The Sword of the Tammoom led his determined cadre of mounted troopers up the entry ramp and into the main foyer of the Magistrate's Parliamentary Centrum Palatea. They charged past a madly running and scurrying throng of hysterical clerks and bureaucrats, and high-ranking administrative pages who were exiting the Palatea building's legislative chambers amid heavy blaster fire and the threat of impalement upon the electro-javelin's of Qe'rithda's attack force.
The Parliamentary Centrum Palatea was essentially Peravendath's royal palace, the imposing and ornate structure that housed the offices of Ymperatur Tomanus Grethvian and the city-fortress' governing council.
The Ymperatur and the Chamber-Lords, the Major-Generals for both Interior and Exterior State Security and their accompanying staffs, and the Exchequer Division's Island Law Bureau all held their main offices inside the Centrum Palatea. So, in order to protect so many august personages, the Peravendathian Higher Unified Special Civilian Services Militia was also headquartered there and, as such, were in charge of building security. No less than a dozen squads of eighteen men each were stationed at the building with at least four squads on active duty on-site at any one time. In the many, many solar orbital heliars since Peravendath had organized itself as a jurisdictionally codified, hybridized Parliamentary-Democratic Aristocracy, no one had ever dared attack the Centrum Palatea and certainly not any of the Chamber-Lords. But with the ascendancy of The Dragon to the throne of the Saurotetramorphs on the Ke'Tareveel, and with the rebellious, frequently violent uprisings driven by their oceanic neighbors in Ometh Nastreq, such things once thought unthinkable had become dreaded possibilities... With the foremost among those things being the actual invasion of Peravendath's main island by a ruthless enemy force.
It would have been thought that the sudden arrival of a even a well-armed mobile enemy force inside the boundaries of a city, part of an island chain, populated by nearly two hundred thousand people would be doomed to failure. After all, those renegade adversarial invaders would be cut off from both reinforcements and supply lines and be limited in the effectiveness of their attack by the very geography of the target city's layout, but Qe'rithda and company, though they rode at the forefront of the wave of invaders, were not the spearhead of the attack. That honor belonged to the cannibalistic Hyaenirax... Upon realizing that the Hyaenirax were loose and hunting among them, many of Peravendath's defenders lost heart. It is one thing to fear the savage ferocity of an enemy ---
It was another thing entirely to fear being eaten alive by them.
The calm and precise execution of long practiced defensive battle strategies gave way to a very singular, terror-driven, every man and woman for themselves survival mentality.
For most the population, the fear of rampant, rapacious cannibalism was a holdover from the early days of the The Wound's effects upon the cultures of Teshiwahur. In those days, when the once-mighty Emperium discovered that, for all its technological might, it could not stave off Teshiwahur's fall into barbarism courtesy of natural disasters like massive continental infernos caused by solar flares, huge earthquakes, unpredictable volcanic eruptions and planetary orbital instability that fractionally shifted the planet's polar orientation. Many metropolitan centers were deprived of food, water, power and even fossil fuels for primitive transportation. Hordes of people became ill and died, overwhelming the public service infrastructure, and so many of the poor, the disaffected and the sick became nomads, wandering from one tekk-oasis to another, trying to regain access to the civilization they once knew and depended upon, seeking a reinstatement of creature comforts of the past. But that did not work. The planetary magnetosphere and microwave emissions from the solar systems dying twin stars prevented the interconnected planetary computer networks from ever again working. And that is when the final collapse into cruel and primitive barbarity began. That's when the brutal realities of desperation drove large groups of human beings into doing the unthinkable. The once-forbidden, formerly inconceivable, conscienceless consumption of human flesh became a valid option of survival. Morality was all too often the first casualty of survival in the face of catastrophe.
Starve or eat. Eat or be eaten. Live or die. Live placidly among a faceless herd of human meat or become a conquering survivor as a Hyaenirax predator.
The Tammoom, conspiring with The Dragon, had counted on the Hyaenirax's joy over being allowed access to an untapped food source to influence their decision to become co-conspirators and battle-mates in the plot to foster war on the turbulent and rocky seaboard. The Hyaenirax were, for the most part, famously apolitical and generally nihilistic, collectively seeing no point and no profit in becoming involved with the world of normal people, but as soon as they were convinced that there were new meat sources to plunder, their alienated neutrality quickly faded.
