[Florin & Lorenzo 01] - The Burning Shore

by Robert Earl - (ebook by Undead)

  Well then, he thought grimly as the skinks dragged him past a phalanx of more red-scaled carnivores, I’d better bring him some heads of my own.

  He studied his captors as they hurried along, fear held back by the sudden desire for revenge. Clinging to the courage it gave him he imagined strangling them, if he could get his hands free, or hurling them from the heights above, if he could lure them there.

  Most of all, he thought about his company’s gunners, and the damage they’d caused to the foul things upon their first encounter. It was a good memory, and he savoured it despite the pang of loneliness it brought. ;

  After another quarter of an hour the party slowed to a walk, then to a halt. Curious, Florin rolled his head back to see why they had stopped and his courage faded, drowned beneath a sudden slick of cold sweat.

  Loping forward to receive him from the skinks was another pack of the giant carnivores. Unlike their brethren, who had been busy sating their appetites on another’s flesh, these looked hungry.

  There was a keenness about them, an alertness that made the heavy bronze cleavers they bore seem light in their claws. They were armoured too, as if ready to fight for their meat. As well as torques, objects identical to those the expedition had recovered, these creatures wore smoothly rounded headpieces, the thick bone of their construction gleaming like ivory as the wearers approached.

  Florin tested his bonds for the thousandth time and, despite the steaming humidity through which his tormentors had emerged, shivered as their shadows fell over him.

  The skinks, on some silent command, set him down and scurried to one side, allowing the first of the great reptilian warriors to draw nearer. As well as the bone helmet, this one had a great burst of feathers haloing its sharp head, the bright colours of the exotic plumage startlingly bright against the murky green of the jungle beyond. The head-dress bobbed as the creature reached down and, grabbing Florin by his collar, lifted him effortlessly up to study him.

  The Bretonnian made himself return this appraisal with a defiance he couldn’t quite feel. Swallowing nervously, he straightened his dangling spine and glared into the icy depths of the reptile’s eyes.

  “I’m going to cut your balls off,” he told it, his voice creaking after two days of silence.

  Ignoring the challenge it turned him this way and that, the scales that covered its nostrils flaring back to reveal the soft pinkness of the membrane beneath. It snuffled at its captive for several long moments, the sharp tips of its forked tongue flitting out to taste the air around this bizarre mammal.

  “What’s the matter?” Florin asked it, coughing to clear his throat. “Too stringy for you?”

  The lizard turned its head to one side, perhaps an expression of surprise.

  “Go on then,” Florin snapped at it. “Get it over with.”

  His captor paused for a moment, as if to consider the proposal. Then it turned on its heel and marched away, dragging Florin along in its wake. The rest of its pack stood back as their leader passed, then fell into two neat columns behind him.

  Florin, his swollen feet scrabbling over the sharp detritus of the rough path, noticed the discipline of their march. Unlike the scuttling mobs of skinks, these larger cousins stamped a perfect drum roll into the ground with their taloned feet. The beat of their progress reverberated through the earth in a relentless rhythm, their weapons were shouldered at an identical angle, their faces were as stony as royal guards on a parade ground.

  Even to Florin, who was hardly a soldier, this discipline was even more alarming than the reptiles’ appearance. They had been frightening enough when gathered together in a mob, but now, marching along in the lock step of a trained regiment, they were terrifying.

  For the first time he began to wonder what might have happened to the rest of the expedition since he had been taken. Could it be that he was the last surviving human in this horrible place?

  He shivered and tried not to think about it.

  The trees on either side disappeared into two neat files as the column reached another clearing and, on exactly the same step, halted. Florin tried to stand up, but his captor lifted him off of his feet and threw him onto the hard-packed earth with savage relish.

  The stars were still clearing from his eyes when a human voice, warm beneath a thick Estalian accent, cut through his pain.

  “Good morning,” it said. “Welcome to the green hell. And may I say, I hope that your stay will be a pleasant one.”

  And with that the pleasant tones shattered into a high pitched braying that might have been either sobbing or laughter.

  Florin struggled up to his feet and studied the Estalian as the man shook beneath his fit of hysteria. Rocking back and forth on the dais upon which he sat, well muscled arms clasped around his bony knees, he had crammed his knuckles into his mouth and was giggling as he wept.

  Although he seemed to be a lunatic, in other respects he seemed fit and hale. The lithe muscles that moved beneath his tan were as strong as Florin’s own, and the teeth which ground against his fist were strong and white. The line of pale scars that ran down the man’s arm were pale in the gloom—square hieroglyphs neatly burned into his tanned skin.

  As to his age, it was impossible to even guess. Beneath the shock of pure white hair that covered his head he might have been forty or he might have been a hundred. It stuck out at wild angles from the crown of his head and line of his chin, his beard the most tangled thing in this strangely ordered jungle.

  “I’m pleased to meet you,” Florin told the man as he stopped rocking and climbed off of the dais with a clink of chains. Florin glanced down and saw the thick chains and wide cuffs that bound him to the carved wood. Even in the perpetual twilight of these tree smothered depths his bonds gleamed with the rich butter glow of gold. Enough gold, in fact, to have made their prisoner a rich man in any city of the Old World.

  “Pleased to meet you,” the poor wretch said, coming to the end of his chains and stopping. Now that his fit of giggles had passed a look of wonder had come into his eyes. With a nervous caution he reached out a trembling hand towards Florin, as if he wanted to make sure he was real.

