[Florin & Lorenzo 01] - The Burning Shore

by Robert Earl - (ebook by Undead)

  “No, he didn’t. The old goat’s not such a fool after all. Said he’d tell us everything we needed to know.”

  “Maybe he will.”

  “Or maybe he’ll tell van Delft first.”

  “That’s all right, then,” Lundorf said, and helped himself to a goblet of boiled water. “As long as the commander gets hold of the gold we’ll all get our fair share.”

  Florin met Lorenzo’s disbelieving eyes over the flickering orange tongues of the fire.

  “Yes,” he said. “Just as you say, Lundorf. But if we find the gold first we can be sure that it’s appropriately accounted for.”

  “I see what you mean. I don’t see why Kereveld wouldn’t want to help us recover this damned treasure, though. It’s why we’re here.”

  “Although not why he’s here.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “The gods alone know.”

  There was a muffled clink to one side of their fire and a huddle of figures, Kislevites by their silhouettes, slunk past and out into the night. Two of them had swapped their axes for spades, and Florin cursed himself for forgetting to buy his own men such tools.

  “Wonder where they’re going,” Lorenzo muttered suspiciously, straining his eyes to follow them into the darkness.

  “So do they,” Florin muttered, gesturing to the pair of Tileans who slipped stealthily along in their wake. A moment later both parties had disappeared into the unbroken night outside of the encampment.

  Lundorf finished the last of his biscuit and washed it down with the water.

  “What I wouldn’t give for a decent cask of brandy,” he sighed, swishing the flat water around his mouth. “Boiled water just never tastes right.”

  “Luckily,” Lorenzo smoothly cut in, “I remembered to bring some tea-leaves. They kept well, too. Always the way with the best quality green.”

  “Wish I’d thought of that,” Lundorf shook his head.

  “Would you like some of these?”

  “Well yes, thank you,” the Marienburger nodded, taken aback by this old scoundrel’s generosity.

  “What are friends for?” Lorenzo said, and opened his satchel to pull out half a dozen sealed tins, each as big as a fist. Cracking open the lid of one he peered inside, took a sniff, and then, satisfied, closed it up and tossed it to Lundorf.

  “I say,” Lundorf smiled, taking a sniff himself. “This is excellent stuff. Thank you!”

  “Don’t mention it,” Lorenzo grinned wide enough to show all six of his teeth. “And because you’re a friend I’ll only ask for a dozen crowns.”

  “Oh, I see. I thought… well, never mind. The thing is, though, I’m a bit short at the moment. Swamptown, you know.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Lorenzo soothed. “Just give me what you can and pay the rest later.”

  “Oh. All right then.”

  Florin watched Lundorf fumble for his purse and felt a sudden twitch of nostalgia. The first time he’d met Lorenzo it had cost him dear, too. His father had wanted it that way; he had used Lorenzo as a tame fire in which his son could burn their fingers.

  His father. A good man, killed by the broken heart of his wife’s death.

  Florin thought about him as he studied the vast cemetorial shapes that towered beyond this little circle of light. They blocked out great swathes of the starlit sky, the spaces within their sharp silhouettes so completely black that they might have been gateways into some dark, empty void.

  With a sudden prickling of the hairs on the back of his neck he wondered if it would be so long until he met his parents again.

  Somehow, sitting in the midst of this terrible wilderness and surrounded by the monolithic shells of a long dead race, he didn’t think so.

  He shivered and spat into the fire as if to exorcise the idea.

  “Tomorrow,” he said, “I’m going to try and get hold of Kereveld’s book. Then we’re going to get the treasure. And then we’re going to get the hell out of here.”

  “Finally,” Lorenzo said, looking up from the handful of coins Lundorf had given him. “Some sense.”

  But, unknown to Florin, tomorrow had other plans for him.

  * * *

  It was a council of war; van Delft had no doubt about that. Nor did he have any doubt about who the enemy was.

  It was chaos.

  Not the horrible twisting madness from the far north, thank Sigmar. But, left unchecked this kind of chaos could be just as lethal.

