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

HELL'S AVATAR -- PART TWENTY-ONE

Forynnuhr and Harqwenne had left Abbot-Commander Qazeem Nei'Wrenh and his Honor Guard behind them, suspended in mid-air, paralyzed, insensate and entranced, floating weightlessly. The Ashen Brood soldier-monks hovered high above the cool floor of the Bleeding Lodge enwrapped within an ever-shifting cocoon of liquid, black-violet light.

"Madman, what have you DONE?" Harqwenne had bellowed at the Pilgrim after the Upworld mage had killed the captive Wenkrang war-chief, Mymkkari.

"Oh please, stop being so dramatic."

The Scribe pointed to the group of men floating in the air in an envelope of light.

"What do you intend to do with them?" he asked.

"So long as they do not constitute a threat, nothing," Forynnuhr answered. "Let Fate or Fortune or whatever it is you people believe in determine their outcome."

"They can't stay that way, trapped between awareness and mindless coma, suspended between Life and Death..."

The Pilgrim fixed Harqwenne with a hard, unpleasant stare, the façade of dispassionate urbanity momentarily abandoned as the dark malice and villainous corruption behind the Upworlder's eyes was allowed momentary ascendency.

"Yes, actually they can stay that way," Forynnuhr said. He then turned away and resumed his way out from the Bleeding Lodge and down the external corridor.

"They'll die."

"Of course, they will. It's what humans do best," the Pilgrim growled.

Stumbling as he followed the man, Harqwenne brought both his fists high into the air, emphasizing his shock and horror as he ranted at Forynnuhr.

"Do you have no concept of honor whatsoever? You lie and you kill without rhyme or reason, with no thought of the consequences. The Guild of Black Gauntlets did not conscript you to do such things and they certainly did not give you authority to betray any treaties they had with the Ashen Brood! How do you think they are going to react to this? You've killed us, you murderous fool, you've killed us!"

"Nonsense. You know, they call this place a 'necropolis', but, strictly speaking, it was never that. Shi'draih-Hakaba was always a nerve-center for a larger creation, a planetary creation that never rested, never slept, never doubted its purpose. Shi'draih-Hakaba was and is far too active and busy, over-stuffed with arcane data of all varieties. The place is almost alive. There are so many active mysteries at work in this city. For instance, did you know that the Duskhelm Priory was once, long ago, a top secret technical facility housing the core of a planetary computer network?" Forynnuhr said in a pre-occupied, distracted way, ignoring his traveling companion's feverish distress.

"I think you mentioned this in passing once before...," Harqwenne stuttered.

"Etherfrost Stormfallen," Forynnuhr said cryptically as he led the Scribe down a narrow, dimly-lit hallway running perpendicular to the main traffic artery leaving the rear of the Bleeding Lodge.

"And what is that and why is it even remotely important now?" The Scribe demanded.

"Etherfrost Stormfallen is inscribed on the paper within that parcel you brought me. It's both an acrostic and an acronym, a verbal reasoning shortcut describing an algorithmic logic insertion into a source-command for an A.I., an artificial intelligence. It is behavioral-based, heuristic coding for subsumption architecture. The variable program is defined as 'ETFRST-STRM-FLN', where the first collection of letters describes the type of command-algorithm it is, the central set of letters tells you where it is to be inserted, and the last set provides the A.I. authorized permission to rewrite and recompile the logic script and then activate and re-run the algorithm using the new parameters. It sounds silly, but it's really quite elegant," the Pilgrim said.