Despite their terror, or perhaps because of it, the volley rang out in one solid thunderclap. This close, the noise of the black powder was deafening; the rolling cloud of smoke and fire blotted out the sun in a bright, stinking cloud.
Before it had a chance to clear, the beast struck.
It punched through the ocean’s surface like a spear through skin. The salt water explosion that burst around it rained through the gun smoke in a chill mist, blinding the men as they staggered back in stunned confusion.
Two of them weren’t quick enough. The monster caught them both in a single, savage bite. One of them, dragged by the snared flesh of his broken shoulder, screamed like a woman as he was pulled into the ocean.
The other died in the silence of absolute shock.
Florin, wide-eyed with horror, forced himself to look back into the alien depths into which the daemon had retreated.
But there was no trace of either man or beast. There was just the gentle rolling of the uncaring sea and a few dwindling flecks of foam.
It was gone for almost three hours. Time enough for Florin to wonder if the deaths of his three men might have been blood sacrifice enough. Time enough for the skipper to think that they might have outrun it. Time enough for the men to start to relax.
They were all wrong. The liquid fire of human blood was too rich a delicacy for their tormentor to ignore. And when it returned there was neither pause nor hesitation in its attack, just a constant drum roll of impacts against the hull of the Destrier.
Her sister ships drew in closer to her, their gunners firing occasional volleys into the sea around her. Yet for all the good they did they would have been as well to have saved their powder. Oblivious to their attack the great beast cavorted beneath the disintegrating hull of its prey.
As the sun vaulted over her masts and began to sink into the west, the Destrier sank lower into the water.
There was no attempt to outrun her nemesis now. All hands were below, fighting a war against splintering wood and snapping beams.
Their weapons were hammers and nails, and great vats of steaming black tar. Professionals to the end, they fought hard; even though they knew that this was a battle they were doomed to lose. Already the ship’s lower deck was submerged, the timbers of her keel split and torn so that she wallowed as heavily as a corpse in the water.
Florin stood on the foredeck and looked longingly at the ships on either side. He, like the rest of his men, had stripped down to breeches and shirts, ready for their last hope at salvation. When the Destrier went down, they would swim.
Running a comb through hair already ruffled by the evening breeze, he barked with a mirthless laugh at the thought.
“What’s so funny?” Lorenzo asked, sourly.
“Nothing,” his master told him. “Nothing at all.”
He gazed across at the Hippogriff and wondered how long it would be before he found himself clawing his way towards it. He studied the neat lines of her hull, and the golden reflection of the dying sun on the white canvas of her sails. She looked so solid. So safe.
Then he looked closer. Something, or rather somebody, was being hauled up that tall mast with a block and tackle.
His form swung from the bottom of a rope as inelegantly as a bag of potatoes, arms and legs windmilling around from the discomfort of some sort of harness.
Squinting his eyes, Florin leaned forward. From this distance he couldn’t make out much more than the figure’s flapping blue robes, or the wild tangle of his fleecy white beard. He looked old, hardly fit for the terrible demands of either sea or war, and the Bretonnian wondered what had brought the old fool out here.
When the struggling form reached the crow’s nest the lookout manhandled him into the lattice-work of the basket. Then, as soon as he was secure, the sailor climbed over the side and shimmied down the rigging as quickly as a rat from a burning barn.
“Who is that?” he wondered aloud.
“Must be Orbrant’s friend.”
“Who?”
“You know…”
The deck jumped beneath their feet. Both men tensed as they listened for the cry to abandon ship. Instead they just heard a chorus of desperate orders, followed by Graznikov’s drunken curses and the crack of his pistols.
“Drunken fool,” Florin muttered and looked back up to the strange figure that now stood atop the Hippogriff.
By now he had wedged himself firmly into the crow’s nest, where he stood tall. The wind flung his robes out behind him like a battle flag, and although his eyes were squeezed shut his mouth was moving. Florin guessed that he was shouting against the wind, even though he could hear nothing from here.
