[Florin & Lorenzo 01] - The Burning Shore

by Robert Earl - (ebook by Undead)

  Bertrand was still fighting against the stretched tendons and locked joints that kept him from snatching a taste of the water below. He whimpered pitifully with the strain of his contortions, body and soul torn by the sheer desperation of his predicament.

  Florin watched the pitiful sight for a long moment, remembering how he alone had wanted to press on after finding the Kislevite’s hat. If he hadn’t been such a fool they wouldn’t be in this—

  Never mind that now, he told himself sharply: Think.

  Without knowing that he was doing it, Florin began to grind his teeth. He peered upwards again trying to see how his hands had been tied. It was no use. The knots, as well as his paralysed fingers were hidden behind the bamboo. He tried to pull himself up, but with the strain came a terrible numbness that was somehow worse than the pain.

  Florin quickly lowered himself back into the river even before he noticed the thin rivulet of dark blood that had begun to trickle down his wrist.

  On the other side of the cage Bertrand started to sob. It was a hopeless, tearless weeping, an eerie sound for such a man to make. It worked upon Florin’s nerves like a scalpel.

  “Hey, Bertrand,” Florin called out. “Bertrand!”

  But the man was lost in his own personal hell of poison and thirst; Florin’s cries fell upon deaf ears.

  “Bertrand!”

  It was almost an hour before the mercenary fell silent. An hour in which the sun climbed higher into the sky, the burning glory of its strength beating down upon the cage like a smith upon an anvil. An hour in which the water became blood warm, enlivening the leeches that found them, squeezing the blood from their veins as painlessly as the heat wrung every last drop of sweat out of them.

  An hour in which the two men’s bodies grew weaker as their thirst grew stronger—a torture that was made all the worse by the constant gurgle of the water that flowed past their dehydrating bodies.

  All the while, hidden by shadow, instinct and long, long practice, the builders of the cage watched their captives. They watched with ice-cold eyes and limitless patience, their minds still with a serenity that no human suffering could ever touch. Later, when the cries of the weakest man faded to nothing, a silent command was given by their leader; a flick of a tail sent a group of the silent watchers swarming soundlessly towards the cage.

  Amongst the breed that served the race in this capacity, Xinthua Tzeqal was one of the youngest. He had seen scarcely more than three thousand orbits of this world since crawling from his birthing pool, and the patchwork of continents, the massive stone slabs that glided across his planet’s skin like lily pads across a pond, had not moved more than a few miles.

  Still, his breed had not been created for impetuousness; he had only made one of youth’s errors. It had been whilst fighting the long ears in the North. There had been a retreat and, despite the fact that he knew how easily replaced their lives were, he had allowed contemplation of his shattered kindred to cloud his mind. Anger had muddied his thoughts as silt muddies water and he had moved hastily.

  True, the long ears had committed sorcerous horrors that were as disturbing as most of their novelties. Somehow their witches had found a way of setting skinks alight with an unquenchable, slow burning fire. As green as venom, it had taken weeks to crawl from the tips of their tails to their still beating hearts.

  The air had been sharp with the acrid stench of their burning bodies as, loyal to the last, the flaming creatures had attempted to go about their duties. Dragging the charred remains of their tails and hind legs behind them, the afflicted had started so many fires that eventually Xinthua had ordered their comrades to kill them.

  Almost all of the cursed skinks had lifted their jaws and exposed their throats, although whether through the desperation of pain or the iron rules of their existence the mage priest could never decide.

  The iron tang of their blood had mingled with the smoke of their still burning flesh to form a smell that was quite unique. Perhaps it had been that smell that had so unsettled the younger Xinthua. Whatever the reason, as soon as the invader’s army had been broken he had inflicted this same torment upon their few survivors.

  And yet, although the long ears proved frailer torches than the skinks, he knew that he had been mistaken in the action almost before the last one had stopped screaming. It had been a waste of resources, a waste of effort that could have been better employed elsewhere.

