01 - The Burning Shore (45 page)

There was a cry of alarm from behind him, the call suddenly cut off by the
hiss of the cold water which closed in over his head. The momentum of his fall
sent him plunging down into the silty depths, spinning him around until, even
when he opened his stinging eyes against the murky salt water, he had no sense
of up or down..

Another man might have panicked. Tumbling down through a drowning void of
blinding water, the hiss of his own blood whispering terrible rumours of
suffocation in his ears, another man might have lashed out blindly, muscles
burning the last of his oxygen as he pulled blindly through the murk.

Not Graznikov though. For all of his faults he was a Kislevite, and Kislevite
blood is strong. If he was a coward that was a matter of choice rather than
instinct.

With a discipline forged by his inbred survivor instinct he forced himself to
wait, floating as limply as a corpse through the bubbles and currents that would
soon send him bobbing up towards the surface.

He waited for a few seconds more.

Any minute now, he told himself, I’ll float back towards the surface. My
boots are full of air, my body is lighter than water, my clothes…

Then he remembered the bag that he’d strapped around his shoulders, and the
gold that it contained.

A whimper of panic sent a mouthful of precious air twinkling up towards the
surface as he sank further down. He fumbled at the straps of the satchel,
tugging at them uselessly. They seemed to have become tangled in his shirt.

Eyes wide against the stinging salt water Graznikov sank further, water
pressure starting to squeeze at his temples, black spots of oxygen starvation
whirling through the silt that clouded his vision.

Now he was pulling at the hem of his shirt, trying to squirm out of the whole
murderous tangle of cloth and leather and useless gold. It was no good. The
burning in his lungs began to fade and his panic slipped away.

Death, it seemed, was at least comfortable.

But then he felt his rescuers’ hands upon him. Some seized his shoulders in
an iron-hard grip. Others grasped his ankles or his wrists, their bodies
churning the water around him as they pulled him back up towards the surface.

Graznikov felt the pressure receding as they ploughed upwards, and sunlight
began to glow through the muddied water. A moment later, just as the garrotte of
suffocation was about to snuff out his breath for good, Graznikov felt his head
thrust back out of the sea and into the air above.

He sucked in great, gulping mouthfuls of air, pain flooding through his head
as the numbness of drowning faded. A wave punched into his face, forcing water
into his open mouth. He vomited it back up before gasping down another delicious
lungful of air.

His rescuers, seeing his plight, lifted him higher above the surface, their
fingers pinching into his flesh. But Graznikov didn’t mind. The pain felt good.
It meant that he was alive.

He turned to thank the nearest of his rescuers. It looked back
expressionlessly with cold, alien eyes. As the ships fell behind him, and as the
Lustrian coast drew nearer, Graznikov began to scream.

It had been well worth the Inconvenience of the journey. Not only had it
afforded him with the opportunity to hone his tactical skills but, more
importantly, he had gained personal experience of a whole new race.

Yes, Xinthua Tzequal considered his decision to investigate this small matter
to have been a wise one. These sea folk, or coastal apes as he’d decided to
rename them, were fascinating animals. So fascinating, in fact, that he was
contemplating subjecting their humble species to his full attention for the next
few decades.

It was a shame that battlefield necessity had compelled him to kill their
shaman, but that was only a short term setback. Already, his skinks had been
dispatched, scurrying northwards to the small colony of the creatures that clung
so tenuously to the coast. When they returned, their captives would provide
months of interest.

The mage let this thought spin lazily through his mind. His eyelids lowered
contentedly as it vanished into the stillness of his consciousness, leaving
behind it a void, a blank immensity of pure, unsullied awareness in which he
bathed like a chameleon in sunlight.

The novel sound of sobbing brought him back from that blissful emptiness.
Xinthua swallowed and blinked, the myriad lenses of his eyes adjusting to the
failing evening light. The skinks, it seemed, had found a survivor after all in the coastal waters. They had shackled the
noisy creature to the palanquin which had held their previous captive, and the
mage priest watched with interest as it tested its paltry strength against the
solid gold of its chains.

Xinthua hummed with pleasure.

“Your success pleases me,” he told the first-spawned, sending the skink’s
crest rising into a vermilion fin of delight. “Now bring the dissecting tools. I
wish to examine this specimen fully.”

Far above, the red ball of the sun disappeared over the tangled horizon of
the jungle. The azure heights of the sky faded to the sheer black of the
universe beyond, the stars glittering with an icy splendour that cared nothing
for the pain of the world below.

Night drew on and the stars grew brighter. They lit the steaming depths of
Lustria’s interior with a pale luminescence, turning her swirling mists into
blinding fogs. They burnished the waves that battered against her shores,
setting their crests alight with a white fire that was fierce enough to match
their rolling thunder.

And, out in the black expanse of the midnight ocean, they glowed upon the
stained sails of three fleeing ships. They billowed and snapped gleefully, the
canvas as fat with wind as the ships’ bellies were with gold.

In the crow’s nest Florin shivered, and sniffed happily at the clean salt
tang of the air. Around him the rigging sang, humming a discordant lullaby in
the darkness.

Or perhaps, he considered, as he lay back and wriggled his toes, it was
trying to warn him of dangers to come. It was all the same to the Bretonnian.
After all, whatever lay ahead couldn’t possibly be any worse than the living
nightmares which thrived within Lustria’s dark heart. Nothing could be that bad.

Nothing at all.

The thought brought an easy smile to his face and he stretched, and sighed.
Then he wrapped the ragged remains of his cloak around him and drifted off into
a deep, dreamless sleep.

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