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 suns 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. The huge, bulging eyes atop the writhing tendrils emerging from its skull's eyeholes 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...

                                                                *        *        *