“He’s cracked up,” he muttered, watching in fascination as the distant figure began to gesticulate like a crazed actor. Then, with a final roar, he threw both of his arms down, fingers extended to the sea below the Destrier.
“I wonder if he is crazy,” Lorenzo mused, looking thoughtfully at the aged man. He remained stock still, fingers held in rigid accusation at the sea beneath their feet.
“I wonder if he’ll jump.”
“I wonder…” Lorenzo began, and was cut off as Florin seized him by the shoulder.
“Listen.”
Lorenzo listened. For a moment he could hear nothing but the lapping of the waves on the hull, the murmur of Orbrant’s prayers, the muffled cries and hammering from below decks.
But then, as soft and insistent as the hissing of absolute silence, he heard something else.
He craned his neck to find the source of the sound, gazing up through the lattice-work of canvas and rigging that creaked above them.
The noise grew louder, whistling like steam from a kettle. Lorenzo squinted up, then winced painfully as, against the darkening sky, the source of the sound appeared.
There were at least a dozen of them, probably more. They tumbled downwards from the clarity of the heavens, shapeless blurs of eye-watering brightness.
“Gods above,” Florin breathed, watching the fireballs hurtling downwards. The noise of their descent shrilled into a terrible scream as they fell past the sails, the blinding tails that trailed behind them sending crazed shadows dancing across the twilight-lit deck before splashing into the sea.
The storm of burning hail grew stronger, the missiles hissing like scalded cats as they hit the ocean. The squeak of instantly boiling water mingled with the splash of further impacts, and a thick mist rose up to drift across the waves.
“What a show,” Florin said, his predicament momentarily forgotten as the last of the meteors flogged the churning sea.
“Yes, lovely,” Lorenzo grumbled, watching the burning lights disappear into the darkness below. “It’s just a shame that the daemon wasn’t anywhere near it. I’m sure it would have been very impressed.”
“Maybe if it surfaces again…” Florin began.
But even as he spoke, the leviathan was doing just that. Before the last wisp of steam had cleared the water between the Destrier and the Hippogriff began to churn, roiling like the contents of a cauldron. Once more the sea darkened as the beast rushed to the surface.
This time, though, to the pressure of its ascent was added the white-hot .fury of pure agony. It leapt blindly; arching its back like a leaping salmon as it burst writhing from the water.
For one timeless moment it towered above the watching men, a sight that would live forever in the dark places of their dreams. The twelve tons of its form were suspended as effortlessly as a wasp in amber, every angle of its terrible form was revealed.
They saw the massive dagger of its dorsal, flaring as wide as a sail, and the smoothness of its underbelly, as thick as a schooner’s hull. They saw its razored jaws flung wide open in an insane grin, and the rolling orbs of its dead eyes.
But what Florin would always remember were the string of meteors that studded its body like diamonds in a tiara. They shone with a blinding intensity in the melting blubber of its form, as hot as hatred, as constant as love.
They were still burning when the great beast crashed back into the ocean. The thunderclap of its departure served the silent monstrosity as a scream, the tidal wave its bulk displaced a parting shot before it fled back to the icy embrace of the depths from which it had come.
So it was that, as dusk turned to darkness, and then to the starlight which lit the twin voids of ocean and heavens, the Destrier limped onwards.
The next day, as if gifted to the ship as a victory laurel, the misty line of Lustria’s shore rose above the horizon.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“This place is wonderful.” Florin roared, waving his mug as though it were a marshal’s baton and the thatched wall’s tapestries. “It’s fantastic. By Shallya’s belly I’d forgotten how wonderful dry land felt!”
“Reminds me of Bordeleaux,” Lundorf remarked, provoking an explosion of drunken laughter from his friend.
Lorenzo took a sip of the fermented sugarcane that passed for brandy in this hovel of a tavern, then spat it out onto the damp earth of the floor. He was beginning to wish that he’d gone with Orbrant to search for supplies.
Although, had he done so, he had no doubt that Florin would have led his brother officer into some lethal excess or other. And Swamptown, despite the brothels and bars that formed its decadent core, was no place for excess.
