On the ground under his feet, wide patches of coarse sand the color of iron-smelt slowly swirled into twisting whorls while above him, under a sky peppered with dark clouds that resembled clotted blood spatters, the thin atmosphere spewed forth air that tasted like dust and desiccated vegetation.
He was not so easily fooled, however. The terms "ground" and "sky" were relative. This was not a true geophysical environment, as such an environ would normally be defined for human minds.
This was someplace else, somewhere else.
"Well, well, what have we here? Whatever has she sent me now?" The sound of those words did not ride the desultory, indolent winds that spiraled from under wispy cloudcover so much as pelt them, like hot sludge splashed up against a stone wall. The voice that spoke those words was hushed and hollow, the sound of a serpent aping human speech, draping each phonem uttered in a cloak of decadent malignancy. "Such gifts she provides, never intentionally, after all, since she does not know nor think to even concern herself with whereof she imperiously discards her victims, but she sends to me things, entities, beings, I consider to be gifts nonetheless."
Where was he? Who is it that was speaking? He felt strange. He felt, physically, strained and insubstantial, sensorily stressed, stretched thin, and the light that bathed the lunatic landscape surrounding him was anemic and unclean, as if infested by some indefinable disease. His techno-biologically genegineered power armor had instituted its extraplanetary environ life-support mode, making it clear that wherever it was he'd awakened, the place was hostile to human life. Additionally, his armor's gene-bonded, biocybernetic, neurotelemetric human systems augmentation unit, the Watcher-Brother, was in full combat-protection mode. He was apparently in extreme jeopardy despite the relatively inanimate calm his surroundings projected. There was death here.
He observed the surrounding panorama as if he peered through the haze of a membranous, translucent caul. As his vision adapted to the filmy, oppressive atmosphere D'Spayr quickly came to the realization he did not at all like what he beheld.
And he was getting damned tired of having to deal with yet another thing he didn't like.
"Enough gamesmanship. This is not an endeavor for the entertainment of spoiled children. Show yourself," the Knight demanded, impatience hardening his tone.
"You are not in command here," the voice said, an unspoken threat edging its soft sibilance.
"All that interests me is information on how to get out of here and back to where I was," D'Spayr said. "Who is or is not in charge, whoever has dominion over this place, or whatever other details of territoriality there may be are of no interest. Now, unless you have any strenuous objections, tell me how I can or what I need to do to leave here?"
"And what if I do have objections? What if I don't want you to leave here?"
D'Spayr fought to suppress an aggravated growl from escaping past his lips. "There isn't time for this silliness. I obviously don't belong here and just as obviously, you're no friend or ally of mine. Grant me passage out and away from this place and so we can save ourselves further unpleasantness."
"Ah yes, there it is. 'Time'. The typical Teshiwaurian preoccupation with the ticking of the clock..., What time is it? How much time will it take? How much time is there left? Time is so important to you and your ind and yet you barely have any cognizance of its true complexity or importance, only seeing it in terms of your own comings and goings and your schemes and desires. And the fact that you are living on a planet in a solar system where Time is actually broken, where it is fragmented, strangled and in disarray doesn't in any way color your perception of what's really going on around you... You truly are a short-lived race of pathetic and blind, angry little apes..."
D'Spayr sighed and shook his head. Continuing the exchange with his mysterious co-occupant in these odd surroundings was useless. It was apparent the hidden speaker was intent on, at least for the moment, satisfying their own twisted agenda to the exclusion of all else. It was also just as apparent that the speaker was a non-human.
The Knight squared his shoulders and cocked his head in the general direction from which he detected the voice was originating. "Get to the point. You want something, yes?"
The reply was as enigmatic as the rest of the conversation had been. "Do you know where you are?"
D'Spayr concentrated and via mental command initialized a quick series of detailed optical scans sweeping everything in human visual range.
