[Thanquol & Boneripper 02] - Temple of the Serpent

by C. L. Werner - (ebook by Undead)

  Was this a part of the Great Math? Was it the will of the Old Ones? Lord Tlaco was uncertain. Even the slann’s brain could not follow the calculations to their end. The plaques of prophecy were again silent. Had the jungles of Lustria been delivered from the unbalance of the xa’cota only to fall to a more insidious corruption?

  Lord Tlaco closed his eyes as the warmth of the rising sun flowed into its damp body. Many times had the slann pondered the problem of Xiuhcoatl and Quetza the Defiled. For the skinks to survive, there needed to be something preserving them. But was it a part of the Great Plan?

  The xa’cota were coming back. That fact had ended Lord Tlaco’s meditative slumber. In their coming, it saw a menace to Quetza. There were other possibilities that arose, other sums that could be introduced into the algorithm. In casting its mind through the lattice of creation, Lord Tlaco became aware of a small cluster of xho’za’khanx, the untamed warm-things that infested so much of the world. The mage-priest calculated their potentiality. The spots on its skin shifted, setting skink scribes into a frenzy of activity.

  Lord Tlaco concentrated on the humans and made a minor adjustment to the geomantic web…

  The storm’s fury descended upon the Cobra of Khemri like the hammer of a titan. The ship rolled violently between each undulation of the angry waves. Punishing rain pelted the decks, stinging the bodies of the crew desperately trying to secure the rigging and bring some semblance of control back to their vessel. A shrieking wind tore through the sails, setting them cracking and snapping before the masts, bulging with the malign power of the storm.

  Even the most experienced of the mariners was ashen-faced; sun-baked skin turned pale by the malevolent power of the storm. Men who had spent decades upon the Great Ocean whimpered and wailed like whipped dogs, those with less experience simply clung to the rails and wept.

  Adalwolf tried to help a pair of sailors secure the wheel, unaware if the effort was even worth it. The violence with which the wheel spun threatened to snap the tiller. He grimaced at the thought. Without the tiller there would be no way to steer the ship’s rudder. They would be utterly at the mercy of the capricious sea.

  A shriek from aloft and a body came hurtling down from the rigging. Ropes broke beneath the plunging weight. The fallen sailor struck with such violence that he bounced from the aftdeck before being thrown into the sea.

  The cry of the lookout was echoed all across the main deck as the foremast began to crack. Men scrambled to fit lines to the mast, trying to strengthen it against the wind by sheer brawn. The mast continued to groan and sway, drawing more sailors to the desperate effort.

  Adalwolf shook his head in disgust. It was a brave effort, but utterly doomed from the start. Splinters as long as his arm were already jutting from the surface of the mast. The men should be trying to cut it free, not hold it in place, but blind panic sometimes overwhelms even the most experienced. The mercenary ground his teeth together, waiting to hear the sickening finale of the farce.

  It came with a low wooden growl that shook the ship more fiercely than the storm. Like a towering Drakwald giant, the foremast came smashing down, crashing through the railing and chewing a great gouge in the ship’s hull before slipping over the side and plummeting into the depths. Several sailors were crushed beneath the impact, a half-dozen more were pulled screaming into the sea, unable to loosen the ropes with which they had struggled to save the mast.

  Adalwolf felt his stomach churn at the hideous vision, violently turning his head away from the scene. At once his eyes found a sight just as ghastly.

  A cluster of sailors were gathered around Brother Diethelm, boathooks and belaying pins clutched in their fists. The mercenary could see van Sommerhaus and Captain Schachter standing some small distance away, as silent as Arabyan sphinxes. Only Hiltrude’s drenched figure stood between the raging sailors and their intended victim.

  “You don’t dare do this thing!” Hiltrude shouted at the men. “Think what you are doing!”

  A burly, scarred ruffian, his leather vest plastered to his dripping body, glared at the woman. “Some priest!” the villain scoffed. “What good are his prayers?” He gestured with the long dirk he held, sweeping it as though any of them could forget the storm raging around them. His outburst brought murderous oaths from the sailors around him.

  Hiltrude turned desperate eyes towards van Sommerhaus and Schachter. “Stop them!” she pleaded.

