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 petri 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.

More, 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.

And then, when it finally WOULD arrive, the horror of the situation would dawn on you and you’d realize the truth was that it had been there all along ---

--- because it WAS you. The monster wore your face.

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.”

He’d watched D’Spayr make his deal with the Gray Widow and he’d imagined that broken glass being sprinkled liberally across all the grand buffet’s steaming, peppery dishes.

It was a dinnertime for predators in the Withered Lands. The best thing about Evil was that it was a glutton.

* * *

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 slimy, 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.”