The Night of the Swarm

5

Monday, 21 Modobrin 941.

A dlomic woman spat a seed into the waves today amp; made me cry. She never saw me watching her. First her lips worked round and round, then her face lifted amp; she made kissing-lips amp; when the seed flew her eyes tracked it like a gunner his cannonball. At first I couldn’t account for my tears; then I knew I was seeing my Annabel on a picnic, with a sweet green mush-melon, spitting seeds in Lake Larre, the juice runnin’ down her lovely chin.

Nine days since the Shaggat’s waking, the torture of Chadfallow, the proof that Rose has ceded his captaincy in all but name to Sandor Ott. We are blazing west by northwest under topgallants and triple-jibs, over waves like rounded hills, putting mile after mile between us and our abandoned shipmates. Coward, traitor, fair-weather friend: at night the accusations churn my stomach, though no one makes them but me.

A queer dark spot in the sky this morning. It moved closer amp; we saw it was a solid mass, very low in the sky. We beat to quarters, ran out our guns. The object bobbed amp; turned. It seemed adrift in the air, and with indescribable horror we saw that it was the bow of a sailing ship, fifty feet of hull and deck and shattered framewood, the stump of a foremast, the whole bowsprit thrusting upwards like a narwhal’s tusk. Rin as my witness, the thing looked torn, like a heel of bread from a loaf. Two cables reached skyward from the anchor ports, a quarter-mile maybe, and at the end of ’em we could now see one of those weird sky-sails used by the dlomic armada: half kite, half balloon, kept aloft by some power none of us could explain. The wreck blew right over us, some hundred feet above our forecastle. There were flames inside her, and dlomu, living dlomu, holding fast to the rigging and rails. They looked down at us and I expected to hear calls for help, but they were silent. Maybe they thought us phantoms, heralds of doom, as their cousins did that first night in the port in Masalym.

No one spoke, no one could. One of those poor devils jumped for our rigging but of course at that speed it just tore through his hands like razors and then his foot grazed something and he turned and reached the deck headfirst and Heaven’s Tree, how I wish I’d shut my eyes.

If only someone up there had thought to drop a rope. We might have reeled them down with the capstan, spread combat netting between the yards. They could have jumped and lived. As it was the wreck drifted northwards, gaining height. For hours we watched it dwindle against the sky.

I am done with journal-keeping. Let oblivion take these memories. Anni will have had the child by now; Rin knows how she’ll care for the little thing, or who she’ll turn to for comfort. Goodbye to you, journal. You’re a womanish weakness I’ve indulged and that is the true reason I kept you a secret. No more entries, no more pain. Goodbye I say. The end. Let me be an animal that labours for his food bag, a dumb brute who does as he’s told.

Wednesday, 23 Modobrin 941. But what I’m told — the miracle that Rose would have me work — is to keep their spirits up. ‘Make them hope a little longer, Quartermaster,’ he says. ‘You’re honest, and you’re an ally of Pathkendle and Company. It falls to you.’

Make them hope. I close the door to his cabin, walk ten paces. Before me is a man I recruited off the streets of Etherhorde, a pious youth as I recall. He’s in a deathsmoke trance. I remember what I said to him, in that tavern doorway on a cool summer’s eve: ‘Finest run you’ll ever make, and the easiest. Due west to Simja, feasting and carousing at a festival that’ll be the envy of your grandkids, the pomp and splendour when we give away the Treaty Bride. Then due east to Etherhorde again, and ninety cockles in your purse by midwinter.’ I believed all that myself — wanted to believe it, needed to. My own pay for that easy run would have let me clear Anni’s parents’ debts, with maybe a bit left for a humble wedding.

Now here the fellow stands, reeking, mouth agape, so fogged he doesn’t know me, or his peril should he draw the captain’s eye. He is a Plapp, and when I alert his brother gangsters they whisk him down to the hold to sleep it off — or to look for his stash, or both.

That was midday. At three bells there’s a tarboy before me, horrified, whispering that a group of thugs is working the berth deck, snatching boys from their hammocks at night, clapping hands over their mouths and bungin’ ’em in the lockers until they bleed. At five bells another deathsmoker appears in the galley, in worse shape than the first. He’s a Plapp as well, but this time the Burnscove Boys get to him first, and turn him in. I suppose his execution will follow.

