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 was surprised at the misted haze that drifted over the area they traveled through and worried about the lack of clear visibility peering into the distances.
Behind them, the wall of fog looked solid as granite-colored stone.
The place was awfully damned quiet. Even the sound of their footfalls and the occasional grunts or huffing exhalations they made were swallowed up by the silence, as if it hungered for the sound of animate life.
They’d traveled for a little over two hours during which they’d shared little conversation, when they heard the jangling of metal and the rhythmic clip-clop of running hooves. The Knight didn’t have to signal for them to stop. They all held their positions, listening…
A large carriage drawn by four powerful horses streaked into view, coming towards them. The horses, eyes wide as saucers and lips drawn back over huge teeth, frothing from their exertions, were running with the hysterical intensity of animals frightened beyond reason.
That may have been because the carriage was on fire.
Or it may have been because of the thing that was atop the roof of the egg-shaped carriage, squatting in the fire and yet not burning and not troubled by the heat…
It looked like a toad, but it had writhing tendrils where the eyes should have been and it had four arms off its torso. Across the drooling smile of its wide toothless mouth, a small thin woman wrapped in dirty rags was draped. No larger than a tall child, the woman was not dead. She moved lazily, as if drugged or still prey to the disorienting effects of sleep. Her flesh, and much of it was exposed, was the color of dirty eggshells. The areolas of her exposed breasts were dusky purple. Her dark hollowed eyes were animated with the fires of insanity, and she lounged in the frog-thing’s open mouth with sickening comfort and familiarity.
The carriage slowed its headlong charge and slowly drew to a stop. The panting horses whinnied and pawed the ground nervously, not turning their large heads to look back at the thing on the carriage roof.
The fires surrounding the carriage flickered and lashed the vehicle, but consumed nothing. The flames generated no heat and burned soundlessly.
“New skin”, the woman hissed aloud past thin, cyan-hued lips, “new skin.” She gave no greeting other than this.
“Skin? Did she say skin?”, Derivan sputtered.
“We’ve no business with you, I am sure”, D’Spayr ventured, shushing the boy with a hard glare, “Let us pass and we’ll be on our way.”
“Been so long since new skin was mixed into the Fold”, she said, as if the Knight hadn’t spoken. “Been so long since something warm and soft and wet was shared with the Fold.”
“And it’s going to be yet longer still”, D’Spayr said, a hint of warning in his voice, “I don’t know what ‘the Fold’ is and I’m really not interested in finding out, if you don’t mind. Just let us pass and there’ll be no trouble.”
“Trouble?”, the woman echoed. “However could you trouble us? We are not of the Fold. We are Castoffs…”
“What were you running from? You were running, weren’t you? What from?”, the Knight demanded.
“Not running. Prolonging…”, the woman said cryptically. “Making the fearsomeness last.”
“The fearsomeness?”, Derivan blurted to no one in particular. “Is this a joke? She’s mad. It’s obvious. She’s insane…!”
“Shut up!”, D’Spayr hissed. Startled, the boy shrank away from the Knight apologetically.
Nygeia lost patience with the woman’s eerily disjointed manner and snarled, “Move. Now.”
The woman looked at Nygeia as if noticing her for the first time. Her eyes were wet and shiny, fixed yet unfocused. The fires that whipped around the carriage cast an orange glow in her dark eyes. She smiled. The expression revealed a mouth full of far more thin razor-sharp teeth than any human being could ever possess. It looked like the smile of a shark. “Born of The Pahrayah. It was thought you were lost… You have returned. So nice. Sparkly fires inside the flesh, magic skin…”
D’Spayr unlimbered his long-barreled pistol, but made a point of keeping the muzzle pointed towards the ground as Nygeia looked over to him and said, “That sound like a threat?”
“Sounds like a threat.”
“Thought so.” The Princess of the Withered Land threw back the edge of her cloak, freeing the arm in which she carried her walking stick, and she brought it forward.
The toad-thing grumbled, a sound like a muted trumpet behind an iron door, and it’s lanky arms moved up to flex bony hands tipped with black talons. Its huge bulging eyes reflected a distorted picture of Nygeia and D’Spayr. It shifted its gelatinous bulk and fresh drool fell from its lips, cascading over the thin woman’s body.
“Something tells me this isn’t good”, Tuolenne said softly from the back.
The Knight waved his hand, shushing her. He noticed that the wind was picking up, the sporadic desultory breezes fanning this area now becoming more forceful, surging in gusts of ever-increasing intensity. He cast a quick glance out the far edges of his peripheral vision towards the tall dist-devils off in the distance, seeing if they were coming closer or growing into full-fledged tornadoes, but that was not what was happening.
This was a different wind.
“No threat am I”, the woman said, raising a skinny hand to her lips to suppress a giggle. “Only a messenger I be.”
“A messenger? For whom?”, Nygeia demanded.
“The starbursts, the lost lightning children, those who are imprisoned inside the fog…”
“ ‘Starbursts’... Really. And the message is…?”, D’Spayr prompted.
The woman looked down at him through the flickering flames dancing around the carriage and the massive toad and the Knight could see many things in her eyes, a dream of a time when she was just a teenaged bride crossing the Wastes with her family. He saw a vision of her dead husband, strong and proud, a massacre courtesy of an attack by reptilian mutants, blood and screaming, death, isolation and the realization she was a widow and all alone, not worth the attention of the flesh-eating mutants. She became a slave. And then she was adopted into the tribe and psycho-biologically bonded to the lead mutant beast, the tribe leader. But that was many years ago. Since then, the tribe had scattered, hungry to explore new territory, and those who’d remained with their leader died as food became more scarce. D’Spayr shared all this, her memories, past sensations and past pain, in the blink of the madwoman’s eyes. For a moment, they joined, mind to mind, an unwanted and unexpected intrusion of psychic empathy. She was so tired of being alone, except for the company of the monster whom she served. He saw a flash of weary sadness behind the fevered intensity of her stare…
A last spark of her dying Humanity.
“Run”, was the hushed answer.
That was when a dozen of the flashing sparking spheres of free-floating electric light, ball lightning imbued, it seemed, with a strange hive-intelligence, came rocketing at his small band.
The horses pulling the carriage abruptly came out from their stupor, again hysterically raging against the alien influence in their brains, the vile toad-thing driving them by creating waking nightmares in their impressionable minds, and they rushed the archaic arcane vehicle away, trailing a rooster’s tail of cold flame. The horses’ pounding hooves kicked up a cloud of dust as they pulled the ornately carved and gaudily painted wagon out of view.
The ball lightning flew over the dust clouds and swooped down towards them.
“Do you hear that”, Derivan asked, his voice wavering between a whisper and a frightened whine, “Do you hear them? The balls of light are whispering, I can hear them whispering…!”
“How nice for you”, Nygeia muttered, deftly removing her voluminous cloak in one quick movement, revealing her tunic and the form-fitting banded armor she wore. She wanted freedom of movement to battle the strange alien spheres. The silvery metal globe topping her walking stick began to glow orange, an energy charge rapidly building in it, hungry for release.
“What do you think will happen if one of those things touches us?”, he asked.
“Don’t know, don’t want to know”, Nygeia spat irritably, the boy’s continual ignorance aggravating her. Derivan caught the edge in her tone and put some distance between himself and the tall princess.
D’Spayr drew his defractor-pistol and raised it at the spheres, sighting down the muzzle at each glowing ball and then moving to the next, quickly fixing their position and flight pattern in his mind.
He fired five times… focused coherent light energy in a streaming magnetic beam discharged from the pistol’s wide mouth. Four direct hits. The balls shrieked and then imploded, vanishing in a blossom of white-hot sparks. The fifth ball of lightning rapidly veered out of range of the defractor beam and kept its distance.
The other balls ceased their advance and hovered in the sky, buzzing like angry hornets, vibrating.
“Nice shooting. How’d you know to do that?”, Nygeia asked.
“Science. The defractor beam generated by the pistol disrupts electronic packets, breaking the bonds of polarization keeping energy in any particular form”, the Knight replied.
Nygeia regarded the Knight. “So, you’re a learned man as well as a warrior. Who taught you that?”
“Bluhd. I did mention that he was a scientist…”
One of the glowing balls began tracking across the sky, flying low to the horizon, a sneaky attempt at flanking the band.
Nygeia unleashed a jagged bolt of energy from her walking stick that curved and changed course, following the ball lightning, until it bisected the ball’s flight path and then whacked it with a sound like clashing cymbals. The ball screamed as it shuddered, swelled in size and then disappeared like smoke before a gust of breeze.
D’Spayr raised an eyebrow and looked at the Princess, who smiled humorlessly as she said, “Chaos magick, not science. What I wish to have happen, provided I have strong enough emotion behind the wish, happens. Eventuality and causality are warped by my willpower. Angering me is not at all wise. Who knows what I might decide to wish...”
“Are you sure you’re not a Wytchborn?”, he asked.
“You know I’m not. I’m beyond that.”
She waved her walking stick in a complex crescent and spiral pattern and a wide wave of energy flew out, like the lash of a solar powered whip, washing across the rest of the floating starbursts. The cluster of living lightning balls emitted a collective wail and retreated before the sizzling wave of energy. They regrouped a good distance away from the group of travelers and made no motion to approach any nearer.
“Magick is just science no one has broken down into understandable components”, D’Spayr remarked.
Nygeia laughed nastily. “Sure it is.”
“The ghostflares are not moving, but their whispering sounds more than a little angry”, Tuolenne interjected, stepping up next to the pair of warriors.
“They’re surprised. They’re not used to prey that can fight back”, D’Spayr observed.
“Let’s just get past them”, Nygeia said. “Let’s get outside of their hunting range. I suspect they are limited in where they can travel in the Wastes.”
“And that dead-looking crazy woman and her demon-toad?”, Derivan asked.
“Hopefully we won’t run into them again, but if we do I’ll make a point of seeing what a defractor beam will do to her skull”, the Knight growled.
“Double-time”, Nygeia barked and she took off towards the horizon at a jog. “Let’s go!”
The Knight hissed from between clenched teeth and shook his head as he watched Nygeia head off. Derivan and Tuolenne looked up at him. He stepped down from off his dragon-steed and hefted Tuolenne’s knapsack and camping-roll onto the beast’s ridged back, rapidly tying it across his saddle. He grabbed the snarling beast’s reins and pointed after the Princess’ swiftly moving figure.
“C’mon. Let’s move!”, he said and he took off jogging after Nygeia. Tuolenne and Derivan looked at each other and shared a moment where they both shook their heads.
The group ran deeper into the sinister, haunted interior of The Wastes.
When their figures could only be seen as tiny moving dots against the landscape, the floating collective of whispering ball lightning began to heartily laugh in sardonic tones.
* * *
He hated it out here, in this drab dead place.
Commander Ran’drizi put down his spyglass. He was not happy about what he had just seen. He rose from off his stomach from his position atop a three story tall hillock overlooking the flat edges of the prairie. The wall of fog lay northwest of them. The flittership Pandemyon was two leagues to the east of their position. They traveled with the brownish-red glare of the setting suns masking their movements. With him, off over by the spike-studded battlewagon, were the pirate Bekkov, Major Camerlin the mercenary, Bryesh the Obsydiac, and Ozwabann, the tattooed native shaman from the southern continent, and the woman Kojah, an animal talker.
They were the Away Force, Bishop Bluhd’s Huntsmen.
Ran’drizi had come into service for Bluhd thirteen months ago, after the month-long fall and sacking of Warlord Ablahz and Duke Kaffreel’s combined fiefdom, a mineral-rich and heavily-industrialized walled fortress-kingdom next to a huge lake, and he had quickly risen in Bluhd’s service to reach a post of responsibility and trust. Ran’drizi had been in the service of Warlord Ablahz as a Commander of Mounted Forces in the Cavalry, had fought honorably for the Warlord, but had seen the fight for the futile contest it was between land forces and technologically advanced air superiority. He had surrendered to Bluhd’s forces in an effort to keep what few remaining troops he had left alive and the plan had worked. Bluhd had honored their agreement, with the caveat that Ran’drizi serve as team leader for a special tactics espionage and retrieval team Bluhd envisioned someday needing. Ran’drizi was continually astonished how, for a Holy Man, Bluhd’s knowledge of military strategy and ingenuity as a field commander seemed limitless. Though he personally neither trusted nor liked the Bishop, Ran’drizi did not underestimate the man’s power, influence and charisma. Most who served the Bishop idolized him as a living god. The rest feared him as a bloodthirsty and merciless devil.
This time, though, it seemed that Bluhd had made a slight miscalculation in the resourcefulness of his former prisoners.
“What is it?”, Camerlin, the career mercenary, rasped past his damaged throat. Major Camerlin’s throat had seen the business end of a saber in a fight many years past. The life-threatening wound had healed, but the Major had not regained full use of his vocal chords. When he spoke, it sounded like a wheezing steam engine heard through a hollow pipe.
“The Wytchborn have acquired allies. Powerful ones by the looks of it”, Ran’drizi answered. “They confronted the Gray Widow and fought off the ghostflares with little effort.”
“They met with the Gray Widow and lived? Unusual…”, Bekkov, a former sea-going privateer, remarked as he stroked his beard. “The Widow is eternally ravenous. I’d have thought she’d have slaughtered and eaten the old woman and the boy without the slightest pause.”
“A Knight”, Ran’drizi said, “They’ve managed to fall under the protection of a Knight. And one other, some kind of woman warrior-sorceress. I’ve not seen her like before.”
