The First Reapers were not men of the sword. They were of the sickle and scythe. The fields they toiled in were not those of conflict. They were of stalk and grain. The change came over those humble farmers on the day the ylfs emerged from the untamed northwoods with their bows drawn and bloody intent in their moonsick eyes. The sylvan folk had good reason to hate. Their boreal wilds had been threatened by the encroaching settlements of mankind. Tree after tree fell as the Nation cleared away the hallowed and ancient forests to make way for endless cultivation and consumption. The human settlers repurposed those razed deadenings into farmland and built houses and barns from the timber. In the eyes of the ylfs the menfolk might as well have constructed homes from the wild ones’ own flesh and bone.

Of course the frontier people of the Nation did not submit. They poured sweat into that land. Birthed children there. Buried their parents there. It was their home. The spirits of those simple but strong agrarians shifted like the winds of a woeful storm. They made weapons of their tools and stood against the feral invaders with scythe and pitchfork and sickle and saw. A harvest was made of both sides but in the end the humans prevailed. The surviving ylfs were forced to retreat and claim a new sanctuary deeper in the wickeds where they could plot their dark retributions. For many years the crops of those fields would grow from soil enriched by the blood of the fallen.

Legends of the farmers who stood their ground against the woodfolk came to be widely known across the Nation. Their bravery and prowess captured the hearts and spirits of their fellow countrymen. And so it was no surprise when, many seasons later, the order was pronounced to assemble units of elite soldiers within their modernized army for the blackest of purposes, those responsible chose to honor those farmers-turned-fighters in the naming. These commandos were called Reapers.

Team 9 had been the first and only when the military forced the loose northern militia called the Reapers into its ranks after much bloodshed and repurposed them into an official strike force that little resembled their forebears. They were given the number ‘9’ to trick the enemy into believing the threat the Reapers posed was in fact ninefold. But when the Nation’s conflicts escalated and spread, the Triad decided to expand and make their enemies’ fears real. Thus Teams 1 through 8 were born. But Team 9 always had a reputation beyond the others. Those who achieved its ranks prided themselves on their bond and became that bond. They had each made sacrifices in blood that ran deeper than any inherited link. Their love for one another had been hard-earned and was stronger than death. There was no higher or more glorious an honor than to die a member of Team 9.

That unit’s current leader Castle was in many ways the man Halo would have become had Team 3’s former leader not trailed down his own strange and unexpected path. Castle spoke to his men often and from the heart. They knew him better than they knew any other soul, even their own fathers and mothers and brothers and lovers. Castle spoke aloud all his fears and his regrets and sorrows and those were myriad. His followers found themselves at odds with their own instincts to keep such things stifled within. Soon they all opened up, one by one. Though many nights they shared jokes and tall tales as did many another Reaper company, these men then went deeper. They communed through the night together. Said mantras together. Swore oaths to one another. Practiced rituals of bonding they had learned from those they killed. Rakshasa and ylf and even sandman. Each race has its own methods of tapping within. The confessions gushed like mortal wounds. The members admitted to murders and cheatings and the darkest desires in their hearts. They squeezed botflies out from under the skin on their comrades’ backs. They began to eat their dead.

Existence was harder earned in the vast and harsh wastes in which Team 9 operated. Effectively this was the truer world, Castle came to understand. The verdant lands of the Nation were a rare oasis, an anomaly, when set against the greater wildernesses beyond. The overwhelming reality, the truer norm, was this grinding hell of hardened shells and serrated pincers and piercing horns and deadly venoms. Life defined itself by death and fornication and little else. Eat or be eaten. Fuck or be fucked. Resources were scarce in these lands and the species hosted by the dying wilds had to fight and scrape more earnestly to have their place. Castle respected the brutal forms of life found in the wastes. The minds of animals were not clouded like those of men. Uncluttered with things like guilt and remorse and honor. The natural world acted on raw impulse, a thing mankind had gotten away from. Castle wanted it back.

He had once been a true patriot, a believer in the Nation. A defender of humanity and law. He had to get away from society to learn what it really was: a great and terrible lie. Civilization was a diseased and bloated corpse, drowning in fear and compromise. Fat with weakness and avarice. The security of its citizens and leaders purchased with the blood of others—men like him and his brother Reapers. Out in these voidlands they molted their old skins and found their true selves. Made gods of themselves. A pantheon of assassin lords lost to the outer madness.

He’d made enemies in the brass in his previous work reporting on failures in the field. In that role he’d exposed embarrassments. Ruffled the feathers of many a proud bird. Ended careers as ruthlessly as he’d ended so many lives in his long service as an intelligence officer embedded within the ranks. His missions became more and more sensitive in nature. Dark as the eyes of a waster. When Castle concluded he was a Reaper in everything but name he asked for entry into that esteemed unit. They turned him away. Told him he was too old in both body and mind. Castle went to his father and grandfather who had themselves served long careers in the forces. The three generations conspired. Called favors. Made ultimatums. Finally the brass acquiesced. Castle was allowed in.

His instructors were ordered to give him particularly cruel attentions. Each Hell Night was more fitting of that infernal name than the last. Castle suspected many of his peers resorted to elixirs or even sorcery to carry on. But he used only him. Took nothing within but fuel and pain. He had control of one life, his own. And so he would rule it. Imagined himself as a god. A divine weapon of muscle and bone. Threw himself against life’s hardest wall and bloodied himself on its stones. Castle did not fear failure in the eyes of other men. Nor his dying grandsire, nor the one between. He was driven by only himself. After long days of training many of the other men groaned about their ordeals and massaged their aching frames in their beds. Not Castle. He only pushed himself harder. Worked his muscles for hours on end until there were pools of sweat and vomit on the earth. While his peers played cards and blew off steam with pussy or dogweed in the small moments of peace afforded them, Castle instead meditated and practiced martial disciplines. Sought the gap between thought and action. To live in that space always and become its master. He needed no one to teach him this. He simply knew it.

Only three men in his program made it to the end. Castle had been a bastard to his teammates, pushed them to the edge. Was single-handedly responsible for driving many wishful Reapers out with bloodied face and eternal scars of shame on their palms. Castle saw this as his duty. That he did the Nation, the Reapers, and humankind itself a favor by ensuring only the best and very best earn their daggers. Castle was among the oldest Reapers to ever graduate and soon was given his own hand-picked team to lead and they were secretly sent across the map to the furthest reaches, the very tip of the Nation’s spear, so fine it goes unseen.

Castle’s men followed him to their deaths. He offered up his own life to his brothers without fail as well—but as a true Reaper he had nine lives all told to shed and still had some to spare. Castle knew what truly drove the souls and desires of people when the stakes were truly dire. Once a man murdered he was a murderer. Make him kill for you and he is yours. Some soldiers seek meaning in the bloodshed. A compass, a cause to justify it all. Easily given by any voice claimant of truth or power. Castle promised both. He learned more lessons in the crucible of Reaper action than in an entire career of common soldiering. He formed his own laws. Concluded his own axioms. Made acolytes of his men and worshippers of the locals. He was god to them. Still, he was troubled. Didn’t know whether he’d lost his mind Out There or found it.

“Why do gobs stink?” Thirteen went on filing the edge of his black knife for the coming bloodletting as he waited for a reply from his comrades. The members of Team 3 were gathered around a campfire after a day of grueling travel. They traded words as they dried their socks and cleaned their gear and massaged their sore bodies.

Jasha bit. “Don’t know, brother.” The healed-over burn scars on the sniper’s face had the look of an aged map in the firelight. A mock topography of these very deathlands they traversed. “How ‘bout you tell us.”

Thirteen licked his lips. “So the blind can hate ‘em, too!”

The men laughed. The reforged party of Reapers had gone into the near wastes tasked with multiple objectives. The first was to learn what they could about the mysterious roads being constructed by the hobgoblins in those vast stretches. Their other crucial charge was to gather intel on their missing men. Foremost in their thoughts were Halo, their former leader, and Tusk, the ranger who was perhaps Team 3’s true heart for many years. Their absence was deeply felt. Other Reapers who had gone missing included instructors Risper and Adamore. All lifelong brothers-in-arms. Beloved by their teammates and students and their families back home. Those men had all vanished in the chaotic events surrounding the Battle of Fort Nothing. Tusk and Risper were assumed to have been captured by the sandmen while on patrol. They could be anywhere in these wastes, alive or dead. Halo had deserted his infirmary bed in the middle of the night along with that cursed hobgoblin sword. His teammates suspected the dark magics locked within that unholy artifact had compelled the decorated officer to abandon his Reaper brothers. Dire times… which these men often diffused with dark humor.

“What do you call a hobgoblin priest?” Jasha posed.

“Holy shit,” the others answered in unison.

