The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Thirty-Nine

***  There once had been a time when he'd been a Believer, when he had lived and breathed the letter of The Law, when he had proudly and gladly enforced the edicts of the World-Father in the service of the mighty Emperium. His beliefs had ultimately put him at odds with his few friends and with his family, especially with his scheming, status-seeking, duplicitous aunt, a diseased fat woman who'd been a scholar and a techno-alchemyst. Leaving the world he'd known, he'd become, for a while, an Apostolic Herald in the Techmarine Legion of the UltraCorps and he had worn the dark crimson and jade-green, multi-system exo-cyberarmor personally designed by His Imperialness Draggyn Han'Khainus-Galorketh, the Crusader Most-High Imperial. He had shared his ideology and his conviction with many others in his armored troop brigade and he had fought fiercely in military campaigns that had taken him far beyond the borders of the vast northwestern continent of Qundin, down past the planet's equator and into the dense and hellish jungles of the southern continents at the bottom of the world.

He had learned much in those days, much about duty and loyalty and fealty. He had learned that morality had precious little to do with politics and with war. It was all about Pragmatism. He had learned that the Strong and the Mighty did not so much protect the Meek and the Innocent than to instead keep them properly controlled, pacified and corralled. He learned he was a soldier and a crusader, but that he was also a jailer and an executioner...

And he'd learned that the World-Father was a liar.

That was when he had turned his back on the structured, tightly regimented world of the Emperium's UltraCorp Legions. He surrendered to the nonaligned, individualistic credo implicit in his savage and pitiless, barbarian bloodline. And if he lusted for It, whatever It was and wherever he found It, he was more than willing to kill for it. He left his military command and sought out and reconnected with his conniving, Machiavellian aunt. He'd then proceeded to carve out his own destiny among the Withered Lands through black-marketeering, information-gathering, double-dealing and intrigue, all aided by the strength of his sword-arm and the deadliness of his multi-chambered blaster pistol.

Soldier no more, he gathered an army of criminals and reprobates and murderers, and then became the match that would light fire to the world. He had become a Warlord.  ***

The delta-winged hopper-skiff was trembling and it had begun to list from side to side as it encountered swirling pockets of turbulence spawned by the roaring waterspout.

At an altitude of nearly a full aerom unit up, placing them far above the skyline of any human-built structures, at the highest altitudinal limits of the atmospheric troposphere, they were being buffeted by violent, water-laden winds. They were still over a heantir, the linear topographical common measurement of distance used in the region by aviators and mariners, from Peravendath's main island, but that placed them inside the city-district's sovereign air space. In Earth-Terran terms, a heantir was roughly equivalent to three and a half kilometers distance or just over two miles. Conditions for powered flight were very rough and visibility had dropped considerably below acceptable safety standards. The semi-monocoque construction of the airship's wedge-shaped fuselage slipped through the storm's eddying horizontal vortices maintaining a manageable level of stability even though the wide, swept-back bat-wings of its design were in danger of being ripped off it under the assault from cyclonic spin.

Inside the craft, in the elliptical bridge-command chamber in the forward space set behind the stubby, outer mustache-vanes, Mikaas Drem peered anxiously out the windshield and cockpit windows. Arvenall Dampiko grimly held onto the edges of his navigational console as his seat twisted and bucked on its squat accordion turret.