“A Knight?”, Camerlin hacked, “That’s a problem. A big one. As a general rule, one tries not to run afoul of Knights. Smart, very well-trained, well-armed, and pretty fearless killers, they are…”
“A Knight? That’s wonderful, absolutely outstanding”, the dour plum-colored man in the feathered bonnet hissed sarcastically. He was Bryesh the Obsydiac. Obsydiac’s were a mountain race from the fiery, mostly uninhabitable southern continent, far past the equator, and they lived in towering mound-cities, hewn from ancient lava, on the edges of volcanoes. They were a wild race with fierce tribal loyalties and strange customs, worshipping a huge flesh-eating lizard-bird as a god, but they were amazing builders and mathematicians, possessing incredibly logical minds not tainted in the least by the softer emotions of love, empathy, or compassion. They ran as hot as the fiery land they inhabited. “I don’t suppose you could tell his former affiliation from any markings on his armor or uniform?”
“No”, Ran’drizi said, shaking his head of long blond hair. “All I could make out was the deflector pistol and shatter-swords. That was enough for me.”
“Tell me more about the sorcerer woman”, the shaman, Ozwabann, asked, his deep sonorous voice lilting with the accents of his far-flung origins. He wore very little except for body-paint, decorative scarring along his face, back and arms, leather wrap-boots that wound up his legs to his loincloth, and several beaded necklaces, one of which was looped through the skull of a human child. He was an angular, painfully thin man with filed teeth and pointed steel caps on each of his bony fingers.
“Can’t say much except she uses a cane or walking stick topped with some sort of energy generator. She doesn’t seem to be a spellcaster. I think her power is self-generated and the walking stick is used to direct the flow. Just a guess…”
Ozwabann frowned. “A Spellcaster would be easier to handle and contain. If the forces she creates come from within her, then she is no less a mutant than some of the savage creatures we’ve encountered here in The Wastes.”
“It makes her less predictable, certainly”, Bryesh agreed.
“So what’s the plan?”, the tall, thickly-built woman named Kojah asked. As tall as any soldier and probably half again as heavy, with wide muscular legs and thick apish arms, Kojah was hardly a physical beauty, but her primal demeanor, all leather wrappings, bone charms, feathers and beads enveloping golden flesh that threatened to burst through her clothing, and a mane of coarse tawny hair that fell to her thighs, made her an arresting figure of womanhood. She looked like some savage tribal idol of uncivilized fecundity come to life. An animal talker, meaning she had some slight telepathic command over the lower predatory beasts of the plain, she was often quiet and seemingly distracted during regular human conversation, but she had remarkably acute senses of touch, sight and hearing. She clutched her dual-headed axe in one iron-gloved hand.
“Our typical hunt, harass and kill routine will need to be amended”, she said, “unless, of course, you gentlemen are feeling fairly cocky about taking on a Knight and a sorcerer on terrain we ourselves are barely familiar with...”
“Point noted”, Ran’drizi said, cutting her off. Sometimes Kojah’s bluntness verged on a challenge, her animalistic nature making her immune to the subtleties of normal human discourse, and indecision from her superiors often whetted her aggression. “We watch and we wait, following their course.”
“They’re headed for Katamahr, hardly a surprise”, Major Camerlin said.
“You’re probably right, but that’s still just an assumption”, Ran’drizi responded, “but there’s just a chance that the Knight may be taking them to meet up with other Knights, maybe a squad he rides with, maybe a band of rogues, we don’t know for sure.”
“Not knowing could get us killed”, Bryesh commented. “And our job is to capture the two Wytchborn, not engage in some running battle with Knights and mutant sorcerers.”
“My point exactly”, Ran’drizi said.
“Bah! As usual, the Obsydiac has little taste for bloodletting…”, Ozwabann chided.
“Unlike some people, the Obsydiac has little taste for bumbling along from one disaster to the next”, Bryesh retorted.
“Fine, fine, as you wish”, Kojah snarled. “If we can capture the old woman and the boy, just tell me if I can eat the Knight’s heart. There would be much power consuming the heart of so powerful and professional a warrior…”
Ozwabann made a rude gagging noise and commented, “Uncivilized cow.”
Kojah laughed. “Not what you said last night thumping atop me.”
“Well, at least he had the good sense to be on top of you and not under you”, Bekkov muttered.
“What was that?”
Bekkov smiled at the wide-set woman venomously, ignoring her flaming gaze.
Ran’drizi cleared his throat and pointed westward. “Enough. We have work to do. For now, we follow them and stay out of sight.”
“And stay downwind”, Camerlin said as he walked past Kojah and Ozwabann to stand next to Ran’drizi. Bekkov and Bryesh snickered. The two less civilized Huntsmen made rude gestures and walked off grumbling.
The rest of Bishop Bluhd’s Huntsmen picked up their weapons and camp gear, then trotted off down the hillside and onto the plain.
The wind rushing over The Wastes moaned like a wounded beast hiding in the twilight...
FOUR
They traveled for a full day without further incident, with only the hissing of winds across the dry plains and the occasional crack of ghostly thunder from the Waste’s storm-zones to break the electric buzzing of the silence, where the absence of noise was itself a continuous droning sound.
Night across the Wastes was a strange hybrid of twilight and stormfall.
The setting of the twin suns, sitting opposing one another in the dreary sky, gave way to a rising wall of grayish violet that encircled the horizon, seemingly rising up from the ground towards the top of the heavens into a bowl-shaped shroud speckled with jaundiced, sickly star clusters. A pewter-colored haze suffused the atmosphere. A line of dirty clouds lolled petulantly across the haze.
D’Spayr and Nygeia saw the approaching caravan just as the first flakes of shadowdust listed their way towards the ground. Shadowdust was a form of ashen snowfall that had plagued the night-time spaces in the Withered Land since the first appearance of The Wound. Flakes of black snow, some large as coins, littered the landscape to eventually clump together to form a black frost that smothered plantlife and drew heat from out of the spoil, leaving everything cold and brittle.
D’Spayr vaguely recalled an old nursery song, a dark lullaby sung so many times its true meaning had been lost over the ages as mother’s sang it to their children at nights, and he recalled it being cold comfort as he would drift away to sleep as a boy…
“Sleep, dead prince…
The falling Night steals the sky
And with cold lips kisses the ground,
Bringing shadow ‘cross small eyes
Winding the ticking clock down,
The finest of last light
Haunting dark hours
Growing long,
Shadowdust
Smothering sleeping baby’s dreams.
Sleep, little dead prince, sleep…”
Looking at the black snowfall, D’Spayr suppressed an unbidden shudder.
The Knight was uneasy about the journey and its eventual destination, and about his own ability to protect his traveling companions. Derivan and Tuolenne were not veterans of outlaw life, neither were they possessed of any military training that could help them in a violent confrontation, and D’Spayr knew that, if they became embroiled in a battle situation, he may not be in a position to watch over them. They were Wytchborn and, perhaps, their mutated alien abilities could offer them protection, maybe even a defensive edge, but from what he’d seen and heard from their own lips, he knew that they were essentially no more than talented civilians, normal folk with a few extra abilities. They may not be hardy enough to survive the journey to Katamahr.
On the other hand, while he understood that Nygeia was a powerful and resourceful being, a warrior-princess cunning and fierce, he also harbored doubts about her reliability. There was a hint of amorality about her, a lack of obligation, which made her seem too liberal in the way she encountered risks. She did not think of others. Her motivations were entirely her own. He didn’t feel he could trust her entirely.
Worse, he did not feel that Nygeia actually trusted herself.
On the couple of occasions when they had taken a rest during their trek, she had wandered away from the group and sat alone, her back to her three companions, and D’Spayr had overheard her speaking to herself, arguing it seemed, as if she were fighting some part of her own mind for control over her actions. When she’d stopped her furiously whispered discourse, she’d looked around with an anxious and embarrassed expression, as if afraid she’d been overheard ---
--- or as if she were worried she hadn’t maintained the control she so desperately needed.
She’d noticed him observing her and she’d offered a weak smile to him in return, but she did not come over to talk. There was a conflict within her that might prove to be as much a danger to the small band as any outside attack.
He decided she’d bear much closer watching.
The caravan came up over a briar-covered dune, twenty-nine nomads strong, trailing a pair of wagons pulled by aged bison. The Knight could, even through the deepening gloom, see from their flowing geometrically-marked robes that the nomad tribesmen were Drattars, castoffs from the plundered kingdoms south of the equator, remnants of Warlord-King Dre’ggek’s former citizenry. Dre’ggek was a wealthy landowner and robber-baron, a former mercenary once in service to the Emperium, who had married the idiot-niece to the Royal Vizier and so ingrained himself into the Royal Court as a Viscount. But the title and its duties grew too bloodless and too gentile for the hot-blooded reaver and he set his private forces across the Forever Plain in search of a territory to conquer where he could set himself up as king. He found one such territory, rich in a jewel-mineral called “fahdariss”, a jewel used in the manufacture of coherent-light lenses for defractor rifles. He made the territory his own, supplanting the indigenous people there. Once he did this, he then renounced his loyalty to the Emperium and ruled his distant outpost with a tyrannical hand. After two decades thus, imagine his surprise when the soldiers of the Emperium marched into his domain and systematically began destroying his townships and enslaving his people. The war between the Emperium and Warlord-King Dre’ggek waged hotly for three years until Dre’ggek was at last assassinated by a team of Emperium special commandos. His goods were confiscated, his factories retooled and converted, his lands divided amongst loyal officers in the Emperium as a reward for services rendered.
His people, the very few loyal to his brutal totalitarian reign, were scattered. They became the tribe of nomads called “Drattars” and the Emperium declared them outcasts and outlaws.
The day The Wound appeared in the sky, all of that ceased to matter.
D’Spayr had very few experiences with nomadic caravanserai bands, being himself a mostly urbanized professional soldier, and so he eyed the approach of the wandering tribe with a leery eye. On the other hand, Nygeia’s countenance immediately lit up with a huge smile as she saw them draw near in the dusk and she animated waved Derivan and Tuolenne up to the front of their small procession to greet the Drattars. D’Spayr gave her a look that was both a warning and a question.
“Why am I glad to see people such as they? Well, a break in this damnable boredom would be a start, but it’s more than that. Food, drink, entertainment, comraderie, and, more importantly, information”, Nygeia said answering his unvoiced question.
“All kinds of information”, Tuolenne chimed in, nodding. “And maybe a moment or two where we can forget our troubles…”
“The fact that they’re here must mean that there’s either an oasis or an outpost nearby”, Nygeia added.
D’Spayr shrugged, saying nothing. Derivan, too, seemed vaguely uncomfortable with the large group’s approach.
Nygeia looked at them both and shook her head, then uttered an exasperated groan. “Men”, she remarked.
She marched out into the lead, towards the Drattars.
The Knight watched her, at once admiring of and irritated by her seemingly boundless self-assurance, and began to follow as a single thought ran through his mind…
“Of all the wild places in the Withered Land to travel, WHY stay willingly within the grim, dangerous boundaries of The Wastes? If I were free to roam wherever I wanted, I would have quit this place long decades ago.”
After all, most caravans were essentially a mobile mercantile community offering trade and moving merchandise and valuables from one township to the next. There were very, very few civilized communities within The Wastes, no towns to speak of at all.
As he followed Nygeia, he unsnapped the pommel latch around his shatter-sword.
They were greeted by a pair of teenaged children, a boy and a girl, both not much younger than Derivan, both tanned and lean and healthy, their eyes clear and their faces open, clearly showing no hidden threats. The duo, brother and sister it seemed, had broken off from the main body of the caravan and were sent out to meet the small group.
“We are messengers from Qarrif, leader of the Veedehan Caravan. We are Drattar. We’re making a stopover at the Oasis Azterhon, just a few miles from here. There is water and shelter there and trees bearing fruit. You look like you have traveled far and you seem to have so few supplies… would you join with us for dinner and conversation tonight?”
D’Spayr’s band unanimously assented.
“Wonderful! We will tell the elders and Qarrif will order four more places to be set at tonight’s banquet! Please follow us…”, and with that the duo left, running swiftly across the plains, up onto the grassy dune, and they rejoined the caravan, gesturing excitedly.
“Odd”, Tuolenne said after a time as the small band fell in behind the caravan and its vehicles, “They didn’t bother to ask who we are and what our affiliations were…”
“Neither did they ask us what we could bring to the caravan to trade for dinner”, D’Spayr noted.
“Relax, you two”, Nygeia said. “The Drattar are a proud folk. They consider acts such as this a demonstration of their largesse, a way to show off a little. If they’d wanted anything from us, we’d have already been under attack.”
“You seem to know a lot about them”, Derivan observed as he trudged along.
“I am Nygeia, the spawn of the Pahrayah”, the princess said darkly, “and there are many unexpected and unusual things that I know.”
“Well, just so long as one of the things you know is that we are your friends…”, D’Spayr said wryly.
She tossed him a look full of daggers and then turned away, dead set on ignoring him.
Derivan tried vainly to suppress a sarcastic smile as he looked at the Knight and commented, “Maybe it’s just me, but you seem to be a tad untalented in the area of charm, soldier. Try saying something nice to her occasionally…”
D’Spayr grit his teeth and ignored the comment.
Inside an hour they wandered into a tree-ringed, kidney-shaped garden area that partially surrounded a huge crumbling ziggurat. The place was illuminated in a perpetual blue haze. Lit from within. The area was at least twenty acres square, partially hidden on the downslope of a mile-long dune, and it held in it a clear pool of water wide as the royal gardens of the distant City on the other side of the Forever Plain. Birds chirped and chattered, a few thin, spidery monkeys capered in the higher branches of the trees, and the grasses and bushes smelled of jasmine. It all would have been quite beautiful if not for the long rectangular graveyard that sprouted from off the pool’s eastern edge. Brass monoliths, gryphon headstones and a trio of marble mausoleums sat central among the many headstones.
