Robert Redick - The Night of the Swarm

A battle is ending in the heart of a black wood. From the surrounding treetops it is all oddly peaceful: the late moonlight, the curve of the river, the grassy clearing on its banks, the ruined tower like a broken bottleneck thrust against the sky. No shouts from the combatants, no clashing of steel. One can even hear the crows across the water, rejoicing in the almost-dawn.

But distance deceives. A little closer, and we find the grass is scorched, the river furious, the stairs of the ruined tower slick with blood. And at the foot of the stairs a dozen figures crouch: all wounded, all contemplating death; in a minute’s time they will be slain by sorcery. They bend low, squeeze tightly together. They are surrounded by a ring-shaped pit, and the inner edge of the pit is crumbling toward their feet.

Above their heads shimmers a dull halo, resembling a mist or cloud of insects. It is neither; it is the whirling of enchanted blades. They have cut someone already; a fine haze of blood thickens the air. The blades, as may be expected, are descending. The ring-shaped pit bristles with spikes.

Crude horrors, these; but so is the confluence of powers that has willed them into being. High on the tower wall stands a mage: skeletal, staring, hideous at a glance. He is gripping the hair of another, a ragged beast of a man, and gesturing at the unfortunates below. The ragged man is drooling, his gaze empty of all comprehension. Tight to his chest he holds a little sphere of darkness, so black it devours the moonlight, so black it troubles the eye.

Movement, suddenly: a third figure has crawled up from behind. A youth, dripping wet, bleeding, his look of fury rivaling the mage’s own. Unseen, he staggers closer, holding what can only be a blackjack. With a spasm of regret he strikes down the ragged man. There is a crack of breaking bone.

The whirling blades vanish, and the pit. The ragged man falls dead, and the sphere slips from his grasp. Among the crouching figures, a young woman closes her hand upon a sword hilt. Above, the sphere of darkness is rolling towards the wall’s sheer edge. The mage lunges, catches the sphere at the last instant, and with it clutched in both hands, he falls. Before he is halfway to the ground, the future of Alifros takes shape.

The touch of the sphere is death, even to one as powerful as this. Death consumes him, hands to wrists to elbows. Thirty feet from the ground his arms are dead. And yet he smiles. He is speaking an incantation. Beside the tower, the surface of the river convulses, and something thin and dark leaps out of it, skyward. The mage tries for a glimpse, but at that instant the young woman strikes with rare perfection. Her blade sings. The body lands headless on the earth.

The dark splinter, however, continues its ascent, like a fish that leaps and forgets to fall. Up through mist and cloud it stabs, above the paths of hawks and falcons, above the spirit highways of the murths, until at last it touches the shores of that greater ocean, the void from whence we came. But no further: it has work to do in Alifros, tireless work.

Northwards it passes, turning and tumbling like a shard of glass, over the mountains, the dew-damp woods, the lowlands where villagers are waking, muttering, hitching oxen to the plough. By the time it reaches the ocean it has doubled in size.

11 Modobrin 941

240th day from Etherhorde

No sunrise in his life — and he has watched hundreds, being a tarboy — has ever made him sentimental, but now the tears flow fast and silent. He is standing in the river with the water to his knees. Voices from the clearing warn him not to take another step, and he knows the danger better than they. Still he cannot believe that anything will harm him now. The sun on his brown, bruised face declares him a survivor, one of the lucky ones, in fact so lucky it staggers the mind.

He can hear someone singing, haunted words about remembered mornings, fallen friends. He lifts a hand as though to touch the sun. Tears of gratitude, these. By rights they should be dead, all of them. Drowned in darkness, smothering darkness, the darkness of a tomb.

Footsteps in the shallows, then a hand touches his elbow. ‘That’s far enough, mate,’ says a beloved voice.

Pazel Pathkendle gives a silent nod.

‘Come on, will you? Ramachni has something to tell us. I don’t think it can wait.’

Pazel bends and splashes water on his face. Better not to show these tears. He is not ashamed; he could not care less about shame or valour or looking brave for Neeps Undrabust, as good a friend as he could ever hope for. But tears would make Neeps want to help, and Pazel the survivor is learning not to ask for help. Friends have just so much to give; when that is gone there’s no hand on your elbow, no one left to pull you ashore.

He turned to Neeps and forced a smile. ‘You’re a mess.’

‘Go to the Pits,’ said the smaller tarboy. ‘You didn’t come through this any better. You look like a drowned raccoon.’

‘Wish I felt that good.’

Neeps glanced down at Pazel’s leg. ‘ Credek , it’s worse than ever, isn’t it?’

‘The cold water helps,’ said Pazel. But in fact his leg felt terrible. It wasn’t the burn; that pain he could tolerate, or at least understand. But the incisions from the flame troll’s fangs had begun to throb, and itch, and the skin around them was an unhealthy green.

‘Listen, mate, the fighting’s over,’ said Neeps. ‘You show that leg to Ramachni. Not in an hour or two. Now.’

‘Who’s that singing? Bolutu?’

Neeps sniffed; Pazel’s dodge had not escaped him. ‘Bolutu and Lunja both,’ he said. ‘A praise song to the daylight, they told us. I think the dlomu are all sun worshippers, deep down.’

‘I’m joining them,’ said Pazel, his smile now sincere.

‘Rin’s truth!’ said Neeps. ‘But right now I just wish I could thank the builders of the tower, whoever they were.’

Pazel looked again at the massive ruin, and struggled as before to picture it intact. He could not do it; what he imagined was just too big. The absurdly gradual curve of the wall, the fitted stones large as carriages, the seven-hundred-foot fragment jutting into the sky: the tower would have dwarfed the greatest palaces of Arqual in the Northern world, along with everything he had yet seen in the South. And Neeps was right: it was the tower, as much as Ramachni’s magic or Thasha’s brilliance with a sword, that had saved their lives.

For they were still within the tomb — a living tomb, a tomb made of trees. Days ago, hunting the sorcerer Arunis, they had found themselves standing above it: a crater so vast it would have taken them days to walk around, if they had not known that Arunis waited somewhere in its depths. A crater which they at first mistook for an enormous, weed-covered lake. But it was no lake. What they had at first taken for the scummed-over surface was in fact a lid of leaves: the huge, flat, rubbery leaves of the Infernal Forest. Pazel had been reminded of lily pads blanketing a mill pond, but these pads were fused, branch to branch, tree to tree, all the way to the crater’s edge.

The entire forest lay sealed beneath this skin. Beneath four such skins, as they had found on descending: for there were older leaf-layers beneath the topmost, all supported by the straight, stony pillars of the trees. Like the decks of a ship, each layer was darker than that above. Below the fourth level their descent had continued for several hundred feet, until at last they reached the forest floor.