  For long decades afterwards he had sat unmoving, a growing understanding of his folly gradually soothing his mind, much as a pearl will form around a piece of grit to sooth an oyster.

  That had been centuries ago. Now when the memory bubbled up into the inner pools of his consciousness he watched it with the same unblinking detachment with which he watched the growth of a tree, or the short, flitting life span of a skink. Xinthua Tzeqal knew, with a certainty that in another race would have been called pride, that he would never make the mistake of haste again.

  Nor, it seemed, would his bearers. They trudged through the overgrown paths of this near abandoned mangrove with stolid persistence, as unaware of the importance of their master’s mission as he was himself.

  The reports that the skinks had brought to him had been intriguing. They had told of a pack of intruders that sounded too coarse to be long ears and yet too sophisticated to be lemurs. Apparently they had come from the sea in primitive canoes before making their way to one of the lesser ruins.

  Intriguing.

  Xinthua wondered if they were a species of the water folk, sickly pale mammals that sometimes drifted across the world pond to die upon the Lustrian shore. He had never seen such beings before, and was contemplating the possibility of studying them with calm anticipation. Runners had already been sent ahead with orders to take some specimens, ready for his study, and he had brought with him exquisite onyx blades and skinks well trained in the arts of live dissection.

  Content to wait for that particular treat, Xinthua rolled back his eyelids and slid away from this world into one of the realms of pure mathematics. The cascading streams of numbers and four dimensional geometries had a beauty that even the jungle lacked, and he bathed in their magnificence as he rested.

  Beneath the fat mass of his earthly weight, the procession marched tirelessly onwards, their minds free of such distractions as their feet devoured the miles that lay between their master and his interests.

  The lizardine forms boiled up from the water, surging around the two captives in a writhing stew of sharp-toothed snouts and snaking tails and yellow, unblinking eyes. So suddenly did they emerge, and so silently, that for the first heartbeat Florin took them to be nothing more than figments of a delirium. It wasn’t until one of their number nipped at his heels in its haste to ascend to the surface that he realized that these apparitions were real.

  A sudden jolt of adrenaline rushed through his battered system, tearing a cry of alarm from his parched throat. Oblivious to the jagged rip of pain that exploded in his bound wrists he instinctively tried to pull himself up and out of the water, retreating from the amphibians that swarmed around him even as he kicked out at them.

  But the skinks had no interest in him. Ignoring the blows he rained down upon their backs they surged past, seemingly oblivious to everything except for the unconscious figure of Bertrand.

  “Hey, wake up!” Florin called to his comrade, desperation lending a jagged edge to his voice. The warning had no effect on the Bretonnian. He remained dangling down into the water as nervelessly as a slab of beef as the skinks surrounded him, jostling for position like a pack of jackals around a corpse.

  “Bertrand,” Florin shouted again, kicking the murky water up in an attempt to gain the man’s attention. This time he had more success. As the droplets splashed onto the smaller man’s lips he lifted his head and blinked, although his face remained slack with the indifferent stupidity of absolute exhaustion.

  “Captain?” he asked, apparently oblivious to the carpet of reptilian heads that bobbed patie
ntly around him.

  Then he rolled his dull eyes upwards, his attention drawn by the sudden patter of clawed feet on the bamboo roof of the cage. There was a flash of onyx from amongst the scurrying limbs up there, the sunlight white upon the black stone of the knife, and Bertrand was cut free.

  He slid bonelessly into the swarm of predators below, the swarm closing around him like the fingers of a scaled fist. Then his head dipped beneath the water, and the shock of it was enough to slap him back into full consciousness.

  It was a cruel trick for fate to play, relieving him of his torpor in the last few seconds of his life. With a shock of terrible realisation, Bertrand’s features contorted into a scream, eyes rolling in sudden horror as he finally realized who his captors were.

  The skinks ignored his protests and busied themselves around him, each fighting for a pinch of warm-blooded flesh. Those at the back crawled impatiently forwards over their fellows, forming a great ball of writhing limbs and glistening scales. Bertrand’s howl of terror was muffled by his captors’ swarming bodies. It was the last sound he made before he was dragged down into the drowning depths below.

