CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

 

 

“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.

“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.

The edges of the pages were scorched and stained, and the front cover hung from a thread, but it was still legible. Florin flicked through the damp pages as the last of the company marched into the path the Tileans had cleared.

“Why not?” Florin muttered in sudden decision and shoved the book beneath the strap of his satchel.

The sound of marching feet became more ragged as they marched on, the litter of abandoned treasure thicker. Kereveld’s book slipped and chafed against Florin’s skin, and he cursed himself for ever having picked it up. And yet the farther he carried it the more difficult it was to throw away.

He was trying to decide whether or not to finally abandon it when he walked straight into the back of one of his men.

“Sorry,” he said apologetically, and then remembered that he was an officer. “Why have you stopped? We don’t have time to waste.”

The mercenary shook his head.

“Don’t know, boss. Have to ask the Tileans. They’re blocking the path ahead.”

“Let’s see what they’re up to,” Florin said and worked his way past the man and up the line. Soon, by squeezing past the men and tearing his clothes on the brambles which hemmed them in on all sides he drew level with Orbrant just as Captain Castavelli came back down the column.

“What is it?” Florin asked him. “Why have we stopped?”

“We can’t go this way,” the Tilean whispered, sweeping his hat off his head and wringing it between his hands.

“We have to,” Orbrant told him, but the man just looked back over his shoulder fearfully.

“We can’t. They are waiting for us up ahead.”

“Damn,” Florin swore.

“How many?” Orbrant asked. “What kind?”

But before Castavelli could reply a shout of warning cut through the jungle, followed by the crack of a pistol shot. Some of the Tileans pushed backwards against them, wide-eyed with fear and confusion. One of them tried to barge passed Orbrant, who shoved back with an angry curse.

“We’re going to have to fight through ’em,” Florin shouted above the cacophony of raised voices. “We’ve got nowhere to fall back to.”

A distant scream sent another ripple of panic through the claustrophobic masses of their packed ranks, and this time it took a crack from Orbrant’s fist to quell the rush of frightened bodies.

“Castavelli,” Florin said, gripping the Tilean by the shoulder and looking into his frightened eyes. “You have to give the order to advance.”

“Yes,” Castavelli agreed unhappily. “Yes, all right.”

So saying he crammed his hat back onto his head, and took a long, steadying breath. It pushed out his chest and lifted his head so that, with the battered plumage of his head gear he looked as glorious as any farmyard cockerel. Only then did he bellow out the order to advance.

His men shifted and looked back uncertainly. They saw Orbrant.

They advanced.

 

Thorgrimm and his dwarfs formed a solid phalanx; a square block of muscle and steel. They had left the ruins and the bloodied remains of their own camp behind them now. There was no point in hiding. Their doom was upon them, and they wanted to die well.

Shoulder to shoulder, with their axes buried deep in their enemies’ flesh and the corpses of the fallen heaped around them.

On every side but one saurus warriors stood, their own lines disciplined into the same merciless geometries of the dwarfs’ formation. Yet, despite their numbers, the reptiles made no move to attack.

Thorgrimm, feet planted firmly in the centre of the front rank, eyed them contemptuously and hefted his axe.

“What are you waiting for?” he roared a challenge. “Come, and test your hides against dwarfish steel.”

There was no response from the waiting saurus, save for a single thrash of one of their leader’s tails.

Thorgrimm laughed mockingly.

“Come,” he commanded them. “Let us see if you taste as good as your kin.”

Still the watching ranks remained silent and unmoving, showing neither fear nor aggression. Thorgrimm felt a certain respect for their discipline, and was glad of it. His life was valuable, he didn’t want it to be taken by the unworthy.

A distant series of crashes interrupted his thoughts, the sounds growing slowly louder. Thorgrimm listened and watched, his eyes scanning the patch of jungle the saurus had left clear. With a determined glint in his eye he reached up to stroke his beard, the feel of cold steel reminding him of his loss.

The light in his eyes became harder.

