01 - The Burning Shore (24 page)

Nothing.

Florin sighed, and wrinkled his nose at the sour smell of decay. He supposed
it came from the corpse. Then he felt for his matches. They weren’t there.

Then, so faint that he almost thought he might be imagining it, a noise. A
tiny, constant patter, as chitinous and relentless as an insect’s rush.

Florin thought about the things he had seen scuttling within the darkness of
the skull’s eye socket and swallowed nervously. Edging away from the sound he
began to absent-mindedly scratch the goose bumps that had risen on his skin.

The noise grew louder. It seemed to be coming from the left side of the hole,
although from where exactly it was impossible to tell. The whole wall was alive
with tapping now, and Florin cautiously reached out to touch it.

“Hullo?” he called out, brushing his fingertips against the cold stone. There
was no way this much noise could be coming from any kind of insect.

Please Shallya, there was no way that these noises could be coming from any
kind of insect.

Was there?

Clenching his jaw Florin drew his fingers back from the trembling stone and
hefted his sword.

“Hullo?”

There was no reply, although the beat of whatever was approaching grew a
little faster.

Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped.

“Hu…”

Florin never finished the word. With the deep groan of shifting masonry the
wall in front of him shifted and began to rise.

Scrabbling back over the shifting bones of the temple’s previous victim he
bumped the back of his head on the far wall.

But before he could even feel the pain the huge block which had formed the
wall of the cell lifted up and out to hover in the tunnel above. From the thin
gap it left a rush of noise, and a wash of orange torchlight, flooded into the
chamber.

After so long spent in the darkness it seemed as bright as the noonday sun,
and Florin blinked back tears as he gazed up at the two watery silhouettes that
appeared against it.

“I told you to wait,” one said gruffly, and threw down a rope.

“I hope you realise how much you’ve embarrassed yourself in front of Master
Thorgrimm here,” said the other, its tones rich with carefully constructed
disgust.

Relief, sweeter than champagne, flooded through him, and for a moment his
injuries were forgotten.

“What’s wrong?” Thorgrimm asked him, brows furrowed uncertainly. “Why are you
making that noise?”

But Florin was laughing too hard to answer.

The tunnel into which Florin emerged was a different place to the one he had
so blindly run down a few hours ago.

For one thing the bone-hard simplicity of its walls had gone, buried beneath
a forest of rough-hewn timbers. They were green beneath the axe strokes which
had just shaped them, and the sickly smell of fresh sap vied with the musty
odour of the temple’s depths.

For another the wide passageway was lined on both sides with dwarfs and men.
Their backs strained as they hauled on ropes, sweat pouring down them beneath
the heat of the torches. Beyond them the ropes disappeared into a complicated
nest of block and tackles, and from these down into iron hooks which Thorgrimm
had fastened to the shifting stonework beneath.

Florin watched as Thorgrimm carried on with his rescue operation, his voice
booming over the grunts of his workers and the squeak of pressurised wood.
Despite his size the dwarf looked like some ancient fire god as he swaggered
through the torchlight, bellowing the orders that were reshaping this sunken
realm.

Men and dwarfs both worked with a will as, beneath Thorgrimm’s commands, they
swung the block that had formed the side of Florin’s cell forward.

“Where’s Kereveld?” Florin asked Lorenzo, who was busily cleaning the gash on
his skull with some burning spirit.

“Watch,” Lorenzo told him without looking up from his task.

Florin watched. The block that Thorgrimm had swung forward was now being
lowered, eased down onto the stone beyond that had formed the ceiling of his
cell.

Almost immediately, there was the slow, remorseless grind of stone upon
stone. The lump of masonry sank as the slab of stone that had roofed Florin’s
cell moved beneath its weight, falling away as smoothly as the paddle of a mill
wheel. As it did so the wall of the passageway rotated down to cover the hole it
left, the stone slabs revolving in a single movement.

This second revolving slab had moved no more than a couple of feet when a
wild, bony figure flung itself out from behind it to fall with a loud slap onto
the paving beyond.

“Kereveld!” Florin called out as the wizard got shakily back to his feet and
blinked around in the torchlight.

