CHAPTER FOURTEEN

 

 

Florin’s eyes fluttered open briefly, then squeezed tightly shut against the painful brightness.

It didn’t help. As soon as his lids were closed a kaleidoscope of exploding stars replaced the ice pick of daylight, the wheeling confusion racking his trembling body with a sudden nausea.

Ignoring the splash of the water in which he’d been slumped, Florin lurched forward, his stomach clenching as the acid rush of vomit burst from his throat.

I’ll never drink again, he promised himself desperately. Not even socially.

Heaving up the last contents of his stomach, Florin tried to roll away from the mess, tried to curl up into a ball and slip once more into unconsciousness. But he couldn’t.

Reluctantly, he felt himself becoming fully awake. It wasn’t very pleasant. Apart from the spike that felt as if it had been driven into his head, and the rolling nausea, there were other discomforts.

The burning pain in his hands and wrists, for example.

Squinting as hard he tipped his head back and examined the knotted vine that bound his wrists together. They had been tied above him, clasped tight together above an iron-hard length of bamboo from which he dangled, like a slaughtered pig ready to be gutted.

Suddenly, Florin found himself wondering if this was just a hangover. However, even as he wondered, an image flashed through his fuddled thoughts, an image of a tiny dart and an unconscious man.

He pulled tentatively against his bonds, and a thousand shards of pain burst into life beneath the swollen flesh of his hands, pins and needles.

With another queasy lurch of his stomach Florin pushed the image away and looked around him blearily He realized that the bamboo pole upon which he had been hung was one of many—a tight grid which chequered the sky above.

The realisation that he was in some sort of cage hit him and he groaned with fresh misery.

What made it even worse was that this was like no kind of cage he had seen before. There wasn’t a single piece of iron in its construction, nor of stone, nor of planed wood. Instead there was a vast, complicatedly woven mass of bamboo stalks and braided creepers, their lengths studded with thorns as sharp as a serpent’s teeth. These materials, still green with life, had been woven around him in something akin to a vast basket, the lower half of which disappeared into the torpid depths of a river pool.

Florin blinked away the last of the crusted tears that had blurred his vision and looked down at the tepid water that flowed sluggishly past his chest. It occurred to him that being strung up like this had probably saved his life. One drunken lungful of this filthy river would have put an end to him as surely as a sword’s edge.

That was not much comfort, of course.

“Give me water.”

Florin started at the voice and turned, blinking into the patchwork of sunlight and shadow beside him. A gaunt face looked back at him, as hollow-eyed and pale as a skull beneath the sodden mat of its straggling hair.

“Bertrand,” Florin croaked, and tried to smile. “You’re looking well this morning.”

“Water,” he repeated feebly, and Florin noticed how wide his pupils were, massive with either dope or delirium.

“Don’t worry, mate,” Florin told him, with forced good cheer. “There’s water enough for both of us.”

Bertrand rolled his head to one side, a flicker of recognition touched his face.

“Costas?” he said. “Hey Costas! Give me the flask. I don’t feel so… so good.”

Florin chewed his lip thoughtfully and looked down at the surface of the river. It was clouded with the rotten detritus of an entire jungle. Even boiled and strained it would be a risky way of quenching a thirst, but to drink it in this state a man would have to be desperate indeed.

“Bertrand,” Florin decided, trying to ignore how swollen his own tongue suddenly felt. “Look down. There’s water everywhere.”

Bertrand looked at him blankly.

“Look down,” Florin repeated patiently, gesturing with his head.

This time his companion understood. He nodded and dropped his face towards the rippling surface of the river like a cow bending down to drink at a trough.

But even as he opened his mouth to drink he was brought up short. Hanging there, the knots of his spine pale beneath his grimy flesh, Bertrand flicked the dry leather of his tongue towards the water.

It was no use. Whether by accident or design he had been suspended a fraction of an inch too high to be able to drink. Florin tried himself, thrusting his head down so far that his shoulder blades touched and his throat tightened. He pushed out his own tongue, making a clown’s mask in the murky reflection he saw in the fetid liquid, but to no avail.

“Swine,” he swore vaguely, pulling his head back up. Now that he knew that the water was out of reach, his thirst began to burn as brightly as his anger.

Bertrand was still fighting against the stretched tendons and locked joints that kept him from snatching a taste of the water below. He whimpered pitifully with the strain of his contortions, body and soul torn by the sheer desperation of his predicament.

Florin watched the pitiful sight for a long moment, remembering how he alone had wanted to press on after finding the Kislevite’s hat. If he hadn’t been such a fool they wouldn’t be in this—

Never mind that now, he told himself sharply: Think.

Without knowing that he was doing it, Florin began to grind his teeth. He peered upwards again trying to see how his hands had been tied. It was no use. The knots, as well as his paralysed fingers were hidden behind the bamboo. He tried to pull himself up, but with the strain came a terrible numbness that was somehow worse than the pain.

