[Florin & Lorenzo 01] - The Burning Shore

by Robert Earl - (ebook by Undead)

  The three men began to stroll, almost casually, towards the dying embers of the fire where the skink had been left. There was still a print in the soft mud where its body had lain, and a sprinkling of the ichors that had served it as blood. Beyond that the ground was a confusion of boot prints and tracks. Almost all of them were recognisably human.

  Each took a different point of the compass, Florin, Orbrant and van Delft turned to peer into the immensity of the jungle. Faceless and brooding it peered back at them.

  Despite the heat Florin shivered.

  “Tell you what,” van Delft decided carefully. “Let’s just assume that somebody took it upon themselves to bury the damned thing, shall we?”

  “Yes,” Florin nodded. “That’s obviously what’s happened.”

  “Very well, sir,” Orbrant nodded, his face blank. “And perhaps we can double the sentries from now on?”

  “Makes sense,” van Delft nodded, glancing down at a pair of shallow prints that led to the fire. Claw marks sprouted from the edges, clear to anybody who wanted to see them.

  With barely a second’s hesitation he strolled across them, grinding them beneath his heels as he watched his two subordinates.

  “Right then,” he said when no trace of the prints remained. “Let’s get everybody up. No time to lose.”

  That day the going was a lot easier. The path they’d cut served well enough and, apart from the odd snarl of fibrous tendrils, and the ground that had disintegrated into a black, evil smelling slime, the going was easy.

  They reached the great highway of the ruined canal before noon, scrambling through the gateway they had hewn into the undergrowth the previous day into the vast, overarching tunnel through which it cut. The expedition threaded through: the hundred and twenty or so members moving in cautious single file as it snaked into the eerie calm of the place.

  Most of them fell silent, weighed down by the dismal feel of the place. Not Kereveld, though. His excited shouts could be heard from Florin’s position at the front of the column to Thorgrimm’s at the rear. Although they didn’t know it, man and dwarf scowled at exactly the same moment.

  They pressed on. With barely a pause they emerged back into the overgrown chaos which ended the canal, and found themselves drawing up to the river.

  It wasn’t until they’d reached the spot where they’d fired their first volley that Florin called a halt.

  “Right then, men. Lorenzo and I are going to have a quick look at the river.”

  “What!”

  “I’m sure there’ll be nothing there. Those, those things…”

  “Skinks,” said Bertrand helpfully.

  “Yes, they’ll be long gone by now. I just want to make sure. Sergeant, take over, would you?”

  “Sir.”

  “Come on, Lorenzo.”

  Florin turned on his heel and marched forward, his heart hammering beneath his ribs. He knew there’d be nothing waiting for him down by the stream. He knew it. No matter how bizarre the creatures had been the formation of their caravan was familiar.

  They’d be long gone by now.

  Yes, long…

  “What’s that you’re saying, boss?” Lorenzo asked.

  Florin, who realised that he’d been talking out loud, smiled sheepishly. “Just cracking up,” he said quietly as the two of them slowed their pace.

  Lorenzo snorted. “Think we’re long past that.”

  “Sometimes,” his master said, his voice low but haughty. “I think you need to remember your place.”

  “But saving your skin takes me to so many places.”

  “I just can’t seem to find any good servants anymore,” Florin whispered, and tiptoed around the corner before Lorenzo could reply.

  Everything remained the same. The occasional silver flash of the rippling stream in the dingy confines of the little clearing. The hacked stalks of the plants they’d been busy cutting back, the damaged boughs, yellow as shattered bone. Everything was just as it had been.

  Except, thank the Lady, for the skinks. Of them there was no sign.

  Florin let out a relieved sigh.

  “Right then, let’s bring our lot up, and send word back to the commander that we’re here. You never know, he might rotate us.”

  Lorenzo leered obscenely.

  “You know what I mean,” Florin snorted.

  But van Delft, when he finally came barging up the path, seemed in no mood for favours. The cloud of mosquitoes that followed him did little to improve his temper.

