“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.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
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.
It was strange that such sickly creatures could taste so good, but there was no doubt that they did. The slippery coils of their intestines were delicious, more succulent even than tree frog, and the soft yellow fat had filled the skinks’ hearts with the desire for more even as they had filled their stomachs. They had suffered beneath the constraints of discipline when the succulent mammals they had captured had been held intact, but now they rejoiced that they had become fair game.
It was a shame that there was only one of them left. They would have to make the most of his tender flesh.
And yet, as they followed the path, it seemed that they were to be denied even this small treat. Their eagerness gave way to a growing disquiet as the hard packed earth stretched ahead without revealing a single foot print or trace of scent. A cadre of saurus lay lounging in a clearing before them, and a swift interrogation of them revealed that nothing had passed this way.
It didn’t make sense. The animal’s chained fellow had shown them that this was the way he had come. And yet, even though he had fled mere moments before, there wasn’t a single trace of the warm-blood here, neither sight nor mark nor scent of it.
The first-spawned turned the problem over in his mind. It seemed that the other animal had been mistaken as to which direction its fellow had t
aken, stupid weak-minded thing that it was.
The skink’s tongue flickered out, tasting the air as it considered what to do next. As it briefly considered a dozen differing search patterns it stopped, completely frozen but for the curling tines of its pink tongue.
Faintly, very faintly indeed, it could taste the warmblood’s sweat on the air. Divining the direction, he hissed a string of orders to his pack, sending them slipping away into the wilderness to the east.
The sight of Florin falling lifelessly from the scar-leader’s grasp had torn something loose within Gottlieb’s tortured soul. He’d crammed his knuckles into his mouth, biting down to stop the scream of despair until the taste of copper filled his mouth.
Perhaps because he had touched the Bretonnian he had allowed himself the luxury of thinking that he might also survive.
It was a foolish hope, of course. He knew that. The cruel gods allowed none to survive in the humidity of this, Gottlieb’s own personal hell. Hadn’t he seen half his friends die of the poisonous air in this place, their corpses scattered like grisly chaff between the shore and that cursed temple? And then there had been the crushing jaws of the gargantuan structure itself, and the terrible inferno which had lain in ambush at its heart.
At first he’d mourned his fallen comrades, weeping even as he and the handful of survivors had tried to hack their way back to their boats. But that had been before he’d been trapped by the lizards and brought back to entertain them like an animal in a zoo.
That had been eight long years ago. Eight years that had seemed like eight centuries. Countless times since, he’d begged them to put him out of his misery, to kill him as they had killed all the others.
In a way, he knew, he had been killed by the lizards. The daring nineteen year old they’d chained and tortured with their attempts at communication had been destroyed by their ministrations. The only sign that he’d ever lived was the broken shell of his older self, passing from one miserable day to the next as a living tombstone to the man he had been.
At least, that was what Gottlieb had thought whilst wallowing in the miasma of his depression. That and the fact that he would like to do to the gods what they had done to him, curse their balls off. But then he’d seen Florin miraculously rise and crawl away from the confusion of his captors and, deep within the confines of his chest, Gottlieb’s soul had flared back into life.
Whispering with quiet urgency he’d sent the Bretonnian into the thorn bushes that backed into the wild jungle beyond, snarling impatiently at the stranger’s attempts to open his own shackles. He’d tried to free himself from these golden bonds every day for almost a decade, there was no point in the youngster throwing away his chance in another useless attempt.
Then Gottlieb, scarcely believing that his ragged scrap of a plan was working, sent the skinks racing away in the wrong direction. Even now he could hardly believe it. Of course, the skinks probably would catch the fleeing youngster eventually. Almost certainly, in fact.
Gottlieb didn’t think about that. As the skinks rushed empty handed back into the clearing, the wizened old twenty-seven year old smiled like a baby.
The Bretonnian had escaped. For the first time in eight years, he’d stolen a victory from his captors. Victory. A beautiful word, and far more than a word. It was a battle flag, a burning flare that was bright enough to cut through the leaden weight of his despondency.
For the first time in half a decade it gave him the strength to start hating his captors again.
Gottlieb lay back on his litter, chains clinking, and howled joyously up into the jungle. His eyes rolled back with a wild exultation as he bellowed his defiance at his enemies, the sound degenerating into a mad cackle.
“Silence that mammal,” ordered Xinthua Tzeqal, whose valuable concentration the noise had disturbed.
“Yes, my liege,” a bodyguard said and, a club stroke later, Gottlieb Mannfredstein’s suffering was finally over.
The sound of the river called to him like a bell and, despite the thickets of needle-pointed bamboo that barred his path, Florin hurried towards it. By now his thirst was strong enough to drag him towards the water relentlessly.
The river was wide here, he saw, perhaps sixty feet across from one muddy bank to the other. Sunlight cut through the passage it had slashed through the canopy, the light glistening on top of the brown water.
