Robert Redick - The Rats and the Ruling sea

Pachet Ghali knelt, and filled his lungs, and played. The music was like nothing else in ixchel tradition. It was not a melody as such, and yet there was a loud and lilting refrain. It was no attempt at birdsong, and yet it was a summons to the creatures. It was spellcraft: one of the last shards of magic in the collective memory of her people. Among the ixchel, only artists retained any link to the ancient disciplines whereby (it was said) miracles had once been performed. It was part of her brother's genius and audacity that he had planned to wed ixchel magic, for the first time in centuries, to a practical use.

But her brother was dead, and the Pachet was old, and the birds did not seem to hear him.

They all stood listening, hoping. The sound contended with the wind, the surf, the noise of the swallows themselves. At last Taliktrum sliced the air with a despairing hand.

'Enough,' he said. 'Save your breath, old man.'

The Pachet did not cease playing, however. Instead he rose slowly to his feet. His eyes were wide. Taliktrum looked from the player to the cliffs and back again. And then Dri realised that the birds had fallen silent.

The others stood as tense as she, watching the cliffs. Pachet Ghali played on. Suddenly a dark shadow flitted past his shoulder. Two more followed in the wink of an eye. Then it was as if the whole colony of birds had become of one mind. They flowed over the rim of the crevasse in a dark torrent and swept among the ixchel, so close that Dri felt the caress of wingtips on her shoulders. The Pachet turned, chasing the swallows with his eyes. All at once his music changed, and from a summons it became an order, a sharp and definite command.

Only twenty or thirty birds heeded him this time, but they were enough. Peeling away from the flock, they formed a racing circle about the ixchel. The Pachet raised his song a whole octave, his face amber-red with the strain.

Then the birds fell on Taliktrum. They jostled and crowded, vying to seize some part of his shirt or leggings. Dri had coached him for this moment, from the old lore of their House, the memories passed down to her by her great-aunts and uncles. Taliktrum raised his arms as though preparing to dive, and then it seemed almost that he was diving, but upwards, as the swallows bore him swiftly through the tree tops.

'Gods of earth and air,' said Diadrelu.

She heard his triumphant laugh. The birds flew where he wished: up the slope of the island, out over the cauldron of waves, down in a plummeting dive from which they were scarcely able to recover.

Myett approached Diadrelu and gripped her arm. 'My grandfather tires,' she said. 'You must tell your nephew to come down.'

'Let him cease playing when he will!' Steldak laughed. 'Our commander wears the swallow-suit; if they drop him he will fly back to us himself. And he no longer answers to Diadrelu, girl: she has been sanctioned by the clan, and walks free by his mercy. Aya Rin, see how they obey! It is as if-'

Steldak never finished his thought. Taliktrum and his swallow-servants raced by overhead, and the young lord swept a hand over the four figures beneath him. And before they could wonder at the move the swallows were boiling around them, black eyes shining with urgency, talons seizing at their clothes.

They rose together in the grip of the birds. The flock winged after Taliktrum, who was racing out over the sea. We'll die! thought Dri. For the Pachet's music had ceased: he could barely hold onto his instrument, let alone play.

But the birds still held them tightly, and still flew where Taliktrum willed. He led them far from the cliff, and high into the sky. For Dri, who had flown many times by swallow-suit, it was a frightful but thrilling experience. For the others it was pure terror. Steldak wore the look of a man in free fall, watching his death rush towards him. Myett and the Pachet were reciting prayers.

Only Taliktrum was fearless: indeed he looked half-crazed with ecstasy. Roaring, he made the birds climb higher still, until they saw beneath them all five Black Shoulder Isles, and the belching cone of an active volcano, and a fantastic mountaintop ruin on Bramian with serpentine walls that vanished in the mist. How is he doing it? Dri wondered. Will they obey him as long as he wears the suit? Then the flock wheeled round and Dri saw fear enter her nephew's face at last.

Great Mother!

A human stood atop the hill she and Steldak had climbed an hour before. He was a tall man in late-middle years, head shaved, dressed in a sand-coloured cloak tied with a crimson belt. His hands were raised above his head, and in one of them he held a sceptre of gold topped with a dark and jagged crystal. The furious seabirds whirled about him, fearing for their eggs, and it was a moment before Dri saw his face. When she did at last, she knew with a certainty that it was not the first time.

The man did not glance skywards; they had not been seen. As Taliktrum brought the flock around for another pass, Dri took out the monocular and trained it on him. The man had lowered his sceptre until it pointed at the Chathrand, and Dri could see his lips moving in some chant or incantation. A moment later he turned and quickly left the hill.

How had he landed, and where was his boat? Dri could not imagine that such a personage had been aboard the Chathrand all along. But where else could he have come from? And where in the Nine Pits had she seen his face?

Taliktrum struggled to draw nearer to his aunt, but he could not control individual birds, and merely sent them all zig-zagging above the isle. 'What do we do?' he shouted in the ixchel-voice no human could hear. For a moment all his pride of lordship was forgotten.

'Land!' Dri shouted back. 'Sweep low around the isle, and land! We must get back to the ship! This magic is no use to us now!'

Taliktrum nodded, still in shock. He swept his hand in a circle, and as if reading his very thought the birds dived for Sandplume. Soon they were safely out of sight, with trees and hill between them and the stranger above.

Then Myett screamed like a child, and pointed out over the western sea.

A warship was racing towards them, around the south shore of Bramian. Dri snapped the monocular to her eye: she was a great sleek predator of a ship, seven falling stars upon her foresail and a hull painted white as snow. It was a Mzithrini Blodmel. No more than twelve miles off. And of course it was not making for them at all — nothing as small as an ixchel was visible at such a distance — but rather for the Chathrand, the unsuspecting Chathrand, still moored on the blind side of the isle.

Taliktrum's gestures became frantic, crude. Wary of being seen by the man above, he drove the flock so low that a few unlucky birds flew full-tilt into the crest of a wave, perishing instantly. Then the nesting-cliff came into view and he veered so sharply that Myett's birds nearly lost their grip. Their landing was rough to say the least. Dri and Steldak were flung against the sides of trees. The old Pachet landed with a grimace of pain, but he kept his instrument safe in his arms.

Taliktrum ran to Diadrelu's side. 'Get up, Aunt, we have to think! It was a Blodmel, wasn't it?'

Dri climbed painfully to her feet. 'Not just any Blodmel,' she said. 'That is the Jistrolloq, the White Reaper. And it cannot be here by chance.'

'But perhaps they still respect the new peace?' asked Pachet Ghali.

'Yes, and they have come all this way to invite us to a game of pass-the-sandal, ' said Taliktrum acidly.

'Keep silent, old fool,' snapped Steldak, 'and let His Lordship think.' Taliktrum pulled a large bundle from under a drift of leaves. It was the other swallow-suit, which they had hidden an hour ago. He tore it roughly from its travel sack.

Diadrelu shook her head. 'No, Pachet, they have come too far for any task but murder. They blame us for their elder's death, and indeed it was Arunis who flung the incubus at their shrine.'