“Get out of the way there,” Thorgrimm roared, and manhandled the wizard away
from the huge stone spoke of the turning wheel that had trapped him.

It was the second time he’d saved the old man’s life. Kereveld had just got
clear when the rope, strained beyond endurance, snapped. It flew whipping
vengefully back towards the men who were pulling it and the stone, now
completely unsupported, plunged as quickly as a guillotine blade through the
trap door.

A bone jarring thud, an ear splitting boom, and the rotating wheel of trap
doors was closed forever. The gap which had allowed the wheel to spin had been
plugged by the falling stone as neatly as a corked bottle.

“Well, that seems to have solved that problem,” van Delft’s voice drifted
through the falling dust and echoing concussion of the impact. “I wonder,
Captain d’Artaud, if you’d be good enough to follow Captain Thorgrimm’s advice
whilst underground. He does seem to know what he’s doing, doesn’t he?”

“Glad to, sir.”

“Good. I’ll leave you in his capable hands, then. Sergeant Frelda. Get all of
these men back to work on the barricades, will you? Captain d’Artaud shouldn’t
be needing them anymore.”

“Sir,” a Marienburger snapped off a salute and smirked at Florin before
barking a stream of orders to the men.

Van Delft returned the salute then, without another word, turned on his heel
and stalked back out of the temple.

“Sarcastic bastard,” Lorenzo grumbled when he was out of earshot.

Florin just shrugged sheepishly as his rescuers started to file past him.
Occasionally one of them would catch his eye and he would mutter his thanks.
Others offered a half mocking salute which he returned, despite the twinge of
pain the gesture sent through his bruised chest.

Since the numbness had worn off his torso felt as delicate as a rack of
tenderised beef ribs, although he wasn’t about to mention that to the commander,
or to anyone else.

Injuries or not, if anybody was going to escort Kereveld and his precious
book, it was going to be him.

He even managed an excruciating little bow as the wizard wandered up to him,
bony wrists proceeding from his torn sleeves.

“Are you all right?” Florin asked solicitously, but the old man staggered
past without a word. At first he seemed to be in shock; his eyes had a distant,
glazed sheen, and his lips moved in a constant, soundless mutter.

But then he turned back to Florin and smiled, the expression incongruously
innocent on the begrimed wrinkles of his face.

“Of course, I’ve got it now!” he said, as if they’d been in the midst of
conversation. “That water wheel thing that was in the book, it was that very
trap. Damned clever it was too, don’t you think? I suppose that originally there
would have been water below the level of the floor here, enough to have drowned
us like rats.”

“So the book was right then?” said Florin, raising one eyebrow. It made his
scalp hurt.

“Yes, yes. Isn’t it fantastic? I knew that those signs wouldn’t be for
nothing, and they certainly weren’t. Why, if this was the rainy season we’d
probably already be dead. I knew the book wouldn’t let us down.”

“Yes,” Florin deadpanned. “And what will we find next? Perhaps we should
study the book before we go on.”

“No, no use,” Kereveld said. “There’s nothing there but some geometrical
patterns. Quite disappointing, really.”

“You don’t say?” Lorenzo muttered. Kereveld looked at him as if seeing him for
the first time.

“What are you hanging about back there for?” Thorgrimm’s voice echoed down
the hall.

“Just coming,” Florin yelled back, and then turned to Kereveld. “After you,
sir. Please.”

Kereveld smiled and rubbed his hands as he strolled back down the passageway.
Florin, trying not to limp, picked up a torch and followed in the wake of the wizard’s flickering shadow, his men behind him.

They advanced cautiously over the fallen stone and into the darkness beyond.
Thorgrimm strode ahead of them, stopping every now and then to brush his fingers
across the stonework of the passage, or to sniff the air.

The ceiling began to lower as they advanced, so gradually that it almost
seemed to be doing it by stealth. The walls closed in. The darkness, which
retreated reluctantly before the light of their sputtering torches, closed back
in around them.

Thorgrimm came to a sudden stop, cocking his head to one side as though
listening to some distant sound and lifted his torch a little higher. The flame
reached a lump of bitumen and sizzled, flaring up in a sudden burst of fire
which illuminated the passage ahead of them.

Or rather, the dead-end.