  “Leave him alone!” Florin roared helplessly, hurling himself this way and that against his bonds in a vain attempt to help his comrade.

  The last of the skinks turned to regard him, the soulless yellow orbs of its eyes as blank as glass as it watched its dry-mouthed prey trying to spit defiance at it.

  “Sigmar curse the skin from your bones!” Florin hissed at it, his bone-dry teeth barred in an impotent snarl.

  The skink seemed unimpressed. It was still watching the human as it melted away below the surface of the water, vanishing from sight beneath a swirl of muddy ripples.

  “Sigmar curse you…” Florin said, his voice quiet with sudden exhaustion. His rage had burnt itself out as suddenly as it had begun. In its place nothing remained but the dry ash of depression.

  What a horrible end it had been for Bertrand, he thought. What a horrible end it will be for me.

  Noon came. The furnace of the sun grew hotter. It dried the blood on his wrists into a dry, brown crust that was soon covered with flies. The leeches that glutted themselves on the submerged flesh of his body grew as fat as ripening grapes, their gorged bodies mercifully hidden beneath the swirling debris of the current.

  Worst of all was the thirst. It filled him with a constant, merciless desire that soon had him straining against his bonds, stretching his swollen tongue out towards the liquid that flowed inches beneath his chin. And when dusk brought its usual host of mosquitoes Florin snapped at them eagerly, as if the specks of moisture their bodies contained would be of any use to him.

  Eventually, he collapsed into, a haunted, restless sleep. It brought him little relief. A quickening fever filled his dreams with countless sharp-toothed phantoms. The worst of them came with the faces of the men who had met their deaths under his command. He pleaded with these hungry ghosts as they fell upon him, tried to tell them that it wasn’t his fault; he was a merchant not a warrior, he had done his best, for the love of Shallya he had done his best.

  Some of them listened. A few understood. Most didn’t; they took their revenge upon their failed leader in the endless maze of his nightmares.

  When the skinks finally came for him, pink-skinned in the red dawn of the next morning, their cold grip was almost a relief from these phantoms. Almost.

  He still fought them, of course. Despite the weakness of shock and of thirst, Florin fought. What else was there to do?

  As the skinks swarmed around him he stamped down on them, the rotting leather of his heels glancing off scale and bone. Then, when he was cut free, he tried to use his trembling thumbs to gouge at their eyes, and snapped his teeth against the slick armour of their scales.

  It was all in vain. Drained and unarmed, Florin’s struggles were futile. The skinks let his blows bounce harmlessly off them as they piled on top of him, wrestling him down into their midst, and securing his limbs with fingers that felt like steel.

  Florin, cursing his foes as his struggles grew weaker, felt himself sinking beneath their evil smelling weight. A horribly human finger pressed against his face and he closed his teeth around it, biting down hard. The finger was snatched away, and his head was pushed beneath the filthy water.

  Despite the taste of rotten vegetation and the film of silt it left on his tongue, it tasted wonderful. After two days without a drink, the near sewage of this jungle river was like something from heaven. Florin gulped a second mouthful down, the sheer bliss of quenching his thirst felt almost unbearably good, and the river closed in over his head.

  The skinks’ long tails churned silently through the water as they accelerated his descent. Ever careful to keep their victim’s arms pinned behind his back they hastened downwards, pressing him onto the silty bottom of the river then rolling him beneath the last bars of the cage.

  Florin felt the bamboo teeth of its construction scratch against his leg as his captors dragged him beneath it. The realisation that the skinks weren’t trying to drown him dawned upon the Bretonnian and he tried to relax, to swim with them.

  It wasn’t easy. The first tight fingers of suffocation were already squeezing at his throat, whispering terrible, panicky advice into his ears and filling his lungs with fire. But already he was hurtling upwards like a champagne cork, the blinding sting of the cloudy water brightening with the glow of the sky that waited above.