“Thunderers, ready your weapons. The beast returns. Let us see if our bullets can find the path through its eyes to its brain.”

There was a click as the Thunderers drew their hammers back, and levelled their weapons at the jungle beyond.

The noise of the beast’s approach drew nearer, the devastation of its passage sending flocks of birds screeching upwards out of its path. As Thorgrimm listened to it he began to feel it too, the pounding of its tread drumming a rhythm deep into the bones of the earth.

Then the towering trees ahead began to shake, and bend, and snap like rotten teeth before a fist as the monster burst eagerly through them.

It wasn’t the monster he had expected. That thing had been heavy, yes, and ferocious in the charge. It would have made an excellent enemy. But the thing which now came striding out of the jungle’s dark heart was a thousand times more terrible.

It stood on two legs, its powerful haunches as big as cart horses beneath the smoothly scaled surface of its skin. Its forelegs were tiny by comparison, held up uselessly beneath the sharp ridge of its chest and the vast, permanent snarl of its maw.

“Don’t fire,” Thorgrimm told his gunners. It wasn’t as if their bullets would have done any good against the perfection of the thing’s scale and bone, and sharp, gleaming intelligence.

The monster lowered its head slightly at the command, tiny eyes blinking as it turned its head to one side and sniffed at the air. It was almost a delicate movement, as was the slow step it took forward. Its three taloned toes opened and closed on the soil as though it was eager to seize a firm, predatory hold on the earth.

Then, bending its head even lower it opened its mouth wide, revealing the forest of blades which lined its jaws. Thorgrimm could hear the hiss of its indrawn breath, see the swelling of its vast chest.

He waited for the challenge to come. When it did, the roar shaking the earth and shimmering through the air in a heat haze of pure aggression, Thorgrimm felt an answering roar bellowing from his own throat. Fumbling at the straps of his helmet with a sudden, mad inspiration, he tore it from his head and hurled it at the monster.

The last thing he remembered before a berserk madness sent him charging forwards was the laughter that echoed in his brothers’ throats, and their prayers of thanks to the ancestors that had sent a worthy enemy upon which to annihilate their beardless shame.

 

Miles distant, another, smaller combat was drawing to its bloody conclusion. It had been swift and violent and, thanks to Orbrant’s sudden appearance, one-sided. The last of the skinks lay scattered about the entrance way to the overgrown canal in which they had been waiting. There had only been nine or ten of them, a spying party rather than an ambush group.

“Not many of ’em.” Florin, who’d fought his way to the front of the congested column of men just in time to miss the fight, said, and kicked one over onto its back. The mouth fell open in a lifeless snarl and he kicked it again.

“At least two escaped,” sighed Orbrant, who was busily cleaning gore from the gromril of his warhammer. “I wonder if we should go after them.”

“No,” Florin decided, peering into the tangled undergrowth into which the survivors had vanished.

Captain Castavelli agreed. “We will run on to the boats,” he decided, and led the column off himself. Florin followed him and, remembering the urgency with which Castavelli had wanted to flee from the handful of skinks, a dozen hilarious jibes sprang to mind. He kept them to himself, though. He quite liked the Tilean, for one thing. And for another, they had enough problems without bickering.

“Well, captain,” he said, stepping up to walk beside him as they entered the long, cavernous hollow which followed the ruined canal. “Looks like we finished off the last of them. Let’s press on anyway, though. Just in case.”

“Good idea,” the Tilean agreed fervently and, shouldering his clinking knapsack, led the way into the gloom of the verdant tunnel beyond.

The bones still lined the slimed depths of the canal, and the sour smell of decay hung heavily in the air. A detritus of leaves and bones and twigs crunched underfoot as the column of men tramped along, as it had the first time they’d been here.

Up ahead, cutting through the darkness like a flare, a slanting column of sunlight marked the exit from this oppressive underworld. Castavelli hung back as Florin stepped forward, slashing the edges of the gap back with his machete and stomping back out into the jungle path. The column followed him as he picked up his pace, marching with anxious speed that soon brought them to their first base camp.

