01 - The Burning Shore

by Robert Ear - (ebook by Undead)

  Florin realised that it was this stillness that had alerted him. Everything else in these green depths was alive with movement: from the dangling vines to the running water to the drifting mosquitoes. These things alone had mastered the discipline of immobility.

  He took a step towards them, mouth dropping open in amazement. At first he had guessed that there were three or four. Now he saw that they numbered a dozen, two dozen.

  Maybe three.

  Where the body of the stream twisted away from him it was choked with even more of them, their batrachian forms as numerous and unmoving as boulders. Some of them were bowed down beneath great packs of leaves and wicker, their burdens as massive on their thin backs as a snail’s shell.

  Others carried weapons. The blades of their spears twinkled like black ice despite the melting heat of their realm.

  Florin knew that he should give the order to fall back. That was the plan he and Orbrant had agreed upon. Yet somehow, despite the evidence of his own eyes, he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe that these things were real.

  How could they be? How could real beings have skin that flickered and changed to match the shifting palette of colours around them? And how could the almost human bodies wrapped beneath that impossible skin be topped with the flat, crested heads of reptiles?

  And the intelligence that gleamed from beneath the cold, nictating membranes of their eyes.

  That at least must be a hallucination.

  Oblivious to the throaty gurgle of the stream and the muttered curses and falling machetes of his men, Florin and the creatures stood and watched one another. They might have stood there until the moon had chased the sun from the hidden skies above if Bertrand hadn’t suddenly cried out.

  “Hey boss! Watch out!”

  The terror in the man’s voice snapped Florin back to his senses, and a sudden explosion of adrenaline unfroze both his legs and his vocal chords.

  He didn’t wait to see if the daemons were moving too.

  “You two, get behind the gunners!” he was yelling as he splashed back out of the water. “Company. Company! Face front!”

  The men, who had been lounging in a clearing a little way back from the cut of the stream, scrambled hurriedly to their feet.

  “Face front!” Florin yelled again as he crashed back through the jungle to meet them. “Face front, damn you!”

  Surprise gave way to their alarm as their captain came racing back along the path, and for a moment confusion reigned as they milled back and forth.

  But only for a moment: Orb rant had drilled them well.

  By the time Florin had dispatched a runner to the rearguard the men had formed two ragged lines. They were untidy, and cramped by the encroaching jungle, but still recognisable as the formation they had practised so many times before during the long imprisonment of the sea voyage.

  “Well done,” Florin encouraged them, his heart racing with excitement as he paced up and down in front of them. “Everyone’s match lit?”

  Some of the gunners chorused their assent. Others were already busy blowing on their fuses, sweating until the tips glowed like fireflies against their glistening cheeks. Florin reached into his satchel and pulled out one of the bombs; its fuse unnaturally white against the black iron casing.

  As he did so the halberdiers who lined the path in front of them shouted a warning as the first of the creatures appeared.

  They came in a tide, pushing at each other as the narrowness of the path funnelled them into a single great mass of golden eyes and flaring crests and short, stabbing spears.

  “Right then,” Florin snarled defiantly. “Front rank, kneel. Gunners, take aim!”

  Half a dozen guns were levelled, their bearers staring wide-eyed along the barrels at the approaching horde.

  Florin struck a match and lit the fuse on the bomb. It hissed gleefully as it withered away, the flame racing eagerly to the charge inside.

  For a split second he wondered at the absolute silence of their enemy. It was as frighteningly unnatural as anything about them.

  But he had scant time to consider it. They were almost upon him.

  “Fire!”

  A great thunderclap of fire and smoke rang out through the jungle, drowning out the sound of bullets slapping into cold reptilian flesh.

  “Gunners, fall back,” Florin bellowed, his voice small and tiny through the ringing in their ears. “Front rank, fall back!”

  No drill this: the men turned and sprinted away, leaving Florin to place the bomb on the path behind them. He looked up in time to snatch a quick glance at the ruined bodies of their foes, the creatures gasping in silent agony as their fellows bounded over them. Then he ran.