  Already two men had gone missing. They had slipped away in the middle of the night, taking nothing but a pick and hessian sack, as far as their comrades could make out.

  The pick had been found by the sentries, lying in the grass at the edge of the jungle. Of the men who had carried it there had been no sign.

  There had also been a couple of fights, one of them over a bundle of spades and the other over some ridiculous rumour. Although captains Castavelli and Lundorf had intervened before they’d escalated into full-blown riots, there’d still been broken noses and cracked ribs. One man was still suffering from concussion.

  Everyone, everywhere, seemed to have been transformed overnight, as if by some insidious magic, from soldiers to prospectors. Even now the sound of picks striking stone, punctuated with cries of sudden excitement, and equally sudden disappointment, rang out into the listening mass of the jungle. To his definite knowledge only Lundorf and d’Artaud, or more accurately, Orbrant, had called muster this morning. That damned Kislevite Graznikov hadn’t even billeted his men together.

  All this and they’d only been here for less than twenty-four hours.

  Well, no more. He’d be damned if he’d see his command disintegrate into a rabble.

  “Glad to see you, gentlemen,” he began, meeting the eyes of each of his captains in turn. Sergeant Orbrant stood at a respectful distance to one side of them, and Kereveld was pacing impatiently around behind them like a cat on a hot tin roof.

  Damned wizards, van Delft thought.

  “Today we are going to start pulling things back together. I know we’re all eager for the riches that brought us here, but if we carry on like this there won’t be a man of us left to carry them home.”

  The captains nodded agreement.

  “Luckily for us, we have good terrain to work with. It’s already cleared of jungle, for one thing. And for another, as you can see, the central pyramid commands the entire area. Then there are these smaller structures, one at each corner.”

  He paused to wave a machete at the great lump of masonry that cased the shadow in which they were standing. Although dwarfed by the towering heights of the central pyramid it was still a massive structure. The stones of its construction, some of them bigger than a carthorse, fitted together as neatly as the pieces of a jigsaw.

  Some of its masonry was missing. The neatly chiselled cornerstones, for example, had long since been knocked off the structure by age or tectonics. They lay amongst the swaying elephant grass now, those great blocks, as impotent and menacing as fallen idols.

  But apart from the damage every surface was blank and monolithic, the countless tons of its construction as completely unflinching and as absolutely soulless as a lizard’s gaze.

  Only a single, black doorway marred the perfection of its skin. The four guards van Delft had posted there, two Kislevites and two Marienburgers, peered into the gloomy interior mistrustfully.

  “We’ll use these smaller buildings as the corners of our stockade,” the commander continued. “Each of the human companies will be responsible for securing one of them, and for building, and manning, an intervening section.”

  “And my men?” Thorgrimm asked. a

  “Your men will be kept in the pyramid. They will also be charged with any mining tasks that may be required. That will include directing my men here in the construction of the stockade. If you think you could do that…?”

  The dwarf’s eyes flashed at the challenge.

  “We can certainly do that.”

  “
Good,” van Delft said. “Nothing too fancy. Perhaps just a line of picket stakes?”

  “Better to mount them on a bank behind a ditch,” Thorgrimm told him, stroking his beard thoughtfully. “It won’t take too long, and it’ll strengthen the whole front. And instead of fixing pickets in individually we’ll make caltrops out of ’em. Six pointers I reckon.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “Today, and most of tomorrow.”

  “All right. Would you assign one of your foremen to each of the captains here?”

  “Of course.”

  “We can have a race,” van Delft suggested, as if on the spur of the moment. “Let’s say that the last company to finish has to dig the latrines, shall we? That way we could have the temple sealed by tomorrow night.”

  “Are we sure that the temple’s empty?” Florin asked, looking at the towering mass warily. It appeared to be completely intact: not a single section of fallen masonry, or chipped stone, marred its cubic perfection.

  “Yes,” van Delft told him. “But I’m glad you’re interested. Bartolomi here wants to go and have a poke around inside it. Take a couple of men and keep an eye on him, would you?”

