Tales of the Old World (27 page)

Lorenzo looked at him sourly. “Incredible is one word for it. She looked like
she’d eat a man alive.”

Florin turned to look at the older man, a strange expression on his face.
Then, for no reason at all, he burst into a fit of wild laughter.

“I don’t see what’s so funny,” Lorenzo muttered. “I’ve been out here baking
in the midday heat while you’ve been in there faffing around for hours on end. I
mean, I suppose at some point you did ask her about what happened to old Nine
Bellies.”

“Yes, of course,” Florin said, wiping his eyes. “Of course I did. He was
eaten by the lizards alright. They took him right off the wharf. Just by where
you’re standing now.”

Lorenzo turned to look suspiciously at the water that slopped against the
scaffolding that supported the wharf.

“She said they climbed up from below here and started eating him while he was
still struggling. She and the guards went to save him, but it was too late. They
stripped him to the bone in seconds. Nine bellies and all.”

Lorenzo spat into the harbour. “She didn’t seem overly concerned by her
loss.”

“Let’s just say that Monsieur Flangei didn’t have enough of an appetite for
his good lady wife.”

“He didn’t have the appetite? But I thought the man ate like a pig. Oh. I see
what you mean.”

Florin winked at Lorenzo, who shook his head.

“I’ll never understand women,” he said.

Florin clapped him on one bony shoulder. “Don’t worry,” he said. “As long as
you understand boats.”

Lorenzo’s look of confusion gave way to one of suspicion. “You’re not
thinking of paddling about beneath the wharf, are you?”

“It’s the only way,” Florin said. “Remember how it was in the jungle? Those
things love water. It’s nice and shady for them down there, too. No wonder they
do all their hunting around the docks. Bet you anything you like we find them
down there.”

“More likely they’ll find us. And I do remember exactly what it was like in
the jungle. We might as well swim out to the manacles to hunt sharks. Look, I’ve
been thinking. Tilea is supposed to be nice, and if we didn’t mind taking a low
price for the tavern we could…”

“No.” Florin shook his head. “It wouldn’t be right. After all, I am Florin
d’Artaud, Hero of Lustria. I can’t turn and run when these things are
threatening my own city.”

Lorenzo looked at him, appalled. “Please tell me you aren’t serious,” he
said.

Florin just shrugged.

“Of course I’m serious. What Bordeleauxan man would leave the fair damsels of
this great city to the mercy of monsters?”

“Manann’s scrotum!” Lorenzo swore. “You’ve finally cracked up. Was it the
heat?”

“Something like that.” Florin, refusing to take offence, just grinned.
“Anyway, we’ll get hold of a boat from Couraine tomorrow morning. Now we should
eat. I’ve got an ogre of an appetite, and I think I saw a fish stew shop just
back there.”

“The condemned men ate a hearty meal,” Lorenzo muttered, but Florin was
already heading hungrily back into the swarming alleyways that led off from the
wharf.

The guards studied the vessel that had emerged from the steaming morning
mist. It had seen better days. Even in the grey light they could see that the
hull was a mildewed patchwork of ancient planking and new timber.

The mast had been lost, too, so the boat wallowed inelegantly forward under
the power of the oarsman. He was grunting with exertion and the smell of his
sweat was fresh amongst the miasma of rot that hung about the wharf.

The second occupant of the boat was more relaxed. He was not rowing. Instead
he was watching. He leant forward over his crossbow, eagerly peering through the
mist towards the pilings that supported the Dragon Wharf.

The guards watched him watch. Their heads floated amongst a confusion of
bobbing detritus, and their eyes remained as still and unblinking as pebbles.
They examined the boat as it splashed ever nearer with a cold-blooded patience,
moving only to keep their bodies steady in the lazy current.

When the intruders had almost reached the dark waters beneath the wharf,
their boat stopped. The two men barked at each other for a while, then set about
lighting a pair of lanterns. Only then did the oarsman continue, slowly edging
the boat between the forest of slimed timber that supported the wharf above.

The lamplight was sharp in the guards’ eyes, although they ignored the
temptation to blink. With an instinctive wisdom they realised that even that
tiny movement might be too much. Instead they suffered, and watched the strange
patterns that the reflected lamplight sent dancing around the roof of this
drowned underworld.

