01 - The Burning Shore (13 page)

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, yes. I’m all right.”

Beneath them there was a bone-jarring thud and the
Destrier
leapt like
a wounded stallion.

“Lorenzo,” Florin urged. “Go below and get Orbrant.”

“Yes, boss,” Lorenzo nodded, feeling the white fog of shock drawing back
beneath the fire of Florin’s energy. As he stumbled down into the hatch,
fighting the tide of men that were pouring up, he saw his master gathering the
company’s gunners around him.

“Fat lot of good they’ll do,” he muttered to himself, and elbowed his way
through the confusion of men that now clogged the deck.

Back on the deck the same thought had occurred to Florin. He angrily thrust
it to the back of his mind as he marshalled his gunners. “Come on lads, get ’em
loaded. Michel. Michel! Go and get Graznikov. We need his pistols.”

He waited until Orbrant’s head appeared in the hatchway, and then leapt for
the rigging that led up to the crow’s nest. Racing up it, the rough hemp
scraping his hands, he glanced back to see the deck shrink away below him.

Climbing still higher he eventually stopped, looking back down at the
foreshortened forms of the scurrying men below and then, almost reluctantly, out
to sea.

The
Destrier
’s sister ships lay on either side of her, the three
vessels forming the points of a tiny triangle in the vastness of the ocean.
Florin could just about make out the matchstick men of their crews, and wondered
if they had any idea yet of the danger that had come upon them.

Of the danger itself there was no sign. No dorsal broke the even swell of the
ocean, no shadow marred the cerulean blue ripples of its surface. The only
movement that stirred in its clear upper reaches came from the kaleidoscopic
sunbeams that danced hypnotically through the clear water.

“Captain.”

The voice came from below. Florin looked down to see the frantically
beckoning form of the skipper.

With a last look out across the sea he slid back down the rigging and dropped
onto the deck.

“Leave the observation to my look-outs,” the skipper told him. “Just get your
lads ready to shoot. We’ll tell you where.”

“Will do,” Florin nodded, running his eyes over the dozen gunners that waited
for him. Now, at Orbrant’s instruction, they stood in two squads. Florin wished
that he’d thought to do that himself.

Well, never mind that now.

“Well done, sergeant,” he said. “Now, I want you to take Michel and his mates
to the stern. The others will come with me. Any questions? Good. Follow me,
men.”

As if in response to the order another sudden impact boomed through the
Destrier’s
hull, sending the men reeling against the gunwales.

They looked at one another, pallid with fright as the
Destrier
settled
back into the water. Beneath them the hull groaned dangerously, the sound
dampening their brows with cold sweat despite the burning sun.

“Come on, jump to it,” Florin told them, jogging towards the fore-deck. There
they lined the rail, peering down into the depths that had spawned this monster, or out over the rolling blue desert of its domain.

Behind them the skipper’s voice rose, a hard edge of fear cutting through the
tortured creak of the ship’s hull.

Florin closed his ears to the sound as he peered desperately into the sea for
some sign of their enemy. There was nothing to be gained from imagining the
splintering of the vessel’s keel, the way the water would rush into her, pulling
her down into the lightless depths below, no comfort from imagining the bloating
of their drowned bodies as they turned in the tide…

Beside him his men, also listening to the whine and snap of the hull, waited
for the next blow to come in fearful silence.

And suddenly, at the same moment as the look-out began to yell, Florin saw
the monster’s return.

It was a shadow, nothing more. A cancerous darkness deep within the womb of
the sea. And although it was small it was growing with a terrible speed.

“To the right side, men,” he shouted. “But don’t fire until I give the
order.”

Now the beast was the size of a carthorse.

Now a cart.

“See it down there…?”

Now the blossoming shape expanded to blot out the light that danced in the
oceans heights.

“Wait for it, wait for it…”

The monster powered upwards. One of the gunners, leaning over the railing to
bring his weapon to bear, began to snarl.

Now the maw of the beast seemed to fill the whole of their world.

“Wait for the order,” Florin growled.

The water began to boil up, lifted by the lethal velocity of its attack.

The ship rocked gently upon the pressure that was building beneath it.

Still he waited.

And then, like a signal flare in a night sky, the dead orb of one of the
thing’s eyes rolled into view. It was as cold as winter, as pale as death.

It was what Florin had been waiting for.

“Fire!”

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.