[Florin & Lorenzo 01] - The Burning Shore

by Robert Earl - (ebook by Undead)

  So it was that, on the morning that the bloated corpse of Morrslieb rolled into conjunction with the rest of the solar system, Florin and Kereveld were both as exhausted as each other. It took them both a moment to realise what the billowing golden mist they stumbled out into meant.

  “It’s a miracle,” the wizard decided as, beneath the scorching heat of the tropical sun, the mist began to clear. The sky above was perfect.

  “Help me with my notes, would you?” he asked Florin. Ignoring Lundorf s greeting, he started to clamber up the rough hewn ladder that led to the upper tier of the temple.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “Perhaps we should let van Delft know that you’re about to start?” Florin suggested as Kereveld sorted through the satchel of scrolls. The two of them had made their way to the highest tier of the main pyramid and Kereveld was still wheezing with the effort. His mottled hands shook as he wiped moisture off the stone before laying out his instruments, muttering to himself as he did so.

  “I said,” Florin repeated to his preoccupied charge, “let’s tell van Delft we’re about to start. Look, he’s just down there.”

  The mercenary pointed to the sodden remains of their camp below, where the commander’s foreshortened but distinctive figure was striding about. He roamed from one quarter to the next, a spark of vital force that set the mercenaries repairing their shelters and rebuilding the storm damaged ramparts.

  “No, no, no. No time,” Kereveld muttered. He frowned distractedly, then selected one of the parchments and, leaning against the dripping granite block behind him, smoothed it out on his knee.

  “This is it,” he said to himself. His eyes flitted down a script that was laid out like the verse of some ancient ballad, then across to the minutely calibrated sundial that he’d set on the stone beside him.

  He looked at Florin. To the Bretonnian’s surprise there was, for the first time since they’d met, the unmistakable pallor of fear on the wizard’s face.

  “What if it doesn’t work?” the old man asked him, as though the thought had only just occurred to him. “What if this has all been for nothing?”

  “It will work,” Florin told him, as confidently as if he had any idea what he was talking about. He patted one of Kereveld’s bony shoulders reassuringly. “Remember during the voyage? You cast that spell against the daemon from the mast of a rolling ship. Here it will be easy.”

  “No, that wasn’t the same. With this one…” Kereveld trailed off with the embarrassment of a man who’s found himself talking to his pet. Then he shuddered, shaking off his doubts like a dog shaking off water, and got purposefully to his feet.

  “I’d advise you to stand back.”

  So saying he slipped his robes off and flexed his fingers. The shadow of the sundial’s needle slipped around the face, darkening one of the sigils that marked it. With a last glance at the scroll, Kereveld began to chant.

  Waist deep in muddy water, Orbrant was bent forward with his hands on his thighs. He was gasping noisily for breath as the men above pulled away the huge, timber-hewn caltrop he’d just wrestled back up out of the ditch.

  It had been hard work. The three interlaced beams, each as long as a man was tall, weighed almost as much as him. Strong as his god had made him, this weight, combined with the drag of the mud that sucked so hungrily at the bundled stakes, had left the sergeant’s muscles burning with exhaustion.

  “Sure you don’t want a hand down there, sergeant?” Lorenzo asked from behind the work party above.

  “No. Just make sure that these are lashed together more strongly. If a bit of rain was able to make such a mess of our defences, so would an… an enemy…”

  The sergeant trailed off, the reddened angles of his face hardening as his eyes became cold. Lorenzo swallowed nervously beneath this sudden anger. Then, with a rush of relief, he realized that the warrior’s disapproval was aimed not at him but at something behind him.

  Sidling out of Orbrant’s line of sight, Lorenzo turned and followed it up towards the top of the pyramid. There, blurred by the pale mist that rose up from the warming stone, were two figures. One of them might or might not have been Florin. But there was no doubt about the identity of the second man.

  Even from this distance Kereveld was unmistakable. The mass of his hair billowed above his skinny form like the flame of a match and, as his mouth opened and closed, his arms chopped through the air in complex motions. Lorenzo thought back to the last time he’d seen the wizard working himself into such a fit, and frowned.