“Old one, old timer,” Blacwin said. The freshly coronated Reaper was well aware of the irony in his words. The ylfblood in Blacwin’s veins greatly expanded his lifespan and so he was truly the eldest in the entire party by many years. Longer in the tooth than Jasha and even seasoned Nail. But that was a secret known only to Blacwin. He had grown much closer to these men in the course of this tour, his first as a True Reaper—but the half-ylf knew he would never dare share the truth of his heritage with them no matter how strong their bond. Ylfs were viewed with sheer antipathy by humankind and that was to include many of his new brothers he camped with this night. Such hatreds often ran deep and impenetrable. This Blacwin knew firsthand. He remembered well the public lynchings of taints his old master had forced him to witness as they drifted from town to town decades ago. Man was no friend of ylf, Grendyll had warned.

As if to confirm this reality Thirteen unsheathed a new knee-slapper on the company: “What do you call a dozen dead ylfs in the back of a wagon?” The Reaper touched his thumb to the freshly honed edge of his blade. “A good day’s hunting!”

“Or a good start,” said Riddle, the rune man from Toloy who had replaced Jinx for this operation. “That’s how I always heard it.”

Blacwin forced a smile but winced within. Now it was the ylfish race that would again become the butt of his teammates’ ridicule. A familiar and frustrating routine. They were out here fighting sandmen, not sylvans. But humans had a particularly hostile and enduring view of ylfkind due to the decades of cycling conflict in the northern frontiers and their ever-clashing cultures and beliefs. Thirteen in particular had a fierce animosity for the woodfolk. He spent his youth in a town that had frequently suffered costly raids from the so-called ferals. Claimed his Reaper name was inspired by the killing of his first ylf at the formative age of so many years.

“How do you keep ylfs out of the backyard?” said their new man Vulture in his throaty rasp. “Crucify one out front!” This commando was ragged as a scarecrow and meaner than a snakefight. Sinewy, head shaved clean. Sometimes spoke to himself. Or someone else unseen. With Tusk captured by the hobgoblins and Shroomer remaining behind to deal with the deluge of wounded at Fort Stowerling, this new member rounded out the team’s roster. Vulture was capable in many roles to include animalist and medic and assassin and joker. His former Reaper teammates had all perished in these very wastes at the hands of the Blind Prophet’s holy fighters. He had been Team 2’s lone survivor, forced to independently contend with the sandmen and the extreme weather and the foul creatures native to this place for weeks on his own wit and grit. Few had the store of knowledge possessed by Vulture about the manner of life that reckoned this hellscape habitable. The ranger had already twice saved Reaper lives on this mission, once by negating a pack of vampiric reptiles that hunted in concert like soundless wolves. These beasts could have easily killed the commandos in their sleep had Vulture not first identified their tracks and leavings. The Reapers found the lizards’ filthy nest-hole and exterminated the monsters and made meals of their tough flesh and kept their skins for the fashioning of leathers. The second notable time Vulture had been of crucial service on this outing was when Riddle was kissed on the wrist by a venomous dune spider. The ranger was able to walk the rune man off death’s ledge thanks to his pharmacopoeia of antivenoms. Without the ranger’s quick help Riddle would have surely been gone in mere breaths.

“How d’ya stop a taint from drownin’?” This one came from Nail and by ‘taint’ he meant Blacwin’s kind. Half man and half ylf. With Halo missing and his own eyes failing, the ex-sniper had been appointed Team 3’s new leader. Halo had been known to often speak with his troops to try and keep their scales balanced and their souls strong. Nail was the other kind of man. He rarely uttered a word at camp except for the purposes of their mission. He led in silence. Preferred his team be a quiet machine. And so it came as a surprise to the others when Nail chimed in now with his own black riddle. He put his hands behind his head and closed his eyes and gave dramatic pause before delivering the finish: “Take your boot off the back of his head.”

Chuckles all around. Nail’s eye opened and landed on Blacwin. The half-ylf’s heart sunk yet further. Did the old hawk suspect something? The stern deadeye did not speak at all without some purpose. Like his ‘coffin nails,’ every word was squarely aimed before Nail pulled the trigger. Perhaps his jokes too had reptilian agendas. And he’d even now changed the subject from ylf to taint in disarming specificity.

Blacwin’s mind raced to think of a joke to better fit in. He tried to remember one his bunkmate Forthrup had told him about ylfs but the words now escaped him. Nail’s eyes were back on the fire now. The moment had passed. The leader had already spoken. A fitting end to the banter. Better not to drag it on. Blacwin’s fingers went back to restitching a failing hem on his leather uniform and his mind returned to Nail’s suspicions. The grizzled leader had made sly comments in the past about Blacwin’s extraordinary senses and lightness of sleeping. What was it Nail had called Blacwin when he’d last spotted something in a darkness no man’s eyes should have been able to penetrate? Ah yes, now he remembered. The word Nail had used to describe him was ‘inhuman.’

A pair of travelers came upon a stream. Stopped to let their horses take water and took the opportunity for rest themselves. The merchants lounged on the grass on its banks and puffed their pipes and chatted about bad happenings. The men were fleeing the escalating tensions in the region with all they had on their backs and saddles. The war was spilling onto their doorstep and if they did not escape now they might never do so. The duo decided they would be safer behind Camshire’s high walls and if that city was already too crowded with refugees, as they had recently heard, they would go north instead. “Better ylfs than gobs,” said one as he picked up his lute and began to play.

The horses grew restless. Neighed and backed away from the treeline. A cacophony of beastly calls issued from the dim recesses of the woods. A low and restless racket of chirps and moans and growls. The babel drew closer to the forest’s edge. Glimpses of animal forms between the parting leaves, bristling hides and festering fangs and wicked talons and predatory eyes. A host of feral horrors. The companions were frozen by the visitation, paralyzed with terror. A mutilated human hand appeared along with the mangy paw of a furred beast and together they parted the branches.

“Unholy stars,” said the musician in a shocked whisper at the apparition that emerged from the thickets. There stood a sight that their eyes took in but their brains refused to accept. It was a hulking agglomeration of bird and beast and reptile and man. A product of imagination gone helter-skelter. Beyond the horrid aspects of the thing that were clearly stolen from the corpses of men, the merchants saw all manner of fauna from the wilderness in the golem’s composition. Bird and beast and reptile and creatures unknown. The companions froze at the sight of the abomination. Made no move to draw the swords at their hips or stop their horses from fleeing down the road and away from this unnatural threat. The men simply marveled at the grisly construct before them, the impossible arrangement of dead things given unlife covered in mad runery.

“Yourth lute,” the golem said. “I wanth to havth it.”

The troubadour silently complied and set the stringed instrument down on the grass. The men backed away. They had of course heard tales of necromancy and the terrors it could create. Knew of rotters and runes. They understood it best to not fight and let the monstrosity have the thing. Perhaps if they cooperated the monster would allow them to keep their most precious possessions—their lives. The golem picked up the lute and retreated back into the thick brush. The travelers waited some time to be sure it was gone before they set out to find the horses. Thankful to still have their lives and, further, an unbelievable tale for the taverns even if it all did come at the cost of one fine lute.

A cold morning light bled across Camshire’s jigsaw rooftops and chimneys. Newsmen barked from the street corners with printed reams in their arms as they sang headlines of war on the frontier and unrest at home. Trees were planted on the sidewalks, fountains splashed, the speech was refined. This was a place of judges and advocates and senators and generals and confidence men of the highest caliber. Carts and beasts hauled goods from the tanneries and rustworks to be distributed among the bickering merchants who readied their stalls for the coming day. The season was wet and so the Diluvian guards at the gates ordered all creatures put to such burdensome purpose washed of their mud before entering that high district.

Servants and housekeepers worked to clear the alleys and avenues and windows and doorways of the webs that had been woven by spindle-rats over the course of the dripping night. The vermin themselves had by that early hour already claimed and cocooned and ferried their prey deep into the stinking reaches beneath Camshire’s cobblestones where they could gorge undisturbed by the stirring metropolis. A Purist street preacher lent his voice to the babble until a throng of Diluvian shieldsmen scooped him up and dragged him to a ward where his proclamations would be better tolerated—after perhaps a bout of rehabilitation at their bronzed knuckles in some tucked-away cell. Traders traded. Children played. Bureaucrats conspired. The city hummed and groaned.

The anarch pushed through all this bustle and walked into the door of a crowded café. His ears were met with a din of competing chatter and clinking ware. The embroiled aromas of coffee and baked pastries and perfumes tinctured the atmosphere. Downtowners crammed the establishment. The eatery had seen praise from Camshire’s prophetic tastemakers and so business was brisk. The bakehouse was near the Julian Wall and thus rife with aristocrats and officers alike in their fulsome silks and feathered hats and gilt scabbards. These men commuted daily from homes in the surrounding neighborhoods to the fortified complex to do their work for the Nation and its people and above all themselves. The anarch was no such man as those favored sons. A stranger to this ward. His compatriots kept to haunts far from these lanterned throughways, away from the bridges and minarets and canals of Camshire’s richer districts. The revolutionaries were forced to lurk beneath the noses of the elite in secret places, dark smoky rooms of forbidden song and unwashed beasts and men. The anarch did not come to this far destination to taste sweet delicacies or to conduct mundane business. He came to spill blood. He came to burn.

