01 - The Burning Shore (25 page)

Around them, sprawled together as intimately as the participants in some
grotesque orgy, lay the skeletons.

They weren’t all intact. Nor were they all human. Some of them had the short,
blunt look of orcs. Others were smaller, their skulls elongated into snouts from
which razor-sharp teeth still sprouted. Another, still held together by its
chainmail, had bones as fine and delicate as porcelain. Whatever it was, it made
Florin think of the tales he had heard of the elven folk that haunted Loren.

But although the skeletons differed in form and race, in one way they were
all alike.

Every one of them, without exception, had been incinerated, the bones burned
into powdery chalk. The motes of dust that floated through the acrid stench of
this chamber were the same, dull white, colour. And that dust, the last stubborn
remains of things long dead in some terrible holocaust, was everywhere. It hung
thickly in the stink of the room, the shifting shroud of it that covered the
dead like some frail attempt at modesty at the explorer’s presence.

Thorgrimm was unhappy.

“There is a trap here,” he told them, sniffing the air suspiciously. “And no
gold. Maybe we should go.”

“No!” Kereveld snapped. “This is the place. I recognise all the skeletons
from the book.”

“Do you?” Lorenzo asked, his voice slicing through the carnal atmosphere like
a razor.

“Yes. There should be a lever here, or some other mechanism.”

“Which does what?” Thorgrimm demanded. Kereveld could only shrug.

“I don’t know, exactly. But it should open some sort of… some sort of
window.”

One of the Bretonnians prodded a skeleton with the toe of his boot. It
collapsed, crumbling into a choking cloud that hung in the still air of the
chamber.

“Let’s see if we can find this lever, then,” Florin decided, tearing his eyes
away from the phantom of dust.

“It should be on the east side,” Kereveld told them helplessly.

“Very well,” Thorgrimm decided after a moment’s hesitation. “If you insist on
this folly, van Delft has bound me to help you. But if you’ll take my advice
you’ll turn back while you have the chance.”

The dwarf looked up, but Kereveld just shrugged.

“This way.”

Clumping through the bones of their predecessors the five men followed the
dwarf into the endless night of the temple. The entrance the plate had lifted
them to was swallowed up by the darkness behind them, leaving them in a world of
crumbling death and cold sweat.

But gradually, out of the gloom, the far wall appeared. In front of it there
lay the heavy body of what appeared to be a stone sarcophagus. A great heap of
bones were piled around the promontory like tinder for a funeral pyre. Thorgrimm
pushed some of them to one side to make his way through.

“That’s not in the book,” Kereveld muttered, rifling through the pages as he
followed the dwarf. Now that the flames of their torches had been brought to
bear on the neatly cut stone Florin could see that it was no coffin. There was
no sign of any lid, or of a name, or of any carving. Apart from the scorch marks
that had blackened its corners, the slab was completely featureless.

Except, that was, for the spheres that rested on its surface.

There were eight of them. Eight cheerful little baubles that looked
completely out of place in the darkness of this place. Beneath polar caps of dust their surfaces swirled with the bright, primary colours of
children’s toys or winter decorations.

Above them, gaping open as hungrily ten holes awaited. Eight were empty, as
black as empty stomachs, but in the first two, lying as neatly as eggs in a
nest, were two more of the spheres.

“Looks like we found your lever,” Thorgrimm said, and took off his helmet to
scratch his head. “The question is will we have any more luck pulling it than
these others?”

He swept his helm around in a broad gesture that took in the ruined forms
that lay around, then crammed it back onto his head.

“Let’s see,” Kereveld muttered, peering myopically at the arrangement. He
reached over to the second of the filled cavities and removed a shrivelled brown
twig, the end of which had been neatly sheared off.

“Looks like something did grow in here,” Florin said, taking it from him. “A
vine, maybe…”

“That’s not wood,” Thorgrimm told him. “It’s a finger.”

