The flittership rode the gunmetal-colored sky against the persistent polar breeze that wafted down in sheets from off the face of the mountain. The ships oval shadow passed over the teeming column of marching soldiers below her, eclipsing the wintry glare from the two suns over The Wastes, and only few of the army of slave-mercenaries cast their eyes upward to behold the hybrid vessel, their senses inured to the constant feeling of weight over their heads as the ship hovered over the marching troop-column.

A sextet of fang-like pinnacles, ragged, ice-laden stony spires jutting up from the mountain slope, marked the entrance to a winding spiral trail, a trail marked by a path littered with crumbling skeletons wrapped in disintegrating rags, that led ever upwards to a flat depression, a plain, set into the naturally-tiered western face of the mountain. The Pandemyon floated over that semi-enclosed depression in the colossus of stone and ice, behind the pinnacle-fangs that cast long sword-blade shadows across the plain's interior. Inside the bowl-depression the remnants of a city sprawled, a vast rambling walled city with stone and glass towers, gleaming bronze domes, a pair of alabaster cathedrals, mighty buttresses cracked and pockmarked by time and weather but still standing, and presided over by the huge rectilinear frame of an outpost battlements hewn from the stone of the mountain itself. At the rear of the ice-draped city, a squat U-shaped building that looked more like a machine that a habitat towered over it all: the ancient hydroelectric plant, the power generator that once ran from off the waterworks from the waterfall off the mountain, a once-mighty waterfall that was now no more that a persistent trickle of oily brackish water, no wider than the Pandemyon itself.

Katamahr.

Bluhd stared past the wide viewport in his bridge onto the vista of the abandoned, empty city and the expression on his face was a mixture of astonishment and bitter anger.

"This? This is all?", he hissed to no one in particular. "No lights, no sound, no people... By the beard of the Devil-Worm, what has happened to this place?"

"The pox?", the Butcher's Ensign-Adjutant ventured timidly in a flat whisper from next to the bridge's pilot-wheel, "Mass starvation?"

Bluhd ignored him, cursing vehemently under his breath. A fool's journey. He had brought his army into the unknown wildness of this barren territory on a fool's errand, wasting precious resources and time. Angrily, he whirled away from the viewport and stalked from off the bridge deeper into the ship's interior, towards the holding chamber where The Pilgrim questioned the Wytchborn.

As he stormed off into the shadows of the skyship, he did not see the lone armored figure astride the back of a dragon-steed sitting next to the desultory, decaying waterfall...

Scores of feet below the Pandemyon, on the path between the stone fangs leading up towards Katamahr, the slave-army continued their brutal march. They squinted against glare from off the ice and the misty air, and they turned their faces away from the occasional icy cold breezes gusting down from the mountain's higher wilder regions, past the cloudline. They were unaware of the dimly glowing serpentine line of light that arced through the mists and cloud cover towards them from the interior of The Wastes.

Lights. Lights in the sky. A muddy rainbow of muted color in the mist. There were so many that no one single color could be discerned from amidst the mob of the rest and they streaked through the air, many hundreds of them, flashing and sparking and pulsating as the traveled in a sinuous swarm through the sky and towards the army. Ghostlights.

Hungry lights...

Lumynn sat wrapped in leather and furs, atop an outcropping of naked rock and peered through a visor at the incoming lights as they began a rapid descent from the overcast heavens and slowly, silently, blanketed the area in the space between the underside of the flittership and the topmost spearheads of the marching army. His stomach fluttered in sick expectation, knowing this ominous pattern from his past experience with the caravan as they eluded and warred with the ghostlights in times past. He grasped his pre-Emperium fire-rifle in one fist and his battle-lance in the other, his tension revealed in his white-knuckled grasp. He felt uneasy about this vile alliance with the unhuman, alien lights, not trusting their predator's rapaciousness, afraid of their unemotional hive intelligence, their relentlessness, expecting them to turn on The Knight and on himself in any passing moment. He did not want to see what would happen next, but he could not look away.

