01 - The Burning Shore (31 page)

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 patiently 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 drove
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.