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

HELL'S AVATAR -- PART EIGHT

4. A GAUNTLET OF DEEPEST BLACK

Five soldiers, hardened, battle-worn men in tattered armor, walked the six story-high walls of the Duskhelm Priory on the southeastern perimeter of the ruins of Shi'draith-Hakaba. They were armed with sonic maces and laser-cutlasses. They were members of the Ashen Brood, a little known special unit of clerics and scholars trained as assassins, who protected the Duskhelm Priory. They were grim, lethal men who'd been cursed through the application of illegal gerontological genomic tech-enhancements, with lifespans four to six times that of normal Teshiwahurians. The Ashen Brood had walked the walls of the Priory for a dozen decades, sentinels against the incursion of the armies of the Emperium. A single, vast trapezoidal building, four-sided where two lateral sides are not parallel, but with the final pair of opposing base sides running parallel, and built around a wide central courtyard atop a flat mesa of unyielding granite-like stone, the Priory had a round tower built into the center of its southernmost wall. A pair of dull-colored flags atop cracked, wind-abraded triangular parapets at opposite corners of the Priory walls drooped from their poles, only occasionally fluttering in the late afternoon's lazy breezes. The flags were diamond-shaped expanses of threadbare cloth emblazoned with the design of a spiked coronet atop the surface of an escutcheon against a background silhouette of a large scarab-like insect. Under that design was a curled banner that read "Keth'samalar-Weejhen Wraull", a phrase written in pre-Emperium Teshiwahurian that meant "Kneel before the Wrath of the Faithful".

"Agents of The Warhound are still in chambers with the Council," one Ashen Brood guardsman said to another as their paths crossed atop the stony wall. The man shook his head as he spoke, indicating his dissatisfaction with that state of affairs.

"Of course they are," said the other, sneering, "There are still more lies to be told."

The men chuckled humorlessly at one another and winked as they passed each other. Without further conversation, they continued their solemn vigil and walked into the glare from the slowly setting suns above.

The situation to which they referred was a violent, ongoing territorial dispute between the local provincial warlord, a greed-driven brute of a man named Kaustille, who had once been a territorial Sheriff, and a caravan-leader from the ruling collective of the nomadic Freq'maneshii tribes, named Grazinh. Kaustille had been gifted with the caustic nickname of "The Warhound" by local politicians in the region. Normally, such affairs were not sufficiently important to require the involvement of the Magisterial Council of the Brood, but Kaustille had petitioned the Territorial Governor's office demanding the formal inclusion of the Emperium's Outposter Diplomatic Corps in the legal resolution of the dispute.

Because, obviously, on a world in a solar system that was bleeding away into alien Nothingness, essentially a dying cosmos, and where Time itself was a fractured and broken thing, the battle for control of land and merchandising rights by an untitled non-royal who had usurped most his power by right-of-arms was of undeniably paramount importance.

As ever, most the general populace had no true idea what was really going on in their world.

For the most part, the governing membership of the Ashen Brood did not much care about border disputes or land claims or crimes of trespass between differing peoples in the region. They were not policemen. And they did not act as an enforcement arm of the Emperium's military governance division. No, the Ashen Brood were an armed vigilante militia who had given themselves the task of protecting the territorial region from the unwanted incursion of invading extrahuman, non-human and mutant lifeforms. They were an apolitical collection of dangerous militant xenophobes... and as such, they were enemies of the Emperium's far-ranging Star Legion.