02 - Temple of the Serpent Read online

  The Cobra of Khemri was out of the Free City of Marienburg. The Freetraders of Marienburg were the most prosperous merchants in all the Old World. Through their hands passed goods from all points of the compass: spices from Araby, silks from Cathay, weird beasts from the Southlands and strange metals from the savage shores of Norsca. The barque’s voyage, however, was to still more exotic shores: the elf homelands of Ulthuan. Trade with the elves of Ulthuan was strictly regulated by their Phoenix King, limited to only a handful of guilds and trading companies. These few mercantile concerns were allowed access to the elven port of Lothern, the only place in all Ulthuan where outsiders would be tolerated. Holding a very real monopoly on elven goods being brought into the Old World, these men and their elven sponsors could command their own prices on elf crafts, making the trade unspeakably lucrative. After a single voyage to Ulthuan, a sea captain could earn enough from his own meagre share of the cargo to retire comfortably. The merchants themselves lived like princes.

  The Cobra of Khemri, however, was not owned by one of the select few traders licensed to deal with the elves. Her hold filled with furs, fruits and timber from the Old World, she would be allowed to offload her cargo and sell it on the docks to the merchants of Ulthuan for whatever pittance the elves would give for such curiosities. But to fill her holds with elf fabrics, dyes, perfumes, ceramics and objets d’art, the part of the voyage where the promise of real wealth lay, would take a formal trade agreement with the Sealords of Lothern.

  The ship’s owner thought about the precarious prospect of making the long voyage for nothing. Lukas van Sommerhaus was a patroon, one of the wealthy merchants of Marienburg. Or at least he had been. Under his stewardship, the enterprise built by his great-grandfather had dwindled, collapsing in upon itself until there was almost nothing left. From a fleet of fifty ships, the Sommerhaus name now controlled only three.

  Van Sommerhaus stared out at the sea, watching the dark waters crash against the prow. The backers of the Sommerhaus Trading Company blamed him for the failures that beset the business. They held him to account for the ridiculous antagonism of the dogmatic royalists of the Empire, men who refused to either understand or appreciate genius! They’d tried to destroy him for refusing to be bound by tradition, and when they couldn’t do that, they had set about trying to destroy his business.

  The sharkskin gloves on his hands creaked as he clenched his fists. They were fools, blind superstitious fools! And his money-grubbing partners were no better! What were they, after all, but small men with petty ideas! He was above them. He was a patroon!

  “Mourning the family business?”

  Van Sommerhaus turned as he heard the soft, feminine voice at his elbow. The patroon was a tall man and he towered over the short woman who had spoken to him. His heavy, dull features contorted into an outraged scowl. He pulled away from the rail of the ship, his hand whipping about, cracking against the woman’s cheek. She crumpled to the deck, her fingers clutching at her face where the patroon’s rings had torn her delicate skin. There was resignation, not fear, in her expression as van Sommerhaus loomed over her and drew his hand back for another blow.

  The slap never struck the young woman. Van Sommerhaus found his arm unable to move, saw strong fingers closed around his arm, crumpling the velvet material of his shirt. He glared into the face of the man who held him.

  “You dare touch a patroon?” van Sommerhaus snarled.

  “Hit her again and you’ll see how daring I am,” the broad-shouldered man who held him growled back. He was a head shorter than the tall patroon, but much more powerfully built than the lean merchant. Not the wiry muscles of the barque’s sailors, but the deadly brawn of a professional soldier.

  “You forget your place, Adalwolf,” van Sommerhaus said. He wrenched his arm free as Adalwolf allowed his hold to slacken. Puffing out his chest, the patroon made a point of smoothing the crumpled material of his shirt before marching off to join the barque’s captain on the quarterdeck.

  The mercenary watched his employer stomp off, shaking his head in disgust. He’d been employed by the Sommerhaus Trading Company for nearly ten years, but this voyage marked the longest he had been called upon to suffer the patroon’s company. After a week at sea with the man, he found himself wondering if there were any goblin warlords who needed a swordsman.

  “That was stupid.”

  Adalwolf looked down as he heard the woman speak. He reached a hand down to help her up, but she ignored the gesture, lifting herself off the deck despite the thick folds of the dress wrapped around her legs.

