The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Three

Xar'gueyeks, armed and angry, and there looked to be at least nine of them, wearing tanned animal skins under woven-alloy trauma armor and jewelry made from the bleached bones of dead things. The weapons they brandished were ugly, inelegant hatchets and cutlasses, things made more for brutalization and mutilation than they were for organized warfare --- the weapons of barbarians. Their weapons marked them as a gang of sadistic, warmongering Blood-Haunters.

Damn.

The southwestern wall of the metropolitan sprawl known as "The City", beyond which a localized rogue ion-wave perpetually raged, had been breached during the earliest hours of the soggy, leaden new day after a Q'rim-Ox tractor, a cybernetic mesh of bulky elephantine animal and diesel-fueled heavy-load crawler, had run amok. The huge machine's driver had unexpectedly died from ill health. Still running its pre-programmed excavation and repair tasks, the wide-tracked, front-bladed cyborg-mechanism plowed unstoppably through the external perimeter of the barrier for the fortress city, ripping a breach wide enough to accommodate a herd of shaggy bruffaloon cattle to stampede through.

An assemblage of Fire Suppression & Rescue Constables around their Tactical Extinguisher Dispatch vehicle and a Mobile Triage Medical Unit attended to the wounded and the maimed.

Outside The City, the Xar'queyeks, a militaristic band of tribal mercenaries composed of outlaw bounty-hunters, sell-swords and weapons-fetishists, had gathered to offer their services to local criminal syndicates and unethical failed state bureaucrats. They had camped inside small, single-person portable yurt-like structures skinned with tri-sheathed, woven aluminum-copper mesh to protect them from the ion wave surges. Since the dissolution and collapse of the Emperium's many territorial governments across the continent, following the appearance of The Wound in Teshiwahur's solar system, violent lawlessness had created strange subcultures that capitalized on the misfortunes of crumbling towns and kingdoms. Some of the motley assemblage of Xar'gueyeks were mutants from the Yur'seyn'Ahktar bloodline, the Withered Land's most discriminated upon subculture, and they had become Blood-Haunters, cannibalistic scavengers, eaters of carrion. They swarmed through the shattered section of the containment wall like hungry locusts, eager to plunder the nearby merchant warehouses residing in the southwest end.

This was where warlord Kolag Y'phree's Public Safety Crisis and Enforcement Brigade had hurriedly dispatched The City's latest deputized law official, the knight named D'Spayr, to respond to breach and endangerment alarms. D'Spayr, still new to the confusing, multi-districted, labyrinthian layout of The City, had arrived on the scene with a pair of municipal police deputies named Oerdyke and Murshipaz, both of whom had once been Pelagic Corp Special Tasks Militiamen when they'd been conscripted into the Emperium's Unified Combatant Defense Command.

D'Spayr hadn't wanted to stay within the confines of The City, he hadn't thought the place even remotely safe, and he hadn't wanted to be wrangled into Kolag Y'phree's employ, having, as a Knight, a natural mistrust of warlords and their power-mongering intentions. As a former Outlands Marshal in service to the Council of Free Territories, the hill country swordsman once known by the birth name of Draekasen Se'nurqille Predayas frae'Bluhd, distrusted any single individual who possessed both military and civil control over a populated area due to the presence of armed forces loyal only to them. That situation was, by definition, oppressive and a benevolent dictator was still, nonetheless, a dictator. Even as corrupt and intolerably undemocratic as the vast central, governmental authority of the Emperium had proven to be, it was still better than being vulnerable to the unrestrained tyrannical whims of a bandit-lord.

And to D'Spayr, that ultimately was what Kolag Y'phree was: a bandit-lord.

Moreover, the Knight had certainly had not wanted to have been deputized into a police force full of untrustworthy and corrupt thugs passing themselves off as public servants, but he had promised the Sorcerer-Princess Nygeia, his friend and comrade Lumynn, and Adam Wilder, the Traveler in Red, that he would reconsider his nomadic ways and stay a while with them as their comrade-at-arms, helping to restore order to the crumbling metropolis. It was a promise he knew he should not have made.