The Night of the Swarm (Chathrand Voyage 4) by Robert V.S. Redick Read Free Book Online

cabin in a circle. His movements as always were fluid, measured, utterly precise. He spoke no offhand words, made no careless sounds, revealed nothing but
what he chose to in the cast of his old, scarred face. His hands hung loose; his knife was visible but sheathed. As he walked, his eyes remained fixed on the circle’s centre: the spot where
Captain Nilus Rotheby Rose sat scowling, fidgeting, in a chair barely large enough to accommodate his bulk.
    The captain’s eyes were bloodshot; his red beard was a fright. It was his own day cabin he sat in, under the assassin’s gaze. The chair was the one he usually gave to the least
favoured guest at his dinner table.
    Rose crossed his burly arms. Sandor Ott continued circling. For some reason he had also brought his longbow – huge, stained, savage – and propped it near the stern galleries, along
with several arrows. Target practice? Shooting gulls from the window? Rose scratched the back of his neck, trying to keep the old killer in sight.
    Maybe he would never speak. It was even possible that his thoughts were not with the captain at all, no matter how much he drilled with his eyes. Some people whittled sticks when they were
concentrating. Sandor Ott tormented people, stripped their certainties away, needled them with doubts.
    There was a small table within the captain’s reach, and a flagon of wine atop it. Rose snatched it up and pulled the stopper. His grip was weaker than a year ago: he had lost two fingers
in a fight with Arunis. Rose had trod on one of them, heard the knuckle crack beneath his boot. Horrible the things that came back to him, the sensations one was powerless to forget.
    He raised the flagon, then paused and removed a small object from his mouth. It was a glass eyeball, beautifully rendered. Yellow and black, orpiment and ebony, arrow-slit iris of a jungle cat.
A leopard, to be precise: the symbol of Bali Adro, this Empire twice the size of Ott’s beloved Arqual, if the dlömic freaks told the truth. They’d handed Rose the taxidermed animal
(sunbleached, moth-gnawed, deeply symbolic in some way he cared nothing about) just hours before the ship’s departure from Masalym. A gesture of goodwill to let a human captain hold the
carcass, during those last hours in port. No matter the captain’s own concerns. No matter that he loathed all things feline, beginning with that vile Sniraga, purring even now beneath his
bed.
    He drank; Ott circled. In Rose’s closet, Joss Odarth was snickering about modern naval uniforms. 2
    Monster. Fool. You have blinded the Leopard of Masalym.
So the freaks had shouted, and of course it was true. The first eye had come loose when he’d handled the carcass a bit too
roughly, clubbed the topdeck with it in fact; the second he’d pried out with a spoon. Thinking all the while of the Tournament Grounds, where his crew had been imprisoned, and from whence
twenty-three men had escaped one panicky night into that great warren of a city, and never returned.
    Damn your soul for all eternity, Ott! Whatever you mean to do, get on with it!
    Rose squeezed the eye in his sweaty fist. He had tossed the leopard ashore when the mooring-lines were freed, just as tradition demanded. And they’d caught it, those dlömic mariners.
They’d even cheered a little: the tail had not brushed the ground, and that meant splendid luck. Then they’d noticed the missing eyes and stared in horror at the departing ship. Rose
had grinned and popped the eye into his mouth. He had traditions of his own.
    He would keep it; there was power in a little theft. One day it would gather dust on his mantel, declaring with its stillness that this
was
a mantel, in a house without ladderways or a
brine reek from the basement, a house that never rolled or pitched or pinwheeled; Gods, how he hated the sea.
    Nonsense, nonsense. A frog could not hate the mud that made him; a bird could not hate the medium of the air. He was fatigued; he needed protein;