trail emerged from the rocks Thaulinin called them together.

‘We are stepping up onto the spine of the mountains, and a long stretch of the Royal Highway. This means we shall often be visible from afar. That cannot be helped, but there are measures we should take to aid our chances. Do not shout: echoes travel for miles if the wind is right. Your shields are wrapped in leather, and your scabbards, buckles and the like are all dulled with paint. But your blades will reflect the sun, so think carefully when you draw them.’

‘And the dlomu must remember their eyes, which outshine silver,’ added Valgrif.

Out they stepped onto the Highway. It was a relic, of course: the broad stones cracked and heaving, and ice and scree burying them in many places. Still it was pleasanter walking, for the Highway neither climbed nor descended much, and here at least it hugged no frightening cliffs. The snows had yet to claim this open land. Sinewy bushes and low, storm-blasted trees grew alongside ruined walls and broken colonnades. There were even patches of late wildflowers, yellow and scarlet, lifting their tiny heads among the stones.

Pazel and Thasha walked with Neeps, and Pazel found himself smiling. His friend was his old, cheeky self, teasing Thasha about the way she’d tried to blackmail him on the Chathrand, a lifetime ago it seemed, by promising to accuse him of stealing her necklace.

‘If only I blary had,’ he said. ‘Imagine if you’d never put that cursed thing around your neck again, never let Arunis get that power over you.’

‘Don’t even start with the if’s,’ said Thasha, smiling in turn.

‘If, if, if.’

He was healed, at least for the present. But when he thought Pazel and Thasha were looking elsewhere he shot glances over his shoulder. Pazel knew why: Lunja was behind them, walking with Mandric and Neda. She had not said a word to any of them since dawn.

They rounded the second peak, just a few miles from the first, before the sun was halfway to its zenith. Nor did the third appear too distant. But now the destruction caused by the old earthquake grew more severe. In one place the ground had been forced up nearly twenty feet, road and ruins and all, only to drop again a quarter-mile on. At another they were forced to leave the road and walk for miles around a gigantic fissure that had opened across their path. When at last they returned to the road Hercol looked back over the fissure and shook his head.