01 - The Burning Shore (26 page)

“Yes,” the Tilean said. “I see is a very smudged. Very unclear.”

“Sorry,” Lorenzo sighed, and started to roll the map back up. “But I did warn
you. Anyway, about that tea…”

The Tilean gripped his wrist and smiled with maniacal insouciance.

“We will take the map anyway. For a souvenir.”

“Well, if you’re sure you want to…” Lorenzo trailed off. “It costs twelve
crowns.”

The Tileans seemed genuinely shocked but Lorenzo remained unmoved.

“Take it or leave it,” he shrugged.

They took it, and just in time. Less than half an hour later a trio of
Kislevites came slinking along through grass grown dull beneath a suddenly
overcast sky.

But that deal was never complete. Before they’d even started to discuss a
price a terrible roar from the jungle beyond had sent all three men bolting away
like hares from a gun.

* * *

Van Delft stood on the highest stone tier of the temple and gazed across the
world below. From this altitude, with the warm breeze brushing the white mane of
his hair back from the flushed skin of his brow, and also keeping the flies at
bay, the jungle seemed almost beautiful.

The morning sunlight gleamed on the canopy of the surrounding trees. The
brilliant greens and golds were a stark contrast to the dark hollows below.
Straight ahead the ground swelled up towards the lip of the plateau—the
overgrown earth rising up before the temple as smoothly as a wave before the
prow of a ship.

Here and there the canopy was cratered with regular patterns of stunted
growth. It occurred to van Delft that beneath these areas lay the ruins of other
buildings, buildings which had not enjoyed the protection lavished upon this
temple complex—buildings whose remains might contain anything. It also
occurred to him that he’d be a fool to tell that to the men below. He’d just
about been able to bully them into building a stockade and maintaining some
daily semblance of drill, but he knew better than to press them further than
that. At least the current wave of gold fever served to keep them within earshot
of the buglers he’d posted on these very heights.

Gold fever. It was like an illness with some of them.

Men who had risked everything to escape from their father’s fields could now
be seen burrowing into the heavy soil below, tearing at the earth without even
peasants’ tools.

Others, contrary to orders, spent their time sneaking around the corridors
and passageways that riddled the outer buildings. So far they had discovered
nothing except falling slabs or concealed pits.

“Fools,” the commander muttered, thinking of the three bodies that the dwarfs
had already recovered from within those buildings. The first two had been merely
broken, but the third had been, well, had been…

Had been
smeared,
van Delft decided, thinking of the man’s jellied
remains.

He winced at the memory and turned his attention back to the tell-tale dips
in the thick carpet of greenery before him.

No. There was no way he was going to tell the men that the city they sought
was out there, hidden beneath a grappling chaos of undergrowth and Sigmar alone
knew what else.

The commander grunted as he reached the decision. Then he frowned. On the far
horizon, the blue of the sky was disappearing beneath a vast mountain of cloud.
The edge of the dismal mass was as straight as a razor, and it was drawing nearer with the speed of a
galloping horse.

He ground his teeth and wracked his brains, trying to remember if he’d ever
seen a sky quite like this before. He didn’t like it, that was for sure. After a
life time spent beneath the choppy weather of the Old World, this hard-edged
blanket of cloud didn’t seem natural.

The brooding was ended with a sudden, sharp explosion from below. It had come
from beyond one of the outbuildings and, as the commander squinted in that
direction, a thin wisp of black smoke started to rise upwards.

The noise died away, swallowed by the jungle. In its place a chorus of ragged
cries floated up. Van Delft, his face grim, started to clamber back down the
ladder of lashed vines that led up to his high eyrie, his thoughts already
turning to what he might find below.

During their first foray into the cremetorial stench of the upper chamber
Florin had felt many things. Fear especially. But now all he felt was boredom.
The crumbling skeletons that surrounded him no longer filled him with anything
other than a sort of distant pity. Even amongst the flickering shadows of the
torchlight they were now no more menacing than stacks of broken furniture.