And, more importantly, to their boats.

Only one of them was missing, washed away by the storm, perhaps. The others lay in a neat line in the grass, their hulls baked as white as clay by the sunlight. Chuckling with pure relief Florin knocked on the bottom of one as happily as if it were a tavern door, then turned it over to find the oars tied safely inside.

“Six men and three wounded to a boat,” he announced, his face split open in a wide grin that was reflected on every face. “Come on, lads, we’re not on a picnic. Get a damned move on. Think of all the meat and brandy that’s waiting on the ships.”

“Think of all the girls in Swamptown!” Another voice lent encouragement as they splashed their boats into knee-deep water and started ballasting them with bloodstained gold and bleeding comrades.

“Yes, think of her,” somebody else added. “Her and her tooth both.”

“Well, I want first go.”

“Nah, that’s the boss’ privilege. But don’t worry, you know what they say about officers…”

“Get that boat moving,” Orbrant snapped. The men rolled themselves into it and pushed away into the rippling expanse of the lily-covered lake. Dozens of streams and rivulets flowed from it, the entrances they cut through the surrounding jungle shrouded with steam.

Florin looked at them and frowned doubtfully. Then he looked at Lorenzo, who’d just finished loading a groaning man into their boat.

“Lorenzo…”

“Yes, I remember,” he said and, with a sucking splash rolled himself into the long boat with surprising expertise. Florin followed him, rocking the boat clumsily as they pushed off the shore.

“We’ll wait here for the rest of the expedition to get into their boats,” he said, watching the first of the Marienburgers stumble into the clearing. Lorenzo, who’d taken charge of the steering pole, grunted and pushed them safely off shore. Somehow, the very fact that they were on the water seemed to mark an ending to their ordeal, a cut off point as neat as the end of a play.

As the boat spiralled aimlessly in the gentle currents of the lake Florin leaned back, the sun bright even through his closed eyelids. Yes, a play. He would see a play when he got back home. He’d see a hundred. And he’d have velvet breeches and silk shirts, oysters in cream sauce with chilled champagne and girls whose corsets were big but not big enough.

A slow smile spread across his face as, to the relaxing chirruping of lily frogs, he drifted off into a world of pleasant daydreams.

Half an hour later the harsh singing of the Kislevites who’d crammed into the last boat brought him back to the reality.

“Right then, men,” he said, drawing himself up and waiting for them to ready their oars. “How did it go?”

“One,” said Lorenzo.

“Two,” a couple of the men joined in as they dipped their oars into the water.

“Three!”

The boat shot off, gliding slowly though the lake and towards the safety that lay beyond.

Behind them they left no sign. The ripples faded. The leaves of the lilies closed back in to cover all trace of their passage. The frogs and the dragonflies continued to hunt undisturbed. Apart from the fading patches of scorched earth where their fires had been, the humans might never have existed.

The first of the pursuing skinks stopped to sniff at the month-old embers before slipping effortlessly into the warm embrace of the water. A dozen of its brethren followed it into the lake, then two dozen more. They swam to the beginning of the tributary down which the current had swept their quarry’s boats before, at a signal from their leader, they dived down to continue the chase submerged and unseen.

 

Xinthua Tzequal studied the body that had been brought to him. It was shorter than the others he’d seen, and better built. Indeed, although no bigger than a skink, its bulging muscles had something of the saurian about them. Also, although its skin lacked even the most rudimentary scales, it was tougher than it at first seemed.

This must be one of their warriors, he decided, a type of human saurus to protect their workers. It was an elegant theory and one which had a pleasing symmetry about it. Odd, though, that one of the lesser races should have followed the same path that the Old Ones had set for the lizardmen. There had been nothing in the ancient texts about that. Could it have been a spontaneous development?

The intriguing possibility danced in the front of the mage’s mind, but he had the wisdom to realise that more research was needed. Perhaps it had been a mistake to kill the one surviving captive they’d had?

No matter. He’d have fresh specimens soon enough.

