[Florin & Lorenzo 01] - The Burning Shore

by Robert Earl - (ebook by Undead)

  Shaking beads of water from their crested heads and blinking the salt out of their eyes, the hunters emerged from the hidden depths below, short spears held clear of the water as they paddled towards their prey.

  And their prey had already been chosen. It was the last boat, the Kislevites’ boat. No matter where each new skink breeched the surface it turned and surged towards it, its lithe body drawn to the target like an iron filing to a magnet.

  As Florin watched, the first Kislevite died, spraying a fountain of blood over his comrades as he pulled a short-hafted spear from his throat and toppled into the ocean. More spears were thrown, bouncing off armour or slicing through skin as the skinks closed in on the confusion.

  A pair of high-crested heads popped out of the water beside the Bretonnians’ boat. They ignored it completely as, blinking water from the yellow orbs of their protruding eyes, they made for the Kislevites.

  “Looks like it ain’t our fight after all, boss,” Lorenzo said. “Let’s make for the shoreline.”

  “Don’t make such jokes,” Florin snapped, although he’d been turning over exactly the same unworthy thought. “Get us turned round and headed towards the Kislevites. Come on, get a damned move on. Do you want to miss all the fun?”

  Once more Lorenzo started to call out the oarsmen beat and, turning reluctantly back into the resistance of the Lustrian current, they rowed towards the quickening violence.

  The sea was boiling around the Kislevites’ boat now, rocking it dangerously against the swell as scaly claws gripped its gunwales, onyx sparked against steel and bodies were pushed back and forth.

  There was a high-pitched scream, cut off by a terrible gurgling sound, as another one of the human warriors was slain. This time, the man’s body fell halfway out of the boat, the dangling arms and torso making a bridge over which more skinks scampered.

  Desperate orders were hurled about as water started to surge into the listing boat, and half the Kislevites threw themselves against the opposite side in an attempt to keep it from capsizing. The skinks took advantage of the collapsing defence and scampered over the gunwale, only to be cut down by the Kislevite sergeant’s axe. Bloodshot eyes glinting with a berserker rage he lunged at the skinks, a white froth of spittle flecking the tangle of his beard as he roared a blasphemous combination of curses and prayers.

  Scale and bone slit asunder beneath the northerner’s frenzied attack, and as Florin’s boat came level the skinks drew back. His men shipped their oars and hefted their weapons.

  For once, the lizards were outnumbered. Bretonnians and Kislevites chopped downwards in a flurry of steel as their two boats drifted closer together, and the skinks, their fearlessness matched only by their tactical good sense, fled from the killing zone. Risking their tails to the vengeful steel of the humans they dived down, resurfacing to swim in a wide circle around them.

  As they fled a wild cheer rose up, echoing from throat to throat as the skinks swam clear.

  Florin cheered too, although he knew that it was only a respite. The skinks hadn’t retreated, they had merely regrouped. Even now, fresh swarms were emerging from the depths of the jungle and disappearing into the depths of the sea, bobbing up to join the survivors of the first attack.

  His comrades’ cheering grew louder as Florin licked his lips and studied the enemy. It seemed a shame to dampen the men’s spirits, but regardless of their morale it was time to prepare for the next assault.

  “Watch out,” Florin warned, raising his voice above the celebrations. “They’re going to hit us again. Get ready!”

  He readied his machete just as a dark, cold shadow fell across his back. Gritting his teeth he looked back over his shoulder, ready to face whatever fresh horror the jungle had sent against them.

  He gaped stupidly when he saw what it was, and at last he understood what all the cheering had been for.

  Bearing down on them, the sea curling into a sparkling filigree before the sharp edge of her bows, came the Destrier.

  “There you go, Master Graznikov,” Gorth grinned, slapping the pale-faced Kislevite on the shoulder. “Told you that you were mistaken.”

  “Yes,” the Kislevite nodded unhappily, and ran his fingers nervously through the satchel of treasure he wore. With an obvious effort he squeezed his cheeks up into a big smile, although the fear never left his eyes.

  “And captain? No to tell the men I said they were dead, yes? Don’t want to hurt their feelings.”

  Gorth’s grin grew wider, until it resembled a shark’s.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, watching the sweat bead on Graznikov’s forehead as the first of the mercenaries tumbled onto the deck of the ship. “They’ll probably think it a fine old tale to tell back home. Anyway, they’ll want to reward Costas. If he hadn’t looked back just before we lost sight of the coast, or if his eyes had been a little less sharp… Well, friend Graznikov, it doesn’t bear thinking about, does it?”

