01 - The Burning Shore (28 page)

“It’s a miracle,” the wizard decided as, beneath the scorching heat of the
tropical sun, the mist began to clear. The sky above was perfect.

“Help me with my notes, would you?” he asked Florin. Ignoring Lundorf s
greeting, he started to clamber up the rough hewn ladder that led to the upper
tier of the temple.

“Perhaps we should let van Delft know that you’re about to start?” Florin
suggested as Kereveld sorted through the satchel of scrolls. The two of them had
made their way to the highest tier of the main pyramid and Kereveld was still
wheezing with the effort. His mottled hands shook as he wiped moisture off the
stone before laying out his instruments, muttering to himself as he did so.

“I said,” Florin repeated to his preoccupied charge, “let’s tell van Delft
we’re about to start. Look, he’s just down there.”

The mercenary pointed to the sodden remains of their camp below, where the
commander’s foreshortened but distinctive figure was striding about. He roamed
from one quarter to the next, a spark of vital force that set the mercenaries
repairing their shelters and rebuilding the storm damaged ramparts.

“No, no, no. No time,” Kereveld muttered. He frowned distractedly, then
selected one of the parchments and, leaning against the dripping granite block
behind him, smoothed it out on his knee.

“This is it,” he said to himself. His eyes flitted down a script that was laid
out like the verse of some ancient ballad, then across to the minutely
calibrated sundial that he’d set on the stone beside him.

He looked at Florin. To the Bretonnian’s surprise there was, for the first
time since they’d met, the unmistakable pallor of fear on the wizard’s face.

“What if it doesn’t work?” the old man asked him, as though the thought had
only just occurred to him. “What if this has all been for nothing?”

“It will work,” Florin told him, as confidently as if he had any idea what he
was talking about. He patted one of Kereveld’s bony shoulders reassuringly.
“Remember during the voyage? You cast that spell against the daemon from the
mast of a rolling ship. Here it will be easy.”

“No, that wasn’t the same. With this one…” Kereveld trailed off with the
embarrassment of a man who’s found himself talking to his pet. Then he
shuddered, shaking off his doubts like a dog shaking off water, and got
purposefully to his feet.

“I’d advise you to stand back.”

So saying he slipped his robes off and flexed his fingers. The shadow of the
sundial’s needle slipped around the face, darkening one of the sigils that
marked it. With a last glance at the scroll, Kereveld began to chant.

Waist deep in muddy water, Orbrant was bent forward with his hands on his
thighs. He was gasping noisily for breath as the men above pulled away the huge,
timber-hewn caltrop he’d just wrestled back up out of the ditch.

It had been hard work. The three interlaced beams, each as long as a man was
tall, weighed almost as much as him. Strong as his god had made him, this
weight, combined with the drag of the mud that sucked so hungrily at the bundled
stakes, had left the sergeant’s muscles burning with exhaustion.

“Sure you don’t want a hand down there, sergeant?” Lorenzo asked from behind
the work party above.

“No. Just make sure that these are lashed together more strongly. If a bit of
rain was able to make such a mess of our defences, so would an… an enemy…”

The sergeant trailed off, the reddened angles of his face hardening as his
eyes became cold. Lorenzo swallowed nervously beneath this sudden anger. Then,
with a rush of relief, he realized that the warrior’s disapproval was aimed not
at him but at something behind him.

Sidling out of Orbrant’s line of sight, Lorenzo turned and followed it up
towards the top of the pyramid. There, blurred by the pale mist that rose up
from the warming stone, were two figures. One of them might or might not have
been Florin. But there was no doubt about the identity of the second man.

Even from this distance Kereveld was unmistakable. The mass of his hair
billowed above his skinny form like the flame of a match and, as his mouth
opened and closed, his arms chopped through the air in complex motions. Lorenzo
thought back to the last time he’d seen the wizard working himself into such a
fit, and frowned.

“What devilry is this?” Orbrant growled, squinting up at the wizard. His
hands were now flashing back and forth in a blur, fingers twisted into strange,
painful looking contortions.

“Maybe he’s speaking Tilean,” Lorenzo joked, but nobody was listening. Their
work forgotten they stared upwards at the wizard, still and watchful.

Only Orbrant seemed unaffected by the sudden unease which had gripped the
work party. Dripping water and mud he clambered out of the ditch and over the
bank, elbowing his way past caltrops and men until he stood between them and the
wizard. There he sank to his knees, pressed his palms together and began to
chant, lips moving as if in answer to Kereveld’s unheard incantation.

“Sigmar be my guide,” he intoned, his eyelids drooping. “Sigmar be my meat
and my drink, and my light in the darkness.”

Lorenzo glanced down at the back of Orbrant’s gleaming skull. But then one of
his comrades cried out and their attention snapped back to Kereveld.

His efforts, it appeared, were working.

To Lorenzo’s relief there was no repeat of the burning hail with which the
wizard had driven off the daemon. This time the searing material of his magic
was confined to motes that, from this distance, seemed no bigger than fireflies.
They winked into existence around the mage’s head, popping like corn in a pan as
they did so.

“Sigmar be my hammer, and the strength with which I wield it.” Orbrant’s
voice droned on, as impassive as his men were restless.

Gradually, at first so slowly that it was hardly noticeable, and then with
increasing speed, Kereveld’s creations began to grow. As they expanded, their
eye watering brightness began to dim and the solidifying shapes displayed
blotchy patterns that reminded Lorenzo of something.

“Sigmar be my shade in the heat of the day and my fire in the cold of the
night.”

The colourful spheres of Kereveld’s incantation continued to expand, the
arabesques which covered their surfaces swirling around like oil on water. Gone
were the bright seeds from which they had sprung. They were now clearly
recognisable as cousins of the orbs they had found within the temple. The largest was striped with fiery
slashes of reds and oranges, already the size of a man. Suddenly for no obvious
reason, it began to roll slowly outwards, away from the temple and towards the
jungle beyond.