Florin flung the thing away and wiped his hand on his robes.

The dwarf smiled.

“If we’re going to try to open this particular lock we’d better have a better
idea of what goes where then.”

Florin, meanwhile, had picked up one of the spheres and was holding it up to
his torch. Despite the orange glow of the flame the colours were clear enough, a
great swirl of blue, broken across much of its surface by green blobs, swirled
between white caps. Here and there tiny capillary lines of blue cut across the
green like the veins on a drunk’s nose.

“How much does it weigh?” Thorgrimm asked, hefting another one of the
spheres. This one was a deep red dotted with countless, interlocking circles.
“I’ve seen something like this before. You need to build up the weight of the
leverage in the right order. Those others must have got the first one right,
then failed with the second.”

Florin replaced the blue green sphere and picked up another. This one was ash
grey; its only features thin orange lines that crawled across its surface.

“I know what they are,” he said cautiously, swapping it for another.

“What?” Thorgrimm asked.

“At least, I think I know what they are.”

“What?”

“Ask Kereveld.”

All eyes turned to the wizard. After a moment he looked up from the book.

“Yes?”

“What’s this?” Florin asked him, and held up the first globe.

“Ahhhhhhh,” the wizard said, the sound as smooth as the end of pain. Eyes
gleaming in the darkness he reached out for the sphere with trembling hands, and
grasped it eagerly.

“Wonderful,” he breathed, turning it around to gloat over every detail.
“Wonderful. This alone will show the old women at the college that the cost was
worth it.”

“What is it?” Thorgrimm snapped, his voice harsh enough to cut through
Kereveld’s rapture.

“It’s the world,” the wizard said, his voice cracking into a jagged little
giggle. “That one you’re holding is Lokratia. See the meteor scars in its crust?
And here, look. Deiamol. The burning world.”

Elbowing his way forward, Kereveld rested his book on the stone slab and
picked up another sphere. This one was deathly pale apart from three bruised
grey smudges, and a smattering of tiny black pinpricks.

“And this,” he said, his voice rising in excitement as he studied it, “must
be Obscuria. That moron Brakelda said that it didn’t exist. He never did
understand calculus.”

Again he giggled, and Thorgrimm looked accusingly at Florin, who shrugged.

He wanted to say, he may be human but don’t hold me responsible. What he
actually said was, “What about the first of the planets, there in the wall?”

“Charyb,” the wizard said. “And that next one is Verda. It shouldn’t be
there. It’s the fifth planet. Like so. Deiamol should be in its place. Then
Tigris. Then our world.”

Here the wizard hesitated, and weighed the globe in his hand reluctantly.

“Better not wait too long,” Thorgrimm cautioned warily.

Kereveld sighed and placed the bauble in its niche. Then, his fingers sorting
through the other five like a dealer at a craps table, he rolled each of the
others into place.

“There,” he said, glancing around expectantly. “That’s it.”

Nothing happened.

“At least we seem to have avoided the trap.”

“I don’t understand,” Kereveld muttered in sudden outrage. “There should be
a…”

But he got no further. With a barely audible rumble of hidden levers, the
sound as powerful as tectonics and as remorseless as death, the ceiling burst
asunder with a flash of blinding light.

* * *

Had the fire come it would have devoured figures frozen in every pose, from
cowering terror to straight-backed defiance. It would have melted eyes that were
squeezed shut in fearful expectation, or wide open in curiosity. It would have
melted fat, and frizzled hair, and set sinews ablaze.

But the fire didn’t come. Instead, a thousand stars blossomed into flaming
life harmlessly in the darkness above.

Yellow or white or old, dying red they hung in the black void of space, the
patterns their tiny bodies made against the vast darkness beyond as complex as a
handful of thrown grain. Some burned bright enough to bring tears to the
onlookers’ eyes. Others, mere specks in the lightless void of space, could only
be seen from the corner of the eye. And behind them all, as smooth and creamy as
a trail of snowdrops across an onyx floor, lay the bulk of their galaxy, its
edges frayed by the thousands of defecting stars.