  “What devilry is this?” Orbrant growled, squinting up at the wizard. His hands were now flashing back and forth in a blur, fingers twisted into strange, painful looking contortions.

  “Maybe he’s speaking Tilean,” Lorenzo joked, but nobody was listening. Their work forgotten they stared upwards at the wizard, still and watchful.

  Only Orbrant seemed unaffected by the sudden unease which had gripped the work party. Dripping water and mud he clambered out of the ditch and over the bank, elbowing his way past caltrops and men until he stood between them and the wizard. There he sank to his knees, pressed his palms together and began to chant, lips moving as if in answer to Kereveld’s unheard incantation.

  “Sigmar be my guide,” he intoned, his eyelids drooping. “Sigmar be my meat and my drink, and my light in the darkness.”

  Lorenzo glanced down at the back of Orbrant’s gleaming skull. But then one of his comrades cried out and their attention snapped back to Kereveld.

  His efforts, it appeared, were working.

  To Lorenzo’s relief there was no repeat of the burning hail with which the wizard had driven off the daemon. This time the searing material of his magic was confined to motes that, from this distance, seemed no bigger than fireflies. They winked into existence around the mage’s head, popping like corn in a pan as they did so.

  “Sigmar be my hammer, and the strength with which I wield it.” Orbrant’s voice droned on, as impassive as his men were restless.

  Gradually, at first so slowly that it was hardly noticeable, and then with increasing speed, Kereveld’s creations began to grow. As they expanded, their eye watering brightness began to dim and the solidifying shapes displayed blotchy patterns that reminded Lorenzo of something.

  “Sigmar be my shade in the heat of the day and my fire in the cold of the night.”

  The colourful spheres of Kereveld’s incantation continued to expand, the arabesques which covered their surfaces swirling around like oil on water. Gone were the bright seeds from which they had sprung. They were now clearly recognisable as cousins of the orbs they had found within the temple. The largest was striped with fiery slashes of reds and oranges, already the size of a man. Suddenly for no obvious reason, it began to roll slowly outwards, away from the temple and towards the jungle beyond.

  Lorenzo scratched his chin thoughtfully and glanced towards the entrance of the ruins. The dank interior had never looked so inviting, the grim blocks of stone never so well made.

  “Sigmar be the truth in my words, and the purity of my heart.” Orbrant’s prayer continued, his words as smooth as the orbs which now rolled towards him.

  By now the entire expedition was gaping upwards at the impossible solar system that Kereveld had summoned. It drifted slowly across the clear tropical sky, the perfectly realized contours of its alien surfaces swimming into focus beneath the spectators’ eyes.

  Magical or not, they were real, these miniature worlds, as solid as cannon balls in the sunlight. As they silently strayed out over the mercenaries’ encampment, shadows flickered into existence beneath them, at first as insubstantial as mist but darkening all the while.

  “Sigmar be my first hope, and my last,” Orbrant said, unperturbed as his men scattered before the approaching shadow of Charyb. It slid over him and onto the steaming grass beyond, as plump and as slow as a Marienburg coal barge.

  “Sigmar be with me in joy and despair, and show me the illusion of both.”

  For
a moment sunlight shone once more on the Sigmarite’s dome. Deiamol rolled over him. Slightly smaller than its sister planet, the surface of this one was softened by a sheath of swirling cloud.

  “Sigmar be with me.”

  More of Kereveld’s monstrous incantations sailed harmlessly over the praying man, who paid them as little heed as he would high clouds on a calm day.

  “Be with me,” Orbrant repeated, his voice sinking to a whisper as the very world upon which he stood rolled overhead.

  The sixth planet, a boiling mass of gas, threw no shadow as it passed. Instead the bound flame of its surface flickered eerily on the kneeling man’s gaunt features. Then Obscuria, its surface glittering with the first ice Lustria had ever seen, passed overhead, and red light became blue.

  A moment later, with neither sign nor fanfare, the procession of Kereveld’s worlds halted. They hung amongst the last wisps of morning mist, as ripe as fruit above the jungle.