It was a desolate and forlorn expanse that spread out around him. To his left, a pair of shadow-dappled, towering obelisks sat in the distance, clouds of blackish-blue sand billowing skywards from their wide bases, just before the distant horizon line. Each obelisk was, at its squared apex, inscribed with the metallic image of an upside down triangle, the geometric shape containing a stylized likeness of a human eye in the center. A fluttering congregation of bat-like, skin-winged, avian-mammal hybrids circled the obelisks, the gaggle of flying creatures soaring in and out from the undersides of the dirty, patchy clouds above. The weak light illuminating the scene came from some hidden source beyond the visible elements of the grungy atmosphere.
To D'Spayr's left, in the immediate foreground, was a dire and eerie example of sculpted statuary. It was a grotesque and dreadful monolith, composed of aged, stained, brass-like metal interlaced with dirty, silvery plates that showed brutal impacts from repeated hammer-marks. The thing, and "thing" it was because it truly beggared common efforts at description, resembled an elephantine sculpture of a human torso, from mid-thigh to neck, facing away from where D'Spayr stood, studded with conical spikes and raised, spidery cross-bracing along the lengthy spine. Running parallel to the ground many stories beneath its center, a collection of thorny, light panel-decorated spines bristled from the front of the torso, obliterating any expected details of humanoid anatomy. Tentacle-like protuberances extended from the torso's abdomen area and plunged serpent-like into the grainy, inky soil. Atop the bizarre, deistic effigy, an overly large human face, frozen in an expression of infinite pain, was facing backwards out over the shoulders, and it was set inside the frame of what looked to be an oblong timepiece. The mouth of that man-like face was stretched agape in a soundless scream.
For a long moment, he held his breath while the sight made his blood run cold.
The power unleashed by the dying Laukenmass Lazulux was even greater and more far reaching than the Knight had ever expected.
D'Spayr knew of this place. He recognized it from the long-ago descriptions he'd read during his brief time as an Emperical Mechanics Theories student when he'd been enrolled at the Territorial Expanse's Star Legion Tekknologitarian Academy. It was a place that was not supposed to exist -- and if it DID exist, it was a place that was completely uninhabitable by humankind.
It was the Grail of The Underwhorl. It was the awful place from which Magick flowed and it held in its dark heart the wicked and baneful origins of The Discipline.
D'Spayr very suddenly did not want to see the face of the mysterious speaker with whom he'd been conversing...
Too late by far, he knew, too late by far.
She sauntered over towards him from the somber stygian shadows collected at the base of the enormous sculpture, her movements at once very familiar and yet repellently alien. She was in the company of another creature, one he'd never seen before, but one he instinctually knew to be one of the abominable offspring of the Laukenmass Lazulux. He wanted to, needed to, disavow the evidence of his eyes, but he knew he could not. Her words, spoken not so long past, rose unbidden to his disheartened mind.
"I'm sorry, my champion, my dearest, I'm so, so sorry...!"
In this place, in this alter-dimensional, hyper-spatial pocket cosmos, no doubt a bubble riding the turbulent waves of the circumstellar accretion disk surrounding the implosion of energy created by the Lazulux's death, surrogate Realities allowed obverse doppelgangers to take on a life of their own.
It was Nygeia. The real Nygeia. The truer, undiluted version of Princess Regent Nygeia Mere'Domay Vela'Mahnnstruhr that was separate in character and in morality from the Upworlds identity of Earth-human Meredith McCrae Chapel. Nygeia, she who was Dame-Royal of the Nightspawn-Evolved,the eldest child of the evil Pahrayah. Warrior, murderer, mesmerist, alchemist, soul-stealer, electromancer and necromancer, this was the cunning devil to Meredith Chapel's righteous angel.
And next to her was the twisted, tattooed, mutant half-cyborg, half-mechanical spider named Ka'esh-Woganhi'e.
"I believe you asked me if there was something I wanted," Ka'esh-Woganhi'e said slyly.
What could be seen of D'Spayr's expressionless face under his armor's protective helm was in defiance of the outrage suffusing every particle of his being as he beheld Nygeia's evil soul-twin. Callous and loathsome, this creature was not the woman he knew and respected. She was not the friend and comrade he cherished. She was an abomination, an insult to everything good Nygeia and Meredith struggled to be. She stood in-league with the demented spawn of the Lazulux. His Nygeia would never acquiesce to do that. A demonic mirror-image, a murderous simulacrum, she wasn't worthy of his continued forbearance.