He sat back with a contented sigh, and barked an order to one of the skinks who was operating on the present specimen. With sure, expert moves it cut around the dwarf’s scalp, peeling back the skin as two of its fellows got ready with a saw.

Xinthua Tzeqal looked on as the sound of crunching bone filled the clearing and the top of the dwarf’s skull was removed. The dead brain inside was all very interesting, but Xinthua decided to wait until he had a live specimen before drawing any more inferences.

 

Somehow, the Kislevites had managed to get drunk. They passed around a shrinking wineskin as they rowed, the splash of their oars becoming increasingly uneven as the tide sucked, them towards the sea.

The song they were singing collapsed into a chaos of raised voices and harsh laughter, the sound bringing a disapproving frown to Lorenzo’s face.

“Lucky swine,” he muttered, and jabbed angrily down with the steering pole.

“Foolish swine,” Florin corrected him. “They could have brought more gold instead of that poison they brewed up. Did you ever taste any?”

Lorenzo nodded.

“Yes, it was revolting. And to think I swapped a treasure map for a measure of it.”

“A treasure map?”

“It’s a long story.”.

The Kislevites’, dispute resolved itself and another raucous chorus floated down the string of boats and towards the widening river beyond. In two hours the current had carried them the same distance downstream that it had taken them two days to row up. The muddy bottom of the watercourse had already deepened out of the reach of their steering poles, and its banks had drawn away from them just as eagerly.

The jungle, it seemed, was as keen to be rid of the men’s intrusion as they were to be rid of its cloying embrace.

Up ahead, the river curled around in a final oxbow bend and, as the boats were carried around it, a salty breeze picked up to brush across the sweat of their brows. After the constant humidity of the jungle it felt almost chill, a glorious freshness that encouraged the oarsmen to row harder. Their mates, meanwhile, leaned anxiously forward, eyes fixed on the slowly opening horizon as they sniffed at the sea breeze.

The banks of the river suddenly peeled away as the boats slipped forward bobbing up and down on the waves which marked the end of the river and the beginning of the ocean. It stretched away in front of him, as bright and fresh as a new dawn after the suffocating confines of the jungle. Sunlight danced and sparkled on top of the thundering rollers, and the breeze picked up as if in greeting.

Now even the oarsmen paused, joining the search for the ships that should have been waiting for them here. All movement stopped as the men scanned the vast expanse of the distant horizon or peered back towards the tangled shoreline, their oars held dripping out of the water as the current spat them farther out to sea.

“They’re not here,” Lorenzo said at last.

“Of course they are!” somebody shouted at him, his face flushed with sudden anger. “They’ll just be around the corner.”

“Yes, that’s what it is,” his mate agreed and a doubtful chorus of voices rose in hopeful support of the theory.

Lorenzo laughed bitterly.

“All right then, they are here. Look, right in front of you.”

A couple of the men, still unwilling to give up hope, looked towards the expanse of empty water that lay beyond. It stretched as far as the eye could see, the blueness of the ocean misting into that of the sky as it disappeared over the far horizon.

“No,” Lorenzo said. “They’ve left us. Left us for dead.”

This time there was no disagreement, just a series of vicious curses, and one low moan.

“All right then,” Florin said, shaking off the despair that threatened them all. “We’ll set up a camp on the shore for now. Light some signal fires, perhaps.”

He sighed and took a last look at the empty ocean. For all he knew there was nothing between him and Bordeleaux but two thousand miles of empty salt water.

Behind him another explosion of harsh Kislevite cries broke out, and he scowled irritably.

“Ranald’s teeth I wish those damned savages would… would…”

The sentence trailed off as he saw the cause of this latest uproar. This time there was more behind the Kislevites’ raised voices than vodka, dice and sibling rivalry.

This time their rage was directed at a real enemy.

The skinks had chosen this moment to strike. A moment before, the little flotilla had been alone in the muddy expanse of the delta’s mouth, with only the rolling waves and the seagulls that circled high above for company. But now, without even a ripple of warning, the sea was thronging with reptilian life.

