01 - The Burning Shore (40 page)

Before it could turn on him once more Florin snatched the eating knife from
his belt and, ignoring the certainty that he should have started running,
pounced forward to stab it into the joint behind the lizard’s knee. The little
steel blade punched through skin and into a knot of gristle and cartilage he
found there.

Florin twisted.

This time it was the saurus that fell back, and Florin followed him. Using
the heavy scales that armoured the creature’s head he pulled it to one side,
then plunged his knife through the serpentine eye and into the brain beneath.

The fallen lizard thrashed like a landed fish as it died, the creature’s
flailing claws holding its brethren back for the second Florin needed to jump
clear.

Suddenly from behind, he felt an impact on his shoulder. He turned, knife at
the ready, and met Lundorf’s white smile.

“Take it,” the Marienburger told him, throwing him a sheathed sword. “Looks
like you’ll be needing it!”

“Thanks,” Florin laughed, a little hysterically. “After you.”

Losing no more time in banter Lundorf winked, turned, and led his men into
the Bretonnians’ line.

A moment later the Tileans appeared, pikes held at hip height as they charged
into the saurus beneath a hail of dwarf fire.

It was a great effort. A heroic effort. But as all mercenaries know, heroic
efforts never end well. Inch by inch and corpse by corpse, van Delft’s little
army was being pushed back towards oblivion by the unstoppable weight of the
jungle’s true masters.

Xinthua Tzequal lolled on the comfort of his palanquin, eyes half closed as
he listened to the reports of the battle unfolding. The plan he had decided upon
was working with the blunt elegance of all mindlessly simple things, yet still
he derived a certain satisfaction from it. Success, after all, was success.

The skinks had first washed around the humans’ defences, wearing them away as
they surged and probed, drawing them to their barriers and trapping them there
like wasps in amber. Then, when they had found the weakest point, Xinthua had unleashed the saurus warriors.
The combination of his delicate appreciation of space and time with the brute
force of the warriors was proving to be the decisive manoeuvre.

Even now, he had just learned, the saurus were smashing their way through the
mammals. Their desperation had made the warmbloods fight with a surprising
courage, but it was not a trait Xinthua admired. In his world there existed only
force and mass, and the purity of calculation. Everything else was a
distraction.

Nor would their courage do them any good. The constant relay of skink runners
all told the same story. The skinks were holding the warmbloods to their
ridiculously overextended positions whilst the saurus, as wisely careless of
their own expendable lives as they were of the enemy’s, ground their way through
to the heart of the mammals’ position.

It was as good as over, Xinthua thought with a sigh. Lowering his eyelids
further he dismissed the fighting from his mind and sent the focus of his
intellect in pursuance of some newly conceived geometries that had just
fluttered into his consciousness. In the clearing around him his entourage
remained standing and alert, the blank perfection of their eyes searching the
surrounding jungle for any sign of danger.

Another skink came up and threw itself into the dirt in front of the mage,
its sides bellowing in and out in near terminal exhaustion. For a moment Xinthua
considered dismissing its report until later. He had more important things to
think about than pest control. It was only a sense of duty that persuaded him to
turn his eyes upon the lowly messenger and gesture for it to speak.

“I bear a report, my liege,” it said, its chirruping voice uneven from its
panting breath. It had obviously run here much faster than its brethren. Perhaps
a stronger strain that the usual, Xinthua considered.

“Speak,” the mage said lazily.

“The humans are employing magic, my liege,” it said. “Scar-Leader Xutzpa begs
that you come to bear witness.”

For a second Xinthua froze, his calculations whirling into a fresh set of
combinations. He had begun to suppose that human sorcery had been either a
figment of his captive’s deranged thought processes, or perhaps the subject of
some anomaly. It wouldn’t be the first time that the power of the ancients
had momentarily manifested itself through one of the lesser races, much as the
power of the skies sometimes struck skinks with bolts of lightning.

