[Florin & Lorenzo 01] - The Burning Shore

by Robert Earl - (ebook by Undead)

  He swept his helm around in a broad gesture that took in the ruined forms that lay around, then crammed it back onto his head.

  “Let’s see,” Kereveld muttered, peering myopically at the arrangement. He reached over to the second of the filled cavities and removed a shrivelled brown twig, the end of which had been neatly sheared off.

  “Looks like something did grow in here,” Florin said, taking it from him. “A vine, maybe…”

  “That’s not wood,” Thorgrimm told him. “It’s a finger.”

  Florin flung the thing away and wiped his hand on his robes.

  The dwarf smiled.

  “If we’re going to try to open this particular lock we’d better have a better idea of what goes where then.”

  Florin, meanwhile, had picked up one of the spheres and was holding it up to his torch. Despite the orange glow of the flame the colours were clear enough, a great swirl of blue, broken across much of its surface by green blobs, swirled between white caps. Here and there tiny capillary lines of blue cut across the green like the veins on a drunk’s nose.

  “How much does it weigh?” Thorgrimm asked, hefting another one of the spheres. This one was a deep red dotted with countless, interlocking circles. “I’ve seen something like this before. You need to build up the weight of the leverage in the right order. Those others must have got the first one right, then failed with the second.”

  Florin replaced the blue green sphere and picked up another. This one was ash grey; its only features thin orange lines that crawled across its surface.

  “I know what they are,” he said cautiously, swapping it for another.

  “What?” Thorgrimm asked.

  “At least, I think I know what they are.”

  “What?”

  “Ask Kereveld.”

  All eyes turned to the wizard. After a moment he looked up from the book.

  “Yes?”

  “What’s this?” Florin asked him, and held up the first globe.

  “Ahhhhhhh,” the wizard said, the sound as smooth as the end of pain. Eyes gleaming in the darkness he reached out for the sphere with trembling hands, and grasped it eagerly.

  “Wonderful,” he breathed, turning it around to gloat over every detail. “Wonderful. This alone will show the old women at the college that the cost was worth it.”

  “What is it?” Thorgrimm snapped, his voice harsh enough to cut through Kereveld’s rapture.

  “It’s the world,” the wizard said, his voice cracking into a jagged little giggle. “That one you’re holding is Lokratia. See the meteor scars in its crust? And here, look. Deiamol. The burning world.”

  Elbowing his way forward, Kereveld rested his book on the stone slab and picked up another sphere. This one was deathly pale apart from three bruised grey smudges, and a smattering of tiny black pinpricks.

  “And this,” he said, his voice rising in excitement as he studied it, “must be Obscuria. That moron Brakelda said that it didn’t exist. He never did understand calculus.”

  Again he giggled, and Thorgrimm looked accusingly at Florin, who shrugged.

  He wanted to say, he may be human but don’t hold me responsible. What he actually said was, “What about the first of the planets, there in the wall?”

  “Charyb,” the wizard said. “And that next one is Verda. It shouldn’t be there. It’s the fifth planet. Like so. Deiamol should be in its place. Then Tigris. Then our world.”

  Here the wizard hesitated, and weighed the globe in his hand reluctantly.

  “Better not wait too long,” Thorgrimm cautioned warily.

  Kereveld sighed and placed the bauble in its niche. Then, his fingers sorting through the other five like a dealer at a craps table, he rolled each of the others into place.

  “There,” he said, glancing around expectantly. “That’s it.”

  Nothing happened.

  “At least we seem to have avoided the trap.”

  “I don’t understand,” Kereveld muttered in sudden outrage. “There should be a…”

  But he got no further. With a barely audible rumble of hidden levers, the sound as powerful as tectonics and as remorseless as death, the ceiling burst asunder with a flash of blinding light.

  * * *

  Had the fire come it would have devoured figures frozen in every pose, from cowering terror to straight-backed defiance. It would have melted eyes that were squeezed shut in fearful expectation, or wide open in curiosity. It would have melted fat, and frizzled hair, and set sinews ablaze.