His face was like stone, but his eyes, fixed as they were upon the fiendish pair gloating in front of him, blazed like rogue suns.
When next D'Spayr spoke, his voice was cold as a grave in winter. "You really don't understand much about Knights, do you?"
His fingers flew to the pommel of his twin-bladed shatter-sword...
* * *
His mind was aswim with images, with chaotic fragments of memory that haunted him unbidden as he struggled to regain his mental equilibrium. He had been one place and then had been forcibly exiled, sent away, tossed aside, to another place. This had been done to him against his will. In his mind's eye, he saw...
...the first likeness of a human face as it looked down on him, regarding him with a look both of cool appraisal and barely suppressed pride and triumph...
...his own fitful and twitchy P.O.V. as he began to observe and catalog the world through which he traveled, a world dominated by an expansive network of intricately architected, labyrinthine artificial mechanisms he knew to be self-replicating, self-sustaining thinking machines...
...the first realization of the structural wonders and attributes of his own physical body when compared with the simpler, more fragile physiques of those who cared for and mentored him...
...the first time he'd become aware of the concept of identity following the occasions when he heard other sentient beings refer to him by name...
...his first autonomous, unchaperoned interpersonal experiences with other intelligent humanoid beings...
...the first time he'd become aware he was different and separate even from the others who'd been designed and constructed like himself...
...the first time he'd challenged the authority of someone he knew was less evolved than himself...
...the first time he'd been punished...
...the first time he'd heard the words "freak" and "monster"...
...the unfamiliar tightness in his chest and the red heat behind his eyes the first time he'd realized he'd been lied to and betrayed...
...billowing black smoke, searing flame, explosive thunder and screaming in the aftermath of his first confrontation with his so-called "Masters"...
The blood on his clenched fists...
Kodespawn 77 tamped down on the dizzying array of emotions threatening to overwhelm him as he returned to conscious awareness following his forced physical displacement through three dimensional space by an alien demigod. He could hear the sharp, reverberating percussion of weapons fire against a droning, hissing backdrop of howling wind. His internal geolocation positioning sense relayed to him his hyperboloid of revolution in relation to his axial coordinates...
He was still on the continent of Qundin, in the far northeastern coastal territories of the Pang Xa'Omathra region. Raising his head unsteadily, he could just make out the skyline of Peravendath against the dimness of night-time illumination as it pierced the underside of the ceiling of eddying storm clouds. He was at the fortress-city's rear, going inland, just beyond the shore inside the island chain's most-populated limits...
The Mondraykile Hydro Plant.
The being called an "Arbiter" had swatted him aside like he was nothing more threatening than an irritating gnat and literally teleported him nearly two full nautical leagues away from where she'd confronted him.
Rising to a sitting position, Staurqe raised his arm and felt along the intercostal region of his side. His preservatory nanite repair swarm had already restitched and reinforced the severe wound that The Dragon had inflicted on him. He could sense that the med-system sub-surface molecular mending had overhauled and improved his body's tensile toughness, making him even more invulnerable than before.
He rose to his feet slowly, his optical system engaging the light-amplifying enhancement features that gave him night-vision, and he surveyed the area nearest the small impact crater that surrounded the ground where he'd materialized after Fianaxis had cast him away... At the Hydro Plant, he saw a squad of nine heavily-armed Saurotetramorph infantrymen and another group of seven ragtag Kadavereen mercenaries atop the buttress wall and the sluiceway's external work access-passage. A vintage compact flittership, fitted with rotating barrel long-range particle beam projectors, hovered over the plant's central power house and its vast turbine hangars, the buzzing skycraft's bright front-mounted spotlight beam sweeping the terrain around the structure. At the base of the open-air ramp leading down from the buttress wall, an armored, four-wheeled urban assault vehicle, a throwback to pre-Emperium era internal combustion technology, was parked, engine revving, manned by a trio of what looked to be unenhanced-human mercenary contractors, all dressed in outdated light-combat trauma-plate suits.
So far as he could tell, they were all completely unaware of Staurqe's presence.
