01 - The Burning Shore (42 page)

“I say we go,” Castavelli said, breaking Florin’s chain of thought.

“No point now,” Thorgrimm shook his head and, despite the burn marks which
cascaded down the left side of his body, lit his pipe. He inhaled, his bare
cheeks bellowing out beneath the few scorched hairs that were all that remained
of his beard. It occurred to Florin that he’d never actually seen a beardless
dwarf before.

Then it occurred to him that he was staring. And that Thorgrimm was staring
back.

“Why is there no point, menheer?” he asked as he hurriedly looked away.

“Because we’ve beaten the enemy. They couldn’t stand against the expertise of
my lads’ gunnery. I didn’t even have to use my axe on them.”

“They withdrew,” Florin forced himself to correct the dwarf. “Because
Kereveld exploded and sent their monster berserk. They’ll be back, though.”

“How do you know?”

Florin was trying to think of a good enough reply when the sergeant the
Kislevites had sent interrupted.

“No matter, all this,” he said, tired of trying to follow all of these
ridiculous accents. “Me, my comrades, we go at dawn. Want gold now.”

“So do we,” Castavelli nodded his head eagerly.

“Lundorf?” Florin asked, and the Marienburger nodded.

“Yes, of course we’ll go,” he said, wincing with the pain of nodding his head.

“Good. You see then, Master Thorgrimm, that despite our respect for you, it’s
four to one. We go in the morning.”

“No.”

“What do you mean, no?”

“You can go if you want to. Me and my men will stay here.”

“Why?” Florin’s voice rose in frustration, and he lowered it. “The lizards
will return, and they’ll overcome you. There are so many of them… Why won’t
you come with us?”

For the first and the last time since Florin had known him a look of
uncertainty passed across the dwarf’s face. He reached up to stroke the frazzled
stubble which covered the square block of his jaw, and sighed.

“No, we must stay in this wilderness. For at least a year.”

Florin and Castavelli exchanged a mystified glance. Then the Tilean shrugged.

“I understand. All right, you make a good bargain for your men. How much
percentage you want to come home with us? My boys, we are very civilised, prefer
life to gold. How much you want?”

“Stop,” the Kislevite burst out, not sure if he had understood. “We all take
same gold. Contract.”

But Thorgrimm waved both their arguments away. He shifted his pipe from his
right hand to his left and felt the naked skin of his cheek. The three of his
kinfolk that the comet blast had killed had been the lucky ones. Not for them
the humiliation of… of beardlessness.

In fact, Thorgrimm was beginning to wonder if the charm that had saved them
from the fire might actually be elvish. Not that it mattered.

“You humans can go,” he said with a miserable sigh. “With our blessing. You
weren’t bad, for your kind. But my brothers and I must stay in this wilderness.
Our honour demands it.” .

“We can take your gold, yes?” The Kislevite asked eagerly, and Thorgrimm’s
hand moved in a sudden blur. There was the hum of sliced air, a flash of
mirrored steel, and his axe thumped quivering into the corner post behind the
Kislevite’s head.

“No,” the dwarf said, taking another draw on his pipe. “We’ll keep our gold.”

The meeting broke up soon after.

* * *

Mage Priest Xinthua Tzequal was content. After the unsettling events with
which the battle had been concluded he had immediately sent out runners to all
of the surrounding military outposts. Then, after a fortifying meal of tree
frogs, he had sat back and reviewed his failed plan of attack.

As he compared the projections he had made for the skirmish with the actual
reality, turning each element this way and that within the deep ocean of his
intelligence, it became clear to Xinthua whose fault the defeat had been. It had
been his.

No feelings of guilt attached themselves to the thought. Such an emotion was
as alien to his ancient soul as was pity. Instead he focused on what had caused
the errors in his calculations. As always, he decided, it boiled down to a
mismatch between the gross physical world and the model of it which he had so
carefully built up within his head.

In other words, he had underestimated the enemy, and overestimated his own
forces.

Pleased by the elegance of this lesson, Xinthua sent some of his attendants
down to the. river to find him a dessert of water snakes. Now that he had seen
where he had gone wrong, he had nothing to do but to sit back and wait for the
forces he had summoned to arrive.

