[Florin & Lorenzo 01] - The Burning Shore Read online

  “And those orcs. Completely disorganised, you said. No leaders.”

  “They might have had some leaders,” Florin shrugged. “It was so long ago.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Three years. Or was it five?”

  “I’m a colonel, not an auctioneer,” van Delft snapped. He let the silence become uncomfortable before turning to his subordinate.

  “Mad or not, your sergeant’s a gift from Sigmar, your men seem to respect you and you’re not as stupid as you look.”

  “Thank you, si—”

  “But if you ever lie to me again I will throw you off the pay roll. Which would leave you with quite a long walk home, wouldn’t you say?”

  Florin, his bluff called, nodded meekly and looked out to sea.

  “Yes, it would be. Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it,” van Delft waved away the thanks. “And for Sigmar’s sake don’t go telling anybody else about this little chat. I doubt if they’d be quite so… forgiving.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Right then, that’s sorted. I hope you won’t take offence, but I want to get to the Beaujelois before the Tileans start serving up dinner. Gods know how they do it, but their lads seem to be able to make anything taste good.”

  The four morsels drifted through the cathedral heights of the warm, upper reaches of its domain.

  Adjusting to the unfamiliar light, the black orbs of its eyes changed from onyx to ivory. Gradually they adjusted to the blinding brightness of the long forgotten sun, and it bathed in the new sensations of light and darkness.

  By the time it reached the first corpse it could make out every ripple of the sodden cloth which bound it, and every silver movement of the tiny fish which nibbled at its bloated flesh.

  Although this prey was obviously long dead, still it attacked. The impact of its first bite tore the body in half, and filled the water with a mahogany cloud of blood. Swallowing the man’s torso it turned, an incredibly agile loop for such a huge creature, and returned for the remains.

  There was no taste, not really. Just a sudden burst of ecstasy as the torn meat pulsed down into its stomach.

  Spurred on, it lunged for the next body, and the next. By the time it had taken the fourth the sensation of fresh meat had set its appetite on fire. Arcing through the bright heights, its own blood pounding with a hideous excitement, it scented the currents for more human flesh.

  As the second full moon rolled over the Destrier the long, sweltering heat grew heavier. Sometimes, beneath the blue furnace of the tropical skies, it became almost unbearable. Combined with the shrinking rations and the void of the endless ocean, it had conspired to drive more than one man into an insanity of despair, or violence. So far the Destrier had been lucky. The maddening heat hadn’t ignited the explosive tensions that had covered the deck of the Hippogriff with blood, nor had it boiled anyone’s brains enough to send them diving into the vastness of the ocean.

  Lorenzo had actually seen the victim of the heat; he had watched him throw himself from the Beaujelois gunwale only to be hauled sobbing back out of the water by his comrades. At the time the sight had united Bretonnian and Kislevite both in uneasy laughter, but mock the Tileans as they might, most of them had already felt an inkling of his desperation.

  There was already a rumour afoot that they’d missed Lustria. The storm, some said, had pushed them so far to the south that they’d rounded the cape and were now heading away into the endless oceans beyond. Others spoke of empty water casks, and the chaos that was to come when the last few drops were gone.

  Thoughts such as these had led Lorenzo to today’s plan. It wasn’t much of a plan, more a way of driving such nightmares from his mind, really. Away of passing one more endless day without straining his eyes on mirages of distant coastlines, or seagulls that turned out to be sunspots.

  The thought that anything would actually come of it never even occurred to him. After all, when he’d tried it as a boy he’d had gossamer thin tendon traces, and the finely carved bone hooks that he’d stolen from his uncle. He’d known the waters too, choosing only the deepest pools in the river that ran through his village.

  Today, by contrast, all he’d been able to find was a rope, a twist of wire, and the sharpened hook of a long departed crossbowman.

  Embarrassed to be seen playing the fool with such a string of rubbish he’d smuggled it on the stern deck before tying it together.