Florin quickly lowered himself back into the river even before he noticed the thin rivulet of dark blood that had begun to trickle down his wrist.

On the other side of the cage Bertrand started to sob. It was a hopeless, tearless weeping, an eerie sound for such a man to make. It worked upon Florin’s nerves like a scalpel.

“Hey, Bertrand,” Florin called out. “Bertrand!”

But the man was lost in his own personal hell of poison and thirst; Florin’s cries fell upon deaf ears.

“Bertrand!”

It was almost an hour before the mercenary fell silent. An hour in which the sun climbed higher into the sky, the burning glory of its strength beating down upon the cage like a smith upon an anvil. An hour in which the water became blood warm, enlivening the leeches that found them, squeezing the blood from their veins as painlessly as the heat wrung every last drop of sweat out of them.

An hour in which the two men’s bodies grew weaker as their thirst grew stronger—a torture that was made all the worse by the constant gurgle of the water that flowed past their dehydrating bodies.

All the while, hidden by shadow, instinct and long, long practice, the builders of the cage watched their captives. They watched with ice-cold eyes and limitless patience, their minds still with a serenity that no human suffering could ever touch. Later, when the cries of the weakest man faded to nothing, a silent command was given by their leader; a flick of a tail sent a group of the silent watchers swarming soundlessly towards the cage.

 

Amongst the breed that served the race in this capacity, Xinthua Tzeqal was one of the youngest. He had seen scarcely more than three thousand orbits of this world since crawling from his birthing pool, and the patchwork of continents, the massive stone slabs that glided across his planet’s skin like lily pads across a pond, had not moved more than a few miles.

Still, his breed had not been created for impetuousness; he had only made one of youth’s errors. It had been whilst fighting the long ears in the North. There had been a retreat and, despite the fact that he knew how easily replaced their lives were, he had allowed contemplation of his shattered kindred to cloud his mind. Anger had muddied his thoughts as silt muddies water and he had moved hastily.

True, the long ears had committed sorcerous horrors that were as disturbing as most of their novelties. Somehow their witches had found a way of setting skinks alight with an unquenchable, slow burning fire. As green as venom, it had taken weeks to crawl from the tips of their tails to their still beating hearts.

The air had been sharp with the acrid stench of their burning bodies as, loyal to the last, the flaming creatures had attempted to go about their duties. Dragging the charred remains of their tails and hind legs behind them, the afflicted had started so many fires that eventually Xinthua had ordered their comrades to kill them.

Almost all of the cursed skinks had lifted their jaws and exposed their throats, although whether through the desperation of pain or the iron rules of their existence the mage priest could never decide.

The iron tang of their blood had mingled with the smoke of their still burning flesh to form a smell that was quite unique. Perhaps it had been that smell that had so unsettled the younger Xinthua. Whatever the reason, as soon as the invader’s army had been broken he had inflicted this same torment upon their few survivors.

And yet, although the long ears proved frailer torches than the skinks, he knew that he had been mistaken in the action almost before the last one had stopped screaming. It had been a waste of resources, a waste of effort that could have been better employed elsewhere.

For long decades afterwards he had sat unmoving, a growing understanding of his folly gradually soothing his mind, much as a pearl will form around a piece of grit to sooth an oyster.

That had been centuries ago. Now when the memory bubbled up into the inner pools of his consciousness he watched it with the same unblinking detachment with which he watched the growth of a tree, or the short, flitting life span of a skink. Xinthua Tzeqal knew, with a certainty that in another race would have been called pride, that he would never make the mistake of haste again.

Nor, it seemed, would his bearers. They trudged through the overgrown paths of this near abandoned mangrove with stolid persistence, as unaware of the importance of their master’s mission as he was himself.

The reports that the skinks had brought to him had been intriguing. They had told of a pack of intruders that sounded too coarse to be long ears and yet too sophisticated to be lemurs. Apparently they had come from the sea in primitive canoes before making their way to one of the lesser ruins.

Intriguing.

Xinthua wondered if they were a species of the water folk, sickly pale mammals that sometimes drifted across the world pond to die upon the Lustrian shore. He had never seen such beings before, and was contemplating the possibility of studying them with calm anticipation. Runners had already been sent ahead with orders to take some specimens, ready for his study, and he had brought with him exquisite onyx blades and skinks well trained in the arts of live dissection.

Content to wait for that particular treat, Xinthua rolled back his eyelids and slid away from this world into one of the realms of pure mathematics. The cascading streams of numbers and four dimensional geometries had a beauty that even the jungle lacked, and he bathed in their magnificence as he rested.

Beneath the fat mass of his earthly weight, the procession marched tirelessly onwards, their minds free of such distractions as their feet devoured the miles that lay between their master and his interests.