It was strange. The oasis seemed imbued of its own source of light, glowing a radiant clear azure in the deepening purple-black gloom of evening.
The black shadowdust snow continued to fall over the land.
The caravan settled into the routine of unpacking and setting up camp, parking their road-beaten ancient vehicles, some chemical fuel-driven, remnants of the technological heyday of the mid-Emperium years, and some drawn by hairy bison or even the odd insectivorid-steers, cattle sized beetles, that roamed the lower steppes, and the people worked in chattering groups as they erected tents and sectioned longhouses.
D’Spayr’s group met Qarrif and his travel captain, Lumynn, by the edges of the glittering pool. A soft clean-smelling breeze blew over the pool. Qarrif was a very tall, lean man, bearded and mustached, with a hawkish profile, all cheekbones and angles, swathed in coarse robes over leather body armor. He had metal jewelry piercings all along the brow ridge of his face and wooden beads tied onto the ends of his beard. He was given to grand hand gestures and dramatic oratory. Lumynn was an ascete, his head shaven, a tattoo of the sun around one eye, dressed in a loose belted tunic of deep green and possessed of a quiet stern exterior.
“A Knight. We are honored. We’ve never before known your kind to travel through The Wastes…”, Lumynn noted. He looked over at Nygeia, who stood apart from them, and said, “And a sorcerer, from the looks of her, perhaps even some distant surviving royalty from the old days. This new age we live in makes for strange traveling companions. The last we had seen of any former Emperium soldiery was back during the Cold Crusade of His Royal Celestialness, Makstarn the Greater, just before the Fall of the capitol, at Persyffonem.”
D’Spayr offered a short bow to the caravan leaders. Nygeia smiled thinly from under the hood of her cloak. She seemed distracted, her previous adventuresome mood suddenly dissipated.
“The Cold Crusade”, Qarrif said nodding, “It has been so long I had almost forgotten it had ever occurred. Hundreds of thousands sold into slavery, thousands more killed, the sands running red soaked under a sea of war and for what? The promise that The Wound did not herald the End of All Things, that the One True Religion would save us from a descent into Chaos, that the Emperium would somehow hold the Universe together even as planets crumbled in the sky, the gravity of The Wound ripping them apart and then sucking away the pieces into Nothingness. In those days, no one looked up at the sky… to look into the sky was to court madness.”
“But that was then, this is now”, Lumynn said, ending the grim reverie. “What brings such as you and the cloaked woman into The Wastes?”
“Katamahr”, D’Spayr answered openly, looking for a reaction. He tossed a sidelong glance at Nygeia, but the princess was staring off into space. He momentarily gave up trying to figure her out.
Qarrif raised a metal-studded eyebrow. “Really now, Katamahr? Though it is not all that far away, the journey is quite a demanding one. It seems to be a somewhat popular destination these days.”
“How so?”, Nygeia asked quietly, her voice subdued, but friendly as she finally allowed herself to draw closer and come into the conversation.
“Others have inquired about the mountain city. Mercenaries, a motley band of armed strangers, they seemed like the forefront of a large military force. They seemed very focused on determining its exact location and getting what information they could about its armaments and defensive compliment. I think Katamahr has been targeted for takeover…”, Qarrif stated.
“It has been rumored that Katamahr has been a ripe target for plunder ever since its birth at the fall of the Emperium”, Nygeia noted. “Many warlords and Shahs of the Wastes have desired the mighty wheelworks and energy supplied by its icy waterfalls and lusted after its alabaster and gold towers. Its lore has been the fodder for a dozen legends about lost kings, exiled royalty and brave heroes tired of war and strife. It is supposedly a place of peace a place of sanctuary, without crime or strife. Food and medicine are abundant. And it is rumored that much of the Old Science survives inside the city’s grand walls. Technology still works there. Yet for all that, it seems to jealously guard its resources and location. Odd, that a city and a people so dedicated to higher moral qualities does not share its good fortunes with others less fortunate who wander the rough plains below…”
“Sounds as if you’ve been there, Madam”, Lumynn remarked, regarding her more closely. Nygeia’s words inspired him to give her a closer, more thoughtful appraisal. She stared back at him from under her cloak’s hood with an undeniably bold and haughty arrogance. She did not speak.
The ascete could not hold her gaze and quickly looked away.
“These mercenaries, what did you tell them?”, D’Spayr asked, bridging the uncomfortable silence.
“Nothing. I don’t know anymore about Katamahr than anyone else. I’ve never been there”, he replied.
“Nor I”, Lumynn added. There was no sense that either man was speaking false. They were only what they appeared to be: apolitical, lifelong nomads scratching an existence from out this far-flung, chaotic region of a fallen empire. “Though I admit that once, years ago, I did spy the city’s fabled gold and ivory spires reflecting the setting sun through the mist midway up the heights of the mountains.”
The Knight seemed to take that at face value and continued the conversation with, “Fair enough. So, what is it exactly that you are doing here? Why travel the length and breadth of The Wastes at all? Surely, there are richer kinder climes and territories for a caravan to traverse.”
He was startled as he heard the first opening strings of a song being played by musicians in the encampment. It was unexpected. It was a sound of life-affirming beauty played openly amongst a dark and dreary landscape now draped under the mantle of night. D’Spayr had not heard the sound of music played for human voices since his early youth, when he had studied as a novitiate in the Church of the Emperium. He had not expected the sound to affect him the way it did, so immediately, so viscerally, moving him to smile, moving him to melancholy, making him suddenly hunger for the company of others. He had been alone too long a time. Even when he had ridden with the other Knights as a member of their roving band, he had kept mostly to himself, allowing himself to create only superficial friendships for the sake of easing tensions and easing workloads. This sound, this music, reminded him of the stronger bond of family.
Yet when he thought of family, all he could see in his mind’s eye was the brutal armored figure of Bishop Bluhd.
He focused his attention back upon his exchange with Qarrif and Lumynn.
Qarrif smiled. “Yes, undoubtedly there are better places to live. But we Drattars are a fiercely ritualistic people bound by iron tradition. The world as it now exists beyond the Fog, outside the Wastes, is an ugly, unpredictable place of thievery, war and murder, of seemingly nonstop bloodshed. And for what? For dominance over a disease-ridden, ecologically-damaged, technology-poor dying planet in a solar system that is slowing bleeding itself to death through a spatial anomaly, caught in the grip of an inverse gravity well? Ah, I see surprise in your eyes… How does a caravanserai Shah know so much about science? To your mind, I should be mumbling superstitious platitudes and praying to dead mythological gods. Well, I was not always a desert nomad, Sir Knight.”
“Apparently”, D’Spayr said appreciatively.
“Please excuse me, but I am not feeling well. I fear my journey has taken more out of me than I’d first thought”, Nygeia suddenly interjected, making her apologies to the group. “Think I’ll walk down by the edges of the palms and sit, maybe catch the early night breezes.”
Without waiting for their response, she slowly strolled away, looking small and insular, a lonely woman in a place she did not truly belong.
“Interesting woman”, Lumynn commented to her back, “If a trifle thorny.”
“The lovely sorceress is a close friend?”, Qarrif inquired, looking at D’Spayr smiling.
The Knight shook his head. “Just a traveling companion. And a fellow warrior.”
“And the old woman and the boy?”, Qarrif asked.
“Family”, D’Spayr answered, surprising himself at the sudden feeling of protectiveness he felt about his Wytchborn companions.
The caravanserai Shah smiled broadly and said, “Family, hehn? I admit I don’t see much resemblance between yourself and they, they seem much more fragile than you, but… Well, come with me, Sir Knight. Let me introduce you to my family, including my daughters and five maiden nieces…”
Lumynn coughed into his knotty fist and favored D’Spayr with a comradely look that said “Better you than me, Mate”. The Knight drew a deep breath and cast a moment’s look towards the dwindling figure of Nygeia as she walked under the trees. Wrapped in her flowing dark cloak, she looked like an exotic nightbird, stranded upon the earth, alone in the night…
* * *
Nygeia felt something intruding in the back of her mind, warring with her conscious sense for control of her Reality, threatening to shatter the control she held over her unpredictable emotions.
As a princess of the Withered Land, and especially as the sole spawn of the foul Pahrayah, she felt a strong empathic link with the spiritual vibrations of this plane of existence, a psychic rapport that transcended the common five senses, or even the sixth sense for that matter. It was as if the very core of her being were linked inextricably with the sleeping power and majesty of the empty desolate wastes and the fallen broken cities of The Withered Land. This place gave her physical strength beyond any she could ever experience back Upworld, amongst the people in the dimensional Reality of planet Earth, and it enhanced her senses of sight and sound many times over, making her a formidable hunting animal. But this was something different.
Someone was knocking at the door. It was the only way her mind could grasp the concept and describe the feeling. At the door to her mind, someone was insistently knocking with an increasingly heavy hand.
It was verging on becoming painful.
“I was wondering whether or not you were too distracted to hear me”, a softly sinuous deep male voice intoned.
Nygeia spun around, anticipating battle, her walking stick and sword drawn from out under the folds of her cloak. Her feline eyes searched the darkening gloom peering past and into the shadowed patterns of shrubbery seeking targets, her enhanced vision magnifying the dim and hazy moonlight.
When she saw him, she gasped aloud.
The Pilgrim.
“You!”, she hissed.
“A good evening to you, Princess. It has been too long since you last graced us with your presence. Hmmmn? When was that last time you were here? Oh yes, I recall. It was on the occasion when you murdered your parents. Tossing around lightning and all that. Very dramatic. Oh, you naughty, naughty girl…”
“You weren’t there. How could you know…?”, Nygeia asked, still crouched in a combat stance.
His voluminous cloak fluttering in the fitful night air, revealing his glistening body armor and weaponry, the shadows seemed to gather across his face and chest like a hood, as if Mother Night had jealousy embraced her grim lover and were keeping him from sight. As he spoke his cruelly-taloned, gauntleted fists gesticulated, emphasizing his words and looking like the steel wings of a trapped hunting bird beating against the bars of a cage. Those talons were hungry to be used.
Nygeia abruptly noticed she’d been holding her breath in the dozen heartbeats that had passed since she’d seen him.
She’d only seen him once before, while in the company of the Pahrayah, in the Royal throne-room, when the Pilgrim had materialized out from thin air, like a nightmare suddenly popping into existence from out the realm of fantasy. He had carried in his arms the broken body of a rebellious minister, a religious leader from one of the outpost communities who’d broken edicts with the Church of the Emperium regarding the teaching of the written word to landless peasants, and she remembered seeing the minister’s cooling blood dripping scarlet-black from those taloned fists.
When he’d noticed her in the throne-room, he’d looked at her with icy disdain, considering her very existence unnecessary and slightly inconvenient.
She’d never forgotten him, his sepulcher-cold inflectionless voice, or those razor-tipped fists.
“Does that really matter?”, he responded, sounding bored. “Have you been amongst those deaf, dumb, and blind capering apes so long that you can no longer follow a logical train of thought? All that matters in that I am here now. You are a trained wielder of Magick, a scientist and a warrior, a member of The Discipline, and you are a Princess. Conduct your self properly. Or am I wasting my time bothering to speak with you?”
“What I am is of no concern to you, killer. What are you doing here, in this place, murder-master?”, she barked.
“My job”, he said simply.
“Ah yes, how did that monstrosity that claimed to sire me describe it? Oh yes, ‘forcibly maintaining the Eternal Balance in the service of the gods of Order and Chaos’”, she recited.
The Pilgrim nodded.
“We could do without the help of creatures like you”, she hissed.
“You have no say in this. I serve no single master, no government or king or nation…”
“Nor any god”, Nygeia spat.
“Temper, temper”, the Pilgrim chided. “I am here to help, Meredith, not harm.”
Meredith? MEREDITH? Her name…! No, she could not have heard him correctly. It was impossible. The Pilgrim knew her Earth-name! There was no way he could know that. Not even the Pahrayah knew what she called herself when she walked amongst Humanity in the Upworld dimensions.
The armored vulture in human form continued speaking, aware of her surprise and her consternation. “Yes, Ms. Meredith McCrae Chapel, retired college librarian, doctor of literature, Oxford, England, victim of a hit and run driving accident that stole from her the use of her legs some eleven years ago, as humans foolishly measure time. Before the supposed accident, you used to spend a lot of time strolling and tending to your garden outside the large window and latticed door to your den. The driver of the vehicle was never apprehended and the damage to your spine is beyond the science of human medicine in this, the beginnings of the 21st Century, on planet Earth, the third planet of nine from a third rate star commonly called ‘the sun’. You play piano, love cable TV, and are quite fond of mixed pedegree cats and dogs, what other less kind people refer to as ‘mutts’. Neat little character quirk, that. Are we compensating for our own embarassing familial shortcomings?”
“How can you know these things?”, she asked in a hushed whisper, her lips trembling. The Pilgrim was becoming even more frightening to her with each new moment.
“Because I know you, dear.”
“Oh my God, you live in the Upworlds, too.”
“Yes. And quite comfortably, I might add. I’m one of your neighbors, in fact, but you’ll never guess whom. Really, you’ll never guess. I also exist as different humanoid identities in three other planes of Reality, one of them an alternate Earth, if you will, while in the others, the planet Earth does not even exist. But, to the point, back on ol’ Terra, as the sci-fi writers refer to the planet, you and I are passingly acquainted.”