  But the fire didn’t come. Instead, a thousand stars blossomed into flaming life harmlessly in the darkness above.

  Yellow or white or old, dying red they hung in the black void of space, the patterns their tiny bodies made against the vast darkness beyond as complex as a handful of thrown grain. Some burned bright enough to bring tears to the onlookers’ eyes. Others, mere specks in the lightless void of space, could only be seen from the corner of the eye. And behind them all, as smooth and creamy as a trail of snowdrops across an onyx floor, lay the bulk of their galaxy, its edges frayed by the thousands of defecting stars.

  “Look,” Kereveld breathed, grasping Florin by the shoulder and pointing one shaking finger upwards. The Bretonnian saw a solid green sphere, no bigger than his thumbnail.

  It was Verda, of that he had no doubt. A perfect twin to the impostor that they had handled minutes ago. This Verda, though, was real. Its distant continents were lit not by candlelight but by the sun; its billions of tons were held in place not by sweaty mortal hands but by… by what?

  What force was strong enough to hold a world in its orbit?

  Florin winced as Kereveld’s fingers pinched harder.

  “This is it,” the old man hissed, and turned his manic gaze on Florin before looking back up to ogle the naked universe above. “This is why we’re here.”

  “It can’t be real,” Florin said, although he knew that it was. “It must be an illusion.”

  “No illusion,” Kereveld said. “Reality. The stars as the Old Ones saw them.”

  “But how can we see them? It’s daytime. The sky outside is blue, not this black.”

  “Yes,” the wizard replied simply. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

  His hand fell limply from Florin’s shoulder, and the first glistening tear ran down the old man’s face and into his beard.

  “Sotek’s Eye,” he whispered reverently in blasphemous prayer. “With your help I will change our world.”

  Florin felt a shiver run through him at the words, a twitch of superstitious fear.

  Don’t be a fool, he told himself. It’s not as though this place does anything.

  Above him, twinkling against the icy void of space, the galaxy burned.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Lorenzo waited until Florin had escorted Kereveld back to the temple before slipping away. He had kept the merchandise hidden beneath the folds of his shirt and the shape of it had soon etched a hot, red patch of insulation into his skin.

  Now, sitting oh his haunches with his back resting against the smooth stone of the corner building, he shifted the goods within his shirt and watched his customers approach.

  They walked with the exaggerated swagger of the world’s only honest men, pausing occasionally to glance around them furtively. They looked as though they were about to burst into an innocent whistle.

  In fact, as they drew nearer, one of them did start to hum. Florin sniggered and stood up, rising out of the tall-bladed elephant grass like a grotesque apparition.

  “Over here, lads,” he hissed. The two men stopped in sudden alarm. Then, deciding that this wasn’t a trap, they ploughed through the grass towards him. The first of them swept off a white-feathered hat and nodded his head politely.

  “What a surprise, to meet you here,” he said, his voice lifting with the musical lilt of a Tilean accent.

  “Likewise,” Lorenzo replied.

  For a moment the three men stood and sweated beneath the gaze of the hot s
un, studying each other.

  “Is a very nice weather we’re having,” the Tilean said and, despite all evidence to the contrary, Lorenzo nodded his agreement.

  “Beautiful.”

  Again the three men lapsed into silence. A dragonfly hummed past, its metallic sheen sparkling beneath the scorching sunlight. The Tileans watched it suspiciously. When it had disappeared around the corner the first of them lent forward, his voice dropping to a whisper.

  “You have the map?” he hissed.

  Lorenzo nodded and looked cautiously from side to side before retrieving the roll of paper from beneath his shirt. He began to unfurl it, and then paused.

  “Look, you might not want it. It’s only one page from Bartolomi’s book, not really a map. To be quite honest, I can’t make anything of it.”

  “Don’t keep us waiting.” The Tilean waved away the protest impatiently. “Let us see.”

  Lorenzo sighed.

  “All right, all right. But if you don’t want it, I have some tea to sell, too.”