Someone is knocking at my door: more bad news, or else Uskins, drooling and vague, with a word from the captain. I should have married her in secret. I should have told her old dad to get stuffed.

Thursday, 23 Modobrin 941.

There is heat in Rose’s innards yet. I went straight to him with the tarboys’ problem, having some inkling that the crime would touch a nerve. That it did: hardly had I spoken when he exploded out of his stuporous slouch and thundered to the cabin door, bellowing for the nearest lieutenant. A moment later he was back, questioning me furiously about the incident. He was taking it very hard by the look on his face, and then he shook my hand. I did not dream that: Captain Nilus Rotheby Rose shook my hand, and did not bite it either. A knock at the door. He scowled and shoved me, but I didn’t mind. The boys would be safe. As I left I saw who was waiting to enter: Sergeant Haddismal and the Bloody Son.

Later there are distant explosions in the south, and flashes like bubbles of fire — rising, bursting, gone. The War Furnaces, whisper the dlomu. Fed not with coal but lead and diamonds, and above all eguar bones. Machines so huge and hot the discharge can be seen these hundreds of miles. The lads just stand and stare, as if the Nine Pits were gaping open there on the horizon, as perhaps they are.

‘Do they threaten us, away out here?’ I ask the dlomic commander, a thick-chested fellow whose long, fleshy earlobes make me think of soup spoons.

He shrugs. ‘When I saw the armada pass by Masalym, I thought, “They’ve emptied all the shipyards of Orbilesc and Bali Adro City; there mustn’t be a boat left to watch over the heartland.” I was wrong. Those sorts of flares, you see them only when a warship launches. Part of the fleet is still here. We’ll be in danger if they spot us.’

‘We’re flying the Bali Adro flag. Won’t that help?’

Only to a point, he says. When they run out of enemies, they fire on one another, ram one another, close and grapple and kill. The eguar gave them indescribable power, but it also made them frenzied and fearful, almost rabid. ‘And a rabid dog must bite something, after all.’

He is a good fellow, Spoon-Ears, but he never cheers me up.

So we run and run, with many a backwards glance. Lady Oggosk crouches topside day after day, like a gargoyle, staring in the direction of the Sandwall, which most days one needs a telescope to see. Felthrup, of all Rin’s creatures, has taken to chatting with her, and even sits in the old crone’s lap. The vicious Sniraga, who used to kill rats by the score for food and pleasure, wails and flicks her ruined tail but will not touch him. When the hag wants Felthrup’s company she sends Sniraga to howl outside the stateroom, and the cat leads Felthrup to her door like a bodyguard. Mr Teggatz watched them walk by and cracked his knuckles and burbled cryptically:

‘Cat takes rat, bah ha! Quite enough, quite enough. Cat takes orders from rat? Topsy-turvy. It’s the end of the world.’

Monday, 28 Modobrin 941.

If Teggatz is right about the approach of doomsday we could well be the last to know it. There is no one and nothing out here. We could be launched already into the heart of the Ruling Sea, save for those brief glimpses of the Sandwall, and the meekness of the waves, which have not topped fifty feet. Some land mass ahead must be taming them, unless the lions of the deep have all turned lambs.

Rose navigates by Ott’s ancient map and a fine dlomic chart provided by Prince Olik, but the former is a faded scrap and the latter only depicts the margins of the Island Wilderness. Our immediate goal: Stath Balfyr, that last bit of Southern land, from which place Ott’s sniffing about in books and archives back home produced detailed course headings for our run across the Ruling Sea. We stand a fair chance of locating the island, too: Prince Olik ventured there in his youth and has pencilled in his best guess at its location.

And what a great black joke if we succeed.

For we’ve kept the secret so far — ‘we’ being just myself and Marila and Felthrup, now the others have departed. Alone on the Chathrand we know that those course headings are a perfect crock. They don’t point to Gurishal, that blighted kingdom of the Shaggat Ness. I doubt they point to any safe, sound path across the Nelluroq at all. Ott’s chart is a forgery, but this time he was not the forger. The ixchel have used us, used us like the great oafs we are, used this ship to ferry them back to Stath Balfyr, their homeland, from whence we stole them centuries ago. Now all the little people have gone, vanished into thin air.

