Karliandras Dru'ell, Grand Vizier to Kolag Y'phree, he who was called the Lord-Marshal of the Western Plains and the territorial High-Protector of Niyaddour-Buried and Niyaddour-Reborn, was alone and lost in thought when they came for her. She'd been in the midst of reviewing her latest solar circumnavigational logs against prior almanac information from her collection of older star maps when the Centurion-Major in Y'phree's internal council service came to her library-sanctum to fetch her. The Centurion-Major was accompanied by a pair of Yeoman Goh-Murkeu swordsmen, an athletic, fresh-faced young man and an even younger, lithe and sinuous woman warrior, both of whom were part of a small military unit that acted as palatial Honor Guardsmen to the Warlord and his council members.
"We apologize for the intrusion, but you are needed to advise His Excellency the Warlord in a pressing matter of immediate diplomatic importance," the Centurion-Major said officiously. "There are guests visiting at the palace from outside the Forever Plain. The Warlord suggests you bring your most recently revised editions of scientific texts and encyclopedic journals with you. Will you require assistance transporting these texts and documents?"
Karliandras looked at the Goh-Murkeu swordsmen and frowned. The Centurion-Major was dressed in the standard daily duties uniform given the command officers under Kolag Y'phree, that being a form-fitting, high-collared tunic of metallic gray-hematite cloth fitted with flexible plates of obsidian-hued trauma armor. It was a dour and solemn uniform denoting a serious collectivist, authoritarian attitude. However, the uniform for the Goh-Murkeu was vastly different, hinting at an older and wilder, more barbaric warrior culture prone to heathen excesses. Dressed in gray and crimson, gold-belted robes over wide-legged pantaloons, the cuffs tucked into band-wrapped, wooden-soled sandal footwear, they carried dual curved shamshir-like swords in shiny, lacquered scabbards. On their scarred and calloused hands, they wore fingerless mesh-gloves fitted with metal knuckle-studs. A wide metal collar-guard encircled each of their necks, the guard decorated with primitive images of pagan spirit-creatures. The pair didn't particularly strike Karliandras as having accompanied the Centurion-Major simply for the purpose of carrying her dusty books.
"You honor me with your courteous offer of assistance. However, I will be quite fine carrying my own materials, thank you," she said. Inwardly, she wearily wondered what aggravating insanity Kolag Y'phree was in the midst of perpetrating now.
The Centurion-Major nodded unsmilingly and gave her a short bow. He led the swordsmen over to one side of the small library's foyer, the side where they could easily survey the corridor outside the room and see out the room's single, wide window, where they waited for her to prepare herself to be accompanied down to the motorized, ancient swift-carriage no doubt waiting at her front doors. She found their caution to be more than a little unsettling. They acted as if they expected someone or something in her employ or in her thrall to attack them. The various whys behind that theorized supposition could be disastrous for her.
What did Kolag Y'phree know?
She knew better than to ask the Centurion-Major. If the Warlord's motives or plans had been shared with him, he would not reveal them to her and if she questioned him about the reason for his and his team's caution in her presence, it would likely unintentionally spark in them a suspicion that maybe there were particulars in her affairs that, indeed, should be investigated.
She went to her closet, gingerly changed her footwear from the soft and comfortable slippers she wore in her chambers to the pillow-soled, braided boot-sandals she reserved for public appearances, and retrieved her voluminous cloak, wrapping herself in its soothing, conductive neuro-analgesic folds with just the barest of whimpers as it touched her perpetually-aggrieved flesh. The Warlord knew full well how much travel through the physical world outside her specially-modified laboratory and living quarters hurt her. Generally, he was quite solicitous of her neurological disorder, but obviously he was going to use this situation to remind her of her vulnerability and of his power over her.
Fine. She had endured worse.
The trip across the six blocks between the palace and the Grand Vizier's tower went uneventful and was mostly quiet except for the brief blare of The City's public announcement loudspeakers to declare there would be a temporary rolling power blackout occurring in Sector Three, the Kam'e'flecho District, due to the Utility Commission's declaration that rotational load shedding would, in the end, head off a larger public blackout period.
The swift-carriage, an internal combustion engined-holdover from a more prosperous and more elegant time in Teshiwahur's urban history, was claustrophobic with worn a worn beige-colored interior and an engine that droned with a groaning sound that resembled that of an old mill-wheel.
