01 - The Burning Shore (27 page)

Orbrant stepped around the corner in time to meet the forerunners.

“Go back.” He told them, holding his hands up as if to ward them off.
“There’s nothing here. I was mistaken.”

Their enthusiasm fuelled by denial, the first couple of men rushed past him.
Orbrant watched them blunder around the corner of the building, their fellows
following them on their wild goose chase. Then he strode through the trampled
elephant grass to the remaining knot of men and dwarfs, ignoring those who
scampered past him after their fellows as he did so.

As he drew up to the skirmish line he realized how close it had been. The air
between them was almost shimmering with hostility.

“Captain Graznikov,” Orbrant singled out the Kislevite, who’d remained to
hover like a vulture behind the imminent bloodshed. “Go and make your report to
Commander van Delft.”

“Don’t dare to tell me what to do,” Graznikov sneered. “I am the… the
captain.”

But beneath the solid impact of Orbrant’s granite stare Graznikov felt his
confidence melting away. After all, if a mere sergeant dared to address him like
this he must have a reason—must have. Perhaps he’d heard some rumour; that dog
Drobnik could never keep his mouth shut.

“Yes, you are a captain.” Orbrant drew closer to him, his eyes as hard as
sapphires. “Now go and make your report to Commander van Delft.”

Graznikov licked his lips and took a step backwards. At the best of times
he’d always found this slight man with his peasant’s dress and his aristocrat’s
weapon a little unnerving. Now, as he so casually risked a flogging by talking
to an officer in this way, he seemed positively frightening. What did he know?

With an obvious effort the Kislevite returned Orbrant’s gaze. He held it for
almost a minute before, sweat trickling down his brow, he turned on his heel and
swaggered away with assumed nonchalance.

When the captain had gone, Orbrant turned to the Marienburgers, who had been
watching the show with every sign of enjoyment. Even the man whom the dwarf had
felled seemed to have forgotten his grievance for the moment. He and his
opponent stood side by side, united in their appreciation of Graznikov’s
humbling.

“What happened to your leg?” Orbrant asked him as he staggered forward.

Marienburger and dwarf swapped a glance.

“Bashed it, sergeant,” the mercenary said.

“Hmm.” Orbrant, who’d seen the look, nodded approvingly. “Get one of your
mates to help you back to the Bretonnian quarter and we’ll give you some
liniment for it. The rest of you can stay here and breathe down Captain
Thorgrimm’s neck, if you want, although you’re wasting your time. Dwarfs love
gold, but they love honour more. They won’t cheat you. Isn’t that right?”

“Aye,” said the dwarf who’d cracked the Marienburger’s knee. Then he winked
at his victim. “More often than not, anyway.”

Orbrant joined in with the uncertain laughter and wiped the first fleck of
rain off the smooth dome of his head. Glancing up, he saw the last distant blue
slash of sky vanish beneath a rolling expanse of black clouds, dwarfing even the
pyramid they pressed down on, fat and heavy-bellied with moisture.

Another spattering of drops pattered against the leaves and a first rumble of
thunder growled out in distant menace—a drum roll for the commander who came
stalking across the fields towards them.

“What’s going on here, sergeant?” he asked, eyes flicking from the line of
men with their unsheathed swords to the line of dwarfs with their unbelted axes.

“Nothing at all, sir,” Orbrant told him with a crisp salute. “Just a spot of
digging.”

“Really? You’d better carry on then.” And with that the heavens
opened.

“So,” said Lundorf, with hearty good cheer. “We seem to have come to the
right place after all.”

The expedition’s share of the gold, which Thorgrimm had carefully weighed in
front of the entire expedition, sat in an empty powder chest before van Delft’s
feet. There were perhaps three or four hundred crowns worth all told, and there
were no two pieces the same, from tangled clumps of golden wire to snapped off
lengths of thin piping.

“It’s strange,” Florin said, lifting one twist of metal up beneath the
suspicious eyes of his brother officers. “But it almost seems like old scrap.”