  The denizens of that tangled mass fell as silent as the men who had brought this sorcery here and, for a while, the only sound to be heard was the constant drone of insects and the whispered repetitions of Orbrant’s catechism.

  “I did it!” A voice, cracked with excitement, drifted down from on high. “Heiermat’s Last Theorem! I am a genius!”

  Lorenzo watched the genius, delirious with joy, run his hands through his sweat-soaked hair and punch the air with triumph.

  “I showed them. The fools!” The wizard’s voice shattered into a peel of wild laughter, and he started to hop up and down in a grotesque jig.

  And that was when the planets fell.

  It was as though gravity, realising how badly it had been cheated, had decided to snatch them out of the air with a fit of sudden anger. It pulled them down towards its bosom with such speed that the mercenaries barely had time to cry out before the spheres plunged into the earth, vast round bullets aimed at the heart of a giant.

  Without even slowing, Verda crashed down through the distant canopy. There was a great crash of splintering timber, followed by a bone-jarring thud and a gout of steaming soil was thrown high into the air. It rained back down as another planet stabbed into the trembling earth, and another.

  Lorenzo clasped his hands to his ears, a desperate attempt to silence the deafening cacophony of the tortured jungle and the screeching animals within. It didn’t do him much good. The noise of the holocaust was too loud to be shut out, and he could still feel the impacts in his joints; his old bones quaked in sympathy with the trembling ground beneath his feet.

  Even after the last of the planets had punched through the earth’s skin these seismic shifts continued. They set Lorenzo’s teeth rattling together as hard as the colossal stones of the temple complex and, when the pristine form of Verda rose up and out of the ground behind the temple, Lorenzo knew why.

  The disappearance of the conjured worlds hadn’t marked the end of the wizard’s spell. It had marked its beginning. The worlds he had summoned hadn’t gone, they were merely orbiting, mangling their way through the surface of the world.

  Seized with a sudden panic, Lorenzo turned to run, but he was too late. No sooner had he reached the mud of the ditch when a slide of falling masonry, ponderous blocks bouncing down from the heights like pebbles, collapsed on top of him.

  The last thing he saw before the world closed in was Orbrant. The invocation of his god completed, he had risen from his knees, soiled robes billowing about him like a storm cloud, and turned to face Kereveld’s sorcery.

  Lorenzo had time to marvel at the placid smile that lit the warrior’s face before, with a jarring impact, twelve tons of granite sealed him into the ditch.

  There was none of the ice he’d been promised. But there was blindness. It took the form of a cloying grey mist through which the indistinct shapes of other dead men moved. Their voices were harsh, the confusion of accents wracked with a rage and with grief.

  Lorenzo wondered how long it would be before the violence of their words was translated into actions. He tried not to think about it. He could recognize one of them as the first man he’d killed, a bandit on the road to Bordeleaux. Another might have been the wife he’d left.

  Funny, he hadn’t heard that she was dead.

  With a shudder he dragged his thoughts away from the sound of the circling daemons and concentrated on the feeling that was returning to his fingers and toes. At least hell wasn’t as cold as the old preachers had made out.

  Maybe he hadn’t led such a bad life after all. Maybe—

  With a sudden flash, the blindness cleared and a hungry face lunged towards him.

  “Why are you screaming?” Florin asked. “Your purse wasn’t damaged.”

  Lorenzo sat up, dried mud crackling off his face as his features twisted in confusion.

  “What happened?” he asked, blinking in the dusk. The voices he’d heard were still as loud as crows over a corpse, and still as angry. Scrabbling up to a sitting position, Lorenzo looked past Florin towards the howling mob.

  “What’s wrong with them?”

  “Seems that Menheer Kereveld’s fireworks weren’t as appreciated as they might have been,” Florin told him, wringing out the cloth he’d draped across his servant’s brow.

  “What?”

  “Kereveld’s spell. It killed seven people. Their friends aren’t too happy about it.”

  “Oh,” Lorenzo rubbed his eyes and took the flask of water Florin handed to him. “Aren’t you supposed to be protecting him?”