 

The lizardine forms boiled up from the water, surging around the two captives in a writhing stew of sharp-toothed snouts and snaking tails and yellow, unblinking eyes. So suddenly did they emerge, and so silently, that for the first heartbeat Florin took them to be nothing more than figments of a delirium. It wasn’t until one of their number nipped at his heels in its haste to ascend to the surface that he realized that these apparitions were real.

A sudden jolt of adrenaline rushed through his battered system, tearing a cry of alarm from his parched throat. Oblivious to the jagged rip of pain that exploded in his bound wrists he instinctively tried to pull himself up and out of the water, retreating from the amphibians that swarmed around him even as he kicked out at them.

But the skinks had no interest in him. Ignoring the blows he rained down upon their backs they surged past, seemingly oblivious to everything except for the unconscious figure of Bertrand.

“Hey, wake up!” Florin called to his comrade, desperation lending a jagged edge to his voice. The warning had no effect on the Bretonnian. He remained dangling down into the water as nervelessly as a slab of beef as the skinks surrounded him, jostling for position like a pack of jackals around a corpse.

“Bertrand,” Florin shouted again, kicking the murky water up in an attempt to gain the man’s attention. This time he had more success. As the droplets splashed onto the smaller man’s lips he lifted his head and blinked, although his face remained slack with the indifferent stupidity of absolute exhaustion.

“Captain?” he asked, apparently oblivious to the carpet of reptilian heads that bobbed patiently around him.

Then he rolled his dull eyes upwards, his attention drawn by the sudden patter of clawed feet on the bamboo roof of the cage. There was a flash of onyx from amongst the scurrying limbs up there, the sunlight white upon the black stone of the knife, and Bertrand was cut free.

He slid bonelessly into the swarm of predators below, the swarm closing around him like the fingers of a scaled fist. Then his head dipped beneath the water, and the shock of it was enough to slap him back into full consciousness.

It was a cruel trick for fate to play, relieving him of his torpor in the last few seconds of his life. With a shock of terrible realisation, Bertrand’s features contorted into a scream, eyes rolling in sudden horror as he finally realized who his captors were.

The skinks ignored his protests and busied themselves around him, each fighting for a pinch of warm-blooded flesh. Those at the back crawled impatiently forwards over their fellows, forming a great ball of writhing limbs and glistening scales. Bertrand’s howl of terror was muffled by his captors’ swarming bodies. It was the last sound he made before he was dragged down into the drowning depths below.

“Leave him alone!” Florin roared helplessly, hurling himself this way and that against his bonds in a vain attempt to help his comrade.

The last of the skinks turned to regard him, the soulless yellow orbs of its eyes as blank as glass as it watched its dry-mouthed prey trying to spit defiance at it.

“Sigmar curse the skin from your bones!” Florin hissed at it, his bone-dry teeth barred in an impotent snarl.

The skink seemed unimpressed. It was still watching the human as it melted away below the surface of the water, vanishing from sight beneath a swirl of muddy ripples.

“Sigmar curse you…” Florin said, his voice quiet with sudden exhaustion. His rage had burnt itself out as suddenly as it had begun. In its place nothing remained but the dry ash of depression.

What a horrible end it had been for Bertrand, he thought. What a horrible end it will be for me.

Noon came. The furnace of the sun grew hotter. It dried the blood on his wrists into a dry, brown crust that was soon covered with flies. The leeches that glutted themselves on the submerged flesh of his body grew as fat as ripening grapes, their gorged bodies mercifully hidden beneath the swirling debris of the current.

Worst of all was the thirst. It filled him with a constant, merciless desire that soon had him straining against his bonds, stretching his swollen tongue out towards the liquid that flowed inches beneath his chin. And when dusk brought its usual host of mosquitoes Florin snapped at them eagerly, as if the specks of moisture their bodies contained would be of any use to him.

Eventually, he collapsed into, a haunted, restless sleep. It brought him little relief. A quickening fever filled his dreams with countless sharp-toothed phantoms. The worst of them came with the faces of the men who had met their deaths under his command. He pleaded with these hungry ghosts as they fell upon him, tried to tell them that it wasn’t his fault; he was a merchant not a warrior, he had done his best, for the love of Shallya he had done his best.

Some of them listened. A few understood. Most didn’t; they took their revenge upon their failed leader in the endless maze of his nightmares.

When the skinks finally came for him, pink-skinned in the red dawn of the next morning, their cold grip was almost a relief from these phantoms. Almost.

He still fought them, of course. Despite the weakness of shock and of thirst, Florin fought. What else was there to do?

As the skinks swarmed around him he stamped down on them, the rotting leather of his heels glancing off scale and bone. Then, when he was cut free, he tried to use his trembling thumbs to gouge at their eyes, and snapped his teeth against the slick armour of their scales.

