The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Fifty

Kolag Y'phree returned the look, his own gaze emotionless and unreadable. He wrinkled his bearded face and sniffed before speaking.

"Karliandras Dru'ell is something special. This city needs her. This government needs her. We cannot let events and circumstances turn her against us. We have to remind her how much she has invested in this new nation, this new world we are shaping outside the control and tyranny of the Emperium. She cannot be allowed to lose her focus and make the mistake of realigning herself with the World-Father and his regime. You can see that, yes?"

"I can," Nue'methnin said. "But how likely is that to happen right now? She's wounded and she's on the run..."

"She's not running. She's plotting. She's not making herself a visible target. There's a difference. Did I ever tell you how I met her? No?"

"No, my lord, you haven't," the adjutant-commander of defensive forces answered, noticeably restraining himself from voicing his criticisms. The man's condemnatory evaluation of Kolag Y'phree's current actions and mindset was clearly evident. The Warlord's ruminations were trying his patience.

The pair had decided to take conference inside the third floor's High Great Chamber, a long rectangular room under the castle buttresses forward eaves, and had lain their weapons atop the oval table sitting on a woven carpet emblazoned with a picturesque depiction of a scene from the War Against the Gorgahnuns during the Age of Blood, historically called the "Kor'tepha'a Shenq'ail". The two men stood at the window-side edge of the Great Chamber near the towering Bishop's Hutch across from the wide maw of the brass and stone fireplace. A quartet of floor-to-ceiling pillars carved from the thick, thoracic rib bones of some ancient and mighty beast were set in parallel rows running the length of the room. The vaulted ceiling was composed of a collection of aged wooden panels decorated with carvings from some runic alphabet. The massive fireplace dominated its inner wall, its man-high jambs striped with serpentine bas-relief carvings while its facing and mantel were decorated with the frontal projections of animal skulls of varying sizes. The overmantel and breast of the fireplace was dominated by a single mounted skeletal artifact, that being the huge skull of a bestial pachyderm-reptile hybrid. The sky through the latticed, multi-paned windows cast a fierce cobalt blue-tinted light that threw a jumble of gray-green shadows across the walls and floor. Through those windows, the warrior duo had a view of mid-morning settling over the miasma of industrial haze cloaking The City's patchwork skyline.

"It was fifteen, maybe seventeen, orbital solar heliars ago, back when I was a card-carrying member of the Hegemonic Emperium, a Shieldsman for the Territorial Mobile Militia under the Continental Dominion's Territorial Security Command, and it was in a trashy, impoverished dukedom called Thassagyronea. We'd been sent out across the northeastern polar desert edges of the Forever Plain. Barren, ugly, dry and populated by venal and unsophisticated, angry people who worship murder and slaughter. The Emperium had sent us there to quell an uprising at a subterranean saltpeter mine. The mine was important because saltpeter was used at that time as the primary component in the manufacture of explosive black powder and black powder was used in road building, in creating primitive projectile ammunition and as a propellant for simple war machine engines. It wasn't until later that the mineral was used to temper the inside nickel and chrome surfaces of barrels for particle beam blasters. Sorry, I got a bit off-track. Sometimes I get a bit lost in the minutia of details ... Anyway, she had been a novice Witch, an Enchanter, who served as Lead Archivist for Qundin Academacea's 3rd Continental University. She'd been assigned to the cesspool that was Thassagyronea by bureaucratic superiors jealous of her intelligence and abilities. In her capacity as Lead Archivist, she was able to spy on rebel technologists and on the local practitioners of The Discipline for the Emperium, reporting back on any discoveries or breakthroughs made in anomalous physics. And that was interesting because she fervently hated the Emperium..."