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.