Robert Redick - The Night of the Swarm

‘She was never just Thasha, my lad,’ said Ramachni. ‘And now I must insist that you sleep .’

The last word was like a finger snuffing a flame. Pazel barely had time to lay his head on the stone before sleep engulfed him, blissful and profound. In the stillness of the clearing he dreamed of a typhoon, and the Chathrand running north again, racing on madcap winds, chasing or giving chase. The whole crew was reunited, the dead and the living alike, and Captain Rose was on his quarterdeck, raging and gesturing, shouting orders, cursing ghosts. Pazel stood in the lashing rain, and Thasha was near him, her eyes bright as sparks, her pale skin luminous, as on the night when they had made love beneath the cedar. And somewhere in the darkness of the ship Pazel could feel the Nilstone, throbbing, pumping death through the ship and the storm and the world like a malignant spirit, like a great black heart.

Myett had climbed three hundred feet before she realised that she did not wish to die.

She knew the difference between flirting with death and hungering for it, wanting it with her soul. She had known the latter condition, and once, very nearly, succumbed. This was different. The impulse to destroy herself weakened with every yard she ascended.

She’d been in earnest that other time, however. Sealed in the Chathrand ’s flooding hold, blind drunk, heartbroken. It was luck that had saved her: luck and the Masalym shipwrights. If the draining of the ship had been delayed another quarter-hour, they’d have found her body clogging the pumps.

Three hundred feet brought her to the level of the bottom-most leaf-layer, where the wind began. She held tight, feeling the still-pleasant burning in her muscles, the strength in arms, fingers, ankles no giant could ever attain. She was wedged in a crack that ran like inverse lightning up the tower wall. The strange birds wheeled around her, crying. Afraid she’d come for what was left of their brood.

The alternative to death had been this expedition, this crossing of battle-lines. She had spent most of the voyage fighting Ensyl and Diadrelu and their giant friends. Myett had been as committed as any ixchel to the hatred of human beings, and heaven knew there was reason for it. But loyalty to her lover had been the bedrock of that hate. She had cleaved to Taliktrum, Diadrelu’s nephew, before and after his rise to power. After he became a visionary, Myett had argued with the doubters, rabidly insistent that he was all that he claimed. Too funny. All along the debate had been with herself.

She could not pinpoint when the change had come. After the flame-trolls, surely, and before the catastrophe in the forest. Was it the night she dreamed her grandfather’s death, and woke sobbing, bewildered, unable to recall for nearly half a minute that she’d left him safe and sound on the Chathrand ? Was it when the giants wept for their dead, and she had nowhere to be but right there beside them, witnessing grief that looked and sounded for all the world like ixchel grief? Or the night she saw Thasha and Pazel Pathkendle slip away to make love, and followed them, unseen of course, and vaguely disappointed to learn that this, too, was not a thing her people did better than giants.

Four hundred feet, and the rim of the crater was in sight. A tearing wind broke around her, trying her grip. The crack had narrowed, too: Myett found fewer places to wedge her body, rest her weight. She could see the large, shaggy nests atop the pinnacle, now, and one grey wing, spread wide to bask in the sun.

Whenever it had happened, the change was real. She stood with Ensyl, now — and heaven help her, the giants. The humans. She would have to remember to hate them, secretly, remind herself of what they were. Or else become one. That was Diadrelu’s choice, and Ensyl’s. Myett would never go that far, never risk becoming a mascot. But the quest was hers now, and she would give more than they did, more than they ever could. It had become a cause to live for, rather than a slower, grander way to die.

She stopped. Her muscles twitching, her fingers raw. She was a hundred feet above the highest leaf-layer, seeing the wider world for the first time in days. She knew that the descent would take all her strength, if indeed she had not gone too far already. The wind tore at her, but she would not retreat without the view she’d come for. Aching, she leaned out from the wall.

The ruins stood almost exactly at the Forest’s centre. To the south, dark hills pressed close to the crater’s rim. A shimmer of reflected sunlight marked the place where the mighty Angungra cut through the crater wall and swept away, into a deepening gorge. A mist hung over that gorge, and beyond it there were mountains, lower than the cold peaks they had passed through, but tight and forbidding all the same. And endless, too: if they somehow escaped this Forest they would have little choice but to brave those mountains — with no guide who had ever set foot there, no notion of what lay beyond.

Or almost none.

There is hope downriver, between the mountains and the sea. The strange message from Vasparhaven, the Spider Temple, came back to her with sudden irony. Hope. Maybe it was out there, somewhere, hidden in this great arbitrary maze of a world. But what of it? The notion seemed cruel, like showing a coin to a beggar, then tossing it away into a field.

Carefully, she turned to face the north. The snow-capped range through which they had come loomed dark and massive. Astonishing to think that a footpath snaked through those peaks, and down again, to the city where they’d left their ship, their one real hope of any life save the life of castaways. To say nothing of kinfolk, clan brothers and sisters, her grandfather. . and Taliktrum.

He was back there in Masalym. The only ixchel in that vast city of dlomu. Her lover, exiled by his own choosing. And by the impossible, the suffocating neediness of their clan.

I should be with you. I should have sought you out.

Nonsense, of course. Taliktrum had spurned her, called her an entertainment. If Myett had abandoned both the ship and this expedition, if she somehow found him in that huge dark hive of a city, Taliktrum would only have called her a fool. And been right in doing so. Myett was done with foolishness: she too had made decisions, chosen sides. It was a strange fate, to be fighting alongside giants, sworn enemies, for an abstraction called the world. But Myett knew what she and Ensyl could give them, how ixchel skills might help them all survive, and that certainty of being needed was what one felt in a clan.

It was not passion, not ‘starlight in the blood’ as the poets had it, not the bliss she had felt when Taliktrum was at his best, when he managed to be loving and kind. But it was good, they were good; even Hercol had forgiven and embraced her. She looked down, mapping out her descent.

Then her brow furrowed. What was blocking the sun?

Instinct came too late. Myett’s hand flew to her knife, but the hawk was already on her, grey wings filling her vision, shrill cry rending the air. Talons longer than her arm bit into her flesh.

She was crushed, barely able to breathe. But as the hawk wheeled away from the tower she managed to pass the knife from her half-pinned arm to her teeth. Her thoughts exploding. She would fall. She would die. She would work the arm free, stab the bird, master it, make it land. No quitting. No quitting. The talons moved. Her arm slid free.

At once she buried the knife in the bird’s leg. Its reaction was swift and violent, a sharp jerking stall, and Myett was thrown, whirling, falling, falling to her death. The sun whirled, the earth flashed in circles around her, the tower wall surged by faster and faster, she was dead, she was surely dead, a life of lust and bitterness and rage-