True, their lidless gaze sometimes seemed filled with resentment of the warm
flesh that still clothed his bones. Or perhaps it was resentment of the fact
that Kereveld had succeeded in opening the all-seeing eye of this chamber where
they had failed. But what of it? They had long since ceased to have any power in
this world, otherwise they would surely have risen up in protest when the wizard
blundered through them.

Skulls continued to roll as the wizard barged carelessly past, muttering to
himself as he squinted up at the blazing constellations above or down at the
paper upon which he scribbled his notes.

Florin watched the old man’s actions disinterestedly and arched his back
against the cold stone of the wall. Only van Delft’s order kept him there, stuck
protecting the wizard.

What a waste of time.

He yawned, despite the fact that it wasn’t even noon yet, and rolled his
shoulders. Maybe he should get in some sword practice. Lundorf had showed him a
new trick yesterday, a way of trapping an opponent’s thumb beneath the guard…

He pressed his hands against the wall to push himself off, then stopped
suddenly. His expression frozen, he slowly began to slide his fingers through
the pale ash which covered the stone behind him. It was dry and greasy, and he
could feel rolls of it filling the spaces beneath his nails. Suddenly it didn’t
seem to matter that this soot was scorched bone. All that mattered were the
finely carved lines that lay beneath it.

Waiting until Kereveld had wandered to the other side of the chamber, Florin
turned and scrubbed the dirt off the wall with the palms of his hands. Beneath
it, the edges of the grooves as sharp now as on the day they’d been cut, a mass
of carved symbols were revealed.

With a quick glance over his shoulder Florin scrabbled for a torch and knelt
down in front of the script the better to read it.

At first he was disappointed. This was no writing he’d seen before. In fact,
he wasn’t even sure if it was writing at all. There were no letters here, not
even the odd little pictograms that occasionally turned up on wares from Cathay.
Instead, the ancient masons had marked the walls of their temple with a
continuous collage of pictures and images, each fitting as neatly into the next
as a brick into a wall.

Florin leaned closer, blinking back tears from the smoke of the torch, and
rubbed away more of the soot.

At least he could recognize some of the images. Despite the way that they’d
been warped and twisted to fit into neat squares and rectangles Florin could
make out snakes and spiders, and some sort of feathered lizard. These carvings
and dozens more were crammed together in a higgledy-piggledy mass through which
not a single line ran.

His brow furrowed with concentration, Florin smeared more dust away,
searching for any clue as to where the fabled treasure might lay hidden. Sweat
trickled down his face and he absent-mindedly wiped it away, leaving a grey
smear on his forehead.

“What’s that you’ve found?” a voice asked from behind him, making Florin jump
and swear. He hadn’t heard Kereveld approach.

“It’s a… hey, what’s that?”

The noise of the explosion echoed dully through the passageways of the
temple, rumbling on long after the first impact had died. Mercenary and wizard
exchanged a long, anxious glance. Then they shrugged.

“Well, Menheer Kereveld,” Florin said as the last of the echoes faded. “I
wonder if you’d be so good as to tell me what these mean?”

The two men hunched forward in the darkness, the outside world forgotten as
they pored eagerly over words that might proclaim their fortunes.

The dozen round-bladed axes gleamed as brightly as the eyes of the dwarfs who
held them. They stood in a stolid line, their backs to the darkness of the
jungle beyond. Between the line and the trees, neck deep in the smoking crater
their blast had created, their fellows toiled. Sweat glistened on their stocky
arms and barrel chests, slicking the dirt that clung to them.

It had taken almost half a barrel of the precious black powder to blow out
the two trees that had grown out of this hole, but it had been worth it. Their
root systems had clutched around the dwarfs’ find like a miser’s fingers,
pressing it down into the earth. Yet with the help of a single, carefully placed
charge, that miser’s grasp had been transformed into an open palm.

The dwarfs worked quickly as they picked it clean. Ignoring the mosquitoes
that feasted upon their pounding blood, they laboured with a sense of
disciplined effort that kept them silent even as the gaggle of humans gathered
resentfully in front of their pickets.