  And with that he unrolled the piece of paper and held it out for the two Tileans to examine. As the men hunched over the paper, Lorenzo saw the contents reflected in their faces. In a matter of seconds their aquiline features changed from eager to disappointed, from disappointed to exhilarated and then, with an obvious effort, from exhilarated to unimpressed.

  “Yes,” the Tilean said. “I see is a very smudged. Very unclear.”

  “Sorry,” Lorenzo sighed, and started to roll the map back up. “But I did warn you. Anyway, about that tea…”

  The Tilean gripped his wrist and smiled with maniacal insouciance.

  “We will take the map anyway. For a souvenir.”

  “Well, if you’re sure you want to…” Lorenzo trailed off. “It costs twelve crowns.”

  The Tileans seemed genuinely shocked but Lorenzo remained unmoved.

  “Take it or leave it,” he shrugged.

  They took it, and just in time. Less than half an hour later a trio of Kislevites came slinking along through grass grown dull beneath a suddenly overcast sky.

  But that deal was never complete. Before they’d even started to discuss a price a terrible roar from the jungle beyond had sent all three men bolting away like hares from a gun.

  * * *

  Van Delft stood on the highest stone tier of the temple and gazed across the world below. From this altitude, with the warm breeze brushing the white mane of his hair back from the flushed skin of his brow, and also keeping the flies at bay, the jungle seemed almost beautiful.

  The morning sunlight gleamed on the canopy of the surrounding trees. The brilliant greens and golds were a stark contrast to the dark hollows below. Straight ahead the ground swelled up towards the lip of the plateau—the overgrown earth rising up before the temple as smoothly as a wave before the prow of a ship.

  Here and there the canopy was cratered with regular patterns of stunted growth. It occurred to van Delft that beneath these areas lay the ruins of other buildings, buildings which had not enjoyed the protection lavished upon this temple complex—buildings whose remains might contain anything. It also occurred to him that he’d be a fool to tell that to the men below. He’d just about been able to bully them into building a stockade and maintaining some daily semblance of drill, but he knew better than to press them further than that. At least the current wave of gold fever served to keep them within earshot of the buglers he’d posted on these very heights.

  Gold fever. It was like an illness with some of them.

  Men who had risked everything to escape from their father’s fields could now be seen burrowing into the heavy soil below, tearing at the earth without even peasants’ tools.

  Others, contrary to orders, spent their time sneaking around the corridors and passageways that riddled the outer buildings. So far they had discovered nothing except falling slabs or concealed pits.

  “Fools,” the commander muttered, thinking of the three bodies that the dwarfs had already recovered from within those buildings. The first two had been merely broken, but the third had been, well, had been…

  Had been smeared, van Delft decided, thinking of the man’s jellied remains.

  He winced at the memory and turned his attention back to the tell-tale dips in the thick carpet of greenery before him.

  No. There was no way he was going to tell the men that the city they sought was out there, hidden beneath a grappling chaos of undergrowth and Sigmar alone knew what else.

  The commander grunted as he reached the decision. Then he frowned. On the far horizon, the blue of the sky was disappearing beneath a vast mountain of cloud. The edge of the dismal mass was as straight as a razor, and it was drawing nearer with the speed of a galloping horse.

  He ground his teeth and wracked his brains, trying to remember if he’d ever seen a sky quite like this before. He didn’t like it, that was for sure. After a life time spent beneath the choppy weather of the Old World, this hard-edged blanket of cloud didn’t seem natural.

  The brooding was ended with a sudden, sharp explosion from below. It had come from beyond one of the outbuildings and, as the commander squinted in that direction, a thin wisp of black smoke started to rise upwards.

  The noise died away, swallowed by the jungle. In its place a chorus of ragged cries floated up. Van Delft, his face grim, started to clamber back down the ladder of lashed vines that led up to his high eyrie, his thoughts already turning to what he might find below.