  The mercenary couldn’t help his eyes lingering over her. Hiltrude Kaestner wasn’t the best looking woman he’d ever seen. She was a little too short for his tastes, a bit too full in her figure. Her features were pretty, not beautiful, and her dark hair was curled and coiled into one of the elaborate extravagances that reminded him unpleasantly of the aristocrats. Still, however much she wasn’t his type, she was certainly easier on the eyes than the scruffy sea dogs who crewed the Cobra of Khemri.

  “You’re welcome,” Adalwolf grumbled.

  Hiltrude pushed against his chest with one of her slender hands. “Mind your own business,” she hissed. “I know what I’m doing.”

  Adalwolf shrugged his shoulders. “Fine. Next time I let him hit you all he likes.”

  Sharp eyes glared into the mercenary’s. “Look, van Sommerhaus retains me to entertain him, just like he retains you to carve up pirates and mutineers. That’s the arrangement.”

  “Seems to me you could do better,” Adalwolf said, handing her a kerchief to daub the bruise on her cheek.

  Hiltrude snatched the cloth from him, pressing it to her face. “He pays well,” she said, as if that explained everything. Seeing the words made no impact, she sighed and elaborated. “He’s under a lot of stress. The family fortune and all that. I can tell when it’s getting to him.” She cast a sidewise glance at the quarterdeck where van Sommerhaus was in a heated discussion with Captain Schachter. “I deliberately provoked him, gave him someone to lash out at. He’d feel better, I’d get knocked around a bit. No big deal. When we get back to Marienburg, he spends some of what’s left of the family fortune on me.”

  “He’s no one to blame but himself,” Adalwolf told her. “The trouble with the Empire is his own fault, not yours. If he hadn’t decided he was a playwright…”

  Despite herself, Hiltrude couldn’t repress a chuckle. “The Victorious Life of Van Hal the Vampire Hunter,” she laughed.

  “One performance before it closed,” Adalwolf grinned.

  “Oh, it didn’t close,” Hiltrude corrected him. “It was closed. By order of the Lord Protector. Seems the witch hunters didn’t like one of their heroes being represented as a shape-changing Child of Ulric. It was the University of Altdorf that condemned it for historical inaccuracy.”

  “Van Hal hunting down Vlad von Carstein, wasn’t it?” Adalwolf asked, trying to remember the details of the play.

  Hiltrude laughed again and nodded her head. “Van Hal being dead for two hundred years before the Vampire Wars wasn’t the sort of detail Lukas would let get in the way of his masterpiece. I didn’t see it, but Detlef Sierck did. I believe his exact words were ‘This moronic abomination is not theatre.’”

  “I don’t know, it was better than his rewrite of Prince of Nehekhara.” The interruption came from a thin man dressed in blue-grey robes trimmed with a white wave pattern, a scrimshaw albatross pectoral strung about his neck. The levity left the man’s leathery, sea-bitten face as he noted the ugly bruise on Hiltrude’s face. He removed a clam-shell flask from his belt, then reached for the kerchief the woman held. After a moment of resistance, Hiltrude let him have it. The woman’s eyes were frightened as she watched him drip the contents of the flask onto the cloth before handing it back to her.

  “Brother Diethelm means no harm,” Adalwolf assured her. The priest smiled at the mercenary.

  “There is nothing to fear,” the priest said. “
It is just sea water. It will sting, but it will help your injury heal fast and leave no blemish.”

  Hiltrude still looked suspicious, but she pressed the cloth to her cheek. She winced as the priest’s prediction about it stinging proved true. “I thought healing was the domain of Shallya, not Manann,” she quipped.

  Diethelm grinned beneath his short blond beard. “Manann has taught us a few tricks,” he said with a wink.

  “Maybe he could teach a few of them to van Sommerhaus,” Adalwolf said.

  “I don’t think the patroon would listen,” Diethelm answered. “He’s an obstinate sort of fellow.”

  That remark brought nods from both Adalwolf and Hiltrude.

  “He’s convinced that elf is going to help him rebuild his fortune,” Adalwolf said. All eyes turned to the forecastle where the subject of his remark was standing, one boot set upon the prow, his eyes locked upon the horizon. Ethril Feyfarer would stand there for hours watching the sea. There was no question he was eager to return to Ulthuan. It was his reason for going back that Adalwolf was dubious about. He’d never met a poor elf. He was fairly certain that still held true.

