Behold, The Withered Land...
It is the Last Place in Creation: a hopeless landscape of ruination and violence, an astonishing, wondrous world of Fallen Kings and haunted dead cities, a place where Time is broken and where science is indistinguishable from sorcery! Knights and brutal warlords vie for dominion over an alien planetary empire that has fallen into savagery, where technology is a thing only barely remembered, and where evil god-like beings play chess with living pawns for control of a dying world just a heartbeat out-of-sync with our own...
We have all been there, in our dreams, in our darkest moments of despair, during our reddest rages..., it is always with us and always seemingly out of reach, a universe away yet as close as the bloody knife clutched in our fist. It is a place that houses all the corruptions in our soul. We know this place.
These are The Withered Lands.
THE WITHERED LAND, The Pilgrim, Nygeia, the Pahrayah, D'Spayr, Bishop Blood/Bluhd the Butcher, Katamahr, The Emperium/Church of the Emperium, The Wound & The Long Death, Wytchborn and related concepts are copyright © Joseph Armstead 2004, and may not be used for unauthorized screenplays, novels, storylines, stories nor may any of the author's works be reproduced in part or in whole without the author's express permission.
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Fable of the Withered Land
by Joseph Armstead
In a place of Fallen Kings, in a Time where History crumbles into dust, the Dark Things that hunger for victims can, themselves, become prey...
1. PILGRIM
It waits.
In the wastes a colossus stands,
a monument of stone and mortar,
old as the stones that lay
broken at its feet.
A giant, a tribute to
a warrior of renown,
a graven image of the hopes
and heroic dreams forgotten
by a people lost to time.
A pilgrim, dour and lonely,
wanders through this landscape
torn by Time, drained of beauty,
touched by Chaos, and he wraps
tightly his cloak around his
armoured body as the storm
approaching on the horizon
steadily draws nearer.
He answers a summons to
this place of neglected
memories, called to duty
by a pious spirit long
since departed. Stoic
and proud, he trudges past
the colossus, deeper into
the panorama of desolation.
This was once a place of kings,
he was told, once a flowering
oasis of energy, creativity
and life, a haven to the
wise and the best. Now all
that remains is broken stone,
dry brittle soil, and the
broken debris from a thousand
lives passed into antiquity.
The silent pilgrim once called
this place his home, but now...
It waits.
2. ARCANUM
Waiting for evening's shadows
to enfold and to conceal,
lost to the broken music
of a madman's dreams,
the Scribe emerges from the
gloom of the ancient crumbling
ruins and sees the knightly
Pilgrim, eyeing him with
suspicion and disbelief.
No one comes here.
No one knows this place.
Only the forgotten and
the desperate would e'en
dare try.
This was once a place of kings,
the Scribe remembers with a
sudden onrush of pain, a
flash of shame, and a whimper
born of misery. Aye,
kings there were and statesmen
and courtesans and soldiers
and merchants and jesters.
All gone, all gone, now
only the Scribe remains,
writing a daily testimony
to the fickleness of Time.
He sees the Pilgrim and he waves...
... where he is seen in return.
The Pilgrim approaches and
all the while, in the
bosom of the deepest shadows,
It waits.
3) DEMONICUS
Once it lived in the very heart
of Creation,
Once it was the brightest light
in the skies,
Once it proudly held the favor of
the Power-of-Powers.
Once...
Now it is an earth-bound, ugly,
pale imitation of the thing of
Greatness it once was.
Now it was merely a deadspawn,
a wondrous thing of darkness,
a broken celestial vessel,
left amongst the decaying ruins
ofthe Withered Lands.
Once, it, too, was a knightly
being, a figure of hope and
legend, much like the Pilgrim.
Once...
Now it merely did what it must
to survive.
But sometimes it remembered,
sometimes it dreamt of other times,
other moments of glory, of
purity, of princeliness.
Sometimes it remembered its name.
And then again, sometimes
it simply hungered.
Ravenously. Ferociously.
Cursed with a need for
the sweet warm red wetness
that coursed through the
veins of luckless others.
It hungered -- like now.
It had known that hunger
for a long, lonely time.
Towering above it all, the great
stone colossus ravaged by Time,
peered down impassively.
Waiting...
4. PRIME EVIL
The Pilgrim, so tall and straight,
faced the Scribe, old and bent, and
the two exchanged distrusful looks.
"What do ye here?", the Scribe did ask
and the Pilgrim did say, in a voice
deep and cold, "I seek a forgotten
relative, a lost friend who needs
my help, though they know it not."
"Why here?", asked the Scribe.
"Where better?", came the cryptic answer.
"I know you, sire", mumbled the Scribe as memory dawned.
"Of course you do", the Pilgrim replied and
stared into the deepness of the shadows
in the jumble of crumbling structures.
And that which waited could wait no more...
The ravening nightmare that once
had been angelic emerged from
the gloom and fell upon the two men,
fierce and powerful, bestial,
striking with great savagery and
a desperate bloodlust.
It had hunted before, it knew
of the fragility of humankind,
it knew the limits of flesh,
it had faced the desperate fury
of its prey before and it knew
its victory was inevitable.
But this time was not
as those times before,
this time something was
different. The strength
the predator confronted
matched its own, the steely
determination of intent
rivalled the fury of
its own undying bloodlust,
the battle was on equal ground.
What awful miracle was this?
What terrible joke had Fate
decided to play on this
angry demonic creature?
Why was the Pilgrim winning?
Locked face to snarling face,
chest to heaving chest, hands
wrapped each around the others',
the battling titans strained
sinew against sinew, a small
eternity of violence distilled
into this one confrontation.
And the Pilgrim lashed out mightily,
knocking the predator to the ground,
and he ripped off the hood which
had hidden his face from view ---
The demon squalled like a wounded cat.
The face it looked upon was its own.
"Duality", the Pilgrim said in a
voice thick with cold thunder,
"Always a there shall be duality."
Watching, the frightened Scribe wept.
The demonic haunter of the shadows
leapt to its feet and ran deeper
into the tilted, jumbled, mess of
collapsed masonry that lined the
scene of battle, crying out its
burning shame and unending agony.
The Pilgrim turned to look to
the Scribe and said, "Do not follow.
This is not meant for thine eyes."
And without further discourse, the
dark traveller quickly pursued the
raging demon.
The Scribe held his breath and watched
the running figure of the knight of
the ruins grow smaller as shadow and gloom
enveloped his running form.
"These things I have seen", the wizened
scholar said tremorously, "fair risk
making a sane man mad."
He looked to the towering ruins
around him and softly said,
"There will be no heroes this day.
Only survivors, only the brave
and the wicked. Only the broken."
The Scribe sighed and walked slowly
out from the city, past the
crumbling statue of the ancient
warrior colossus.
He had now, in his way, become
yet another Pilgrim.
.....END....
This story and related concepts are copyright © Joseph Armstead 2003, and may not be reproduced in part or in whole without the author's express permission.
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NYGEIA: A Return to the Withered Land
By Joseph R. Armstead
Once more, the dark, twisted shadow of the Withered Land stretches across the face of the slumbering world...
It was calling her...
She didn't like looking out her library window when the weather was like this, cold, gray and damp, redolent of regret and melancholy. Her joints ached and her flesh was chilled. The vision out her drowsy eyes was blurred, swimming like the surface of a melting mirror. When she could focus her eyes on the glade past her small garden, just outside the library window, she could make out vauge shapes and colors. The lack of details unsettled her. Winter, it was winter wherever she looked. She didn't like the winter season.
Winter always reminded her of that place, the quiet place where the air did not nourish, where the light fell upon the land like dead leaves, that place where the Universe held its breath, as if waiting...
The place where tomorrow never came.