They’d found the squalid settlement the previous day, just as the pack of pirate sloops that called the miserable haven home had found them. The verminous ships had closed in around Gorth’s flotilla as it tacked its way towards harbour, but a well-timed parade of the ship’s mercenary cargo had been enough to keep them at bay.
One look at the disciplined ranks of mercenaries, bristling with lethal combinations of steel and firearms, had put paid to the brigands’ dreams of loot. They had slunk off disappointedly, slipping over the horizon in search of easier prey.
Which had been lucky. Moments after the flotilla had tied up to Swamptown’s rickety bamboo pier the mercenary army had ceased to exist. In its place was a stampeding mob, an untameable rabble that had swept away into the grubby embrace of the malarial town and left their ships almost completely unguarded.
Colonel van Delft had wisely waited until the first and most violent of his men’s needs had been met before shepherding them to the billets he hastily arranged. Then, and only then, did he give his officers leave, and the freedom of Swamptown.
Swamptown. In naming the place the inhabitants had shown a surprising honesty. Their crudely built huts and hovels were riddled with termites and slimed with mould; even the newest stank of decay as they rotted slowly back into the ground from which they had sprung. They stank as they decomposed, each of them filled with the rank odour of rotten vegetation and other, more revolting things.
But if the air inside was dank, the air outside was even worse. After the dean sea breezes of the voyage the humidity here was choking, an asthmatic fog that droned with the constant hum of countless biting flies. Lorenzo’s battered hide had proved too tough for the insects, so they had feasted upon his companions. After just two hours ashore they’d covered them with an agonising itch of bites and incisions.
Swamptown. Even the streets oozed. Mud and shit sucked hungrily at their feet with every cloying step, insinuating itself into the damp leather of their boots and spilling over the cuffs.
“Wench,” Florin cried out, leaning back on the half barrel that served as a chair and banging his own filthy heels onto the table. “More drink for me and my friend!”
The tavern keeper’s wife, a scrawny woman whose grey hair Florin had already loudly compared to a rat’s nest, swapped a surly look with her husband before filling two more pots.
“You pay now,” she told them, banging the vessels down hard enough to slop a draught over the side.
“Of course we’ll pay now,” Florin crowed. “Although you can trust us. We’ll soon be rich!”
“To glory and gold!” Lundorf roared, snatching up his drink.
“Glory and gold!”
The woman wiped her hands contemptuously on her apron and swapped another glance with the tavern keeper. This time he winked.
“Yes,” she began, and with an obvious effort twisted her hatchet face into what could have been a smile. “I can see that you two lads are destined for riches indeed. Gold’s just waiting in the jungle for anyone with the courage to go and pick it up.”
“So we hear,” Lundorf nodded sagely. “And, by Sigmar’s left ball, we’re the men with the courage!”
“You certainly look like it,” she said. “Anyway, that’ll be a gold crown.”
Lorenzo choked on his drink.
“Certainly, my good woman,” Lundorf said, reaching for his purse.
“Each.” Her eyes barely flickered as she doubled the price.
“That’s too much,” Lorenzo managed to cough out, but she just turned on him, this time with a genuine smile on her face.
“And that’s too late.”
Lundorf rolled the coins into the mess of mud and spilt beer that slicked the table, and Lorenzo sighed.
“Another drink, lads?” The woman said, pocketing the coins.
But before any of them could reply, the thatched door of the hovel burst open, the twigs of its construction snapping as a crowd of men stumbled into the room.
“Aaaaaah, look who it is,” their leader sneered, lurching threateningly towards Lorenzo. “The bringer of the daemon.”
“Graznikov,” Florin cried out, his voice lifting with the cheerful ferocity of a hound that’s sighted its quarry. “Join us.”
Something in his voice cut through the Kislevite’s drunken belligerence, stopping him in his tracks. He regarded his rival with a certain wariness and tugged thoughtfully at his beard.