The boulevards around the Municipal Center and the Vizier's Offices at the Square of the Gate of Divination were densely populated with low-level, divisional corporate bureaucrats, merchants and tradesmen going to and from meetings, license signings and civil legal proceedings. Most walked with their eyes firmly focused on their feet, not looking up, with the few faces she could clearly see set in solemn expressions of spiritual desperation, of stoic resignation, while here and there a few rebel souls wore masks of dissatisfaction and simmering anger, silently raging against their lot in life. The Grand Vizier fleetingly wondered what her own face looked like to someone observing her as she was driven by. Karliandras Dru'ell did not notice any particular increase in the number of urban constabulary or street soldiers enforcing edicts of martial law.
"We're here," the Centurion-Major announced shortly.
He led her up the three sets of tiered stairs leading down the entablatured colonnade to the ornately-carved marble portico in front of the palace.
"He's waiting in the Audience Room," she was told.
"I know the way," she said with a dismissive wave of her hand. The Centurion-Major bowed curtly and left, walking in the opposite direction from the palace doors and down the street away from the carriage.
The Goh-Murkeu swordsmen, however, remained with her and followed her, wordlessly, down the corridors and up two lengthy sets of stairs to the mezzanine area under the building's first of three first rotundas. She noticed there were small clusters of Inner Court Advisors gathered in intense conversation near the palace's central internal fountain and over by the Warlord's specially-designated law chambers. The palace was abuzz with hushed activity. Something unusual and perhaps dangerous was taking place within its walls. This troubled Karliandras in a way she had not before experienced. Kolag Y'phree was a disciplined man and ran his affairs with as close to clockwork precision as could be maintained when involving the participation, whether voluntary or involuntary, of other participants. The feeling she was getting was one of surprised anxiety and nervous dread. She hoped that her own physical discomfort wasn't coloring her perceptions. By the time she reached the Audience Room, she was a mass of throbbing aches and shooting pains, even her teeth ached.
A palace guard, a trim, rawboned, young man with his gauntleted fist around the thick haft of a ceremonial war-pike and dressed in a chest piece of pewter-hued plate armor that had been inscribed with the stylized depiction of an angry wildcat's head in mid-screech, favored her with a cold, grim stare and a small nod before opening the Audience Room's heavy dual doors to let her in.
The Warlord was standing off to the room's right side, framed in the grassy-silver glare from the multi-paneled window onto the partially-enclosed courtyard beyond. He was arraigned in snug, body-contouring, segmented armor of overlapping metal bands and a billowing, ankle-length cloak of assorted tanned reptile skins. He was casually leaning against a waist-high carved wooden console atop which sat a geographic world globe made from smoky crystal. His bearded and mustached, dour, sullen countenance belied the sparkle of acute interest in his piercing eyes. He lazily waved her deeper into the room. She walked in...
The Grand Vizier physically shuddered and felt her throat constrict when she saw the other two people in the chamber. She knew them. She knew them and the memories of her past associations with them haunted her, the recollections bubbling up from the dark recesses of her mind like searing, sulfurous lava from a volcanic pit. When last she'd seen these men, she had been a citizen-subject outlaw of the Emperium and leader of a violent insurrection against their authority, holding them at sword's point in front of a stymied cadre of mounted Plain's Marshals while her armed followers forcibly kept that unit of constable's in check. She had been a different person then, more explosive, more primal, and always murderously angry. She'd almost killed these men, not to avenge any crime committed against her or to satisfy a personal vendetta, but because she'd wanted to make a point. Their deaths would have served as an object lesson to the Ruling Powers to which she was in revolt. That memory was emblematic of a painfully chaotic, dark period in her life and, in the long course of the ensuing orbital solar heliars that followed, she had worked very hard to purge those remembrances from her mind. But here they were, her shame, her victims. The two men were Exalted Emissaries from the Office of the Emperium's Territorial Supremor.
They were Royal Commander Duke Archarya Bak'usfane, and the dread sorcerer, the Viscount Kollachaim, both Soldiers-Honorius in service to His Imperialness Draggyn Han'Khainus-Galorketh, The World-Father.
And they each knew about the existence of the alien creature named Ka'esh-Woganhi'e.
"I was unexpectedly contacted by officials from the Offices of Continental Interior Hegemonic Diplomacy and made aware of some ... irregularities ... in the performance of The City's tekk-network. Apparently, Niyaddour is still important enough to the Emperium that they continue to remotely monitor the remnants of our crippled technological infrastructure and its connectedness to the Emperium's continental network. I checked in with our neural network administration team and they reminded me that, as Grand Vizier, you are in overall charge of the limited computer networking we still retain in this region," Kolag Y'phree said equanimously. "Imagine my surprise when they told me that these emissaries had a history with you, that they already knew you. You know, in all our past conversations, and I've known you for quite a long time, you never once mentioned your somewhat dark and dramatic past interactions with the Emperium's territorial diplomatic services."