  During their first foray into the cremetorial stench of the upper chamber Florin had felt many things. Fear especially. But now all he felt was boredom. The crumbling skeletons that surrounded him no longer filled him with anything other than a sort of distant pity. Even amongst the flickering shadows of the torchlight they were now no more menacing than stacks of broken furniture.

  True, their lidless gaze sometimes seemed filled with resentment of the warm flesh that still clothed his bones. Or perhaps it was resentment of the fact that Kereveld had succeeded in opening the all-seeing eye of this chamber where they had failed. But what of it? They had long since ceased to have any power in this world, otherwise they would surely have risen up in protest when the wizard blundered through them.

  Skulls continued to roll as the wizard barged carelessly past, muttering to himself as he squinted up at the blazing constellations above or down at the paper upon which he scribbled his notes.

  Florin watched the old man’s actions disinterestedly and arched his back against the cold stone of the wall. Only van Delft’s order kept him there, stuck protecting the wizard.

  What a waste of time.

  He yawned, despite the fact that it wasn’t even noon yet, and rolled his shoulders. Maybe he should get in some sword practice. Lundorf had showed him a new trick yesterday, a way of trapping an opponent’s thumb beneath the guard…

  He pressed his hands against the wall to push himself off, then stopped suddenly. His expression frozen, he slowly began to slide his fingers through the pale ash which covered the stone behind him. It was dry and greasy, and he could feel rolls of it filling the spaces beneath his nails. Suddenly it didn’t seem to matter that this soot was scorched bone. All that mattered were the finely carved lines that lay beneath it.

  Waiting until Kereveld had wandered to the other side of the chamber, Florin turned and scrubbed the dirt off the wall with the palms of his hands. Beneath it, the edges of the grooves as sharp now as on the day they’d been cut, a mass of carved symbols were revealed.

  With a quick glance over his shoulder Florin scrabbled for a torch and knelt down in front of the script the better to read it.

  At first he was disappointed. This was no writing he’d seen before. In fact, he wasn’t even sure if it was writing at all. There were no letters here, not even the odd little pictograms that occasionally turned up on wares from Cathay. Instead, the ancient masons had marked the walls of their temple with a continuous collage of pictures and images, each fitting as neatly
into the next as a brick into a wall.

  Florin leaned closer, blinking back tears from the smoke of the torch, and rubbed away more of the soot.

  At least he could recognize some of the images. Despite the way that they’d been warped and twisted to fit into neat squares and rectangles Florin could make out snakes and spiders, and some sort of feathered lizard. These carvings and dozens more were crammed together in a higgledy-piggledy mass through which not a single line ran.

  His brow furrowed with concentration, Florin smeared more dust away, searching for any clue as to where the fabled treasure might lay hidden. Sweat trickled down his face and he absent-mindedly wiped it away, leaving a grey smear on his forehead.

  “What’s that you’ve found?” a voice asked from behind him, making Florin jump and swear. He hadn’t heard Kereveld approach.

  “It’s a… hey, what’s that?”

  The noise of the explosion echoed dully through the passageways of the temple, rumbling on long after the first impact had died. Mercenary and wizard exchanged a long, anxious glance. Then they shrugged.

  “Well, Menheer Kereveld,” Florin said as the last of the echoes faded. “I wonder if you’d be so good as to tell me what these mean?”

  The two men hunched forward in the darkness, the outside world forgotten as they pored eagerly over words that might proclaim their fortunes.

  The dozen round-bladed axes gleamed as brightly as the eyes of the dwarfs who held them. They stood in a stolid line, their backs to the darkness of the jungle beyond. Between the line and the trees, neck deep in the smoking crater their blast had created, their fellows toiled. Sweat glistened on their stocky arms and barrel chests, slicking the dirt that clung to them.

  It had taken almost half a barrel of the precious black powder to blow out the two trees that had grown out of this hole, but it had been worth it. Their root systems had clutched around the dwarfs’ find like a miser’s fingers, pressing it down into the earth. Yet with the help of a single, carefully placed charge, that miser’s grasp had been transformed into an open palm.