She sat looking at the wilted flowers in their fluted vase by the window. Silvery-gray light from the stormy day outside streamed in through the rain-streaked glass and was refracted through the faceted surfaces of the red glass vase, leaving strange crimson geometric shapes on the polished surface of the wooden table's top.
It looked like a memory of blood spilled so very, very long ago...
She slowly and reluctantly fell asleep as all the warmth of memory fled her mind, leaving her cold, brittle and defenseless against the approach of the rolling foggy mist. Unconsciously, she drew her quilted coverlet tighter around her, snuggling deeper into it, and she felt it consume her as surely as if it were one of the anonymous beasts treading the featureless arid plain of the place her nightmares always returned her to...
She wept silently as consciousness left her.
NYGEIA: A RETURN TO THE WITHERED LAND
by JOSEPH ARMSTEAD
1. TRAVELLER
The winds whistled a haunting unmelodius tune.
The wastes stretched on for as
far as the eye could see, unmarked
by footprints, untrammeled by Time,
and a crumbling fortress of aged granite
stood behind the imposing wreckage
of a broken statue, a mighty colossus
that once stood taller than the fort's
highest parapets, straddling a gravelled road
that led to the fortresses huge twin doors.
This was once a place of majesty, of legendry,
of power. Once.
Now it is a hollow ghost of a place, the shell
of some great departed beast, a
primordial predator once master of these
dry and blank-faced plains.
The Traveller, tall and dour, wrapped in
flowing dark robes over a wrinkled and
time-worn tunic of tanned animal hides,
face and hair hidden under a voluminous hood,
stood on the road and stared for long moments
through the dusty air at the crumbling
walls of the aged fort, long slender fingers
tapping the metal ball atop a banded walking
stick with apprehension and some irritation.
The Traveller did not belong here.
The Traveller was called here.
The Traveller did not want to come here.
Once a place of kings, tyrants,
knights and rogues, the fortress
now housed shadows and mystery
amongst carved stones and
cracked alabaster statuary, where
lizards and sand-toads scampered about
in dessicated abandoned gardens sprouting
reedy, petrified stalks of blossoms
that no longer remembered
how to flower.
The Pahrayah lived within this place.
Waiting.
The Traveller did not want to again
have to sit in the presence of
the Pahrayah. It was not a
comfortable thing to do.
It was like waiting to die.
The Traveller followed the winds
along the road and passed the
stone remains of the fallen giant to
finally wander into the interior
of the fortress from whence a
mighty empire once was ruled.
2. MONOLITH AND MEDIUM
The Traveller did not have long to wait
before the Emissaries of the Pahrayah
emerged from the deepening gloom.
Small and bent, gnarled and aged
like the dry limbs of an old tree,
the Emissaries scuttled about like
insects, possessing one mind,
sharing one will, living, in their way
for this was not truly Life,
only to serve, only to enforce the
will of their brutish master.
"This way. Follow.
Step only where we tread.
Do not stray from the path",
they urged in hoarse brittle voices
not used to forming
phonems for human speech.
"What is beyond the path?",
curiosity prompted
The Traveller to ask.
"Not your concern. Obey",
the gnomish creatures
replied snappishly.
The Traveller ceased walking
and turned away from the
dwindling backs of the moving
creatures, peering beyond the
gray shadows into the blacker
pall under the broken patchwork
of fallen buildings.
The Emissaries snarled in tight
little voices full of spite and
reluctantly explained, "Stray from
the path and you become prey.
Nightlingers lurk beyond the
edges of the dying light, angry,
hungry, dreaming of murder.
Now follow and be quick.
Light does not last in this place."
"This was once a place of kings",
The Traveller mumbled softly.
"Aye, that it was, but mostly
it was a place of shame and misery",
the Emissaries said in unison,
voices too dry and light to echo
amongst the rocky debris.
"We miss its greatness,
we miss the pain."
The Traveller was repulsed by their candor...
They walked in silence up a
tall flight of stairs on the side
of a broken ziggurat within the
fortress walls, overlooking a
pool of brackish water.
And then the Emissaries waved
to The Traveller to stop. They turned
and faced the robed pilgrim, their
beady little eyes burning with the
fevers of madness. They spoke
as one being, for in essence,
that is what they were, though a
loathsome broken soul they were.
"We're here. Bow before their
Majesty, the Pahrayah."
3) PAHRAYAH
Once there had been a Family Royal,
beautiful, cruel and blessed with
a wicked insight into the small hearts'
of their subjects' souls. Once there
had been a brother and a sister,
so alike as to be peas from the same pod,
yet each different from the other in
hungering Need and in furious Intensity.
The son, princeling of golden blond hair,
was sinister and violent, eternally enraged.
Power was his obsession, the need to
dominate and to control a driving force
setting his very core ablaze.
The daughter, elegant princess with hair
dark and irridescent as a raven's wing,
lusted for all things fleshy, for the
corruption of all that was soft and innocent,
her hunger for sensation and wickedness,
driving her to greater and greater depths
of debauchery while she had lived.
But then, one dark day, the two
angered the very Gods of this cursed
Withered Land, thinking themselves
above the laws that governed the
balance of the cosmos in this place
where Time wound down and dribbled
from off the face of the clock. Even here,
in a place that was no longer a place,
in a land under a night full of dead stars,
there were lines that could not be crossed
with arrogant impunity.
The two were joined, flesh flowing
like sludge, melting like wax,
combining into a misshapen mockery
of Life, rebirthed into UnLife,
created as a thing already destroyed.
Naked, their intertwined flesh
florrid and striated by exposed
muscle and ligament, they writhed
and undulated like thick liquid
atop a throne shaped like an open bowl.
They became the Pahrayah and, as
years passed into eons, they became
rulers of a dying shrinking empire
of dead forgotten states.
They would not know Death.
They would not know Peace.
They would each forever be privy
to the nightmares and demons
that drove the other.
Together in damnation.
Lost in loathing.
The Traveller thought their fate Just.
The Pahrayah turned their baleful stare
upon the hooded robed pilgrim and said
in a lustreless voice,
"It is good that you have
returned, dearest and only daughter."
(She had lived this moment
many times before. It was
at this moment that Time
collapsed in upon itself
for her: the Past became
the Present became the Future
became the Past yet again,
yet somehow out-of-sync,
on and on but yet different,
Time immemorium yet not
of itself, sidereal instead
of linear, truly endless,
a Full circle that somehow
never truly completed itself,
a serpent unable to
swallow its own tail.
Always, always, she stood
before them, repulsed and
defiant, afraid and yet
dominant, she knew them
for what they truly were
and they, in turn, knew her
secret name, had created her
secret face...
Nygeia they had named her,
"Mother of Nighted Earth",
immortal child of Despair,
princess to the throne
of a cursed land...
They called her back from
her earthly exile, from her
lonely solitary life as
a fragile invalid, so that
she again stood before them
strong, in her Glory, a
Knight-Errant of
the Withered Land.)
"Today it ends", she said,
her voice hard and black
as the Void between the stars.
4) AN EVIL REPULSED
The Traveller reached up
and drew back her hood,
revealing a strong face
with clear hazel eyes,
a strong woman's face,
aristocratic, beginning to
know the lines of age,
wreathed by a tumble of
thick auburn hair, a face
that had shown expressions
of love, grief, joy, worry,
and anger, but never, ever
malevolence or evil.
If daughter she was
to the Pahrayah, then
daughter she was
in name only to that
vile mutated duality
of unrepentent Sin.
"There IS no 'end', child",
the sexually neutral voice
drawled, secure in its power
within the confines of the
ruined fortress' walls,
"There is only Need, there is
only the Hollowness,
there is only the demand for
more and you are, as ever,
here to do our bidding,
here to give us MORE.