  “I hope he’s being honest with Lukas,” Hiltrude said, worry in her voice. She pressed the cloth a little closer to her cheek.

  “Elves are very careful with their promises,” Diethelm told them. “Anything this one has promised van Sommerhaus he will honour. But he will keep the letter of the bargain, not the spirit. A man must be careful making agreements with elves.” The priest turned away from the prow. His face grew dour.

  “However, I don’t think Ethril holds the future of van Sommerhaus in his hands,” the priest said, his voice heavy.

  Adalwolf and Hiltrude followed the priest’s staring eyes. At first, they could see nothing, then they saw what Diethelm’s eerie gaze had seen before them. Black clouds rolling against the sternward horizon, sky and sea seeming to boil with the fury of their coming. It was a storm, a storm such as even Adalwolf had never seen. A storm that was bearing down on them with horrific speed.

  “The future of van Sommerhaus, and everyone on this ship, is in the hands of Lord Manann,” the priest said, his words little more than an awed whisper.

  The sweltering Tilean sun beat down upon the swarming harbour of Sartosa as though an angry god glowered down upon the pirate stronghold with displeasure.

  A less divine figure, Captain Vittorio Borghese glowered from the quarterdeck as his crew took on the last of their supplies. Half the scum were still bleary-eyed from two weeks of drinking and wenching, and the other half were grumbling about rigged dice. The pirate captain rolled his eyes as he watched a pair of dusky Estalian buccaneers arguing about how to set the staysails between the ship’s masts. He could almost smell the rot-gut rum on their breath as their rapid-fire argument grew more vitriolic. He wondered if Luka Silvaro ever had these kinds of days as his eyes roved the deck looking for his hulking first mate to crack their heads together before the argument went any further.

  Instead of his mate, the pirate captain found himself watching an evil-looking Bretonnian swaggering down the dock towards his ship. Behind him, a half-dozen murderous thugs pulled a long wooden cart. Vittorio had only ever seen a similar contrivance when he’d been a boy in Miragliano and a travelling circus had come to town. The cart, with its steel bars, looked like nothing so much as a menagerie wagon. Only instead of a leering harpy or toothless manticore, the cage was filled with the groaning bodies of men.

  “Clearing out the dregs of Peg Street, Levasseur?” Vittorio demanded as the strange procession approached his ship.

  The cold-eyed Bretonnian doffed the tricorn hat he wore in a courtly bow. “I heard that the Black Mary was in need of crew,” he said, a cruel smile on his face.

  Vittorio turned a disgusted glance at the deck of his ship. “I’ve no time to fetch the rest of my dogs from half the taverns on Sartosa,” he answered with a nod. He scratched at the empty socket behind his eye-patch, considering Levasseur’s offer. “What waters did you find your catch?”

  Levasseur’s grin broadened. “The Hole Inn By The Hill,” he answered. “Only the best for the Black Mary!”

  The pirate captain nodded again. The Hole Inn By The Hill was the most notorious of Sartosa’s many taverns, a place frequented by only pirates and their ilk. No weak-kneed pearl-divers or gutless fishermen there. “Somehow I doubt they’re the best,” Vittorio told Levasseur, digging through the pockets of his brocaded vest, “but they’ll have to do.” He tossed a small pouch to the grinning Bretonnian, the contents of the bag clanking together as Levasseur deftly caught it.

  “Always a pleasure, mon capitain,” Levasseur said with another flourish of his feathered hat. He snapped quick orders and the press gang began unloading their drunken charges from the cart and carrying them onto the ship.

  “Let them sleep it off in the hold,” Vittorio directed the press gang. When the indentured crew awoke, the Black Mary would be far at sea and well away from where the men could cause any problems.

  Dismissing his new crew from his mind, Vittorio returned his attention to his old crew, barking orders at them as they made the two-hundred ton brigantine ready to sail. He did not notice the unusual number of men Levasseur’s thugs brought onboard, nor the way many of them were covered in ragged cloaks and wrapped in frayed blankets.

  Vittorio certainly did not see the wicked gleam in Levasseur’s eye as the Black Mary pulled out from the Deadman’s Docks.