It was all in vain. Drained and unarmed, Florin’s struggles were futile. The skinks let his blows bounce harmlessly off them as they piled on top of him, wrestling him down into their midst, and securing his limbs with fingers that felt like steel.

Florin, cursing his foes as his struggles grew weaker, felt himself sinking beneath their evil smelling weight. A horribly human finger pressed against his face and he closed his teeth around it, biting down hard. The finger was snatched away, and his head was pushed beneath the filthy water.

Despite the taste of rotten vegetation and the film of silt it left on his tongue, it tasted wonderful. After two days without a drink, the near sewage of this jungle river was like something from heaven. Florin gulped a second mouthful down, the sheer bliss of quenching his thirst felt almost unbearably good, and the river closed in over his head.

The skinks’ long tails churned silently through the water as they accelerated his descent. Ever careful to keep their victim’s arms pinned behind his back they hastened downwards, pressing him onto the silty bottom of the river then rolling him beneath the last bars of the cage.

Florin felt the bamboo teeth of its construction scratch against his leg as his captors dragged him beneath it. The realisation that the skinks weren’t trying to drown him dawned upon the Bretonnian and he tried to relax, to swim with them.

It wasn’t easy. The first tight fingers of suffocation were already squeezing at his throat, whispering terrible, panicky advice into his ears and filling his lungs with fire. But already he was hurtling upwards like a champagne cork, the blinding sting of the cloudy water brightening with the glow of the sky that waited above.

A second later he burst up from the river’s smothering embrace. Spluttering and sucking down great lungfuls of air, he let the skinks tow him towards the shade of the bank and drag him onto the stinking black mud. He was still gasping like a landed fish as they bound his ankles and wrists with fresh vines. That done, they jostled each other as they plucked the fattened leeches from his skin, eagerly slurping down the blood-filled parasites with chirps of pleasure. A moment later they hoisted him up onto their shoulders, and carried him off into the jungle.

Except, Florin realized, this wasn’t the jungle. At least, not the jungle he’d known.

True, the trees looked the same as they did everywhere else in this green-choked world. The usual bewildering variety of sky palms, thorned sequoia of Ulelander and Cicadia, and the gods knew how many other species thrust upwards from the mulch, each of them struggling to reach the white misted heights above.

And yet, although these ancient wooden giants were the same, their manners were different. Elsewhere they grew in merciless competition with each other, their bodies forming thick scrums of impassable bark as they fought for every scrap of soil and each glimpse of light.

Here, though, that wild competition had been tamed, disciplined. The towering trunks between which Florin was now being carried had been herded into avenues that marched along in lines as straight as Marienburg canals.

Then there were the vines. Again, they had the same form here as everywhere else, but the usual strangling webs they formed had no place in this eerily ordered world. Instead they had been plaited and roped into high, aerial pathways that reached trimly across the heights of the canopy above.

Florin rolled his eyes back to study a complex network of these green capillaries and, as he watched, a pack of skinks raced along its swaying length. Tiny with distance they scurried overhead, as intent on their business as the pack which held him captive were on theirs.

No, Florin decided, this was no jungle. It was more like a city.

As if in confirmation of the thought, another pack of skinks rushed by, each of them bearing a basket on its hunched back. Despite the rotting mass of vegetation through which their errands took them, and despite the scaled skin and twisted physiognomies of the creatures, they reminded Florin of nothing so much as porters in the docks of his own town.

Of course, he mused, where there are porters there are masters, kings or merchants. He was beginning to wonder if these bizarre creatures had ever heard of trade when he saw something by the side of the path which drove that thought, that drove every thought, out of his head.

What he saw was Bertrand.

At least, it was what was left of Bertrand.

There wasn’t much of him. Perhaps because it had been saved as some trophy, his head had been left intact. It lay in the shadows of the jungle floor, recognisable despite the tracery of dried blood that masked its face. Its eyes, despite being as flat and lifeless as those of the things that had gathered around his carcass, glared up at his captain in an unmistakable grimace of silent accusation.

Swallowing hard against the sudden wave of nausea Florin tore his gaze away, and peered into the gloom beyond. The ruins of Bertrand’s body lay there, scattered about like the bloody chaff of a terrible harvest. His ribcage shone white, the vertebrae picked as clean as piano keys. Beside it his shattered pelvis had been driven into the ground like some grisly tent peg.

More bones were in the claws of reptiles that had gathered around. A new breed, these. Grotesque, hulking versions of the skinks that were even now carrying Florin past the nightmare scene. Great slabs of muscle bulged beneath the monsters’ blood red scales, an animal strength which matched the animal cunning gleaming in their small, piggy eyes. Bloodshot and glittering, these orbs were protected by the wide plates of thickened scale that tapered back across their heads like great helmets.