“It is,” said Kereveld, who’d already dismissed the find as irrelevant, as he
looked up from his pipe.

“No, I mean rubbish. Like in the middens back in my city.”

“Yes, that’s what it is,” snapped the wizard, who’d burnt his fingers.

“How can it be? Look, it’s all gold.”

Kereveld inhaled a lungful of smoke and nodded.

“You forget,” he chided the Bretonnian, a sudden rush of nicotine soothing his
irritation. “The beings that built this place had no particular love for gold.
They had so much that they used it as we do lead.”

In the gloom of the corridor the men shifted uneasily and peered out into the
rush of rain that fell like a veil over the premature dusk. It had driven them
and the rest of the expedition into the dubious safety of the outer buildings
where they huddled, as restless and steaming as beasts sheltering in a cave.

Only the sentries remained outside. When they were relieved they sloshed into
the shelter of the dingy stone walls, their sodden clothing leaving trails of
water behind them.

Van Delft had considered calling them all back in. It wasn’t as though they’d
be able to see anything against the blinding grey of the driving rain. But he
knew the value of routine and he’d decided to stick to it, even though it would
mean doing his rounds through the torrential downpour.

How my daughters would scold me if they found out, he thought with a smile
that lifted the tips of his moustache.

The drumming of the rain also kept the other officers locked up inside there
own little worlds. Graznikov thought of Orbrant, and of revenge. Lundorf thought
of Vienela, the daughter of Baron Grulter, and what he wished he’d said to her.
Florin thought of cards, for the first time since he’d fled Bordeleaux, and
toyed with the idea of setting up a game.

It was Kereveld who broke the mood. “How long do you think that this rain
will last?” he asked van Delft, who just shrugged.

“Sigmar knows.”

“But it won’t be longer than four days?”

“I doubt it. But for all we know it might last for four months. Why?”

The wizard, who’d been chewing the end of his pipe, just muttered and looked
away.

“What is it?” Florin pressed him, but the wizard just waved the question
away, one pale hand fluttering like a moth in the dismal light.

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“Try us.”

“Well, all right. It’s really not that complicated, I suppose. It’s all down
to my discovery of the planet that used to be known as Obscuria. We’d always
guessed that it was somewhere out there, because of the doppler effect it has on
the magical field. But until I discovered it we’d never been able to accurately
calculate its ellipse. I’ve decided to rename it Bartolomia Primus, by the way.”

The wizard paused, as if waiting for the applause that only he could hear to
die away. Florin and Castavelli, who was sitting across from him, nodded
blankly. Lundorf opened his mouth to ask a question, then thought better of it
and closed it again. Thorgrimm began to snore.

“Anyway, now that I know the ellipse and can extrapolate the cyclical speed
of its orbital rate from the observations I’ve made in the star chamber, I’ve
made a wonderful discovery.”

He waited expectantly for a moment, then Florin obliged him: “What
discovery?” he asked.

“I have discovered, at least, I think I have discovered, how to cast
Heiermat’s Last Theorem.”

He leant forward, eyes shining with an almost religious fervour.

“Do you realise what that means?”

“No,” said Lundorf, to the wizard’s evident surprise.

“It means that I’ll be famous. Of all Heiermat’s twelve theorems, it’s only
the last that we’ve never been able to follow. If I can cast it I will have made
one of the greatest breakthroughs of any human mage.”

He beamed at the assembled men who smiled politely back.

“Well done,” Florin told him, and Kereveld smiled modestly.

“Thank you, thank you,” he muttered. “Although of course my real genius was in
finding this place. I think that old fool Tiphianus only voted to give me the
money for the expedition because he thought I would fail. Ha! Well, now I’ll
show him. If only the rain clears in time, I’ll cast such a spell that the whole
college will be forced to recognize my genius.”

Seized by a sudden fit of combative energy, Kereveld sprang to his feet and
stalked over to the tunnel entrance. His silhouette was black against the pearly
sheet of the downpour.

“How long do you think the rain will last?” he asked.

This time it was Florin who answered. “It doesn’t really matter, does it? A
week or a day? When it clears you can get to work.”