  He was glad to see that the old skill of knotting and binding remained in his fingers, and by the time he’d finished he even went so far as to waste his ration of maggot-riddled dried fish on the end of the line.

  Then, wrapping the rope around the railing of the stern, he’d thrown the uselessly baited hook over the side and started to think about eating the mouldy handful of ship’s biscuit that was all that remained of today’s ration.

  Somehow, despite the example of the rest of the ship’s company, he’d never been able to crunch down the weevils that wriggled within the stale dough. He couldn’t even do it in the dark, when night would have spared him the sight of half eaten things moving about within the crust.

  Instead he spent miserable mealtimes crumbling up his daily bread and sorting out the writhing maggots from the crumbs before eating them.

  But today he was to be spared that ordeal. For no sooner had he broken off the first piece of the dough than the rope hummed with a sudden tightness.

  Lorenzo looked at it disbelievingly as it began to drag itself along the rail. Jumping to his feet, heart racing with a sudden, disbelieving excitement, he tugged experimentally at the rope.

  Something tugged back.

  With a whoop of joy he braced his feet against the side and started to heave against whatever it was that he’d caught.

  It was strong, whatever it was. By the time he had recovered just a few feet of the rope his muscles were burning, his skin glistening with a wash of sweat.

  “What are you doing?” a voice asked. Lorenzo rolled his eyes back to find Jacques standing above him.

  “Catching fish,” Lorenzo told him. “Want to lend a hand?”

  “Anything for a comrade,” Jacques grinned disbelievingly and, wrapping the rope around his wrist, added his own gangling strength to Lorenzo’s.

  Gradually, inch-by-inch, they hauled the dripping rope out of the sea. The tension in the hemp squeezed so much water out that soon the two fishermen found their feet slipping and sliding across the oak.

  “Hey! You have caught one!” Jacques cried out, eyes alight with a sudden excitement.

  There was a sudden, heart stopping slackness in the rope followed by a loud splash. The two men froze, hearts sore with disappointment, until an excited shout floated down from the bird’s nest.

  “Go on! You got him!” the sailor yelled. Moving with a rush of renewed excitement the two men hauled in the slack rope and felt, once more, the fish struggling on the end of the line.

  Lorenzo thought about how old the rope had been, and how casually he’d tied the knots.

  “What’s that you’re saying?” Jacques asked him, but Lorenzo just grunted with embarrassment.

  He couldn’t remember the last time he’d prayed.

  Again the rope went slack, but this time, instead of a splash, the two men heard, even felt, a thud. A second later the weight on the end of the rope grew so great that it started to rasp through their hands.

  “What the hell was that?”

  “I think it’s clear of the water,” Lorenzo, tears of exertion streaming down the beaten leather of his face, groaned with the pain that burned in his arms. His scrawny muscles felt as though they’d snap at any moment, like so much old rope.

  Jacques, his own hands starting to bleed where the rope had scratched away the skin of his palms, looked up at the men who had joined them.

  “Come on then,” he snapped at them, his voice strained beneath the cords which now stood out on his neck. “Grab the rope. Help us pull the bastard in.”


  Two men grabbed the rope, then two more. Now it began to slide up and over the rail, hissing against the wood as it came faster and faster.

  Lorenzo let the others take the strain, his biceps singing with the joy of relief. Then he peered over the side of the rail, and his heart almost stopped.

  It was huge, almost the size of a man. Its flanks flashed in the sunlight, shifting from silvered blue to metallic green as it fought. But although its body shone with the living colours of the ocean, rippling like living mother of pearl, the long sword of its mouth was as black and sharp as a thorn.

  As Lorenzo watched it bite down upon the impossibly thin length of rope upon which it was suspended. The hemp hummed and groaned with the strain, thistles of snapped fibres sticking up at odd angles as the fish lunged desperately from side to side.

  Lorenzo found himself beginning to pray again. He didn’t know what else to do as the fish was dragged even higher above the safety of the sea below.

  Then he saw the gills flaring. His mind blank of everything but the image offish soup, he lunged over the rail and grabbed the great flare of skin.