  Van Sommerhaus turned his face, unwilling to meet her gaze. Captain Schachter simply spat on the deck. “Even if I could, I don’t think I would,” he muttered.

  “Enough of your lip, wench!” a dusky, monkey-like sailor growled. “Get out of our way or you go over the side with ’im!” He leered wickedly at the courtesan. “Maybe you go over just the same. Maybe Stromfels is hungry for more than just the priest.”

  The deck monkey shrieked as a fist smashed into his face, knocking yellowed teeth from his mouth. He staggered back, blood gushing from between his fingers as he clutched at his jaw. Adalwolf let the heavy chain uncoil from around his hand, the sailor’s blood dripping from the iron links.

  “If the Shark God is hungry, maybe we start by feeding him you,” Adalwolf threatened. In his other hand he gripped a fat-bladed short sword. He waved the weapon menacingly at the sullen crewmen.

  The scar-faced sailor glared at the mercenary. “If we don’t appease the Storm God, then we’ll all drown!”

  He didn’t wait for Adalwolf to respond, but drove his leg upwards, smashing his boot into the warrior’s groin. Adalwolf doubled over. Before he could recover, sailors were swarming over him, ripping the sword from his fingers.

  “First the bitch, then the friar!” the sailor roared, lunging for Hiltrude. The courtesan tried to squirm away, but the greater strength of the seaman prevailed, pulling her close and crushing her against him. Diethelm rushed to help her, but the priest was quickly beaten down by two of the other sailors.

  “Damn you, Marjus, leave her alone!” Adalwolf raged, straining to free himself of the men who held him.

  Marjus sneered at the mercenary, then moved towards the rail, dragging Hiltrude with him. “You better hope this calms Stromfels,” the sailor warned. “Or I know who else gets dropped into the drink.”

  The sailor’s ugly chuckle faded as he saw a shape appear between himself and the rail. While Marjus and the other sailors struggled to keep their feet on the wildly pitching deck, the apparition before him moved with eerie precision and grace. A tall, lean figure, his fine garments barely moist despite the fury of the storm, Ethril stared down the sailors. There was no rage or warning in that look, indeed, it was the chilling lack of emotion that struck the men, like the disapproving gaze of a weary teacher.

  “Do you really think calling out to daemons is going to help?” Ethril’s solemn voice was barely a whisper yet it carried with a quality that the wailing storm could not silence.

  The elf’s words made the sailors cast uncertain looks among themselves. Marjus glanced back at them for support. When he looked back, he found Ethril had drawn a curved dagger and that its point was now pressing against his throat.

  “Let the girl go,” the elf told him. Reluctantly, Marjus released Hiltrude. The courtesan backed away from both sailor and elf, uncertain which to regard with more horror. Unlike the man, she had seen Ethril’s hand. The elf had not drawn the dagger from some hidden sheath. It had appeared there, evoked from nothingness.

  Marjus snarled at the cowed crew, yelling at them to help secure the deck and clear away the debris from the foremast. Even in the midst of the storm, there was no hiding the haste with which they fled the elf.

  Adalwolf nodded his gratitude as Diethelm helped him off the deck. The priest’s robes were torn, his face matted with blood where a belaying pin had struck him. He smiled sadly to the mercenary, then repeated the gesture when Hiltrude joined them.

  “I thank you for your faith, or if not that then at least your assistance,” he said. Diethelm sighed
as another great wave crashed against the deck, showering them all in spray. “But I think perhaps it would have been best not to have interfered.”

  “It would have served no purpose,” Ethril told them, stalking across the rolling deck. “There is magic behind this storm, and it is not the work of your Stromfels. This storm blows us far off course, defying every effort, physical and magical, to oppose it.”

  The elf shook his head, then turned to withdraw into the cabins within the sterncastle.

  “It is almost as though the storm has a mind and a purpose behind it.”

  Screams and cries of horror echoed across the decks of the Black Mary. Captain Vittorio Borghese stood with a small knot of his crew upon the quarterdeck. From the sounds, it seemed they were the last of the pirates still fighting.