He took a brief moment to scan the blustery sky away from the hydro plant, looking towards the east and to the shores of the Pnahrryian Sea and up past the towering twin statues marking the gates of the seaward entrance harbor into Peravendath. There. He could just make it out against the gloom of night. The Aerieakon, its fuselage twisted and bent, its hull torn open wide. It appeared that another aerial vessel, an even larger, broader craft, had hooked up with it and was towing the pirate airship, keeping it aloft as it was assaulted by winds from the cyclonic storm. He estimated the tethered skyships were just over twenty-three hundred chancks distant at an altitude of one hundred sixty stories.
Staurqe had unfinished business up there. No doubt Zhe'Kae-Chah, Captain Wyyng and what remained of her crew were still engaged in a desperately fierce life and death battle. Flying subsonic, he could cover that distance inside a handful of heartbeats. At full gravity-cancelling, atmosphere-ripping, streamslip-velocity, even fighting the storm's furious wind-resistance, he could reach the ships before a person could draw two deep breaths. But, for the moment, that could wait...
He turned his attention back to the Saurotetramorph assault squad securing the Hydro Plant. With a growing sense of alarm and an air of distaste, he spent a moment observing them as they skulked about and he came to the conclusion that these soldiers were not at the plant merely to isolate it and keep it from Peravendath's defenders, that they were there to sabotage it.
They were undoubtedly going to somehow poison the city's water supply. Water was Life on Teshiwahur. A mighty planet of vast land masses, there were a total of only three oceans on the world's surface, and even though two of which were twice as large as Earth's Pacific Ocean while the third ocean was nearly as large as the Atlantic, it wasn't enough. The Hegemonic Emperium's aging water desalination complexes, though gargantuan in size, were slowly falling into disrepair and could barely keep up with the demand for clean water needed by agriculture, industry and human personal use even during the best of times.
The last half dozen orbital solar heliars did not qualify as the "best of times". Many areas of the inland continental land masses were experiencing crippling droughts.
Emaris Staurqe was no saint, no errant paladin riding to the rescue of the weak and the innocent with flags flying and trumpets blaring, he held no aspirations towards heroism, but he did possess a personal code from which he did not deviate. He did not see the world in terms of ultimate Right and ultimate Wrong. To his mind, Reality – and human nature -- was much more convoluted and complicated than that. People and events were neither wholly black nor were they wholly white, they simply were what they were and that often resulted in the realization that the world's situational morality was stained a blurred and slurry gray. And no, he felt no special love or kinship with human beings. But the synthetic being once known as Kodespawn 77 was highly intolerant of mass homicide perpetrated against civilian non-combatants. No individual or group of individuals, no matter what their political or religious cause or crusade, whether in time of war or in the heat of mad passions, could be allowed to kill hundreds or even thousands of other people simply because it was tactically convenient. Covertly poisoning Peravendath's water supply was tantamount to slitting the throats of thousands of defenseless people while they slept and for no reason other than their presence on the field of battle was inconvenient. It would be a soulless act of mass murder. The Saurotetramorph nation could not be allowed to get away with that kind of cruel and torturously slow slaughter just because they felt cheated of prime real estate and mineral-based resources by clever mammalian primates.
If it was necessary to kill someone, then kill them cleanly, openly and honestly. Draw your blade and spill your enemy's blood with something resembling a sense of honor. Poison was a tool used by coward's, madmen and sadists.
Staurqe decided Rae'vynn Wyyng would, for the moment, have to handle things with Zhe'Kae-Chah as best she could. She'd have to. He was going to be busy. He needed to seize an opportunity to prevent wholesale homicide against the defenseless.
Then, when he was done, he'd return to the fury of battle-bred bloodletting against that giant lizard bastard with a twinkle in his enhanced artificial eye and a smile in his thundering synthetic heart.
And after that, he would hunt down and kill the alien devil calling itself an "Arbiter", that arrogant woman-thing named "Fianaxis", in as brutal and as painful a way as he could. She had definitely tried swatting aside the wrong damn gnat...
The supersonic fist of Vengeance-Itself, he levitated from the ground and shot through the wet night's air towards Mondraykile Hydro Plant.
* * *