  “Shake my hand?” he asked, with such a tone of pitiful hopefulness that Florin damned the vines that bit into his own flesh and hopped towards the man: The prisoner waited until he was a hand’s shake away then lunged forward with a sudden speed, grasping his arms with sharp-nailed fingers.

  “You’re really alive,” he gasped, squeezing the Bretonnian’s arms as fiercely as a goodwife selecting a ham. “By Shallya, you’re really alive.”

  And with that he flung his arms around the Bretonnian and hugged him to his chest.

  The feeling of the man’s tangled whiskers pressed against his neck was hardly any more pleasant than the snivelling of his tearful gratitude. But, lunatic or not, Florin didn’t quite have the heart to shake off the unwelcome embrace. The gods alone knew how many years the man had spent chained up in his green hell. It had obviously been too many.

  “There, there,” Florin said awkwardly, and wished that he had his hands free to pat the prisoner on the back. “It’s all right. Could be worse, couldn’t it?”

  “It soon will be,” the prisoner said, pulling back and wiping his nose across the back of his hand. “Sorry. I’m sorry. It’s just that I don’t see many people, and when I do…”

  The sentence trailed off in a shudder and, for the second time, Florin wished that he had a hand free to clap around the wretch’s shoulders. Then the Estalian caught sight of something over Florin’s shoulder and his eyes widened. A second later he’d fallen to his knees in a single, well practiced movement and bowed his head.

  He wasn’t the only one. Turning to see what had had this effect, Florin saw that the floor was littered with the kneeling forms of his persecutors, their bone covered heads held low and the meaty lengths of their tails pressed flat into the ground.

  “Kneel,” the Estalian hissed, scrabbling desperately at the back of Flor
in’s tunic and dragging him painfully to his knees.

  “Your head, too,” the prisoner whispered. “Forehead to the earth.”

  “Why?”

  “Just do it.”

  The fear in his voice persuaded the Bretonnian, and he followed the example of man and lizards both as he bowed his head.

  For a long moment the clearing was still, the bodies that littered its hard-packed earth as motionless as so many tombstones beneath a pair of dragonflies that glided down from above. The insects’ translucent wings were as big as sparrow’s and their mandibles as sharp as pincers. Florin watched them flitting past nervously from beneath his lowered brow, aware of how helpless he was tied up like this.

  He was trying to decide what to do should one of the insects bite him when, preceded by a shuddering sigh of adoration from amongst the grovelling reptiles, their god was carried into their midst.

  Xinthua Tzeqal’s glazed eyes were silent pools of equanimity as he regarded the waiting saurus. As always in his presence they were kneeling, an instinctive reaction he would one day try to break. Behind them, also kneeling in apish imitation, were a pair of the filthy mammals that had brought him here.

  One of them was clearly the property of Scythera, the scar-leader of this outpost. A simple line of branded ownership symbols ran down the pallid flesh of the animal’s spindly arm, and the shackles that bound it carried similar marks, a simple script that spoke its owner’s name and rank.

  The other mammal appeared to be wild. It looked weak, and the improvised bonds that bound its limbs were rough and quickly made. It also had the sickly, uncared for appearance of a creature unused to the rich luxuriance of Lustria.

  Xinthua studied the creatures for a length of time, watching with interest as moisture formed on their mottled skins like condensation on the cold surface of an onyx blade.

  But no, that was a bad comparison. These animals weren’t cold. In fact, even from here, Xinthua could see that they were abnormally hot. With a quick blink, thermal lenses nictated over his eyes, and the air around the two oddities flared as white hot as the rats that were sometimes brought for his delectation.

  Fascinating.

  “Scar-leader Scythera,” he said at length. “Is there anything that presses upon you?”

  “No, my liege,” the warrior said without lifting his nose from the dirt.

  “You and your underlings will stand.”

  The score of saurus rose to their feet and, without a further command, stood to an effortless attention that was so instinctive that neither they nor their god noticed it.

  “Scythera,” Xinthua asked. “Why is that animal changing colour?”

  “It’s how they think, my liege,” the saunas said. “They change colour before they flee.”

  “And will it flee?”

  “It cannot, my liege, not being strong enough to free itself.”

  “Free it and see what it does.”

  “Yes, my liege.”

  Scythera turned his head and snapped a command to two subordinates. One pounced upon the struggling human to hold him still whilst the other cut his bonds. Then, obedient to their orders, they stood Florin on his feet and waited for him to run.

  “He isn’t fleeing, Scythera,” Xinthua observed after a moment.

  “No, my liege. These are strange, weak creatures. Sometimes their bodies will not obey their minds.”

  “Their natural habitat must be a forgiving place.”

  “I don’t know, my liege. Some of the skinks have been trying to teach the other one to talk, as ordered by Our Lord Chuptzl Qo when he passed through ten years ago. But its brain is too small to understand anything. All it can do is point with its forelimbs at what it desires.”

  Xinthua said nothing, the icy purity of his mind suddenly filled with a thousand different reflections of Chuptzl Qo, and the implications of the failure of his order to teach these animals to speak.

  “I think that I will communicate with the wild one,” he decided, completely unmoved by even a shred of competitive spirit. Competitive spirit, after all, was only something that animals felt. “Hold it still. I want to examine it.”

  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?”