“What do you want?”, Nygeia demanded, striking the implications of The Pilgrim’s words out of her mind in a struggle to keep her wits about her. She had to focus and not let him rattle her.
“The Object the boy carries, the powers in the old woman’s mind”, the Pilgrim stated flatly. “And I cannot waste time contending with you in useless combat to secure those things. I am here to offer you a deal: let me take the boy and the old woman without interference and I will let leak, say, a certain undiscovered medical technique, a gift from one of the other worlds on which I live, that will return to you the use of your legs. I can make you whole again, in your other life, that life you so very much prefer to this.”
“And I am to believe you can do this?”, Nygeia said.
“You have no idea the things I can do”, the Pilgrim said in voice like a serpent’s hiss.
“Why should I let you do this?”
“Um, I’m not being clear. You are not ‘letting’ me do anything. You cannot stop me. I am offering you the choice out of politeness for our shared affiliations with a life Upworld. We are more alike than you’d care to think. I simply do not want to have to harm you.”
“The Knight will oppose you”, Nygeia pointed out. “You are underestimating his determination and his power.”
“Perhaps, but I think not. He has his own cross to bear, so to speak. He’ll be kept too busy to offer me much opposition. And if he does, I’ll have to kill him.”
“You’re not telling me everything…”, Nygeia concluded.
“No. And I never will”, the Pilgrim answered. “Decide. What is it to be?”
“Go to Hell”, Nygeia said without further hesitation, “and burn in agony, you murderous bastard.”
The Pilgrim bowed his head and his shoulders slumped. He seemed genuinely disappointed. “I suspected that might be your answer. Such passion and such foolishness… under different circumstances, these qualities would make you so irresistibly attractive, but here and now, they simply make you a target. As you wish, dear Princess, as you wish.”
He disappeared with a hollow, echoing sound like a whisper down a long, dark tunnel. The lazy breeze carried over just the slightest stench of sulfur to her nostrils.
Nygeia dropped to her knees, shaking, chilled far beyond the temperature of the night surrounding her.
* * *
Major Camerlin and Commander Ran’drizi, on a stony island of rock jutting up from the floor of the rolling plan almost a mile downwind from the oasis, lowered and collapsed their special light-amplifying spyglasses as The Pilgrim materialized behind them.
“What is the word?”, Ran’drizi asked without turning around to see the dark figure form.
“Kill everything, human and animal. Leave only the boy and the old woman alive. You can damage the old woman’s body, but not her mind. The boy must be intact”, the Pilgrim commanded.
“Done and done”, Ran’drizi replied.
In another explosive puff hinting of sulphur, the Pilgrim vanished.
FIVE
“You should have died with your men, but you didn’t. Instead you elected to live and dedicate your life to the Crusade”, he had said to the quivering, bruised and battered wreck of a man who knelt in the sand before him.
Qrystatos Fa’neel Mica Bluhd, all six feet seven inches and four hundred eighty armored pounds of him, had towered over the fallen soldier, a court-martialed killer named Tunc’dosh, a former captain of the guard for a fallen warlord in the lands to the northwest of the Forever Plain, and admonished the man in front of his squadron. They had all been standing in the shadow of the flying ship, the Pandemyon, which gently bucked and lolled in the twilight skies overhead when the day’s punishment proceedings had begun.
Tunc’dosh had been caught stealing the personal weaponry of a newly-captured recruit to Bishop Bluhd’s forces. The prisoner, who like all prisoners was actually a soldier-in-training (Bluhd did not believe in wasting resources), had decided to terrorize and victimize the new soldier. Understandably, the new man fought back, the weapons had been a gift from his tribal elder back before Bluhd’s forces had wiped out his tribe, but he had lost to Tunc’dosh.
Bluhd did not welcome thieves into his forces. He wanted his forces bloodthirsty and fierce, capable of astounding acts of atrocity, but he would not tolerate thieves. Armies ran on intimidation and discipline and where there was stealing between members of the same corp, there could be no discipline. If so, intimidation was all that remained… and fear was a fleeting method of control. Fear was too uncertain, it depended too much on maintaining a steady balance of power and those who ruled thusly had to make sure the status quo remained unchanged. Any thinking leader realized that to assume such things was completely unrealistic. Over time, fear did not work.
Mind control was much better. Creating a twisted patriarchal sub-society within the ranks of his army where aggressiveness and blind loyalty to the Crusade was rewarded by food, clothing, and personal advancement worked far better. And within that patriarchal sub-society, those who acted dishonorably, meaning contrary to the wishes of the dominant hierarchy, were punished, swiftly and severely.
Punishment was personal. That was Bluhd’s credo, a holdover from his time as an Emperium Inquisitor.
Tunc’dosh had sat at Bluhd’s feet after being bludgeoned by armored battering ram fists powered by dozens of tiny servo-motors. It hadn’t been much of a fight, more like a brutal one-sided demonstration of the armored battlesuit’s capabilities. The man, himself very large and bulky with layers of grizzled muscle, had sustained several broken bones and his face had become a raw mass of pain with one purpled eye swollen closed. Blood had drooled from out his battered mouth, past torn lips.
“This is an army”, Bluhd had said imperiously, “not some ragtag gang of jackals running across the countryside raping and plundering, cannibalizing one another, weaker against stronger. An army. An instrument of judgment and justice. A force for Order in a lawless land. You have shamed it with your actions.”
“An army of prisoners and slaves”, Tunc’dosh had countered rebelliously. “We serve because we must, NOT because we believe in your so-called ‘crusade’.” He’d said nothing more than that.
Bluhd killed him without remorse, without further hesitation. He had not intended to originally. He’d only intended to punish the man, but his insubordination and heresy had earned him a violent death.
Bluhd had struck Tunc’dosh once, in the red ruined center of his beaten face, with all the power the armored battlesuit could summon.
The man’s head had exploded like a melon struck by a cannonball.
Without even waiting for the red mist of blood and all the fleshy pulp to settle to the ground, Bluhd had turned to the soldier whose stolen weapons had prompted the punishment session and had said, “I have killed for you. In the service of my army, for its honor and yours, I have killed one of our own. Now tell me, who do you serve?”
“Bluhd”, the man had barked unhesitatingly, his wide eyes riveted on the gore at Bluhd’s booted feet..
Bluhd had smiled like the proud patriarch he was and then killed that man as well, punching a bloody hole through his thin chest. The body fell limply, a gout of crimson jetting out onto the dirt.
“That”, Bluhd the Butcher had snarled, “was for being weak.”
And so the evening had begun…
He could feel the thrumming, the low-pitch harmonics from the engines, under the floorboards and up through his boots and he imagined it was the pumping of life’s blood through the aging arteries of the crumbled former Empire. Here, among the gray-dappled clouds in the tumultuous storm-ridden skies above The Wastes, sitting in the flight paths of the confused and careening flocks of birds following the ever-changing serpentine path of the planetary magnetic lines gone astray since The Wound appeared, the heart of the Withered Land still beat with a primal fierceness. The Withered Land was not yet ready to die. The beast was gravely wounded, broken and beaten by Fate and by Circumstance, drained by a ragged rent in the fabric of a universe gone mad, but it was not yet ready to surrender what life it had left.
The beast would again, one day, roar.
The image was a poetic indulgence, one of very few personal indulgences, he allowed himself.
Bishop Bluhd flexed his tired shoulders and turned his face away from the view-portal through which he stared at the land below in his quarters aboard the flittership Pandemyon.
It had been a long and draining campaign against the last remnants of the Emperium, a series of armed conflicts with greedy, tyrannical little men, bereft of any vision other than that of controlling their stolen territories and plundering the wealth of a fallen star-spanning empire, and Bluhd was impatient for the next phase of his world-plan, the Reconstruction. He planned to restore the Empire to its former greatness, planned to return some semblance of order to the broken structure of their fallen civilization, and to do so he had to be as hard and as impervious to attack as the armor he wore.
He had to crush Katamahr.
The lost city of rogues and rebels represented a dream of hope, of independence from kings and emperors, of a unified race of survivors of the collapse creating a new and free future that abandoned the basic tenets of life under the Emperium. He could not have that. It could not be allowed. Once, before the Emperium, ages ago, the Withered Land was a wild and lawless amalgamation of territories engaged in vaguely-defined government practices and mercantile competition and barter through loosely drawn-up pacts or treaties, most drawn along tribal divisions, that favored Warlords with large armies. There were constant territorial skirmishes and episodes of bloody bickering that resulted in stunted industrial development and huge numbers of illiterate itinerant tradesman who stole from friend and foe alike. Widespread ignorance proliferated as quickly as the many strains of venereal diseases afflicting the poor and disaffected. Children were often sold into menial slavery in exchange for a year’s worth of foodstuffs or a patch of wormy, weed-ridden real estate.
The growth of the Emperium changed all that. The Emperium brought order and a rough justice to the land. Outlaw blood-tribes and violent, uncooperative warlords, and strange indefinable “family” collectives worshipping pagan religions were destroyed, wiped out by the Ministry of Racial Alignment. Gamblers, minstrels, pimps and their whores were subsidized as a regulated industry by the Ministry for Social Order. The land’s many Warlords and their territories were brought under reign with allegiance to the Royal Court courtesy of the Ministry of Internal Unity. Mages, warlocks, witches, shamans, medicine-elders and spirit-talkers were controlled by the Ministry of Spiritual Allegiance and, beyond that, by the Royal Inquisitors. Inventors, teachers, mathematicians, builders and Industrialists were controlled by the Ministry for Technological Development. Commerce throughout the land was regulated by the Ministry for Controlled Commerce. Stellar exploration, space travel, was developed under the aegis of the Ministry of Space. And law enforcement was the province of the Royal Union of the First Militia, the Ministry of Order. The unincorporated regions beyond the Great City and the Forever Plain were called the ‘Council of Free Territories’ and they were patrolled by the Outland Marshals, known as ‘The Knights’.
Bluhd the Inquisitor had created those Knights, shaping them into the unstoppable, fiercely honorable, anachronistic moral dinosaurs he knew that they’d eventually become. They were never intended to last as a law enforcement concept. They lacked the necessary political sophistication to develop past the frontier stages of the empire’s slow growth in the far regions. They were always intended to be nothing more than frontier policemen to be used and then thrown away as the Emperium grew and evolved. And for the most part, that had worked as planned.
But there were a few, like his brother, who became more than they were intended to be, who grew in talent, intellect and insight even as the Emperium grew from an oligarchal military power into a vast technocratic confederation. Some of the Outland Marshals became embroiled in the Office of Scientific Systemology’s “Next Jump” program, wherein, under the sponsorship of the Ministry for Technological Development, the Emperium tried to create biomechanical-technogenetic upgrades for their military and their law enforcement community, so that the Ministry of Space could avail themselves of soldiers and policemen techno-biologically suited for climes beyond the skies of the Withered Land. Some Knights refused to remain dinosaurs and became virtual supermen … like his brother.
No. He squashed the thought before it could fully form. He would not entertain that image.
He would not allow himself to say or even to think that name.
Bishop Bluhd was very worried. He had thought that the time of the supermen had passed, that his worries as he became a force for Order after the advent of the Long Death wouldn’t ever concern contending with the last few remnants of a failed experiment from the folly of the Emperium.
After all, he himself had killed two dozen of the Knights when he’d revolted against the Emperium and set himself up as the next ruler of the Withered Land. They were silly, stupid men, blindly loyal and fanatical to the cause of Justice, not realizing that ‘Justice’ was an ever-changing concept in a land where the law was defined by the needs and whimsies of the Royal Court, and they considered The Inquisitors as Holy Men. They never saw their betrayal coming. Bluhd had killed them with as little regret as most men would experience while disposing of old clothing. When some of them had realized what was happening to them, they had stopped fighting and surrendered to their fate, remaining loyal to their masters. Dinosaurs.
But, apparently, some of the dinosaurs wouldn’t go away.
Like the fiercest of them all, the one who had, in his righteous fury, snapped Bluhd’s spine, forever resigning him to live in the full-body cybernetic exoskeleton that he bitterly referred to as “armor”. Without his armor, he would fall to the floor and lie wriggling like an invertebrate slug, unable to stand, unable to even crawl. Betrayal had its price. He lost the battle, but he’d won the war. Or so he had thought.
Bluhd turned to face The Pilgrim, who waited in silence across the room, having only recently returned from seeing the Away Force, and from providing the Huntsmen with the only orders that made sense in this situation.
“We will bring the Pandemyon alongside the oasis, at a distance and behind cloudcover, and the Ground-Captain will dispatch a contingent of a dozen elite shocktroops to support the Huntsmen. That way we can be sure that we have sufficient firepower to oppose the Knight and his sorceress”, Bluhd rumbled. “We’ll keep the cannons trained on the caravan’s vehicles.”
The Pilgrim nodded.
“I still don’t see why you just didn’t kill the bitch when you had her alone”, Bluhd growled.
“It was because of The Discipline”, the Pilgrim intoned, “Members of The Discipline cannot engage one another in open combat for fear of unleashing catastrophic forces that could spin out of control. The Wound has made exercising the arcane energies of The Discipline very unpredictable.”
Bluhd made a disgusted face. It sounded like pseudo-scientific double-talk to him. More mumbo-jumbo from a freak of nature. In the old days, The Inquisitors would have dismembered him as they tore his secrets from out his broken mind. But these were not the old days. He did not force the issue. Freak or not, The Pilgrim was not someone to antagonize.
“Fine. Just make sure they are not in any shape to create problems for me when I invade Katamahr…”, he sneered to the cloaked figure.
