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 magick at their command.

Magick was forbidden. She'd known that they weren't supposed to make the magick 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.

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 comradery and companionship, even though that comradery 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."

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