Before venturing out prior to dawn, the insurrectionist had removed the metal from his piercings and covered his runic tattoos in a sleeved and hooded robe like those worn by the scholars and dignitaries whom he now moved among. The attire had been peeled from the back of one such statesman as he lay dying in the street, his blood mingling with the mud, struck down by the anarch and his fellow conspirators during the noble’s clandestine outing to a ghetto sinhouse. The disguise would not serve the anarch well if he were to fall to any real scrutiny and so he was prepared to act quickly if trouble came. It did not. The crowd was busy with itself and gave no attention to the thin pale man who walked the throng. He came to the center of the room and surveyed those whom he would soon unmake and was pleased at the looking. Soon he would be a martyr. History would know his discontent. His gaunt breast surged with power, a feeling he’d never known until that moment. Today he would steal from his enemies their most precious thing. He would be their god. A reaper of souls.

He drew a blade from his waist and pulled his robe open to reveal a chest like a bird’s, hollow and frail. Etched into his pallid skin was a spiraling and intricate network of tangled scarifications. This action caught the notice of only a few and there was no time for them to do much more than register the oddness of it. One silver-haired officer gasped and rose and stretched out his arm and even gained purchase of the anarch’s sleeve but it was by then too late. The rebel mage put his blade to the unfinished rune carved into his own flesh and etched the final vector that would complete its solution. In this fatal act he triggered the awesome kinetic force locked within that intricate geometry and unleashed a spectacular and irreversible doom.

A wall collapsed as sorcerous shockwaves lashed through the place. The anarch himself was instantly torn to ragged pieces, bereft of his consciousness by the time his singed and bloodied skull ricocheted off the flaming rafters and plummeted back to the cratered floor. The awful blast splintered and flipped tables and flung the patrons outward, slamming them broken against the scorched stone walls. All took to burning. The arcane explosion shattered windows and made eardrums bleed and left the streets outside smacked with gore. Many of those who survived the blast were brutally rid of their limbs and senses. People panicked, animals stampeded. Dozens were crushed under boot and hoof. Survivors wandered in the dusty aftermath, tattered and soiled and confused to be alive.

Onward the boneframed wagons rolled, ever deeper into the creeping wastes. Time lost its meaning to Tusk but for the rhythmic complaints from the procession’s loping wheels and the occasional steady report of a flagellant’s cane. The cruel sandmen threw rocks and cacti and rotted things into the caged vessel that held the animalist and his comrade Risper. The wasters afforded their captives no blankets through the long frigid nights. The men were exposed naked to the sky when the sun reached its scorching zenith so that they could cook and bask in the glory of the zealots’ cyclopean and radioactive god. Rare sparkling oases, green and inviting, sometimes punctuated the journey. The hobgoblins only regarded such places as evil islands of temptation cursed with the twin wrongs of comfort and abundance and thus gave them no pause or regard. From his cage Tusk masked the dismay he felt as he watched those emerald clutches fade into the shrouds of dust that smeared the retreating horizon. He tried to shut out the thoughts of how the water that fed those lush mineral springs would taste on his tongue and feel as it splashed into his parched mouth and blossomed in his droughty breast. Struggle as he might, the Reaper failed to banish away the intruding visions of swimming in a lake clear as crystal and listening to fronds flapping in the warm winds like the sails of ships as he ate of manna plucked from the palms.

Instead of such choice fare the captive Reapers had been fed stuff gathered and scraped from the desert floor by their sunsick keepers. Tusk had no guess as to the origins of many of the things he took into his gut on that baleful journey and much of it did not stay in his belly for long. The men were given just enough water to cling onto wretched life. They suffered frequent blackouts from the sun’s dehydrating barrage. What little piss trickled from Tusk’s pecker was the color of purest yellow gold and then soon came flecks of red.

Bereft of locomotion by his captors, Risper was of abysmal spirit. This formerly virile man, once a swordsman and dancer and lover, now this. He had made it as far as solving his own cage’s lock with a bonepick lifted from the hair of one of his tormentors before being caught and dealt with in severe fashion, every ligament and tendon in his body surgically severed by the monsters. His wounds were then crudely sutured and dressed and he was thrown into this crippled wagon. Tusk learned that he’d avoided the same fate only because he had not also attempted escape from his foul coop. Risper began the subsequent journey in quiet melancholy with his tongue claimed by yet another kind of paralysis, that of despair—but then as time rode on the prostrated man grew irritable and bitter and, to Tusk’s chagrin, far more verbose. After hours upon hours of moaning and cursing Risper’s voice finally grew dry and weak and eventually Tusk knew peace again if only for a while.

After some days of it Risper asked Tusk to kill him. Of course the animalist refused and instead plucked and swatted pests from his fellow Reaper’s body to help alleviate his suffering. The poor man was covered in bites. Tusk knew formulas of beast sweats and musks that could ward off the nuisances but he had no access to such remedies from this cage and in these strange environs where the life was so alien and sparse. He did his best to preserve the dressings on his comrade’s wounds but feared infections would soon take root.

“Don’t bother,” Risper said. “Let the pests at me. I am numb to them. Or do the right thing and just kill me as I asked.” On this last word his throat again seized and he retched and coughed violently.

“And how would I?” Tusk picked up one of the many rocks that had been cast at him by the sandmen. “With this?” He tossed the stone from the cage.

“Put your hand over my mouth,” Risper said hoarsely, speaking to Tusk like he would a child. “And pinch my nose, and I’ll be ferried to the stars before you know it. Worry not, your scales will not tip. It would be an act of mercy.”

“I need you to stay alive,” replied Tusk. “If not for you, for me.”

“I’m touched that you find me such pleasant company,” said Risper as he hacked dry phlegm. “But this is my choice to make, brother.”

“Not if it is my hand that must carry out the deed,” said Tusk.

Risper’s eyes took on a new level of desperation. “I outrank you, Reaper! Give me sweet death! I order it!”

Tusk shooed with futility at the business of flies. “You may have been robbed of your limbs, man… but you still have your mind. Are you not still a teacher?”

“And what would you have me teach?” asked Risper. “How to swing a sword?” He spit.

Tusk looked ahead at the hobgoblin zealots that rode on the spines of their bactrian steeds, their thighs worn raw and black with blood and their toothy spears pointing sunward. Their leader, the one wearing a robe stitched of human faces whom Risper had overheard the others call Tecneli, rubbed sand into his own inflamed eyes and uttered a jangled prayer.

“Teach me,” said Tusk, “how to better speak their tongue.”

And so Risper did. Tusk’s more advanced instruction in the hobgoblins’ language started much the same way Risper’s own had commenced decades before—with crude jokes and curses and folktales translated from the human lexicon. The captive Reapers even shared precious and fleeting moments of mirth in their exchanges, though they were forced to stifle their laughs lest their keepers take notice. Again, humor helped desperate men through the most desperate of times. Tusk was surprised at the number of cognates between the human and goblin tongues, as if they shared some common and distant root. He’d observed similar dynamics in the animal kingdom. Fauna, too, appeared to share distant and common ancestors that broke off and diversified, conforming to the new environs and climates in which they found themselves.

The comrades traded all the knowledge they knew, passing the countless hours with lectures on the subjects of taxonomy and animal theory from Tusk and poetry and riddles and wordplay from Risper. Tusk described the ecologies of nonsense monsters whose teeth had teeth themselves and creatures that broke their own bones to use as weapons in last resort. The ranger recounted a parasite he’d studied that dissolved away the numbed tongues of their victims only to take the place of the organs so that they may for the remainder of their lives skim sustenance from the diet taken in by their deprived host. He told Risper of embryonic beasts that fought and ate one another while still in their mother’s womb until only one survived to be born to the world already a seasoned murderer. The world was a mean one, all right.

As they were dragged deeper into gob country the caravan lurched through the occasional waster settlement. The natives gathered round and stared with their wide and curious black eyes at the strange men in the cage. Most of these people, the children especially, had never seen a human in all their lives. There were zealots and slavers and warriors among the sandmen, but most appeared to Tusk to lead prosaic lives, walking similar paths familiar to any common man or woman of the Nation. They were homekeepers, cooks, tailors, tanners, and shepherds. Yet, despite all the similarities Tusk saw between man and gob, there was one stark behavioral difference that distinctly separated the innate character of the two species—never once had he seen a hobgoblin smile or laugh. The race appeared to be fully devoid of humor. Perhaps the demands of their sadistic religion stripped the desert folk of any capability of experiencing joy. One bad idea could inflame a culture like wildfire no matter how absurd or dire its notions. There were humans of similar extremes, but the sandmen had truly made suffering a way of life. Their skin was marked with scars that accumulated like the rings of trees. One could almost count their years by them. Mutilations upon mutilations, and the eldest of the tribesfolk had no place left on their bodies untouched by whip or hook or brand. Their jewelry and clothing were designed to scratch and chafe at the skin. Many of the gobfolk were malformed from their very birth, with limbs missing and askew as they greeted the mad world. Tusk saw the disfigurements more and more frequently the deeper into the wastes they went. Beyond the teeth on their cheeks and necks and extraneous fingers and toes, some of the indigenous folk of these outer reaches even spawned horns and tusks from their elongated skulls. What drove such a deluge of mutations in these parts? It was as if some vast corrupting force saturated the very air and land, twisting the bodies and minds of its inhabitants.