As the sun set, and as the first of the defanged snakes his skinks had
brought crunched between his teeth, the first elements of the army arrived.
Xinthua sent them to rest and then, for the first time in half a century, closed
down his own mind to get a full night’s sleep.

Florin was woken at dawn by Lorenzo who, perhaps for once remembering that he
was a servant, had brought him a cup of black tea. It was good and sweet, and
Florin drank deeply before looking up at his friend.

The hot liquid slopped over the sides of the mug as he burst into a peal of
laughter.

“What’s so funny?” the smaller man demanded, drawing himself up with a series
of clinks.

“How far do you think you’ll get with that?”

“Far enough,” Lorenzo sniffed, with a metallic jingling. The fragments of
gold which he had strapped to himself clanked like armour as he turned, gleaming
queasily beneath the greasy sheen his fingers had left on them.

“It must weigh a ton,” said Florin. “And don’t forget, you’ll have to help
Lundorf.”

“Lundorf’s back with his own company. Now that the gold’s been divided,
nobody’s going to waste energy on someone else’s wounded.”

Florin slurped his tea and nodded. It was understandable. They already had
too much treasure to carry out with them. The mercenaries might be willing to
sacrifice their own wounded comrades’ weight in gold, but not somebody else’s.

“And are the men ready to set off?” Florin asked, getting stiffly to his feet
and hobbling over to pull back the thatched mat of the door. Like almost
everybody the rigors of yesterday’s battle had left him feeling as weak and
arthritic as an octogenarian.

“All ready to go,” Lorenzo nodded, following his master out into the morning
mist.

The shapes of the company were dark shadows in the whiteness before him.
Those who weren’t ready with crudely built stretchers were stooped and
hunchbacked, their gargoyle forms bent beneath the weight of their treasure.
With the stench of rotting flesh that hung in the air, and the buzzing of the
flies, it could well have been a scene from purgatory.

There was a sudden, savage cry from the left, and for a moment Florin jumped.
Then he realized that it was just a mule, its distress quickly soothed by
somebody with a Bretonnian accent. Florin frowned.

“Does Thorgrimm know we’ve got one of his mules?” He asked Lorenzo
suspiciously.

“Yes, of course he does,” Lorenzo said hurriedly. “Shall we get a move on?
The Tileans left half an hour ago.”

“In a moment. First of all, I want to find Orbrant and do a head count. Make
sure we’ve got everyone. Would you go and tell Thorgrimm we’re off, by the way.
And thank him for the mules.”

“About that…” Lorenzo began, and licked his lips. “The thing is, I knew that
you wouldn’t want us to steal from the dwarfs. So we bought the mules from him.”

“Good idea,” Florin agreed. “They’re worth all the gold we couldn’t carry.”

“We didn’t pay with gold,” Lorenzo said, starting off into the mist.

“What did you pay with, then?” Florin called after him.

“Gunpowder.”

“What!”

But Lorenzo, hidden by the billows of rolling fog, didn’t appear to hear him.
Neither did he care to return until Florin and Orbrant were in the midst of
counting off the remains of the company, the pitiful few survivors filing past
them and into the first inklings of the rising sun.

There were eleven walking men, in all, not counting Orbrant. They carried
with them five of their comrades whose injuries were too great for them to walk,
and the two mules, one of which helped to drag another survivor along behind it.

Despite the fact that they were rich men they walked with the lowered heads
of destitutes, dragging their feet like dockside beggars. Even Orbrant seemed
subdued. He had taken the lead with the grim tread of a chief mourner at a
funeral. He’d sheathed his warhammer, the gromril of its head as useless as the
gold which weighed down the company, as they hacked a path through the
undergrowth.

It was almost noon by the time they’d climbed, struggling and slipping, to
the clearing which overlooked the pyramids. Some of the men, staggering by now
under their loads, begged for a stop. But Florin, the certainty that the
lizardmen were in pursuit combining with the fleeting memory of his capture in
this place, refused.

They pushed on, some taking a single backwards glance at the temples. They
looked as stark and alien now as they had on the first day they’d seen them.
Despite the mercenaries’ efforts they seemed untouched by their scraping
excavations, unsullied by the litter of rotting bodies they’d left behind.