That is nonsense, of course: they are flesh and blood, not pixies. They are also a brave and decent people, no more vicious or deluded than we ourselves, and more committed to one another by far. Probably they slipped ashore in Masalym, to try their luck on some less lethal ship. Rin save us, if men will rape tarboys half their size, what will they not have done to tiny ixchel, in the silence of attics, laboratories, holds?

But now that the ixchel are gone, should I tell? Should I try to persuade Ott that his whole mad circumnavigation of Alifros is based on a lie? Soon enough I’ll have no choice, for he means to start our northward run the minute Stath Balfyr gives us our bearings. For the moment I see nothing to be gained by speaking up: Ott would insist on attempting the crossing anyway, sooner, probably. Stath Balfyr will not help us get home, but so long as we are searching for it we are at least on the same side of the world as our friends.

Tuesday, 28 Modobrin 941.

Felthrup is sleepwalking. This is preferable, he declares, to not sleeping at all, by which malady he nearly perished on the Ruling Sea. Yet any sleep disorder in the rat should set alarm bells ringing throughout the Chathrand. His insomnia proved to be his way of fighting Arunis, who was attacking the minds of who-knows-how-many crewmembers as he tried to master the Nilstone.

He has come a long way as a dreamer, Felthrup declares. Time was that Arunis had infiltrated his dreams, and placed a lock on them, so that he could torture and interrogate the rat all night, and be certain Felthrup would be none the wiser by day. Now that lock is broken (another result of the sorcerer’s death, maybe?) and Ratty can remember his dreams like anyone else: imperfectly, that is, and through the veil that falls with the opening of the eyes. I ask what he thinks he’s searching for, when he roams the passageways, or bumps along the edges of the stateroom chambers in his sleep. ‘The doors of a club,’ he tells me cryptically. ‘I have a friend there who might help us, if I can only find him.’

Marila has a little bulge at her beltline already, as though her stomach aspires to catch up with those round cheeks of hers. Felthrup tells me that she is ‘miserable, weak, sickly, ill-humoured, dolorous’, but he is distressed whenever one of us suffers a hangnail. What is certain is that Mrs Undrabust has no patience with the indignities of her condition. She storms about looking for work and grows irritated when the women steerage passengers — old spinsters to the last, since the desertions in Masalym⁵ — coo and cluck at her and tell her she should be abed. Mr Teggatz lives in fear of her: she is usually famished but gags on his offerings. The tarboys are sniggering over a rumour that she begged the cook for a salted pig’s ear, claiming it was for Thasha’s dogs, and then was seen gnawing it herself on the No. 3 ladderway.

Dr Chadfallow, for his part, is healing — Ott knows just how far to torture a man — but he is broken in spirit, and does not hide the fact. ‘I have chosen all the wrong paths in life,’ he said this evening, as Marila and I changed his bandages. ‘I should never have set foot in the Keep of Five Domes. I grew to like it there, among the jewels and courtesans. I thought I could stand beside Magad and nudge his Empire towards the good. I thought reason would prevail. Self-delusion, nothing more. The Emperor gelded me the day he called me to court.’

At that Felthrup began to leap up and down. ‘The villain! The wretch! Was the operation terribly painful?’

‘Hush, Ratty, it was a figure of speech,’ I said. And to Chadfallow: ‘All you could do was try, man. Nobody steers a ship but the captain.’

The doctor was having none of that. ‘When a captain will not turn you must place another boat across his way. I should have fought Magad sooner, while there was still time.’

‘You’d have made a lousy rebel,’ put in Marila, who has a knack for getting to the heart of things. ‘You’d have just been hanged or stabbed or something. And then you’d never have invented your parasite pills, and I’d have died when I was eight.’

Chadfallow snorted, then winced with pain, but for a moment I saw pleasure in his eyes.

He is not alone in his melancholy, of course. Rose is still hermited in his cabin; Uskins still shuffles about like the walking dead. The men are grim, the tarboys witless with fear, the dlomu simply astonished. They hang together, these dlomu. Rin knows they must need the comfort of familiar faces, when all they see are pale humans, ghost faces to them, their country’s exterminated slaves come back to life. They sleep on the boards, play a game with dice and chalk lines, exercise at dawn. Teggatz says they don’t eat much — not more than half what a human eats — but after labour how they will gobble mul. I’ve watched ’em knead those sticky globs like bread dough, then chew and chew ’til a peaceful look steals over them, and they sleep. I’ve eaten the stuff myself (bland and vaguely foul it is) but still haven’t a clue what’s in it.

