The tall, voluminous gray crystal sarcophagus was open and several long, floating tendrils of liquid metallic syrup floated impossibly on the dusky air, slowly writhing and lashing like bad tempered serpents. They made a hushed, slightly wet noise, heated and blistering, that resembled the sounds of meat being seared. And each of those coiled, gyrating strands of aqueous metal appeared possessed of a malignant, independent intelligence.
Though they were eyeless, they watched him as he moved.
At first, he couldn't quite understand what it was he was looking at and perhaps it was because of the angle of perspective through which he viewed the contents of the dimly lit chamber he'd entered or maybe his confusion was due to his general unfamiliarity with life-sciences biotechnology. But it wasn't any of that. He was not a scientifically unsophisticated man. Nor was he was a superstitious man. The fact of it was that he didn't understand what it was that lay before him because it was truly an artifact of alien design and origin.
Alien. The word, and all that the word entailed, resonated through his waking mind and his subconscious, native Teshiwahurian xenophobia immediately set itself at odds against his intellect's sense of reason. Things that were alien were, by very definition of their otherness, wrong. To Teshiwahurians, the term "alien" was synonymous with the concept of wrongness. It was indicative of ill intent. It, whatever it truly was, was an enemy and it should be destroyed.
Kolag Y'phree fought against his growing primal unease and clenched his jaws against the wave of unreasoning panic that birthed within him.
To any person uninitiated to the darker secrets of the Withered Land, the first sight of the creature called "Ka'esh-Wogani'e" was a slap to the face, a refutation of the nature of the Natural Order. Heresy.
"So you have at last brought to me the being to whom you owe your allegiance," the sardonic alien said through a throaty, buzzing hiss. "This is a big moment for us. You are taking quite a risk. And all for me. I feel like I've been accepted as if I were family. I am almost touched."
The Warlord gave Karliandras Dru'ell a hard and disapproving stare.
"What are you?" Y'phree demanded of the anthropoid non-human. He frowned as his eyes roved across the alien mutation's visible surface morphology, taking in the strange texture of its flesh and the glowing, interwoven scarification patterns that decorated it.
"I am what I need to be," the creature answered. "But I suspect your question is more specifically centered around a definition of my evolutionary identity relative to a mammalian primate offshoot like yourself. And, if that is the case, then I must demurr and say that what I am is far too complex a concept to be casually discussed with a life form as limitedly sentient as you. What I am is only of passing interest. WHY I am, how a being such as myself came to be, should be of far greater concern."
Kolag Y'phree snorted derisively, unimpressed with the creature's arrogant response.
"What are you?" he repeated past a sneer.
"The dagger of darkest Destiny," the Ka'esh-Wogani'e said. "The trigger of Judgment."
"He is mad," the Warlord said to Karliandras. His Grand Vizier, her lips compressed into a thin, tight line, stared hotly at Y'phree, her shame and resentment vying with an expression of warning. She knew that the Warlord's games of intimidation and dominance would have no effect on the Ka'esh-Wogani'e.
"Oh my, where are my manners? I feel there is an underlying awkwardness here. This is so tense. Can I possibly help? Are the two of you not getting along?" the creature slyly asked.
"I am called Kolag Y'phree, I am the Militia-Governor and Regent-Mayoral Commandant of this city," he said imperiously, ignoring the alien mutant's remarks. "Within this jurisdiction, mine is the authority to either administer to your needs or to contain and restrain your ambitions as I see fit. The actions and decisions of the Grand Vizier, with whom you have established communications and ... interactive relations ... are subject to my approval. Here, in this city, I am the Law."
"I do not care," the Ka'esh-Wogani'e said, tilting its oblong, ungainly head and moving its facial muscles through a sickening imitation of a human smile.
The Warlord blinked his watering eyes several times to clear them. It was hard looking at the creature. It's image randomly dimmed and then brightened again as the observer watched and it vibrated at differing intervals and then reversed itself, like flipping the reflection in a scarred and dirty mirror, without it actually committing to any physical motion. Ka'esh-Wogani'e's physical presence was more like a partially completed manifestation as opposed to a real organic materialization. He was there. And then he was not. And then something that closely resembled him was there, instead. And it all happened within the space of nanoseconds.