These were the first idle lizardmen that Florin had ever seen, if the gnawing and sucking of Bertrand’s bones could be called idleness. As the Bretonnian watched, one of them effortlessly snapped a femur into two jagged pieces. Pausing to sniff at the still warm marrow inside, it thrust the slimy length of its forked tongue into the hollow of the bone, its eyes narrowing with pleasure as it slurped out the rich nutrients.

A moment later the skinks rounded a corner, sparing Florin the sight of any more such details. But it was already too late. He knew that Bertrand would be waiting for him the next time he fell asleep, if he were to live that long.

Well then, he thought grimly as the skinks dragged him past a phalanx of more red-scaled carnivores, I’d better bring him some heads of my own.

He studied his captors as they hurried along, fear held back by the sudden desire for revenge. Clinging to the courage it gave him he imagined strangling them, if he could get his hands free, or hurling them from the heights above, if he could lure them there.

Most of all, he thought about his company’s gunners, and the damage they’d caused to the foul things upon their first encounter. It was a good memory, and he savoured it despite the pang of loneliness it brought. ;

After another quarter of an hour the party slowed to a walk, then to a halt. Curious, Florin rolled his head back to see why they had stopped and his courage faded, drowned beneath a sudden slick of cold sweat.

Loping forward to receive him from the skinks was another pack of the giant carnivores. Unlike their brethren, who had been busy sating their appetites on another’s flesh, these looked hungry.

There was a keenness about them, an alertness that made the heavy bronze cleavers they bore seem light in their claws. They were armoured too, as if ready to fight for their meat. As well as torques, objects identical to those the expedition had recovered, these creatures wore smoothly rounded headpieces, the thick bone of their construction gleaming like ivory as the wearers approached.

Florin tested his bonds for the thousandth time and, despite the steaming humidity through which his tormentors had emerged, shivered as their shadows fell over him.

The skinks, on some silent command, set him down and scurried to one side, allowing the first of the great reptilian warriors to draw nearer. As well as the bone helmet, this one had a great burst of feathers haloing its sharp head, the bright colours of the exotic plumage startlingly bright against the murky green of the jungle beyond. The head-dress bobbed as the creature reached down and, grabbing Florin by his collar, lifted him effortlessly up to study him.

The Bretonnian made himself return this appraisal with a defiance he couldn’t quite feel. Swallowing nervously, he straightened his dangling spine and glared into the icy depths of the reptile’s eyes.

“I’m going to cut your balls off,” he told it, his voice creaking after two days of silence.

Ignoring the challenge it turned him this way and that, the scales that covered its nostrils flaring back to reveal the soft pinkness of the membrane beneath. It snuffled at its captive for several long moments, the sharp tips of its forked tongue flitting out to taste the air around this bizarre mammal.

“What’s the matter?” Florin asked it, coughing to clear his throat. “Too stringy for you?”

The lizard turned its head to one side, perhaps an expression of surprise.

“Go on then,” Florin snapped at it. “Get it over with.”

His captor paused for a moment, as if to consider the proposal. Then it turned on its heel and marched away, dragging Florin along in its wake. The rest of its pack stood back as their leader passed, then fell into two neat columns behind him.

Florin, his swollen feet scrabbling over the sharp detritus of the rough path, noticed the discipline of their march. Unlike the scuttling mobs of skinks, these larger cousins stamped a perfect drum roll into the ground with their taloned feet. The beat of their progress reverberated through the earth in a relentless rhythm, their weapons were shouldered at an identical angle, their faces were as stony as royal guards on a parade ground.

Even to Florin, who was hardly a soldier, this discipline was even more alarming than the reptiles’ appearance. They had been frightening enough when gathered together in a mob, but now, marching along in the lock step of a trained regiment, they were terrifying.

For the first time he began to wonder what might have happened to the rest of the expedition since he had been taken. Could it be that he was the last surviving human in this horrible place?

He shivered and tried not to think about it.

The trees on either side disappeared into two neat files as the column reached another clearing and, on exactly the same step, halted. Florin tried to stand up, but his captor lifted him off of his feet and threw him onto the hard-packed earth with savage relish.

The stars were still clearing from his eyes when a human voice, warm beneath a thick Estalian accent, cut through his pain.

“Good morning,” it said. “Welcome to the green hell. And may I say, I hope that your stay will be a pleasant one.”

And with that the pleasant tones shattered into a high pitched braying that might have been either sobbing or laughter.

Florin struggled up to his feet and studied the Estalian as the man shook beneath his fit of hysteria. Rocking back and forth on the dais upon which he sat, well muscled arms clasped around his bony knees, he had crammed his knuckles into his mouth and was giggling as he wept.

Although he seemed to be a lunatic, in other respects he seemed fit and hale. The lithe muscles that moved beneath his tan were as strong as Florin’s own, and the teeth which ground against his fist were strong and white. The line of pale scars that ran down the man’s arm were pale in the gloom—square hieroglyphs neatly burned into his tanned skin.