  “Why have we stopped?”

  “This is where we came across the skinks yesterday, sir,” Florin told him.

  “Yes, well they seem to be gone now.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We can’t afford delays, d’Artaud. The men are tired, I know, but I want to press on until it’s time to make camp. Got that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Kereveld reckons there’s higher ground ahead. Apart from anything else I want to get away from these damn flies.”

  So saying he slapped himself across the jaw, smearing a mosquito across his flushed skin.

  “Right you are, sir. Sergeant, round up half a dozen volunteers for machete duty, would you?”

  “Sir,” Orbrant snapped off a salute.

  “And if you’ll excuse us, commander, we’ll see if we can find where this track crosses the stream.”

  “Yes, yes, good man,” van Delft said distractedly and rubbed his itching hands together. “Carry on.”

  He was still scratching as the Bretonnians splashed across the stream and began hunting through the thickets on the other side for some trace of the previous expedition’s path.

  Bloody mosquitoes, van Delft thought. Damned things even seem to bite through a man’s moustache.

  Above him eyes as cold as stone gazed down. They watched the leader of these strange pallid apes tearing at himself, and wondered why. .

  But although they wondered, they didn’t care. Their job was merely to watch, and to report. Even as the first of the intruders stumbled across the remains of a primitive path beyond, one of them slipped away with the news, moving through the treetops as stealthily as the sultry breeze.

  “Kereveld! What are you doing here?”

  “Don’t mind me,” the wizard wheezed, leaning against the bole of a tree and gasping for breath. His robes hung about his spindly form in a dank mass, slicked with sweat and dirt, and his hands and face were covered in a polka-dot rash of insect bites and poor circulation.

  “Come to help us with the machetes?” Lorenzo asked sarcastically.

  “Well done,” Orbrant said, clapping a hand on Lorenzo’s bony shoulders.

  “I didn’t say…”

  “Go and take over from Louis over there,” the sergeant ignored him and pointed to the front of the column. “Louis! Give your machete to Lorenzo here.”

  Florin watched him trudge off to replace the smiling Louis, then turned back to Kereveld.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Nothing, really,” he managed to say before a fit of coughing seized him.

  “Orbrant, give him some water, would you?”

  The sergeant hesitated before unslinging his canteen and handing it over with a scowl of disapproval. The old man took it with trembling hands, drank deeply, and then wiped the back of his hand across his forehead.

  “Thanks,” he said, handing the canteen back. Orbrant took it suspiciously, and pointedly wiped the rim with the hem of his tunic.

  Kereveld was oblivious to the slight. Even though he was now turning a deep puce beneath his mosquito bites he was already struggling to stand up straight again. Behind him, struggling on the mud slicked slope they’d been climbing for the past two hours, a mule brayed. The sound was followed by a string of curses from Kereveld’s servant.

  “You probably think I’m foolish, joining you all in your monkey work,” the wizard said between laboured breaths. “But we’re almost there, I’m sure of it. This slope mus
t be the one mentioned in the book. It probably hasn’t occurred to you, but we’ve come a long way up.”

  Florin winked at Orbrant, but the sergeant was too busy glaring at Kereveld to notice. Seeing the expression on the bald man’s face Florin felt his amusement melting away, to be replaced by a calculation of whether or not he’d be able to stop the warrior if he chose to attack the old buffoon.

  “Yes,” Kereveld repeated. “We’re high up here. This must be the plateau Pizzaro spoke of.”

  “Who?”

  “Oh, nobody, nobody.” Kereveld waved away the question. “Well, I feel better now. Perhaps you’d be good enough to tell your men to get a move on? The day’s wasting.”

  Florin had a sudden, mischievous impulse to tell Kereveld to go and tell them himself, but before he could, Lorenzo cried out from the front, his voice tinged with surprise.

  “Wait here,” Florin told Orbrant and raced up the slope to where the lead party had hacked a path through the jungle. Two great trees stood on either side of them like the pillars of a gateway; the distant boughs of their heads huddled together in a conspiratorial arc high, high above.