All he remembered was the Gray Widow, stroking the snout of the huge toad in whose mouth she was cradled, laughing in her weirdly echoing sibilance, chimes inside a deep cavern stirred by a cemetery breeze, as she and D'Spayr worked out the details of their alliance. When The Knight had finished speaking with her he had returned to Lumynn with a face hard as stone.

D'Spayr had not spoken a word to Lumynn since then. Only occasionally pointing to something he wanted moved or loaded onto a steed and nodding when Lumynn understood and properly executed the pantomimed instructions. The man had retreated into himself, leaving the world of human interaction and leaving on the mechanical instincts and violent ruthlessness of the professional killer. From that moment onward, Lumynn had feared what would happen next.

Finding the trail to Katamahr and completing the final leg of the journey had been anti-climactic. The Gray Widow had always known the city's exact location, but had never before had reason to share it with The Knight, seeing him initially as prey instead of as predatorial competition. Now she knew better.

Katamahr had been the stuff of legends in the Withered Lands for almost eighty years, its role of mythic city of noble knights, ladies, physicians, scientists, explorers and heroes transmogrified to that of a heroic haven for rebellious survivors and refugees from disease, political corruption, bloody territorial war, and The Wound itself in the last quarter century. The few facts known about it only added to its myth and its heroic luster. It had once housed almost twenty thousand people. It had its own mighty technology. It had successfully fought off brutal massive assaults from the armies of the Emperium three times and Katamahr's Plains Marshals had roved The Wastes dispensing territorial justice to pillagers, pirates, murderers and plunderers, always protecting the caravans and small villes and outposts set into the mountain vales next to the streaming waters from the falls. But then, unaccountably, people in the region had lost contact with the city and the Plains Marshals slowly disappeared. In time, even the location of the city had dwindled away into rumor and speculation. But the legend of the city lost none of its luster --- it was still haven, sanctuary, still a place to call home in a dying land where empires crumbled and social order gave way to outlaw violence and cultish chaos.

And now Lumynn sat amid the bones and crumbling ruins of a dead abandoned fortress-metropolis, knowing the time of legends had long passed from out the Withered Lands.

He watched the gathering of the ghastly ghostlights. When it happened, it happened quickly...

The bouncing, spinning clusters of ghostlights became still and their colors faded as the glowing lights suddenly lost shape and disintegrated into a rain of liquid light, brilliance caught in a mercury-like amalgam of energy and gelatinous solid that fell silently from the sky onto the resting army like droplets of thick mucoid water...

And then the Wyrms, three foot long segmented strips of fat muscular flesh with three toothy mouths set at either end, materialized from out the running rainbow of water drops and the awful pale white creatures burrowed into flesh, right through leather and armor and through clothing to slide wetly against exposed muscle and cartilage, slicing, ripping, biting, and eating at speeds so fast the movement of their teardrop shaped heads as their mouths worked was an indistinct blur...

Blood began to spatter and then to spray everywhere all at once. Men ran as if their insides were erupting, as if their flesh were on fire, as if they could escape the sticky slimy wetness that was invading their bodies five and six gulps at a time. They couldn't get the creatures off from them. There were literally hundreds of the yard-long abominations writhing, thrashing and flicking their bodies across open wounds, torn skin and exposed organs. The Wyrms crawled into exposed stomach cavities and into open howling mouths and forcibly inserted themselves into other tightened orifices, al the while biting and gnashing and eating, devouring meat and muscle with insane single-minded gusto. The screaming became a choral symphony of agony and horror.

Lumynn decided he could not bear to look down anymore upon the wave of crawling butchery on the small field below him and so he looked over to where he had last seen the Knight, D'Spayr, atop part of a crumbling superstructure for the reservoir locks and levee across the dissipated waterfall.

The Knight and his steed were gone.

With a shudder, Lumynn concentrated to block out the screaming from the field below and allowed himself a small feeling of embittered victory:

It was going to be a very bad day for Evil...

* * *

Movement to and from the Pandemyon was via a pair of sources: either the crew from the sky-flying ship used the winch-gondola or they cruised forth and back aboard an ornithopter-barge.

