The Withered Land, The Empire Falls: ABYSSIUM

ABYSSIUM, Part Two

The chartreuse sky held streaks of parakeet green running through it, like visible rips in the atmosphere, just above highest peaks on the uneven horizon. As was usual in this environmental zone of the flatish, disc-shaped moon, a persistent, low-pitched aural thrumming followed the winding of the sweltering winds fanning this humid corner of the Oceanic Zone. The thrumming issued forth from the ground beneath them, from the rotating iron-nickel alloy core, a dodecahedron-shaped mass some 644 kilometers in circumference and surrounded by a liquid, molten lead. Above ground, the scent of moist rock and peppery wild grasses scented the air while the glare from the largest of the dual suns was filtered behind the looming bulk of the giant planet in space below.

Teshiwahur rolled like a spherical leviathan in the gloomy deepness beneath the underside of the moon.

Syngemma Krede drew in a breath of hot air through her clenched teeth and tossed an irritated glare over towards her friend and employer, Taran'Gaohnge, who was more commonly known among the outlaws and sell-swords of the region as "The Blind Watchman". They had been waiting for almost a quarter of a heliar for the arrival of a detachment of Protectorate Constables they'd requested half a fortnight ago from Regional Security Command out of Port Breqhamwurth, a dozen leagues far to the east. Syngemma, a cautious and experienced ex-Emperium Star Legion military officer, didn't like waiting and she liked it even less under circumstances where she was operating deep inside hostile Offworld territory. For his part, Taran'Gaohnge was more stoic and self-possessed, displaying superhuman patience as he stood in the shadows of a stone arch, leaning against the inside curve of the crumbling, heat-baked structure that housed the secure station-terminus for non-civilian visitors traveling the desert Hookara'ie Wadi outside rocky Tuwerbleek Atun on Pex'Insava's interior equatorial basin.

Taran'Gaohnge was referred to as "The Blind Watchman" by most members of Pex'Insava's paramilitary mercenary community because of his macabre affliction and strange service record. An outcast descendent of Teshiwahur's Cid'Ammar blood lineage, the Cid'Ammar being the oldest, wealthiest and most politically-influential social class, Taran'Gaohnge, a commissioned officer in the Emperium's Special Division Gunnery Liaison Company, had emigrated from the continent of Qundin's southeasern coastal territories, where the fabled sister cities of Veranthius and Dralhabbyrn straddled the stormy Bay of Schymediera. He'd left his sprawling ancestral estate after having killed one of his own relatives in a personal duel over familial culpability in an industrial disaster. That disaster had injured, disfigured and permanently maimed dozens of the loyal workers in his family's industrial chemical plants. Taran's relations had vigorously denied their responsibility in the calamity while simultaneously seeking to profit from it via the aid they supplied -- at a profitable premium -- from their own medical warehouses. The disillusioned Special Ops soldier had simply refused to let the matter lie and, after coming into bitter and violent conflict with his brothers and his older sister, had left Teshiwahur to seek his destiny elsewhere.

What Taran had not known was that the same chemical accident that had split his family asunder had also slowly damaged and transmuted his own genetic make up. The after-effects of the accident had gradually destroyed his vision and then physically mutated the lobe of his cerebral cortex that controlled his sense-awareness of Time. He became "clairaudiently cognitive", able to project his mind one hundred and eighty pulse beats into any predictive possible future, allowing him to avoid both physical and experiential pitfalls as a result of any action he took. That ability had very nearly driven him mad.

And he had known he would meet former extra-legal contract-enforcerSyngemma Krede, who herself was a fugitive from a pair of vengeful underworldcrime syndicates, before he'd bumped into her at the Spaceport Terminal.