D'Spayr: A Knight in the Withered Land

D'Spayr: A Knight in the Withered Land, 5

FIVE

“You should have died with your men, but you didn’t. Instead you elected to live and dedicate your life to the Crusade”, he had said to the quivering, bruised and battered wreck of a man who knelt in the sand before him.

Qrystatos Fa’neel Mica Bluhd, all six feet seven inches and four hundred eighty armored pounds of him, had towered over the fallen soldier, a court-martialed killer named Tunc’dosh, a former captain of the guard for a fallen warlord in the lands to the northwest of the Forever Plain, and admonished the man in front of his squadron. They had all been standing in the shadow of the flying ship, the Pandemyon, which gently bucked and lolled in the twilight skies overhead when the day’s punishment proceedings had begun.

Tunc’dosh had been caught stealing the personal weaponry of a newly-captured recruit to Bishop Bluhd’s forces. The prisoner, who like all prisoners was actually a soldier-in-training (Bluhd did not believe in wasting resources), had decided to terrorize and victimize the new soldier. Understandably, the new man fought back, the weapons had been a gift from his tribal elder back before Bluhd’s forces had wiped out his tribe, but he had lost to Tunc’dosh.

Bluhd did not welcome thieves into his forces. He wanted his forces bloodthirsty and fierce, capable of astounding acts of atrocity, but he would not tolerate thieves. Armies ran on intimidation and discipline and where there was stealing between members of the same corp, there could be no discipline. If so, intimidation was all that remained… and fear was a fleeting method of control. Fear was too uncertain, it depended too much on maintaining a steady balance of power and those who ruled thusly had to make sure the status quo remained unchanged. Any thinking leader realized that to assume such things was completely unrealistic. Over time, fear did not work.

Mind control was much better. Creating a twisted patriarchal sub-society within the ranks of his army where aggressiveness and blind loyalty to the Crusade was rewarded by food, clothing, and personal advancement worked far better. And within that patriarchal sub-society, those who acted dishonorably, meaning contrary to the wishes of the dominant hierarchy, were punished, swiftly and severely.

Punishment was personal. That was Bluhd’s credo, a holdover from his time as an Emperium Inquisitor.

Tunc’dosh had sat at Bluhd’s feet after being bludgeoned by armored battering ram fists powered by dozens of tiny servo-motors. It hadn’t been much of a fight, more like a brutal one-sided demonstration of the armored battlesuit’s capabilities. The man, himself very large and bulky with layers of grizzled muscle, had sustained several broken bones and his face had become a raw mass of pain with one purpled eye swollen closed. Blood had drooled from out his battered mouth, past torn lips.

“This is an army”, Bluhd had said imperiously, “not some ragtag gang of jackals running across the countryside raping and plundering, cannibalizing one another, weaker against stronger. An army. An instrument of judgment and justice. A force for Order in a lawless land. You have shamed it with your actions.”

“An army of prisoners and slaves”, Tunc’dosh had countered rebelliously. “We serve because we must, NOT because we believe in your so-called ‘crusade’.” He’d said nothing more than that.

Bluhd killed him without remorse, without further hesitation. He had not intended to originally. He’d only intended to punish the man, but his insubordination and heresy had earned him a violent death.

Bluhd had struck Tunc’dosh once, in the red ruined center of his beaten face, with all the power the armored battlesuit could summon.

The man’s head had exploded like a melon struck by a cannonball.