The Night of the Swarm

20

On 11 Halar 942, as the Chathrand crept north between scattered islets, and Pazel and his friends neared the bridge over the Parsua, Empress Maisa of Arqual declared herself to the world.

She did it through simultaneous letters to her peers on fourteen thrones, from the Crownless Lands to Noonfirth, from Tholjassa to Bodendell and Auxlei City. She did it also through anonymous placards erected overnight in every town and city of the Empire she meant to reclaim. The announcements were explicit, describing the circumstances of her overthrow, the defamation of her character, the purging of her loyal subjects, the murder of her sons. And very significantly, it announced her marriage to ‘Arqual’s proudest native son’, Fleet Admiral Eberzam Isiq.

But Maisa declared herself most clearly in the cries of the two thousand lean fighters who coalesced out of the still-snowy Highlands and swept down into Ormael City, and in the cannon-fire of the twenty ships that took the harbour at dawn.

She had timed the attack with exceptional care. Arqual had held little Ormael for almost six years, and its forces were entrenched. But in early spring the Empire found it necessary, or perhaps merely comfortable, to adjust its grip on the city-state. The new war with the Mzithrin was going its way: Commodore Darabik had led a second incursion into the Gulf of Thol — far larger than the one Isiq had witnessed on his way to the Crab Fens — and had lost far fewer ships and men than anticipated. In Etherhorde this was seen as proof of Mzithrini weakness¹⁶ and a reason to accelerate their plans for conquest.

Thus, late in the month of Modobrin, six thousand Turachs were withdrawn from Ormael to Ipulia for training in mountain warfare. Most were soon dispatched for hidden bases in the Tsordons, on the very margin of the Mzithrini heartland. Others were placed on war vessels and sent south to the Baerrid Archipelago. The White Fleet had been spotted conducting exercises north of the angry volcanic island called Serpent’s Head. There were even reports of Mzithrini vessels slipping east into the Nelu Rekere. Arqual feared nothing so much as an assault from the Rekere, which was too long and rough to guard completely. It was in the Rekere that the White Fleet had crushed Arqual’s navy in the last war. Never again would Emperor Magad be caught unprepared.

But the first assault came from the mountains, not the sea. Maisa’s foot soldiers, trained over a decade in the Crab Fens, had been moving into the sparsely patrolled Chereste Highlands for more than three years. They looked like peasants, not soldiers; and they had entered the Highlands by the rudest of Highland paths. Threadbare and shuffling, they had taken up not arms but agriculture, blending in with the mountain folk. Year after year Maisa’s emissaries had moved among these villagers: boys in rags, girls leading scrawny goats, women bent under bundles of sticks. Every one an operative, passing the Arquali checkpoints with blank faces, fearful stares. Every one with a message for the dormant fighting-force: The lake is filling, but it is not yet full. When the lake is full the dam will burst. Some will drown in the flood, but we will ride it. Listen, listen, for the bursting of the dam.

On that decisive morning, Maisa’s forces swarmed over the city’s northern wall. Ormael had faced no Highland enemies in three hundred years, and the occupiers had gradually relaxed their guard on the sleepy northern quarter. Even when the attack came the Imperial governor felt more embarrassed than afraid. Two thousand peasants? What sense did it make? Even after the redeployments of the previous month, he still had three thousand trained Arquali soldiers, including several hundred Turachs, who were each as good as five. The simpletons had not even slowed down to contest the wall itself, but had pushed deep into the northern quarter — looking for meat pies and brandy, no doubt. They were trapped. They would be slaughtered. Why had Emperor Magad condemned him to rule a land of dunces and suicides?

But the dunces fared better than expected. They were not seeking meat pies but the northern armoury, which they seized and raided; and the gates between the city’s third and fourth quarters, which they lowered and jammed, thus delaying the arrival of reinforcements. They were also joined by a number of regular Ormalis, labourers from the tanneries and the docks. This was not quite, the governor conceded, a spontaneous raid. But surely it did not amount to a revolt?