“Look,” Kereveld breathed, grasping Florin by the shoulder and pointing one
shaking finger upwards. The Bretonnian saw a solid green sphere, no bigger than
his thumbnail.

It was Verda, of that he had no doubt. A perfect twin to the impostor that
they had handled minutes ago. This Verda, though, was real. Its distant
continents were lit not by candlelight but by the sun; its billions of tons were
held in place not by sweaty mortal hands but by… by what?

What force was strong enough to hold a world in its orbit?

Florin winced as Kereveld’s fingers pinched harder.

“This is it,” the old man hissed, and turned his manic gaze on Florin before
looking back up to ogle the naked universe above. “This is why we’re here.”

“It can’t be real,” Florin said, although he knew that it was. “It must be an
illusion.”

“No illusion,” Kereveld said. “Reality. The stars as the Old Ones saw them.”

“But how can we see them? It’s daytime. The sky outside is blue, not this
black.”

“Yes,” the wizard replied simply. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

His hand fell limply from Florin’s shoulder, and the first glistening tear
ran down the old man’s face and into his beard.

“Sotek’s Eye,” he whispered reverently in blasphemous prayer. “With your help
I will change our world.”

Florin felt a shiver run through him at the words, a twitch of superstitious
fear.

Don’t be a fool, he told himself. It’s not as though this place does
anything.

Above him, twinkling against the icy void of space, the galaxy burned.

Lorenzo waited until Florin had escorted Kereveld back to the temple before
slipping away. He had kept the merchandise hidden beneath the folds of his shirt
and the shape of it had soon etched a hot, red patch of insulation into his
skin.

Now, sitting oh his haunches with his back resting against the smooth stone
of the corner building, he shifted the goods within his shirt and watched his
customers approach.

They walked with the exaggerated swagger of the world’s only honest men,
pausing occasionally to glance around them furtively. They looked as though they
were about to burst into an innocent whistle.

In fact, as they drew nearer, one of them did start to hum. Florin sniggered
and stood up, rising out of the tall-bladed elephant grass like a grotesque
apparition.

“Over here, lads,” he hissed. The two men stopped in sudden alarm. Then,
deciding that this wasn’t a trap, they ploughed through the grass towards him.
The first of them swept off a white-feathered hat and nodded his head politely.

“What a surprise, to meet you here,” he said, his voice lifting with the
musical lilt of a Tilean accent.

“Likewise,” Lorenzo replied.

For a moment the three men stood and sweated beneath the gaze of the hot sun,
studying each other.

“Is a very nice weather we’re having,” the Tilean said and, despite all
evidence to the contrary, Lorenzo nodded his agreement.

“Beautiful.”

Again the three men lapsed into silence. A dragonfly hummed past, its
metallic sheen sparkling beneath the scorching sunlight. The Tileans watched it
suspiciously. When it had disappeared around the corner the first of them lent
forward, his voice dropping to a whisper.

“You have the map?” he hissed.

Lorenzo nodded and looked cautiously from side to side before retrieving the
roll of paper from beneath his shirt. He began to unfurl it, and then paused.

“Look, you might not want it. It’s only one page from Bartolomi’s book, not
really a map. To be quite honest, I can’t make anything of it.”

“Don’t keep us waiting.” The Tilean waved away the protest impatiently. “Let
us see.”

Lorenzo sighed.

“All right, all right. But if you don’t want it, I have some tea to sell,
too.”

And with that he unrolled the piece of paper and held it out for the two
Tileans to examine. As the men hunched over the paper, Lorenzo saw the contents
reflected in their faces. In a matter of seconds their aquiline features changed
from eager to disappointed, from disappointed to exhilarated and then, with an
obvious effort, from exhilarated to unimpressed.