As to his age, it was impossible to even guess. Beneath the shock of pure white hair that covered his head he might have been forty or he might have been a hundred. It stuck out at wild angles from the crown of his head and line of his chin, his beard the most tangled thing in this strangely ordered jungle.

“I’m pleased to meet you,” Florin told the man as he stopped rocking and climbed off of the dais with a clink of chains. Florin glanced down and saw the thick chains and wide cuffs that bound him to the carved wood. Even in the perpetual twilight of these tree smothered depths his bonds gleamed with the rich butter glow of gold. Enough gold, in fact, to have made their prisoner a rich man in any city of the Old World.

“Pleased to meet you,” the poor wretch said, coming to the end of his chains and stopping. Now that his fit of giggles had passed a look of wonder had come into his eyes. With a nervous caution he reached out a trembling hand towards Florin, as if he wanted to make sure he was real.

“Shake my hand?” he asked, with such a tone of pitiful hopefulness that Florin damned the vines that bit into his own flesh and hopped towards the man: The prisoner waited until he was a hand’s shake away then lunged forward with a sudden speed, grasping his arms with sharp-nailed fingers.

“You’re really alive,” he gasped, squeezing the Bretonnian’s arms as fiercely as a goodwife selecting a ham. “By Shallya, you’re really alive.”

And with that he flung his arms around the Bretonnian and hugged him to his chest.

The feeling of the man’s tangled whiskers pressed against his neck was hardly any more pleasant than the snivelling of his tearful gratitude. But, lunatic or not, Florin didn’t quite have the heart to shake off the unwelcome embrace. The gods alone knew how many years the man had spent chained up in his green hell. It had obviously been too many.

“There, there,” Florin said awkwardly, and wished that he had his hands free to pat the prisoner on the back. “It’s all right. Could be worse, couldn’t it?”

“It soon will be,” the prisoner said, pulling back and wiping his nose across the back of his hand. “Sorry. I’m sorry. It’s just that I don’t see many people, and when I do…”

The sentence trailed off in a shudder and, for the second time, Florin wished that he had a hand free to clap around the wretch’s shoulders. Then the Estalian caught sight of something over Florin’s shoulder and his eyes widened. A second later he’d fallen to his knees in a single, well practiced movement and bowed his head.

He wasn’t the only one. Turning to see what had had this effect, Florin saw that the floor was littered with the kneeling forms of his persecutors, their bone covered heads held low and the meaty lengths of their tails pressed flat into the ground.

“Kneel,” the Estalian hissed, scrabbling desperately at the back of Florin’s tunic and dragging him painfully to his knees.

“Your head, too,” the prisoner whispered. “Forehead to the earth.”

“Why?”

“Just do it.”

The fear in his voice persuaded the Bretonnian, and he followed the example of man and lizards both as he bowed his head.

For a long moment the clearing was still, the bodies that littered its hard-packed earth as motionless as so many tombstones beneath a pair of dragonflies that glided down from above. The insects’ translucent wings were as big as sparrow’s and their mandibles as sharp as pincers. Florin watched them flitting past nervously from beneath his lowered brow, aware of how helpless he was tied up like this.

He was trying to decide what to do should one of the insects bite him when, preceded by a shuddering sigh of adoration from amongst the grovelling reptiles, their god was carried into their midst.

 

Xinthua Tzeqal’s glazed eyes were silent pools of equanimity as he regarded the waiting saurus. As always in his presence they were kneeling, an instinctive reaction he would one day try to break. Behind them, also kneeling in apish imitation, were a pair of the filthy mammals that had brought him here.

One of them was clearly the property of Scythera, the scar-leader of this outpost. A simple line of branded ownership symbols ran down the pallid flesh of the animal’s spindly arm, and the shackles that bound it carried similar marks, a simple script that spoke its owner’s name and rank.

The other mammal appeared to be wild. It looked weak, and the improvised bonds that bound its limbs were rough and quickly made. It also had the sickly, uncared for appearance of a creature unused to the rich luxuriance of Lustria.

Xinthua studied the creatures for a length of time, watching with interest as moisture formed on their mottled skins like condensation on the cold surface of an onyx blade.

But no, that was a bad comparison. These animals weren’t cold. In fact, even from here, Xinthua could see that they were abnormally hot. With a quick blink, thermal lenses nictated over his eyes, and the air around the two oddities flared as white hot as the rats that were sometimes brought for his delectation.

Fascinating.

“Scar-leader Scythera,” he said at length. “Is there anything that presses upon you?”

“No, my liege,” the warrior said without lifting his nose from the dirt.

“You and your underlings will stand.”

The score of saurus rose to their feet and, without a further command, stood to an effortless attention that was so instinctive that neither they nor their god noticed it.

“Scythera,” Xinthua asked. “Why is that animal changing colour?”