  Lorenzo cried out again, this time his voice cracking with excitement. The other troopers had ceased their assault on the jungle, and huddled around him.

  Florin pushed his way through them and followed their gaze.

  “Shallya’s blood,” he whispered, eyes widening as he saw what had stopped them.

  “Shallya’s blood.”

  They stood together, an unmoving little tableau, until Kereveld stumbled into them.

  When he. saw it he fell to his knees, lifted his hands to the heavens, and whooped, a thin and eerie cry of joy.

  Before them, rising up out of the sea of mist in the valley below, stood the city.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Alone of all the captains, Florin had had little faith in Kereveld’s tales of cities and gold. He hadn’t needed it. Mordicio’s vindictiveness, and the knowledge of the terrible fruit it was likely to bear, had been enough to drive him across the ocean and into the cloying embrace of this dank wilderness.

  Not for Florin were the whispered promises and mounting greed that had brought the others here. Not for him the dreams of wealth beyond measure lying scattered amongst the bones of a dead race.

  But now, standing on the spine of the ridge that overlooked the plateau beyond, he felt a sudden flare of avarice in his chest.

  There could be no doubt that the wizard’s tales had been at least partly true. The buildings that struggled up through the jungle’s choking fingers were as real as anything else in this world. As real and as inhuman.

  Even from this distance it was obvious that no human hand had taken a part in their shaping. It wasn’t just the size, although the hulking lumps of smooth granite structures were massive. Nor was it the design, although surely no sane human architect would craft buildings as grim as these. Even the massive central building, which Florin guessed must be a temple, was little more than a pile of neatly stacked cubes. Devoid of windows, clean of any decoration, it slumped broodingly amongst its smaller cousins, blind and featureless.

  No. What marked this city out as something beyond the power of men was the sterility of its polished surfaces. Not a single vine dared to blur its sharp edges, nor a single tree stump, or tuft of grass.

  Whatever had built these gargantuan structures had lent them immunity to the wilderness, the same protection which still hung over the ruined canal.

  “That’s it, that’s it!” Kereveld howled, holding the book out in front of him with trembling hands. His eyes flitted from the stark silhouette of the central building to a smudged ink drawing on the central pages, and he giggled horribly.

  Florin, who’d been gaping at the incredible structures beyond, realised it and closed his mouth with a snap.

  “Looks like we’re here then,” he said. “What do we do now?”

  “Carry on,” Kereveld told him, his voice breaking with a high-pitched laugh that sounded a little too hysterical for Florin’s liking.

  “No, we’ll inform the commander first.”

  “Why waste time?” the old man snapped with impatience “It’s there, right there! Let’s go.”

  “Lorenzo, go ask Orbrant to send a runner back to van Delft. Tell him what we’ve found.”

  “Right you are, boss.”

  “Tell him we’re pushing on down towards the city.”

  Kereveld’s eyes creased, and for a moment he looked as smug as a child whose tantrum has worked. Florin felt a flash of anger at the sight of it, but hid it well. If anybody needed to be cultivated now it was the wizard.

  Who knew what other pieces of useful information an enterprising man might wheedle out of those mildewed pages of his book?

  “Well then, Menheer Kereveld. Look’s like we all owe you a vote of thanks.”

  “Yes,” the wizard said. “Do you think we can make the temple by nightfall?”

  Florin took the hint.

  “I think so. Bertrand, pop back and tell Sergeant Orbrant we’re heading on, will you? Here, I’ll take that. I must ask you to step back, Menheer Kereveld. Perhaps you can wait back in the main body with your servant.”

  But Kereveld was oblivious to anything but the temple. He was gazing at it with the wide-eyed rapture of true love, the rest of the world forgotten.

  “Suit yourself, then,” Florin muttered, and swung the machete through a tangle of vines to his left.