Tecneli of the Many Faces met with a gaggle of hobgoblin clerics there in the dusty square as the settlers watched on. Tusk listened to them speak, applying the knowledge Risper had imparted and what he had already gleaned over the course of his training and career. He had never been stellar with languages in school but found that now, when the words he tried to comprehend regarded the matter of his own life or death, extra dimensions of understanding presented themselves. Tusk gleaned from the wasters’ talk that his group would soon reach a place called Thajh, for further “research.” A troubling thought what such dark studies might entail in these “Painworks” the sandmen spoke of.

Tusk eyed Risper who had fallen unconscious in the sweltering heat and wondered whether he should honor his friend’s request to die. On the journey’s last leg Tusk had discovered a venomous stinger on one of the dead insects the sandmen had tossed into his cage and now kept it ready in his palm. It would be a simple matter to inject it into the necks of his comrade and himself and attempt to end their suffering. There was enough in there to kill at least one man, but maybe two in the state they were in. Death would be a welcome relief from this.

The hobgoblins bit at their wrists in gestures of farewell. Tusk hid the scorpion’s stinger away under a crooked stone near his head. He would bide his time and see this through to the bitter end. And perhaps take out one or two of these fanatics before it came to that. He was a Reaper. And he wanted to live. Death would come in its own time. Until then he would see where this hellish road would lead even if thanks to no motive beyond that of sheer morbid curiosity. The wagons lurched forward and went back into the arenose wild toward uncharted fate.

“It’s been rough, on Mercy especially,” Rooster said. “But we’re pulling through.” The old commander sat across from Jinx in a dim booth lit by a rustic lantern. Ascension Boulevard’s lamplights twinkled in the canals through the windows. They were having dinner in the Rooster’s favorite Camshire haunt, the Hunt House. Heads and busts of various strange beasts that had been slain across the realm were mounted on the walls and in the dividers between the booths and in the latrines. To Jinx the taxidermic trophies only served as reminders of the horrors of the wild. But despite its fearsome and morbid decor, the Hunt House was a sedure place for men such as Rooster and Jinx. The servers were also guardsmen with swords at their hips, sworn to the Nation and ready to give their lives to save those of their ranking patrons.

Both men had journeyed to the great and pandemonic city after the Battle of Fort Nothing’s conclusion. Jinx had come first with the captive necromancer Skelen in tow to be delivered to the Diluvian Inquisitors. Rooster came later to bury his son who had died on the eastern front and to help defend the Reapers against Ogerius’ mounting legal charges. Ogerius himself had accompanied Jinx and Skelen on their journey to this City of Uneasy Winds (called so more for its shifting political and social landscapes and architectures and economies than the chicanerous winds themselves), along with his entourage of lackeys, all of whom kept close eye on the two runists for any hint of dialogue or witchery.

“We’ve lost many children,” Rooster continued, “but they had all been very young. Dreu was about your age.”

“Yes, I know,” said Jinx. “I met him once, at the Academy. A good man. Smart and honorable. He died well. I hear he gave the Erumanir hell in the push to retake Fort Holdt.”

“The stars cup his glory now,” said Rooster. “I’ll tell Mercy you asked.”

“Please do,” said Jinx as the waiter brought out their steaks. “Have you seen Halo’s family yet since your return?”

“Yes, I’ve run into his father Leofrick on a couple of occasions downtown,” said Rooster, “and I checked in with Mulia a short while ago in her Sablewood home. The woman is strong as oak. A better pairing to Halo than my steak to this wine and that is something mythic indeed. It was hard enough for us to lose our boy. But for Mulia to still not know Donric’s fate at all… whether he is dead or, perhaps worse, alive and suffering at the hands of the sandmen—her spirits must be crushed. But she does not show it.”

Jinx nodded grimly. “She has to be strong for their poor girls.” He didn’t want the mood to sour any further. It would not suit his agenda well. The rune man picked up his utensils and began to cut his food. “But enough with such grim talk. We need to stay strong. And keep busy, focus our minds on our work. Not our losses. Which brings me to a favor I’d like to ask of you, sir. And with your permission I’d rather just get it out of the way now so we can relax and enjoy the evening.”

“Go ahead,” said Rooster as he forked a hunk of rare steak into his mouth.

The tone had noticeably shifted upon Jinx’s uttering of that loaded word ‘favor.’ “I was just hoping to get a recommendation from you.”

Rooster chewed. “For?”

“It regards the mage Skelen,” Jinx said. “I did as you ordered and brought him here to Camshire and immediately handed him over to the Diluvians.”

“Yes, I’m aware.” Rooster dabbed at his lip with a napkin.

“They’ve denied me access to him ever since,” said Jinx.

“I see,” said Rooster. “And why do you need it?”

“I want to question him.”

“What about?” Rooster swished his wine.

“The codex,” said Jinx. “The book he learned from. I want to know where he found it, so we can secure the site. And I want to interrogate him about the golem he created. That thing had a mind of its own. Some form of intelligence—but artificial. It’s our job to uncover everything we can about these dangers so we can be prepared for them in the field.”

“And exploit them ourselves?” said Rooster.

“Not at all,” said Jinx. “I fully support the ban. I’ve seen firsthand the horrors sorcery can bring. More than you, possibly.”

Rooster said. “Your new superiors at the Triad can’t help with this?”

“All they have me do is break gob runery all day long,” said Jinx. “And design new codes for our own chatter. They don’t know my value. But with a recommendation from you—”

“I’m not sure it would help much,” Rooster said. “I do happen to know what the Inquisitors have done with Skelen. I’m kept abreast of such matters. And I could possibly get you access to him. But I’m afraid he won’t be saying much.”

“I just want the opportunity to try, sir,” Jinx said. “That’s all. I honored my agreement not to pry Skelen on our journey—”

“You misunderstand,” said Rooster. “I say Skelen won’t be speaking because the Diluvians have relieved him of his tongue.”

Jinx’s own tongue caught. He was unable to speak or swallow. His cheeks flushed with warm blood. His discomfort was surely obvious to such a perceptive man as Rooster.

“They severed both of his hands as well,” Rooster casually said as he sawed at his steak. “And cauterized the stumps.” He took another bite and savored its seared juices.

“Stars,” said Jinx. “Why not just kill the poor man?”

Rooster leveled his gaze on Jinx. “You know how your kind like to study so much, and poke and prod. They took him away. To be analyzed. Dissected. Who knows what else. The Diluvians are documenting the effects of entropy on the body and mind and Skelen is a prime specimen for such efforts. Your so-called ‘Stitcher’ has been steeped in the cursed arts for some time now.” He pointed at Jinx with his fork. “Understand, what I’ve told you is sensitive information. Keep it to yourself.”

“Of course,” said Jinx. “Won’t say a word. Reaper’s honor.”

“I don’t believe you,” Rooster said. Jinx tensed at the accusation. The commander’s eyes went to the other man’s food. “That slice of game getting cold on your plate is the most succulent piece of ass you’ll find on this side of the Julian Wall. And you haven’t even touched it.” The commander favored this establishment because its meat was true game caught from the wild and brought into the city, not farmed and butchered wholesale like the pigs of Marrow had been. Not to dismiss the swinesmiths. He had personally sampled their fare while in those regions and lamented the mass loss of the culinary genius thanks to the deathmage they spoke of. Rooster thought Skelen should be burned alive for that one sin alone, depriving the world of those savory secrets.

“I’m just not feeling well,” said Jinx as he picked up his utensils and began to cut his meat. He thought of Skelen’s severed hands and tongue as he did so. It was true, Jinx felt not well at all. This was in part due to some degree of sympathy he felt for Skelen, given his poor treatment as a young child, and a general empathy for any man who suffered such harsh abuses. But of course Skelen had given no such thought or mercy to those he tortured and killed. The true source of Jinx’s discomfort came from the fact that he was himself now a practitioner of the forbidden arts. The Reaper had taken for himself the damned book from which Skelen had learned his thaumaturgy. Every night Jinx fell headfirst into its cryptic pages in search of secrets that ran as deep as the darkest oceans. Skelen had paid the price for such hubris with his tongue and hands and surely many other things. Jinx would have to be careful. He faced an equally brutal fate if his clandestine studies were ever to be unveiled. And eyes were everywhere.

Deep in the forests northwest of fallen Marrow came a song in the lost village’s honor. It was a melody of arpeggios and plucky roulades roughly spun by unpracticed hands. If one were to follow this lovely if imperfect tune it would lead to a clearing, emerald and untouched, where a pool of water glistened and the birds chirped merrily in encoded broadcasts of sexual braggadocio and territorial claim. It would be a fine place to live forever and that was just what the golem Bramble wished to do. But his companion Dimia pined to be with others of her own kind, the living. And so the little girl and her monstrous friend had continued west toward a village named Wolfwall where her nearest kin dwelled. Dimia hoped her extended family of cousins and uncles and aunts would take her in and help find her a new home—where she could then turn her efforts toward tracking Skelen down and making him pay for his crimes against Marrow. The sandmen, too. Dimia shivered at the thought of that one hobgoblin who’d come up the steeple looking for her as she hung from the tongue of that bell, with its cruel deathstick and robe of wretched faces. The wasters’ leader had called this one ‘Tecneli.’ The fiends had murdered her last few friends, the children to whom even Skelen had shown mercy. At least he had that small shred of humanity. Not so the sandmen.