  The marlin lurched wildly at the agony of his touch, dragging him farther over the rail. Below him there was nothing but the foamed surface of the sea, the wake of the ship rolling hungrily beneath him.

  Again the fish swung back out, and Lorenzo felt his hip slide over the gunwale so that, for a moment, man and fish hung there, each as captured as the other.

  But by now more men had come to see what the commotion was. Without waiting for orders they threw themselves into the battle, Bretonnian and Kislevites both. From then on the struggle was short and one-sided. Fight as he might, the great fish was dragged upwards, and then heaved over the rail and onto the deck of the ship.

  He thrashed around in the suffocation of this terrible new world, the rapier of his beak sending his captors scurrying back. It was Lorenzo, still too alive with adrenaline to feel the sprain in his fingers, who grabbed a hold of his dorsal and ended his pain with a dagger blow.

  For a few more seconds the great fish continued to dance and skitter across the deck, his gushing blood painting grotesque arabesques upon the seasoned oak. Lorenzo waited until the final spasm had died away to a mere shiver before nipping forward to cut the hook from the side of its mouth.

  “Let’s get this down to the cook,” He left half a dozen of his comrades to haul the fish down to the galley.

  “And bring some more dried fish,” he called after them. “Seems that it is fit for animals after all.”

  Jacques, his hair slicked with sweat and salt water, laughed with wild abandon.

  “You’ll do anything to avoid those damn biscuits,” he roared at his own humour and slapped Lorenzo on the back. Still grinning he left his comrade slumped exhaustedly on the deck and went to peer over the rail.

  “There must be more fish down there,” he called back. “Do you think they swim in shoals?”

  “The gods alone know.” Lorenzo shrugged and flexed his bruised hand. “The only thing I caught before were trout.”

  “Trout!” Jacques scoffed, leaning over the gunwale. “That thing would need a hundred a day to… hey, what’s that?”

  “What?”

  “That shadow below us.” The mercenary glanced upwards, but the sky remained empty of even a trace of cloud.

  “What shadow?” Lorenzo asked, watching the excitement at the other end of the ship as the cook hoisted his catch up on a block and tackle.

  “Look here. Beneath the ship. It’s getting bigger. Maybe we’re running over some shallows.”

  “Can’t be,” Lorenzo turned his attention to the frayed and bloodied fishing line. The rope, at least would need to be replaced, he decided. It was miracle it had held the first time.

  “Then perhaps… Oh no.”

  Lorenzo looked up, surprised by his friend’s tone. He saw Jacques try to pull himself back over the rail. He was a second too late.

  With a thunderclap the ocean behind the Destrier erupted into a dazzling column of water. It blitzed upwards from the surface, a liquid thunderbolt born of the deeps, with such violence that the plume of it rose as high as the Destrier’s mast.

  It wasn’t this explosion that tore the scream from Lorenzo’s throat though. It was the thing that the sea had vomited up with it.

  It tore itself from its sheath of water so quickly that it revealed hardly any detail. It was just a confusion of terrible parts, a nightmare made flesh.

  It took Jacques without a pause, snuffing him out in a sudden spray of blood before crashing back into the sea as suddenly as it had come.

  Despite the wash of salt water that swamped the Destrier’s stern, and the screams of the crew, and even the final image of terrible jaws closing over Jacques’ body, Lorenzo couldn’t believe what he had just seen.

  Shock, as soft and lethal as a shroud, wrapped him in its embrace.

  “What, by the gods, was that?”

  Lorenzo turned, like a man in a dream, as Florin rushed across to him.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” Lorenzo said vaguely. Florin grabbed him by the shoulder, stared into his eyes.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, yes. I’m all right.”

  Beneath them there was a bone-jarring thud and the Destrier leapt like a wounded stallion.

  “Lorenzo,” Florin urged. “Go below and get Orbrant.”