The boat splashed and echoed its way between the pillars, the oarsman cursing
as he rowed. His companion remained silent, his senses as taut as the arms of
his crossbow. Occasionally he would hold one of the lanterns up to study the
mildewed underside of the wharf above. Mostly he just squinted into the
surrounding darkness.

Silently, and with barely a ripple, the guards followed in the intruders’
wake.

Hunters and hunted progressed, and the waters grew more treacherous. Beneath
the carpentry of the wharf, the city had spilled into the sea. Collapsed masonry
and islands of refuse formed reefs in the stagnant water between the pilings.
Strange fungi glistened in the lamplight, and every dip of the oar brought a
fresh waft of rotting brine.

It wasn’t until the intruders had reached the crumbling foundations of the
warehouses that they stopped. The rotting masonry seemed to send them into some
confusion, and they started barking at each other again.

The guards’ eyes glistened in the lamplight as they drifted to a halt around
the vessel. Two of them, moving with the silent grace of poured treacle, slipped
from the water and slithered into the timber-work above the boat. Those that
remained submerged themselves so that only their eyes remained above water. It
had been a day since they’d eaten, and that had only been a skinny dockhand. Now
their tails twitched with excitement at the thought of the feast to come.

Their prey continued to bark meaninglessly as the guards closed in on them
from all sides. Within seconds they were in position as, completely oblivious to
their peril, the humans continued to bicker.

“Now that we’ve come to the end of this lunacy,” Lorenzo said, gesturing
towards the solid masonry before them, “can we go and start putting our affairs
in order? Belmeier is coming to value the tavern at noon, and I want to make
sure we have everything done by high tide tonight. If we don’t find a ship
leaving for Tilea we could end up anywhere.”

Florin didn’t bother to reply. Instead he carried on squinting through the
lamp-lit darkness, fidgeting with his crossbow all the while.

“They’re definitely down here,” he said, and bit the inside of his lip. “I
can almost smell them. They’ll love all this. The heat. The dankness. Just like
the jungle.”

Lorenzo looked at his partner. In the reflected lamplight his expression
could have almost been joyful.

“Whether they love it or not,” Lorenzo said, “we have to go. Today. We don’t
have any more time. If we don’t sell up and go now, we might not have another
chance. Are you listening to me?”

“Yes, of course,” Florin lied, and turned to where he thought he had heard a
splash.

“If we don’t go, the Harbour Master will use us as a scapegoat to fob off the
merchants. He told us as much himself.”

“No point in that.” Florin’s ears twitched at the sound of something
slithering through the darkness. “Hanging us won’t solve anything.”

“Of course there’s a point. It will provide the merchants with a… Oh, by
Ranald’s dice bag, I’m sick of this,” Lorenzo yelled, his patience snapping and
his anger sudden and ferocious. “Why do you always have to be such a damned
fool? It was bad enough with the cards. Then the madness with those mercenaries,
and that stinking jungle. Now this. Why is it that every day with you is like
with Morrslieb rising?”

Florin looked at his companion. For the first time he could see the genuine
anger in the older man’s battered features. The anger and the fear.

“Lorenzo,” Florin said, his features icy with a terrible patience. “I am not
a fool.”

And with that he lifted his crossbow, pointed the steel barbed bolt towards
Lorenzo, and pulled the trigger.

There was a hum and a blur, and Lorenzo’s mouth fell open as he felt the
flash of the bolt whisper past his cheek. But he didn’t have time to be
surprised. Before he could even gasp the bolt had bit home with a dull thud and
the water behind him erupted into a desperate thrashing.

“Told you they were here!” Florin exulted, his voice echoing around the
drowned depths. He swapped one crossbow for another and looked around for a
fresh target.

“Look up,” Lorenzo yelled, seizing the boat hook that lay between his feet.
Florin threw back his head in time to see a confusion of scales and talons
shining in the lamplight. He aimed and fired the crossbow in a single sweep, and
the bolt pinned the lizard to the woodwork beyond it as neatly as a butterfly on
a pin.

