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 oligarchical 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,