  “Yes, boss,” Lorenzo nodded, feeling the white fog of shock drawing back beneath the fire of Florin’s energy. As he stumbled down into the hatch, fighting the tide of men that were pouring up, he saw his master gathering the company’s gunners around him.

  “Fat lot of good they’ll do,” he muttered to himself, and elbowed his way through the confusion of men that now clogged the deck.

  Back on the deck the same thought had occurred to Florin. He angrily thrust it to the back of his mind as he marshalled his gunners. “Come on lads, get ’em loaded. Michel. Michel! Go and get Graznikov. We need his pistols.”

  He waited until Orbrant’s head appeared in the hatchway, and then leapt for the rigging that led up to the crow’s nest. Racing up it, the rough hemp scraping his hands, he glanced back to see the deck shrink away below him.

  Climbing still higher he eventually stopped, looking back down at the foreshortened forms of the scurrying men below and then, almost reluctantly, out to sea.

  The Destrier’s sister ships lay on either side of her, the three vessels forming the points of a tiny triangle in the vastness of the ocean. Florin could just about make out the matchstick men of their crews, and wondered if they had any idea yet of the danger that had come upon them.

  Of the danger itself there was no sign. No dorsal broke the even swell of the ocean, no shadow marred the cerulean blue ripples of its surface. The only movement that stirred in its clear upper reaches came from the kaleidoscopic sunbeams that danced hypnotically through the clear water.

  “Captain.”

  The voice came from below. Florin looked down to see the frantically beckoning form of the skipper.

  With a last look out across the sea he slid back down the rigging and dropped onto the deck.

  “Leave the observation to my look-outs,” the skipper told him. “Just get your lads ready to shoot. We’ll tell you where.”

  “Will do,” Florin nodded, running his eyes over the dozen gunners that waited for him. Now, at Orbrant’s instruction, they stood in two squads. Florin wished that he’d thought to do that himself.

  Well, never mind that now.

  “Well done, sergeant,” he said. “Now, I want you to take Michel and his mates to the stern. The others will come with me. Any questions? Good. Follow me, men.”

  As if in response to the order another sudden impact boomed through the Destrier’s hull, sending the men reeling against the gunwales.

  They looked at one another, pallid with fright as the Destrier settled back into the water. Beneath them the hull groaned
dangerously, the sound dampening their brows with cold sweat despite the burning sun.

  “Come on, jump to it,” Florin told them, jogging towards the fore-deck. There they lined the rail, peering down into the depths that had spawned this monster, or out over the rolling blue desert of its domain.

  Behind them the skipper’s voice rose, a hard edge of fear cutting through the tortured creak of the ship’s hull.

  Florin closed his ears to the sound as he peered desperately into the sea for some sign of their enemy. There was nothing to be gained from imagining the splintering of the vessel’s keel, the way the water would rush into her, pulling her down into the lightless depths below, no comfort from imagining the bloating of their drowned bodies as they turned in the tide…

  Beside him his men, also listening to the whine and snap of the hull, waited for the next blow to come in fearful silence.

  And suddenly, at the same moment as the look-out began to yell, Florin saw the monster’s return.

  It was a shadow, nothing more. A cancerous darkness deep within the womb of the sea. And although it was small it was growing with a terrible speed.

  “To the right side, men,” he shouted. “But don’t fire until I give the order.”

  Now the beast was the size of a carthorse.

  Now a cart.

  “See it down there…?”

  Now the blossoming shape expanded to blot out the light that danced in the oceans heights.

  “Wait for it, wait for it…”

  The monster powered upwards. One of the gunners, leaning over the railing to bring his weapon to bear, began to snarl.

  Now the maw of the beast seemed to fill the whole of their world.

  “Wait for the order,” Florin growled.

  The water began to boil up, lifted by the lethal velocity of its attack.

  The ship rocked gently upon the pressure that was building beneath it.

  Still he waited.

  And then, like a signal flare in a night sky, the dead orb of one of the thing’s eyes rolled into view. It was as cold as winter, as pale as death.

  It was what Florin had been waiting for.

  “Fire!”