You are our loyal
hunting dog, sent forth
to retrieve our fallen prey..."
"No, not so any more", Nygeia
answered with the firm and calm
resolve of on who has reached
the end of their time in
unwilling familial bondage.
"You will no longer be allowed
to drain the joy and beauty
from my Life in the Space Beyond
the Plain. Not all things serve
to fuel the sleeping hatred
in the Withered Land. Not all
things exist only to die for
your sad sick entertainment."
"What are you saying?
How DARE you say such things!",
the Pahrayah hissed.
Nygeia shook her head mournfully.
"I am your Gatherer, your
hunting hound, the collector of
fallen prey, but you forget
that which I am also:
I am that which clears
away the Dead, that which
carries away those foul fallen
things that rot and decay
because they have reached
the End of their evolution.
YOU have reached that End.
I have sensed the rot
within YOU!"
And with that the hooded robed woman
stretched out her hand and raised
her walking stick to the darkened
ceiling of the imperial chamber
and silvery gray lightning flashed
again and again and again...
The screaming went on for
what seemed a slow Eternity.
5) FROM THE WASTELANDS RETURNED
When they found her,
days later, alone, wrapped
in her quilt, she was red-eyed
from weeping and her breathing
was as slow and light as the
whisper of a feather falling
from the wing of a moulting dove.
So weak was she that her
concerned friends and neighbors
despaired she would fade
from this life, and
it saddened them that
she should be so very alone
in so fragile a time in her life.
They didn't know much about the
dour and regal old woman, except
they were stunned by her beauty,
by her regal bearing, by the
patience she showed in the
face of her great disabling pain.
Her strength was a source of
inspiration for them.
Their strength was a source of power for her.
As the woman recuperated, regaining
her depleted strength, it sometimes
seemed her new-found friends shared
her cycles of exhaustion, sometimes
they felt drained from being near her,
and they convinced themselves that
this was due to their efforts to
bring the woman back from the brink
and they felt good about their
growing fatigue.
Nygeia blossomed...
She was truly the daughter of her parents.
She was a child of the Pahrayah.
She was undeniably the exiled princess of
the mysterious Withered Land.
Sometimes, alone, she sat and stared at the wilted flowers
in their fluted vase by the window. Silvery-gray light
from the wintry day outside streamed in through the
rain-streaked glass and was twisted through the faceted
surfaces of a red glass vase on her table, leaving strange
crimson geometric shapes on its polished surface.
It looked like a memory of blood spilled so very, very long ago...
.....END....
This story and related concepts are copyright © Joseph Armstead 2004, and may not be reproduced in part or in whole without the author's express permission.
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D'Spayr: A Knight in the Withered Land
By Joseph R. Armstead
ONE
There were no coincidences in this strange, grim place. Anything in this land was damned, biblically doomed and reviled, and could not escape paying some kind of penance.
That was why he no longer believed in innocence.
**** The Withered Land had once been a place of kings, a galaxy-spanning empire of technology and politics and power, a place of pomp and majesty where familial lineages and tradesman-merchant classes dominated a stratified and orderly society where a confederation of nations and worlds created wonders. No more.
When Time had broken, when Relativity had hemorrhaged, it all came crashing down around their shoulders.
Whole species of plants and animals died within weeks. The polar caps shifted. Weather changed calamitously and regions, in some cases continents, became uninhabitable. The economy of the star-spanning confederation collapsed even as hundreds of millions of its citizens died before the viral and chemo-biological onslaught of new diseases.
The laws of physics changed… Machines that once worked flawlessly, stopped working at all. Gravity suddenly became uncertain, in some places there were anti-gravity vortices where entire cities had unexpectedly spun off from their planetary surfaces into the old depths of space. Earthquakes happened more frequently, were far larger than ever before, and occurred in places unused to quakes to devastating, often fatal, effect.
The light from the twin suns on the horizon permanently dimmed and the atmospheres of several worlds no longer protected their planetary surfaces from an unending rain of deadly radiation.
Then the people began to mutate, some mutating forward, taking great evolutionary leaps, others devolving into predatory beasts, and yet others became deadly alien things never before seen and only vaguely related to humanoid life.
Laws broke down. Society collapsed even as the universe did. Anarchy became the norm. Warlords and tyrants raged forward to step into the gap, imposing their twisted brutal order upon the remaining population that had survived the changes that had overtaken their Reality. The universe changed, morphing into what it was now…
The Withered Land.
They had come to the fallen fortress-city, once the center of the starspanning empire, as a team, six of them, rogues and mercenaries, masterless warriors looking for a cause, looking to make ends meet, looking for a purpose in a world that had irrevocably crumbled into chaos and disorder.
They were there to escort a human package out from the ruined city, a wealthy merchant or a fallen crimelord or masquerading royalty-in-exile, it didn’t matter which, and they expected a large windfall of treasure and supplies, extravagant goods with which they could barter to get their weapons and armor repaired, to keep a few weeks supply of food in their bellies, obtain a few credit to use for getting what little medicine there was left in the civilized places. Survival, it was all about survival now. Where once they would have opposed or even arrested such people, they now counted on getting small jobs from them for their survival.
But when they’d entered the crumbling, towering fortress’ walls, traveling into the depths of the decaying city, they’d encountered the worst of the symptoms of the Withered Land’s downward spin…
Cannibals.
They’d been lured to The City with lies. It was a trap. The cunning, amoral creatures that had spawned in the garbage and waste-littered alleyways and in the ruined, broken buildings were casting a wide net with which to catch all sorts of nomadic travelers ---
--- for food.
The team had fought with the precision and ferocity of trained military warriors, but they had been overwhelmed by the numbers of their foes, stunned and unprepared by their mutant vitality, and disadvantaged by their unfamiliarity with the turf on which they’d fought.
They must have killed a hundred cannibals, only to find that three hundred more lurked waiting in the shadows.
They ran.
They died.
Only one escaped the madness of that murderous place. Just one. The Unbeliever, the most fallen of those disreputable dirty rogue soldiers, the one who had been alone and friendless the longest…
Only he survived, if surviving it was. Survived to wander the arid vastness of the Forever Plain in the Withered Land… ****
The Knight was wandering two leagues out from the southernmost edges of the Forever Plain when he’d happened on the boy. The lad had been wandering alone, without water, stumbling and crawling out from the cracked and featureless expanse of dead soil, a sea of grit barely covering a wide equatorial scar of volcanic rock, and he was nearly mad with exhaustion, feverish and hallucinatory from exposure and exertion.
He’d held The Object clutched in a near death-grip in his skinny fist.
At the edges of the Wastes, the sparsely-populated territory beyond the Plain, there was a thick rolling cloud of fog, fleece-white and smudged with charcoal, where bizarre lights danced within, glowing red and amber. A flock of armored birds, flapping membranous wings of speckled, wart-covered skin, flew high over the fogbank. The Knight watched the flock and saw they studiously avoided any contact with the thick cottony mists.
That was a bad sign.
The Knight rode a tall four-legged steed, a long-faced, stalk-legged reptilian beast with a flowing mane of coarse hair and a long, segmented saurian tail that ended in a bony spiked ball resembling a battle mace. The beast hated him. He hated it. They relied on one another with a trust born of experience and expediency. They had traveled together for almost two years, enduring sandstorms, rainstorms, hail and lightning, hungry dune-spiders and the fury of marauding caravan-bandits. They survived an epic journey across the Forever Plain because they were together and each knew it.
So when the Knight pulled lightly on the chain-link reins attached to the steed’s harness, he did not expect it to rear up into the air, lashing its legs and kicking, and then growl and scoot sideways away from the prone, unmoving body of the boy in tattered clothes.