  “Bon chance, mon capitain,” Levasseur laughed as he watched the ship sail out from the pirate city of Sartosa for the last time. He fingered the small bag of silver Vittorio had paid him, tucking it beneath his tunic beside the larger bag of coins his special friends had given him earlier that night.

  The Black Mary was going to need all the luck she could get.

  A slight exertion of will, so insignificant only the smallest portion of its mind was focused upon the task, and the heavy golden dais beneath Tlaco’amoxtli’ueman rose from the ground. Gravity was a question of value; the slann had simply unbalanced the equation. It was something that had long ago ceased to even stir the mage-priest’s thoughts. Levitation and telekinesis were among the first adjustments the Old Ones had taught their minions.

  Skink attendants loped after the slann’s dais as it glided slowly through the stone halls of the pyramid-temple. Beyond the golden doors that guarded the sacred well of contemplation at the heart of the pyramid, the dais rotated, facing an angular corridor with a squared ceiling. Only senses attuned to the Great Math could detect the menace behind the many glyphs carved into the walls, each possessing the power to disperse the sum of any creature daring to pass between them. Such wards had withstood the hunger of the nether-things in the Age of Strife. Lord Tlaco did not break their power when he passed between them, instead shifting it so that it curved about the dais and the skinks following after the slann.

  Through the long corridor and its protecting glyphs, the dais entered a grand hall. Monstrous warriors waited here, lizardmen of more formidable shape than the slight skinks. The warriors stood twice the height of the slann’s attendants, the bodies beneath their thick blue scales swollen with muscle. Their heads sported powerful jaws, sharp fangs curling across their scaly lips. Cold, passionless eyes stared from beneath thick brows. The saurus warriors wore gilded armour of fossilised bone and bore spiked clubs of bronze in their claws. Lord Tlaco’s temple guard bobbed their heads in recognition of their revered master, silently forming ranks around the mage-priest.

  Now surrounded by his bodyguard, Lord Tlaco’s dais began to climb a set of immense stone steps. There were more protective glyphs as the dais reached a raised platform, lesser wards to keep parasitic mites and worms from the pyramid. A short passageway opened onto the platform, and up this the slann’s procession proceeded. The hot stickiness of the air was a thing beneath Lord Tlaco’s notice, but skink attendants quickly leapt to their master’s comfort, fanning the toad-like creature and ba
thing its mottled skin with water drawn from the razordon bladders many of them carried.

  Sunlight broke the dark gloom of the pyramid. The dais rotated again, shifting so that it could face the sun as the slann emerged from the cave-like opening set into the side of the great temple. His guards still surrounding him, skinks still bathing his hide and fanning his skin, Lord Tlaco pondered the fractals that had disturbed his meditations.

  Xa’cota were at the source of the slann’s unease. The unnatural spawn of the rat-fractal had caused no end of disturbance to the Great Math. Many of the cities that had survived the Cataclysm had not survived the coming of the xa’cota. Their aberrant plagues, far more virile and deadly than anything engineered as a part of the natural equation, had devastated the lizardmen. Entire spawnings of skinks had been wiped out before even setting eye upon their enemy.

  The war with the rat had turned at the temple-city of Quetza and the dominance of the xa’cota had been broken, many of them driven back into the sea. Many skinks claimed the victory had been brought about by a mammoth serpent they called Sotek and which they worshipped in warm-thing fashion as a god. More than the breaking of the xa’cota, the rise of Sotek troubled Lord Tlaco’s meditations. Among the names of the Old Ones, that of Sotek was not to be found. Upon the plaques of prophecy, the advent of the serpent was not foretold.

  The city of Quetza was saved from destruction, but the plagues of the xa’cota festered within the very stones. It had become Quetza the Defiled and was abandoned by the lizardmen. At least for a time. Now inhabitants once again stirred within its walls, the followers of Xiuhcoatl, one of the Prophets of Sotek. Under Xiuhcoatl’s leadership, the skinks erected a new pyramid in Quetza, a temple to their serpent god. Spawning pools had been dug from the foundations of the temple, holy serpents brought from the jungle. Here, where the skinks claimed Sotek had manifested before them, Xiuhcoatl did obeisance to his god.