01 - The Burning Shore (23 page)

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.

The bones beneath his feet shifted, and he slipped back down to a sitting
position.

In the darkness, silence blossomed.

“Lorenzo!” Florin cried, his voice loud enough to start his headache pounding
back into life.

“Thorgrimm!”

“Kereveld!”