The ornithopter-barge, called a "fling", sat cradled in the underside of the Pandemyon's superstructure, tucked away inside a dock referred to as "the pouch". The pouch could not remain open as the ship traveled, it caught too much wind and made steering the craft impossible, but whenever the ship weighed anchor, the pouch was always left open, a trapezoidal maw stretching into the ship's interior, extending a wide mechanized plank through which supplies were transported to and from the fling before it glided to the ground carrying supplies or command officers.

As the Pandemyon hovered over the field past the entrance to the ruined, abandoned city, the lip swung past the tallest part of the waterfall's superstructure, the plank less than fifty feet away from the stained and cracking frost-laden concrete. The plank swung by at a clip just slightly faster than that of a running wolf.

D'Spayr's dragon-steed, a sinuous muscular animal with eagle-like vision and frighteningly fast reflexes belying its reptilian bulk, was a superb predatory hunter, a creature used to targeting an object and then lunging at it to strike with unerring accuracy. D'Spayr counted on this. He watched as the mighty ship loomed into view, waiting, watching for it to anchor and then begin a slow clockwise turn as it spun about on its axis to face away from the city, and in so doing expose the pouch in the massive hull. The maw of the dock quickly slid into view and then hovered in front of his eyes for a moment... He goaded his mount into motion. The beast made the split-second leap with perfect execution of muscular control and physical timing, flying through space, landing on the plank, its talons ripping effortlessly into the woven rubbery fabric of the conveyor belt running the length of the plank as it fought against being thrown backwards out from the pouch-dock, and then it scrambled its way into the dark interior of the ship.

The pair of guards within the pouch-dock never knew what killed them.

D'Spayr did not bother with finesse or with stealth. He did not intend to infiltrate the Pandemyon and spy on activities there. He was not interested in trying to further fathom the schemes of a madman bent on conquest and his crusade of continuing bloodshed. He couldn't have cared about the arcane sorcery behind the sinister plot hatched by The Pilgrim. The secrets behind Katamahr's myth and legend were not so much as a passing thought as he rode his steed pell-mell through the length of the darkened lower decks of the ship, slashing with his dual-bladed shatter-sword, striking flesh and bone lethal blows powered by biosynthetically-enhanced muscle behind a metal gauntleted fist. He moved fast, he rode hard, and he attacked ruthlessly. He was there to kill all his enemies.

He was there to set things right. The powerful could not be allowed to subjugate the defenseless.

He would not lose any more friends or allies to the chaos and violence of this twisted, decaying world he called home.

The narrow corridors of the Pandemyon were a ruin of splintered debris as the armored scales of the dragon-steed slammed into either side and the beast's barbed battle-mace tail lashed and bullwhipped from side to side, pounding the inner walls of the hull. The animal was roaring its bloodlust with every other breath, releasing all the pent up rage and frustration it had been feeling on its long journey, existing partly as a captive, partly as a beast of burden and partly as a reluctant pet to a human master it had developed a grudging affection towards.

The Knight guided the rampaging creature onto the upper decks...

Where an incredible sight awaited him, a sight so strange and nightmarish he was struck dumb and froze atop his mount, while the dragon-steed, stunned by what greeted its slit-irised eyes, was shocked immobile as well.

A massive night-black storm cloud, stretching twice the length of the flittership and moving against the wind, hovered over the open top-deck of the Pandemyon, a thick, tumbling, rolling mountain of charcoal and ink-colored vapor hiding an inferno of pulsing lightning within its heart.

Nygeia, nude except for a tattered and dirty cloak, a leather breechcloth and a leather belt with utility pouches, purplish bruises showing on her exposed skin, was hovering in the air just under the cloud, which seemed to hang on thirty feet or so over the deck of the airship, she was howling in some foreign tongue-mangling language that sounded like the vomiting of devils and the storm cloud seemed to answer her in bolts of snaking lightning that scoured the deck, setting wood afire and slagging steel. A quintet of soldiers were firing streams of coherent light at her from advanced-looking weaponry, some sort of pulse-rifles, but the laser-light was reflecting off from some kind of invisible barrier around her. A man in total body armor, looking like a metal crab, was firing a ballistic weapon at her, the huge bore-muzzle of the weapon spitting flame and dozens of pellet-bullets at her, but the heat from the storm-cloud and the force field protecting her melted the bullets before they hit.