  Behind him the fuse of the bomb withered into ash, fell silent, and was gone.

  The first of the creatures paused to examine it, nose wrinkling as it pawed at the iron casing with delicate fingers. It darted out its tongue, the pink flesh striking the object with a serpent speed. It leapt back at the taste and spat before turning to join the rush of its fellows in their pursuit.

  It had covered less than a dozen feet before the explosion tore through its body and flung it like living shrapnel into the ranks beyond.

  For a moment the creatures stopped, stunned by the violence of fire and steel which had erupted in their midst. They stood frozen for a couple of heartbeats, counting the toll the bomb had taken. The ruined bodies of their dead or maimed fellows lay all around, charred and twitching; the slaughter was enough to have sent most troops running for their lives.

  Not the troops of this race, though. Blinking away their confusion as easily as tears, the lizardmen continued their pursuit.

  * * *

  “They’re right behind us,” Florin gasped as he followed the last of his men through Orbrant’s neatly drawn up ranks.

  “Sir,” the sergeant said, the deep timbre of his voice level with confidence. “There’s a clearing a hundred yards back. You can wait for us there.”

  “Yes. Good idea,” his captain wheezed, his hands on his knees.

  “Axe you all right, boss?” Florin looked around to find Lorenzo peering from between the last two gunners of Orbrant’s line. He was tossing a grenade from one hand to the other, an insolent smile on his battered face.

  “Not bad,” Florin told him, and wiped the sweat from his face.

  “Wondered how you’d do without me to keep an eye on you,” his servant said, spinning the bomb on one misshaped finger as though it were a ball.

  A flurry of alarmed voices rose behind them as the first of their pursuers scuttled into view. A gunshot rang out, the echoes lost beneath Orbrant’s disapproving snarl.

  “Well I can’t stand around here all day,” Florin said and punched Lorenzo on the shoulder. “Things to do.”

  And with that he was off, chasing his squad ahead of him. He passed the first of them, a halberdier whose face was a grimace of pain beneath the agony of this heat.

  “We’ll wait for you ahead,” he told the man as he rushed past, suddenly realising that, unless he got to the clearing first, this stampede would likely rush right past it.

  Lungs bellowing in and out with the hot jungle air he sprinted past another knot of halberdiers, the men struggling beneath the weight of their weapons, and then some of the gunners.

  Ignoring the burning in his chest Florin pushed on, eyes rolling with relief when he stumbled into the clearing Orbrant had mentioned.

  “Wait…” he gasped as the front-runners joined him. “Here.”

  Gradually, gasping like landed fish in the choking humidity, the rest of his squad straggled in. As they did so Florin bullied them into line, oblivious to the contagion of vomiting that had seized his exhausted men.

  “Don’t worry about that,” he told one wheezing gunner who’d managed to puke on his boots. “Just so long as it’s your lunch and not your weapons you lose, I don’t mind.”

  The man grinned at him sheepishly, and Florin slapped him on the back.
r />   “Right then, who needs to relight a fuse?”

  Gradually their exhaustion eased, giving them time to suffer from cramped muscles instead of burning lungs.

  Florin strode up and down in front of his men, stopping now and then to strain his ears against the busy hum of the jungle for some sound from Orbrant.

  “We’d hear their guns, at least,” he said after they’d been waiting for perhaps half an hour.

  “Unless they were surrounded,” one of the men volunteered helpfully. “Saw that in Heldeborg once. Remember lads, when Constanza’s lot were cut down in that bit of forest?”

  “Horrible it was,” someone else said with gruesome relish. “They didn’t stand a chance. There was no quarter given, was there? Just chop, and your head on a stake.”

  “Constanza shouldn’t have burned those prisoners. Stuff like that never pays.”

  “Can’t see these devils giving any quarter either way,” Bertrand said grimly.

  “Although they might quarter us.”

  The whole company cursed the joker, who cursed them back.