After all, it has been famously said that an army travels on its stomach...
The Hyaenirax horde descended on Peravendath like a homicidal tsunami. The intensity of the mass bloodletting became manic and unhinged. Qe'rithda didn't care. He had his orders.
It was on the seventh floor of the Centrum Palatea that he finally encountered Ymperatur Tomanus Grethvian. Within his spacious office, the Ymperatur stood in front of his massive tri-sectional desk which, positioned as it was under the triangular Seal of Authority mounted on the wall behind it, was bracketed by the flags of the Liberated State of Peravendath and of the Independent Federated Navy.
"Ah, I see. It's to be you. I wasn't sure who would be the one to walk through those doors after the killing started," Grethvian said calmly. As ever, his unruffled, unperturbed coolheadedness was thoroughly nerve-grating. The man always projected a quiet air of arrogant self-possession and superiority. "I've always known Peravendath had become too complacent, too soft, to truly be able to defend itself against a determined and more savage aggressor. I guess that is my own fault."
"It is indeed," Qe'rithda said, his equanimity matching the Ymperatur's dispassionate composure. "You underestimated the quiet fury smoldering in the hearts of your enemies. Any man who dares to don the mantle of kinghood must always, by necessity, intimately know the faces, and the hearts, of his enemies and be prepared for those men to forcibly wrestle that kinghood from him."
Grethvian raised an eyebrow. "Well said. I can see that you're a man of some education."
"I will admit that I am more than what my armor would suggest. Mostly, I am what I have been forced to become. I am a man of my times."
The Ymperatur smiled sadly. "Aren't we all? Oddly, I had somewhat hoped for more drama in this moment. I had imagined the hand holding the sword would belong to a former friend or colleague I had wronged, or to a vengeful criminal I had prosecuted and sentenced, or to a conniving and greedy competitor. Instead it's to be a death by proxy. I will fall to the sword of a man I know only by way of rumor and reputed infamy. I will die by the hand of a man who works for someone who will not stoop to executing the act himself. I suppose I am somehow not worthy of having a face-to-face audience with the person who has ordered and engineered my murder. So... You are, I assume, the Sword of the Tammoom?"
Qe'rithda nodded.
"And why does the Prophet-Lord of the United Tribes of Ometh Nastreq, son of Braiqsteff Sha-Norrin, exiled Prophet-King of Pnahrryagos, formerly of the Kingdom of the Underlands, see my death as something so great and necessary that he would burn and sack this magnificent city justfor the chance to spill my blood?"
"Vyngreak Norrin bears you no personal ill will. He does what he must for the good of the people. And for the future of this region now that the autocrats of the Emperium have remembered and rediscovered our existence. This is not about ages-old grievances and political vendettas nor is it about local blood-feuds between noble families. The Emperium will again visit their tyranny upon Peravendath -- and upon Ometh Nastreq, as well. Both our states will suffer for their presence. The reptile people of the Ke'Tareveel and the United Tribes under the Tammoom will not allow this to happen. There will be no deal-making, no drafting of needlessly complicated and purposefully ineffectual treaties. We will retain our freedom and autonomy and we will not be slaves to the World-Father," Qe'rithda said.
"I can understand that. You have convinced yourselves that I, the Peravendathian Federated Navy and the Ometh Nastreqian Sea Marshals Hazard Force will all pledge our allegiances to and kowtow before the World-Father," Grethvian mused. "But surely you know that, for most the general citizenry, both human and reptilian, life under the rule of Vyngreak Norrin will be life under the boot heel of a paranoid, fanatical religious despot. His brand of enlightened absolutism will not profit any of us. You know this."
Qe'rithda sighed and leveled his already bloodied sword at the Ymperatur. "We're not going to agree on this. Why are we even having this conversation?"
"I know that I'm about to die. I never said I was in a hurry to do so."