D'Spayr smiled nastily. He had been wrong. She was definitely who and what she had claimed to be and it looked like she was especially unhappy with the crew of Bluhd's airship. He watched a smoke stack raked hit by repeated lightning strikes suddenly shatter into dozens of flying metal shards as sparks flew from the deck twice the height of a man. The bodies of two crewmen fell kicking after being beheaded by the spinning shrapnel from the blast.

Nygeia looked down on him, looking surprised to see him, and she briefly smiled. Then she turned her attention back to the attack force that was concentrating its firepower on her floating form.

Damn. Complications. He couldn't get away from complications. That woman was going to be trouble.

He kind of liked the idea.

Kicking the sides of the dragon-steed, D'Spayr swiftly rode past the battle above decks and aimed his charge straight at the latticed windows surrounding the pilothouse, which housed the bridge. Ignoring blasts streaking at them from inside the bridge, blowing out holes in the windows, the Knight and his steed crashed into the semi-circular room. As the windows and framework shattered in front of him a stray thought ran through his mind, bubbling up from underneath the homicidal logic of battle instincts...

The Worst Thing about battling Evil in the fierce heat of direct confrontation, was that Evil was never so clearly defined as a warrior thought.

For instance, when young Derivan emerged from the wreckage of the pilothouse for'ard wall, he was smiling unlike any human being D'Spayr had ever seen. His eyes were hollowed out holes in his head, empty bloodied sockets, and he was walking as if puppeteered from a source outside his own mind. Two swords protruded from the boy's thin chest, hanging from bloodless holes in the flesh, and he walked stiff-legged, as if unused to that mode of locomotion and relearning it.

Tuolenne floated cross-legged in the air next to the boy, her face obscured by a mask, a caul of veiny reddish-violet flesh, a thick muscular strand of exposed naked muscle running between Derivan's body and her head. A single shapeless tentacle, like the muscular pseudopod extension of a snail's body, rose wriggling from over Tuolenne's shoulder, sensing, sniffing the air, a sightless wormy monstrosity from something that had taken up residence inside her body. The same something was also living inside the wrecked and wounded shell that had once been Derivan. They had become joined as one creature.

... a creature so alien it did not even belong in The Withered Lands ...

The Knight realized he was too late.

Whatever alien power had resided within The Object in the boy's keeping had been unleashed.

Bishop Bluhd, standing in the shadows next to the vile symbiotic sorcerous construct, was laughing. It was the laugh of a man with only the most fragile and tenuous hold on whatever remained of his sanity.

"Witness The Future", he chortled, "The Future of our survival. The only way to live in a land that is dying under the shadow of The Wound. The only way to survive this blight in Reality as the cosmos winds down. Devolution...!"

D'Spayr could bear to hear no more and he leapt from off his steed and ran at Bluhd, swinging his shatter-sword.

As he ran a blast of lightning, close enough to singe the hairs on his neck, hot enough to push a blastwave of sizzling heat in front of it, rushed by and stabbed into Derivan's body, leaping across the meager distance to snap and lash across Tuolenne's mutated form. Thunder rolled.

The Thing from Beyond Space, hiding in kidnapped flesh, screeched like a thousand crows.

D'Spayr and Bluhd engaged one another, bodies slamming into one another as they wrestled with their weapons, each attempting to gain advantage over the other, elbows smashing into chests, abdomens, metal gauntleted fists smacking into one another's faces, falling, tumbling locked in combat, kicking out from the violent embrace and slashing again at one another with swords that hummed with disruptive electro-magnetic power tuned to sever atomic bonds. There were several huge metallic tolls, like the peals of giant church bells, as the energized swords smacked together blade against blade, thrust, parry, slice, slash, counter-parry, counter-disengage, attack au fer, riposte, strike, corps-a-corp...