Karliandras said nothing as she squared her shoulders and reigned in the welling surge of panic that threatened to unseat her composure and reason. But her anger grew as she strolled in, shifting her gaze from the diplomatic emissaries back to lock onto the face of Kolag Y'phree... The thought came to her mind unbidden.
"There was a time when we were friends, when we were allies. We stood back-to-back with one another against all who opposed us. Once I could trust you. I believed in you. But that time has passed and when I look at you, I wonder what it is you see when you look at me... You think I do not see the knife you have hidden behind your back, but you, in turn, have not yet noticed the blade I hold to your throat. And that is how we shall end, Old Friend, together as always, but locked in a death embrace."
She ground her teeth as she saw the insincerity behind his smile.
Duke Archarya Bak'usfane was a swarthy, athletic man of medium height and moderate build, a product of the Lawgivers Militia system, and thusly one of the few nobles who had actually thrived under regimented military discipline and had excelled at martial combat. He dressed in the white and umber, long-sleeved, high-collared tunic of his family's Guild-house. A cluster of different colored metal Badges of Merit were affixed to the left side of the chest of his tunic. An urbane and educated man, he was a wealthy land-owner whose serfs mined a mineral called "gavterian pale", a yellowish-white rock that visually resembled soapstone, but had magnetic attributes like one of planet Earth's lodestones. In his service to the World-Father, Duke Bak'usfane, a hawkish, hardline loyalist, acted as Provost-Marshal to the region's Special Weaponry & Counter-insurgency Defenses unit of the Continental Territories police force.
He neither smiled nor offered a courteous bow when he noticed Karliandras Dru'ell enter the chamber.
Conversely, the Duke's subordinate high-born associate, the Viscount, smiled broadly when he saw Y'phree's Grand Vizier. That smile was anything but warm and there was no hint of friendliness in it. The smile wrinkling his long, rectangular face was an expression of ill intent, a baring of teeth in joyful anticipation of committing acts of purest villainy. Kollachaim was like that.
Though a titled noble, Kollachaim was not of a family descended from the most well-known Teshiwahurian bloodlines, not drawing from either the regimented and warlike Qa'Sarkoon or the privileged and aristocratic Cid'Ammar, from which the majority of nobility were born. He was not, if one were really forced to consider it, wholly human, and yet he did not belong to the mutant Yur'seyn'Ahktar bloodline, either. His gray-blue, waxen flesh and his exotic physical morphology attested to his unique place in the evolutionary tree. Standing head and shoulders taller than both Kolag Y'phree and Duke Bak'usfane, the Viscount had rough-surfaced, hard, chitinous antlers emerging from either side of his heavy skull. His shoulders were impossibly wide in comparison to the dimension of his trim waist and long, heavily-muscled legs and the plate armor he wore over his tight-fitting neoprene bodysuit was of an intricate and ornate totemic design, with bas-relief sculptures of gods and demons with anguished, open-mouthed faces on his shoulders, pectorals, and knees. He was an Other, an evolutionary sui generis, a unique and unparalleled non-mutant variant. In the Withered Land, such beings were given the name "Qymaeruhn" and, to many of the populace, regardless of social class and education, they were superstitiously thought to be harbingers of catastrophe. Karliandras Dru'ell knew some of the truth behind that legendry. Kollachaim was a renegade coven-master from the ranks of the Wytchborn. He was an educated and experienced practitioner of the dark necromantic science called The Discipline. He was a Chaos-Mage.
And if he was here, in The City, meeting with Kolag Y'phree, then she knew that the World-Father either strongly suspected or knew that she was in league with or somehow connected to the Homo Obscuratum Irae, the mutant creations of the Darke Astromancers. The Vizier suspected her interactions with Ka'esh-Woganhi'e had somehow been discovered and that was no small thing... Criminal charges of treason, sedition, species terrorism and illegal, unethical scientific experimentation would be leveled at her and she had no way of derailing the investigation nor of fending off the punishment that would follow. Yet she did not panic. It would be dangerous for her to assume that she was backed into a corner and thoroughly without defenses. Her own panic would undo her. She would bide her time and see what it was they really knew.
"A rare occasion this," she said. "From what I remember, the Emperium was not especially tolerant of Secessionists and, if memory serves, they have labelled Niyaddour, now called The City, as a haven for criminals, spies, rebels and secessionists. I'm surprised to see such august personages as Duke Bak'usfane and the Viscount Kollachaim here, in the presence of a man they have deemed a High Criminal Against the State, without a small army of shock troops from the Protectorate Services."