The steed was a killing machine in its prime. It feared nothing.
Yet it would not approach the boy holding the stone and glass Object.
The Knight wasn’t stupid. There was more here than met the eye.
Beyond the boy, lying on his side, one thin leg slightly bent, at the edges of the fog, sat an old woman in a rickety chair, under a wooden slat-parasol, straggly silver hair wrapped in a soiled bandana. She watched him approach with the patience and nervous anticipation of a madwoman.
“Smart animal”, she commented in a hoarse voice that spoke of grain alcohol and hard-living. Her accent was strong and it was the accent of a Northerner, a wind-worshipper from the icy hills and cliffs of the region called Jaggerheim, an unimaginably far distance away from the Plains, past the equatorial Wastes, on the top of the world, where day lasted months at a time and true night never fell, where the only respite from constant dazzling day was a month-long twilight once every three years.
Jaggerheim was one of the first places in the Withered Land where the Long Death had begun, two centuries ago, after the flaming meteor swarm had fallen from the iron-colored sky, after the scientists had discovered the huge rent, a tear, in the deepness of the sky, a hole in space. They had named that slash in the fabric of the universe, “The Wound”. Jaggerheim was one of the few places in existence where you could see it without the aid of a telescope. There, in the gray hills of the wind-lashed northern climes, they could see The Wound as clearly as they could see the fading illumination of their twin suns. When the Long Death descended on them all, it was the first place to see The End coming. There were supposedly no survivors from the ice-palace cities of that brutal frigid clime.
Well, none except for himself, he’d thought. Apparently, he was wrong.
“You’re a free-rider, from the looks of you, a masterless soldier, got no army to fight with anymore, serving no king or warlord. I thought that the Emperium’s death-hounds, those traitorous mercenary bastards, had destroyed all your kind, down to the last, some twenty years ago. Yet here you come, riding out from the Forever Plain. Precious few have ever done that, trooper, precious few. Fewer still lookin’ so fierce and strong. Ain’t you a wonder?”
The Knight didn’t respond. He knew she’d say more.
“Animals know more than people, even sorry-ass scaled lizard-horses. And that one’s lettin’ you ride him. Unusual. You must be special. About as special as a crazy old woman sittin’ next to the fabled Thirst Fog on the edges of The Wastes, I imagine… the universe has become a crazy place, hasn’t it, trooper?”
He ignored the question. “Do you need water? Food?”
The old woman stretched her arms and shoulders and her joints popped softly. “Thank you, no, we have supplies.”
He looked around. He saw no oxen, no dragon-steeds, no wagon, no camp other than her chair and parasol and a couple of large leather saddlebags on the ground.
“And how are you managing to travel these empty wastes with so few visible supplies?”, he asked skeptically.
“We manage”, the woman said firmly.
The Knight kept silent, watching the lights within the fog bank dance and bob within, defying gravity, moving independently of one another. There was something slightly ominous about them, something predatory…
“The boy”, the Knight said after a long uncomfortable moment, “tell me about the boy.”
The old woman cackled. “Give me your name first”, she asked.
He was uncomfortable with that. Giving a stranger your name could surrender part of your power to them, it was said, and yet, he could see no strategic advantage in keeping it from her.
“D’Spayr”, he said.
“I am Tuolenne”, she said. “I was once a member of the Emperium’s Royal Court back in the Fallen City, you know, in The Cracked Fortress. I was a scribe, a scholar, a healer. That was back when things made sense. You notice I didn’t say ‘back when things were better’. They weren’t. Too many liars and killers hiding behind fancy words and powerful titles, back then. But at least you knew where you stood. Now… Things have changed so much in the world… The clock is winding down.”
“The boy… Is he injured? Dead?”, the Knight named D’Spayr pressed in stern tones.
Tuolenne sighed and shook her head. Stiffly, she rose from her chair and shuffled out from under her umbrella, walking towards D’Spayr.
“Damn it all, if you’re not in a hurry in a place where hurrying doesn’t make any sense”, she muttered crossly. “The boy is called Derivan. He is the last Prince of the Family Golgottah, and yes, yes, I know, the Golgottah’s were wiped out to the last by the Emperium a decade ago, but the truth is, they didn’t kill everyone. Derivan survived. He is a Keeper. You know about Keepers? No? Keepers are Holy People, special souls selected at birth to carry the burden of shepherding certain talismans, Objects of Power, articles of antiquity and legend that supposedly possess magical powers… you know the stories. Well, anyway, that’s what the boy has right now and he is having himself a moment. You’re looking at the aftermath of one of his fits.”
D’Spayr raised an eyebrow. “He is subject to seizures?”
“Not in the normal sense. Only when the Object activates.”
“I see.”
“No. You don’t really. You’d have to experience it to understand it, but that’s the story here. Derivan will be fine in a little while.”
“Are you his Guide or his Attendent, Tuolenne?”
The old woman smiled mischievously. “Not hardly. Wouldn’t be this little freak’s nanny or his teacher for all the riches in the Emperium. We met up eight months ago, both of us homeless and hungry and on the run, and we have been traveling together since. It’s mutually satisfying. Companionship and protection. Another hand to help beg for hand-outs. Another set of eyes to watch for danger in the night.”
The Knight frowned. “And why would either of you be in danger? You said that everyone supposes the boy is dead and I imagine neither of you advertise his lineage, so you two should be fairly inconspicuous…”
Wellll…”, Tuolenne shrugged. “There’s a little more to the story than that. Like I said, we were both on the run, and, as Fate would have it, we were running from the same people.”
“And they would be…?”
“Bluhd. Bishop Bluhd of the rogue flittership ‘Pandemyon’, a skyship in case you do not know what a flittership is…”
D’Spayr snorted and cursed under his breath. “Bishop Bluhd, formerly of the Grand Family’s Royal Inquisitors? The same Bishop Bluhd who torched the entire ville of the Warlord, Baron Kratep, setting ablaze half of Mount Thunder back to the north of the Plain? The same Bishop Bluhd who was an alchemist and developed blasting powders for the Emperium and then denied the Royal Army the use of those powders, keeping them for himself? The man they call ‘Bluhd the Butcher’? THIS is who you were running from?”
Tuolenne nodded, cowed at the intensity rising in D’Spayr’s voice.
“And he has a flittership?”
“Yes”, Tuolenne replied somberly. “A battle-skycraft with nine cannon and a crew of thirty mercenary soldiers, all armored, all carrying slingshafts, all trained huntsmen.”
“He doesn’t want the boy, does he? He wants the Object…”
Tuolenne nodded.
“And why does he want you?”
“I, myself, AM an ‘object’. I am a focus of magical energy…”
The Knight made a face and rose back in his saddle on his steed. “A Wytchborn.”
“Yes”, Tuolenne said, squaring her shoulders and standing before the Knight with stubborn dignity.
D’Spayr bowed his head and muttered, “Marvellous.”
“You don’t need to stay. None of it concerns you”, the old woman snapped.
“How far ahead of Bluhd are you two? I assume he’s still chasing you…”
“Three days. As if that matters to a proud and noble traveler, a paragon of perfection, such as yourself”, she said with sarcastic venom.
The boy began to make mewling noise and stir from his position on the ground, one of his hands reaching up, towards the sky, and his eyes squinting open. He noisily sucked in a huge lungful of dry, still air and tried sitting up. It took him two attempts before he was able to right himself and sit splay-legged in the dirt.
“By Luminezia, that hurt”, he complained bitterly. He looked up and saw D’Spayr astride his dragonish steed and gulped audibly. He quickly and clumsily tried to hide the strange piece of sculpture he grasped in his fist. He cast a look towards Tuolenne, moving only his eyes, afraid to move lest he draw attention to himself and risk the Knight’s wrath, and asked softly, “So how much trouble do you think we’re in now, Old Woman?”