Fortune smiled on him, then: twenty ships, the bulk of Commodore Darabik’s squadron, were entering the bay in splendour — unexpected, but more than welcome under the circumstances. They were cheered by the nine other Arquali vessels still in port, and urged to land as many men as could be spared to aid in the city’s defence.

The vessels did indeed land a great number of men — but they did not leave the port. Rather, they seized the cannon placements along the waterfront, and trained them on the vessels not under their command. At the same time, Darabik’s vessels ran out their guns.

The resistance was bloody but short-lived. Of the nine vessels, seven were at anchor, with no chance whatsoever of running. The Glave and the Vengeance, two proud Arquali sloops on manoeuvres in the bay, prepared to fire on the new arrivals and were buried in ordnance.

The Vengeance sank outright; the Glave listed, her stern filling fast. Out of the palls of smoke men came swimming for their lives, and the rebels were as fierce in their rescue efforts as they had been moments before in their attack. Nearly two hundred perished in that horrible exchange, the first time Arquali had fired on Arquali in forty years. But twice as many lived, and the other vessels surrendered without a fight.

In the city, men were rising, joining the tanners and stevedores. There was some hesitation: six years earlier, Turachs had swarmed into the streets like bees, wave after killing wave, and those who had resisted were summarily executed. But when word reached the city that Arquali rebels held the bay and all its ships, doors flew open by the hundreds, and soon nearly every able-bodied Ormali fell in with Maisa’s troops. Here too the Empress had her partisans; here too there were those who stood ready to create diversions, wave the Arqualis into ambushes, lead Maisa’s forces to the jails, which were bursting with political prisoners. By midday the governor knew that the half-restored Palace of Ormael would fall, and sent out emissaries to arrange for a peaceful surrender. By mid-afternoon the last Arquali soldiers laid down their arms.

It was a cool spring day. At the old Slave Terrace (where Pazel had begun his life as a tarboy six years before) the defeated soldiers were herded together in a mob. They had a look of desperation, although only the Turachs were chained. Some had heard that they would handed over to the Mzithrinis, others that they would be run through with spears.

All that followed for good or ill (Admiral Isiq would later muse) had hinged upon a confrontation on Commodore Darabik’s flagship, the Nighthawk, two evenings before the raid.

Darabik had spent the last six years gathering his most trusted officers into his squadron. Patiently, he had probed them, learned their gripes and sympathies, and slowly stacked the deck in his favour. To a very few of these men, his soul-brothers, he had even spoken of Maisa, and the rebellion to come.

Then a fortnight ago he had taken the boldest step of all, dismissing the officers he knew would never side with Maisa, on trumped-up charges of malfeasance and graft. The charges would never survive review by the Lord Admiral; indeed, they would explode in Darabik’s face, and very likely end his career. But for the present it was ideal: the officers were recalled to Etherhorde, and their commands passed to underlings promoted by Darabik himself.

The present was all that mattered now.

On the evening in question, the Nighthawk had veered a little away from the squadron, edging closer than was strictly necessary to the perils of the Haunted Coast. There the commodore had made them linger an hour, until at last a little skiff had tacked out of the darkness and come alongside. They hoisted up the tiny vessel. She was sailed by a crew of three ruffians, but there were two passengers aboard as well: an old warrior, whose face was immediately familiar to most of Darabik’s crew; and an even older woman, whose profile struck a disturbing, dreamlike note in their recollections. Forbidden portraits, fading memories of picture-books too dangerous not to burn.

The warrior, of course, was Isiq himself. He swung down from the skiff onto the deck, and scores of men cried his name — amazed, frightened, confused. Then he and Darabik helped the lady descend.

Silence fell, though no one called for it. The oldest sailors made the sign of the Tree. The woman freed her hands from the two men and looked the crew over sharply, carefully, before she spoke.