“As you wish”, the Pilgrim said as his image wavered like water rippling in a pond. In a moment he faded from sight.
Bluhd allowed himself a moment to wonder just how it was the Pilgrim could do things like that and then quickly turned his mind back to his battle plan for the sack of Katamahr.
Yet for all his powers of concentration, he could not dispel the searing image of his brother wading into battle like some avenging god of war… the image chilled him. He could suddenly feel the claustrophobic embrace of his body-armor. He clamped down on his anxiety and rechanneled his energy elsewhere, putting the Knight out from his mind.
He would still not allow himself to say his name.
* * *
The deepness of night was a thing alive, full of velveteen electricity, and in the distance the many storms centered within The Wastes rolled thunder in hollow echoes over hills and glens, past the edges of the oasis, sending a teasing siren’s song to the ghosts haunting the broken shell of the once-mighty ziggurat within the Oasis Azterhon. The black snowfall had long since ceased falling and the perpetual electric blue haze that illuminated the oasis had dimmed to a dull violet glow. Swirling winds, faint trailers from the huge dust devils many miles away, fluttered tree branches and leaves, tickling the surface of the pool’s waters. The scents from the evening meal still lingered on the wind. The twin campfires that marked either end of the caravan’s encampment flickered and lashed the darkness whip-like, casting elongated shadows against the tarpaulin sides of the three longhouse tents wherein the nomadic band slumbered.
The camp slept after a long sumptuous dinner where stories were shared and rumors were traded, where the people of the caravanserai were allowed, through the eyes of Tuolenne and Derivan mostly, a peek out into the greater world beyond the foggy wall of The Wastes.
Now the music of the evening was stilled, the chattering and laughing voices quieted, the tales long told now relegated to memory where they would be reshaped and expanded upon come the next telling, and sleep descended on their small world.
Tuolenne slept and dreamt of a family she’d last seen herded into the prison wagons of the Emperium. She reached out for them, but could not touch them as the stone-faced guards drove them and others from her village away, never to be seen again…
Derivan twitched and shifted on his bed of straw and dreamt of riding across wide vistas on his pony, laughing as the horse galloped, smiling at his brother and at his sister, going falconing with the other members of his family’s entourage, in the days before the Lords of the Emperium had such minor members of old royal blood-lineage lined up against a wall and shot…
Nygeia, as always, wept quietly in her sleep, hearing the phantom music of the empty places in space and dreaming only of a day where she could forget who and what she was…
D’Spayr sat quietly meditating in the evening gloom. He would not sleep, could not. He’d surrendered his ability to be so commonly human on the day he achieved his final Articles of Knighthood. Knights never slept. They did not need to. They meditated and entered a waking dream state where they could decompress, rest and recuperate.
A little over a mile distant, the Huntsmen gathered into a circle around a mound of burning coals masked by a sheltering hood they built and they sat cross-legged on the hard soil.
They did not speak. They did not look at one another. They did not touch. The night settled onto their shoulders like a second skin. They began to breathe in long slow exhalations, relaxing, reaching out, dissembling, phasing…
They prepared for the hunt in the traditional manner of Deathwalkers, because such they all were, each of them, splintered off from the essence of the Death-God, Wraethogua, the Bleeding Maggot with a Thousand Mouths. Each member of Bishop Bluhd’s Away Force were specially chosen because of their mutant affinity for contacting the spirit world, for an ability to psychically move between the different chambers at the Heart of Eternity, between Brightside and Mourningside. They each lived with a foot planted in each world: that of the Living and that of the Dead.
Huntsmen did not hunt as normal humans did. They did not run among the forests of their prey.
They united, they became as one entity in an act called “entwining” and they sent their minds and their bloodlust out into the world as a single collective being, formed from hate and dark urges, where it would track down and kill their prey.
Sweat that smelled of copper, sour meat and violent desire began to pour off from their bodies as their breathing became shallower and more rapid and they all looked up, blind-eyed, into the night sky and each opened their mouths wide ---
A shining red mist, thicker than smoke or fog yet not quite heavy enough to be called a liquid, ejected slowly from their mouths and collected into a single floating oval, like a giant drop of blood.
The blood-droplet, rapidly eclipsing the size of two adult men, floated away from the circle as the Huntsmen fell limply onto their sides, entranced, emptied, walking the desolate realm of the ghost-plane. They moaned sporadically, breathy primal animal moans of satisfaction and sensual completion. They felt so much more alive when they were entwined in their collective fugue-state than they did as separate individuals when conscious. They felt such things as could not be imagined by the mind of a sane being.
It was intoxicating.
The blood-droplet became a darkly crimson, reptile-scaled thing with tentacles that ended in talons, multiple snapping bird-like beaks, spidery insect legs, and a pair of giant crab-like pincers. When it moved, its body shook, jiggled and flowed, semi-solid, and it emitted a strange trilling noise periodically. It was a spawn of the Bleeding Maggot with a Thousand Mouths, it was animus, Id, psychosis and dementia given physical form. It was a harbinger of slaughter. The amalgam of predatory nightmares skittered across the distance and silently entered the perimeter of the oasis…
The prone bodies of Ran’drizi, Camerlin, Bekkov, Bryesh, Ozwabann, and Kojah seemed to thin out, to whiten and grow less substantial as the gelatinous predatory beast hunted in the night. Their chests did not rise and fall with sustained respiration: they were unbreathing, unliving, inanimate meat redirecting their enervating energies into a visible homicidal poltergeist manifestation.
By the time the first eight people in the camp had died, attacked unsuspecting in their sleep, torn limb-from-limb, their blood splashed and spattered across the bodies of the people lying nearest them inside the longhouse tents, the urge for indiscriminant mayhem fueling the spawn of the Entwining was an overriding electric storm of emotional urges that shook the paralyzed bodies of the comatose Huntsmen like a sweet palsy.
So good…, it was so good. Their united darkness had its own personality, its own voice. Their own collective consciousness receded into a dream of charnel house imagery.
All that mattered was the killing.
D’Spayr was startled out from his meditation by the first few screams of pain and fear. Before the sound had died he was already armed and charging out from his small sleep chamber in a far corner of the tent furthest from the oasis’ pool. Running outside, he was greeted to a confused melee of stumbling sobbing nomads, a frenzied kaleidoscope of images in the darkness, and people scrambling for their weapons.
He saw the thing immediately. It was forcibly decapitating Qarrif, one muscular, serpentine tentacle literally ripping the man’s head from off his lacerated torso. Several javelin-spears were imbedded in the creature’s sides, but to no effect. One hysterically screaming caravan nomad was hacking at it with an axe, but the weapon’s blade simply sliced through gelatin that sealed and reformed behind the axe-blade’s path.
D’Spayr was, by necessity as a former soldier and traveling mercenary, familiar with the various types of mutated lifeforms running the changing face of the Withered Land, familiar with their logical biological progressions and offshoots, and he had never before seen a creature such as this, so, he immediately assumed it was not a native beast from the land, but some kind of construct, either a bio-genetic experiment or a product of chaos science.
He barely noticed that Nygeia had arrived breathlessly at his side, her lightning-staff clutched tightly in her fist, her hair flowing loose and wild in the night breezes and the light from the camp’s fires catching the urgency and concern in her eyes.
“Where did that thing come from? What is it?”, she shouted over the din of the camp’s uproar.
“Never mind me”, D’Spayr answered. “Find Tuolenne and Derivan and don’t let them out of your sight!”
Nygeia nodded and bolted away, running in the direction of the longhouse where the Wytchborn had taken refuge for the evening.
The Knight’s mind raced at a speed that would have made the greatest supercomputers of the Upworlds envious as he categorized and extrapolated based on the beast’s movements and physical characteristics. He could not concern himself with the fate of the fallen or of the wounded. He had to concentrate on devising a quick way to contain the creature’s murderous rampage. He had to protect the Living…
The creature could not be native to The Waste’s, he decided. It was not a desert animal, it was not an animal of the plains, it was not a beast of the air --- D’Spayr remained cool in the face of the slaughter around him and he deduced that the beast was a by-product, a puppeteered construct, a psycho-sensory construct.
Unhesitatingly, D’Spayr drew his defractor-pistol and fired into the creature four times…
The spawn of the Bleeding Maggot with a Thousand Mouths screamed from out of its many bird-like beaks. The red hue of its jiggling bulk faded to whitish pink and smoke wafted from off its burnt spectral-flesh.
It was vulnerable to the sizzling beams of magnetically-amplified coherent light from the disruptor.
Smiling wolfishly, the Knight fired twice more.
The beast screeched again and them began an immediate retreat back across the clearing and up the hillside it had traveled, mindlessly following its original path back to the Huntsman encampment.
D’Spayr drew his double-bladed shatter-sword and followed, hounding the thing by blasting at its spidery legs with the pistol, driving it away, goading it into revealing the location of its source. He ran, pursuing it, legs pumping and driving him across the loamy uneven landscape, past rocks and gnarled bramble patches, through the deepest gloom of night beyond the illuminated borders of the oasis.
The beast disappeared over the rise ahead and there was a concussive blast, wind and light, as it surrendered itself back to Unreality, severing the connection of the Entwinment.
In a moment, the Knight stood on the hill where the Away Force encampment sat camouflaged behind a teepee-like construct of heavy coarse cloth and tall support staffs, bound with rope.
Camerlin, Bekkov and Bryesh were just rising to unsteadily to their feet, even as Ran’drizi and Kojah stood swaying at the edges of the glowing coals at camp’s center retching and regaining their conscious minds, as D’Spayr launched himself into their midst.
The Knight wasted not a moment for reflection nor for indecision: the first three blasts from the disruptor-pistol ripped fiery holes through Bekkov and Camerlin’s torsos, both men fell gasping around bubbling super-heated blood that splashed from their surprised mouths, with only Bekkov managing to again rise. D’Spayr spun balletically, his eyes and mind already having measured the distance between foes inside the small clearing, and his shatter-sword, a sword with twin double-edged triangular blades vibrating at subsonic frequencies, a sonic weapon, ripped through Bryesh, laterally from shoulder to waist, as the Obsydiac tried to slash at him with a dagger. Bryesh died screaming, his body separating in a spurt of blood and torn flesh.
Ran’drizi snapped up the muzzle of his ballistic multi-barrel gun and fired at D’Spayr’s streaking form as the Knight pulled Bekkov’s stumbling figure between he and the hornet’s swarm of bullets. Bekkov, already half-dead from the searing disruptor wounds, jerked and spasmed as Ran’drizi’s fusillade peppered his body. D’Spayr snapped off a shot from the disruptor and the brilliant beam of light lanced through Kojah’s left side, struck the polished surface of an armored shield behind her, and ricocheted back though her left breast, charring past bone, muscle and fat, and she fell atop Ran’drizi, who cursed acidly as he tried shoving her wounded bulk aside.
Ozwabann’s gaunt ungainly body danced past the next beam of the disruptor as he hurled a handful of anemone-darts at the Knight. The small metallic balls studded with razor-thin poison-tipped spines flashed through the air as D’Spayr dove under them and rolled on the ground, hurling his shatter-sword like a javelin at Ozwabann. The shaman coughed as the sword ripped into his abdomen with force enough to knock him onto his haunches. When flopped onto the dirt he was scrambling and kicking like a cockroach that had been flipped onto its back. He died with a cold curse on his lips.
Ran’drizi took the commotion of Ozwabann’s frenetic death to wriggle out from under Kojah and fired another volley at D’Spayr. The majority of the storm of bullets whizzed past the Knight’s dodging form, but one smacked into his thigh and spun him around, throwing him heavily to the ground. The mercenary Commander shook sand and grit out of his face and hair and ran out from the encampment, off down the opposing side of the clearing and deeper in to the night.
On his knees, sweating in huge droplets and breathing like a bellows from his exertions, D’Spayr snarled as he surveyed the scene around him: only the feral, half-naked fat woman remained and her ragged emphysemic breathing told the Knight that soon she would succumb to her wounds. Allowing himself only a single loud groan, D’Spayr rose and limped over to her. Teeth grit in a pain-maddened grimace, he pointed the muzzle of the disruptor down into her face as he snarled the word:
“Who?”
Kojah looked up into the Knight’s face, her eyes registering shock and disbelief at the turn of events, and showing pain from the ravages of the disruptor beams’ effects.
“Bluhd”, she wheezed with a grimace. “It was Bluhd.”
D’Spayr nodded. “Where?”, he demanded.
“The sky… Right over our heads”, she stammered around a mouthful of blood. “He has an army… You can’t win.”
“I know”, D’Spayr growled as he fired the disruptor once more. Kojah’s body jerked as the beam of light punched a hole through her face.
He held down the trigger of the beam-weapon as he raised the sights and set the entire camp ablaze, the disruptor beam igniting wood and cloth and boiling liquid to explode.
He stumbled down the hill back to the oasis… Angry.
* * *
Lumynn met him at the ruins of the caravan camp. The thin ascetic’s face looked even more drawn than usual and his doleful eyes were red-rimmed. He was leaning on a flachette-studded spear that was taller than he was and his clothes were torn and blood-stained.
There were bodies everywhere.
“The monster killed a dozen of us. A wave of black-garbed soldiers came for the rest of the camp undercover of the confusion. A two-pronged attack. It was you, they wanted you away from the camp”, he explained wearily. “Your woman, the sorceress, fought impressively, fought with fury and determination, but they overwhelmed her with sheer force of numbers. I tried my best to keep the rest of my people safe, but, as you can see…”
“Nygeia... where is she?”, D’Spayr asked, his heart frozen in his chest.