"Well, I suggest you do your best to muster up some kind of concern since you are in my city without invitation and without approved proper documentation," Kolag Y'phree snarled. "That makes you an outlaw and a criminal, possibly a seditionist, and as such, an enemy of the state. And that makes you subject to my interpretation of proper justice."
"A threat? How novel. Rules and order as so important to you and your kind. You perceive me to be a danger to your city. It upsets you, doesn't it, to look at me, to acknowledge my presence in your carefully ordered utilitarian world," the artificially-evolved Homo Obscuratum Irae said. "I cannot say I would be any different were I in your place, but, of course, I'm not in your place. I'm not like you at all. So, all things being equal, which they're not, I have to say that your rules and regulations mean nothing to me. And you do not possess anything like the level of power you'd need to hurt me. So, we're back to where we were only a moment ago..."
"And that being?"
"I do not care."
Kolag Y'phree quickly turned to stare down on Karliandras Dru'ell, his anger barely in check, and he whispered to her, "I gave you a city, a kingdom, a cause to which to dedicate your energy and will. After all this time and after the many things we have done together, experienced together, fought for together, you would keep something of this magnitude, something so loathsome and yet so very important, hidden from me? Woman, what has possessed you? Do you understand the risk to which you have exposed us?"
Karliandras Dru'ell did not answer. She trembled and silently stared at the Ka'esh-Wogani'e with wide, tearful eyes.
"Why are you here?" the Warlord demanded of the creature with growing irritation and vehemence.
"The Overhelm, those to whom you refer as 'Void Gods', want something that your kind possess and I am their instrument in obtaining that thing," the creature said slyly. "And what the Void Gods want, they get."
"Is that so? Well, in this land, whatever it is you wish to obtain, you can only do so with my permission."
"Nonsense," the Ka'esh-Wogani'e hissed. "The woman will help me, as she has always helped me. Because she knows the truth of what will happen if I am denied my objective. She knows the awful price that will be paid."
"You are dealing with me now, not her. So why don't you tell ME what this great price is we will pay for denying you your prize?"
The creature looked at the Warlord with an expression that was clearly one of pity. It did not speak for a long and tense moment.
"She didn't tell you, did she? About the Arbiters, that is. No, I can see she did not. The answer to your question is a name. Grimmurmanthe," it said. "Grimmurmanthe. He hungers."
* * *
A pair of sizzling orange beams of coherent light punched in to the floor at his booted feet and he threw himself forward, twisting, and he fired his pistol into a the hazy gloom. There was a quick shower of sparks and a shriek of pain as his blasts found their targets. The sound of blood wetly spattering onto the stony floor echoed in the enclosed space. A pair of assailants jerkily stumbled from out their hiding place along a wide vertical niche in the corridor wall and they dropped awkwardly onto their faces.
Air chugged noisily from out through the building's circulation vents and it was thick with the detritus of billowing clouds of cement dust and fire-spawned ash. That air groaned and it wheezed and there was a phantom undertone of hollow clankings from damaged environmental comfort machinery that made the enclosed space of the long corridor and the halls and alleys from off it feel sinister and unhospitable. Shadows and ill-defined shapes danced in and out of view through the rolling, expanding mass of sand-like particulates and the noises of battle beyond immediate vision were muffled. There was an eerie ghostly quality to the claustrophobic battle zone that rendered the already dire situation even more nightmarish than it would normally have been.
And, given the fact that there were nearly three dozen bleeding and mangled bodies scattered over an area the length and width of a winding, serpentine acreage, the nightmare of the situation was sickeningly inescapable.
The corridor was a story and a half tall and appeared to wind on for just over a quarter of a kilometer. A series of waist-high glass windows lined the right, inward-facing side of the corridor and the walls of the left side held doorways and portals leading to lobbies and foyers that led a spiraling concentric path towards the core of the massive building. Doors hissed open or slammed shut at random as hysterical administrative staffers, clerks and lower-level bureaucrats sought quick escape from the pitched battle ensuing around them, but were quick to realize that they had no way out.