‘You are not deceived,’ she said. ‘Your Empress has returned, and she will fight for you. Not for your glory — that is a chalice filled with brine — but for your well-being, and your children’s. And for justice, which alone can bring them to you. You do not understand me yet: never mind, you will. For now, you must think on one matter alone, and try to face it.

‘The usurper in Etherhorde does not love you, men of Arqual. Magad the Fifth has never learned love, though he demands it everywhere. Once he tried to love me, the aunt who raised him as her own. But his father was the Rake, the beast who tried to drown his mother, while she still carried Magad in her womb. The Rake, who through slander and mutiny drove me, his sister, away into exile, killed my husband and my sons. The Rake, who through his hatred at last drove Magad’s mother to walk into a smithy in Etherhorde and procure a bowl of bubbling lead and gulp it down.’

Maisa raised her hands as if to demonstrate. Long fleshless fingers, swollen knuckles, veins. But her gaze was hawklike as she studied them, and not a man aboard drew breath.

‘Hear me now. It is hate that has poisoned our lives. Magad is evil, yes, but his evil began as a canker, and that canker was born of hate. My brother taught his son to hate. When they drove me from Arqual, Magad was still a boy, too frightened and confused to know lies when he heard them. And years later, when he understood his father’s betrayal, Magad was still too weak and frightened to reform himself. But he lashed out, and slew his father, and so doubled the hatred he felt for himself. He squats now upon my throne in a deathsmoke-stupor of self-loathing, and lets the Secret Fist decide the fate of Arqual. Decide your fate, my soldiers, and the fate of those who would bear your name, if only you were there to raise them. And there are those at work in this world for whom even the Secret Fist is but a tool, and Arqual a chip to be wagered in a larger game. I speak of sorcerers. This is their war, not Arqual’s. They seek victories more scorched and savage than the vilest dreams of Sandor Ott. To them, each of you is but a pinch of black powder. You exist only to be burned. They are very clever, these plotters. But none of them was clever enough to kill Maisa of Arqual, and now their chance is gone.

‘I am an old woman,’ she went on. ‘I am sick to death of pride and status and deceit. But I would fight for your children, who will love you as children should. Who in peacetime will sit upon your knee and adore you — parents, providers, builders of a world worth living in.

‘Home, family, the bounty of love: they have all been denied you through hate. We need not fight the Mzithrin again. We need not seize the Crownless Lands. This war was sparked by Arqual’s smallest minds, in loathing of an enemy that no longer matters. An enemy that is only sailing against us because we have played cruelly on its fears.’

She paused, coughed, swallowed. Perhaps she was having trouble with her voice. But when she spoke again it was as clear as before.

‘I have been trying to convince you, of course. I am finished now.’ Then she reached for Isiq’s hand, and raised it high, and all who looked saw the lamplight dancing on a great bloodstone ring on the admiral’s finger.

‘ This man I did not have to convince,’ said Maisa. ‘He came to me with the same purpose, the same fire. They betrayed him too, finest soldier of the finest navy in all the world. They tried to kill him and his only child — the Treaty Bride, Thasha Isiq. He has taken up my banner again. And I have taken him as my prince.’

There was an involuntary roar. Then Isiq spoke for the first time, booming, ‘Silence in the ranks!’

Maisa dropped Isiq’s hand. She stepped forward, unguarded, and gazed at them with neither fear nor hope.

‘ That was well done: you have just obeyed an order from your Fleet Admiral. But look again: he has no power, unless you choose to give it. And I am the same: without your pledge I am nothing. If you stand with me, you stand with the Arqual we were all taught to cherish, and one day this fragile world will thank you. Have no doubt: it may be our only reward this side of heaven. I cannot promise victory, but I can promise my soul. I am Maisa, your Empress, and in no thing shall I ever deceive you. But you must decide whether or not to believe me — and you must decide here and now. Choose well, men of Arqual. You hold the very world in your hands.’

With that the Empress dropped her eyes. The crew held so still that Isiq heard the waves sucking and sloshing among the fog-hidden reefs.