The Sword of the Tammoom nodded sagely. "Would that we had met under different circumstances. We would not have been friends, but I think that we would have had much to teach one another."
"And how do you know we still don't?"
And with those words still floating on the air between them, Tomanus Grethvian turned to fully face Qe'rithda, threw his arms wide, and took a single step forward as the armored warrior-paladin, his sword-arm extended, lunged forward. The single powerful thrust took the Ymperatur high in the chest, right through his heart, the tip of the keen-edged blade slicing through muscle and bone to emerge from Grethvian's back.
"For what little it is worth," Qe'rithda said as the light dimmed in Grethvian's pain-widened eyes, "This is one lesson that we all will eventually learn. Death brings us each a knowledge unwanted and unavoidable, but it is a knowledge we all will share."
He withdrew his sword blade from the Ymperatur's body and let Grethvian fall to the floor. Then he turned his back on the man's corpse and left the large and stately room.
* * *
When he was a young boy, he had boldly run across the towering sand dunes, running full out, as if he were propelled by the coursing, dust-laden north by northeasterly dry winds his people called "Ghimje'erams". The dunes had settled multiple stories high over the broken masonry, collapsed walls and crumpled temple pillars of ancient buildings and towers that were the bones of ghost cities with names like "Urab Kulphorem" and "Kaiguz Narmaith". He had run and run and run and he had felt the heat from Teshiwahur's twin suns on his skin like the dying benediction of a beloved, but sickly village elder. His mother, his aunts and his uncles had told him to stay from off the dunes, but the sandy, ashen wind-erected hillocks and drifts, some only just shorter than mountains, had called to him. They inspired in him a wild feeling of unfettered freedom. He preferred the thick carpet of heat-baked, coarse sandy particulate matter over the horrid dampness of the sub-tropical Maunja'hral Groves beyond. Beyond the Groves lay the crowded coastal isthmus which perpetually lay in partial shadow below the mountainous, spinning egg that was The Ke-Tareveel.
He could not bring himself to adapt to life under that great floating rock; such an existence was far too claustrophobic for his tastes. Even at a young age, his deep-seated paranoia would not let him escape the idea that he was being observed, his every move carefully watched and his motivations dissected, and the possibility of living under The Ke-Tareveel only magnified those feelings. So, unless it was absolutely a neccessity, he did not travel to the coast. The desert was his home.
From atop the dunes he could talk to the fierce, hawk-like flying creatures, meat-eating raptors that were part-avian and part-fish, called "avvenes" or "Avvipitraes". Frequently, the scythe-winged copper and silver-colored creatures screeched and chattered as if answering him. He'd felt like most things that crawled and scuttled across the desert spoke to him. He was magical. Though he'd been only a child he had known, even then, that he had been saddled with the tremendous responsibility to unite and rule his world, tearing it from the iron grasp of the Emperium's despotic and cruel World-Father, the "Omniperator Cosmoterius".
He was Vyngreak Norrin, son of the exiled Prophet-King of Pnahrryagos, making him heir to the Kingdom of the Underlands, and someday he would be renowned as the Tammoom. But he had been a child then, and there had been much he had not known.
What he had not known was that even as the Tammoom, he would bow, himself a servant, before the grandeur and the power of the mysterious and fearsome She who was the leader of those strange mythical entities called "The Arbiters". She was Fianaxis, most commonly called "the Woman", and she was Destiny Itself.
As he knelt before her, he remembered those things, recalled those feelings, and he trembled in the grips of a dark rapture.
"It was hidden with the reptile people. The mad adventurer Rarbuji'i Koraevenus had hidden it with them, leaving it in the care of their Royal Family. The hybrid reptile, bio-synthandroid mutant named 'Zhe'kae-Chah', the Protector Imperious of the House of Zhe'tsan, has unleashed the power of the Lazulux," he said. "He is a ruffian and a sadist. An intelligent beast. He doesn't understand its true potential. He only thinks of the Lazulux as a weapon."
"Do not be so dismissive. This Zhe'kae-Chah understands enough about it to be able to activate it," The Woman said. "He may know more than you think. Perhaps there was a specific reason the artifact was given to the Saurotetramorphs."
