01 - The Burning Shore (33 page)

Once more the saurus closed in on Florin, burying their claws into his
shoulders and dragging him towards the mage priest as eagerly as acolytes
dragging a sacrificial calf to a knife-wielding priest. The human struggled
pitifully against their iron strength, but to no avail. Its muscles were as
pathetic as its claws and teeth, it seemed, and after a while exhaustion stilled
its rebellion.

“Can you understand me?” Xinthua asked it.

Florin listened to the clicking and piping that came from this vast toad. It
made as much sense as wind from a drunkard, and he replied with a string of
contemptuous curses.

“It would appear not,” Xinthua mused. One of the dragonflies that had chosen
this clearing as its hunting ground flitted past, its long body shining with a
metallic lustre. With hardly a thought Xinthua whipped out his tongue, snatching
it from the air. Crunching down on the delicious insect, the meat within its armour all the more delicious
for the spice of its dying struggles, he considered his options.

There were a thousand ways in which he could study this animal. It was just a
shame that so many of them would break it. After all, it was such a weak thing
that he doubted if there could be many of its kind left.

“Scythera, do you have any more of these specimens?”

“No, my liege, though we took a dozen as your runner instructed. This is the
only one to survive, despite the mildness of the skinks’ sedative and the shade
and moisture in which they were kept.”

“And are there any more where you found this?”

“Yes, my liege. A small colony has moved into the ruins of Ytzel Cho.”

“Fascinating. I will look inside it now.”

Behind the mage’s palanquin one of the skinks that he’d trained to use
dissecting tools rushed forward to present itself, but Xinthua waved it away. .

“No, not that,” he decided, watching the captive lick its lips with a
detached interest. Its tongue was grotesquely stunted and deformed, an amputated
stump which lay behind useless nubs of teeth. No wonder it found it so difficult
to feed itself.

“I am not Chuptzl Qo. My methods are more refined.”

The second dragonfly buzzed past, and once more the magnificent length of
Xinthua’s own tongue lashed out to snatch it. He pulled the morsel to his lips,
crushed its head with a single bite, then plucked it from the gluey tip of his
tongue and handed its spasming remains to Scythera.

“Give this to the animal.”

The saurus obeyed with unthinking alacrity, thrusting the dying insect into
Florin’s hand. He looked down at the yellow goo that was seeping out of its
ruined body, the broken twitching of its wings. Then he looked back up at the
bloated monstrosity that had offered him the repulsive snack and opened his
mouth to reply. But, as soon as he saw the gorgeous depths of the mage’s eyes, a
thousand scintillating lights flashing within them like carp in a pond, he
forgot what he had been going to say.

He forgot why he’d wanted to say anything.

He forgot where he was.

Who he was.

What he was.

Florin’s jaw dropped stupidly as his mind began to unravel like a dropped
spool of wool, his consciousness a mote in the hurricane of memories. Sometimes
the memories flashed past with a blinding speed. Sometimes they were sequential.
Sometimes they were replayed once, or a thousand times.

Yet fast or slow, detailed or blurred, they were… fascinating.

The way that small square bones and brightly coloured tiles had followed
scraps of metal across a thousand dirty tables, for example. What possible
purpose could that have served? Did it have anything to do with the drinking of
rotten, toxic fruit juice that so often accompanied the activity?

Then there was the leaking vessel that had carried him and his pack across
the world pond. An unbelievably crude thing crafted from splintered tree trunks;
its survival had been a miracle. One of the deep ones had even fallen upon it,
then gone away again, its fate confused with some constellation in a way that
the mammal obviously hadn’t comprehended.

More memories flowed, and the mystery of why clenched faces and bared fangs
were considered welcoming disappeared beneath the embracing humidity of the
jungle. Yet somehow the luxurious warmth was unwelcome—its bounty of delicious
insects was left uneaten, even during the stumbling trek to the ruins of the
tertiary observatory, Ytzel Cho.

There at least was sanity, the clear lines of the structure harmoniously
aligned with the universe beyond. But only one of the mammals had seemed to
appreciate this. He’d somehow combined this appreciation with a book of
meaningless patterns and used it to make solid the music of the spheres. Alone
of all his race he’d seen the obvious way in which the spirits of the inner
worlds could be made to dance like mayflies against the clear blue sky.

The spirits of the inner worlds summoned to roll beneath the blue sky…

By an animal.

It wasn’t possible. If it had been possible, it would have been a blasphemy
almost too hideous to contemplate.

And yet, possible or not, hideous or not, it had happened. The memory was
clear and unsullied, the images bright and unconfused by any primitive attempt
at understanding.

A scream tore itself from Florin’s throat, although he had no idea why.
Suddenly released from the mage’s inspection he fell bonelessly to the ground, his forgotten form left to lie and shake whilst the
saurus blinked stupidly at their stricken god.

Xinthua’s eyelids were flickering in agitation, his chest visibly moving
beneath the shock at what he had seen. How was it possible that such grubby
little vermin could have opened one of the charms of the ancients?

Ignoring the collapsed body of the mammal before him Xinthua began to recite
an ancient mantra, the words echoing soothingly within his thoughts. When the
last ripples of agitation had been smoothed from his consciousness he turned to
Scythera.

“Scar-Leader,” he said, purposefully using the warrior’s honorific. “These
animals must be driven from Ytzel Cho, and they must be annihilated. Can you do
this with your own forces?”

“Your command is my order.”

Xinthua regarded the saurus patiently. These things really would have to be
improved upon. In many ways a skink’s brain in a saurian body was a goal worthy
of further pursuance.