Before he had time to admire his handiwork another scaled body was falling
from above. This time it was Lorenzo who took it. Thrusting up with the boat
hook he pierced its stomach then flipped it into the turgid water beyond, a
manoeuvre which tipped the boat terrifyingly close to capsizing.

Even as they tried to balance their weight in the yawing vessel, the two men
realised that the water around them was alive. As soon as the sharp tang of
fresh blood had seasoned the water, the lizards had thrown off all caution. They
were hungry, and driven on by their appetites they arrowed towards the boat, the
water churning up behind them.

“Damn,” said Lorenzo as he tried to count them. Florin just grinned, a lethal
crescent in the darkness. The twin cutlasses he unsheathed shone their own eager
welcome as the first scaly body vaulted over the oarlocks, teeth bared.

Florin bellowed as he scissored the heavy blades towards the creature. Steel
met scale a whisper before fangs met skin, and the serpentine head went flying
back into the water.

“Be careful not to capsize us,” Lorenzo cried, and grabbed a hold of the oars
to steady the rocking vessel. He kicked the decapitated body back over the side,
and ducked as an arc of bloodied steel flickered overhead. By now the swarm was
upon them, and Florin was fighting with an abandon that had the boat rolling
like a barrel. Lorenzo could only dodge the blades and pray as, throwing his
weight this way and that, he tried to keep them from capsizing.

“There’s loads of them,” Florin cried as, with a pirouette worthy of an
acrobat, he twisted to simultaneously lop the arm off one opponent and the head
from another. “Try to see where the heads are going.”

He turned and stabbed at something behind Lorenzo’s bowed back. The boat
reared alarmingly, then splashed back down. A spray of cold brine dashed across
the back of Lorenzo’s neck, followed by a spray of hot blood. He tried to ignore
both as the boat bucked beneath him.

“We’ll need the heads,” Florin grunted as he punched the steel guard of one
cutlass into a serpentine snout and hacked down on another. “To collect the full
bounty.”

Lorenzo cursed this fresh insanity, and tried not to think about what would
happen if the boat was flipped and the lanterns extinguished.

But already the ambushers seemed to be retreating. Florin prised his cutlass
from the skull of his last victim and looked around him, confusion furrowing his
blood-spattered brow.

“They’re going,” he decided as Lorenzo kicked another body into the water.

“Yes. Let’s join them.”

“Good idea. We’ll have to be quick though. Come on, start rowing. That one’s
wounded, so we should be able to follow it.”

Florin dropped a cutlass into the bloodied bilge that slopped around his
boots, leant over the prow, and lifted a lantern overhead.

“Come on, they’re getting away,” he complained.

Lorenzo didn’t have the energy to argue. Instead he threw his meagre weight
behind the oars and, praying that Manann would continue to offer his traditional
protection to lunatics, he rowed.

Had the survivor not been so badly wounded, Florin and Lorenzo would never
have kept up with it. Every part of the creature, from the smoothly scaled arrow
of its head to the powerful rudder of its tail, was built for speed in the
water.

What hampered it were its injuries, and they were horrific. A cutlass stroke
had sliced open its back, so that as it moved the severed muscles slipped and
tore over the chipped ribcage beneath. Its left arm was also gone, lopped off at
the shoulder by a butcher’s blow that had been aimed at its head.

A warm-blooded creature would surely have succumbed to the shock and pain of
these twin mutilations, but not this one. As its pursuers closed in it struggled
on, ignoring the agony that sang through its nerves as easily as it ignored the
pieces of flotsam that churned beneath its remaining limbs.

“Slow down a bit,” Florin hissed, waving his hand at Lorenzo.

“Slow down?” the older man repeated, surprised.

“We’re getting too close,” Florin whispered, as if afraid that their quarry
could understand. If it did it gave no sign. The serpentine shape of its
bleeding body writhed through the black water ahead, its head tilted to one side
as it crawled lopsidedly through the rotting brine. As Florin watched a flash of
reflected lamp light glittered in one of its eyes. It reminded him of the gold
at the bottom of a prospector’s pan.

“It’s turning right,” Florin hissed as the thing rolled to one side and made
its way through a row of pilings. Lorenzo heaved on the oars and followed it.
Florin helped him, pushing the boat away from one of the timber columns before
looking back to the rippled water of their quarry’s track.