Dimia continued to strum her song using the lute Bramble had stolen. She had admonished the golem for stealing the instrument but was in truth grateful. In this world of terrible sins it was a small crime done in generous spirit. Bramble did not understand their laws. He only knew Dimia had broken her previous lute when she had been forced to use it in vain as a weapon to defend herself from a rapist before the hulk himself stepped in to rescue her in brutal fashion. The golem was now placid, humming with his many mouths to accompany Dimia’s tune. It was a pleasing sound against the babble of the water and the chatter of the birds and the sighing of the leaves in the wind. There was peace, ever fleeting. But this glade too held threats. Dimia once had to rescue Bramble from the hypnotic charms of a knot of polliwogs in the brook’s eddies. The golem had found himself enchanted by their furtive dance beneath the water’s surface, unaware of the tadpoles’ true and dire aim of drowning him and claiming the revenant for a meal. The larvae fed on those they caught in such fashion so that they may grow into the monstrous froglodytes that blustered their way through the bogs and lent their croaking and rhythmic voices to the night. Bramble fought their adult kin off many a time, shielding Dimia from their gulping mouths and adhesive tongues. His unnatural appearance and horrific composition were often enough to drive the deathly amphibians back into their humid dens in wait of easier prey. And here Dimia had now saved Bramble from their younger and seemingly more innocuous kin. Each needed the other to survive this trek through the thorny wild.

It had been weeks of ponderous travel. They saw and avoided conflicts between men and other things. Hobgoblins, beasts, themselves. They stayed away from the roads when they could, except for a stretch spent quietly huddled under the tarp of a bale-wagon to more easily cross the long network of bridges across the great sinking marshes that divided the region. Biting insects, the hot sun, the cold nights. Dimia suffered all these things but Bramble felt none. It pained the golem to see his little friend in such misery and wished they could trade bodies. Perhaps through this thing called sorcery, they could. Would she even want such a thing?

The duo arrived to find that Wolfwall was gone and Dimia’s kinfolk gone with it, burned to the earth by the barbarous sandmen. The victims had clearly been tortured before they were put to death. The wasters were more interested their enemies’ pain than their deaths. Dimia fled back into the wilderness hysterical and the golem chased her and found her curled into a ball at the base of a tree. A fountain of tears was the girl. Bramble scooped her up in his many arms and carried her deeper into the forest where he discovered this untouched glade. “It’s all death,” Dimia cried feebly into his shoulder. “All death…” As they huddled there on the soft moss the tears began to subside. Dimia felt odd in the golem’s myriad arms but also safe and protected. Some of those limbs had belonged to the people of Marrow. Possibly souls she knew. And there were strange nonsense arms comprised of the joints and appendages of animals. A deer’s leg that ended in a talon. A shaggy appendage that ended with a human hand. This had possibly been some form of conscious, animate art form in Skelen’s mad paradigm. Dimia tried to think of all these people and creatures that comprised Bramble as things of harmony. Natural and safe. What mattered was the mind that controlled those limbs now. Not who they belonged to in the past. Dimia’s own brain was still occupied with mortal reckonings in the aftermath of their discovery of ruined Wolfwall. She spoke as the golem stroked her hair with a dead man’s hand.

“Before Skelen returned to Marrow,” she said, “I used to go to that church with my parents. The one I told you about, where I hid and all my friends died. One time I asked the priest after service whether all the pigs that our people killed went to the stars to live with their ancestors like we humans did. He said only people had souls and so we should not grieve for the dead animals. Perhaps he thought that would be the end of my questions, but as my parents tried to pull me away so they could go home to their drinking and cursing I asked the priest if that meant only humans live on in the After, and not animals. He said yes, that was true. My parents dragged me away before I could pry further. I tried to understand what all this meant. So when the pigs die… that’s it. No life in the After. Nothing. In my eyes, if what the priest said was true, to kill a pig was a worse sin than to kill a man. For them it was the True End. And there I lived in Marrow whose livelihood depended on slaughtering pigs by the day. I became blind to it, numb to it, with it right before my eyes and unstopping. I fell into my music and reading. But I still fear it. Death. Who knows if the priest spoke true. I felt like he was making up his answers when I pushed him. I trust no one but you, Bramble. You don’t seem to need or want the things a normal man does. The need to eat, to have power, to lie, to…” Dimia trailed.

“Doesth Bramble havth soul?” asked the golem. Too many brains and mouths competed to articulate. His words often came out a jumble but Dimia had come to understand them clearly.

Dimia felt an achingly deep empathy for her friend and an overwhelming guilt for inviting such dragons into its mind. Of course he would begin to wonder about his own death, his own soul. He was man and animal. A composition of many life forms. Or, rather, death forms. Did Bramble have a new, artificial soul, emergent from those runes all over his body? Or was he a cornucopia of warring minds that were forced to work in bitter concert to animate its body and create a voice? Had the priest in Marrow been a liar? A fool? Were there no souls at all?

Bramble’s question lingered in the air. Dimia now understood why the priest and her parents and all of them went so readily to the most comforting answers despite their own secret misgivings and reckonings with mortality and what might lie beyond its veil. Here the golem was the child. Dimia chose the easy road as well. “Yes, I think so. I think you have a soul and it is beautiful.” If anyone they knew had answers to such existential questions, it was the man who made Bramble himself, the one who brought so much death into Dimia’s life. Skelen. Perhaps Dimia would ask him for those answers before she drove a knife into his twisted heart.

Men came in the night with dogs and torches and pitchforks. Surely the mob had been roused by the travelers whom Bramble had robbed on the road. The golem knew Dimia would be accepted back into the fold of humanity if only he could quit her. It was the golem—the freak, the monster—that their pursuers wanted to burn.

“Go,” Bramble said to her. “Be with your people kin.”

Dimia did not. Instead, the budding bard took the malformed hand of her friend into hers and said a silent goodbye to that temporary paradise they had shared. Forever fated, together they fled into the thornwoods.

Undead beasts that did not tire or thirst pulled a hissing and steaming machine across the low desert on great wheels of ossein and petrified seawood. Hobgoblin laborers worked in the abomination’s dusty wake and left behind them a stretch of baked mudbrick that cut through the desert’s floor like the spear of a fallen titan. The path was strung over its long course with the bodies of those peons who had expired in the relentless march toward the elusive horizon. Team 3 watched in patient and stalking silence as those spent souls fell in the trail of the road-forge. A shimmering cloud lingered over the sweaty procession. It took the Reapers a moment to determine what the pother was. Vulture realized it was insects, swarms of them. The countless desert locusts and scarabs and wasps were controlled by the hobgoblin overseer’s sorcery to help gather mud and pack the baking roadway as they normally would do with their own great nests if left to nature’s own devices. Eerie hums issued from the head coach. These shrill sounds were borne, Riddle explained, from the runed set of pipes the plague-master used to dominate and control the buzzing swarms and force them to lay mud. The piss-drinkers were constructing yet another inexplicable road to add to the legion of highways that now crisscrossed these vast sandscapes.

Nail and his scouts roosted atop a cragged hill and looked down at the lean and sweaty road-builders. The hobgoblin caravan was now about twenty strong. Half were there to guard and supervise. The other half there to work until their bodies forbade it and then work some more. He relied on the other two men to discern and relate the details of the scene. Damn his own eyes. Of all things to fail him. Even with the spyglass Nail struggled at times. Too much straining in his long life of sharpshooting and the hard glare of the sun.

“Enough eyeballin’,” Nail whispered to his men. “We strike tonight.” The Reapers crawled back down the hill and returned to camp. Waiting there were the other members of Team 3. Their rune man Riddle scoured over the sketches they had drawn of the network of arteries the company had traced thus far in their trek through the weird wastes. He looked vainly for some clue as to what would compel the sandmen to invest their energy and time into building a sprawling series of roads to nowhere. Many of the avenues ended abruptly and others shot off into new directions seemingly at random. Their purpose was sheer mystery. Surely it was nothing wholesome.