  As the expedition worked its way down into the plateau, the trees once more closed in above their heads. Soon their world had shrunk back down to the few feet that lay on either side of them. The surrounding vegetation grew ever thicker as they pushed on, the tangled thickets swarming with biting insects and hungry lizards that reminded Florin of the skinks they’d run from.

  One by one the men fell back exhausted, passing their machetes to those of their fellows who waited behind. Gradually the ground levelled off, the sliding mud of the slope giving way to a morass of rotting detritus. It reached up to the men’s ankles, and sometimes even higher, to dump mouldy leaves and squirming things into their boots.

  The shadows lengthened, and in spite of himself Florin began to wonder if they were on the right path. He was even thinking about returning to the ridge to camp for the night when the men up front cut through a great hanging wall of vines and revealed the clearing beyond.

  “This is more like it,” Florin grinned and led the way forward.

  “Yes, wonderful,” Lorenzo said, although there was something half-hearted about his sarcasm. After the cloying heat and suffocating mass of the jungle the clearing did feel wonderful.

  The only undergrowth here was the elephant grass, fibrous and sharp-bladed but easy enough to walk through. It rolled away into the distance, a great shifting sea of green above which the dark silhouettes of the ruins seemed to float. The light of the setting shone on the crumbling stone of their western faces, but painted the other sides as black as the colossal shadows which lurked behind them.

  Florin drifted to a halt, the better to feel the sun on his face and the warm breath of the wind in his hair. Then, aware of the crush behind him, he sheathed his machete and swished his way into the knee-high grass.

  The first of the buildings lay before them, the giant gravestones of a dead civilization. But despite their glowering presence the Bretonnians laughed and chattered as they emerged from the dank shadows of the jungle and into the light of the sun.

  “Looks like Kereveld’s found a friend,” Lorenzo said as the wizard pushed past them and trotted, robes flapping, towards the nearest of the buildings. His book, as always, was clamped tightly beneath one arm.

  “We’d better keep an eye on him,” Florin said thoughtfully. “You stay here. Tell Orb rant to stake out the best site to make camp.”

  “Take a couple of the lads with you, boss. The Lady alone knows what could be lurking around here.”

  “No.” Florin his eyes locked firmly
on the book, shook his head. “I’ll be all right.”

  “So,” Lorenzo said, the firelight twinkling in his eyes. “What about this gold?”

  “Thought you said you didn’t believe in it,” Florin chided him, and passed one of the biscuits they’d been baking to Lundorf.

  The Marienburger took it with a nod of thanks.

  “Well I believe in it, anyway,” he decided, tossing the morsel from hand to hand as it cooled. “Kereveld’s book was right about everything else, why not the gold? Just think: there could be a fortune sitting not a hundred yards from us. No wonder the commander posted guards on these buildings. Imagine the trouble if someone found the loot and made off with it tonight!”

  A thoughtful silence descended on the little group. Florin looked across the campsite, where a score of similar conversations were no doubt taking place over a score of similar campfires.

  “I already know what I’m going to do with mine,” Lundorf said confidently, and bit off a piece of his biscuit. “Stables. I’m going to build a stables, just outside of Marienburg.”

  “Not very adventurous,” Florin chided him, and found himself counting the campfires. Up until now the men had been content to huddle around the comforting blaze of the expedition’s cooking pits.

  Tonight, though, they all seemed to have developed a taste for privacy.

  “Oh, I won’t run it,” Lundorf said. “There’s a girl back home that I know. Vienela. She can do it.”

  “Vienela, hey? Got a good business head, has she?”

  “Yes.”

  “And a pretty face to go with it?”

  Lorenzo sniggered in the darkness, and Lundorf’s even features hardened into a fierce scowl.

  “Not that that has anything to do with it, but yes.”

  Florin was amazed to note that his brother officer was blushing. But before he could tease him any further Lorenzo brought the conversation back to business.

  “So,” Lorenzo asked. “What about Kereveld’s book?”

  “He showed it to you?” Lundorf wondered, obviously keen to change the subject.