As I say, they’re close. Still the ganglords smell fresh blood and are trying their luck at recruiting. This evening I heard Kruno Burnscove make a pitch to three of the youngest dlomu. Protection, he kept saying. ‘At the darkest hour, you’ll need more than forty brothers and sisters, won’t ye now? Human beings are wicked, you have no muckin’ idea. If we get lost out there, and the food gets low? You think them Plapps will settle for that dlomic putty you live on? Why, they’ll kill you and cut out your fat and boil it up into a stew. They’ve done it on other ships, lads. There’s witnesses aboard.’

He noticed me listening, then, but only smiled. What was I going to do about it?

‘All lies,’ I told the dlomu. ‘Pay no attention, lads. There’s strychnine on certain tongues.’

‘He would say that,’ Burnscove countered, pointing at me with a blackened nail. ‘Let me tell you about the neighbourhood this one comes from-’

We bickered, but I could tell who had their ears. So could Kruno Burnscove, whose twinkle kept on brightening. Rose still needs the gangs; their hatred of each other protects him from any serious threat of mutiny. Otherwise he’d long ago have cut the heads off those twin snakes.

Thursday, 31 Modobrin 941.

A ghastly night. Marila came weeping to my door. Sharp pains in her gut, and vomiting too: the poor girl was a sight. I put her in my bunk and ran to Chadfallow, hating to think of him rising and tearing all his stitches. But Felthrup was there ahead of me (he is Marila’s constant guardian in the stateroom), nipping at his ankles, chiding him to be careful.

‘Dysentery, if she’s lucky,’ said Chadfallow. ‘Nothing to do with the pregnancy — but I’ve seen it end a few. We must be ready for that.’ He sent me dashing off to Teggatz with a fistful of herbs to brew into tea. By the time I got back to my cabin he and Ratty were there, and Marila was moaning. She threw up the first cup; the second gave her the runs. A crowd gathered in the passage, hushed and fearful. Of all forms of good luck that sailors believe in, a babe in a lawful, wedded womb is the most potent. Not the cruellest bastard aboard wanted her to lose the child.

Marila sipped that brew for hours, Teggatz rushing back and forth from the galley with fresh kettles, Chadfallow taking her temperature, sniffing her sweat, making her blow up little balloons Rin knows what else besides, Ratty flying about my little cabin like blary ball lightning, insisting that everything be ‘perfect, please everyone, not good enough, passable, tolerable, tarboyish, rodent-grade — perfect!’ and Marila herself moaning and squatting mortified on chamber pots behind a blanket. No blood, she’d say, and we’d all sigh and swear.

Very late, the symptoms broke. Marila lay still, breathing easier, and the crowd drifted away, smiling like children. In time she persuaded Chadfallow to go to his rest, and I sent Felthrup along behind to see that he did so. Marila fell asleep gripping my sleeve. I lowered myself to the floor and closed my eyes. If anyone can bring us hope it will be young Mrs Undrabust.

I dreamed of the other youths. Pathkendle toppling from a bridge. Undrabust knuckle-walking like an ape. Thasha trapped in stone like a fly in amber. I had the power to save them from those calamities, to pull them together in my arms, and wonder of wonders, when I did so we had all become the same age, each of us in our bursting prime, unbent and exuberant and delivered from fear. They’re my kin, I thought, and why did it take so long to see it? For the journey was ended; someone was calling me away. And I only knew the place they had in my heart because I was leaving, because we’d never live beneath the same roof again. I woke stricken, on the point of blubbering tears.

Then my eyes snapped open. An ixchel was crouched on my foot locker, gazing at me. I started to rise, and knocked over the little stand with the tea kettle, waking Marila with a gasp.

The ixchel was gone. Surely I’d had a dream within a dream? ‘What is it, what’s happened?’ cried Marila. Nothing, dear, nothing. Old men will have nightmares, they talk to themselves, you should never spend the night in their company.