Then a young lad stuttered: ‘M-Maisa!’ and the dam burst, all of them taking up her name and cause and not a soul holding back. In the men’s eyes Isiq saw a brilliant excitement, a hunger, an alertness to hope. By the Tree, he thought, they’ve been waiting for her all these years.

On the Slave Terrace, the crowd grew massive and disorderly. A few youths lobbed stones into the stockade where the Arquali soldiers were waiting to die. No one was quite in charge, but word leaked out that a boat had been dispatched from the Nighthawk with the rebel leadership aboard. The citizens of Ormael waited, grumbling.

Nothing could have prepared them for that moment, however. For it was left to Isiq himself, the most hated man in Ormali history, to declare the city not reconquered, but free.

He spoke from atop a fish crate. Sturdy enough, but it teetered underfoot.

‘Six years ago I burned this city,’ he shouted over the mob. ‘Do not forgive me. I do not want forgiveness I have yet to earn. But with what days are left to me I shall right all the wrongs I can, and fight the villains who led me to that crime. I was a fool to follow them — a fool and a coward. It was a son of Ormael who proved this to me at last, when he refused to bow before me. I punished that boy. I hated him for speaking the truth. He told it anyway, and in his courage my own liberation began.

‘Your freedom, people of Ormael, is no man’s to give. But in the name of Arqual and my Empress, I bow to that freedom, now and for evermore.’

The cheers were not for him, but they were deafening all the same. Isiq waited grimly for them to subside, then spoke to them once more.

‘Magad the Fifth will never bow to your freedom,’ he said. ‘He will try to steal it back, as he stole the Ametrine Throne from Empress Maisa. He will send great forces westwards to destroy this rebellion. Some will abandon him and join us. Most will not. Today we are like the little dog who nips the tiger. If the tiger turns and catches us, we die. We must be swifter. We must dodge and bay — bay loud and long, for all Alifros to hear. We must call a pack out of the forest, and stay alive until it comes.

‘How long must we run? I do not know. But I know this: we cannot protect you, not yet. If we stay we will only bring about your certain destruction. The best favour we can do for you now is to leave, to draw Arqual’s fire away from Ormael, and to harry the tiger from the bush. I do not ask for your aid. That is not my right-’

He broke off, abashed, and struggled down from the crate. This time the cheers did not come. Isiq marched stiffly away through their staring eyes, feeling less a liberator than a cheat. The little dog was running. Ormael knew better than most what to expect from the tiger.

At the back of the crowd, Suthinia waited for him. She was hooded and veiled, lest anyone recognize the wife of the second most hated man in Ormael, Captain Gregory. She bowed at the waist, but her dark eyes stayed on him.

‘Well done, Prince Eberzam.’

‘I hear your irony, vixen,’ he muttered.

‘By now I should hope so.’

She was laughing at him, behind that scrap of silk. Oh, but he wanted her. Day by day his wanting grew, and her utter unreachability did nothing to cool the fire. It had grown so unbearable that he had nearly asked Maisa to send her back to Gregory, or to King Oshiram’s court in Simja. How could he, though, when Suthinia had become his most trusted friend?

How could he, for that matter, when her mage-craft brought him visions of Thasha? True, they came only through the dreams of Neda Pathkendle, and were clouded and cluttered and rarely about Thasha at all. But Suthinia walked in those dreams, and Neda was sensitive to her presence, and would even answer questions, now and again. Once Suthinia had sought him out at dawn, half-dreaming still, and placed a bomb in his hands:

‘It was your daughter who killed him, killed Arunis. She beheaded him with Hercol’s sword.’

Of course he’d had no choice but to marry the Empress. Tactically, it was a master stroke: now the restoration of Maisa, instead of fracturing the military, could be seen as a chance to exalt it as never before, by giving it a foothold in the royal family itself. And unlike a widow, a married couple could make any willing Arquali their child in the eyes of the law. They could reach into the populace and pluck out heirs.

And if his daughter was restored to him? It could happen, by all the Gods. Thasha herself could one day follow Maisa to the throne.