Despite the solid blanket of cloud that blocked the sun, occasional specks of
light flashed amongst the steaming detritus of the crater. Sometimes the glint
came from shards of splintered onyx, from jagged pieces of glazed pottery, or
from carbonised bones. When that was the case these objects were hurled
contemptuously into the jungle.

But sometimes the specks of light reflected the bright, maddening yellow of
gold. When that happened the nearest dwarf would pounce upon the twist of metal
like an owl upon a rat, his gaze becoming fevered as the object flared briefly
into life beneath the darkening sky. Then, perhaps with a shudder of self
control, he would pass the treasure to Thorgrimm, who would stow it in his
satchel.

It seemed that the heavier the satchel grew the bigger the surrounding mob of
humans became. Occasionally, a brief struggle would break out as men fought over
detritus that had been thrown clear by the blast. But for the most part the
spectators just shifted uneasily and watched their fellow mercenaries, waiting
with the same restless patience of wolves waiting for their prey to weaken.

Graznikov, careful to remain a good twelve paces away from the nearest of the
dwarf axemen, had elected himself their spokesman.

“Hey, leedle man,” he called towards the dwarfs. “Stand clear. We want look
for gold too.”

The nearest dwarf glared back at him, his only reply the shifting of his axe
from one hand to another.

Graznikov took another step back.

“You stealing from your
Tovaritches
,” he protested loudly, his voice
miserable with cheated honesty. “Better you share.”

Some of the men behind him yelled out their agreement and made an abortive
push forward. Thorgrimm looked up from the crater where his dwarfs were working
and put his hands defiantly on his hips.

“Bugger off!” he told the Kislevite. “This is our find.”

A growl of protest rose up from the men and Graznikov, to his increasing
alarm, felt himself being shoved forward towards the dwarf axes.

“You no find gold beneath,” he shouted, tearing his eyes away from the cold
steel. “Not yet. That, we want find.”

More of the men behind him added their voices to the cries of encouragement,
and pushed against Graznikov’s meaty shoulders with renewed vigour. This time he
was ready for them, though, and dug his heels into the soft earth even as
another flash of gold from the pit beyond filled them with a new energy.

“No,” Thorgrimm told him. “This is our find. We will give van Delft half, as
it says in our contract. The rest, we will keep. As it says in our contract. And
in yours.”

“Let us dig too,” Graznikov challenged him, growing braver as some of the men
jostled passed him. “You no own ground.”

One of the mob, a beefy Marienburger, could stand it no longer. He barged
forward and tried to shove past one of the dwarfs who, twisting away from his
hand, reversed his axe and struck the man’s knee with the haft.

There was a crack of steel against bone and a pained howl as the Marienburger
collapsed into the mud. From behind him his mates yelled in protest and surged
forward. One of them drew a sword, and the others followed his example so that
soon the air was sharp with cold steel.

The dwarfs had seen too much gold for steel to melt their hearts, no matter
how much or how sharp. They raised their axes to the ready position and shifted
to prepare for a charge, the centre of the line drawing back to entice the enemy
forward.

Graznikov swallowed nervously and wriggled backwards as a brief heartbeat of
silence seized the warriors. Chiming into that heartbeat with perfect timing floated a distant voice, a single word. It was a
beautiful word, a magical word. It was the only word powerful enough to stop the
violence towards which they were falling.

“Gold!” Orbrant called, his voice quivering with the effort “Goooold!”

He peered around the corner behind which Lorenzo had been doing business to
see if the call was having any effect. It was: the tight huddle of mercenaries
that had surrounded the dwarfs opened up, the men’s faces turning to the cry as
flowers turn to the sun.

Orbrant took another deep breath, filling his lungs before repeating the cry.

“Gooold! It’s Gooooold!”

The first of the men turned their backs on the scrum that surrounded the
crater. Casually, as if they were going nowhere in particular, they started
walking towards his position. Orbrant watched them impassively, waiting until
one of them began to trot, before repeating the call.

More men drifted away from the dwarfs’ claim.