But the vision troubled me throughout the day. For it was not just any ixchel I’d dreamed about. It was Talag, their lord and elder, the embodiment of the clan. A genius and a fanatic, and a man who’d not be pried away from his people by any power on earth.

Friday, 1 Halar 942.

By our shipboard reckoning it is New Year’s Day. And thus the first day of spring in the North — though here the dlomu say that autumn has begun. And why should I expect anything comforting and familiar? Everything is backwards here. There are mould spores on the biscuits of a colour I’ve never seen in my life. There’s a second moon in the sky. Creatures with the skin of black eels and spun-silver hair rule an empire, and humans — what are they? Formerly slaves; today nothing at all, a bad memory, a handful of mindless scavengers dying of hunger in the wild. Rin’s mercy, what will happen to those we left behind?

The new year. Start of the twenty-nineth in the reign of that crooked man I shall never again call His Supremacy. I once adored him, our Magad of Arqual. I knew he’d had a hand in driving Empress Maisa from the throne, but the fact never troubled me. She was corrupt and twisted, she had to be — my schoolteachers had told us so. Never mind that the Abbot’s Prayer we said every morning had included a plea to Rin for her safekeeping. One morning she was our Empress; the next her portrait came down, and we were told that she was a villainess, and had been ‘mercifully’ allowed to flee into exile. They spoke of her with shame, that day. The following morning no one spoke of her at all. The last time I pronounced her name it was to my brother Gellin, and he hushed me angrily. ‘Don’t you ever pay attention, Graff? We’re not to mention that whore. She’s a stain on Arqual and best forgot.’

I didn’t argue. He was right; I was certain of it. Our generation had rather too many certainties.

Thirty years would pass before I heard another tale of Maisa’s overthrow. Hercol Stanapeth’s was a darker tale, but I didn’t have to be terrified or bullied into believing it. And we live (don’t we now?) in the hope that it may yet end well.

Whatever the future holds, this new year is starting off as dismal as the inside of a shark. The men’s feet drag, their eyes wear foggy veils of despair. They’re haunted by this day, of what it could be for them, what it has been. The work furloughs, the gifts of candy, the kids screaming and hugging your knees. The games and laughter. The wine gulped, the girls kissed, the marriages consummated or destroyed. So precious, even the bad memories, here on an alien sea.

Then at midday Rose proves once more his gift for shocking us (the man’s mind is a jungle; at any moment a bright bird may issue from it, or a gruesome snake). We’re assembled on deck, even the late watch rousted and dragged into daylight, and there from the quarterdeck he bids us believe in the future: ‘As I told you once before, lads, the future we can fight for, not be given.” He doesn’t elaborate, mercifully enough: we are none of us open to pretty speeches any more. But he does bring forth the apple-cheeked Altymiran woman who helps out Teggatz in the galley. She’s well liked, and has regained a bit of her plumpness on the rations provided by Prince Olik. She also turns out to have the lungs of a choir mistress, and she sings us a naive little melody about the lambing-time in Arqual, and blast me if she doesn’t turn us all to lambs for ninety seconds or so.

Next comes his real trick: the old fox suddenly produces thirty bottles of aged juniper idzu, secured in his cabin since Etherhorde, he says — but in what rat-proof, wave-proof miracle of packing I should like very much to know. The men don’t care to ask: tarboys have brought our tin cups from the galley and are passing them quickly. Rose breaks the sealing wax and pours a thimbleful. Before a silent ship, he drinks, swallows, considers. Then he nods and looks at us.

‘No better idzu could I obtain in the capital,’ he said softly, ‘and I would have you know two things. First, neither I nor anyone aboard has partaken of this store, until this moment. Second, that I am a fair judge of liquor-’ there are chuckles at the understatement ‘-and this drink is fine. Truth be told, it surpasses the drink they plied me with in the Keep of Five Domes, when I dined with the Emperor’s sons. If it were possible, I should declare it fit for you — fit for the most capable and dauntless men ever born beneath the arc of heaven, born to make mockery of hardship, born to crack an old, bedevilled skipper’s heart with pride. I should like to declare it that good — but nothing is that good. It is all I have to give you this New Year’s Day. A drink, and my promise to fight for our lives, hard as it may be to find the path to their salvation. Drink now to its finding, men of the Chathrand. That is all.’

