REAPERS - Book Two: The Hunger and the Sickness

8

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 in his early days of training. But here the structures were magnified a thousand times in scale. The sandmen had somehow—perhaps with the help of sorcery, perhaps through sheer love of suffering and toil—built crude mud towers that pierced the very sky as their makers' 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 and lined with a connective tissue of bridges and scaffolds. The sweltering city hummed with doings, much of it devoted to hurt. 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 moaning life.

Tusk regarded Risper with concern. The journey of chokingly hot days and nights of aching chill had furthered the toll on his disarticulated frame. Risper was pale as the Banshee ghost from the childhood tales, his breaths short and ragged. Tusk knew the sight of a man close to death. The eyes looked beyond. Risper's wracked body lurched and rolled as their caged wagon rode through a great labial door and into one of the towers and up a winding ramp fashioned from earth and glass and other matters 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 smother the wretched moans and lamentations of this pandemonic city's occupants. Tusk could only guess what was in store for him and his comrade, if this was what these maniacs did to themselves. As the convoy drew deeper into the tower's heart the sickening cries only grew more powerful. The hobgoblins' word for this hell could be translated to the Julian tongue as '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 in his life. He and his Reaper trainers had taught him to choke down fear, to acknowledge it with calm and set it aside. He'd 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 of past ills tormented his psyche... his participation in the misguided slaughter at Edsohonet, apparitions of Mad Skelen's unthinkable revenge in Marrow, the subdued and sterilized nightmare curations of the Anatoli halls, a phantasmagoria of moments from his own bloodstained career as a Reaper. He oddly thought of Thirteen from his team, how lucky that man had been to have no conscience. Tusk realized that he would likely never see his old teammates from Team 3 again. Halo, Shroomer, Jinx—he'd miss those boys, they filled the hole that had been rent open when he was brutally orphaned. He looked over at Risper. The broken man's eyes stared into some other place better than this. 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 needle in his palm, careful to avoid injecting himself. The contents within the gland, still intact, were only certain to kill one person, perhaps two. He would have to time this right.

There were half a dozen hobgoblins around them—black eyes set in skeletal faces, pierced and scarified flesh, rattling bones and chains. A bristling arsenal of spears and blades and spurs ready to unmake them. Even if Tusk could kill one of the wasters, it would be impossible for him to fight off the rest, Reaper training or no. He was dehydrated, starved, fatigued. And Risper certainly couldn't help fight in his shape. It was decided... Tusk knew his course.