Shaking beads of water from their crested heads and blinking the salt out of their eyes, the hunters emerged from the hidden depths below, short spears held clear of the water as they paddled towards their prey.

And their prey had already been chosen. It was the last boat, the Kislevites’ boat. No matter where each new skink breeched the surface it turned and surged towards it, its lithe body drawn to the target like an iron filing to a magnet.

As Florin watched, the first Kislevite died, spraying a fountain of blood over his comrades as he pulled a short-hafted spear from his throat and toppled into the ocean. More spears were thrown, bouncing off armour or slicing through skin as the skinks closed in on the confusion.

A pair of high-crested heads popped out of the water beside the Bretonnians’ boat. They ignored it completely as, blinking water from the yellow orbs of their protruding eyes, they made for the Kislevites.

“Looks like it ain’t our fight after all, boss,” Lorenzo said. “Let’s make for the shoreline.”

“Don’t make such jokes,” Florin snapped, although he’d been turning over exactly the same unworthy thought. “Get us turned round and headed towards the Kislevites. Come on, get a damned move on. Do you want to miss all the fun?”

Once more Lorenzo started to call out the oarsmen beat and, turning reluctantly back into the resistance of the Lustrian current, they rowed towards the quickening violence.

The sea was boiling around the Kislevites’ boat now, rocking it dangerously against the swell as scaly claws gripped its gunwales, onyx sparked against steel and bodies were pushed back and forth.

There was a high-pitched scream, cut off by a terrible gurgling sound, as another one of the human warriors was slain. This time, the man’s body fell halfway out of the boat, the dangling arms and torso making a bridge over which more skinks scampered.

Desperate orders were hurled about as water started to surge into the listing boat, and half the Kislevites threw themselves against the opposite side in an attempt to keep it from capsizing. The skinks took advantage of the collapsing defence and scampered over the gunwale, only to be cut down by the Kislevite sergeant’s axe. Bloodshot eyes glinting with a berserker rage he lunged at the skinks, a white froth of spittle flecking the tangle of his beard as he roared a blasphemous combination of curses and prayers.

Scale and bone slit asunder beneath the northerner’s frenzied attack, and as Florin’s boat came level the skinks drew back. His men shipped their oars and hefted their weapons.

For once, the lizards were outnumbered. Bretonnians and Kislevites chopped downwards in a flurry of steel as their two boats drifted closer together, and the skinks, their fearlessness matched only by their tactical good sense, fled from the killing zone. Risking their tails to the vengeful steel of the humans they dived down, resurfacing to swim in a wide circle around them.

As they fled a wild cheer rose up, echoing from throat to throat as the skinks swam clear.

Florin cheered too, although he knew that it was only a respite. The skinks hadn’t retreated, they had merely regrouped. Even now, fresh swarms were emerging from the depths of the jungle and disappearing into the depths of the sea, bobbing up to join the survivors of the first attack.

His comrades’ cheering grew louder as Florin licked his lips and studied the enemy. It seemed a shame to dampen the men’s spirits, but regardless of their morale it was time to prepare for the next assault.

“Watch out,” Florin warned, raising his voice above the celebrations. “They’re going to hit us again. Get ready!”

He readied his machete just as a dark, cold shadow fell across his back. Gritting his teeth he looked back over his shoulder, ready to face whatever fresh horror the jungle had sent against them.

He gaped stupidly when he saw what it was, and at last he understood what all the cheering had been for.

Bearing down on them, the sea curling into a sparkling filigree before the sharp edge of her bows, came the Destrier.

 

“There you go, Master Graznikov,” Gorth grinned, slapping the pale-faced Kislevite on the shoulder. “Told you that you were mistaken.”

“Yes,” the Kislevite nodded unhappily, and ran his fingers nervously through the satchel of treasure he wore. With an obvious effort he squeezed his cheeks up into a big smile, although the fear never left his eyes.

“And captain? No to tell the men I said they were dead, yes? Don’t want to hurt their feelings.”