“They took her. She was hurt, a sword wound I think. I can’t be sure. Took the old woman and the boy, too. They laughed as they beat down the lad. The soldiers killed as many of the rest of us as they could. We’re all that is left. You and me.”
D’Spayr sighed and passed a tired hand across his eyes. “It was a flittership undercover of darkness, wasn’t it? Hiding in the clouds…”
Lumynn simply nodded. He moaned softly and muttered, “Qarrif… the children…”
“I know. I know. I saw”, D’Spayr murmured. “At least those who controlled the beast are no more.”
“Let me see to your wound”, Lumynn offered, regaining control after a moment’s mourning. “And then, maybe you and I can set about a plan for vengeance.”
“Not vengeance, old man”, D’Spayr said coldly, “Retribution.”
Lumynn nodded and looked away from D’Spayr’s face. There was something dark and raging in the Knight’s eyes that he did not want to look upon for long. Compared to the blandness and the resignation in the Knight’s face from hours earlier, the world-weary look of a soldier who’d seen too much, this new expression was too fearsome to behold. Where before there had been a lonely soldier, a reject from a forgotten time and a disbanded army lost to memory, there was now the face of a proud and raging Knight, a champion reborn.
Retribution. Yes, the Withered Land would see such a dark and terrible miracle as that.
SIX
The Worst thing about Evil wasn’t in the misery it caused, was not in the unrepentant mayhem it visited upon people and their lives, nor was the worse thing about it in the way its aura of negativity could drain Life and Hope out of every passing moment in existence. No, Evil’s main strength was not in its ability to frighten or to repel or to blossom like a cancerous tumor, hungry and all-consuming, in a fresh petrie dish-culture of global discord and disharmony. Evil wasn’t scary. What Evil did wasn’t scary, it was tragic and dehumanizing and sickening, but it wasn’t scary.
No, the thing that was worst about Evil was that it always kept you waiting. It made you wait. You were already half-dead and bleeding from the anticipation before the awful-thing-with-the-teeth bit into you. You couldn’t rely on its arrival. It came and went when you least expected it and were least ready for it.
The worst thing about Evil was its arrogant belief that it was eternal and that it had forever to do with you what it wanted. It was a bad dog. It knew you were there, calling. It did not come when you called.
And then, when it finally WOULD arrive, when Evil WOULD answer the Call, the horror of the situation would dawn on you and you’d realize that the truth was that it had been there beside you all along ---
--- because it WAS you. The monster wore your face.
Waiting for Evil to come was a game of self-realization. That was the worst thing about it.
Case in point:
D’Spayr had staked himself out in the midst of a flat sand-blasted plain just inside the borders of the Wastes, the rolling, tumbling mist of the seemingly impenetrable fog-wall in plain sight, surrounded by six slowly decaying bodies and two chests of treasure from the ravaged caravan.
Bait. Lumynn had bitterly argued the virtues of the plan with him, but D’Spayr knew that the shortage of Time had made of them desperate men and desperate men took unbelievably risky gambles. They had no army, no allies, and they needed them. More they needed an edge that would balance the disparity of power between Bluhd’s forces and themselves.
They had to call the Devil to dinner.
He’d waited for almost sixteen hours before she came to him. The clatter of the hooves of the steeds pulling her coach pounded into his head like a mutant heartbeat and he saw the flames surrounding her coach like the light from a dying sun. He knew she’d been out there, just out of sight, hiding behind the rippling mirror-wash rising from off the heat-blasted ground, skulking about masked by a mirage showing nothing but an innocent blank horizon, he knew and he’d waited, matching his patience to hers.
When, at last, the Gray Widow came for him, she’d found the Knight smiling.
“New skin”, she’d said, recognizing him. “Alone.”
The immense wart-covered toad-thing in whose jaws she lounged had drooled and made soft grunting noises. A sudden gust of wind had fanned the flames surrounding the coach, making them burn higher and brighter, yet they consumed nothing. The fuel for the flames was instantly replenished.
“New skin. Bringer of pain. Warrior. Intruder. Disrespectful. We have hoped to see you once again. We have wished you much harm…”, she’d said, her angry hiss sounding almost like a feline purr.
“There is much I can do for you”, D’Spayr had said, ignoring the rising threat in the Widow’s manner.
“Dying with a scream on your lips would be only a start… Death would not end the agony.”
“Revenge is useless. You’ve had prey escape you before. And you’re still here. It cost you only a momentary mark on your pride. Look around me. See what I’ve brought you… you could kill me and settle for only this or you could have so very much more.”
“An empty promise from New Skin afraid to die...”, she’d replied in a voice like broken music.
“Stop thinking small, you skinny rotting witch”, the Knight had growled impudently. “I bring you the key to a feast that will last you for years. I could bring you beyond the wall of fog, out from The Wastes and into the Forever Plain, across that arid expanse to where the cities still stand. You and your Lord could know freedom and the ecstasy of a feast unending…”
The Gray Widow had perked, rising to the implied challenge and the offer of larger reward. “You would do this?”
“Yes.”
She had leaned forward from out of the toad-thing’s damp stinking maw, her unblinking eyes wide and wet, the alien intelligence behind them calculating risk and reward, and she’d said, “And what is it we’d need to do for you?”
D’Spayr had stared into the purple shadowed features of her graphite gray face and had meaningfully asked, “How great is your hunger?”
Two hundred feet away and atop the ridge of a conical dune, hiding in a nest of brittle-ridged rocks jutting out from the gritty soil, Lumynn had bowed his head and squinted his eyes against the glare of high noon under the twin suns…
He’d remembered something he’d once heard Qarrif say after witnessing a duel between jilted lovers within the caravan’s population.
“Vengeance, were it a meal served at a great table, would be a meal best eaten sprinkled with broken glass. As you would bite into it, it bites back. Hurt for hurt, blood for blood.”
The Worst thing about Pain was that it precipitated depression. After a lightning bolt of agony ripped its snaking way through your body and your mind, it left a gathering darkness that threatened to smother your will and suffocate your courage.
Nygeia’s shoulders and wrists ached with a rhythmic pulsing that threatened to drive her screaming into a darkness of unfettered lunacy ---- and it seemed a very seductive journey, to choose to abandon sanity and embrace the fury from her aggrieved nerve-endings.
She felt alone, hanging wet and cold in the dark. (She was.)
She felt fragile and useless. (She was.)
She felt like a prisoner. (She was.)
She was incredibly angry with herself.
“Stupid, useless old woman”, she mentally chided herself for the hundredth time in ten hours, “what have you become? How did you let this happen?”
Chained, hung up by her arms and wrists, to a huge wheel-gauge in the darkest part of the Pandemyon’s engine room, Nygeia shivered as slimey, brackish water from the pipes running overhead dripped and drizzled across the exposed flesh of her naked torso. They had stripped her of her cloak and her armor and she hung, bare feet suspended only inches from the cold metal floor, feeling the thrumming pulse of the flittership’s engines as it traveled through the skies, hair hanging in her face, muscles in her shoulders and arms spasming from the effort of supporting her weight. She was near the gas compressor, her left side feeling the waves of heat radiating out from the pipes leading in and out of the compressor, and she could hear a constant gurgling from within the steam pipes that spouted from a rivet-studded dais to her right.
Four of Bishop Bluhd’s soldiers sat at a rickety wooden table playing cards, just outside the furthest reaches of her peripheral vision, and a half-dozen engine room mechanics wandered through the long and narrow rectangular machine room, reading gauges, making notes on clipboards, occasionally spinning a gauge-wheel or flipping a lever.
Once in a while one of them would stop to leer at nakedness. Another of them had expressed his disdain at her nudity, finding her clearly defined musculature too masculine and unattractive. One had, a couple hours into her captivity, drawn a crude image, a representation of the old Star of the Emperium, on her bared stomach in dirty oily sludge.
He might have done more, but the murderous glare she’d turned on him had unsettled him more than he cared to admit to his shipmates.
Bluhd had come down into the engine room and he had briefly questioned her. The humiliation was still fresh in her mind:
*** “So you claim to be the sorcerer-princess Nygeia, the only child of the Pahrayah, the daughter to the last mad monarch of the Emperium”, Bluhd had rumbled in his educated tiger’s growl. He had stared into her face with coldly clinical diffidence.
“I am more than just a ‘sorcerer-princess’ “, she had replied defiantly.
“Yes”, Bluhd had said, “Yes. You were the Pahrayah’s Enforcer, often judge, jury and executioner to enemies of the Royal Court, that is, until you decided to turn on them, to bring judgment to them, your parents, and murder them yourself. I have privately always thought you were a madwoman, a slavering, delusional homicidal fanatic, but mostly I thought you were long dead…”
“Sorry to disappoint”, she had murmured acidly.
“Doesn’t matter”, Bluhd had responded evenly. “All I am interested in is why you decided to become protector to the Wytchborn. In your time as an Enforcer for the Emperium, you were responsible for the deaths of at least two score of their kind. Why protect these two? Why involve your self in my affairs? Is it the Object? Do you covet its power for yourself?”
She didn’t answer. He was boring her.
He had reached forward to stroke her skin, to run his huge hand along her haunch, and she had thought ‘How typical’. She’d barely recognized her own scream as her flesh sizzled where he had placed his metal gauntleted hand against her naked hip and released a stream of raw electrical energy into her body. The muscles in her thighs had quivered uncontrollably and she’d felt as if she would void her bowels. The pain had seared her mind as well as her body and black spots danced in and out of her vision as she tasted copper in her mouth. She had panted open-mouthed, like a beast. She couldn’t draw in enough air.
“Do I have your attention?”, he’d asked coolly.
She’d whimpered in the affirmative, hating him with a fury that threatened to steal her breath away.
“Who were you intending to meet in Katamahr?”
“I don’t know. They never said they were meeting anyone. They were simply trying to keep away from YOU…!”
“Who were you intending to meet in Katamahr?”, Bluhd had asked again, his voice more demanding.
“I’m telling you there was no such plan…! The woman and the boy were going to Katamahr seeking sanctuary!”
“What do you want with the Object?”, Bluhd the Butcher had rasped.
“Not. One. Damn. Thing.”, Nygeia had answered through clenched teeth. “I have no interest in the stupid…”
The electrified gauntlet had stroked her exposed breast and her explosive wail harshened as her legs jerked and thrashed.
She was barely conscious when he’d released her flesh.
He’d brought his helmeted face near hers and had said, “I believe you. Really. I know you have nothing in common with that mutant rabble. This is in no way personal. I was bored and needed to do something to pass the time.”
Nygeia had seen her reflection in the opaqued visor of his helmet and her eyes had filled with tears when she saw the fear and frustration in her on face.
He had summarily drawn away and had left her hanging chained to the metal wheel in the dark.
She’d cried for almost half an hour after he had left. ***
This was all D’Spayr’s fault. She should never have joined with him and his Wytchborn charges. She should never have allowed herself to feel any attraction to the Knight. She should never have gotten involved with their ill-advised quest for Katamahr. Crusaders…, bah! To the deepest pits in Hell with all of them! She shouldn’t have gone back to rescue the old woman and the boy during the attack from Bluhd’s commando forces, should have let them fend for themselves, but she didn’t want to let the Knight down. Imagine that: she was worried about disappointing him, a nomadic, mercenary, landless, untitled, sword-slinging commoner. Somehow he had made her believe in something more than just survival in this dying, savage part of the decomposing cosmos. But, mostly, she shouldn’t have bothered engaging The Pilgrim in conversation and should have simply killed him on sight, when the opportunity had first presented itself. It wasn’t really D’Spayr’s fault.
All the decisions had been her own.
She decided it was time to do something about her predicament. She’d been concentrating, meditating, gathering her power deep inside her mind, for almost an hour. She’d allowed her mind to roam far and beyond the confines of the ship’s engine room, outside the craft itself and she had touched that part of the Withered Land that always waited to embrace her, the part untouched by the infection of The Wound, the part where the Magick dwelled.
“I hurt”, she croaked past a dry mouth. She waited. No response. She drew in a deep breath and said more loudly, “I HURT!”
“So what do you want us to do about it, freak?”, one of her captors sneered in response.
“Make it feel… better…, please…”, she infused the request with just enough helplessness and powerlessness to arrest their bestial nature, hinting with a sexually vague coyness.
“W-W-What?”, another man sputtered. The quartet of sentries had ceased their game of cards and were staring openly at her nude figure. One of them hissed a feral breath out between clenched teeth as he stared appreciatively at the muscularity of her naked form, as he imagined her strength tested under his lust, while another snickered lewdly.
“My arms, my legs, they’re so tight… hanging here… it hurts! If you could just rub them. Just a little…!”
“You’re a prisoner. Why should we care if you are in pain?”, one of the men reasoned, yet his voice betrayed his curiosity and his urge to touch her, to feel her skin and to command her helpless form.
Nygeia remembered Bluhd’s words and venom filled her mind even while her voice was gentle, supplicant, and enticing. “Look at me. I can’t harm you. I just need you for a moment, a single moment. Just make the pain go away. Can’t you do this even if it’s just to pass the time?”
Two of the men rose. Good. Even better than she had hoped. And one had the keys to the locks binding the chains swinging from a belt loop. The men looked around. None of the mechanics in the immediate area were paying them any attention.
They walked over. One was licking his lips. The other was flexing his hands in anticipation. They watched the light play on the contours of her wet skin as she moved sinuously, hanging from her bonds.
She looked up through a clump of wild, errant locks of her damp hair and breathlessly whimpered, “Touch me.”
Hesitating only a moment, they did.
