01 - The Burning Shore by Robert Ear - (ebook by Undead)

throat. “Men, we are gathered here
today to bid farewell to our comrades Gilles Chevron, Enri Batien, Michellei
Vallard and Niccolo Jambon. It was your privilege to know them better than I,
but I know that they were loyal comrades and true. They will be missed.”
    The men remained silent and grim-faced.
    “It is with sadness that we send their bodies into the deeps. But it will be
with joy that they are remembered by those they leave behind, the joy of
friendship remembered and loyalty fulfilled. Let that joy speed them on their
way as we commend their souls to the great Manaan’s keeping.”
    He paused, listening to the wind sighing in the knotted rigging above him,
and wondered if there was anything else to say.
    But if there was, he didn’t know what.
    “Sergeant, the salute.”
    “Back rank,” Orbrant roared.
    “Aim.”
    “Ready.”
    “Fire!”
    A dozen guns boomed as the volley thundered upwards and rolled away into the
infinity of the ocean. Taking that as their cue, the men chosen to be
pallbearers stepped forward and lifted the planks. There was the hiss of rough
cloth on the planking, four distinct splashes, and the corpses were gone.
    “Attention,” Orbrant barked. “And—wait for it—wait for it—dismissed!”
    Florin watched the tight ranks of his company melt once more into a mob, and
wondered how many more of them would follow those first four before the
expedition was over.
     
    There was no telling how old it was. It kept no count of the passing of
years, or of seasons. Its life was lived to one rhythm and one rhythm alone:
hunger.
    And to follow this rhythm it was perfectly built.
    Long and sleek, as dark and sudden as a nightmare, it scythed through the
lightless pressure of the depths with a lazy ease. Every line of its great bulk
was as sharp as a blade, every facet of its black skin as smooth as a pearl.
From the high sickle of its tail to the thousands of tiny razored teeth that
lined its maw, it was beautifully, horribly, lethal.
    There was no telling where it came from. Others of its kin had been hatched
from eggs or birthed from monsters such as themselves. This one, though, seemed
too perfect to be natural. It was as though some insane god had crafted it as a
living poem of terror, and of violence, and of constant, endless hunger.
    The only hint that it was a thing of this world and not of some troubled
dream were the traces of scars that marred the perfect blackness of its skin.
They came from eons past when it had struggled against vast and alien beasts,
horrors that had taken their mastery of the ocean’s trenches for granted.
    Nightmares of beaks and tentacles they had grasped at it in a foolish
ambition that was to spell their doom. Now all that remained of them were the
cicatrices of healed wounds that punctuated their killer’s hide.
    As the leviathan slipped effortlessly through the ocean’s deepest chasms, it
knew that there was nothing left that would dare to challenge it again. Its
dominance of this dark universe was unasailable, its hunger unassuaged.
    When the first hint of blood drifted into its nostrils it didn’t hesitate.
With a slight twist of its body, a fractional curve of its fins, it turned
effortlessly away from its path and up towards the flesh that it smelled
above.
     
    “They have come on,” Commander van Delft said as Orbrant ran the company
through their drill. Under his instruction the Bretonnians formed ranks, changed
formation then fired a perfectly timed volley into the sea.
    “Good work.”
    “Thank you, sir,” Florin’s chest swelled with pride.
    “I was talking to your sergeant.”
    “Ah.”
    Lundorf, ever the professional, tried not to smile. Graznikov made no such
effort.
    “Looks like he knows what he’s doing,” van Delft continued, tugging on the
white walrus tip of his moustache thoughtfully.
    “Yes, sir,” Florin nodded. “I hear that he used to be a warrior priest. One
of those mad