Lorenzo scratched his chin thoughtfully and glanced towards the entrance of
the ruins. The dank interior had never looked so inviting, the grim blocks of
stone never so well made.

“Sigmar be the truth in my words, and the purity of my heart.” Orbrant’s
prayer continued, his words as smooth as the orbs which now rolled towards him.

By now the entire expedition was gaping upwards at the impossible
solar system that Kereveld had summoned. It drifted slowly across the clear
tropical sky, the perfectly realized contours of its alien surfaces swimming
into focus beneath the spectators’ eyes.

Magical or not, they were real, these miniature worlds, as solid as cannon
balls in the sunlight. As they silently strayed out over the mercenaries’
encampment, shadows flickered into existence beneath them, at first as
insubstantial as mist but darkening all the while.

“Sigmar be my first hope, and my last,” Orbrant said, unperturbed as his men
scattered before the approaching shadow of Charyb. It slid over him and onto the
steaming grass beyond, as plump and as slow as a Marienburg coal barge.

“Sigmar be with me in joy and despair, and show me the illusion of both.”

For a moment sunlight shone once more on the Sigmarite’s dome. Deiamol rolled
over him. Slightly smaller than its sister planet, the surface of this one was
softened by a sheath of swirling cloud.

“Sigmar be with me.”

More of Kereveld’s monstrous incantations sailed harmlessly over the praying
man, who paid them as little heed as he would high clouds on a calm day.

“Be with me,” Orbrant repeated, his voice sinking to a whisper as the very
world upon which he stood rolled overhead.

The sixth planet, a boiling mass of gas, threw no shadow as it passed.
Instead the bound flame of its surface flickered eerily on the kneeling man’s
gaunt features. Then Obscuria, its surface glittering with the first ice Lustria
had ever seen, passed overhead, and red light became blue.

A moment later, with neither sign nor fanfare, the procession of Kereveld’s
worlds halted. They hung amongst the last wisps of morning mist, as ripe as
fruit above the jungle.

The denizens of that tangled mass fell as silent as the men who had brought
this sorcery here and, for a while, the only sound to be heard was the constant
drone of insects and the whispered repetitions of Orbrant’s catechism.

“I did it!” A voice, cracked with excitement, drifted down from on high.
“Heiermat’s Last Theorem! I am a genius!”

Lorenzo watched the genius, delirious with joy, run his hands through his
sweat-soaked hair and punch the air with triumph.

“I showed them. The fools!” The wizard’s voice shattered into a peel of wild
laughter, and he started to hop up and down in a grotesque jig.

And that was when the planets fell.

It was as though gravity, realising how badly it had been cheated, had
decided to snatch them out of the air with a fit of sudden anger. It pulled them
down towards its bosom with such speed that the mercenaries barely had time to
cry out before the spheres plunged into the earth, vast round bullets aimed at
the heart of a giant.

Without even slowing, Verda crashed down through the distant canopy. There
was a great crash of splintering timber, followed by a bone-jarring thud and a
gout of steaming soil was thrown high into the air. It rained back down as
another planet stabbed into the trembling earth, and another.

Lorenzo clasped his hands to his ears, a desperate attempt to silence the
deafening cacophony of the tortured jungle and the screeching animals within. It
didn’t do him much good. The noise of the holocaust was too loud to be shut out,
and he could still feel the impacts in his joints; his old bones quaked in
sympathy with the trembling ground beneath his feet.

Even after the last of the planets had punched through the earth’s skin these
seismic shifts continued. They set Lorenzo’s teeth rattling together as hard as
the colossal stones of the temple complex and, when the pristine form of Verda
rose up and out of the ground behind the temple, Lorenzo knew why.

The disappearance of the conjured worlds hadn’t marked the end of the
wizard’s spell. It had marked its beginning. The worlds he had summoned hadn’t
gone, they were merely orbiting, mangling their way through the surface of the
world.

Seized with a sudden panic, Lorenzo turned to run, but he was too late. No
sooner had he reached the mud of the ditch when a slide of falling masonry,
ponderous blocks bouncing down from the heights like pebbles, collapsed on top
of him.

The last thing he saw before the world closed in was Orbrant. The invocation
of his god completed, he had risen from his knees, soiled robes billowing about
him like a storm cloud, and turned to face Kereveld’s sorcery.

Lorenzo had time to marvel at the placid smile that lit the warrior’s face
before, with a jarring impact, twelve tons of granite sealed him into the
ditch.

There was none of the ice he’d been promised. But there was blindness. It
took the form of a cloying grey mist through which the indistinct shapes of
other dead men moved. Their voices were harsh, the confusion of accents wracked
with a rage and with grief.

Lorenzo wondered how long it would be before the violence of their words was
translated into actions. He tried not to think about it. He could recognize one
of them as the first man he’d killed, a bandit on the road to Bordeleaux.
Another might have been the wife he’d left.

Funny, he hadn’t heard that she was dead.

With a shudder he dragged his thoughts away from the sound of the circling
daemons and concentrated on the feeling that was returning to his fingers and
toes. At least hell wasn’t as cold as the old preachers had made out.

Maybe he hadn’t led such a bad life after all. Maybe—

With a sudden flash, the blindness cleared and a hungry face lunged towards
him.

“Why are you screaming?” Florin asked. “Your purse wasn’t damaged.”

Lorenzo sat up, dried mud crackling off his face as his features twisted in
confusion.

“What happened?” he asked, blinking in the dusk. The voices he’d heard were
still as loud as crows over a corpse, and still as angry. Scrabbling up to a
sitting position, Lorenzo looked past Florin towards the howling mob.