Robert Redick - The Night of the Swarm

Days later, when he came to his senses, he was far from the city of his birth. The clipper was running north along a foggy coastline. New freebooters were aboard, and one of them evidently outranked the captain, for he had taken over the man’s cabin, and could be heard inside, with a woman. Each time the man laughed Pazel found himself staring at the door.

Later that morning, the man sent for him. Pazel was shown right into the bedchamber. There in blue pajamas, beside a rosy-cheeked woman Pazel had never seen, was Gregory Pathkendle.

He was older — so much older! All the hair that remained to him was grey. Still his eyes were bright with mischief as he beckoned Pazel to take a seat.

‘Pazel Chadfallow, is it?’ he said, making a face, as though the name tickled the back of his throat. ‘Afflicted with some permanent magic, they tell me? Well never mind, my daughter’s just the same.’

‘Which daughter’s that, love?’ said the woman.

‘I don’t mind a man with problems he owns up to,’ said Captain Gregory, ‘but there’s one thing I can’t abide. Can you guess what it is?’

‘Domesticity?’ said Pazel.

‘Beg your pardon?’

‘No sir, I can’t guess.’

‘Boasting, that’s what,’ said Gregory. ‘So I have in mind to find out if you were boasting when you told my boys you knew your way around a ship.’

He drilled Pazel for some ten minutes concerning sails and rigging and the standard etiquette of the sea. Then he asked Pazel about his surname.

‘I knew a Chadfallow. He was a doctor, and a great man, although he was too close to the Usurper in Etherhorde. He was one of the most powerful men in Alifros, in his time. Do you know the man I’m speaking of?’

‘Ignus Chadfallow,’ said Pazel uneasily. ‘I knew him. I’m his son.’

The woman burst out laughing. But Captain Gregory just looked him up and down. Pazel found himself remembering certain mornings when the woman beside Gregory had been his mother, and the window behind the bed had looked out on plum orchards. There had been mornings when this man made griddle-cakes, or took Pazel out to edge of the Highlands to spot foxes and deer. A small, sweet life. A life he’d never thought would end.

‘Hush your cackling,’ Gregory told the woman. ‘The lad didn’t lie about his sailing smarts; why should he lie about his father? And even the noblest among us may sew a few wild seeds.’

‘You’re proof of that.’

Gregory kissed her. ‘Even dry old Chadfallow had a passionate side. I happen to know that for a fact.’ He winked at Pazel. ‘There’s a past behind every man, ain’t there, my boy?’

Pazel signed on with Gregory’s freebooters that very day, and in the two years that followed he saw more of the Northern world than he had on all his years on merchant vessels. With his new shipmates he camped in bogs and salt marshes, danced with Noonfirth courtesans, smuggled arms, liquor and living men across the battle-lines. He was aware that he had realised his oldest dream: to sail with the man he’d always believed to be his father. But that had been a childish dream. Gregory’s passion for ribald jokes, for helping orphans, for bedding women whose languages he didn’t speak and whose very names he confused: all that had been carefully hidden. Pazel only now began to know the man.

Gregory’s friendship with the Empress was something more than strategic: he had despised Arqual even before it invaded his homeland. He took countless risks for Maisa’s rebels, whether by sharing intelligence in secret letters or hiding swords in sacks of meal. ‘I’m no idealist, Pazel,’ he confided once, ‘I just know how to pick the winning team.’

Pazel hoped Gregory was right, but doubted anyone could be sure. Maisa’s rebels had yet to launch a single raid on Etherhorde. Still, defectors continued to join her ranks, and the noose about the capital was tightening. After one bloody week in springtime, Ulsprit fell. Pazel was there in the city when Maisa rode through as a liberator, waving from an open carriage beside Prince Eberzam Isiq. Pazel was surprised to see a little bird swoop down and land on Isiq’s shoulder. Prince Eberzam turned it a blazing smile.

But if Gregory had aged, Thasha’s father was actually venerable, and Maisa was almost ancient. Her iron will was apparent in every glance, but her frame was skin and bone, and her hands shook as she waved. And for the first time Pazel wondered who, if anyone, these two were grooming as an heir.

That night Gregory did not come back to the ship, and the next day they sailed for Dremland without him. As Ulsprit dwindled on the horizon, the bosun let it slip that Gregory had stayed behind for a woman.

‘Of course he did,’ said Pazel. It had happened before: Gregory leaving his ship in other hands, arranging passage with friends or fellow schemers, rejoining them in some distant port. But the bosun said that this woman was a special case. ‘They were married once, you see. She was his wife.’

‘His wife? His wife Suthinia ?’

‘Aye, the witch. So he’s told you about her, has he?’

Pazel looked back at Ulsprit. It was hard to find the words. ‘I know about her,’ he said at last.

In Dremland, late at night, he wrote a letter to Gregory and slipped it under his door. Then he bundled his things into his hammock and slipped onto the dock. He had forged papers and fine seamanship, and thirty languages to his name. He’d spent less money than he’d earned in Gregory’s service. He knew how to get along. How was never likely to be a problem, he decided. The harder questions were where , and why .

He went on wandering. Now and then he took a drink. There were times when his loneliness rose up and seemed to smother him, and other times when he recalled Ramachni’s words on Gurishal, and felt glad, and was determined to hold on.

He bribed his own way across the battle-lines and walked the streets of Etherhorde, and stood in front of the old Isiq mansion on Maj Hill. That upper window, her bedroom. That garden, where Herco1 taught her to fight. Then he found his way to Reka Street, and was admitted to the Physicians’ Temple, and lit a candle for Dr. Ignus Chadfallow, and stayed there in silence for a time.

By evening he was anxious to be gone: too many women in Etherhorde looked like Thasha Isiq. He fled to Uturphe, and grew drunk on Uturphan brandy, and stumbled into the flikkermen’s quarter in a daze. The flikkermen chased him, cracking their whips, until they realised he was cursing them in their own language, flawlessly. At once they grew affectionate, and fed him raw river eel, and never wanted him to leave.

The next month he stopped in Simja, and visited the taverns there, and listened to the sailors’ gossip. To his amazement, he heard them speaking of the Shaggat Ness.

‘What’s that?’ he said, breaking in. ‘You have that wrong, surely? The Shaggat’s dead.’

‘Oh, the father, aye, on Gurishal. But this is his son, lad. On Bramian. Ain’t you heard? The Usurper raised him like a pet snake, with thousands of his crazies, up a big river in the jungle. He even built them a fleet. And the Shaggat’s boy sailed off just like they wanted, to make war on the Mzithrinis. It was all according to plan.’

‘Somebody’s ugly plan,’ his friend added, with a belch.

‘Until one day the son wakes up and says, “It’s over. My father the Shaggat is dead. I am going home to set the white monkeys free.” And he turns his fleet around and sails back to Bramian, and sets up a kingdom on that riverbank, and starts to bring the tribals into his fold. The island’s full of savages, you know. And the poor old Secret Fist! They can’t take Bramian back from him. They don’t have the manpower these days.’