“It’s how they think, my liege,” the saunas said. “They change colour before they flee.”

“And will it flee?”

“It cannot, my liege, not being strong enough to free itself.”

“Free it and see what it does.”

“Yes, my liege.”

Scythera turned his head and snapped a command to two subordinates. One pounced upon the struggling human to hold him still whilst the other cut his bonds. Then, obedient to their orders, they stood Florin on his feet and waited for him to run.

“He isn’t fleeing, Scythera,” Xinthua observed after a moment.

“No, my liege. These are strange, weak creatures. Sometimes their bodies will not obey their minds.”

“Their natural habitat must be a forgiving place.”

“I don’t know, my liege. Some of the skinks have been trying to teach the other one to talk, as ordered by Our Lord Chuptzl Qo when he passed through ten years ago. But its brain is too small to understand anything. All it can do is point with its forelimbs at what it desires.”

Xinthua said nothing, the icy purity of his mind suddenly filled with a thousand different reflections of Chuptzl Qo, and the implications of the failure of his order to teach these animals to speak.

“I think that I will communicate with the wild one,” he decided, completely unmoved by even a shred of competitive spirit. Competitive spirit, after all, was only something that animals felt. “Hold it still. I want to examine it.”

Once more the saurus closed in on Florin, burying their claws into his shoulders and dragging him towards the mage priest as eagerly as acolytes dragging a sacrificial calf to a knife-wielding priest. The human struggled pitifully against their iron strength, but to no avail. Its muscles were as pathetic as its claws and teeth, it seemed, and after a while exhaustion stilled its rebellion.

“Can you understand me?” Xinthua asked it.

Florin listened to the clicking and piping that came from this vast toad. It made as much sense as wind from a drunkard, and he replied with a string of contemptuous curses.

“It would appear not,” Xinthua mused. One of the dragonflies that had chosen this clearing as its hunting ground flitted past, its long body shining with a metallic lustre. With hardly a thought Xinthua whipped out his tongue, snatching it from the air. Crunching down on the delicious insect, the meat within its armour all the more delicious for the spice of its dying struggles, he considered his options.

There were a thousand ways in which he could study this animal. It was just a shame that so many of them would break it. After all, it was such a weak thing that he doubted if there could be many of its kind left.

“Scythera, do you have any more of these specimens?”

“No, my liege, though we took a dozen as your runner instructed. This is the only one to survive, despite the mildness of the skinks’ sedative and the shade and moisture in which they were kept.”

“And are there any more where you found this?”

“Yes, my liege. A small colony has moved into the ruins of Ytzel Cho.”

“Fascinating. I will look inside it now.”

Behind the mage’s palanquin one of the skinks that he’d trained to use dissecting tools rushed forward to present itself, but Xinthua waved it away. .

“No, not that,” he decided, watching the captive lick its lips with a detached interest. Its tongue was grotesquely stunted and deformed, an amputated stump which lay behind useless nubs of teeth. No wonder it found it so difficult to feed itself.

“I am not Chuptzl Qo. My methods are more refined.”

The second dragonfly buzzed past, and once more the magnificent length of Xinthua’s own tongue lashed out to snatch it. He pulled the morsel to his lips, crushed its head with a single bite, then plucked it from the gluey tip of his tongue and handed its spasming remains to Scythera.

“Give this to the animal.”

The saurus obeyed with unthinking alacrity, thrusting the dying insect into Florin’s hand. He looked down at the yellow goo that was seeping out of its ruined body, the broken twitching of its wings. Then he looked back up at the bloated monstrosity that had offered him the repulsive snack and opened his mouth to reply. But, as soon as he saw the gorgeous depths of the mage’s eyes, a thousand scintillating lights flashing within them like carp in a pond, he forgot what he had been going to say.

He forgot why he’d wanted to say anything.

He forgot where he was.

Who he was.

What he was.

Florin’s jaw dropped stupidly as his mind began to unravel like a dropped spool of wool, his consciousness a mote in the hurricane of memories. Sometimes the memories flashed past with a blinding speed. Sometimes they were sequential. Sometimes they were replayed once, or a thousand times.

Yet fast or slow, detailed or blurred, they were… fascinating.

The way that small square bones and brightly coloured tiles had followed scraps of metal across a thousand dirty tables, for example. What possible purpose could that have served? Did it have anything to do with the drinking of rotten, toxic fruit juice that so often accompanied the activity?

Then there was the leaking vessel that had carried him and his pack across the world pond. An unbelievably crude thing crafted from splintered tree trunks; its survival had been a miracle. One of the deep ones had even fallen upon it, then gone away again, its fate confused with some constellation in a way that the mammal obviously hadn’t comprehended.

More memories flowed, and the mystery of why clenched faces and bared fangs were considered welcoming disappeared beneath the embracing humidity of the jungle. Yet somehow the luxurious warmth was unwelcome—its bounty of delicious insects was left uneaten, even during the stumbling trek to the ruins of the tertiary observatory, Ytzel Cho.