Her chastising tone angered him, but he kept his demeanor outwardly docile and acquiescent.
"As you say."
"This reptile, this so-called king, is he aware of your duplicity?"
"No. I have his trust."
"Excellent. Then take the Lazulux from him. Use any and every means at your command, but take it. Do it at your earliest opportunity."
"The Dragon possesses cunning and great power. He will be a relentless and lethal opponent. I may require the aid only a being such as yourself can provide."
"You are requesting the aid of The Arbiters in completing a task the Arbiters have given you?" The question was a trap, an excuse to embarrass, belittle and, thusly, proof of his unworthiness to her. Should she see him as weak and ineffectual, she would kill him ... slowly, over the course of many, many heliars. And then, after killing him, she would likely resurrect him so she could kill him again.
"You said you wanted this done quickly..." he let the question trail off.
"Say nothing else. The sound of your grovelling offends me. What is it you need?"
"Jotelokkur."
"He is not your servant and neither is he your attack animal. Nonetheless, he is currently damaged and cannot be recalled until he has healed. Your request is denied."
"Well, perhaps I was a bit ambiguous," the Tammoom said, pressing his case. "I don't actually need Jotellokur himself. My needs would be well satisfied to be able to temporarily use some fraction of his great power."
The Woman regarded Vyngreak Norrin suspiciously for a long and ponderous moment. There was an innate danger in her wariness. It would take very little for her to decide to have done with him and kill Norrin where he knelt. Then her full lips twisted into a sneer and she blinked with the slowness of a cobra regarding its prey.
Something erupted inside Norrin's mind and a bolt of liquid fire traced its way down his spine. He felt ill, nauseous, and he felt somehow violated as the feeling changed and his mind reeled under an abrupt assault of depraved and rapacious violent imagery. He felt a bloodlust, a literal hunger for blood, unlike anything he'd ever imagined he could feel and the sensation was intoxicatingly hypnotic. It took him a moment to realize he'd begun baring his teeth and panting like an animal. He felt like molten lightning was pulsing through his veins.
"It is done," she said and then imperiously held up one hand in a gesture indicating she was finished with him.
Vyngreak Norrin quietly gulped past a dry mouth and then said, "Quhr demands. Quhr will have. The Lazulux is all."
* * *
"Damn it all to the Bleakest Hundred Hell's of Vyrmethius, this mess is taking too gods-damn long! Someone explain why aren't those synthetic bastards aren't fre'harqqing DEAD yet?"
A shaky male bartone said from next to him, "I'm not really sure they CAN be 'killed', my lord..."
At that moment, a half-ton fragment of steel-reinforced masonry rocketed past the Warlord's right shoulder, ripping through the space between himself and Mikaas Drem as the wounded, but still furiously battling Pnoom-Ogg literally tore up part of the roof of the building on which he fought from its mooring understructure and hurled it at his assailants. Ogg's external sheath-weapons projection assembly apparatus was damaged which prevented him from morphing various parts of his body into energy-discharge ordnance. As a result he'd resorted to using extreme brute force against his attackers. Two of the Kadavereen mercenaries in The Dragon's employ ducked while a third, moving only a quater of a second slower than his comrades, took the impact of the blended concrete and marble slab full on. Even covered as he was head-to-toe in combat armor, his body exploded like a meat-filled water balloon bursting.
Having fully activated their offensive/defensive sensory analytics and intermeshed that data input into what undamaged components remained of their personal weapons' systems, the twin synthezoid titans had fully unleashed their fury upon the dozen and a half, heavily-armed Kadavereen mercenaries comprising Arvenall Dampiko's insurgency assault team. The battle raged and time ticked away, and the meaning of all such wrathful turbulence slowly became lost with the dawning realization that the weighty events in Ometh Nastreq had devolved to secondary status compared to what was occuring in Peravendath.