Yes, he’d had to marry. And Suthinia Pathkendle had to go on being a mage, in love with nothing but the mysteries of her calling. She did not have to keep watching him in that maddening way, though, or smiling furtively when he and Maisa departed for the same chambers at night.

Like the marriage itself, those departures were for show. Her tiny army, her foetal court: apparently they thought quite a lot about the old woman’s need for a mate. ‘ They must think us conjugal,’ Maisa had told him, that first evening in the Fens. ‘ They must never for an instant fancy that we might be divided. Be ready to perform, Isiq. A show of love inspires men like nothing else.’

But they were not in love, and they never removed more than a coat or shawl in each other’s presence, and within their chambers they had separate bedrooms, always.

‘Sleep with no one for half a year,’ the Empress had said, ‘and then confine yourself to servants until the war is won. And see that they’re gone before daybreak, always. That’s family tradition.’

His knee was aching. Suthinia helped him down the stairs onto the docks.

Now, in a fit of recklessness, Isiq shared those words with Suthinia. She gaped at him, then stopped to lean against a wall, shaking with silent laughter. ‘What’s so blary amusing?’ he’d demanded. But Suthinia just shook her head, and dried the tears before they wet her veil.

That afternoon she slipped away into the city, alone. Maisa raged, and Isiq too was fearful: Suthinia’s disguise was hardly foolproof. But she returned before nightfall, and bowed her head while Maisa shouted that no one in her company was to run off like a wayward child. When Isiq caught up with her on the deck of the Nighthawk, she told him merely that she had visted her old house above the city, and that the plum trees were budding in the snow.

He heard the misery in her voice. What had she found there, he wondered? A ruin, a burned-out shell of the house she called the Orch’dury? It was, after all, where her happiest years of exile had been spent. The years when exile had become belonging, when lead had transmuted into gold awhile, for this lonely woman from across the Ruling Sea.

Suthinia had looked him up and down. ‘You’re exhausted,’ she said. He rubbed his face, wondering why she had to state the obvious.

‘I defied your Empress today,’ she said. ‘If you wish to defy her too I can meet you below. It would be an act of the body only, not an act of love. You know my limits.’

‘But you do not know mine,’ he snapped. ‘Out of the question.’

To imagine touching her when she did not want it. A kind of charity. Not in this lifetime, witch. But to his surprise he saw her eyes were moist. She was nodding, head lowered, accepting his rebuke. ‘I meant no insult, Eberzam,’ she said.

What did it mean to befriend a woman? Could he ever hope to understand?

Suddenly she looked up at him, challenge in her gaze. ‘Is this lunacy? Is Arqual going to massacre us, and everyone who fights at our side? Don’t tell me what you say to the men. Tell me the blary truth.’

Now he was the one who had to look away. ‘We’re vulnerable,’ he said. ‘By my count we have twenty-eight ships, including Maisa’s hidden half-dozen. Arqual has five hundred.’

‘And they’ll chase us.’

‘Pitfire, they’ll live for nothing else. They’ll pull ships in from the Rekere, they’ll dispatch forces that would have sailed on the Mzithrin. And they’ll never quit while a single boat lofts Maisa’s flag.’

‘She has a plan, though? And alliances? All those dignitaries she smuggled into the Fens throughout the years? Some of them will help us, won’t they?’ When Isiq said nothing, Suthinia leaned closer, her face suddenly alarmed. ‘Hasn’t she confided in you yet? Pitfire, you’re her mucking husband!’

‘Lower your voice,’ he growled. And of course she’s confided in me, witch. But if she hasn’t told you, what in Alifros makes you think I’d dare?

‘It would be safer to disperse,’ he said, just to fill the silence. ‘Make them struggle to guess where our commanders are. To say nothing of Maisa herself. But if we disperse it may be impossible to regroup.’

‘And if we don’t?’

‘ They may box us in — sometime, somewhere — and crush us with a single, massive blow. It’s as I said before: nip and run, nip and run, for ever.’

