01 - The Burning Shore (41 page)

What could such a beast have to fear? Certainly not them. The great armoured
plate that covered its lowered skull bore three great tusks, each as sharp as a
stake and as long as a man. It had a sharp-looking beak of a muzzle as well, a
great jagged mantrap of bone that snapped threateningly open and closed as the
beast drew nearer. It was more than a match for any man.

Nay, van Delft corrected himself. Not any man. Any regiment.

No wonder the skinks scattered at its approach, abandoning their attack to
turn and flee despite the vengeful blades of the Marienburgers. No wonder
either that the Marienburgers, when they saw the avalanche of armoured rage that
was bearing down on them, fled in turn, dropping helmets and weapons in their
panic.

“Damn,” Kereveld said again as the monster crashed through the remnants of
the eastern barricade. Van Delft, an anaesthetising wave of euphoria washing
through him now that he knew that the end was drawing near, turned and looked at
the wizard. He was sitting on the stonework of the pyramid, pale and shaking
beneath a sheen of sweat, with his thumbs pressed into his temples.

“Cheer up, old man,” van Delft told him with a wild grin. “Sigmar loves those
who die against a mighty foe.”

He waved towards the stampeding tonnage of the reptile below them. It
staggered from side to side, trampling fleeing Marienburgers underfoot even as
its handlers drove it towards the back of the Bretonnian line.

But Kereveld wasn’t looking down. He was looking up.

Van Delft followed his gaze as the comet filled the sky above.

It was the last thing he saw. The white hot intensity of the falling star was
enough to melt his irises, fusing flesh to bone in a smeared deathmask.
Mercifully the heat boiled his brains as it tortured his flesh, blotting out any
pain he might have felt before it annihilated him completely.

Hotza was of a breed that disliked blood even more than it disliked noise. Or
pain. Or anything, in fact apart from wallowing in cool mud and eating. The
sharp beak of her mouth wasn’t designed to crunch bodies, it was designed to
crunch through roots. Nor were the three curving horns that jutted from the
thickness of her skull meant for anything more than protection.

But what nature had created, the lizardmen had tried to perfect. Hotza had
been trained from the egg to associate tasty fibres and roots with the scent of
blood and the noise of war gongs. She’d also been trained to obey the goads of her skink masters, the tiny controllers
that swarmed across her back like fleas on a boar.

The training had been a terrible experience for a young stegadon, a nightmare
of fire and pain and sudden, savage nips. The memory of it had sunk into her
tiny mind like diamonds through mud so that now, when she felt the lightest prod
from one of the skinks’ goads, she responded, drawn by the chains of
conditioning that were stronger than iron.

Yes, the lizardmen had spent long, patient years turning her into the great
war beast that was now smashing through their enemy’s line. And every second of
her training had been done with a single aim in mind—the subjugation of
instinct to discipline.

It had been an enormous effort.

And, in one second of blinding light, it was gone, the countless hours of
training vanished beneath a floodtide of terrified instinct. As the comet struck
the top of the temple, blinding her and filling her nose with the scent of
unnatural death, Hotza went berserk.

The skinks clung to her as, bellowing in terror, she stampeded away from the
sorcerous fire, charging through the scattering Bretonnians and into the
tightly packed saurus warriors that now stood between her and the jungle.

They stood in ranks, packed too tightly to flee or even to dodge as she
trampled over them. Her pounding feet crushed their armoured skulls as easily as
snail shells, splintered their bones, and pressed their broken bodies deep into
the graves of her footprints.

One of the skinks jabbed at her desperately, aiming for a pressure point
beneath the plate of her helmet. It missed, piercing the wrong nerve ganglion
with the needle point of its goad. Hotza screamed in agony and raced forward
through the remainder of the saurus warriors, brushing their bodies aside like
elephant grass and fleeing for the shaded sanctuary of the jungle.

Xinthua Tzequal had enjoyed wresting the human’s incantation from his feeble
grasp. It had been an act of simple artistry which he had found deeply
satisfying, so much so that he was committing every detail to memory, closing
his heavy eyelids to replay the event before it faded.

It wasn’t until he opened them again that he realised that something was
happening on the battlefield.

At first he assumed that it was the final victory. It had been only a matter
of time before the mammals’ frail defences had cracked like an eggshell between his teeth. Then he looked again, and all thoughts of
elegant victory slipped from his mind. Even as he watched, the rampaging
monstrosity of Scythera’s stegadon smashed its way through to the rear of the
saurus warriors, rolling over them in an avalanche of scale and bone and sheer,
unstoppable power.

Xinthua blinked uneasily as the monster broke through the final rank of
saurus. Trampling the last of them underfoot it let out a rumbling, bone-shaking
roar and fled towards the tree-line.

Towards Xinthua Tzequal himself.

The mage priest calculated what the result of the maddened creature’s
trajectory would be and blinked again.

“Bearers,” he decided as Hotza’s approaching silhouette grew against the sky.
“Run away.”

They didn’t need to be told twice. Before the last syllable had left their
master’s mouth they had turned and raced into the jungle, desperately weaving
amongst the tree stumps as Hotza smashed into the undergrowth behind them.

Xinthua Tzeqal’s messenger skinks fled too, scurrying off to every corner of
the battlefield with their master’s last order.

Within minutes, every lizardman that could had left the clearing. Not long
after that the first of the vultures that had been circling overhead descended,
ready to start their feast.

As the mage priest had predicted, the battle had lasted for no more than an
hour.

“Captain.”

The voice rolled over Florin. He was sitting on the remains of the parapet,
gazing sightlessly at the crushed bodies that lay beyond. One hand still gripped
the hilt of his chipped and notched sword, the sticky blade already swarming
with flies. The other lay trembling in his lap.