The Reapers readied for the coming night’s raid. They had been outfitted with an array of new gear for this operation. The Nation engineers constantly worked to build more effective and lethal equipment to give their soldiers every attainable edge over nightmarish enemies that boasted such enviable boons as black sorcery and unflinching zealotry and untold numbers. The Nation’s machine never tired, and the sudden escalation of war on multiple fronts only further galvanized their craftsmen. The Reapers were the first to get their hands on razor-edge weaponry. Their newly-issued crossbows were now more accurate and powerful. They had greater range and were fitted with seats into which the soldiers could easily insert bayonets rather than having to tie them on with lashes. The weapons’ bow-arms could be folded back to make them more compact and slender for ease of transport and a streamlined profile. The commandos were supplied with latest-issue spyglasses featuring improved range and clarity. And of course there were the gliders that flew like piceous bats and doubled as tents. These had been coated with some alchemical formulation that reflected away the sun’s heat but not its light. The Reapers had also been issued intricate little bronze timepieces with which to coordinate their movements. On the backs of these devices were housed compasses to help them find their way—though sometimes these irradiated wastes did strange things to the instruments’ needles and so they could not be trusted above the stars when the sky was clear enough to read them. The oldest ways were still often the surest ways.

The Reapers crouched together and made their plans. There would be two teams, one attacking from each side of the roadway. Nail would lead Vulture and Thirteen. Jasha would lead Blacwin and Riddle. They were to fire from the darkness, taking out as many of the armed guards as possible before infiltrating further to finish off the laborers.

“We giving the non-combatants any opportunity to surrender?” asked Blacwin.

“And do what with them?” asked Nail. “Carry them on our backs? We can’t burden ourselves with prisoners.”

“We could simply release them into the desert,” Blacwin said. “They’re just laborers. Possibly slaves. Let the stars decide their fate.”

“Can there even be such a thing as a hobgoblin slave?” asked Thirteen as he oiled his riflebow. “They enjoy suffering. To them being a slave must be like being a king.”

“It is more kind to simply slay them on the spot,” said Nail. “And less risky for us.”

“At least keep the overseer alive, if possible.” said Riddle. “I would like to interrogate him about the roadways.”

“Make sure no bit of your skin is left bare,” Vulture warned as the Reapers checked their gear and put ashblood on their faces. “Those bugs will bite.”

Night fell like a dead god. The commandos went as one with the shadows and descended upon the road-builders. Together they were Father Death’s outstretched black hand.

Jinx kept a lab in the cellar of his brownstone on Battery Lane. Here he kept the tome and conducted his forbidden research, experimenting on frogs and toads he’d bought in some back alley from an old lady who seemed to be wholly spun from rags. Presumably most customers bought the small animals for food but the rune man had other plans. Consulting Skelen’s necromantic book, Jinx carved runes into their tiny legs and warty backs and underbellies. He was able to get the undead toads and frogs to leap and stop on command but he had not perfected his runecraft yet so at times the creatures would restart on their own volition or refuse to stop when he uttered the phrase that should if properly articulated still the bodies of the risen amphibians.

There was a knock at his front door, breaking his concentration. Jinx snapped from the trance he so often fell into down there where it got quiet as a coffin and the book’s teaching’s cast their spell. Who could it be at the door? He had shied away from social pursuits thanks to his new obsession. He never entertained friends, particularly at this late an hour. Many of them had simply vanished during his time in the field, swept away to serve or worse. Most of his friends were other students of thaumaturgy, a dangerous occupation. The Inquisitors had made many sweeps of their halls of study, rounding up those they felt might be dabbling too eagerly in the forbidden. Or at least that had served as the Diluvians’ excuse to silence those whom they did not see eye-to-eye with. He no longer mixed with women, either. He had become lost to the necronomicon at the expense of all else.

Jinx went up the stairs and through the trapdoor into the main hall of his home. He crept to the front by way of shadows and peered through the window. His heart skipped a beat when his eyes caught sight of the figures lingering out in the rain. They were Diluvians officer in their long coats. They knocked again with authoritative fists. “We know you are in there, Reaper! Answer this door!”

Jinx quickly raced back down to the cellar and slammed shut the book and shoved it into a trunk which he frantically locked with trembling hands. He reminded himself that he was a Reaper and he reclaimed his nerves to still his shaking. The mage spoke the arcane word to stop the motion of the reanimated frogs. All but one ceased their twitching and hopping in their cage. Another knock came at the front door. Now the fist was pounding harder. Jinx spoke the sorcerous word again and finally the last frog stilled. He shoved the cage under the desk and covered it with a black cloth and raced back upstairs. His legs ached as he hurried thanks to the hit they had taken in the arcane blast that had killed Rancent and consigned Jinx to a desk job at the Triad until he could, if ever, recover. This and other previous injuries—to include the groin wound in Krakenbone—was one of the reasons Jinx had for wanting to plumb necromancy’s secrets at all. Perhaps therein laid a way to forever avail himself of physical pain or injury. Could the sciences taught within help heal and animate the living as well as the dead? All the killing Jinx had seen in his career as a Reaper also played its part in his mad desire to understand death and perhaps find a way to somehow conquer it. He closed the trapdoor that led into the cellar and it blended perfectly with the woodwork of the floor. The rune man slid a rug over the space. The hard knocking came again.

“I’m coming!” Jinx yelled. He raced to the door and finally opened it.

The head Diluvian officer immediately sauntered in and flashed a badge that displayed a shield emblazoned with the angry face of a dragon. “I am Inquisitor Wral and this is an inspection of your domicile.” The two enforcers followed their boss inside and began rudely opening and slamming cabinet doors and overturning furniture. The men all wore high black boots and long black coats slick with rain. Swords were at each of their hips.

Jinx wasn’t fully surprised by the visit. At his security clearance level as a Reaper and employee of the Triad he was subject to such invasions. But he had not been scrutinized since his return to Camshire and thought he had nothing to fear. Perhaps the recent bombings by anarchist mages had caused the Diluvian machine to crack down harder. Some even claimed the people in power had orchestrated the bombings themselves to advance the reach of their draconian powers and justify their hawkish ways. Had Rooster said something about their dinner chat to trigger this visit? Perhaps the commander had even made the recommendation Jinx had asked for and this was the first step in the Diluvians’ vetting process. What had Jinx been thinking to work his black craft right here in the house his employers knew he lived in? His obsession had eclipsed his sense of caution. Now it might be too late.

There was a very subtle thump from below. Scissors, thought Jinx. The frogs. The unliving specimens must be acting up. Jinx coughed to try and cover the sound. All three Diluvians sharply looked up and stepped back.

“Are you sick?” said the Inquisitor. The Black Rot and other plagues had been vicious that season and the worry on the faces of the Diluvians was clear. Some pockets of the city had been nearly decimated by pestilence in recent weeks. There was no understanding the Rot in particular. The disease seemed to choose its victims almost at random. Officials claimed it was not contagious. It just happened. Though one could never be sure, and many a charlatan made a fine crown on selling wards and trinkets said to keep the Rot at bay. Wral had no interest in finding out himself. He had seen what happened to the victims. Their blood turned into curdled pitch and the eyes went black and then finally came sweet merciful death. The contagion had been around for as long as anyone could remember, though rarely had it ever been this bad. People blamed the hobgoblins for the Rot. Saw the similarities in the black blood and eyes. Perhaps there was something to that logic, despite the protestations of the Anatoli.

“It’s a simple cold, I’m sure,” said Jinx. The Reaper believed he could hear more of the thumping below, fearing it was one of the disobedient dead frogs. But it was so subtle he couldn’t be sure the clamor was not just the imagining of his own paranoid mind. “The weather’s been—” He faked another cough. “—quite damp.” A thought occurred to him. This was an opportunity to shake these men. “But then… my cousin recently did die from a horrible case of sickworm,” Jinx pretended to struggle through the words between his false spasms. “Perhaps it would be best if no one was near me.”

Sidelong glances between the unwelcome guests. “Then perhaps we should simply have you placed in quarantine,” said Wral.

“I live here alone,” said Jinx. “This essentially is a quarantine… if I take no guests.”

Inquisitor Wral smirked at the remark and took another final look around. “We have our eye on you, Reaper. We know you rune men are weak-willed and like to dabble in things best left untouched.” Before exiting the Inquisitor stated: “Dryad root and willicker. For the cold. My grandmother’s formula. Works like a glamour.” And then they were gone, their boot steps rapping on the walkstones as they made their way through the drizzle back to their stagecoach drawn by dark huffing beasts.

When he was sure they were gone Jinx pulled the rug away and ran back down the stairs to his cellar and brought that cage of frogs up to his hearth where he dumped them all into the fire. As the reanimated creatures’ runes were singed away their necromantic bindings became erratic and their bodies twitched before the glyphs were fully snuffed. The dead animals finally grew still for the burning. Jinx considered consigning the tome to the same fate but could not bring himself to do it. The book had its diabolical hooks in him. It had a power over him of which he was aware but had no faculties to combat. Almost a mind of its own. Jinx could not destroy the necronomicon. But it very well might destroy him.

The Reapers lined the surviving hobgoblins up by the road the wasters had themselves just laid. Thirteen moved down the line and executed each of the gobs in brutal fashion, cruelly jamming his bayonet into their faces and eyes. The man was a tutor in all ways to die. Blacwin imagined being one of those poor doomed sandmen. Hearing the sick smack as the Reaper does each of your fellows in… as he comes closer for you with each murder in the array. And before there is time to bring to closure any reckoning with guilt or god it is your turn. Thirteen above you in his smirking skullface painted with your own peoples’ blood. That long unforgiving blade drawn back and then coming toward you with nihilistic thrust and no precision to its callous aim. The feel of the hard steel giving your anatomy no quarter, wedging between cheekbone and jaw, grinding through gristle and bone or blasting away a section of your cranium through which your final thoughts would leak. Vulture too participated in the butchery and he was a man of the hatchet. Blacwin shuddered and turned away from the atrocious scene and walked over to Nail who was examining the great fuming furnace that hung from the back of the hobgoblins’ leaning wagon.