  A second later he burst up from the river’s smothering embrace. Spluttering and sucking down great lungfuls of air, he let the skinks tow him towards the shade of the bank and drag him onto the stinking black mud. He was still gasping like a landed fish as they bound his ankles and wrists with fresh vines. That done, they jostled each other as they plucked the fattened leeches from his skin, eagerly slurping down the blood-filled parasites with chirps of pleasure. A moment later they hoisted him up onto their shoulders, and carried him off into the jungle.

  Except, Florin realized, this wasn’t the jungle. At least, not the jungle he’d known.

  True, the trees looked the same as they did everywhere else in this green-choked world. The usual bewildering variety of sky palms, thorned sequoia of Ulelander and Cicadia, and the gods knew how many other species thrust upwards from the mulch, each of them struggling to reach the white misted heights above.

  And yet, although these ancient wooden giants were the same, their manners were different. Elsewhere they grew in merciless competition with each other, their bodies forming thick scrums of impassable bark as they fought for every scrap of soil and each glimpse of light.

  Here, though, that wild competition had been tamed, disciplined. The towering trunks between which Florin was now being carried had been herded into avenues that marched along in lines as straight as Marienburg canals.

  Then there were the vines. Again, they had the same form here as everywhere else, but the usual strangling webs they formed had no place in this eerily ordered world. Instead they had been plaited and roped into high, aerial pathways that reached trimly across the heights of the canopy above.

  Florin rolled his eyes back to study a complex network of these green capillaries and, as he watched, a pack of skinks raced along its swaying length. Tiny with distance they scurried overhead, as intent on their business as the pack which held him captive were on theirs.

  No, Florin decided, this was no jungle. It was more like a city.

  As if in confirmation of the thought, another pack of skinks rushed by, each of them bearing a basket on its hunched back. Despite the rotting mass of vegetation through which their errands took them, and despite the scaled skin and twisted physiognomies of the creatures, they reminded Florin of nothing so much as porters in the docks of his own town.

  Of course, he mused, where there are porters there are masters, kings or merchants. He was beginning to wonder if these bizarre creatures had ever heard of trade when he saw something by the side of the path which drove that thought, that dro
ve every thought, out of his head.

  What he saw was Bertrand.

  At least, it was what was left of Bertrand.

  There wasn’t much of him. Perhaps because it had been saved as some trophy, his head had been left intact. It lay in the shadows of the jungle floor, recognisable despite the tracery of dried blood that masked its face. Its eyes, despite being as flat and lifeless as those of the things that had gathered around his carcass, glared up at his captain in an unmistakable grimace of silent accusation.

  Swallowing hard against the sudden wave of nausea Florin tore his gaze away, and peered into the gloom beyond. The ruins of Bertrand’s body lay there, scattered about like the bloody chaff of a terrible harvest. His ribcage shone white, the vertebrae picked as clean as piano keys. Beside it his shattered pelvis had been driven into the ground like some grisly tent peg.

  More bones were in the claws of reptiles that had gathered around. A new breed, these. Grotesque, hulking versions of the skinks that were even now carrying Florin past the nightmare scene. Great slabs of muscle bulged beneath the monsters’ blood red scales, an animal strength which matched the animal cunning gleaming in their small, piggy eyes. Bloodshot and glittering, these orbs were protected by the wide plates of thickened scale that tapered back across their heads like great helmets.

  These were the first idle lizardmen that Florin had ever seen, if the gnawing and sucking of Bertrand’s bones could be called idleness. As the Bretonnian watched, one of them effortlessly snapped a femur into two jagged pieces. Pausing to sniff at the still warm marrow inside, it thrust the slimy length of its forked tongue into the hollow of the bone, its eyes narrowing with pleasure as it slurped out the rich nutrients.

  A moment later the skinks rounded a corner, sparing Florin the sight of any more such details. But it was already too late. He knew that Bertrand would be waiting for him the next time he fell asleep, if he were to live that long.