  “Let’s go,” Kereveld interrupted the commander’s last word.

  Florin stared at him, and struggled not to scowl.

  “Yes, sir. Although perhaps Captain Thorgrimm here would like to accompany us. If we’re going to go poking around underground…”

  “Yes?” the dwarf asked.

  “I mean, I would value your engineering expertise.”

  “All right,” agreed Thorgrimm, eyeing the temple with professional interest. “You’ll probably need it.”

  “Well, I’m glad that’s settled then,” van Delft said, with barely a hint of sarcasm. “Captain Thorgrimm here will lend each of you a quarter of his men, and they will direct your efforts. Let’s say… Castavelli you take the northernmost outbuilding and construct your stockade to the eastern most, Lundorf you’ll take that one and dig south. The Bretonnians will take over there and go west, and Graznikov will close the gap from there. Is that acceptable to everyone? Excellent.”

  “Come,” said Kereveld, actually tugging at Florin’s sleeve. “Let’s make a start.”

  The Bretonnian looked at van Delft, who nodded, then turned to Thorgrimm.

  “When you’re ready, captain, we’ll be at the entrance to the central pyramid.”

  “I’ll be an hour,” Thorgrimm estimated.

  “An hour!” the wizard snapped impatiently.

  “Yes. An hour.”

  Fifty minutes later the wizard, the dwarf and a handful of Bretonnians met outside the entrance to the temple. The doorway was a perfect square, a neatly shaped hole amongst neatly shaped blocks.

  Thorgrimm was running the gnarled skin of his hands over the sharp edges of the pillars at the side of the entranceway and gazing up at the lintel that hung twelve feet above him with a warm smile.

  “Very nice,” he muttered approvingly. “The lines are almost perfect.”

  Kereveld looked up from his book and frowned.

  “Is this the only entrance?”

  “The only one that we can find,” Florin said. “Why?”

  “There’s something in the book here about a revolving door. It looks like a flap or something.”

  “Let’s see,” Florin leaned closer to the wizard, who reluctantly showed him the page. The only thing that he recognised was a smudged ink drawing of something that looked like a pile of child’s blocks. That, he supposed, was the pyramid. Apart from that the page was covered with a scrawl of undecipherable handwriting and bizarre sketches, none of which appeared to be any more useful than the doodlings of a lunatic.

  Not for the first time Florin found himself amazed that the book had actually led them this far.

  “Is it all like that?” he asked, trying to hide the disappointment in his voice.

  “Some of it,” Kereveld said, looking up suspiciously before shutting the book with a jealous snap. “Oh well. Never mind. Let’s see what we can find, shall we?”

  Lorenzo lit the first of a bundle of torches and passed them around. The tar-soaked cloth of their heads spat and fizzled into life, the flames flickering weakly in the tropical sunlight.

  Kereveld seized his torch and, without hesitating, strode into the gaping maw of the temple. The others hurried after him, huddling together in the darkness and the cold.

  And it was cold. Even a few metres into the passageway the humid breath of the jungle was gone, to be replaced by a chill breeze that whined miserably from the depths beyond. It iced the walls with condensation, the glistening moisture dripping down the faded carvings that adorned them.

  Not that this had dissuaded the spiders that seemed to rule this dank domain. Their slimy webs were draped across the passageway, the grey fibres beaded with dew and the drained carcasses of huge insects. Moths with wings as big as a bats, dragonflies with mandibles as sharp as pliers, other, stranger things; the chitinous shells of their bodies rattled as the men brushed tentatively past their hanging graveyard and into the depths beyond.

  “Hey. Hey, wait!” Thorgrimm cried, looking up from his study of the stonework as the last of Florin’s men disappeared into the darkness beyond.

  “Wait for what?” Florin paused and called back, his voice echoing within the wide confines of the passageway. He didn’t like the sound of it. Perhaps it was his imagination, or perhaps some weird acoustic, but the echo made his voice sound somehow alien.