There was suddenly a brittle sounding clamor that ended in the sound of a man screaming. A collection of rough, guttural mutterings immediately followed the scream and a decided non-human voice barked a command in a slurring, unnatural language that somehow still managed to sound vaguely familiar to human ears. Dark silhouettes darted from in and out of view inside the swelling, eddying dust cloud and debris littered the rocky, downward sloping floor. An electronic buzzing noise preceded the harsh percussive cough of a weapon discharging and an abrupt burst of light illuminated the corridor for an eye's blink.
The Saurotetramorphs were going about the business of assassination and war with practiced diligence.
D'Spayr trotted forward deeper into the darkened, protracted length of the winding corridor, his sword sheathed and his defractor-pistols drawn and pointing in front of him as his eyes, hooded under the circuited visor of his armor's helmet, swept the scene from side to side. The visor had engaged the mechanized armor's ocular enhancements and the Knight was peering at the world through thermal and visible-light imaging system technology. His visor allowed him to see long-wave infrared and forward-looking infrared light ranges through digital optics enhancements that activated offense-defense analytics response programs in his armor's exoskeletal shell. Even in the darkest or most visually occluded combat conditions, under conditions of extremely limited luminance, it was hard to evade the Knight's vision. That, coupled with D'Spayr's own innate mutant genetic predisposition for hypernormal ocular perception, made it almost impossible for him to miss any target he acquired.
Bobbing and weaving from one side of the long corridor to the other, crossing one another's paths to consistently confuse anyone targeting them, a practiced urban battle drill, Oerdyke and Murshipaz followed behind D'Spayr. The light battle-armor Oerdyke and Murshipaz wore was not nearly so sophisticated as D'Spayr's, but those exo-enhancement battle suits, while not so combat trauma-resistant as the Knight's, were equipped with proximity radar motion sensors and multispectral optical sensors that put the duo far and ahead of the majority of normal infantry combatants since the collapse of the Emperium's hegemonic military command.
*** D'Spayr had cursed a blistering streak of bitter invective when he'd become aware of their presence as he'd bolted down the main traffic corridor -- the very last thing he'd wanted was for anyone to follow him into a dark, enclosed battle zone that had not been scouted and reconnoitered. The Knight was at his most comfortable when he could work alone, freed from the responsibility to have to communicate his every move or to explain abrupt changes in battle strategy to people who were not as highly trained nor as physically gifted or as durable as himself. He didn't welcome Oerdyke and Murshipaz's appearance as his backup. The Knight had no talent for babysitting or handholding and, while he did have a grudging respect for their fighting abilities and their reluctant courage, he could not in good conscience accept the fact that they automatically deferred to him as their leader. He didn't want to lead them or anyone else. D'Spayr was a hardcore pragmatist and a survivor, a predator of sorts, and he was as likely to be as unheroic in his violent actions as he was occasionally heroic. If he did something extreme or committed an act considered beyond the pale, he didn't want to have to explain himself in the aftermath of those actions.
They goddamn well shouldn't have followed him... ***
Considerations of weaponry and armor-strength were of prime importance since the average Saurotetramorph soldier was, in Earth-Terran terms, nine to ten inches taller and fifty to sixty pounds heavier than the most gifted human athlete and three to five times stronger with skin that could turn the blade of a standard steel bayonet. Saurotetramorphs were frighteningly durable. Bluntly put, it took a lot to put the reptile-men down.
A set of wide double doors leading into the maw of an equipment zone emitted a loud hydraulic hiss and rapidly slid open. The sudden rush of air into the corridor spun the tumbling haze and gritty mist into a swirling maelstrom.
To the left, a trio of towering, overly-muscular figures ran forward into the corridor...
To the right, at one of the glass windows, a pair of figures carrying rifle-like long weapons leapt into view...
D'Spayr fired his defractor pistols. Murshipaz dropped to one knee and fired his weapon once, twice, three times while Oerdyke, caught in mid-step as the doors unexpectedly slid open, released a five round volley of particle ray bursts into the blackness of the space behind the doors. There was another burst of weapons' fire that nearly deafened the trio of adventurers within the confines of the corridor and Murshipaz stood fully erect and levelled his photonic battle-javelin and fired twice and then dropped to the floor under the line of return fire. Scorching beams of blisteringly hot light ripped ruts of dissolving stone into the walls and floor. There were shouts of alarm, startled grunts of pain and a short screech as reflexive return fire stitched patterns on the walls on either side of the corridor and glass shattered noisily. D'Spayr and his companions ducked, rolling onto their sides. Then the bodies of their assailants collapsed heavily back into the shadows.