It was as if someone had flipped a switch, welding their flesh to hers, and an invisible current of raw power was channeled through them both in a flash of heat and razor-edged sensation, draining them, emptying them, reaching in and yanking out their vital life essences in a dizzying flush of hunger and need… the dessicated husks of both men fell to the floor, vibrating, and broke into brittle pieces as Nygeia flexed her arms and snapped the chains, now temporarily imbued with the additional strength of the men she’d drained. Even as the two remaining sentries abruptly leap from their seats at the table, knocking it over and scattering their cards across the floor, she was already among them, trained hands seeking and finding purchase as she grasped and twisted one man’s arm, breaking it, and then slammed the heel of her hand into the other man’s throat, knocking him backwards off his feet, killing him. She spun and thrust her knee into the first man’s sternum, his broken arm flapping uselessly, and she wrapped an arm around his throat and twisted. She moved quickly, her own considerable strength augmented by that of the men from whom she’d stolen life-energy. His neck broke.
Nygeia dropped to her knees, momentarily exhausted, breathing raggedly as the last of the energy she’d drained from the two guards left her. Her head was pounding from her exertions and from the intense concentration needed to control her magick.
None of the mechanics had noticed the mayhem. Good. Her spell of masking had worked. They hadn’t seen anything other than what they’d expected to see: a naked female prisoner hanging chained from a metal wheel. Aboard a skyship run by a sadistic madman, such sights were not uncommon.
She grasped at a bundle of oil-stained shapeless clothes in a pile nearby, dressed herself and set about to find Tuolenne and Derivan.
She’d settle up with Bluhd and The Pilgrim later.
* * *
The Worst Thing about Knowledge was that sometimes it led to Pain. Knowledge was an end to itself, a way of structuring an individual perception of Reality and align it more with what was actually True than what one may have considered as True, that Truth colored by one’s point of view or frame of reference. Truth was Truth. Knowledge pointed the path towards Truth. But sometimes, Truth was Pain.
And the Worst Thing about Pain was that it was a rapacious, relentless, ravenous beast that fed off its own rage. Pain, once awakened, once catalyzed, fueled itself. It grew. It consumed. And eventually it could become, in its own stunted and misshapen way, Truth.
Tuolenne and Derivan were learning a lot about the truth of Pain.
For a full day after their capture at the hands of Bishop Bluhd’s stealth-commando force, their minds still reeling in shock from the slaughter at the Oasis, they had been probed and prodded by Bluhd’s medical devices, his so-called “machineries of derivation”. They were stripped of their clothing and nearly stripped of their dignity, But they kept what little dignity they each could retain while being paraded nude in a stark featureless room full of harsh light and surrounded by half a dozen men who manhandled them onto and off tables, hooking and unhooking tubes and wires. They were each lashed to a padded table next to a bank of machines. Those machines tested their blood, tested their heart and circulation, checked the health of their vital organs, measured their synaptic responses and bioelectrical states, the machines insinuated their way under the captives’ skin and invaded their innermost being with single-minded alien machine logic, demanding answers to endless questions of condition. Bluhd’s physicians, none, thankfully, had the hubris to refer to themselves as “healers”, needed assurance that they could survive the strain of the trial ahead of them…
Then they gave them to The Pilgrim. Truthfully, nothing could have prepared them for that.
“Wytchborn”, he intoned, his voice deep and cold, “Know that I have no animosity towards you or any of your kind. A task has been set before me and I am duty-bound to complete it for the greater good of all. In doing this, I must at times make harsh choices and sacrifices must be made…”
“I suspect”, Tuolenne muttered around pair of curved metal flanges hooked into the corner’s of her mouth, “That all the ‘sacrificing’ tends to be one-sided.”
The Pilgrim looked at her from out under his hood and through the eyeholes in his metal faceplate. His eyes glittered with something that looked like a cross between amusement and an unwholesome, though decidedly non-sexual, lust.
“Didn’t you ever wonder WHY the Wytchborn exist at all? Did you just think you were an accident of biology? Do you truly think that Nature or Creation or whatever you want to refer to the guiding force in the universe as, creates without purpose, designs without intent?”, he asked. “No, the Wytchborn exist in The Withered Land for a purpose.”
“And what possible purpose or greater good could torturing us until we die serve?”, Derivan asked, the harshness of youthful rebellion masking the fear behind his words.
“Salvation”, The Pilgrim said. “You will serve as our salvation.”
Tuolenne’s face was upturned towards a set of bright lights secured in a metal halo over her lab table. Her eyes teared and widened, the water falling in tiny rivulets from out their corners and making lights sparkle on her face.
“You’re mad”, she said.
“That does seem to be the general consensus”, The Pilgrim said with a shrug. “So it goes.”
“You’re not a madman”, Derivan sneered, “There is nothing BUT clear and decisive thinking behind everything you do. You are simply the only one with all the facts. You know why the things you do are necessary and you are not inclined to explain any of that to anyone else. You don’t feel you need to explain or justify your actions. You think that you are above all that. Madman? No, not at all. Self-serving, egocentric, murderous, cold-hearted, power-mongering BASTARD, well, yes, THAT you are!”
“Keep a civil tongue in your head, boy, lest I rip it out”, The Pilgrim said in an even tone that belied his anger. “We each play our roles in this Life. Mine is somewhat darker than yours. The terms ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are not germaine. This is about the survival of The Withered Land. This is about YOU…!
“What are you saying?”, Tuolenne demanded.
“The Object the boy possesses can activate a power that can be used to stave off the constant and accelerating decline caused by The Wound. We have the opportunity to briefly arrest the collapse of our Universe, our Reality, our World. The power in that Object can buy us TIME!”
“So to do that, you must kill us”, Derivan concluded bitterly.
“No, you need NOT die! It is not a certainty! You could survive…! The activation and the transfer of this power will require the two of you to act as conduits for the energy. Your minds are the key. Your bodies are the doors. Your strength must be up to the task…!”
“And you KNOW this to be true, that this will work…?”, Derivan challenged. “You are so certain of what you are doing, you have such faith in the outcome, that instead of asking for our help, you hunt us like animals, kill our friends, then kidnap and imprison us. Oh yes, that certainly sounds reasonable…”
“So the salvation of our world lies in our ability to do evil to one another”, Tuolenne commented, expecting no answer.
“You’ll never understand”, The Pilgrim hissed defensively. “Only those well-versed in The Discipline would even begin to grasp the concepts I am working with…”
“Spare me”, Tuolenne spat, her disgust evident. She struggled against her bonds more as a symbolic gesture than in any real hopes of finding any weakness she could exploit. She breathed in angry, rapid gulps and her eyes never left those of The Pilgrim.
“Do your worst and be damned”, Derivan sneered, despite the tears glittering in his fear-filled eyes.
The Pilgrim stiffened, unused to such defiance. “As you wish, so shall it be”, he said softly.
And as the machines in the room began to ominously hum, the two Wytchborn captives nervously waited for Evil to come…
… and for them, the Worst Thing about Evil was in the waiting…
* * *
The flittership rode the gunmetal-colored sky against the persistent polar breeze that wafted down in sheets from off the face of the mountain. The ships oval shadow passed over the teeming column of marching soldiers below her, eclipsing the wintry glare from the two suns over The Wastes, and only few of the army of slave-mercenaries cast their eyes upward to behold the hybrid vessel, their senses inured to the constant feeling of weight over their heads as the ship hovered over the marching troop-column.
A sextet of fang-like pinnacles, ragged, ice-laden stony spires jutting up from the mountain slope, marked the entrance to a winding spiral trail, a trail marked by a path littered with crumbling skeletons wrapped in disintegrating rags, that led ever upwards to a flat depression, a plain, set into the naturally-tiered western face of the mountain. The Pandemyon floated over that semi-enclosed depression in the colossus of stone and ice, behind the pinnacle-fangs that cast long sword-blade shadows across the plain’s interior. Inside the bowl-depression the remnants of a city sprawled, a vast rambling walled city with stone and glass towers, gleaming bronze domes, a pair of alabaster cathedrals, mighty buttresses cracked and pockmarked by time and weather but still standing, and presided over by the huge rectilinear frame of an outpost battlements hewn from the stone of the mountain itself. At the rear of the ice-draped city, a squat U-shaped building that looked more like a machine that a habitat towered over it all: the ancient hydroelectric plant, the power generator that once ran from off the waterworks from the waterfall off the mountain, a once-mighty waterfall that was now no more that a persistent trickle of oily brackish water, no wider than the Pandemyon itself.
Katamahr.
Bluhd stared past the wide viewport in his bridge onto the vista of the abandoned, empty city and the expression on his face was a mixture of astonishment and bitter anger.
“This? This is all?”, he hissed to no one in particular. “No lights, no sound, no people… By the beard of the Devil-Worm, what has happened to this place?”
“The pox?”, the Butcher’s Ensign-Adjutant ventured timidly in a flat whisper from next to the bridge’s pilot-wheel, “Mass starvation?”
Bluhd ignored him, cursing vehemently under his breath. A fool’s journey. He had brought his army into the unknown wildness of this barren territory on a fool’s errand, wasting precious resources and time. Angrily, he whirled away from the viewport and stalked from off the bridge deeper into the ship’s interior, towards the holding chamber where The Pilgrim questioned the Wytchborn.
As he stormed off into the shadows of the skyship, he did not see the lone armored figure astride the back of a dragon-steed sitting next to the desultory, decaying waterfall…
Scores of feet below the Pandemyon, on the path between the stone fangs leading up towards Katamahr, the slave-army continued their brutal march. They squinted against glare from off the ice and the misty air, and they turned their faces away from the occasional icy cold breezes gusting down from the mountain’s higher wilder regions, past the cloudline. They were unaware of the dimly glowing serpentine line of light that arced through the mists and cloud cover towards them from the interior of The Wastes.
Lights. Lights in the sky. A muddy rainbow of muted color in the mist. There were so many that no one single color could be discerned from amidst the mob of the rest and they streaked through the air, many hundreds of them, flashing and sparking and pulsating as the traveled in a sinuous swarm through the sky and towards the army. Ghostlights.
Hungry lights…
Lumynn sat wrapped in leather and furs, atop an outcropping of naked rock and peered through a visor at the incoming lights as they began a rapid descent from the overcast heavens and slowly, silently, blanketed the area in the space between the underside of the flittership and the topmost spearheads of the marching army. His stomach fluttered in sick expectation, knowing this ominous pattern from his past experience with the caravan as they eluded and warred with the ghostlights in times past. He grasped his pre-Emperium fire-rifle in one fist and his battle-lance in the other, his tension revealed in his white-knuckled grasp. He felt uneasy about this vile alliance with the unhuman, alien lights, not trusting their predator’s rapaciousness, afraid of their unemotional hive intelligence, their relentlessness, expecting them to turn on The Knight and on himself in any passing moment. He did not want to see what would happen next, but he could not look away.
All he remembered was the Gray Widow, stroking the snout of the huge toad in whose mouth she was cradled, laughing in her weirdly echoing sibilance, chimes inside a deep cavern stirred by a cemetery breeze, as she and D’Spayr worked out the details of their alliance. When The Knight had finished speaking with her he had returned to Lumynn with a face hard as stone.
D’Spayr had not spoken a word to Lumynn since then. Only occasionally pointing to something he wanted moved or loaded onto a steed and nodding when Lumynn understood and properly executed the pantomimed instructions. The man had retreated into himself, leaving the world of human interaction and leaving on the mechanical instincts and violent ruthlessness of the professional killer. From that moment onward, Lumynn had feared what would happen next.
Finding the trail to Katamahr and completing the final leg of the journey had been anti-climactic. The Gray Widow had always known the city’s exact location, but had never before had reason to share it with The Knight, seeing him initially as prey instead of as predatorial competition. Now she knew better.
Katamahr had been the stuff of legends in the Withered Lands for almost eighty years, its role of mythic city of noble knights, ladies, physicians, scientists, explorers and heroes transmogrified to that of a heroic haven for rebellious survivors and refugees from disease, political corruption, bloody territorial war, and The Wound itself in the last quarter century. The few facts known about it only added to its myth and its heroic luster. It had once housed almost twenty thousand people. It had its own mighty technology. It had successfully fought off brutal massive assaults from the armies of the Emperium three times and Katamahr’s Plains Marshals had roved The Wastes dispensing territorial justice to pillagers, pirates, murderers and plunderers, always protecting the caravans and small villes and outposts set into the mountain vales next to the streaming waters from the falls. But then, unaccountably, people in the region had lost contact with the city and the Plains Marshals slowly disappeared. In time, even the location of the city had dwindled away into rumor and speculation. But the legend of the city lost none of its luster --- it was still haven, sanctuary, still a place to call home in a dying land where empires crumbled and social order gave way to outlaw violence and cultish chaos.
And now Lumynn sat amid the bones and crumbling ruins of a dead abandoned fortress-metropolis, knowing the time of legends had long passed from out the Withered Lands.