It seemed not, though. It seemed that these primitive mammals did have some
small understanding of their own.

Fascinating.

“Messenger, lead my entourage to the field of battle. I want to see this
sorcery for myself. Oh, and send another runner to Scar-Leader Scythera. Tell
him that it’s time to commit the final element of the attack. We will now end
the battle.”

Despite the men that he’d thrown into the Bretonnian line van Delft knew that
it was doomed. The ferocious lizard hordes were chewing through his forces like
rats through leather, making a bright red carpet of their corpses. The Colonel
could almost smell the animal instinct to flee rising off his surviving forces
and, loosening his sword in its sheath, prepared to stiffen their resolve with
his presence. Better to face death together than alone.

He was about to hand the last shreds of his command to Thorgrimm, a final
act of responsibility before he rushed through the doors of the enemy’s fangs
and into the paradise that lay beyond, when something stopped him.

Most men wouldn’t have noticed it. Between the clash of battle that roared
without and the fearful pounding of their own hearts within, most men would have
been incapable of noticing such a small thing. But van Delft, whose long and
violent life had taught him the art of constant awareness, did.

It was his shadow that caught his eye. At first it seemed normal enough, the
distorted shade having the right amount of limbs and heads. The only thing wrong
was that it wasn’t the only one.

His forehead furrowed in puzzlement as he watched the second shadow flicker
and grow, prowling around him as if he were a sundial in a speeded up world.

Then he heard the sound, the constant hiss of boiling moisture. Looking up in
sudden alarm, half expecting to see a rain of snakes, the Colonel squinted at
the star that was tumbling down from the skies above. The eye-wateringly bright
mass of it was followed by a white trail of steam, the condensation marking its
path across the blue sky like a snail’s trail.

“Kereveld,” the Colonel told himself, and glanced across at the wizard. His
eyes were still half closed, his hands and lips still moving in incantation. The Colonel resisted the temptation to ask him what was going
on. Instead he turned back to watch the comet tumbling downwards, feeling a
gambler’s rush of adrenaline as it fell screaming towards the combat below.

As it dropped through the last few hundred feet the back ranks of both sides
paused, craning their necks to stare up at the white hot inferno as it yawed
towards first one side and then another.

A second later it impacted onto the earth. With a blinding flare of magical
energy the comet punched into the ground, crushing a great swathe of figures
beneath the holocaust of its own destruction and flinging their shattered bodies
high into the air to rain down in a gory hail.

Xinthua Tzeqal was quite impressed. To summon a comet was a simple enough
spell, true. It was also as easy to dispel as it was to pop a mudfish’s bladder.
This one had been well controlled, though, landing almost entirely on the saurus
warriors that beset the mammals.

Xinthua spent a moment contemplating the shattered remains of those that it
had caught, unconcerned by their fate. There were still more than enough of
their brethren to do the job in hand, and replacements were easily spawned.

He looked up then, the complex symmetries of his great golden eyes
readjusting to peer at the tiny group of humans that stood atop the pyramid. One
of them had a glow about him, an aura that identified him as a magic user.

For a moment Xinthua considered having the animal captured alive. It would be
interesting to unravel the strange twists of its tiny mind, to see what scraps
of anomalous knowledge lay trapped within.

But no. He had a duty to preserve his forces, and already he could feel the
beginnings of another comet overhead. Leaning back in his chair he changed his
focus, letting the physical world dissolve into a blur of murky colours whilst,
high overhead, the winds of magic became clear and sharply defined.

With an effort the mage tore himself away from the contemplation of their
beauty and began to search for the comet.

Ah, there it was. Just blossoming in the troposphere.

The mage let the second comet grow into full life and begin to descend before
he reached out to take it. Gently he exerted his will on the incantation,
wresting the fireball from the human’s grasp with barely a struggle.