  “If you can’t take a joke…”

  “You shouldn’t have joined up,” his mates jeered back, cheerfully.

  “Sod this,” Florin resolved. “I’m going to see what’s going on. Bertrand, you’re in charge. Stay here for half an hour then get back to van Delft.”

  “I’ll come with you if you like, boss.”

  “No, it only needs one of us.”

  “As you say. And you want us to go after half an hour?”

  “That’s right,” Florin said, although he didn’t want them to go after half an hour. He didn’t want them to go at all. What he wanted was for them to stay put, maintaining their fortress wall of pikes and guns for as long as he was still out there.

  But what he wanted, and what they’d do, were two different things.

  “Won’t be long,” he told them, and jogged back up the path they’d cleared.

  He met Lorenzo just around the first bend.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, worry creasing the scars on his face into new forms.

  “Nothing,” Florin told him, laughing with relief. “Just wondered what you were up to.”

  “Nothing,” Lorenzo shrugged. “The devils took one look at Orbrant’s miserable face and fled.”

  Orbrant’s miserable face appeared behind him, right on cue. He was leading four stretcher-bearers, the body they bore lying on a sheet carried between two branches.

  “Sir,” the sergeant said, catching sight of Florin. “Everything all right?”

  “Yes. But I see you have a casualty.”

  “Not one of ours, I’m pleased to say.” Orbrant, sounded no more pleased than usual. He lifted a corner of the sheet to reveal a shiny, ichor-stained snout.

  “Well done,” Florin said approvingly. “We can take the head as a trophy.”

  “I was thinking that we should show the others what we’re up against,” Orbrant frowned.

  “Wonder what it tastes like.”

  The two men turned to Lorenzo.

  “What? Never eaten frog before?”

  “Let’s go,” Florin said.

  Night, and a dozen coldly observant eyes, followed them back down the path they had hewn.

  “Ugly looking fellow, isn’t he?” van Delft asked, prodding the stiffening corpse with the point of his dagger.

  Kereveld disagreed.

  “No, he’s perfect. Look at the gills. He’s amphibious, I’m sure of it. And the skin. It was multichromatic, you say?”

  Florin, who wasn’t really sure what that meant, nodded anyway.

  Graznikov grunted, unimpressed.

  “Why you run? Is only small.”

  Before the Bretonnian could reply Kereveld barked with dismissive laughter.

  “Only small you say. But I’ll wager these things hunt in great swarms. At least, that’s what the book says.”

  So saying he leaned forward and pulled up one of the creature’s eyelids. The lifeless orb beneath flickered glassily in the firelight, gleaming like the gold that haunted their dreams.

  The mage let it slide back shut and started rifling through the pages of his book. He squinted as he read, tilting the scrawled sketches and captions he was examining this way and that in order to catch the flickering firelight. Eventually he grunted and snapped the covers shut.

  “I wish that I had this thing’s night-vision. This really isn’t my field though,” the mage said with a sigh. “I wonder if we could have this specimen pickled?”

  “No,” van Delft replied. “We couldn’t. But you seem to know what it is anyway.”

  “Oh yes,” said Kereveld distractedly, gazing into the thing’s eye and then turning his neck to gaze up at the starlit sliver of sky above them.

  “Well, what is it?”

  “Well, our predecessors seemed to call it a skink, although I have my doubts about their etymology. It’s one of the lesser forms. A slave caste, perhaps.” >

  “Can they build canals?” Florin asked doubtfully.

  For the first time since he had set eyes on the specimen Kereveld turned his full attention back to his colleagues. The old wizard’s eyes lit up like deep brown fireworks.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, they could have, if they were shown what to do. Canals and cities both.”

  “I thought you said that the cities were built by an extinct race?”

  Kereveld shrugged uneasily.

  “Well, that’s one of the things we’ll find out.”

  Van Delft looked at the wizard suspiciously, and then grunted.

  “Right then, I think we know where we’re going. We’ll wake at dawn, eat, and push on up this path of d’Artaud’s. Whatever these things are it seems that they don’t like the sight of their own blood.”