He watched the gathering of the ghastly ghostlights. When it happened, it happened quickly…
The bouncing, spinning clusters of ghostlights became still and their colors faded as the glowing lights suddenly lost shape and disintegrated into a rain of liquid light, brilliance caught in a mercury-like amalgam of energy and gelatinous solid that fell silently from the sky onto the resting army like droplets of thick mucoid water…
And then the Wyrms, three foot long segmented strips of fat muscular flesh with three toothy mouths set at either end, materialized from out the running rainbow of water drops and the awful pale white creatures burrowed into flesh, right through leather and armor and through clothing to slide wetly against exposed muscle and cartilage, slicing, ripping, biting, and eating at speeds so fast the movement of their teardrop shaped heads as their mouths worked was an indistinct blur…
Blood began to spatter and then to spray everywhere all at once. Men ran as if their insides were erupting, as if their flesh were on fire, as if they could escape the sticky slimy wetness that was invading their bodies five and six gulps at a time. They couldn’t get the creatures off from them. There were literally hundreds of the yard-long abominations writhing, thrashing and flicking their bodies across open wounds, torn skin and exposed organs. The Wyrms crawled into exposed stomach cavities and into open howling mouths and forcibly inserted themselves into other tightened orifices, al the while biting and gnashing and eating, devouring meat and muscle with insane single-minded gusto. The screaming became a choral symphony of agony and horror.
Lumynn decided he could not bear to look down anymore upon the wave of crawling butchery on the small field below him and so he looked over to where he had last seen the Knight, D’Spayr, atop part of a crumbling superstructure for the reservoir locks and levee across the dissipated waterfall.
The Knight and his steed were gone.
With a shudder, Lumynn concentrated to block out the screaming from the field below and allowed himself a small feeling of embittered victory:
It was going to be a very bad day for Evil…
Movement to and from the Pandemyon was via a pair of sources: either the crew from the sky-flying ship used the winch-gondola or they cruised forth and back aboard an ornithopter-barge.
The ornithopter-barge, called a “fling”, sat cradled in the underside of the Pandemyon’s superstructure, tucked away inside a dock referred to as “the pouch”. The pouch could not remain open as the ship traveled, it caught too much wind and made steering he craft impossible, but whenever the ship weighed anchor, the pouch was always left open, a trapezoidal maw stretching into the ship’s interior, extending a wide mechanized plank through which supplies were transported to and from the fling before it glided to the ground carrying supplies or command officers.
As the Pandemyon hovered over the field past the entrance to the ruined, abandoned city, the lip swung past the tallest part of the waterfall’s superstructure, the plank less than fifty feet away from the stained and cracking frost-laden concrete. The plank swung by at a clip just slightly faster than that of a running wolf.
D’Spayr’s dragon-steed, a sinuous muscular animal with eagle-like vision and frighteningly fast reflexes belying its reptilian bulk, was a superb predatory hunter, a creature used to targeting an object and then lunging at it to strike with unerring accuracy. D’Spayr counted on this. He watched as the mighty ship loomed into view, waiting, watching for it to anchor and then begin a slow clockwise turn as it spun about on its axis to face away from the city, and in so doing expose the pouch in the massive hull. The maw of the dock quickly slid into view and then hovered in front of his eyes for a moment… He goaded his mount into motion. The beast made the split-second leap with perfect execution of muscular control and physical timing, flying through space, landing on the plank, its talons ripping effortlessly into the woven rubbery fabric of the conveyor belt running the length of the plank as it fought against being thrown backwards out from the pouch-dock, and then it scrambled its way into the dark interior of the ship.
The pair of guards within the pouch-dock never knew what killed them.
D’Spayr did not bother with finesse or with stealth. He did not intend to infiltrate the Pandemyon and spy on activities there. He was not interested in trying to further fathom the schemes of a madman bent on conquest and his crusade of continuing bloodshed. He couldn’t have cared about the arcane sorcery behind the sinister plot hatched by The Pilgrim. The secrets behind Katamahr’s myth and legend were not so much as a passing thought as he rode his steed pell-mell through the length of the darkened lower decks of the ship, slashing with his dual-bladed shatter-sword, striking flesh and bone lethal blows powered by biosynthetically-enhanced muscle behind a metal gauntleted fist. He moved fast, he rode hard, and he attacked ruthlessly. He was there to kill all his enemies.
He was there to set things right. The powerful could not be allowed to subjugate the defenseless.
He would not lose any more friends or allies to the chaos and violence of this twisted, decaying world he called home.
The narrow corridors of the Pandemyon were a ruin of splintered debris as the armored scales of the dragon-steed slammed into either side and the beast’s barbed battle-mace tail lashed and bullwhipped from side to side, pounding the inner walls of the hull. The animal was roaring its bloodlust with every other breath, releasing all the pent up rage and frustration it had been feeling on its long journey, existing partly as a captive, partly as a beast of burden and partly as a reluctant pet to a human master it had developed a grudging affection towards.
The Knight guided the rampaging creature onto the upper decks…
Where an incredible sight awaited him, a sight so strange and nightmarish he was struck dumb and froze atop his mount, while the dragon-steed, stunned by what greeted its slit-irised eyes, was shocked immobile as well.
A massive night-black storm cloud, stretching twice the length of the flittership and moving against the wind, hovered over the open top-deck of the Pandemyon, a thick, tumbling, rolling mountain of charcoal and ink-colored vapor hiding an inferno of pulsing lightning within its heart.
Nygeia, nude except for a tattered and dirty cloak, a leather breechcloth and a leather belt with utility pouches, purplish bruises showing on her exposed skin, was hovering in the air just under the cloud, which seemed to hang on thirty feet or so over the deck of the airship, she was howling in some foreign tongue-mangling language that sounded like the vomiting of devils and the storm cloud seemed to answer her in bolts of snaking lightning that scoured the deck, setting wood afire and slagging steel. A quintet of soldiers were firing streams of coherent light at her from advanced-looking weaponry, some sort of pulse-rifles, but the laser-light was reflecting off from some kind of invisible barrier around her. A man in total body armor, looking like a metal crab, was firing a ballistic weapon at her, the huge bore-muzzle of the weapon spitting flame and dozens of pellet-bullets at her, but the heat from the storm-cloud and the force field protecting her melted the bullets before they hit.
D’Spayr smiled nastily. He had been wrong. She was definitely who and what she had claimed to be and it looked like she was especially unhappy with the crew of Bluhd’s airship. He watched a smoke stack raked hit by repeated lightning strikes suddenly shatter into dozens of flying metal shards as sparks flew from the deck twice the height of a man. The bodies of two crewmen fell kicking after being beheaded by the spinning shrapnel from the blast.
Nygeia looked down on him, looking surprised to see him, and she briefly smiled. Then she turned her attention back to the attack force that was concentrating its firepower on her floating form.
Damn. Complications. He couldn’t get away from complications. That woman was going to be trouble.
He kind of liked the idea.
Kicking the sides of the dragon-steed, D’Spayr swiftly rode past the battle above decks and aimed his charge straight at the latticed windows surrounding the pilothouse, which housed the bridge. Ignoring blasts streaking at them from inside the bridge, blowing out holes in the windows, the Knight and his steed crashed into the semi-circular room. As the windows and framework shattered in front of him a stray thought ran through his mind, bubbling up from underneath the homicidal logic of battle instincts…
The Worst Thing about battling Evil in the fierce heat of direct confrontation, was that Evil was never so clearly defined as a warrior thought.
For instance, when young Derivan emerged from the wreckage of the pilothouse for’ard wall, he was smiling unlike any human being D’Spayr had ever seen. His eyes were hollowed out holes in his head, empty bloodied sockets, and he was walking as if puppeteered from a source outside his own mind. Two swords protruded from the boy’s thin chest, hanging from bloodless holes in the flesh, and he walked stiff-legged, as if unused to that mode of locomotion and relearning it.
Tuolenne floated cross-legged in the air next to the boy, her face obscured by a mask, a caul of veiny reddish-violet flesh, a thick muscular strand of exposed naked muscle running between Derivan’s body and her head. A single shapeless tentacle, like the muscular pseudopod extension of a snail’s body, rose wriggling from over Tuolenne’s shoulder, sensing, sniffing the air, a sightless wormy monstrosity from something that had taken up residence inside her body. The same something was also living inside the wrecked and wounded shell that had once been Derivan. They had become joined as one creature.
… a creature so alien it did not even belong in The Withered Lands …
The Knight realized he was too late.
Whatever alien power had resided within The Object in the boy’s keeping had been unleashed.
Bishop Bluhd, standing in the shadows next to the vile symbiotic sorcerous construct, was laughing. It was the laugh of a man with only the most fragile and tenuous hold on whatever remained of his sanity.
“Witness The Future”, he chortled, “The Future of our survival. The only way to live in a land that is dying under the shadow of The Wound. The only way to survive this blight in Reality as the cosmos winds down. Devolution…!”
D’Spayr could bear to hear no more and he leapt from off his steed and ran at Bluhd, swinging his shatter-sword.
As he ran a blast of lightning, close enough to singe the hairs on his neck, hot enough to push a blastwave of sizzling heat in front of it, rushed by and stabbed into Derivan’s body, leaping across the meager distance to snap and lash across Tuolenne’s mutated form. Thunder rolled.
The Thing from Beyond Space, hiding in kidnapped flesh, screeched like a thousand crows.
D’Spayr and Bluhd engaged one another, bodies slamming into one another as they wrestled with their weapons, each attempting to gain advantage over the other, elbows smashing into chests, abdomens, metal gauntleted fists smacking into one another’s faces, falling, tumbling locked in combat, kicking out from the violent embrace and slashing again at one another with swords that hummed with disruptive electro-magnetic power tuned to sever atomic bonds. There were several huge metallic tolls, like the peals of giant church bells, as the energized swords smacked together blade against blade, thrust, parry, slice, slash, counter-parry, counter-disengage, attack au fer, riposte, strike, corps-a-corp…
As Bluhd and D’Spayr fought, yet more snaking flashes of jagged raw lightning flashed into the shattered room to pound down the smoking, smoldering figure of the Thing that had once been two Wytchborn. A white glare from the repeated lightning strikes kept the deck illuminated in eye-watering light even while Nygeia’s self-generated thunderhead hooded the ship. The Thing began to weaken, although it maintained its shambling advance towards the floating Princess of the Withered Lands.
The deck of the Pandemyon began to shudder and roll, the pitch of the craft changing drastically with each new breeze as the engines destabilized and the craft surrendered to an unpiloted state.
Blades flashed and sparks flew and the two men hammered at one another with increasing ferocity, neither giving quarter and neither asking any, and they at last crashed through the last remaining frame of the wrecked, multi-windowed pilothouse and each fell to the deck, breathing in wheezing gasps. A dozen feet from one another, they stared across the distance separating them with eyes emanating waves of hate.
And then The Pilgrim materialized from out the very air, first not there, then very much there, winking into existence.
“Get up, buffoon, there isn’t time for this!”, The Pilgrim hissed. “I will not lose my prize because of your twisted ego and childish pride!”
And then they were gone. Vanished.
D’Spayr stared at the empty space where they had been for a heartbeat, uncomprehending how Bluhd could have been yanked from his grasp, again escaping vengeance, when he heard a final scream from the charred, scorched and burbling pile of pulpy meat that had been Derivan and Tuolenne.
The Thing from Beyond Space died.
Nygeia, exhausted, fell to the deck of the smoking, teetering airship, her fall cushioned by the fading remnants of her magick. She tried to rise, but her legs gave out. Weakly she waved D’Spayr on, indicating he should leave without her.
“Like hell”, he muttered crossly.
D’Spayr scooped her up and lay her across his steed and he re-mounted the beast. Together they retraced his deadly path back down into the depths of the vast craft and they rode unsteadily out from the pouch-dock, across the tattered plank to leap again across the distance to the highest reaches of the lock superstructure across the waterfall.
Behind them, the Pandemyon, crewless, afire, engines collapsing, began a death spiral down to the corpse-strewn field below. It was almost as if, in death, Bluhd’s army of conquest were joined in egaliterian unity, no longer divided by class or rank, joined in the aftermath of the eternal dimness of death.
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, a man named D’Spayr, no longer believed in innocence.
* * *
Hours had passed since the awful violence aboard the wrecked airship and D’Spayr and Nygeia had not spoken as Lumynn attended their wounds and fed them steaming broth. They sat outside Katamahr, out past the thorny stone fangs marking the path upwards, on the slope of the mountain.
The Gray Widow and her ghostlights, sated and dreamy from the slaughter, had left without so much as a word of parting.
“Where do you think they are?”, The Knight asked Nygeia.
“I couldn’t begin to imagine”, the dark princess admitted. “But wherever it is, I’d be willing to bet Bluhd the Butcher probably wishes he’d died on the deck of his flittership. I can’t imagine The Pilgrim dealing well with failure…”
She and D’Spayr lapsed into another prolonged period of solemn quiet, where only the sound of the wind through the mountain pass played in their ears.
Lumynn hesitantly broke the silence. “I know a place called Oshplaktur, a city atop a mighty bridge across a wide river, a place of technology, free of any diseases and free of mutants, a city of thieves, whores, witches and exiled kings, three kings actually, where a good sword arm and a talent for magickal discipline might find favor, warm beds, food and a few purses of coin…”
“Oshplaktur? Never heard of it. How do you know this place?”, D’Spayr asked after a moment.
“Robbed someone there once.”
“Someone?”
Lumynn cleared his throat. “Before my conversion into the Holy Order and my spiritual enlightenment, and long before joining Qarrif’s caravan, I stole a scepter from one of the kings…”
D’Spayr smiled. Lumynn smiled in return. The two men nodded to one another. Nygeia frowned, looking at them both, and said, “Oh please, tell me we’re not going there.”
“Sounds like a place that could use a Princess…”, the Knight said. Lumynn shrugged.
“I hate you”, Nygeia sighed, speaking the words without venom.
“Stop. You’ll make me blush”, D’Spayr remarked dryly.
They stopped talking after that and sat for a while longer, then repacked their meager belongings and headed down the mountain, moving as far away as they could from Katamahr and the myths and legends that haunted it.
THE 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.