The brown, dirty, swarming water.
But never mind that, Florin thought, falling to his knees and cupping his hands to take a scoop. Dangerous or not, he needed a drink. His eyes closed with sheer animal pleasure as he sucked the water down, letting the last of it run down his chin as he bent to take some more. Something wiggled in this handful, and Florin opened his hands to let the thing escape before drinking again.
Damn, that tasted good!
He was still drinking, glugging down his dozenth mouthful of the filthy stuff, when there was a series of sudden crashes into the stand of bamboo behind him. He leapt to his feet and turned, hand instinctively reaching down for the sword that had been taken from him.
The bamboo thrashed wildly from side to side and a rush of bodies came bursting out towards him. As tall as dwarfs, their wiry tufts of hair sticking up at all angles, the beasts barrelled towards the Bretonnian in a confusion of tusks, hoofs and wrinkled snouts.
At first he took them to be pigs. The peel of blood curdling squeals that they emitted upon finding the human before them would certainly have done justice to any Old World specimen. But there was something about their size, and the intelligence which gleamed within their tiny eyes, that hinted of a different breed.
And then there were their teeth. No farmer would keep animals with teeth like these. The long yellow blades looked designed to devour living flesh rather than swill or scraps of potato, dagger blades beneath powerful jaws.
Florin, unarmed and alone, cast about him for a weapon with which to defend himself. Anything would have done, a stone, even a sliver of bamboo. But before he could arm himself the animals were upon him, then past him, then splashing out into the sunny expanse of the river like so many twenty-stone water spaniels.
Florin watched them paddling away, the curls of their tails a curiously dainty touch atop their graceless forms. Then he looked back through the devastation they’d wrought in the bamboo and saw what they’d been fleeing from.
The tide of skinks was moving in total silence. Whether swinging from low-hanging boughs or scuttling along the jungle floor, they moved with an easy economy of motion that seemed almost ghostly. Their slender forms slipped through the tangled web of the jungle as if it were no more substantial than a spider’s web, flitting effortlessly over barriers that would have been all but impassable to a man.
Not only did the jungle refuse to slow them down, it also refused to hurt them. The clinging vines and cutting brambles that had tattooed a patchwork of dried blood and painful bruises across Florin’s skin seemed to slide off the skinks like raindrops from emeralds. Their smoothly-scaled bodies remained as unblemished as newly budded leaves, their golden eyes as blankly relaxed as a merchant’s in his parlour.
The first of them slowed to a halt when it saw Florin, pausing to consider how best to take him. Behind it, its fellows fanned out, groups of them rushing to the flanks to cut off any possibility of escape.
For a heartbeat Florin returned the impassive gaze of the front runner as it started warily towards him. He watched its crest rise up, the veins within the membrane swirling like an insignia on a battle flag, and he watched its forked tongue dart out, as though impatient for a taste of his blood. Then he did the only thing that he could do.
Kicking off the ruins of his boots Florin turned and dived into the river.
The skinks watched in fascination as their quarry splashed and thrashed into the water, his inadequate frame bobbing up and down as he struggled against the unfamiliar element. They observed him patiently. Drowning always added flavour to warm-blooded meat, and there was no reason to fight anyt
hing that would soon be dead anyway.
But as Florin inexpertly clawed his way across the river, the mage’s orders flared in the first-spawned’s memory—the instinct to obey was almost a physical sensation. With a further elevation of his crest, he chirruped an order that sent his brethren streaming into the river, their sleek bodies slipping into it as easily as eels.
They arrowed towards their prey, eyes and crests held level above the gently lapping water, tails beating rhythmically against the lazy current.
Beneath them other, smaller things swam. Some of them turned away at their approach, whilst others turned to observe.
It wasn’t until the first of the skinks was close enough to their quarry to spit on it, that there was a sudden frantic splashing from the rear of the swarm. It was followed by a high pitched shrill of alarm, the single sound changing the swarm’s whole world.
Suddenly they were no longer predators.
They were prey.
The first-spawned, his quarry momentarily forgotten, turned to appraise the situation that was developing behind him. Three of his brethren were already gone, their life signs snuffed out as suddenly as a mayfly’s by the unseen attacker. A dozen others were struggling against it with the abandon of complete desperation. Keening and chirruping they thrashed hither and thither, their flailing limbs churning the cloudy water up into sheets of boiling foam that turned from white to red before the first-spawned’s very eyes.
He watched one of the skinks flip onto his back in a horrible, stricken manoeuvre, revealing the bleeding stump that was all that remained of its tail. With a hiss of agony the casualty swiped into the water beneath him with his claws, only to recoil back from his target, his forelimbs reduced to pink stumps of flesh-shorn bone. Beside him another skink’s leg floated free, twitching with the last impulses of dying nerves as it was tugged down beneath the surface.
[Florin & Lorenzo 01] - The Burning Shore Page 25