‘For ever?’

‘Are you deaf, woman? Those were my words.’

She turned on her heel, leaving him alone on the forecastle. Angry at her for nothing. For making him face the truth.

Isiq was shaking. Across the bay Ormael glowed in the red light of dusk. Some will abandon him and join us. Most will not. Freedom had returned to the city under the shadow of a second death. He turned away. The deck was in shadow; Suthinia was gone. Darkness had crept up behind him like a cut-throat. Darkness was coming for them all.

But hours later Empress Maisa asked permission (permission!) to set foot on the sovereign territory of Ormael, and when it was granted she took Isiq and Suthinia with her and went ashore. She left her guards at the docks, over the sputtering objections of Sergeant Bachari, and walked out into the throng unguarded, holding the elbows of her admiral-husband and her witch. The crowd swallowed them. It surged and grumbled, stinking of blood and alcohol and sweat. There were some hisses, no cheers. Maisa ploughed forward like a soldier through a swamp.

She took a cup of plum wine in a waterfront tavern, for that is Ormael’s drink, and dabbed a little on her forehead, and her ankle above her satin shoe, for that (who had told her? Suthinia?) was the region’s beloved pagan prayer: Let this sweetness anoint me, head to foot; let me age not as vinegar but as wine.

Word of Maisa’s gesture rippled out from the tavern into the growing throng. Then she asked which neighborhood was the roughest in the city. When they replied that it was surely Tanners’ Row, Maisa set out for it afoot. Laughing and amazed, the crowd moved with her. Block by block Isiq watched it grow, fast as word and feet could travel, until it seemed there could hardly be anyone in Ormael who was not making for the Row.

The squalor here was frightful. Blocks of rubble, homes built of scrap. Children watching from broken windows, thinner than castaways. Ashamed of what the Empress was seeing, the crowd kicked garbage out of her path, broomed away puddles of filth that nonetheless rushed back and soaked her shoes. Isiq looked at Suthinia, who walked a pace behind Maisa. There was fear in her eyes.

When they reached the poorest, shabbiest streetcorner, Maisa asked for a platform. A crate was produced from somewhere, and she let herself be helped atop it. When she was certain she had her balance she gazed around her sadly, and shook her head.

‘Tomorrow it will be six years,’ she said suddenly, in a voice that shocked them with its power. ‘Six years that you have lived under the boot of the Usurper. You know what has happened to Ormael in that time. Slavery for some of you, starvation for others. A lean, bare, scraping survival for the lucky ones. Your wine stolen, your fisheries plundered, your shops strangled for want of goods. In just six years. Now here’s an ugly thought: what will it be like in sixty?’

Then she looked over the mob and declared that if anyone thought Ormael would gain more by her death than by the war she had declared on the Usurper, that man should strike her dead. Here. Tonight. A chance to do what was right for your homeland, she shouted, taunting them. Perhaps the best chance you’ll have.

The throng shifted nervously. Isiq gazed out at the harbour. The woman was mad to provoke them; she didn’t know the depth of their pain. He experienced a frigid stab of premonition: not fear, but awareness that this moment, like that one on the deck of the Nighthawk, was a fulcrum. They might well kill her, and thrust all Alifros onto a trail of blood and ashes. But if they did not: what new lands, what strange vistas would open before them, sweeping away into the future from this place of despair?

The silence deepened. The city of Ormael stood transfixed, a single mind contemplating an old, grey woman on a crate. Finally, slowly, Maisa raised her arm, as if to grasp a piece of the night. Her voice rang out in the darkness like a siren’s call.

‘Ormael does not choose to slay me, because Ormael is rightly named. The people of the Womb of Morning cannot be kept for ever cowering in the dark. I will have my throne. I will see a world where thieves and murderers are brought to heel — and you, and this night, will never in a thousand years be forgotten.’

By the next morning, her forces from the mountains had doubled in size, and there were more volunteers ready to join the rebel fleet than boats to carry them.