  “Unlike us,” Lorenzo muttered from the shadows. Van Delft pretended not to hear him.

  “Any questions?”

  “What will our marching order be?”

  “Bretonnians first, dwarfs last. If that’s all right with you, Captain Thorgrimm? I want a solid rearguard.”

  Which was to say, he wanted a rearguard that wasn’t going to run at the first sign of trouble, Florin thought. To judge from the look of contented pride on the dwarf leader’s face, he guessed the same.

  “That is all right with me,” Thorgrimm said. “But we’ll need a couple of the mules for the gun.”

  “Hungry already?” Lorenzo called out, but this time he wasn’t ignored. Thorgrimm leapt to his feet, half drawing the axe from his belt, and glowered into the suddenly silent gloom that hid the Bretonnian.

  “Did somebody speak?” he asked, his voice deceptively smooth. Florin crossed his fingers and silently willed Lorenzo to bite his tongue.

  For once the manservant did just that.

  “Only two mules?” van Delft asked, as if there had been no interruption.

  “Aye, for the barrel of the cannon. The rest we’ll carry.”

  “We’ll help with that if you like,” Florin offered, eager to make amends for his servant’s tongue. “We can take the shot or something.”

  “Thank you,” the dwarf said, meeting his eyes and bowing slightly. “But we can manage.”

  “Are you sure? It’s damn heavy going out there.”

  “I said we can manage.”

  “Good,” van Delft clapped his hands together. “Well, then gentlemen, I’ll see you in the morning.”

  He waited until his officers were safely back in front of their own fires before squatting down beside Kereveld. He had some questions of his own.

  Not least about what the wizard had meant by “lesser forms”.

  Dawn stole over the inert forms of the sleeping men. Occasionally one of them shifted restlessly beneath his blanket, or cried out against some nightmare. But for the most part they lay as still as corpses upon the damp grass mounds of their beds, the only signs of life being the snores that rose up to compete with the cries of the things that prowl
ed around their flimsy stockade.

  Even the sentries were half asleep. Their eyes blinked as the flat grey shades of dawn replaced the flickering orange firelight of the night watch. They were leaning on halberds or axes, studying the undergrowth suspiciously.

  Van Delft, who, as always, had risen just before dawn, paced around them. Occasionally he’d stop to exchange a quiet word with one or check the weapon of another. He was glad to see the way they stiffened their backs as he approached, holding their weapons a little straighter.

  They were good lads, these, he decided. Good enough, anyway. As he’d hoped the oppressive gloom of the jungle had succeeded in pushing them closer together, curing them of the plague of bickering the sea voyage had created.

  “Morning, Captain d’Artaud, Sergeant Orbrant,” the commander said as Florin came yawning towards him. Dragging a comb through the tangled knots of his hair, the flimsy shirt he wore already damp with sweat and humidity, the Bretonnian hardly looked the part of the officer.

  Never mind, van Delft told himself. Nothing you can do about that now.

  “Morning sir.” Florin straightened and pulled off a clumsy salute.

  “Sir,” Orbrant snapped to perfect attention.

  “At ease, sergeant, at ease. I see you took your trophy last night. Good idea. Those things are always worth the weight.”

  “Sir?” Orbrant raised his eyebrows and looked at Florin, who was trying to bite back a yawn.

  “The, ah, the… how do you call it? Ah yes, the skink. I see the body’s gone. I expect you’ll be boiling the meat off the skull.”

  Florin and his sergeant exchanged a glance.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but we left the skink in your charge. Not that we wanted it back, of course,” he added hastily as his commander scowled.

  “Then who took it?”

  The question hung in the air between them, heavier than the warm steam of the morning mist.

  “Perhaps it was Lorenzo,” Orbrant suggested, disapprovingly.

  “No reason why he shouldn’t have, I suppose,” Florin made the excuse without a blink. “But then, there was no reason why he should, either.”