“None. He’s just a traveler, a sword-slingin’ free-rider. He’s got no business with us,” she hushed edgily.
“That true”, the boy, Derivan, stammered.
“My name is D’Spayr and I was once Outlands Marshal, a Knight in service to the Council of Free Territories, a survivor of the Emperium Crusades into Jaggerheim and Vanhelmslund, and I’ve just left the Barony of Osthursdale, within the Forever Plains’ Western Hills, where I lost my entire team of comrades to cannibalistic ruin-dwellers”, he explained. “We were hunted and killed by the very people who’d hired us, hired us on false pretenses. So you’ll excuse me if my levels of trust for my fellow man aren’t very high right now. I am not an enemy of either of you, but I am no friend, either. I do not need to make more enemies for myself and the two of you have a very powerful one in Bishop Bluhd.”
“Why tell us any of this?”, Derivan asked.
“So that maybe you’ll understand why I just leave the two of you here, stuck in the middle of nowhere…”
“Ah, you seek to excuse your cowardly behavior and disregard for common decency…”, Tuolenne chided bitterly.
“What I seek to do, madam, is survive”, D’Spayr stated coldly. “You do not have steeds. You are not warriors. You have no visible weapons and, even if you do, I doubt you’re particularly well-versed in using them. You’re soft. You’re liabilities. And the Wastes beyond the fog are full of dangers… Frankly, you could get me killed. If we travel together, you could get all of us killed.”
“Logical”, Derivan admitted, rubbing his head.
“Bah! He was once a Knight… he has abandoned the very code that made him what he is”, Tuolenne snapped.
D’Spayr shrugged at her outburst. He saw no sense in arguing the point. Nothing would be gained by engaging her in debate.
“So where are the two of you going, so long as you can evade the Bishop and his forces?”, he asked.
“Across the Wastes, to the Outpost of Common Hope, called Katawahr, where it is said that survivors of the Emperium and free-persons have banded together to create the one last place where Order rules in the Withered Land”, Derivan said. “It is said they turn away no one, so long as that person is willing to work, live within the Law, and mind their own business.”
“Katawahr..”, D’Spayr said shaking his head.
“You’ve heard of it?”, Tuolenne asked.
“That I have, that I have. I always thought it a myth. In all my travels, I’ve never met anyone who’d ever actually been there. I do not see how such a place could exist anymore in this cosmos, especially on the edges of The Wastes…”, the Knight replied, his eyes once again focusing on the cyclical, independent dancing of the eerie muted lights within the swirling fogbank.
“It is not a myth”, Derivan said, “Bishop Bluhd himself is searching for it. He has turned all his resources towards finding it. To destroy it. That way he becomes the one dominant power beyond the borders of the cities, out on the Plains and in The Wastes. He is on a crusade of conquest.”
“So how is it that you two are alive?”
“We have The Object”, the boy said simply. “And he cannot make it work without us. Only we know its secrets.”
Again, D’Spayr muttered an epithet and said from out the side of his mouth, “Of course. Wytchborn business.”
“I am a Keeper”, Derivan said proudly, stepping towards the Knight, “and I am a prince of the blood. By the same token, I have also been a prisoner and a slave to evil men. I have survived. Some respect is due me…”
“Don’t push your luck, boy”, D’Spayr growled. “Royalty and Holy-folk bleed just as well as poor common folk. Wytchborn, too, I would imagine.”
Derivan made a face and looked at his boots, unable to maintain his gaze into the Knight’s fierce glare.
“So where is it that you are traveling, free-rider?”, Tuolenne asked, breaking the tension.
That question stopped him cold. He didn’t know. And, belatedly, irritatingly, he realized that he hadn’t known for a very long time. He no longer knew where it was he was bound. All he’d known to do these past years was to survive, falling into one situation after another, hooking up aimlessly with this crew or that, selling his martial talents to whomever needed a soldier desperate enough to take what often turned out to be suicide jobs. He had become a slayer, a reaver…
…much like Bishop Bluhd.
Once he’d had a mission. Once he’d had a purpose. Now all he had was his survival skills. He lived while others died. He’d become a solitary predator amongst other predators. He’d become as much broken as the Withered Land itself.
The knowledge left the taste of ashes in his mouth.
“Looks like it might be Katamahr…”, D’Spayr said at last, sighing, inwardly damning himself for a fool.
“Really?”, the old woman asked dubiously.
“Hell, why not?”
Derivan smiled thinly. For all his inexperience, the boy was a realist. He learned from his misadventures.
“So into the fog we go, is it? Well, perhaps better there than here, waiting for Bishop Bluhd to rediscover us and capture us again. The journey will be long and hard. We might not make it.”
“We’ll deal with whatever we have to deal with”, D’Spayr growled. “Take the journey one step at a time. Hopefully, Bluhd theButcher will not think to follow us into the Wastes and will pursue his own interests…”
“He is searching for Katamahr, too”, Tuolenne reminded the Knight.
“Then we deal with him when the time comes.”
Tuolenne regarded D’Spayr with a piercing gaze. “You know him, don’t you?”
“Yes, as well as any man can say he knows another.”
“Where do you know him from?”
“That is my business.”
“Not if we’re traveling together. That knowledge could be the key to keeping us alive”, Tuolenne pressed.
D’Spayr turned eyes as cold as glacial frost on the woman. “He is the man who trained me. Before I became a Knight, I was in the Sacred Order. I would have been a priest-warrior of the Penitent, a protector of the Church of the Emperium. He cast me out for a crime I did not commit. Not that I was an innocent --- there were other things I actually DID do, but the one I was accused of was far worse than any of my other infractions and I was not guilty of committing that crime. No matter, that was another life in another time. I have moved on since then and so, apparently, has he. Oh, by the way, he is my half-brother.”
Tuolenne and Derivan were rooted where they stood. D’Spayr smiled with forlorn wickedness.
“So, are we ready to go, then?”
He tugged the reins of the steed, pulling the animal in towards the fog and slowly began moving away from the astonished duo.
“Half-brother to the butcher”, Tuolenne whispered to Derivan. “Can you believe?”
“Marvelous”, the boy remarked, the word drenched with fatalism.
TWO
As Derivan and D’Spayr, resigned to their sudden and unexpected partnership as wanderers through the Wastes, began to move towards the wall of fog that bisected the horizon, Tuolenne turned her attention to the sudden feeling of something electric in the air, like the scent of an approaching summer storm. A subtle coppery ozone scent, like electricity expended through the open air, tickled her nose and a sudden build up of a static charge made her skin tingle and the ends of her long gray hair dance against the breeze. She could not suppress a feeling that something was moving behind her.
She turned… Images and memory played at the edges of her consciousness, one overlaying the other, as if her perceptions were being manipulated and they were resisting, attempting to again right themselves.
Something was coming…
(Not so long ago, as a younger woman though still matronly, she once attended a small ceremony, outside a village she’d adopted as a temporary home, where the local shaman had invoked something he’d called “the Rites of the Machine”. It was mostly silliness, with a lot of magician’s sleight-of-hand accompanying a recitation of a meaningless series of words in the Elder Language, the speak of academicians before the Emperium outlawed books. She’d felt embarrassed for the thin, ragtag charlatan and was about to leave the ceremony just as the air quivered and several attendees sank to their knees, eyes and ears bleeding, as the shaman tapped their bio-encephalic energy, the energy of their very thoughts, to make appear a strange apparition – a shadow wrapped in scarlet flames.
Tuolenne had been frozen in place, paralyzed with fear and dread, as she’d realized that this uneducated and untrained, reckless little man had opened a doorway to Elsewhere and was on the verge of allowing something from Outside to move into his own world.