For a moment it seemed that perhaps, despite the drink and the euphoria of shore leave, the wary peace that ship’s discipline had enforced might remain between Graznikov and his rival. But as the Kislevite hesitated on the brink of violence Lundorf pushed him over it.
“I see you’ve brought your men with you, captain,” he said. “What will you lose for them this time? Their boots?”
“Or their breeches?” Florin asked.
The Kislevite’s flushed faced turned pale, the red that had suffused it melting away apart for two spots of rage that burned a warning on his cheeks.
“We come for the wizard, Lorenzo,” he announced with quiet menace, and there was a murmur of agreement from the men behind him. They sounded more excited than angry, more like men waiting for a dog-fight to start than a serious lynch mob. Florin felt a flicker of relief, and noticed that, so far, none of them showed any sign of drawing steel.
“What are you talking about, you fool?” he asked, shifting uneasily in his seat as he counted Graznikov’s men. A couple of them had followed their leader through the sagging arch of the doorway to stand beside him in a little knot. Many more waited outside.
“You heard the commander’s orders,” Florin called out, more for their benefit than Graznikov’s. “You saw what he did to that lunatic on the Hippogriff. Remember how long it took him to choke to death, and how he danced in the breeze. Touch my man here and van Delft will have you dancing that same jig. Don’t be an idiot.”
Graznikov scowled at the uneasy shuffling the reminder brought, and silently cursed his men for their cowardice.
“Idiot,” Graznikov spat. “You idiot. You bring this wizard on board, and he bring the daemon. The sea daemon.”
This time the murmur of agreement was muted, perhaps as each man’s thoughts turned to the murderer’s corpse van Delft had left hanging to rot. It hadn’t been pretty. Especially when the maggots had hatched beneath its skin.
“So,” Graznikov, changing tack, pressed on, “we won’t kill him. We just beat him. A warning for next time.”
He pointed an accusing finger at Lorenzo as more Kislevites barged into the room, eager for a better view. They jostled past their comrades who, as yet, seemed in no hurry to m
ove any closer to the wizard.
Florin and Lorenzo looked at each other and then, turning in perfect time, looked back over their shoulders to the window that lay behind them.
“Ha!” Graznikov snapped with ersatz satisfaction. “You don’t deny it.”
“Deny the ramblings of a lunatic?” Florin snapped back. “Why waste my breath? Lorenzo helped us to fight the beast while you were still cowering below.”
“Lies!” roared Graznikov, taking a step closer.
“On three?” Lorenzo muttered into his pot, and Florin nodded imperceptibly. Lorenzo tapped his finger on the table once.
“Oh, I see,” Florin jeered at his foe. “So you did help us against the monster?”
A second tap, the sound damp upon the sodden table.
“I no bring it,” Graznikov growled, eyes narrowing dangerously, “No. Your Loren…”
But the third tap had already sent the two Bretonnians springing to their feet. The tavern keeper howled in protest as his table flew forwards, a rain of pots smashing onto the floor even as Lorenzo reached the window.
“Come on,” Florin shouted at Lundorf, grabbing his shoulder.
“I’m with you,” the warrior shouted back, and leapt at Graznikov.
Florin was halfway to the window by the time he realised that Lundorf hadn’t quite understood. He turned on his heel in time to see Graznikov’s horrified face disappear behind Lundorf’s attack, and to see the gang of Kislevites closing in around the two men like the fingers of a fist.
“Damn,” he cursed, the obscenity a statement rather than a battle cry. Then he flung himself into the melee.
His first target was one of the Kislevites’ sergeants. From the brown pelt of his beard to the heavy gut, which even the voyage hadn’t been able to strip away, he looked more bear than man. And although he was rounded with fat, there was no mistaking the muscle that bulged in his thick forearms, or the aggression that burned in his eyes.
Not that it was to do him any good. Before he’d even thrown his first punch Florin’s thumb jabbed forward, finding the soft spot beneath the big man’s ear. His world disintegrated into an explosion of pain and bright light as he collapsed.
[Florin & Lorenzo 01] - The Burning Shore Page 10