D'Spayr was worried. There should have been more of them. They should have encountered much more formidable resistance than this. Additionally, he silently questioned the assumption that had driven him to pursue the Saurian commandos: what kind of insane battle-strategy was it for them to sacrifice themselves in the destruction of the massive admin building? What would it possibly accomplish that could not have been accomplished by an aerial bombardment?
What in Kel'ayffar's Nine Hells was going on?
Further thoughts were rapidly dispelled as the ground suddenly shook and a low-pitched, chest-vibrating grinding noise preceded a sharp metallic creaking as the building's lower foundations awkwardly shifted. Brick and cement powder fell in suffocating sheets from the cracked ceiling and then stopped, the thick torrent of particulates dwindling away to nothing in seconds. As the dusty haze cleared, they could see a trio of massive support beams bent at ungainly, problematic angles as they protruded through the thick walls, partially blocking further egress down the corridor. As they gasped in a lungful of grit-speckled air, they could each taste burning metal on their tongues.
The situation was getting worse with every passing heartbeat.
That was when D'Spayr saw the silhouettes of a pair of Saurotetramorph warriors as they emerged from the deepest part of the haze ahead of him. The reptile-men looked tired, drained and sickly, quite unlike what the Knight had expected, and they moved with a jerky, spastic gracelessness that told a tale of degenerating, dying nervous systems. The expressions across the elongated, triangular faces of the saurian soldiers did not reflect the intentions of fierce and deadly foes, but were instead the facial articulations of men overcome by a dark, unwelcome, debilitating power beyond their abilities to resist.
They were dying.
From within the depths of the ash cloud, a blue-white light gradually radiated outwards, clearing away the haze even more quickly than moments before and behind that glare was cobalt-hued gloom that shook, vibrating as if it the low light were a physical thing, reverberating like the murky walls of some paraphysical bell after being struck by its clapper. The visual reminded D'Spayr of an effect he'd seen before, long ago, during his tenure as a soldier-for-hire among the ranks of the Emperium's Extraplanetary Expansionist Forces. What he recalled seeing was not something that could or should ever take place within the geophysical parameters of a building construct or a city or even a continent. What he'd seen, that thing that so closely resembled what he was looking at now, was a gathering and compression of layered photonic force into a single elongated point of focus --- a tornadic tunneling through the fabric of the dimensional continuum. Space itself was warping...
When D'Spayr had last seen such a thing, it had been in his distant youth when he had been at war with the dreaded Celestial Empyreans, homicidal alien beings from the Rimworlds, back during the Sacred Mutagenesis Campaigns.
The Knight suddenly understood what was happening. The Saurian commando assault team weren't trying to blow up the Administration building. They were opening a hole in Space to swallow it whole and send it elsewhere. He, Oerdyke and Murshipaz were watching the the effects of gravitational lensing in the formation of a hypersurface light-cone, resulting in an artificially-generated Event Horizon. And there was no human-engineered technology he knew of, not ever, that could do such a thing. There was only an old, discounted rumor, a fanciful legend, a madman's myth concerning the proposed existence of an artifact capable of such a violent manipulation of spacetime.
Rarbuji'i Koraevenus' folly: the Laukenmass Lazulux. It was real. It existed. And, clearly, The Dragon had it in his possession.
"What is that thing?" D'Spayr heard Oerdyke, from over his shoulder, demand in hushed, tense tones.