It had been the first time that she’d realized that there were others abroad the Land like herself, that she was one of a small select group, each disconnected from the others, most unaware of the importance and the danger inherent in using their strange abilities, and that perhaps the Emperium was not so arbitrary nor evil after all in hunting them down and rounding them up so that they could be controlled.
She’d known they weren’t supposed to flaunt their powers like that. She’d known they were supposed to try to live their lives in secret, hiding their unique abilities from family and friends, and especially from the Emperium. She’d known that even a drink-addled, prideful half-simpleton like the prancing little magician knew better than to make use of the real magik at their command.
Magik was forbidden. She’d known that they weren’t supposed to make the magik happen…
The rag-draped rodent of a man was incredibly irresponsible in performing the ceremony he’d begun, in invoking the appearance of a creature he knew nothing about and setting it loose amongst his own kind…
Tuolenne remembered watching the Thing-in-Flames erupt from out of a hole in the twilight air and screaming as it brutally and cheerfully killed every living being in that small clearing, outside the village. It bit, it tore, it dismembered, it stabbed and it cackled with unrestrained glee. Nine men, four women, and three children. Murdered inside a dozen heartbeats. Then it turned its vile attention on the shaman. It embraced him in a clutch that was all scorpion stings and mulberry thorns, and it beheaded him, literally ripping his head from off its neck, tearing, twisting and pulling until the head separated with a splash of blood and the pop of split tissues, and it then calmly walked back over to the rent in space from which it had emerged. It stopped long enough to look back at her, though it was only a silhouette in flames and possessed no facial features, and nod, as if recognizing another of its own kind. Then it vanished, the rent closing, and it took the shaman’s head with it.
Only she had survived. Tuolenne remembered that the scent of old lightning had lingered in the air after the slaughter.
Tuolenne went a little crazy after that and had spent three months screaming herself awake every night after that.
And she always fought the urge to scream herself crazy whenever she smelled that coppery electrical scent…)
“Derivan! Sir Knight! Something is coming…!”, she screamed. “Something is coming!”
* * *
Amazing. It was a continual source of amazement to her.
Her head still ached…
Her soul had once again been hijacked back to that place, that awful dreary realm of misery, discontent, simmering rage and lost dreams. Well, at least that was how she looked at it, how she reasoned it, dreading inside the secret knowledge that, whether she liked it or not, she was inescapably bound to the tortured fate of this Reality where she’d been born.
The pain of continual rebirth was really quite exquisite, marvelous even, and this was, despite its unending stillness and deep grayness, a place of marvels.
The headache had heralded the beginning of the transition from Here to There. Yet even after her arrival, her transplacement, the ring of pulsing agony that wrapped her skull in an electric buzz remained.
Rebirth. The after-effects of her rebirth were still with her.
She hated the fact that it thrilled her, each and every time. She worked so hard to purge herself of that twisted animal, that thing that licked its lips in anticipation of the pain, that her parents had created so very long ago, had thoughts she’d buried it under a mountain of new impressions, sensations and memories. But it would not die.
Neither would she.
Mere hours ago she’d sat comfortably in her wheelchair, in her library with its grand latticed windows overlooking the interior of her vast greenhouse garden, a tall woman, her dead legs draped with an expensive handmade afghan throw and a warm cup of tea sitting in porcelain on a reading table at her side. Aged and infirm, yet still possessing reserves of physical strength and mental faculties that raced at a speed that made light look sluggish, she had been enjoying her late afternoon, reading and listening to classical music from her stereo system. And then the light that streamed past the greenhouse roof and through the library windows deepened to resemble candlelight passing through a shade of thinned blood and the headache began.
The Summons. Impossible. The only beings capable of such an extrasensory call across Time and Space, her parents, were dead, slain by her own hands. Yet there it was, undeniable… The Summons.
The Laws of Attraction took over at that point, the corollary of Retracting Co-Linearity ruled, Like called to Like, the Whole demanded the return of its Splinter, gravitational and temporal cohesion roared angrily, Being and Affinity inverted and she was pulled back into the grasp of the Withered Land.
She was shunted from one dimensional Reality to another. It was a miracle, a dark marvel.
Nygeia, Princess of the Withered Land and daughter to the late unlamented Pahrayah, was forcibly returned home. She allowed a single black tear to fall from her brimming eyes and trail a charcoal streak down her face.
Her amazement did not deter her from deciding she’d kill whosoever had summoned her back.
She hated this place.
She rose from the gritty soil where she’d been kneeling as she’d allowed the after-effects of the transplacement to pass, standing tall on strong and shapely legs, the legs of a trained athlete, lithe and long-muscled, and she was dressed in her traditional leather tunic under a billowing hooded cloak. The years had dropped away from her face and form, leaving her young and vital, desirable in a demanding aggressive way, and she held her banded walking stick in her slim fist. Her piercing hazel eyes, cold and calculating, surveyed the scene around her.
She was beyond the borders of the Forever Plain, on the fog-shrouded edges of The Wastes.
A boy and an old woman looked at her with wonder and fear, recognizing her to be more than merely mortal, and a muscular armored man on a prancing dragon-steed eyed her with suspicion and cool assessment. He was undoubtedly a trained soldier and he was deciding whether or not she was a threat.
She licked her full lips, her anger belying the sensual nature of the action, and demanded, “Why is it that you brought me here?”
Though he didn’t answer aloud, the boy gasped and shook while the older woman supported him, tossing the lad a look of consternation, mentally ordering him to get hold of his faculties.
“You”, she said with a sneer. “Do you have any idea what it is you have done?”
Still unable to speak, the boy stretched his arm out towards her and held the Object out for her to see.
Nygeia hissed an irritated breath between clenched teeth and said, “A Keeper. Oh, this is rich! One of the hysterical, spell-mumbling, convulsing Holy-folk! Ignorant little savage, you probably didn’t even now what you were doing…!”
“You have a name, I suppose?”, the mounted Knight demanded, interrupting her tirade.
“Nygeia”, she spat.
The Knight chuckled. “Nonsense. There is no such person. Nygeia is a myth used to frighten children, a memory from dark days before knowledge spread across the Emperium. You are a wanderer, a woman-warrior from the looks of it, probably a thief or a mercenary, nothing more or less. The boy’s magic snared a comely killer…”
Nygeia’s head tilted to one side in disbelief. “If you stop talking now, I promise you I’ll allow you to die quickly. Insult me again and I‘ll kill you, resurrect you, and kill you again.”
The Knight’s lips pursed. He didn’t speak again. His fingers went to the pommel of his twin-bladed shatter-sword, but paused their motion as the woman slowly shook her hooded head in warning. She looked very serious.
D’Spayr didn’t want to risk dying a fool. After what he’d seen and heard the past few days, he allowed that he could be mistaken. He decided to take the tall woman’s declaration on faith. For now. If, indeed, she proved to be a delusional, heat-stroked mercenary, he would gut her without hesitation later. There was no hurry.
The old woman spoke in a trembling voice and introduced herself and her companions, speaking a little too loudly, as if Nygeia were hard of hearing.
“I didn’t ask your names. I wanted to know why I am here”, the dark princess demanded.
“The Object called you”, Derivan stammered. “I do not always control what it does. It senses things, situations. It arranges events, sometimes before they happen. Sometimes I am only a conduit for its power…”
“Your accent is strange”, D’Spayr noted aloud, interrupting, “I have never heard its like and I have traveled much across this land. You are not from here.”
“I have spent much time… elsewhere”, Nygeia admitted.
“So the real question isn’t why you are here. We know why. The Object summoned you. The real question is why it summoned YOU, in particular, amongst all the many things and beings it could have called…”, D’Spayr said. “What does it need you for?”