Arvenall Dampiko was beside himself, fighting to keep tight rein over the tide of homicidal rage threatening to overwhelm him, and struggling with the perception that time and events were spinning out from his control. Though he was a strategic thinker and a cunning schemer, the renegade warlord was nonetheless a man of action and was driven to midwife even his most outrageous ambitions and plots into fruition, making of them a concrete reality. The plan he'd concocted to obtain control over the fabled Laukenmass Lazulux, a plot to tip the balance of power astride the continent of Qundin away from rival warlords like Kolag Y'phree and others of his ilk to himself and establish his own ruling house, had been a good one. The conspiratorial alliance into which he'd entered with The Dragon, the Tammoom and the military forces of the Ke-Tareveel had been an inspired and supremely intelligent decision. He'd made all the right moves... And then the Knight D'Spayr and his motley fellowship of extrahuman, interplanetary crusaders -- all of whom should have died when last he'd encountered them at the dilapidated and crumbling, mammoth cathedral ruins of Qatedralle Zwarte -- had interjected themselves into the proceedings along with that duplicitous, lunatic pirate Rae'vynn Wyyng. Their interference had been unanticipated and, as such, unplanned for, making any response he made to correct the course of events frustratingly complicated.
Dampiko involuntarily flinched at the abrupt eruption nearby of an incendiary fusillade of mini-smart-bomb projectiles. A Kadavereen soldier had taken aim and had launched the projectiles at the leaping, darting, and twirling figure of Pnoom-Aig a short distance away as she confronted a trio of armored combatants. The sound from weapon's fire made the warlord's ears ring.
"My Lord, The Dragon has abandoned us to satisfy his savage vendetta against Captain Wyyng and her ship's crew. That action in no way brings us any closer to obtaining the Lazulux and, worse, has put us in harm's way by forcing us into a battle with these synthetic gene-'bot constructs. They're much stronger, faster and far more durable than the enhanced Kadavereen mercenaries in our employ. Even with our superior firepower, there's every likelihood they may defeat a strike team of this size. I say we leave this place posthaste. The Lazulux is with The Dragon's invasion force over in Peravendath. That is where WE need to be. We owe that lizard-scaled barbarian no further allegiance!"
Dampiko, grasping the bronze-decorated titanium pommel of his massive, diamond-bladed broadsword, hissed his displeasure, but nodded his agreement with Drem's brutally pragmatic assessment of the situation.
"Allowing himself to surrender to his bloodlust was ill-conceived. I was always doubtful about his control over his feral nature." The warlord's comments were tinged with both disappointment and bitterness. "The woman, his lieutenant, where is she?"
Drem's face wrinkled in displeasure. "Ptoleria? Like the good little pet-slave she is, and courtesy of her liftjet-boots and her gravity-deflection vest, she flew off after him when he attacked the corsairs' battle cruiser. She has no sense of priority and no discipline for strategy when it comes to The Dragon. She is his creature, body and soul."
"Pfaugh! We should not have expected more from her... after all, she's just a lab-bred mutant."
"And a fang-toothed carrion-eater," Drem added, airing his overall distaste towards the Hyaenirax subculture.
"Enough. We've suffered our association with these mongrel species long enough. Call down the hopper-skiff, have it home to our position," Dampiko, who was sometimes called "the Crucifixer", snarled. "Plot a course to Peravendath's main island. We can be there before the suns next change their position in the sky. You are right, old friend, staying here serves no further purpose."
Drem quickly opened a rectangular compartment in the wide-sectioned metal waistband of the armor that enwrapped his torso. He depressed a pair of small buttons. A green LED light twinkled briefly on the circuit chassis and then he closed the compartment. The deed was done.
A high-pitched sonic hiss then emitted from an area at a nearby rooftop and the hopper-skiff, a small bubble-cabined, delta-winged fancraft, rose upwards and then flew to unerringly intersect with the embattled roof on which the Warlord and his Infantry Commander waited.
* * *
Peravendath, moments after the onrushing impact of the gravitic shockwave from a hypersurface light-cone...
The Laukenmass Lazulux had been described as a compact and portable Wormhole Engine, an autonomous device capable of manipulating vast quantum-phasic magnetic fields in a localized geographic area and sculpting those fields into a matrix that resembled a "nondeterministic polyspatial singularity".