“Those men take too much pleasure in it,” Blacwin said to his leader.

Nail continued to survey the carnage. “Long as they get ‘em dead I don’t much care.” Team 3 had done their work well and so their leader was satisfied and proud. In a span of minutes nearly all the roadmakers had died or surrendered—guards and laborers and, despite Riddle’s request, the overseer too, struck down by Jasha’s riflebow in haste as the gob emerged from the main tent screaming words of sorcery that brought fire to his tattooed fingers and more locusts from the wastes to cloud the air. The pestiferous bugs bit at the Reapers but thanks to Vulture’s warning to cover themselves they were spared much agony. Upon the plaguemancer’s death the commotion halted as quickly as it had begun and the insects lazed back into the lifeless fringes. The Reapers picked through the remains and the pickings were few. The wasters’ food was nothing a human would wish on his most hated foe. Their weapons were wicked but primitive. Their clothing was rough, chitinous. Built for the wearer’s discomfort with barbs and tines on the inside and out. There was little of use.

Riddle emerged from the main wagon with leathery scrolls in his hands. “Boys, take a look at this.” He dropped the inked hides onto the mudbrick road and rolled them out. Nail stepped closer. They were fashioned from animal skins, perhaps human, and had branded upon them a series of glyphs that meant nothing to the officer.

“Disturbing.” Riddle knelt and ran his fingertips over the markings. “These are not roads the piss-drinkers are building. I can’t believe it. They’re runes. Gigantic runes that stretch for miles.” He looked down the long roadway the hobgoblins had built. It looked as if it led to the very end of things. “The sandmen are carving an enormous network of sorcerous glyphs into the sands.”

“Fartin’ stars,” said Nail. “Dare I ask to what end?”

“It’s anyone’s guess,” said Riddle. “It would take more time and more minds to decipher their ultimate purpose. We need to get these back to Camp Nothing, now.”

The Reapers’ imaginations ran amok as they worked through all the nightmare scenarios. The sandmen could be building some sort of doomsday weapon meant to blow Camshire into a smoking ruin. Or constructing a gate to some other place from which the wasters would summon a daemon or even an army of the mythical extradimensionals if such things were to be believed. Whatever the mad purpose this massive network of runes might serve, the Nation had to be warned.

“Ticks!” Dimia screamed. She was covered in the parasites, swarms crawling on her skin. The girl and the golem had been walking through a hillside carpeted with tall yellow grass. Until the discovery of the insects on her body it had been a serene moment. Precious and ephemeral. A stolen moment of peace. Dimia ran shrieking to the bottom of the hill toward a stagnant pond. She threw herself past the reeds and into the polluted waters to wash the things from her body. They were legion. Many of the bloodsuckers fell with a brush of her hand but others had to be furiously plucked away one-by-one. After a forever of plucking and swatting and brushing she was finally free of the biters. Dimia put her hands on her knees and caught her breath. Looked over at Bramble who only watched on in dumb silence. He didn’t understand. The parasites did not bother him. He only saw Dimia scream and race to the bottom of the hill and roll in mud and frantically slap at her legs and feet and run fingers through her hair like she had gone lunar. Dimia oddly laughed at the thought. Bramble still only stared with concern. “Isth Dimia sick?”

“I’m fine.” Dimia shivered at a phantasmal revisitation of the insects that still crawled and bit in spirit. She tried to put them from her mind and got to her feet. They walked further. The girl and the golem seemed to have lost their pursuers, that mob that had likely been sparked by Bramble’s brand of highway banditry. During their flight from the lynchers Dimia tried to think like her heroes. What would Halo and his Reapers do? The pair crossed streams to hide their scents from dogs. Found higher ground and monitored the far shouting of the searchers and the barking of their dogs and the light from their torches until they slowly faded with distance. Bramble’s senses were beyond the girl’s and had been vital to their escape. To be safe they continued to move through the next day. Although Bramble carried her for much of the time Dimia was past exhausted. They needed to find a place to settle for the night. Soon. The wild was even deadlier by night than by day. These croaking and lethal reaches were full of things that had stalked them. Muscled canines and great hissing birds and twin-tailed cats. Hungry for Dimia’s delicious meat and bones. She would have been dead a dozen times had she walked alone. The hulk at her side frightened away those predators that were less bold. And Bramble fought off those that were too desperate with hunger or aggressive to be intimidated by the unnatural protector. He had been hurt on occasion. Dimia used some thread and needles taken from that farmhouse on the outskirts of Marrow to treat him. But some of his runes appeared to have been damaged. Difficult to discern whether that had some effect on him, for good or ill.

As they moved on Dimia noticed hints of an old ruined structure in the recesses of the gnarled trees and woodshadows. Perhaps they could stay here for the night. They quietly drew closer to the ruins. She had a small knife in her hand, taken from the farmhouse’s kitchen. The slanted and overgrown plaza they came upon was dominated by a squat stone tower with a crumbling balcony. It was unoccupied, lost to the wild. Bramble helped Dimia clear the upper floor and make a bed of hay and skins. They lay there together for some time. She drifted in and out of sleep, safe with her protector. Traced the runes in his flesh with her finger. How comfortable she had become around a thing that would terrify any person unfamiliar with the golem’s true inner nature. She had taken to studying the glyphs and began to see patterns emerging. Patterns not unlike those in music itself. She had made a game of playing the runes as if they were sheet music until the golem asked her to stop. Something about the music spun from his runery bothered Bramble. Upset him, striking a deep and troubling chord. And so she stopped doing so when he was near.

But Dimia found herself becoming obsessed with the puzzle of runery and song. She had heard tales of bards who spun cantrips from their music, charming audiences and even brightening or darkening a room or producing fire or smoke and other illusions simply by strumming their strings and chiming their cymbals and blowing into their runed pipes. It was said that the best bards could charm a listener into walking off a cliff—or even strike a man dead with sound alone. Dimia always took those to be untrue tales for the ears of gullible minnows but now she wondered if there was indeed a hidden power in the intricacy of sound itself. Perhaps music and magery were entwined. She was determined to seek deeper meaning in songcraft and glean from it all the secrets she could. Such knowledge would be a powerful weapon against Skelen and the hobgoblins. Whether it bothered Bramble or was outlawed by the Nation, she did not care. She would study it in secret, as all magisters did. Dimia was already a slave to its hypnotic seduction. Such hubris was the lot of all who heard the art’s call.

Spent, the little girl fell asleep in her makeshift loft with runery dancing in her brain to strange and discordant arias. Bramble went back down to patrol below, all those unsleeping eyes vigilant for any threats that might emerge from the chirping and moaning darkness.

Upon landing his weary eyes on the hobgoblin city of Thajh, Tusk was reminded of the great termite mounds he’d seen in the scrublands of the Lower Crescent when he visited those reaches on an Anatoli excursion. But here the structures were magnified a thousand times in scale. The sandmen had somehow built crude mud towers that pierced the very sky as their needles did their flesh, hundreds of stories tall and countless in number. Their very buildings strove to climb closer to their sun-god. The Reaper suspected the wasters’ control of insects through sound and sorcery had something to do with their construction. The spires were pocked with windows that winked like pinned fireflies in the chalky twilight. The sweltering city hummed with activity, much of it devoted to suffering. Cries of pain occasionally erupted from buildings and tucked-away alleys but many of the gobs suffered their flagellations in sacred and prolonged silence. Droves of the zealots were strapped to poles and walls, stretched into sublime agony. The place crawled with twitching and parasitic life.

Tusk and Risper’s caged wagon was hauled into one of the towers and up a winding ramp fashioned from mud and materials unknown that had been hardened into a composite strong enough to sustain the structures’ impossible heights. The wind howled through the tunnels within but never did those sounds fully drown out the wretched moans and lamentations of this pandemonic city’s occupants. If this was what these people subjected themselves to, Tusk could only guess what was in store for him and his comrade. As they drew deeper into the tower’s heart the sickening cries only grew more powerful. The hobgoblins called this place the ‘Painworks’ and never had a name been more fitting. Fear made Tusk as prostrate as his companion. But he had known that emotion much his life and taught himself ways to choke it down. He had found the bodies of his parents, murdered by road agents, as they still twitched and gargled. From that day forward fear came to Tusk on the back of every night. Ghosts tormented his psyche. Reminders of his participation in the slaughter at Edsohonet. Apparitions of Mad Skelen’s unthinkable horror show. Faces and soul-wracking moments from his own bloodstained career. He oddly thought of Thirteen, how lucky that man had been to have no conscience. Tusk realized that he would likely never see his old teammates again. Halo, Shroomer, Jinx. He’d miss those boys. He looked over at Risper. The broken man’s eyes stared into some other place. He was already lost, blessedly numb. Immune to the horrors around him. Dead but for a stubborn heart.