“That shouldn’t be there,” Kereveld cried out, his voice quavering with
outrage. He started forward past Thorgrimm, but the dwarf just lifted his arm
and shoved the wizard back.

“Wait,” he said and sniffed the air hungrily. Then he licked one finger and
held it up into the air.

“Ha!” he said at last, and strode forward until he was no more than ten feet
from the dead end.

There he stopped again and craned his neck to stare upwards.

“What is it?” Florin asked, stepping past Kereveld to look upwards.

“Chimney,” Thorgrimm told him.

“And what’s that?”

Thorgrimm looked down.

“Some sort of pressure plate. Don’t touch it.”

“Yes,” Florin agreed carefully. “But what’s it made of?”

Lorenzo and the two men they’d brought with them jostled forwards, and for a
moment all six explorers gazed down at the metal plate. It gleamed in the poor
light of their torches.

Yet even in this gloomy light there was no mistaking the rich, liquid warmth
of the stuff from which the plate had been made. A complicated checkerboard of
shapes had been punched into the smooth metal of its surface, strange cubic
ideograms of lizards and feathers and skulls.

But it wasn’t these strange hieroglyphs that silenced the men.

“It’s gold,” Lorenzo whispered, rubbing the sweat from his palms before
reaching out to touch it.

“Don’t,” said Thorgrimm, his voice choked with emotion. Florin glanced down
at him and saw a fresh sheen of sweat glistening on his brow.

He wants it all for himself, Florin thought with a flash of sudden anger. The
greedy little wretch.

Thorgrimm, who was thinking exactly the same thing, took a step backwards
from the little knot of men, each of who now looked like a thief.

“We’ll have to build a scaffolding over it,” he decided, wiping his hand
across his face and making an effort to pull himself together. It was always the
way with this much gold, he thought with a wry smile. Even the most loyal of his
kinfolk could be ensnared by it, driven beyond honour by the beauty of the
wonderful, terrible metal. And as for humans…

His smile was replaced by a scowl.

“Look,” Lorenzo said with a sudden excitement. “Someone’s already
shaved a piece off!”

“Where?”

“On the corner there.”

“Yes, I see it,” said one of his companions, pushing forward.

“I saw it first,” Lorenzo snarled and, before anyone could stop him, he’d
leapt onto the plate and snatched the shard up.

This time there was no warning groan of moving stone, or crunch of snapping
bones.

This time there was just a rush of air as the plate, with Lorenzo still on
it, hurtled upwards and out of sight.

It happened as effortlessly as if gravity had simply reversed itself. Lorenzo
had hurtled upwards so quickly that, but for the sound of screaming that floated
down from the emptiness above, he might never have existed.

Florin, the gold forgotten, leapt forward onto the spot where the plate had
rested and squinted anxiously up into the darkness.

“Lorenzo!” he called, his voice echoing against the sheer stone sides of the
chimney.

A distant cry rang out as if in answer, and Florin raised his torch up into
the void above. Something up there seemed to be moving. Or growing.

Then there was another cry, but this time it was his own as he hurled himself
back and out of the way of the returning plate. It plummeted back down from the
heights above, a wash of foetid air preceding it, before slowing down to a gradual halt and settling gently back
down onto the floor of the passageway.

“Save you building a scaffold, won’t it Master Thorgrimm?” Lorenzo said
shakily, and jumped off the plate like a cat off an oven.

“How did you get it to do that?” Kereveld asked jealously.

“If you step on these markings,” Lorenzo said, pointing to a spiral of what
appeared to be tree frogs, “it goes down.”

“And to make it go up?”

“Those bundles of snakes.”

“Here,” said Florin, slapping Lorenzo on the back and handing him a flask of
cold tea.

“And where does it go?” Kereveld pressed him.

Lorenzo swallowed a mouthful of tea, his eyes glinting as he studied the
wizard’s eager face. He wiped his mouth, belched, and returned Florin’s canteen
before answering.

“Come on up,” he said, eager to move on before anybody remembered the shaving
of gold that now rested inside his breeches, “and I’ll show you.”

It was difficult to tell how large the chamber was. Its ceiling and far walls
were hidden by the darkness, invisible to the explorers who now stood in the
little island of light their torches cast.