To Florin, they looked triumphant. He spat in their direction, then followed
the last of his men into the jungle beyond, kicking aside a golden goblet one of
them had dropped in the path.

Thorgrimm and the remaining dwarfs breakfasted well that morning. After the
last of the humans had gone they had built a huge fire pit and burned the
remains of their shacks. When the flames had died down into red glowing embers
they’d strode amongst the bloody harvest of the enemy, hacking off great steaks
of lizard meat to throw upon the sizzling coals.

The blackened steaks were as tough as leather but as succulent as chicken,
especially when washed down with wine the Tileans had left. Thorgrimm watched
his brothers as they gorged themselves on lizard meat, trying not to stare at
the nakedness of their faces as they tried not to stare at his. Grease ran down
their uninsulated chins, an obscene sensation that had them constantly dabbing at their faces with strips
of cloth.

After the meal, the hot breeze cool on their chins, they took the armour
they’d gathered along with the meat and began to build a forge. None of them
mentioned what it was they were doing, or why. They didn’t need to. It was clear
to all of them what needed to be done.

.The waning sun combined with the heat of the forge to slick their bodies
with sweat as they worked, so that, to the watchers in the trees, their pale
bodies gleamed like the cogs of a well oiled machine. An anvil was hacked out of
a fallen granite boulder, a trough dug out and filled with water, golden bowls
emptied and cleaned to be used as alloy vats.

A few hours later Thorgrimm tried out the first example of their rough,
battlefield craftsmanship.

It was perfect. The chief smith had fastened a simple hinge to either side of
his helmet and, attached to that hinge, a long, beard-shaped faceplate. As yet
there was no decoration on it, none of the scrolling steel curls which each
dwarf had imagined, but that didn’t matter. Elegance was the last thing anybody
needed in such a prosthetic.

Thorgrimm’s eyes gleamed with a flinty satisfaction above the top of his new
beard, and he nodded his approval. The production line immediately went into
operation, work continuing even when the scurrying and crashing in the
surrounding jungle became too much to ignore. In a rush of activity the last
dwarf was handed his modified helmet, and, even as he crammed its burning weight
onto his head, the tree-line split asunder beneath the juggernaut of the
enemy.

They caught up with the Tileans at the river where they’d first seen the
skinks.

“Hey, you there,” Florin cried out as the last of them splashed across to the
far bank.

“What do you want?” the mercenary, red-faced and grimacing beneath the weight
of a golden statue, growled.

“How about some creamed ice?” Lorenzo sniped, but the Bretonnians were too
exhausted to laugh at his wit.

“Where’s your captain?” Florin asked the Tilean, who was ploughing on into
the jungle beyond.

“Ahead.”

“How far?”

The Tilean shrugged, the effort of hunching his shoulders beneath the weight
of his loot bringing a wince of pain to his face.

Florin decided to leave him in peace, and contented himself with following
silently in the man’s footsteps. The elephant grass that lined this track had
already started to grow back, the new shoots fresh and green. Hidden amongst
them, ready to turn treacherously underfoot, were abandoned pieces of gold. Orbs
and cups and bundles of twisted wire, each of them worth a fortune back in the
Old World, had been left to sink back into the earth’s soft embrace.

Florin was tempted to stoop and take at least one of them, but the leather
stitching of the satchel he carried was already squeaking beneath the weight of
the golden ingots he’d taken. There were a hundred of them, each as long as a
man’s thumb, covered in the same blocky hieroglyphs that he’d seen in the
temple.

He was looking at a piece of jagged shrapnel which stuck out of the tree
ahead like a sign post, the metal already orange with rust, when he stumbled
forward over another object. Steadying himself, he turned and kicked the
offending object and was surprised to hear, instead of the clink of gold, the
dull thud of leather. A water bottle, perhaps, or a wine skin.

“All right boss?” one of his men said as he filed past.

“Yes, fine thanks,” Florin said, and stooped to find the object he’d just
kicked. In fact it wasn’t a canteen of either water or wine, but Kereveld’s
book.