“No, no, no.” The wizard shook his head impatiently. “The planets have to be
in correct alignment. In particular, Morrslieb has to eclipse Obs… Bartolomia
Primus.”

“Why?”

“How do I know?” Kereveld snapped. “It just does.”

“Morrslieb,” Castavelli muttered dubiously, taking off his cap to fidget with
the feathers that crowned it. Their bright colours had vanished beneath a layer
of grime and the quills were almost threadbare. “I don’t like Morrslieb. It’s a
bad omen.”

“Paah.” Kereveld dismissed him, and turned back to watch the rain.

“The lunatics are always particularly energetic when it’s full,” Lundorf
added. “I took Vienela to see them once, and… well…”

“Lunatics!” Kereveld scoffed. “What do they know? Morrslieb is no more
dangerous than warpstone, if you know how to use it.”

Florin glanced around, satisfying himself that Orbrant hadn’t been in earshot
of that particular comment, then got up and joined Kereveld by the entrance.

“Let’s go back to the star chamber while we wait,” he said airily. “We can
have another look at the, um, stonework.”

“Why?”

“To pass the time,” Florin told him, already thinking about the inscriptions
and what they might tell him. “To pass the time.”

* * *

That night there was no let up in the downpour. The rain danced upon the
stone of the temple and beat into the clearing beyond. It filled the ditches the
men had dug, the mud swimming into a dirty brown as the water rose up to slurp
at the ankles of the stakes above, and a white mist rose from the jungle, as
thick and blinding as the smoke from burning straw.

The next day it grew heavier.

Kereveld spent this time gazing up at the great open universe that lay
sprawled before the all-seeing eye of the star chamber, scribbling away as he
watched distant worlds spin through their orbits. If anything on those alien
spheres had looked back it would have seen nothing of the temple, even if it had
had the eyes or the art to pick out such detail. All it would have seen would
have been the cyclone—the vast spiral of its body roaming across the lush
green face of this continent with the silent grace of some grazing animal.

Had Kereveld known the size of the weather system, or its lethargy, he would
have despaired. For two days it barely moved. Then, with three days left, it
twisted to the north, only to be beaten back by some unseen, rival force.

Time ground past, as effortlessly and remorselessly as the stars which turned
above. Morrslieb drew near, and, when there were no more than two days until its
rise, Kereveld began to think about casting Heiermat’s Last Theorem despite the
storm that raged outside. Deep in his heart, though, he knew it would be too
dangerous to unleash such energy into the blindness of driving rain—who knew
what might happen? It would be madness to cast the incantation without being
able to see how it progressed.

Twenty-four hours later, the night before the heavens’ appointed hour, he
changed his mind: danger or not, he had to know. That night he neither slept nor
ate. Instead he paced up and down the chamber like some wild animal trapped in a
cage, pausing only to stare up into the clouds above. Then Morrslieb rose over
the distant horizon. Although hidden by the streaming cloud from the men
outside, within the star chamber it could be seen with a perfect clarity.

It appeared like a bloody tumour, a cancer malign enough to blot out whole
galaxies as it rolled across the universe. Its surface seemed horribly near
beneath the magnification of the ancient lens, the vast expanse of the visible
hemisphere as inflamed and pockmarked as a plague victim’s face.

Not even the wizard could bring himself to look at it for long. Every time he
did so he began to get the feeling that the moon was looking back at him. The suspicion filled him with the same sort of horrible
unease that, on the other side of the world, was already sending the lunatics of
Marienburg thrashing against their chains.

Florin hardly noticed how thin the wizard’s nerves were wearing. The old fool
had never seemed really sane from the beginning anyway. Besides which he had
problems of his own. Every time he thought he had cracked the code of the
ancients’ writing, a cross check would bring his theories crashing back down.

As yet nobody else knew about his find, and he wanted to decipher it before
they did. The gods had gifted it to him, and he fully intended to wring whatever
advantage he could from the information before anybody else could. If that meant
matching Kereveld’s sleepless vigil, so be it.

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.