There at least was sanity, the clear lines of the structure harmoniously aligned with the universe beyond. But only one of the mammals had seemed to appreciate this. He’d somehow combined this appreciation with a book of meaningless patterns and used it to make solid the music of the spheres. Alone of all his race he’d seen the obvious way in which the spirits of the inner worlds could be made to dance like mayflies against the clear blue sky.

The spirits of the inner worlds summoned to roll beneath the blue sky…

By an animal.

It wasn’t possible. If it had been possible, it would have been a blasphemy almost too hideous to contemplate.

And yet, possible or not, hideous or not, it had happened. The memory was clear and unsullied, the images bright and unconfused by any primitive attempt at understanding.

A scream tore itself from Florin’s throat, although he had no idea why. Suddenly released from the mage’s inspection he fell bonelessly to the ground, his forgotten form left to lie and shake whilst the saurus blinked stupidly at their stricken god.

Xinthua’s eyelids were flickering in agitation, his chest visibly moving beneath the shock at what he had seen. How was it possible that such grubby little vermin could have opened one of the charms of the ancients?

Ignoring the collapsed body of the mammal before him Xinthua began to recite an ancient mantra, the words echoing soothingly within his thoughts. When the last ripples of agitation had been smoothed from his consciousness he turned to Scythera.

“Scar-Leader,” he said, purposefully using the warrior’s honorific. “These animals must be driven from Ytzel Cho, and they must be annihilated. Can you do this with your own forces?”

“Your command is my order.”

Xinthua regarded the saurus patiently. These things really would have to be improved upon. In many ways a skink’s brain in a saurian body was a goal worthy of further pursuance.

But not now. Now the only thing that mattered was the elimination of these terribly frail yet terribly dangerous mammals.

“Do you have enough warriors to succeed in carrying out my order?”

“In this camp we have seventy claws of warriors, another hundred of skinks. We also have a great one, freshly trained for battle. These sickly creatures have some small magiks, but they are no more than twenty claws in number. They also remain as ignorant of us as the dragonfly upon which my liege has just so skilfully feasted.”

Xinthua waited as Scythera fell silent, the tip of his tail twitching as he made his calculations.

“Yes,” the warrior eventually decided. “We can carry out your order, unless the stars are against us. And even so, a call to our brethren who dwell at the river’s head will give us certainty.”

“Then make your preparations,” Xinthua decided. “But first send a party of skinks to catch and kill the sickly animal that was dropped.”

One of the surrounding saurus blinked stupidly down towards the spot where Florin had fallen a moment before. There was no sign of him now except for the agitation of the other mammal. It was pulling uselessly against its chains and reaching out with grasping fingers, obviously pointing the direction in which its fellow had fled.

Scythera hissed a sibilant order, and one of the swarms of skinks that had gathered around them set off in the direction the animal was indicating.

“It seems that he did intend to flee after all,” Xinthua said. Then, whilst saurus and skinks busied themselves with their preparations, he stilled his breathing and lapsed into a deep trance. Thus secure within the confines of his vast cranium, he studied Florin’s understanding of his comrades’ encampment, turning the stolen memory this way and that like a jeweller examining a watch.

Barely a week passed before the mage blinked back into the corporeal world, the simple perfection of his strategy so clear in his mind that it might already have happened. While he breakfasted on a basket of delicious little frogs, he explained the plan to Scythera.

It didn’t take long. The first mists of morning still lay heavily about them as, with a single command, Scythera set his forces in motion. The magnificent phalanxes of his brethren marched into the steaming depths of the untamed jungle, a cold blooded avalanche of scale, claw and razor edged weaponry that drove the jungle’s lesser beings fleeing before it.

Skinks swarmed around this great central column, their eyes and ears as neatly co-ordinated as the countless lenses of a dragonfly’s eye. They scurried back and forth from their patrols to feed their leader a constant stream of information about the soil, the undergrowth, the trees and the myriad life forms that held them to be home. In this way, even in the most densely choked swathes of undergrowth, Scythera’s view of his surroundings remained crystal clear.

Xinthua, meanwhile, lolled comfortably on his palanquin. He let his mind wander as he watched his guards’ iron-scaled backs strain beneath his weight. Behind him the tread of the great beast that brought up the rear of the little army rolled on just as remorselessly, the deep impacts of its footsteps shaking the ferns.

The mage’s eyes glazed as he began to construct a complex mathematical model in his imagination, a great shining tetrahedron of an idea by which sound could be connected with the medium of distance to calculate force.

On the humans, he didn’t care to waste another thought. In a single turn of the world they would be gone, as dead as all the others.

They were fascinating animals, though. Perhaps, when time permitted, he would take a force to one of their colonies in the north and study them in more detail.