But not now. Now the only thing that mattered was the elimination of these
terribly frail yet terribly dangerous mammals.

“Do you have enough warriors to succeed in carrying out my order?”

“In this camp we have seventy claws of warriors, another hundred of skinks.
We also have a great one, freshly trained for battle. These sickly creatures
have some small magiks, but they are no more than twenty claws in number. They
also remain as ignorant of us as the dragonfly upon which my liege has just so
skilfully feasted.”

Xinthua waited as Scythera fell silent, the tip of his tail twitching as he
made his calculations.

“Yes,” the warrior eventually decided. “We can carry out your order, unless
the stars are against us. And even so, a call to our brethren who dwell at the
river’s head will give us certainty.”

“Then make your preparations,” Xinthua decided. “But first send a party of
skinks to catch and kill the sickly animal that was dropped.”

One of the surrounding saurus blinked stupidly down towards the spot where
Florin had fallen a moment before. There was no sign of him now except for the
agitation of the other mammal. It was pulling uselessly against its chains and
reaching out with grasping fingers, obviously pointing the direction in which
its fellow had fled.

Scythera hissed a sibilant order, and one of the swarms of skinks that had
gathered around them set off in the direction the animal was indicating.

“It seems that he did intend to flee after all,” Xinthua said. Then, whilst
saurus and skinks busied themselves with their preparations, he stilled his
breathing and lapsed into a deep trance. Thus secure within the confines of his
vast cranium, he studied Florin’s understanding of his comrades’ encampment,
turning the stolen memory this way and that like a jeweller examining a watch.

Barely a week passed before the mage blinked back into the corporeal world,
the simple perfection of his strategy so clear in his mind that it might already
have happened. While he breakfasted on a basket of delicious little frogs, he
explained the plan to Scythera.

It didn’t take long. The first mists of morning still lay heavily about them
as, with a single command, Scythera set his forces in motion. The magnificent
phalanxes of his brethren marched into the steaming depths of the untamed
jungle, a cold blooded avalanche of scale, claw and razor edged weaponry that
drove the jungle’s lesser beings fleeing before it.

Skinks swarmed around this great central column, their eyes and ears as
neatly co-ordinated as the countless lenses of a dragonfly’s eye. They scurried
back and forth from their patrols to feed their leader a constant stream of
information about the soil, the undergrowth, the trees and the myriad life forms
that held them to be home. In this way, even in the most densely choked swathes
of undergrowth, Scythera’s view of his surroundings remained crystal clear.

Xinthua, meanwhile, lolled comfortably on his palanquin. He let his mind
wander as he watched his guards’ iron-scaled backs strain beneath his weight.
Behind him the tread of the great beast that brought up the rear of the little
army rolled on just as remorselessly, the deep impacts of its footsteps shaking
the ferns.

The mage’s eyes glazed as he began to construct a complex mathematical model
in his imagination, a great shining tetrahedron of an idea by which sound could
be connected with the medium of distance to calculate force.

On the humans, he didn’t care to waste another thought. In a single turn of
the world they would be gone, as dead as all the others.

They were fascinating animals, though. Perhaps, when time permitted, he would
take a force to one of their colonies in the north and study them in more
detail.

Florin had known neither his fellow captive’s name nor his provenance. Still,
he had decided as he had crawled through the undergrowth, he would remember him
at the Lady’s shrine, if he ever made it back to the safety of Bordeleaux.

If it hadn’t been for the wretch’s whispered instructions and his promised
misdirection, Florin wouldn’t have made it further than the tree-line. As it
was, even to have made it this far was something of a miracle. It had taken him
long, painful hours to work his way out of earshot of the encampment. Following
his saviour’s desperate instructions, he had crawled into a thicket of thorns, a
seemingly impassable mass beneath which a few inches of crawl space opened up
between the plants’ stems.

It had been a wise move. No sooner had he wriggled beneath the thorns than an
explosion of activity had broken out behind him. His frightened eyes glinting in
the darkness of the thicket he’d paused, breathless with anxiety as a rush of
scaled feet dashed towards the path he had been meaning to take.

Had he done so he would already be dead, he had no doubt of that. Dead, and
devoured.

Scarcely daring to move because of that thought, he had carried on wriggling
beneath the thicket. Although every movement had been slow and controlled, and
although he had pressed himself down into the dirt to wriggle through the acidic mulch that covered the
ground, the undergrowth had written a bloody signature across his back, leaving
some of the hooks buried in his flesh to throb with a constant pain.

Florin didn’t care. He had more important things to worry about.

His first concern, when he had cleared the tangled thorns and slithered into
the relative comfort of the ferns beyond, was direction. Alone and unarmed he
was a dead man, he knew that much. Even if the skinks didn’t catch up with him
(and he had a feeling that they would), starvation and disease would finish him
off just as surely as their murderous claws.

He had looked up at the distant canopy and fought a feeling of despair. Even
if he had known what compass point to follow, it would have been nigh on
impossible to calculate the direction he was travelling in from down here. The
sun was hidden by the familiar, oppressive weight of vegetation, its light
diffused into a murky green mist that cast no single shadow, but rather a
shifting stew of gloom.

It was his thirst that had decided the direction that he would take. The
ferns that blanketed this trackless wilderness stretched away in all directions
beneath the feet of the trees and so, knowing that water was never far off in
this humid world, he set off downhill, leaving a trail of crimson droplets
behind him.

The skinks had raced down the path the mammal had followed with a terrible
speed. As well as the instinctive compulsion to obey their mage lord, they were
driven by the knowledge that the first of them to reach the mammal would taste
the finest portions of his spindly frame.