The crew roared. Staggered, I looked out over that throng of wretches. Plapps and Burnscovers, sailors and Turachs, even some of the folk we’d blary kidnapped on Simja: all cheering. They hadn’t even tasted the drink, but what did it matter? The Red Beast had praised them to heaven, and they loved him, suddenly. The drink went round; it was ambrosial and strong as the devil’s mead. ‘He’s not just our captain, he’s our father!’ shouted a young midshipman, and seconds later I heard a song we used to sing in Temple School, on the lips of hundreds of overgrown boys:

Father dauntless, we’re your lads, through cold and darkness wending.

Climb we will that blasted hill,

Lonely, sad but marching still

Father fearless, lead us on, the night is surely ending.

They pressed close to him. Rose never did smile: that would have diluted the effect. He only nodded, urging them to drink, and the idzu was gone before anyone could get too afflicted. They went singing to their stations, those wretches. I turned and slipped through a crowd of bewildered dlomu, making faces at the strange stuff in their cups and stranger joy in the humans around them, and then I saw Sandor Ott at the No. 4 hatch, looking over the scene with a certain abhorrence. I could have laughed. This is why you need him, killer. This is why you don’t dare make a final enemy of the man.

Saturday, 2 Halar 942. The second day of any year is a disappointment. This one was marked by weird and hideous events. The predawn watch came off their shift wild-eyed and swearing: one of them had heard music in the darkness, flutes, but no players could they find, aloft or below. Already the talk is of ghosts. Did you see ghosts, I enquire? Well no, Mr F, not as such. But who made that music, eh? A fevered imagination, that’s who, I told ’em, but I wasn’t getting through. Ghosts, they insisted. Of course Rose’s endless mutterings on the subject have made it hard for even the natural sceptics among them to hold steady.

At two bells, the expected cry finally comes: land ahead, a mist-fuzzed shadow, and another spotted minutes later, further west. They are the Sparrows, the dlomu aboard tell us: little no-count islands, but for any ship with business in the Island Wilderness the sight of them marks the moment for turning away from the continent once and for all. With double hands on the braces we’re soon tacking northwards. I look back and cannot see the Sandwall. But when I close my eyes I see their faces, plain as my hand: Thasha and Pathkendle, Undrabust and Hercol. I don’t believe in prayer, and yet I pray.

Five bells. I’m on the berth deck (routine inspection, no whimpering tarboys any more) when from the orlop below comes a howl such as man gives only when running for his life. I’m down the ladderway in seconds, with Teggatz and the tarboy Jervik Lank on my heels and Mr Bindhammer racing ahead. Rin save us, who do we see but the purser, Old Gangrune, running like a lad of twenty, and just behind him a mountain of red muscle and white tusks and slobber. It’s the Red River hog — the same mucking animal that disappeared in the rat war — fat and huge and furious, and before we can do more than gawk they’re both around the bend in the corridor.

Alas for Gangrune it was a dead-end passage. We charged in, screaming, but the beast was already goring the man, waving him about on its tusks like a dishrag. We attacked and a horrid melee it was. No boar in Alifros compares to a Red River either in size or sheer mean mordaciousness. Bindhammer was trampled. Jervik stabbed the beast in the jaw but his little knife broke off at the hilt. Teggatz had brought a meat cleaver and lopped a slab of pork from one fatty shoulder. The hog turned screaming and caught his arm near the elbow, and you could see his arm would not long inconvenience those boltcutter jaws, so I drove my knife into the neck of the beast, once, twice, thrice, and the third time it screamed again and backed off Teggatz and smashed me up against the wall. I lost my knife. I locked my hands on those tusks but they were slippery with blood and then it chomped me, Gods of Death, it’s a wonder this left hand ain’t in its belly right now.

I have Jervik to thank for that. He picked up the cleaver and proceeded to carve his way into the hog’s right buttock, deranged and deadly he looked, and the hog whirled and trampled him worse than Bindhammer, and Pitfire if all four of us weren’t down, bleeding, beaten flat and the hog not remotely tired of thrashing us, and a few men I’d like to vivisect just gazing meekly around the corner, and then a huge shadow and a roar and Refeg the augrong lifted the beast off Jervik, smashed it left and right, shattering the walls, and then his brother Rer caught up from behind and bit down on one huge kicking hog-leg. A crack, a squeal. The thing kept fighting. They had to tear it apart.