* * *

Scar-Leader Scythera had wanted to send in Hotza at the very beginning of the
battle. He had seen enough of the puny foe they faced to rest assured in his
contempt for them. The first one he’d experienced had disintegrated beneath his
claws as he’d torn it apart the better to sample its soft flesh. A single charge
from Hotza would, he was sure, have broken open their formation as neatly as
he’d broken open their bones to reveal the succulent marrow inside.

Yes, he had wanted to send in Hotza, but then Mage Priest Xinthua Tzequal had
told him to wait and the wanting had stopped. Until, that was, the skink runner
had brought mage’s latest order. The order that now was the time to unleash the
wild strength that he had spent so long in disciplining.

Scythera’s blood began to race as he strode over to Hotza, letting the warm
steam of her breath condense upon his scales. He felt it trickling down between
them like morning dew as he bent to remove a tick from one of her legs. Only
then did he look up to the skink handlers that waited perched on top of her and
give them their orders.

With an excited chittering the lesser brethren scrambled to their positions
and, with a dozen carefully placed prods, set Hotza lumbering forward. The
ground trembled beneath her feet as, with slow, steady deliberation she started
off.

The scar-leader and his guard followed in her wake, their going made easy by
the creature’s passage. With never a pause, she smashed a path through thickets
of small trees and overarching vines, trampling the undergrowth beneath the
great crushing pads of her feet into a scratch built road.

Such effortless destruction, Scythera thought, and felt his mouth water with
pleasure. Such careless power.

His blood pounded with anticipation as he considered what would happen when
they reached the humans. With an impatient bark, he bid the skinks to move her
along faster. Once more they wielded their long, sharpened poles, and this time,
with a low rumble of protest, Hotza broke into a heavy, lumbering run that set
the earth trembling.

The warriors had to run to keep up with her. Leaping over the smashed
detritus of her passage and dodging the splintered trunks she left behind they
raced along, their breathing becoming deep and heavy. They were gasping for air,
when, with a final cacophony of smashed wood, Hotza broke into the clearing.

She paused as she saw the ruins, and the bloodstained ground around them.
Lifting the great beak of her nose she snuffled uncertainly at the coppery tang
of blood and the rich smell of scorched flesh that hung in the humid air. The
scar-leader, panting after the sprint through the jungle, came to stand beside
her.

He too sniffed the air, letting the glorious smells of battle soak through
his sinuses as he watched the confusion of violence which was unfolding before
him.

They had emerged on the eastern side of the clearing, as arranged. The
nearest group of humans was hidden from them by a swarm of bloodied and battered
skinks. Meanwhile, to the right of the minor temple which marked the end of that
flank, he could see his brother saurus grinding forward in a single great
phalanx, its ranks snaking away towards a distant tree-line.

It was a glorious sight, despite the fact that so many of them had been torn
into steaming corpses by some foul magic.

The scar-leader, every synapse humming with the pleasure of instinct
satisfied, prepared to hurl Hotza into the battle. He’d use her unstoppable
strength to smash through the eastern side of the humans’ pitiful defences and
then, cutting up like a knife beneath a ribcage, he’d throw her into the back of
the remainder who were still struggling with his brethren.

Hotza shifted uneasily beside him, and it was easy for the scar-leader to
confuse her unease with anticipation. It goaded him into action and, with a last
admiring glance at her huge, armoured bulk, he stood back and gave her skink
riders the order to charge.

At first she seemed hesitant, but the skinks had trained her well. With a
series of carefully timed jabs and pokes with their herding sticks they squared
her up to the battle line and, with a final jab at her rear, sent her rumbling
forward. The ground shaking beneath her feet she lowered the three great horns
that sprouted from the armoured plate of her head and bellowed miserably.

“Damn,” Kereveld said, his voice low with disappointment. Van Delft, who was
watching the mountainous beast that had just burst out of the jungle, admired
his understatement.

“Damn indeed,” he said, looking at the monster. Bigger than his town house
back in Marienburg, and as well armoured as a steam tank, it came lumbering
towards them with a series of bloodcurdling howls and roars that sounded
incongruously fearful.