But what most scholars had never realized was that for the Lazulux to be able to perform such a task, the device had to possess some measure of referential geospatial awareness -- it had to be able to identify itself as an entity separate from all other individual things in its immediate vacinity and then be able to identify and isolate everything external to itself.
That meant the Lazulux had to be, to some degree, Self-Aware. And that self-awareness would indicate that it had to collate data from multiple sources. The collation of data would obviously require the Lazulux to be able to perceive, to recognize and appreciate external stimuli, and to process information from that stimuli into conclusions. And that would mean that the device would need to be able to independently deduce and formulate results, thus indicating it had to possess some level of individualistic intelligence. Artificial intelligence.
That, in essence, meant the Lazulux could, for lack of a better term, "think". And it is innate in all things that could think that they would need to be able to communicate said thoughts...
Amid the wreckage and ruin of the Grand Advisor's chambers, something very bad was happening.
Nygeia's mind was on fire. The Laukenmass Lazulux some four stories below her feet was insistently trying to speak to her, the individualistic organic intelligence most likely to be receptive to the device's unique form of communication. It was trying to communicate with her mind through the extrasensory psychic interface she had with her semi-sentient lightning staff.
The staff was making pitiful mewling noises, as if it were a frightened animal.
Vashnur Xhant was down, severely wounded in the upper thigh of one of his legs and blaster-shot through his heaving, bloodied abdomen, and the Red Archivist, Yllvanea Razora, was half-blind and nursing harsh, possibly disfiguring burns to the left side of her face.
"LOOK AT HER! What is wrong with her?" Yllvanea demanded while pointing at Nygeia. "How did she do what she did? What she did ... that's not possible. HUMAN BEINGS can't do that! But NOW look at her... What's wrong with her?"
Exhausted from his own exertions during the battle, Lumynn watched in growing horror as Princess Nygeia began to stumble and tremble, the use of her motor skills suddenly gone awry, while she waged some brutal internal conflict at which he could only guess. He felt confused and powerless as she hyperventilated and knocked over office furniture, abruptly lashing out and scattering to the floor the objects sitting atop the expansive desk against which she leaned. It was clear she was under some kind of mental and neurological attack, but, frustratingly, there was nothing he could do to help her.
So when the lightning staff in her fist began to brightly glow and suddenly emit an uncharacteristic beam of silver light from its jeweled apex, Lumynn took it as a sign that she was losing control. Whatever was assaulting her was winning and it was wresting control of her most powerful weapon away from her. He knew the Princess would not want to become a puppet to an enemy and used as a weapon against her own friends. He reluctantly raised the pistol-like weapon he'd appropriated from one of the fallen reptile warriors, flicked on the power cartridge button to gather a charge, and aimed at her heart...
That was when the silver light from the staff blindingly expanded to fill the entire chamber. The floor and ceiling disappeared, not occluded by the retina-scarring glare from light, but actually erased from Reality. As the flash of chrome illumination faded, the interior of the vast, debris-littered room shimmered and instantaneously transformed into a spacescape filled with stars and streaking comets.
Something spectral manifested. It was tall and humanoid in appearance, resembling a man draped in simple clothing that resembled a monk's hood and robes, and it floated at the edges of what looked to be an immense, glowing stellar nebula. It spoke loudly, in an unpleasant voice -- as if such an otherworldly sound could be described as resembling a human voice -- that rang too much of storm-born thunder, crackling flames and clashing metal.
<You have come. At last.>
Lumynn felt his skin crawl. The thing spoke in a manner that transcended the creation of sound. No human larynx could produce that tonality. Whatever it truly was, this figure that resembled some variety of celestial monk was quite obviously not a being born of humankind. Lumynn doubted the creature that confronted him qualified as any kind of a biological entity at all, human or otherwise.
<I am Rarbuji'i Koraevenus, the Last Guardian to the Key,> the apparition intoned, < and I am the Adversary of the Mokaeren Host, the Overminds of the Megacosm, who are also called the Void-Gods.>
Void-Gods? Lumynn's face collapsed into a pained expression and he shook his head wearily.
"Well, how wonderful is that?" he said softly. "The ghost of a dead man. Damn and begafrelk."
* * *