Leagueheim

And so, departing the elysian meadows of Holy Terra, I needs must beg the reader's indulgence, for we are to sojourn to its polar opposite, the nadir to its zenith. Alas, no work depicting the perils of technology can be whole without some reference to blighted Leagueheim, lair of the godless Guilds and engine churning out the Shadow's works at a devilish pace.

Here the Guilds' overseers prance and caper like mocking imps, brandishing their Sceptres of Regency as a noble's jester waves his fool-stick. Here all that is sacred is profaned, and all that is profane is upheld and worshipped. Here technology is venerated, and nature the reviled abomination. Leagueheim is the seat of the Guilds' commerce, the capital of such government as they uphold, and the bazaar, or shall I say brothel?, where they hawk their iconoclastic wares. (That we are forced to share the Regency with such as they!!)

How to describe the unspeakable, to categorize utter blasphemy? The reader has no doubt heard tales of Urth's ancient "sin cities": dens of vice, depravity and moral turpitude, the ruin of countless ingenues. A few names from the ancient days, Gomora, Tartarys, Vaygas, Naw'leens, raise their heads like horned dragons from the pages of yore: molochs which, even millennia after their ruin, still cause a shudder to wrack the frame of the virtuous.

Now, if the reader can swallow his righteously outraged gorge by imagining all these cities and many more besides, all placed on the same tortured planet and extruding outward and upward and downward, so that the entire world's face is erased in a noxious cesspool of sin, and then multiply that picture by a quintillion sordid, lewd, salacious and otherwise pernicious acts, performed in basement dens, tower eyries, bridges, public works and everywhere in between, at all hours of the day or night, perhaps the reader might glean some inkling of the abomination that is Leagueheim.

The approaching traveler, scrutinizing the descent to Leagueheim from the viewing portal of his transport, might well imagine that he is approaching that celestial phenomenon the Charioteers describe as a "nebula"; for does not a miasmic cloud hover in the blackness before him? In truth, however, this foetor is not starborn, but is the mephitic union of innumerable smokes, fogs, smogs, gases, hazes, mists, stenches, vapors and other atmospheric violations; for Leagueheim is if nothing else a cyclopean cauldron wherein brews and festers the machinae of the Guilds.

But now the traveler prepares to disembark; and so he takes to the shuttle, and his craft detaches itself from the body of the star-swimming vessel and plummets into that seething effluvium, and through it, sparks flying from the pitted hull of the shuttle, and at last hovers over the world and city of Leagueheim.

Endless, endless, endless! Buildings, a maze, a jungle, a plateau, a canopy of buildings, spiring and stretching and arcing beneath and behind and above and sprawling unto the curve of the planet; burrowing into the groaning world's core; crazily towering in every direction unto the very horizon. Yea, if the atmosphere has been swallowed by the work of man, then the ground has been choked out of existence entirely. And even so there is little room for all the Guildsmen and their works, and so the buildings arc halfway to the Guilds' noxious substitute for clouds.

Everywhere the phosphorescent insignia of the Guilds blaze like the crazed cipherings of a mad god, and everywhere the stench of unchecked commerce wafts; for here, it is said, everything in the universe save the Eight Virtues can be purchased. At all times the air reverberates with the snap of a Muster's lash, the opiate-moan of an Analdyne prostitute, the whine of a vibrophilia engine, the wail of a vendor hawking klaj, the whirring of countless hovercraft skimming like minnows amid the gargantuan edifices, engaged on missions of trade; for, more than anything else, Leagueheim exists to buy and sell. He who descends to Leagueheim without mantises, claws or the like is as helpless as one who, ignorant of how to swim, decides to sport in the Madocian deeps.

Yea, Leagueheim is admittedly awesome, impossibly colossal, majestic, true, but then so, I am told, is a Void Kraken. I have no desire to measure the span of the ship-eater's tentacles firsthand, and I have even less inclination to view the Guilders' hive from anywhere but the pages of a distant book. I desire least of all to view its masters.

For amid Leagueheim's vertiginous eyries and pitchy corridors skulk and slither the dregs of the Guilds, the devils overseeing this hell: the Charioteers, navigators of the abyssal wastes and half-consumed with Shadow at their best; the brutes of the Muster, equally eager to haul a load or chain a slave or split a skull so long as the Firebirds are ready; the Scravers, whose tongues are as light as their souls are dark; the Engineers, who choose to defile even the Pancreator's most fundamental gift, their very bodies, through mechanical intercourse; and behind them all, the Reeves, so eclipsed by Shadow that even the vast profits of their endeavors cannot force a smile or a laugh to lighten their countenances.

The whole is led, if such a term may be applied to such a motley and cacophonous mob, by a supreme criminal known as the Guildmeister. This individual governs the dispensation of the Guild's Regency votes. Naturally, competition for the spot is rife among the Guilds; and so naturally, blackmail, extortion, assassination and every other form of treachery taint Leagueheim's "politics." I have heard it said that in her lifetime a sceptre-holding Matriarch, anointed to her spot through the Pancreator's grace and holding it until the Empyrean calls her home, will likely make the weary acquaintance of a dozen Guildmeisters, as one after the other falls victim to the selfsame betrayal that won them the office in the first place.

Aye, I say: Let the nobles finish their struggle; and every day I pray that the one who takes the throne prove friendly to Church and fearful of Pancreator, that Emperor and Patriarch may unite in a great crusade to excise the cancer that is Leagueheim from the universe.