  There was a sudden bang as one of the longboats the sailors were hauling up hit the hull. Then a sudden pause, the crew’s usual foul-mouthed efficiency silenced by what they saw glinting in the bottom of the boat.

  “Please, captain. It would only upset them. Say I asked you to wait.”

  One of the mercenaries, a Bretonnian who Graznikov didn’t recognize, seemed to recognize him. He turned and tapped one of his mates on the shoulder. Within minutes even more faces had been turned in his direction.

  “Please, captain,” the Kislevite hissed, the false smile melting away like butter in a frying pan. “Don’t tell them I said they were all dead. I thought they were.”

  Despite the fact that Gorth seemed not to hear him, Graznikov lowered his voice.

  “I’ll pay you.”

  There was another series of bumps and booms as the sailors manhandled the longboat onto, the deck, and then tipped it out. Amongst the bloodied cloth and blunted weapons a hundred misshapen golden fragments gleamed, twinkling like fallen stars against the dark woodwork. The sailors lapsed into a reverential silence at the sight.

  Gorth licked his lips, the only movement in a face gone suddenly still.

  “Is that real?” He asked quietly.

  “Yes, yes. It’s real,” Graznikov told him, desperately trying to ingratiate himself.

  “Well, then. Looks like you don’t have enough to bribe me with. Sorry.”

  A look of sheer terror passed across Graznikov’s face as Gorth leapt down onto the main deck, the better to study the haul.

  “Looks like it wasn’t a wasted journey after all,” he told Florin, who was too busy watching his men gathering up the spilt gold to have seen Graznikov yet.

  “Wasteful enough,” Florin replied. “Van Delft didn’t make it. Neither did a dozen of my men.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Gorth said, and it was true. Even so, his eyes glinted with the pleasure of seeing so much treasure.

  On the far side of the ship more sailors stood lined up whilst their mates recovered the expedition’s boats and men. Armed with a motley collection of hunting bows and handguns they’d been standing ready to guard against the strange, reptilian goblins that their arrival had driven back into the shallows.

  Gorth roused himself from his appraisal of the loot, and nodded towards the shoreline where the enemy waited, eyes held above the water like giant frogs despite the occasional shot that churned into the water between them.

  “Who are your friends?”

  “No friends of mine,” Florin scowled humourlessly, and glared past the strangely familiar figure that stood silhouetted on the foredeck and into the jungle beyond. It seemed to glare back, the great stinking mass of it as threatening and as alien as the first day he’d seen it.

  Yet despite the men he’d lost to it, and the blood, Lustria’s hungry wilderness no longer filled him with fear. He had faced it, after all, . had taken every peril and every beating that it could throw at him.

  And he’d won.

  A wolfish smile appeared on Fl
orin’s gaunt face, and the falling sun caught the glint of victory within the hollows of his eyes.

  “I beat you,” he whispered, the chill ocean breeze carrying his boast into the steaming jungle beyond. Behind him he heard more gold clinking onto the deck. His smile grew wider.

  Graznikov, who was still huddled against the stern rail, saw the expression and whimpered with fear.

  “Treacherous dog,” he quietly cursed Gorth. He’d seen the captain talking with that psychotic Bretonnian, and a second later his face had twisted up into that terrible snarl.

  The Destrier rolled beneath a wave, and Florin took a step forwards. That was the final straw for the Kislevite. His world collapsed into a single calculation, a weighing of the odds of survival in the jungle balanced against the odds of survival on a ship full of the mercenaries he’d tried to abandon there.

  It was an easy calculation.

  With barely a second’s hesitation, Graznikov kicked off his boots and, holding them in one hand and pinching his nose with the other, vaulted over the railing and into the sea beyond.

  There was a cry of alarm from behind him, the call suddenly cut off by the hiss of the cold water which closed in over his head. The momentum of his fall sent him plunging down into the silty depths, spinning him around until, even when he opened his stinging eyes against the murky salt water, he had no sense of up or down..

  Another man might have panicked. Tumbling down through a drowning void of blinding water, the hiss of his own blood whispering terrible rumours of suffocation in his ears, another man might have lashed out blindly, muscles burning the last of his oxygen as he pulled blindly through the murk.

  Not Graznikov though. For all of his faults he was a Kislevite, and Kislevite blood is strong. If he was a coward that was a matter of choice rather than instinct.

  With a discipline forged by his inbred survivor instinct he forced himself to wait, floating as limply as a corpse through the bubbles and currents that would soon send him bobbing up towards the surface.

  He waited for a few seconds more.