“Captain,” Orbrant said again, his gentle persistence bringing a flicker of
recognition to Florin’s eyes.

“Captain, we have to make provision for the wounded.”

“Yes,” Florin said, blinking around him as if surprised by the carnage
amongst which he sat. The bodies of his men littered the ground in a bloody
harvest, their corpses twisted into grotesque poses. Clouds of fat bluebottles
were already landing upon them, and, even as he watched, a vulture flapped
slowly down. It danced around whilst it folded its wings, then stooped to pluck
an eyeball from one of the fallen. There was a squelch as it swallowed the
titbit. The small sound was enough to galvanize Florin.

The ashes of his fighting rage stirred faintly and he lurched to his feet,
flexing his sword arm and stalking towards the carrion eater. The vulture saw
him coming and, with an alarmed squawk, began to unfold the complicated width of
its wings.

It was too late. With a single, backhanded sword stroke Florin sent its head
spinning from its scrawny neck. He kicked its body for good measure, then straightened his back, brushed the bloody tangle of
hair away from his forehead, and looked around him.

Amongst the dead lay the wounded. They screamed or sobbed or called out,
their accents mingling into a single, international cry of pain. Their
companions stood by them, or at least by some of them. Others had been left to
bleed or to die alone, their comrades lost in the same fog of exhausted shock
from which Orbrant had pulled Florin.

“Right then,” Florin croaked, waving his hands in a helpless gesture of
encouragement. Nobody paid him any heed.

Get it together, Florin told himself. Take control. You are their captain,
their leader. Do your job.

He took a deep, shuddering breath, held it for a moment, and then stabbed his
battered sword down into the ground.

“Right then,” he started again, this time his voice firm with a grim
determination. “Sergeant Orbrant, take every man who isn’t wounded and pair him
with one who is. From now until we get back to the ships, every one of the whole
will be personally responsible for one of the injured.”

“Yes, sir,” Orbrant snapped a salute, the gesture as neatly executed within
this bloody chaos as if it were a parade ground. “And what are your orders for
the water carriers, sir?”

“Water?”

“After a battle men are always thirsty. It’s as well to give them water,
especially as we have no wine.”

“Yes, of course. All right, you get on with forming up the pairs, I’ll
organise the water.”

“Yes, sir,” Orbrant saluted again, and Florin, realising how comforting that
sign of normality was, snapped a salute back.

“Made it through, then boss?” Lorenzo’s voice made the gesture seem
ridiculous, and Florin dropped his fist as he turned, a tired smile lifting his
bloodstained face.

“More or less. It’s going to be one hell of a laundry bill when we get back.”

Lorenzo, for once, seemed to be lost for words. Then he rallied. “The
butcher’s bill looks a lot higher.”

“Yes,” Florin agreed, taking another look at the massacre amongst which they
stood. What a victory, he thought bitterly. I’ll be damned if I ever play this
game again. The decision made, he shook himself back into action.

“Well, I haven’t got time to stand around here all day chatting,” he said.
“And neither have you. Come on, we’ve got to find men and buckets and start
passing water around.”

They gathered a handful of men on their way to the cooking tents, bullying
them down to the stream with the company’s palm leaf buckets whilst others lit
the fires beneath the cauldrons.

Florin’s detail worked mechanically, taking empty pails down to the stream,
then back to the boiling sterility of the cauldron, then from the cauldron to
their comrades, then from their comrades back to the stream.

It was hard, mind-numbing work, which was good. Anything was better than
sitting and contemplating the ruin of their companies. Many of those ragged
regiments had formed little worlds within which the men had lived for decades,
the nearest thing to a family a mercenary could get.

The sun was sinking mercifully into the west, bringing an end to this hideous
day, when Florin and Lorenzo found Lundorf.

“Avoiding all the hard work, I see,” Lorenzo said as he dragged the last
scaly corpse off the officer. “Typical aristo.”

Lundorf scowled as he struggled to sit up, his clothes so soaked with the
blood of the slain saurus that they squelched when he moved.

“Hold your tongue, peasant,” he snapped and started to say something else,
but the effort was too much for him. Eyes rolling back upwards, Lundorf
collapsed back down into unconsciousness.

“Why did you have to say that to him?” Florin scolded Lorenzo, who remained
unrepentant.

“You weren’t so delicate,” he defended himself. “Anyway, if it hadn’t been
for me we’d never have found him.”

Florin sighed and knelt beside his old friend, rolling him over to see where
he was wounded. There was a bone-deep cut along the side of his ribcage, but it
seemed to have already clotted, thank Shallya. There was also a bruise as big as
half an apple on the back of his skull, although Florin doubted that that would
do much harm to a Marienburger.

“He’ll live,” he decided, his surge of relief giving him an idea. “Although
we’ll need to find him a minder until we get back to the ships. Lorenzo…”

“What?”

“You’re it.”

Keeping the smile firmly off his face as his servant’s protests degenerated
into muttered curses Florin turned and left. It had gradually dawned on him
that, with the Colonel dead, there was nobody to give the decision to leave.

Well, he’d soon see about that.

Compared to the council of war they’d held the previous day, tonight’s was a
depressing affair. The Colonel was dead, his body vanished. So was Kereveld.
Lundorf, bandaged and propped up against one of the chests of gold, slipped in
and out of consciousness. And Graznikov…

Well, nobody knew where he was. Graznikov had disappeared.

Nobody had seen him leave, nor had any sign of his body been found. The only
clue to his fate had been when they’d come to the Colonel’s old tent and found
the pile of treasure disturbed, although even Florin had to admit that that
could have been done by anybody.