Tonight we are all still alive, though Bindhammer’s lung is collapsed and he fights for breath, and Jervik is so bruised and battered he can scarcely move. But the hog! I know its history: that fool Latzlo meant to sell it to the highest bidder, for the feasts after Thasha’s wedding. He’d fattened it out of his own purse, all the way to Simjalla City. Of course neither he nor his prize pig ever made it ashore.

Where can the beast have hidden, all this time? The answer is nowhere. We run a tight ship; nothing half its size could be overlooked for long. I think back to the ixchels’ accusations, when they were still in charge: that we were hiding cattle and goats somewhere aboard. They claimed they’d heard the creatures, a moo-moo here, a bleat-bleat there, and we just laughed in their faces. No one is laughing any more.

Jervik lies in sickbay. I brought him a new knife: a fine blade with a walrus-ivory handle and a locking hinge. It had belonged to Swellows, the first bosun on this voyage, but in this case I didn’t mind raiding the locker of a dead man. Swellows had bragged about winning it in a tavern by cheating at spenk, and had made other, fouler remarks about how it was just the tool for a necklace-fancier.⁷ Jervik was pleased and didn’t ask where the knife had come from. What he did ask, to my surprise, was when we’d be turning back for Pazel and Co.

I stumbled a bit. ‘That. . ain’t quite clear.’

He lifted his black and blue face from the pillow. ‘Wha?’

‘The captain. . hasn’t made me privy to the plan.’

Jervik squinted at me. ‘Yer leaving ’em behind, ain’t ye?’

I expected a grin. If he’d given one I think I might have snatched that knife back from him and stabbed him in the ribs. Instead I saw the same distress in his face that I was feeling myself. I was floored. I bent down in the chair and fiddled with my shoe.

‘Lank,’ I whispered, ‘what am I missing, here? Did you all become friends before they left?’

He scowled. ‘I ain’t good enough to be their friend. Not after wha I done. But I’m on your side, all right. Them others, Rose, Ott, they can all bite my-’

‘Hush! They’ll kill you.’ I ran a hand through my hair. ‘You can’t shoot your mouth off about this, d’ye hear? But you’re perfectly right: Ott means to sail north and abandon them all. I don’t think the captain wants to, although with Rose it’s blary hard to tell. But Ott has the Turachs behind him, so what he wants, he gets.’

‘I’ll cut him open. And Rose too.’

I looked at him. ‘That was my promise to Lady Thasha. That I’d stab Rose dead if he tried to sail away and leave them here. But who would it help, lad? Are we going to seize the Chathrand and sail it back to Masalym? And what if they’re not waiting for us in Masalym? What if they’re making for some other port?’

‘Then it’s hopeless. Bastards, whoresons-’

‘It’s not hopeless. You know what they’re made of, Pathkendle and Thasha and Hercol. And there’s Turachs with ’em too, and eight dlomic soldiers. But if we’re going to see ’em again, I think they will have to come to us.’

‘Come to us! On what boat, Mr Fiffengurt? And how would they know where to look?’

I toyed with mentioning Stath Balfyr, and the master plot of the ixchel. I considered trusting him with the knowledge of Hercol’s sword. What could be gained by either confidence, however, save further danger for us all? ‘They’ll know,’ was all I managed to say.

He nodded, and I left him to his rest. A new ally, in the person of Jervik Lank. There’s no end to wonders under Heaven’s Tree.

Teggatz reassembled the hog (Refeg and Rer did not eat it; they live on a diet of fish meal and grains) and roasted it in the galley stove, with cooking sherry and dlomic onions and snakeberries and yams. Everyone aboard got a bite of that beast, and it was sumptuous beyond all telling. I was wrong: Latzlo is no fool. For such a splendid pig the royals on Simja would have showered him with gold. I took him a plate. He nibbled with tears in his eyes.

As for the officers, we ate in the wardroom. Uskins joined us for the first time in days, looking like something a dog had tired of chewing, as Sergeant Haddismal informed him to general delight. Rose and Ott were elsewhere, which made for looser tongues, and I dare say the rich food made us wild. Fegin told us about one such hog that got loose in a slaughterhouse in Ballytween and killed every man in the place, and seven delivery boys one after another, and the foreman who came to see why the packing was so slow.