  Any minute now, he told himself, I’ll float back towards the surface. My boots are full of air, my body is lighter than water, my clothes…

  Then he remembered the bag that he’d strapped around his shoulders, and the gold that it contained.

  A whimper of panic sent a mouthful of precious air twinkling up towards the surface as he sank further down. He fumbled at the straps of the satchel, tugging at them uselessly. They seemed to have become tangled in his shirt.

  Eyes wide against the stinging salt water Graznikov sank further, water pressure starting to squeeze at his temples, black spots of oxygen starvation whirling through the silt that clouded his vision.

  Now he was pulling at the hem of his shirt, trying to squirm out of the whole murderous tangle of cloth and leather and useless gold. It was no good. The burning in his lungs began to fade and his panic slipped away.

  Death, it seemed, was at least comfortable.

  But then he felt his rescuers’ hands upon him. Some seized his shoulders in an iron-hard grip. Others grasped his ankles or his wrists, their bodies churning the water around him as they pulled him back up towards the surface.

  Graznikov felt the pressure receding as they ploughed upwards, and sunlight began to glow through the muddied water. A moment later, just as the garrotte of suffocation was about to snuff out his breath for good, Graznikov felt his head thrust back out of the sea and into the air above.

  He sucked in great, gulping mouthfuls of air, pain flooding through his head as the numbness of drowning faded. A wave punched into his face, forcing water into his open mouth. He vomited it back up before gasping down another delicious lungful of air.

  His rescuers, seeing his plight, lifted him higher above the surface, their fingers pinching into his flesh. But Graznikov didn’t mind. The pain felt good. It meant that he was alive.

  He turned to thank the nearest of his rescuers. It looked back expressionlessly with cold, alien eyes. As the ships fell behind him, and as the Lustrian coast drew nearer, Graznikov began to scream.

  EPILOGUE

  It had been well worth the Inconvenience of the journey. Not only had it afforded him with the opportunity to hone his tactical skills but, more importantly, he had gained personal experience of a whole new race.

  Yes, Xinthua Tzequal considered his decision to investigate this small matter to have been a wise one. These sea folk, or coastal apes as he’d decided to rename them, were fascinating animals. So fascinating, in fact, that he was contemplating subjecting their humble species to his full attention for the next few decades.

  It was a shame that battlefield necessity had compelled him to kill their shaman, but that was only a short term setback. Already, his skinks had been dispatched, scurrying northwards to the small colony of the creatures that clung so tenuously to the coast. When they returned, their captives would provide months of interest.

  The mage let this thought spin lazily through his mind. His eyelids lowered contentedly as it vanished into the stillness of his consciousness, leaving behind it a void, a blank immensity of pure, unsullied awareness in which he bathed like a chameleon in sunlight.

  The novel sound of sobbing brought him back from that blissful emptiness. Xinthua swallowed and blinked, the myriad lenses of his eyes adjusting to the failing evening light. The skinks, it seemed, had found a survivor after all in the coastal waters. They had shackled the noisy creature to the palanquin which had held their previous captive, and the mage priest watched with interest as it tested its paltry strength against the solid gold of its chains.

  Xinthua hummed with pleasure.

  “Your success pleases me,” he told the first-spawned, sending the skink’s crest rising into a vermilion fin of delight. “Now bring the dissecting tools. I wish to examine this specimen fully.”

  Far above, the red ball of the sun disappeared over the tangled horizon of the jungle. The azure heights of the sky faded to the sheer black of the universe beyond, the stars glittering with an icy splendour that cared nothing for the pain of the world below.

  Night drew on and the stars grew brighter. They lit the steaming depths of Lustria’s interior with a pale luminescence, turning her swirling mists into blinding fogs. They burnished the waves that battered against her shores, setting their crests alight with a white fire that was fierce enough to match their rolling thunder.

  And, out in the black expanse of the midnight ocean, they glowed upon the stained sails of three fleeing ships. They billowed and snapped gleefully, the canvas as fat with wind as the ships’ bellies were with gold.

  In the crow’s nest Florin shivered, and sniffed happily at the clean salt tang of the air. Around him the rigging sang, humming a discordant lullaby in the darkness.

  Or perhaps, he considered, as he lay back and wriggled his toes, it was trying to warn him of dangers to come. It was all the same to the Bretonnian. After all, whatever lay ahead couldn’t possibly be any worse than the living nightmares which thrived within Lustria’s dark heart. Nothing could be that bad.

  Nothing at all.

  The thought brought an easy smile to his face and he stretched, and sighed. Then he wrapped the ragged remains of his cloak around him and drifted off into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  Scanning, formatting and basic

  proofing by Undead.