Gorth’s grin grew wider, until it resembled a shark’s.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, watching the sweat bead on Graznikov’s forehead as the first of the mercenaries tumbled onto the deck of the ship. “They’ll probably think it a fine old tale to tell back home. Anyway, they’ll want to reward Costas. If he hadn’t looked back just before we lost sight of the coast, or if his eyes had been a little less sharp… Well, friend Graznikov, it doesn’t bear thinking about, does it?”

There was a sudden bang as one of the longboats the sailors were hauling up hit the hull. Then a sudden pause, the crew’s usual foul-mouthed efficiency silenced by what they saw glinting in the bottom of the boat.

“Please, captain. It would only upset them. Say I asked you to wait.”

One of the mercenaries, a Bretonnian who Graznikov didn’t recognize, seemed to recognize him. He turned and tapped one of his mates on the shoulder. Within minutes even more faces had been turned in his direction.

“Please, captain,” the Kislevite hissed, the false smile melting away like butter in a frying pan. “Don’t tell them I said they were all dead. I thought they were.”

Despite the fact that Gorth seemed not to hear him, Graznikov lowered his voice.

“I’ll pay you.”

There was another series of bumps and booms as the sailors manhandled the longboat onto, the deck, and then tipped it out. Amongst the bloodied cloth and blunted weapons a hundred misshapen golden fragments gleamed, twinkling like fallen stars against the dark woodwork. The sailors lapsed into a reverential silence at the sight.

Gorth licked his lips, the only movement in a face gone suddenly still.

“Is that real?” He asked quietly.

“Yes, yes. It’s real,” Graznikov told him, desperately trying to ingratiate himself.

“Well, then. Looks like you don’t have enough to bribe me with. Sorry.”

A look of sheer terror passed across Graznikov’s face as Gorth leapt down onto the main deck, the better to study the haul.

“Looks like it wasn’t a wasted journey after all,” he told Florin, who was too busy watching his men gathering up the spilt gold to have seen Graznikov yet.

“Wasteful enough,” Florin replied. “Van Delft didn’t make it. Neither did a dozen of my men.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Gorth said, and it was true. Even so, his eyes glinted with the pleasure of seeing so much treasure.

On the far side of the ship more sailors stood lined up whilst their mates recovered the expedition’s boats and men. Armed with a motley collection of hunting bows and handguns they’d been standing ready to guard against the strange, reptilian goblins that their arrival had driven back into the shallows.

Gorth roused himself from his appraisal of the loot, and nodded towards the shoreline where the enemy waited, eyes held above the water like giant frogs despite the occasional shot that churned into the water between them.

“Who are your friends?”

“No friends of mine,” Florin scowled humourlessly, and glared past the strangely familiar figure that stood silhouetted on the foredeck and into the jungle beyond. It seemed to glare back, the great stinking mass of it as threatening and as alien as the first day he’d seen it.

Yet despite the men he’d lost to it, and the blood, Lustria’s hungry wilderness no longer filled him with fear. He had faced it, after all, . had taken every peril and every beating that it could throw at him.

And he’d won.

A wolfish smile appeared on Florin’s gaunt face, and the falling sun caught the glint of victory within the hollows of his eyes.

“I beat you,” he whispered, the chill ocean breeze carrying his boast into the steaming jungle beyond. Behind him he heard more gold clinking onto the deck. His smile grew wider.

Graznikov, who was still huddled against the stern rail, saw the expression and whimpered with fear.

“Treacherous dog,” he quietly cursed Gorth. He’d seen the captain talking with that psychotic Bretonnian, and a second later his face had twisted up into that terrible snarl.

The Destrier rolled beneath a wave, and Florin took a step forwards. That was the final straw for the Kislevite. His world collapsed into a single calculation, a weighing of the odds of survival in the jungle balanced against the odds of survival on a ship full of the mercenaries he’d tried to abandon there.

It was an easy calculation.

With barely a second’s hesitation, Graznikov kicked off his boots and, holding them in one hand and pinching his nose with the other, vaulted over the railing and into the sea beyond.

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.