“A thinker”, she said softly. “Interesting. Maybe I should just kill you now.”
“This is the Withered Land and many things have changed, mostly for the worse, but some of us still retain a respect for life. You have mentioned killing us twice now in only a few minutes and with precious little provocation. Maybe you really are who you say you are. The legends always had you cast as a mad, blood-hungry bitch…”, D’Spayr growled.
“Tell me he didn’t say that”, Tuolenne muttered. “I think I like him better when he doesn’t talk so much.”
When Nygeia moved, it was startling. It was as if a rushing storm wind had picked her up and propelled her at the trio like a missile. She was a blur of motion. Before they could blink their eyes, she was standing in front of D’Spayr’s startled steed.
And she was staring open-mouthed at the wide-muzzle of the defractor-pistol he had drawn from his shoulder-holster.
“You’re fast, very fast, but I’m a professional”, he said evenly, cocking the weapon, which began to hum menacingly. “I knew you were going to do that before you did.”
He leaned down into her face and said softly, “And if I even think you’re going to threaten to kill me or my friends again, I’ll spray your brains all over the ground. Do we understand one another, ‘Nygeia’?”
Nygeia drew in a deep breath. She was acting like an animal, like a tyrannical bully. This was not the way she behaved when she was on Earth. It was this place. The Withered Land was growing inside of her. She hated this place. More than that, she hated what it made of her. The longer she stayed, the more it would become part of her and the more she would belong.
She did not want that to happen.
The dark princess smiled dazzlingly. Something insane danced behind her eyes that disturbed D’Spayr, but he did not let it distract him from the moment. The way she had moved frightened him. She was not one of the normal folk, nor was she even one of the few remaining technologically-enhanced Berserker steel-folk. She was something different, a mutation, something outside.
For her part, Nygeia lightly remarked, “Ruthless, too. I like that.”
D’Spayr clicked off the energy charge building in the weapon and holstered it. His eyes never left her face.
Her eyes never left his. Curiosity showed. There was some amusement, as well. But, in those lovely eyes there was also a challenge that was both an invitation and a curse.
His disturbed feelings grew.
Things could get complicated. He didn’t need any complications.
“Where are you headed?”, she asked him, ignoring his two other comrades.
“Katamahr.”
“Boring. Been there. Bad food.”
“It exists?”, D’Spayr said, startled.
“Just because you haven’t seen something is no reason to immediately doubt its existence. Of course it exists, you armored clod.”
“You don’t have to travel with us.”
“Of course I do. That’s probably one of many reasons why the Object brought me here.”
He sat up on the steed and said, “I don’t suppose there’s a reason why I’m the only person here not on foot? What is with you magical types and the lack of worthy transportation? You seem to make everything appear out of thin air except a steed to ride…”
“Uh, are we leaving for Katamahr now?”, Derivan asked, scratching his head as he watched the interplay between the two warriors. Tuolenne simply tossed her eyes skyward and silently asked her gods for deliverance.
“Yes”, D’Spayr and Nygeia said in unison.
Without further conversation, the quartet walked into the thick, flowing cloud of dirty fog, D’Spayr eyeing the ghostly orbs of dancing light suspiciously.
* * *
He looked down past his steersman and the navigator’s console and out the huge curved forward window. From his vantage point some two hundred feet above the surface of the land, he could see a vast panorama of life that few others knew to exist on the hilly, rough tundra past the Forever Plain. He had to squint past the swirling mists occasionally, but, for the most part, from the air, The Wastes fairly teemed with an amalgamation of strange wild life.
It was its own world. The Wastes were a primeval tundra dotted with traveling bands of armored antelope eating swaths through fields of glen-thickets, swarms of tunneling blind fen-wyrms stitching holes through the rocky carapace under the loamy soil, tribes of ground-dwelling carnivorous primates haunting the wooded areas, packs of horned and hoofed feral dogs running wild everywhere, all traveling to and from the many small oases where plants and water flourished.
They were headed for just such an oasis at this moment.
Below the strange skycraft, six columns of soldiers, each column three men across, marched in time to the craft’s lazy flight speed. The soldiers were not all wearing the brass and burgundy filed uniforms of the Emperium’s former Royal Command Guard, only about thirty or so of those men marched with the slowly growing army that followed the ship’s course, but most at least wore a tunic emblazoned with the crest of the House of Service to which they owed their allegiance. Most the army were former prisoners, refugees, and mercenaries seeking to hold onto some last vestige of order in their rapidly fragmenting lives. They had joined the remnants of the Command Guard simply because, for most of them, there was no other place to go, at least no other place that offered food, shelter, clothing, social structure and the promise of human comraderie and companionship, even though that comraderie may have been gruff and hard-hearted .
They marched towards what they were told was History and the salvation of the world as they knew it.
They looked up at the floating ship that rode the clouds above, a one hundred seventy-foot three story-tall former sailing vessel that now had two vast triangular wings that slowly flapped, stroking the air currents like giant oars, and five huge hydrogen gas balloon cells where once there had been the masts for mighty sails. They looked up and they saw one of two things:
Hope or Tyranny.
The man standing on the bridge of that ship, a man untouched by the passage of time, having lived over twice a normal man’s lifespan, represented both ideals.
Everything had changed so very much since he’d been a child. Everything. All the proud monuments of civilization had fallen. Even the twin suns behind their perpetual haze of violet-gray seemed different, as if the stars themselves were somehow diminished by the opening of that celestial abomination known as The Wound. The sense of relative safety and order that had permeated his world growing up was now long gone, replaced by a fear that catastrophe lurked around every bend, that holocaust was waiting behind every moment… The Darkness of the eternal Void was waiting to engulf them all. Of this he was certain.
The Wound was only the most major of the symptoms of the decline and collapse of his universe. The cause was still a secret. No matter.
The cure was Order: total unrelenting control, pure and simple.
He knew he could make things right again. He could hold back the Darkness. It was his mission, his purpose in Life.
He would bring Order back to the Chaos of The Withered Land.
Bishop Bluhd stood on the bridge of his flittership, a converted ocean vessel called ‘the Pandemyon’ that he’d had refitted to become an ornithopter, his hands clasped behind his back while he took in the scenery, allowing his mind to relax for the first time in days. He was a tall man, broad-shouldered and thickly muscled, and he wore a modified version of the vestments of his former religious office: a sleeveless tunic of royal blue and brilliant orange over a chain-mail shirt and banded, segmented steel leggings over leather pants ticked into shiny black boots. From around his waist, wrapped around the leather belt holstering his twin shatterbolt pistols, a corded yellow strap secured the Blooded Prayer shawl, a brocaded yard-long silk sash emblazoned with a crucifix circumscribed by a five-pointed hollow sun. His mark from the Church of the Emperium.
It was a reminder of his true loyalty, a reminder of the power he still served even though the Church had collapsed two decades ago, a souvenir from a life of knowledge, sacrifice and servitude that had shaped him into the only man who could dare mount a crusade against the very cosmos to return his world to its former greatness.
So far as he knew, or at least the way he explained it to himself in the lonely hours between midnight and dawn when Doubt crept like a thief into his soul, he was battling to save Paradise.
The fact that the Church of the Emperium had brutally enslaved nearly twelve million people in its ninety-seven years of existence or that it had been responsible for the total genocide of nineteen native hill tribes who would not submit to religious conversion, causing no less than three civil wars that had torn the major continent on their home planet apart, did not ever enter into the world view to which Bluhd subscribed.
There were many his religion did not save. To many, his Church was a force for oppression and wholesale murder.
But, those could be discounted as the quibblings of those whom Salvation’s fires could not purify.
