Robert Redick - The Night of the Swarm

‘Look at the Imperial Surgeon! How the mighty are fallen, eh, Captain Rose? How the highborn are brought to heel!’

Fiffengurt was sobbing. Chadfallow moved feebly, leaving smears of blood. Captain Kurlstaff stared at Uskins with vague apprehension. There was a white scarf knotted at his neck.

Ott cleaned his knife in Chadfallow’s hair, then stood and stretched his back, wincing with pleasure. ‘Spread him out,’ he said.

The Turachs pulled at Chadfallow’s wrists and ankles until the doctor lay spreadeagled on his back. Unbuttoning his fly, Ott began to urinate on the man, methodically, face to feet and back again.

‘The trust we put in you,’ he said, ‘makes your defection all the more base. It is not only treasonous but hurtful to His Supremacy. It is a crime against — what did you call it, Doctor? — the soul.’

The room grew rank. Chadfallow groaned and spat but could not move. Ott paused, chose a new position, began again, soaking the doctor’s wounds and shreds of clothing. When he finished, he went to the table and gathered the linen napkins and tossed them at the doctor. ‘Clean yourself,’ he said. ‘Rose, I am sorry this occurred in your cabin. Tell the steward to clean it with vinegar and lye. I believe this concludes our business, gentlemen. Let us hope for favourable winds, and a swift departure for the North.’

13 Modobrin 941

He heard the dogs behind him at midday, while he rested near the mountain’s peak. He had the telescope out and trained on the inlet. When the baying started he swung the instrument back down the mountain in the direction of the city, and swore.

‘Are they hers, Prince?’ asked the ixchel man on his shoulder.

‘Oh yes, they’re Macadra’s.’

That ancient sound, the war-bay, the summons to their masters: here is the blood you want. He could see five dogs on the mountain, huge and lean and red. They were racing up the dry ridge like furies, cutting the switchbacks, tearing through brush. Their deep chests heaved like bellows. Their wide paws gripped and pulled. Athymar eight-fangs, bred for murder, the dogs that bit and never let go.

‘They have our scent,’ said the ixchel.

‘My scent, Lord Taliktrum,’ said the prince. ‘I doubt they would know what to make of your own.’

Prince Olik Bali Adro, rebel and fugitive and distant cousin to the Emperor, allowed himself a last glance at Masalym below the mountain: her layer-cake loveliness, her waterfalls, the River Mai winding through her like a sapphire braid. City of marvels, and of fear, with its wealthy households squeezed together like a rosebud at the apex, and the poor adrift in the crumbling labyrinth below. He had ruled Masalym for something less than a week. This morning, he had barely escaped it with his life.

Five dogs, five athymars . He did not want to fight them. He did not, in truth, want them to exist. Dogs had a beauty and a purity no dlomu ever matched. They would work or fight as their keepers required, go through battle and flames and savage landscapes that bloodied their paws. They would serve until their bodies broke, or their hearts. And they would kill him regardless of Imperial law.

‘She has branded them on their hindquarters,’ he said. ‘That seems a senseless act. Who would be fool enough to try to steal those monsters, I ask you?’

‘Prince?’ said Taliktrum.

‘Hmm, yes?’

‘Put that scope away and run.’

The prince lowered the telescope, considered the dogs without it, the distance they had travelled in the last few minutes alone. ‘Quite right,’ he said, and let the instrument fall from his hands.

He ran west along the summit trail, through the hyssop and giant rosettes. No cover, nothing to climb. He saw his own dogs loping parallel to him, dispersed as he’d ordered them to be. The nearest were keeping him in sight; those further out watched their companions. All nine could be called in with a gesture to help him fight. But his dogs were smaller creatures, a mixed pack of hunters and scouts. They could fight, certainly: they had been trained by the Masalym Watch. But the slaughter, the maimed animals — no, this was not the place to make a stand. What he needed now was distance from Masalym, and the servants of Macadra Hyndrascorm that streamed from it in all directions.

Prince Olik had already killed once that morning. Barely an hour up the Rim Trail, with the huge cliffs called the Jaws of Masalym open beneath him and the thunder of the great falls reverberating in his bones, a pair of riders had suddenly rounded a bend and spotted him, and the one in the lead had charged. The prince could not help but feel a moment’s fright. He had lived so long in safety, protected by his face and name: a face it was every citizen’s duty to know; a name that meant death to anyone who touched him. When he fled beyond the Empire they had made him a target, but here, all his life, they had accustomed him to invulnerability. Each time he met a citizen who feared Macadra more than the ancient law, it was as if a crack had opened in the bedrock of the earth.

Still, the prince had not hesitated. He had killed them, those men who had been his subjects only the day before: the first as he tried to run Olik down with his spear, the second as he raised a bugle that would have sealed his fate. Lucky kills, both of them. Yet he had no luck with the horses, which bolted riderless back down the ridge.

Two hours later the sun was fully risen, and the prince stood atop the headland, wild rosemary about him and Taliktrum on a stone nearby, looking down at the Kirisang, the Death’s Head , Macadra’s hideous ship. ‘Why, it’s almost a twin of the Chathrand !’ the ixchel had exclaimed. And of course that was true: though much older and heaped with strange Plazic weaponry, the Kirisang was a Segral -class ship like the one the humans had arrived in. Olik turned away from the sight: he knew that Macadra herself was on that ship, unless she had gone ashore to look for him. The sorceress had not stirred from Bali Adro City in thirty years, but lust for the Nilstone had drawn her out.

Then the prince had raised his eyes and looked north, through the gap in the Sandwall where the Chathrand had sailed five days before. ‘I wonder if they are truly out there, waiting for an all-clear signal, so that they might return and collect their missing crew. Rose’s eyes were shifty when he promised to do so. And that bloodthirsty Mr Ott never left him alone. “Stath Balfyr, Captain; our goal is Stath Balfyr.” He was in a fever to reach that isle.’

‘He should not have been,’ Taliktrum had replied. ‘If they ever do reach Stath Balfyr, it will be the end of the voyage for them all.’

‘You sound quite sure of that.’

‘I am,’ said Taliktrum, ‘but ask me no more about it, Sire. There are some oaths even an exile must keep.’

He was a cipher, this tiny lord who’d saved his life. The prince knew almost nothing about ixchel. They had suffered under the Platazcra, but their own habits of secrecy disguised the extent of their persecution. They were found occasionally aboard boats plying the Island Wilderness, and were said to be tolerated by the people of Nemmoc and other lands west of Bali Adro. Yet Taliktrum had given him the impression that the Northern ixchel who had come with the Chathrand were of a very different sort: rigidly communal, even indivisible in their clan structure and ethos of ‘us’ before ‘me’. Which made Taliktrum’s own defection rather startling. On the headland, with as much delicacy as he could muster, Olik had asked Taliktrum if he regretted leaving his people behind. Taliktrum had stared hard at the sea.