Without hesitation, the Duke amicably responded, "The dual cosmic catastrophes of The Wound and the Long Death have served to temper the more disciplinarian side of our central government's authoritarian tendencies. The more militant among the Emperium's patriots simply have better things to do. On the whole, we have far larger matters to concern us lately than what flag flies over an outlaw-governed, frontier fortress-city with a crumbling infrastructure. No offense intended, of course."
"None taken," Y'phree remarked lightly. "Though I suspect the Emperium's divided attentions have less to do with The Wound and the Long Death, which have been with us for almost nine generations now, than it does with the various new technologies being developed across this continent by radical engineering efforts of non-Emperium employed scientists since the discovery of the wonder metal Ikarenium."
"And there's that," the Duke agreed with a shrug.
"So what brings you here?" Karliandras asked pointedly.
Duke Bak'usfane drew in a deep breath before saying, "Well, you do know, I would assume, that the Planetary Defense Network's Security Reconnaissance Services are still up and running, even after the Great Revocation. They have observed and tracked several separate incursions onto Hegemonic-unified Teshiwahurian territories by alien bio-energy phylotypes."
"Alien phylotypes? Incursions?" Karliandras asked, one eyebrow cocked.
"We, the Offices of Continental Interior Hegemonic Diplomacy, have confirmed evidence of pluralic alien incursions into the Homeworld Solar System through tears in and transit through Veil-defects in Space-Time," Kollachaim said speaking slowly, as if reluctant to share the information with personages whom he obviously considered unworthy of participating in such a conversation. "The interspatial transit trails register on multiple nodes of your tekk-network that still actively interface with trusted-domain, Emperium networked, nested data-objects. This means there is irrefutable evidence of chronometric disturbances in these alarm-targeted areas, indications of episodes of cross-spatial transit, likely from Upworld given the nature of the engram-signatures. Bluntly, several of those transit incursion threads appear to triangulate here, in The City."
"So good of you to tell us about our computer network traffic being secretly monitored and recorded on your master network," Kolag Y'phree said with an acerbic edge, his words rife with disapproval. "Spying can be so awkward, after all. As regards these incursion threads that may or may not be Upworld aliens, can you provide us with something a little less general in nature? As in perhaps telling us what in the Fat Devils of Abominorem we're supposed to be looking for?"
Frowning, Kollachaim crossed his thick arms across the bulging death-masks sculpted onto his torso's armor plating and said, "Two things. We've run across repeated references to some kind of an alien collective or invasive attack cell currently in operation called 'The Arbiters'... Does that name or term mean anything to either of you?"
"You said two things," Karliandras pressed.
"What is a 'Laukenmass Lazulux'? There's only anecdotal historical reference to this term as a footnote in the brief biographical history of a minor adventurer named 'Rarbuji'i Koraevenus', the Duke said.
Inwardly, Karliandras Dru'ell breathed a sigh of relief. Neither man mentioned Darke Astromancers or Homo Obscuratum Irae. Her involvement with the creature Ka'esh-Woganhi'e was still off official Emperium radar.
"Rarbuji'i Koraevenus was renowned as a self-aggrandizing narcissist, a thief, a mercenary, and a self-styled explorer of unknown antiquities," the Grand Vizier offered. "And in the end, he fell victim to paranoid delusions and other mental illness. He was actually institutionalized in faraway Peravendath in the final days before his death. I'm not sure anything written by or about him would be considered a reliable source of information."
After she spoke, Kollachaim simply looked at her with inexpressive, dead eyes. She thought she saw the twitch of a smile play at the edges of Duke Bak'usfane's lips, but quickly decided she was allowing her fears to read more into the conversation than there actually was.
"Yes, well, be that as it may we think it is time for the Emperium to offer the full complement of its investigative extraplanetary counter-invasionary services in the protection of The City and its inhabitants against any possible incident of alien infestation," the Duke said. "In the spirit of cooperation, it is in all our best interests if we can identify, isolate and contain possible Otherworldly influences and ambitions from negatively impacting our culture and our planet."
"In the spirit of cooperation," Kolag Y'phree repeated wryly, throwing a quick look of uncharitable and insincere, but acquiescent, sufferance at Karliandras.
"So what does this entail, exactly?" she asked the visiting duo.
"They need you to grant them physical access to the Tower of the Grand Vizier," the Warlord said. "Once there, you will need to show them around and let them examine those surroundings."
Hands at her sides, the pale, plump chancellor of sciences and engineering rolled her thick fingers into fists. Damn, so close. Why couldn't things ever go smoothly? There was always some kind of a catch...
She nodded her assent, hiding her reluctance, and executed a short bow to the two nobles. She was already devising different and exotic, untraceable ways she could quietly kill them and get away with the murders.
* * *