‘And they all knew about the hog. It didn’t just appear like a fairy.’

‘This weren’t no mucking fairy,’ said Haddismal.

Mr Thyne speculated that the hog might have gotten into a dark corner of the hold and gone to sleep — hibernated, in a word. The notion brought jeers. ‘Listen to the company man! Telling us about pigs!’

‘The Red River is on Kushal,’ I explained. Seeing his blank look, I added: ‘Where it’s warm all the time. No need to hibernate if you’re a tropical pig.’

‘Latzlo hid the creature,’ said Haddismal, matter-of-fact, ‘and I hope Rose hangs him from the yards by his thumbs. No worse moneygrubber alive than that man. You heard him in the passageway: “My property, my investment.” Gangrune and Bindhammer lying at his feet, half killed, and he’s got eyes only for this.’ He waved at the platter of bones. ‘He’s the guilty party, no doubt about it. Still thought he could sell it, I shouldn’t wonder.’

‘Sell it to whom?’ asked Mr Elkstem.

‘To us, of course. Later on, when the fresh food ran out, and we got hungry again.’

‘Brainless twit,’ said Uskins, through a mouthful.

Haddismal looked at him with contempt. ‘That depends on who he’s compared with,’ he said, and chuckled at his own jest.

‘I wasn’t speaking of Latzlo,’ said Uskins.

Our busy jaws stopped dead. Haddismal stared in amazement. Uskins normally flinched at the very sight of the marine, who smacked him about with some regularity. But now he just went on eating.

‘I didn’t quite catch that remark,’ said Haddismal, low and deadly.

Uskins shrugged, chewed faster. Haddismal kept drilling him with those eyes, then slowly shook his head, as if he’d decided Uskins wasn’t quite worth interrupting his dinner for. The rest of us exchanged glances, started breathing again. Thyne hiccupped. Haddismal took another rib from the platter.

‘This hog was smarter than you on a good day,’ said Uskins.

The Turach exploded from his chair. Thyne and Elkstem dived out of his path as he rounded the table.

‘Because nobody kept it, you see,’ said Uskins, the only one of us still seated. ‘It was woken, intelligent, and we’re eating it anyway, how d’ye like that, Sergeant, hmm? The Sizzies always did call us cannibals.’

The Turach was reaching for Uskins’ collar, but he froze there, agog. Now we were all shouting at the first mate, in rage and disgust. Woken? What in the brimstone Pits did he mean?

Uskins swallowed a large gristly bite. ‘Of course woken,’ he said. ‘How do you think it got away from the rats? Day after day in that wooden crate. Thinking, knowing its circumstances. Knowing it was travelling to its death. What did piggy do? It watched and waited. And when the rats came it kicked that crate to pieces and fled into a vanishing compartment. Just like mages have done for hundreds of years. Just as Miss Thasha used to do, in olden times, when the ship was hers. The cows and goats went too, but they were just lucky.’

He pushed more flesh into his mouth. ‘Uskins,’ I said, ‘the hog never talked.’

‘Neither do I, most days,’ he said. ‘Why talk when nobody listens? You’re a bilge-brain, too.’ He gave me a meaty grin. ‘What would it say? “Hello, Mr Latzlo! It’s your thousand-pound piggy, let me out and I’ll play nice with you, I’ll fetch your slippers, I’ll never bite off your head.” ’

‘Raving lunatic,’ said Haddismal.

Uskins lurched forward and dragged the whole platter to himself, knocking his plate to the floor. He began to eat with both hands, chin low, making slobbery sounds like a dog. Yet somehow he managed to keep talking.

‘Vanishing compartment. Vanishing compartment. The same trick the crawlies pulled to escape us — they never went ashore, they’ll be back to fight us yet — the same trick that let Arunis hide so long in the-’

Smack. His face went right into the pile of meat, as though shoved by an unseen hand. He began to squeal and writhe, in terrible fear, and it took all of us to restrain him, and hours for him to wear himself out. He is in his cabin now, strapped to his bed lest he hurt himself. A few of us are taking turns watching over him; I am writing this by his bedside in fact. I’ve tried to talk with him, to tell him that whatever’s happening is not his fault. When I raise the candle he stares at me with the blank eyes of an ape.