Tusk discreetly picked up the stone under which he had hidden the reserved scorpion’s stinger. He cupped the venomous thing in his palm, careful to avoid injecting himself. The contents of the gland attached to that needle was only certain to kill one, perhaps two. There were half a dozen hobgoblins around them. Black eyes set in skeletal faces. Pierced and tattooed and scarified flesh. Rattling bones and chains. An odious arsenal of spears and blades and spurs. Even if he could kill one of them, it would be impossible for Tusk to fight off the rest, Reaper training or no. He was dehydrated, starved, fatigued. And of course Risper could not act in his condition. It was decided. Tusk knew his course.

As the hobgoblins unlocked the latches and flung the cage doors open Tusk quickly turned and jammed the stinger into Risper’s neck. He pumped the venom into his comrade’s bloodstream and then as the hobgoblins fought to pull Tusk off Risper, he did the same to himself. He felt the sharp stab as he injected the needle into his own jugular. The hot chemical flush of the venom. The chamber spun into a wheeling blur of screaming and snarling hobgoblin faces. Tusk’s heartbeat pounded in his skull. His stomach kicked and lurched. The ranger heard Risper mutter a final thanks for bringing him the escape he so wished. And then all was darkness.

“Whether he is alive or dead is not important here.”

Mulia shook her head. “Such words from his own father.”

“You must be pragmatic,” said Leofrick as he bit another hunk of maggot cheese and chased it down with wine. A wriggling larva clung to his bottom lip and the old senator sucked it in. “It’s been long enough. Declaring Donric dead on that piece of paper means nothing. It will not change whether or not he still truly draws breath. But it will change whether or not you draw his pension.”

They were seated in Mulia’s study, each in a large and plush chair before a cantankerous hearth. Mulia took a bite from the cheese and fought the urge to mind the maggots. Leofrick had surely brought the expensive so-called delicacy as a gift to test her mettle, or simply make her less comfortable during their talk. She would give him no such satisfaction and though it turned her stomach to do so she chewed and swallowed the cheese, squirming larvae and all. In doing so it occurred to Mulia that perhaps she had indeed failed the test, anyway… that if she were truly a strong woman she would have simply told her bearish father-in-law that she didn’t care for the stuff and just watched him dribble the cheese’s tears over his beard and suck the larval flies between his teeth alone. And this was the most likely goal of Leofrick’s choice of this midnight snack above all others—to get her mind working on these games and not the matter at hand.

Mulia gathered her focus. Was there something else at work here, something in the wine Leofrick had also brought? “I don’t care about the money and I never have.”

Leofrick snorted. The unsigned document they discussed sat on the table between them, feathered quill at the ready. The majority of the scrawlings on the parchment were devoted to the full true name of the man known as ‘Halo’ to his fellow Reapers. Donric von Leofrick von Callister von Keipsul von Strattahorm von Giorbrun von Thum von Matterkrymn… and on and on it rambled with every forefather accounted for along the way. In daily use people kept it to the first two—“Donric von Leofrick” in this case—leaving the runaway versions for official materials such as the somber one Mulia and Leofrick now debated. Many of the run-on names used by Camshire’s aristocracy begin to fray and unravel at their ancient ends, prone to fabricated connections and invented bloodlines to bolster one’s ego and standing in society. And it was true—many a noble did measure the other by how far back their lineage could be traced and how many ‘vons’ or ‘ofs’ they could claim—as if one who couldn’t name his or her grandsire five generations back never had one at all. Some of the social elite counted a hundred patronyms or more, plunging into the deep murk of uncertain past to the point of farce, even naming lesser gods in the boasting of their lineage. Mulia chafed at the whole practice. It rejected the notion that all people were born equal and while it ensured that the names of men were inscribed into history, the appellations of the mothers, the women, were tragically discarded and lost beyond any other accountings that might with any luck exist such as wedding records and tombstones.

“Your manor is ruinous,” said Leofrick, looking around at the fine cracks and peeling paint. “Your staff is on the verge of mutiny. And I refuse to help you with your debts if you will not first help yourself by signing that meaningless writ.”

“I can do without the house or the servants,” said Mulia. “I will see them off immediately and put the place on the market. So the girls and I will lead a simpler life, a more humble life. Perhaps that is for the better.”

Leofrick huffed. “We’ll see if you still crow the same tale after a year without your precious theater and fine cuisine. Further, where is your conscience? Your Nation is at war. An honorable woman who is not barren would be busily serving that cause by bearing and raising more men to fight for us. I assure you the gobs are fornicating like gremlins. If they don’t outkill us, they just might outbreed us. If you sign, you can remarry and get on with things and help add to the ranks.”

“Perhaps I’ll go to fight, myself,” said Mulia. “Would that be enough?”

Leofrick snorted. “You would say no such thing if you ever witnessed what unfolds on the field of battle. It is no place fit for woman.” Leofrick looked up at the family portrait hanging over the mantle. There was Donric, known to his fellow Reapers as Halo, handsome in his military uniform, with Mulia at his side and their twin daughters Astrid and Amelie in their laps. “A shame that you never bore Donric a male heir.”

“His daughters fill his heart enough.” The girls were sleeping upstairs at the current hour. Mulia ceaselessly worried about them in these brutal times. There had been threats against the schools from the anarchs and so Mulia had kept them home in recent days. She wished Donric at her side. As equals, they would help each other navigate the treacherous paths of life. She trusted no other.

“Donric’s blood pumps in my veins.” Leofrick stepped closer to Mulia. The senator’s breath reeked of maggot cheese and liquor. “Perhaps I should give you that son.”

Mulia slapped Leofrick and he snorted again, more pig than man. The old legislator headed for the door. “Declare him dead. Take the money.” And then he left the room.

Mulia stared into those angry flames and weighed the scales. Her eyes went to the family portrait and it became blurred by her tears. She snatched up the document that if signed would declare her one and only love dead and thrust it into the fire.

A great spiral shell that had been emptied of its original occupant long ago lay on its side in the sulfurous wastes. The nautical carapace now had itself a new claimant. This was an old human who had long ago forsaken his own kin. Or perhaps it was he who had been the forsaken one. It all depended on the teller as do most things of such nature. The opening where some gigantic crab or snail once emerged from this great shell millennia ago now had been curtained to serve as a doorway. The sandworn husk’s interiors had been furnished by the hermit over the years with tables and chairs and a bed hewn from the petrified leavings of an ancient kelp forest.

The bearded nobody led a quiet existence out there alone in the hinterlands far from society and its laws and judges. The hermit had hoped to study sorcery but found no aptitude for it. Instead he kept snakes in cages and grew beds of cacti and witchgrass for the eating. The long-timer had seen no other man or woman for years upon years before that stranger came as if birthed by the horizon with his curious and ominous sword. The hermit recognized the design of the blade to be of hobgoblin make and he wondered how the wayward visitor had come by the prized weapon. Was it possible this man had actually slain a holy warrior and claimed the artifact for himself?

The hermit had no trust for the newcomer nor any other man. But he also could not turn such an aimless soul away. In the name of hospitality and self-preservation he invited the drifter into his fossilized home. They ate a meal of half-dead snake (the old man’s specialty) and the boiled eggs of urgetoads and crumbling hunks of stale cactus rusk. The hermit noticed runes carved into the hands and wrists of the stranger to match those on his stolen blade and his eyes wandered the length of the visitor’s arm and found on his shoulder a different sort of tattoo. It took the septuagenarian’s aging mind a moment to register the meaning of that symbol, a snake coiled round a scythe, but then it struck him. It was the mark of a Reaper.

The hermit tried to strike up conversation. He asked about the Nation. He asked about Camshire. But the visitor spoke little, just strange mutterings of forts and nothings and men with the heads of pigs. The Reaper had the stare of someone already dead. After they ate the hermit gave his visitor a blanket and showed him a place where he could sleep on the floor and asked that he be on his way in the morning.

It took some time for the hermit to ease into sleep and when he finally did, deep in the night, he soon woke again to find that ornamented blade at his neck.

Halo watched his hand draw the ancient blade against the pariah’s throat but found himself uncaring. The part of him that would have taken issue with such cold-blooded murder was lost within that blade, sucked from his soul by the heartless and ancient emperor housed within. The Reaper was a shell of a man now, not unlike the husk this old dying hermit called home. He was a man made hollow. Could no longer remember the names of his daughters. Could no longer see the face of his wife in his mind’s eye. All Halo had in him now was a compulsion to do the weapon’s bidding, to march deeper into the wastes at the one called Rattanak’s behest. Obey the tug in his gut that would lead him to some enigmatic destination for a purpose untold.

Halo watched the old man choke and bleed out and fall from his bed onto the dusty floor. The half-Reaper took those few possessions that would aid him on his journey deeper into the wastelands and then through those ragged curtains he went. That old hermit was the last human that would set eyes on Halo for a long and lonely while.