There was no way they could outrun the catastrophic effects of the hypersurface light-cone before it redshifted, fully metastasizing into an event horizon. The only thing working in their favor was that the scope of the blast effect of the oncoming wave was contained within the structural geometry of the building's corridor. The light did not penetrate the corridor's walls, but instead was channeled along the length of those walls, like water rushing down a tube. The device the Saurian warriors' had activated did not create a true event horizon. Ignoring Oerdyke's fearful query, the Knight drew his twin-bladed shatter-sword from its sheath and activated the control's on the powerflow gauge in its pommel, upping the deadly weapon's sonic-dissonator capacitance. The sword emitted an ear-piercing shriek as the weapon's focused seismo-acoustics enveloped the molecularly-hybridized metal of the sword's blades. The weapon shook and bucked like a thing alive and D'Spayr had to tightly grasp it with both fists.
"Follow me!" the Knight bellowed. Without a moment's further hesitation, he whirled to face the corridor's nearest wall and then swung the sword in a wide, waist level-high arc through the air. Instead of slashing into the wall, where the blades would rip through the stone surface and vaporboard insulation, the weapon penetrated as if the wall were composed of liquid and created a rent that, incredibly, began to flutter and tremble as it stretched open a hole, like a portal.
D'Spayr dove through, into the blackness beyond.
"WHAT?!" Murshipaz blurted as he watched the Knight disappear. Oerdyke rolled his eyes exasperatedly and harshly shoved his befuddled partner through the quivering hole into the inkiness. He took one fleeting, last look at the rolling wave of blue-white brilliance rushing at him and then leapt through, too.
And, for a long, cold hearbeat, everything went away. There was no thought, no feeling and no sensation of the passage of Time. They couldn't feel their bodies. There was only a mercifully brief period of Nothingness, a state of non-being.
When Oerdyke and Murshipaz were next aware, they were back in the partially collapsed corridor, feeling heat and ash upon their skin and breathing in dusty, dead air. The two men blinked rapidly as consciousness washed back over them.
They noticed D'Spayr standing a few feet away. He was breathing rapidly and deeply and his gaze was cast downwards, locked onto the sword that dangled from his grip. It was evident from his posture that he was blatantly unhappy.
Anticipating their questions, D'Spayr quickly said, "It's called an 'Entropic M-Vent'. That's where we just went. I opened a shallow, temporary rift in relativistic spacetime, a supersymmetrical pocket with a built-in predestined half-life, and we briefly hid in there, protected from the blastwave from the expanding effects of the hypersurface light-cone -- we could not be flattened and disassembled by the power of the localized event horizon."
Oerdyke raised an eyebrow and shook his head wonderingly. "Right. Of course. I knew that. Why didn't you think I knew that? Entropic M-Vent. What other solution could there have been? If there had been more time, that's what I would have done. Forgive me for asking, but how did you even know how to do that?"
"It was something I learned a long time ago, from my Tactics-Master, Knight-Marshal Primus Vaelynger, in the Outland Marshal Corps. It was a last resort battlefield strategy he said we should avoid executing at all costs," the Knight responded. "I wasn't actually sure that it would work since this is first time I ever tried it under atmosphere planetside. It is a strategm intended for use in the conditions of deep space."
"... marvellous ...," Oerdyke muttered.
"What's wrong? Is there something going on with your weapon?" Murshipaz asked, ignoring his friend's sarcasm.
The faceplate to D'Spayr's helmet had retracted into its framing slots and his exposed features reflected his grave concern. "No power. Opening the M-Vent drained the sword. It'll take time to regenerate an effective, combat-ready charge. That's time I'm pretty sure we don't have."
"So what next?" Murshipaz asked.
D'Spayr pointed further down the corridor. "Well, I suppose that depends entirely on them..."
Emerging from the scattered rubble, dust and flames were two dozen man-shaped, metallic automations draped in voluminous purplish-gray capes, their rectangular faces dominated by a single,oversized artificial eye, and each of them carrying a long shafted, twin-bladed war axe.
Standing at the head of the organic metal androids' triangular phalanx battle formation was what appeared to be a Chaos-Mage. The man may have once been a member of the Wytchborn, but it was obvious that the antlered, gray-blue fleshed man was definitely a Qymaeruhn mutant. D'Spayr did not know the man, but his trained eye could tell that he was no longer a product of the normal Teshiwahurian bloodlines. He'd been changed. Artificially altered by some external power. But such suppositions were of the least importance given the portentiousness of that moment. All that truly mattered was one thing...
The Instrumentality had joined the fray.
* * *