  But before his own flinty tones had died away they were drowned out by a long, terrible screech, and a cry from Kereveld that was cut off as soon as it had begun.

  “Kereveld!” the Bretonnian cried out, gazing wide-eyed into the gloom into which the wizard had rushed. “Kereveld!”

  There was no reply apart for the echo of his own voice, twisted into a cruel mimicry by the endless depths beyond.

  “Sigmar rot the bollocks off you, you old fool,” he muttered and then, since there was nothing else to do, he followed the wizard’s footsteps into the darkness.

  From behind, Thorgrimm’s voice floated through the darkness, the words lost beneath the distorting effect of the temple’s stonework.

  “He wants us to wait, boss,” Lorenzo said, nervously.

  “Yes. But look, what’s that ahead? Is it his body?”

  Squinting through the flickering shadows the torches sent fluttering around the walls, much as the spiders’ prey must have fluttered in their traps, Florin stepped forward.

  “Shouldn’t we wait for the dwarf?”

  “You wait here. Damn. That is a body up ahead.”

  There was no mistaking it now. Alone of all the shadows the form slumped in front of Florin lay still. The dark mass of its cloak twisted around it like a ready-made shroud, the hood thrown up to cover its head.

  Florin switched his torch from his right to his left hand and unsheathed his sword, the sharp rasp of metal on leather seemed almost painfully loud to his straining senses. Then, nose wrinkling at a musty smell which grew more cloying by the second, he took another step forward and licked his lips nervously.

  The body was dead; there was no doubt about that. No living man could lie in Such an awkward angle. Beneath the merciful covering of his cape Kereveld’s bony form had been twisted into hideous new geometries, as though it had been chewed up and spat out.

  Of the book, which until then had never left the wizard’s grasp, there was no sign.

  “He must be lying on top of it,” Florin told himself, his voice flat with disbelief.

  Caution forgotten he trotted forward, grasped the corpse by the shoulder and pulled it over.

  The cloak fell back and death leered up at him.

  Although its smile was manically wide there was no humour in the black hollows of its eyes, no emotion on the polished bone of its face. The scraps of hair that remained stuck to its head looked as false as if they’d been glued on by a grizzly practical joker. />
  Perhaps the same hellish comedian that had hidden nests of tiny spiders in the thing’s eye sockets.

  With a sudden, spinal crack, the jaw fell away from the rest of the skull and struck Florin on the forearm.

  He cried out in shock and pushed the skeleton away. As he shifted his weight there was a deafening grinding squeal: the same sound that had marked Kereveld’s demise, and the earth fell away beneath his feet.

  Florin caught one last glimpse of Lorenzo’s horrified face as the passageway folded over him. A last taste of the world of the living before he, like the corpse below him, was swallowed up by the temple’s hungry stone jaws.

  For a long time there was peace. As soft as an endless, black, velvet sheet Florin felt himself sliding down its unbroken skin, his troubles slipping away in the blankness of it all. Then the peace disappeared and in its place only darkness remained. And from the darkness came pain.

  It was difficult to tell how badly hurt he was. There was a numbness that stretched down one side of his body, although in the blinding darkness of this place that could be from anything from pins and needles to a snapped spine.

  Florin, his head splitting with the pain of fading concussion, drew his finger across the sticky dampness that dripped from his hairline, then tasted it.

  The coppery taste of blood was sharp on his tongue.

  “At least I haven’t lost my sense of taste,” he told the darkness, and tried to ignore the shakiness of his voice. “And it seems that I’ll still be able to lift a flagon of wine.”

  There was no echo here, only a heavy silence.

  “So I’ll be all right.”

  Gradually, every movement sending bright white sparks of pain spinning through his head, he sat up. There was a muffled rattle, like dice in a leather cup, as the shattered remains of the skeleton shifted around him.

  “Sorry,” he told it, then tried to get to his feet.

  It was surprisingly difficult, and not just because of the numbness which still paralysed his left side. There seemed to be no floor here, just a wide semi circle of sloping wall. Florin leaned against it, and felt himself sliding down a surface that was as smooth as glass.