He planned on bringing back all that had once been.
He was feeling good about the plan. It was beginning to look like it would work. It was still, in may ways, under-developed and cloudy, but now it was at last beginning to look like it had a firm basis in reality. More, it looked like he wouldn’t have to mount this crusade alone. He would not have to be both outlaw and savior. He had found a powerful ally.
The Pilgrim was with him.
Enigmatic, a dour, grim being wrapped in a cloak iridescent black as a crow’s wing, taller than even the tallest mountain barbarian, an armor-helmeted hawk of a man who exuded the stillness of a cemetery at dusk, the Pilgrim had emerged from the depths of his fallen city and met with the captains of Bluhd’s army, arranging a meeting with the former religious leader.
He’d sold the pragmatic scholar and conqueror-to-be with just one sentence and a demonstration of his abilities. He’d said:
“I can show you how to undo Time.”
And, to demonstrate, he’d reached out an iron-gauntleted fist, a wide spider-fingered glove that ended in metal talons, and tapped the shoulder of the nearest soldier to him, an anonymous random choice...
Within ten heartbeats the man had shrunk, folded over, his skin flowing like mud down a hillside, the angles and planes of his body rolling and shifting, until finally, in a puddle of bubbling protoplasm, a tiny pink embryo, lidless eyes dark and wide as those of a tadpole, what was left of him twitched on the ground. The Pilgrim had reached down. He’d picked it up the wet pink form, holding it in the metal covered palm of his hand. He’d held it out before him.
He had then crushed the life from it.
The battle-hardened grizzled veterans from a half-dozen wars, rough violent men used to bloodshed, had cowered away from him, muttering superstitiously, some of them trembling, others praying in quiet, frightened tones.
“I can show you how to undo Time”, he’d repeated in a venomous voice, deep and cold.
From that moment, Bishop Bluhd considered the Pilgrim a gift from the Gods themselves.
Of course, that depended on what kind of a gift and what gods you were thinking of at that particular moment.
The present, aboard the Pandemyon…
“The Objects will be retrieved soon, yes?”, the Pilgrim asked Bluhd.
“Yes”, Bluhd answered confidently. “The old woman and the boy will soon be back within our control.”
“They must not be harmed. Their psychic harmonics must not be impaired for the moment when concentration is needed to gather all the dangling threads severed by the opening of The Wound”, the dark traveler counseled.
“Of course, of course”, Bluhd said impatiently. “Although I admit that I have trouble understanding how an old Wytchborn woman and a fledgling Keeper could possibly hold the secret to repairing nearly three centuries of damage done our universe…”
The Pilgrim sighed, a deep windy noise, like a wind through an empty cathedral. It was a sound that bordered on the edge of exasperation and, as such, carried an implied threat. One got the impression that the Pilgrim was not the kind of being who responded well to being exasperated or irritated.
“Wave harmonics is an ancient forgotten science, priest”, the Pilgrim said, aware that his use of the term ‘priest’ to Bluhd walked the fine line of insult, “and extrasensory relativistic viewing, you call it ‘perceptual clairvoyance’ or “backwalking’, is a manipulation of existing physical fields of energy. The boy’s talisman, his stone and glass Object, and the woman’s subconscious mutant mind, are keys to manipulating that energy on a wide, planetary level…”
“Augmenting your own formidable abilities”, Bluhd concluded. “Abilities which apparently flow, in part, from the very Wound itself.”
“Even so”, the Pilgrim agreed.
“We’ll have them back with us by next nightfall”, the Bishop said unwaveringly. “They are no match for my huntsmen.”
“I suspect there may be more players in this game than you are now aware”, the caped vulture commented.
“And why should that concern a being who can bend Time itself to his will or a man who controls a flying battleship and his own army?”
“We are not the only beings of power astride this universe, priest…”
“Perhaps”, Bluhd said softly, his eyes narrowing, “Or perhaps you do not have so much control over the strange energies flowing from the Wound as you believe. Maybe you begin to doubt the promises you made.”
He turned to confront the Pilgrim and saw that he was gone. All that was left was a smoking message burnt into the floor on which he’d formerly stood…
It was a mathematical equation of sorts, a lesson in logic.
“Question what you Reap. Do not question the Reaper.”
The implied threat was not lost on the former Holy Man.
A corpsman walked slowly over to the Bishop, carefully skirting the sulphur-smelling smoke rising form the words, cleared his throat lightly and asked, “Sir, do we weigh anchor for the evening? The troops have been on forced march for most the day…”
Bluhd looked into the pale face of the nervous crewman and pursed his lips, aware now, more than ever, of just how much things had changed in his world.
“Yes. All engines stop. Weigh anchor. Send out the Away Force and tell the Huntsmen that I want that old hag and the dumb pup back here by tomorrow nightfall.”
“Aye, sir.”
THREE
The air smelled of ancient memories and tasted of bad dreams.
On the haze-cloaked horizon, the foothills before the mountains to Katamahr looked to be a lifetime away.
The Wastes were a mostly unmapped, uncharted region of the Withered Land. It was a place traveled by only the bravest of explorers. The Wastes had always existed. They were not a product of the slow and torturous devolution of the continental landscape. It was a prehistoric territory where the laws of physics suspended themselves, a place that seemed to reinvent itself from day to day. Once, back in the glory days of the Emperium, the Grand Vizier and the Royal Cartographer had planned an expedition into the territory in the hopes of creating a network of roads into the far mountains, past the Forever Plain. Surveyors and scientists and soldiers entered, passing through the wall of fog and once into the mist, they became embroiled in a fantastic journey beyond time and mind. Three groups of a dozen intrepid experienced explorers went into that place…
None ever returned.
There were no stories or legendry surrounding the Wastes, no mythology to pass down from generation to generation, and no epic poems or sagas of heroes and villains at war within its mysterious interior. This was simply a damp, fog-enshrouded, windswept land of strange beasts and sudden dramatic changes in weather. This was the dead zone before one reached the southern mountains, where volcanoes still rumbled and where small hard-bitten pockets of humanity lived free and fierce beyond the tyrannical reach of the Emperium.
But the Empire had now fallen, dead some seventy-eight years. Entire villages had been abandoned, their economies dying faster than their listless populations, and buildings crumbled, falling into ruin. Time itself started and stopped fitfully, like chronal micro-climates, passing faster in one town than in the next. The twin sins that had once bathed the land in a crimson and gold glow, feeding vast plains of wheat and creating the perfect climate for vast rambling forests, now were dim pale glowballs in the ever-murky skies.
The winds blew in three different directions at once, winds without any discernable source of origin, and dust devils, some as tall as fortress guard towers, roved the landscape. In the distance, to the east, lightning scoured the skies without the accompaniment of thunder. To the west, a rainstorm raged, the sheets of icy cold water falling to earth where they evaporated on contact, leaving no patches of muddy acreage. And somewhere in the center of the strange region, balls of multicolored ball lightning, sizzling free-floating spheres of electricity rose from the porous swampy earth and rode the air currents to every corner of the territory, never straying past the towering wall of rolling mist. Winds blew…
None of those winds seemed to touch the fog. The fog was eternal. The Wastes were unchanging.
Ever solemn, ever haunted, ever hostile.
No one in their right mind ever chose to travel through them.
D’Spayr was on foot, walking beside his dragon-steed, and his eyes traveled the width and breadth of the what little he could see of the far horizon, off towards the foothills that led to the mountains. Nygeia strolled next to him, walking as if she hadn’t a care in the world, taking in the bleak and dreary vista with a sardonic eye, while Tuolenne and Derivan brought up the rear of the small procession, each carrying knapsacks across their shoulders, walking with measured pace, with the practiced ease of experienced wanderers. The Knight wa