  The ship’s attackers had boiled up from the hold like the rats they so loathsomely resembled. Vittorio did not know how many of them there were. It seemed like hundreds, certainly dozens. They were wiry, agile creatures, their furry bodies wrapped in dark cloaks. He’d grown up on stories of these creatures, of how they would snatch bad children and take them into their burrows never to return. He’d seen the ugly, man-like bodies paraded through the streets by the rat-catchers after one of their excursions into the sewers. They were a nightmare he had grown up with and one he had never forgotten.

  Vittorio did not know how the monsters had gotten aboard his ship, but as the Black Mary was just leaving the Pirate’s Bay, they had struck. There was no warning. One moment, all was calm, the next the deck was crawling with beasts of Chaos. His crew had managed to down a few of their inhuman attackers, but not enough to stem the verminous tide. The rusty blades of the skaven stabbed and slashed with cruel abandon, their chittering laughter scratching at his ears as they cut down his men.

  The Black Mary’s quartermaster stood beside the swivel gun mounted on the quarter deck. He’d refrained from firing while the crew was still fighting. Now he hesitated because the skaven had prisoners. The ratmen seemed intent on taking captives. It was a thought that evoked all of Vittorio’s oldest childhood fears. He drew one of the pistols fastened to his belt and aimed it at his quartermaster.

  “Blast ’em down, or I blast you!” Vittorio snarled.

  The quartermaster paled beneath his dusky Tilean complexion, but swung the gun about and took aim. No sooner was the cannon pointed towards a cluster of skaven than a slim throwing knife crunched into the pirate’s forehead. The quartermaster was already dead when he smashed against the rail and toppled into the sea.

  Skaven were converging on the quarterdeck now. Vittorio shifted the aim of his pistol and exploded the face of a brown-furred monster scurrying up the side of the sterncastle. He drew another pistol and shot a second ratman creeping along the rigging above him. The pirates around him tried to hold back the hissing mob of ratkin trying to rush up the stairs from the main deck.

  Vittorio cast about for any avenue of escape. What he saw sent raw panic pulsing through his heart. The Black Mary was sailing past the mid-point of Pirate’s Bay. A single rock jutted up from the depths upon which had been carved an immense statue of Jack o’ the Sea, the patron of all pirates. No one was certain just who had carved the strange statue, but pirates were careful to leave small offerings to it each time they sailed into Sartosa.

  It wasn’t Jack o’ the Sea who captured Vittorio’s attention, however. The waters around the statue were almost black with ships, a ramshackle fleet of dinghies, barges and flotsam, every inch of them crawling with more skaven. As soon as the Black Mary drew near, the ghastly fleet debarked from their moorings around the rock and began rowing towards the brigantine.

  “Every man for himself, lads,” Vittorio snarled, hurling his spent pistols into the bay. The pirates watched in alarm as their captain climbed onto the rail and followed his weapons into the sea.

  Grey Seer Thanquol stood tall in the bow of his boat, his staff clenched tight in his fist, his robes whipping about him in the crisp ocean breeze. He enjoyed the smell of the sea, it excited his senses with its suggestion of far-off places. Of course, the vastness of it was profoundly disturbing. Sometimes he felt his head spinning with the sheer immensity of it. No skaven liked open spaces, they preferred the comforting feeling of close walls, firm floor and a thick ceiling overhead. Thanquol wasn’t immune to the psychology of his kind. Indeed, he was finding this first phase of Nightlord Sneek’s plan unsettling.

  The Eshin flotilla had waited for hours sheltering beside the lonely rock and its ugly human statue, their boats swaying sickeningly beneath their paws. Some of Shiwan Stalkscenf’s warriors had passed the time poking through the jumbled heap of trash the man-things had piled at the base of the statue. Thanquol took a detached interest in their investigation. He’d seen enough evidence that humans were all insane, he didn’t really need more. Why they would row out into the middle of so much water to throw something away he couldn’t understand, even less when he saw little metal disks among the rubbish. Man-things would kill each other for little circles of gold and silver, yet here they had gone and left a pile of them on this abandoned rock. Perhaps they were trying to hide it from their clan leaders? It was the only conclusion that made any sort of sense to him, though he would have thought even a human could hide something a little better.