  Florin barked with laughter.

  “Your bang on the head seems to have knocked something loose. As far as I’m concerned the silly old fool’s on his own. He’d have been strung up already, by the way, if it hadn’t been for van Delft and Orbrant. They’ve got him safely in the temple while the row dies down.”

  “If it dies down,” Lorenzo muttered, and took a drink. Somebody seemed to be talking to the mob but, whatever the voice was saying, it clearly wasn’t popular. One of the crowd replied, and his words were met with a roar of savage approval.

  “Where’s Lundorf?” asked Lorenzo.

  “With his wounded. One of those damn things came up right beneath their bivouacs. What a mess. I’ve never seen him so angry.”

  Florin took the flask back from Lorenzo and popped the cork back into it.

  “He helped me drag you out of the mud, by the way. You’re damned lucky to have made it to that ditch in time. Good thinking.”

  “Yes.” Lorenzo, who’d been desperately trying to claw his way out of the ditch when the sky had fallen in, took the compliment anyway. “I never was just a pretty face.”

  Florin grunted, his smile betrayed by the concern that furrowed his brow.

  “Are you sure you’re all right? Apart from losing your good looks?”

  “Yes, I think so,” Lorenzo nodded cautiously and drew his knees up to his chest. “I’m better off than Kereveld, anyway. Ranald’s balls, imagine if he hadn’t stopped the damned spell when he did.”

  “He didn’t,” Florin said. “Orbrant did.”

  “Orbrant?”

  “I didn’t believe it either, but it’s true. Some sort of Sigmarite charm.”

  Lorenzo snorted.

  “Now that is a contradiction in terms.”

  The two men laughed as they turned to watch the lynch mob that surged around the temple’s entrance. It parted for a moment to reveal van Delft and, standing beside him, Orbrant. He stood silhouetted against the tunnel beyond, his warhammer held before him, an immovable object against the tide of angry men.

  Florin sighed.

  “If you’re sure you’re all right, I suppose I’d better go and give our sergeant a hand,” he decided, getting back to his feet.

  “I’d leave Orbrant to it,” Lorenzo said, and spat out a mouthful of dirt and blood. “He can handle himself, I’ll warrant.”

  “No,” Florin shook his head reluctantly. “He’s certainly saved our hides often enough. I owe it to him.”

  �
�You’re starting to sound like your empty headed mate,” Lorenzo said with disgust.

  “Lundorf’s not empty headed.”

  “Then how did you know who I was talking about?”

  Florin opened his mouth to reply, then closed it again. Lorenzo lay back down with a smug expression on his face.

  “Well,” his master rallied at last. “It’s a good job he was empty headed enough to pull you out of the mud.”

  “Right you are, boss,” Lorenzo said airily, and Florin decided to quit while he was ahead. Loosening his sword in its sheath he made his way over to the hubbub, stepping out of the way of a Marienburger that came pelting around the corner. Florin hung back as the man flung himself at the crowd, willing him to clear a path through the tightly packed bodies.

  “Message for the Colonel,” the Marienburger cried out imperiously, using his elbows to clear a path through his comrades’ mutinous ranks. They cursed at him as he ploughed his way through them, and more than one elbow struck back. The messenger had been well chosen, though. He ignored the blows just as stubbornly as he ignored the complaints, and fought his way through the bruising scrum as if his life depended on it.

  Florin, following in his wake, was thankful for it.

  “Message for the Colonel.”

  “What is it?” van Delft, welcoming the distraction, called out to him.

  “We’ve found it, sir. Captain Lundorf says to come quick.”

  “Found what?”

  “The loot, sir. The abandoned treasure.”

  “Rubbish,” a voice cried from the back of the crowd. “We’re not falling for that one again!”

  But already, in a hundred hearts, feelings of vengeance were melting away beneath thoughts of wealth. Dozens of muttered conversations faded beneath the movement of scores of feet which turned, before Florin’s very eyes, to a stampede. All of a sudden he found himself surrounded by a tide of rushing men.