The Withered Land, THE EMPIRE FALLS: HELL'S AVATAR

HELL'S AVATAR -- PART ELEVEN

A stray thought pierced the sea of turmoil that threatened to overwhelm his mind.

It is the Order of Things. This is going to hurt...

He'd left Annet Galjeshir's Hegemonic Governance District and the bloodshed he'd experienced there long behind as he'd joined with a Free Market Guildsman Troop traveling to Koombari City. The Free Market Guildsman troop consisted of a band of nomadic carpenters, carpet and tapestry weavers, odd-job mech-repairmen, and gene-med apothecarists. They were mostly displaced people who'd once plied their trades in the larger megatropolises of the Eastern North but, after the deleterious galvanic and electromagnetic effects of The Long Death on the major metropolitan power grids, they'd been forced to abandon their stationary business ventures in favor of a traveling circuit serving needy lower population locations edging the perimeter frontier of the Forever Plain. Many large urban center economies had undergone restructuring and decentralization due to the uncertainty caused by the failing state of public utilities.

The troop had greeted Draekesen with some reluctance but, after having recently had unpleasant and violent experiences with local thieves and bandits enroute to their last destination, the travelers decided having a Knight amongst them for even a short time was a benefit. For his part, the young Honorman kept to himself, realizing he'd only be with the troop for less than half an orbital solar rotation.

But he hated the quiet time. Draekesen's personal history was such that he was seldom nostalgic for events in his past and those few times when he was alone, isolated or drawn into a period of introversion made for emotional episodes with which he was thoroughly uncomfortable. One such episode haunted him more than most...

It was during the madness of the Sacred Mutagenesis Campaigns, several heliars past. He'd been a mere Infantry Lance-Corporal in the Homeworld Liasion Unit attached to the Offworld Crusade's Extraplanetary Expansionist Forces. He'd been at the Battle of The Descent at Kestalmarq-Alberras, only his third military combat excursion, when he'd encountered the horror of The Beautiful Ones. "The Beautiful Ones" were a species of bio-simulacra, basically engineered biological synthetic humanoid life forms, who became a renegade collective nation and inhabited the distant Rimworlds. They referred to themselves as Celestial Empyreans. At Kestalmarq-Alberras, amid the thundering noise of ionic pulse-blast artillery and the screeching of streaming particle beam cannon fire, there among the platoons of Emperium soldiers and squads of covert-operations mercenaries, under the acrid clouds of smoke and cinders, his team of grenadiers had been decimated and he'd been captured by the enemy. They, the Celestial Empyreans, had locked him and a few others within the cold and damp confines of a featureless stone chamber circumscribed by a laser-grid containment perimeter.

The Celestial Empyreans had been, on an individual basis, haughty, condescending and egocentric beings. As an army, they'd been ruthlessly clinical, unemotional and harsh, with unpredictable outbursts of animalistic, strangely unfocused rage.

They'd held him prisoner there for the duration of five climature-seasons, almost a full two heliars. Sehrenglum, Qeringloom, Pneosungloom, and Vahlierglum each passed and it was during the most brutal part of Xeshargloom that he was finally released, and that had been during the third phase of the Mutagenesis Campaigns' Great Armistice.

And when he was finally allowed to walk out from that meat-grinder of a prison containment camp, his flesh still bearing the livid scars of his treatment at the merciless hands of The Beautiful Ones, he was a changed man. He felt older, more taciturn, less patient, and was imbued with a ruthless streak he hadn't had before.

Spend a couple of dozen fortnights with hot knives sawing at your flesh, with barbed hooks being laced through your skin, be brought to the brink of death two or three times and then revived, and it would be a singularly rare individual who would not become colder and more hardened.

One of the Empyreans in particular haunted Draekesen's most bitter recollections and his darkest nightmares. The creature had interrogated and tortured the young soldier as if there existed a prior personal vendetta between the two of them. The creature had been an unusually sadistic alien named "Atu-ihma".

He didn't know why he had thought of the creature after all this time, but the alien's mathematically precision-sculpted and racially unspecific, characterless, bland good-looks suddenly came to the fore of his memory as he traveled. He, Atu'ihma, had been given the appearance of a child's doll crossed with the impossible physical presence of a mythological angel. Yet, conversely, the Empyrean had been somehow imbued with the all-too-human slumbering malice and menace of a sociopathic killer.

Dawn would break over the prison camp and the synthetic hybrid-man would come for him, escorted by a small contingent of servile sentry-bots.

Most times they led him to an open courtyard and its centrally-located concrete block into which had been set a metal eye-hook through which they would thread the chain to his wrist-manacles. Those days Atu'ihma would whip him, going at him with an electrified bullwhip called a "neural lash". Each time the metal coil of the mechanized whip struck his naked flesh, a charge of seventy thousand volts would set his body ablaze with excruciating torment.

Other times, they would lead him to a dimly-lit, damp and featureless room in a metal hut set a distance away from the main prisoner's barracks. Once there, they would strap him into a metal harness festooned with conductive wires and bundles of twisted cables. A semi-autonomous. multi-armed medibot, a medical services cyborg reprogrammed for military-based interrogations, rolled on its tank-tread base across the room to extend it claw-like hands and grab him while another, slimmer arm injected him with a sonic hyperdermic.

Atu'ihma would smile, an expression beyond its unhuman, alien capacity, and the pain would begin to grow, hot and jagged-edged, unfolding like a poisonous blossom imbedded in the loamy garden of his weakened flesh.

He could still hear the synthetic creature's sexless voice, neutered of any overtly male or female characteristics, so precise, so erudite, and so calm, where only the slightest hint of malice would occasionally creep through.

"Now it is your time for catechization. Now is the moment of your baptismal, blood and horror, flesh and lightning. This is not personal. This is simply how things must be. It is the Order of Things. The fury is loosed. This is going to hurt."

That would be when the Celestial Empyrean would reach out, its hand wrapped within a hooked and point-studded metal gauntlet, and place his hand on D'Spayr's exposed skin.

The Knight frowned and squeezed his eyes tightly shut as if to block out the unwanted mental imagery. He hoped the memory wasn't a precognizant harbinger of evils yet to come...

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