  Thanquol shook his horned head and stared once again at the ship his minions had decided to steal. He wasn’t any kind of sailor, but even he could appreciate the sleek lines of the brigantine, the intimidating black hull of the ship with her yawning gun ports. He knew enough about seafaring to understand the importance of the huge white sails billowing from her two masts. He even liked the little black flag flying from her bow, the one with a grinning human skull set between two leg bones. It was a ship worthy of Grey Seer Thanquol and his brilliance.

  “Sit-sit or have knife stuck in back,” Shiwan Stalkscent growled from the stern of their little boat. Thanquol stared back over the heads of the cloaked skaven sitting at the oars, his lip curled back in a challenging snarl. The assassin snarled back, a dripping knife in his paw.

  Thanquol decided to cover his own fangs and sit down. It wasn’t the right time to challenge the upstart assassin, not when that old mage-rat Shen Tsinge was sitting right beside him. Thanquol lashed his tail in annoyance as he thought about the sorcerer. Clearly Shen had little confidence in his supposed abilities, otherwise he wouldn’t be hiding behind the bulk of a rat ogre. He couldn’t imagine what kind of magic such a coward would be good for! A real mage-rat, one with real power, didn’t need the mindless brawn of a rat ogre to keep him safe! A real mage-rat was able to bend the aethyr to his will, command its forces to protect him, petition the Horned One for his divine might! A real mage-rat didn’t need a stupid rat ogre stumbling after him, getting in the way and making his boat ride dangerously low in the water!

  Bruxing his fangs in annoyance at all so-called sorcerers who felt the need to compensate for their inadequacies with a rat ogre bodyguard, Thanquol turned his eyes again to the Black Mary. His fur bristled as he studied the ship. It was little more than a scow, probably so worm-eaten that it would sink before it left the bay. If he was in charge of things, he would have Tsang Kweek and his gutter runners skinned for their temerity in stealing such a dilapidated vessel and endangering the lives of their betters. Certainly they could have stolen one that could actually be seen at night and that didn’t have such a worrying over-abundance of sail. There was such a thing as going too fast, after all. And that ugly little flag with its smiling skull; what kind of morbid sadist thought that was appropriate?

  Yes, Thanquol would have much to say to Shiwan about this reckless display of incompetence from his skaven. He’d wait until he could discuss the matter in private, when Shen Tsinge and his rat ogre weren’t around to eavesdrop. There was no sense embarrassing Shiwan before his subordinates, after all.

  Taking another glance behind him, Thanquol decided he’d also wait until the assassin put away h
is knife before talking to him.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Green Hell

  Adalwolf could not take his eyes off the endless green wall before the prow of the Cobra of Khemri. It was like watching a hungry wolf slowly licking its chops.

  He could feel the hot, stinking damp of the jungle pawing at him, driving back the clean ocean breeze like a lion snapping at jackals. There was a putrid, rotten smell in the air, a charnel reek of death. The coastline was thick with towering palms, their thin trunks mottled with parasitic growths, their fronds dripping with clinging vines. Bulky, nasty-looking bushes squatted beneath the trees, their thorny branches sometimes sporting oversized flowers of brilliant crimson and vibrant orange. Stalk-like plants for which Adalwolf could think of no name, but which looked like an oversized sort of grass peppered the few dozen yards of beach between sea and jungle, hordes of flies buzzing about them.

  Raucous croaks, insane cackles, piercing cries, all told of the animal life lurking beyond the face of the jungle. The incessant drone of unseen insects pounded upon his ears, punishing them with a remorseless intensity that made Adalwolf long for the deafening boom of a broadside or the angry howl of a storm.

  The storm. It had raged against them for two full days. Adalwolf was not a firm believer in the beneficence of his gods—he felt they had better things to do than bother about men—but he was convinced only a miracle sent by Manann could have kept the barque in one piece throughout the long ordeal. As if to illustrate the limit of Manann’s indulgence, the keel of the ship had snapped as it grounded itself on the twisted grey rocks that jutted from the shore.

  “By Khaine’s fiery hell, where are we?”

  The outburst came from Lukas van Sommerhaus. Like the rest, he had clustered at the rail to stare at the forbidding jungle. The Cobra of Khemri had come aground in the middle of the night, forcing them to wait until dawn to discover what new land had received them.