REAPERS - Book Two: The Hunger and the Sickness

31

Tusk admired the hofru's powerful musculature as it undulated beneath its runed hide, causing the glyphs to writhe and twitch as the animal ate from a low bed of bristly cacti. The beast gorged on the plants with snorting relish and abandon, oblivious to the spines that embedded themselves in its thick snout. The hofru's nose must be nerveless, thought Tusk, negating any pain. It was truly as if every living thing was designed perfectly for the habitat in which it thrived. Or somehow the land shaped the life that dwelled upon it, that their forms emerged from the circumstances of survival and procreation alone. Perhaps both things were true, two hands that guided the shapes and characteristics of life. The hofru pulped the surrounding cacti with its tusks as it rooted and snorted, pulverizing the batch into a mash. Tusk watched the dumb feast with fascination until he heard a subtle gasp to his side. It was Aoh.

The Reaper looked up, hand to dagger. His companion was staring at the base of a small rock formation not far off. Tusk squinted and searched for some threat, a predator perhaps, and saw nothing but a flower. The plant seemed to have drawn and captured his new lover's attention like a spell. The Reaper's heart skipped a beat. There were creatures that could transfix and pacify their prey, why not a flower in these bizarre wastes? It was a lone orchid, long of tongue, feminine, colored a glorious red that sprung like virginal blood from the monochromatic wastescape. Tusk realized then that this was a crimson orchid of the same exquisitely rare species that the Nation had used to label the elusive Blind Prophet, the hobgoblin cleric who figured so prominently in Tusk's mind given the chain of events that had personally affected him and his brothers in the campaign to eliminate him.

Aoh slowly drifted toward the blood orchid in an entranced silence and knelt before it like a worshipper. Tusk kept at the hofru's side with the reins in his grip. Aoh reached down and gently cupped the flower in her hands and sniffed it. Then she plucked it from its stem.

"Should we—" Tusk said, but it was too late. What if it was poisonous to the touch? Or what if this plant was among the very last of its kind, or even the very last? He cherished the diversity of life, even the most cruel sorts, and it grated him to risk driving any species to extinction. All the lives Tusk had taken in the names of knowledge and duty and yet here he was feeling sorry for a plucked flower.

"We must eat it," Aoh said, her voice reverent. "It is the way of my people." She stood and turned and carried it to Tusk. "Those who see the bloodflower must take it within before the next fall of Xul. It is the highest honor one could know. It was fated the moment I saw it. Share this with me. One petal for each of us. We will dry the rest for keeping."

She held the orchid up to Tusk and he had to blink his eyes it was so bright a red. It reminded him of the emblazoned monstrous beaks and vivid plumage he had seen in specimens brought out of the southern jungles for study. "When we are with your people," Tusk said, "we will do it then. It will be an honor, a moment to cherish. But not now with these killers on our tail, out in this wilderness. It's not safe. We must be of sound mind."

"I am the one who first saw the orchid, so you have no such burden. But I must."

"They're rumored to create powerful visions," Tusk said. "Tricks of the mind."

"Not tricks," Aoh said. "Truths, if you wish to know them. I am lost, I was beginning to realize. I have forgotten the way of my people. Perhaps the visions will show us the way." Aoh plucked a petal and placed it in her mouth. Tusk instinctively moved to stop her but knew in his heart he couldn't put a hand to the woman. Aoh looked into his eyes and swallowed it down.

"Do you not realize," Tusk lamented, remembering the twinning runes, "that what you take into yourself, I now also take into me?"

Aoh groaned and her eyelids fell and she collapsed into Tusk's arms. He gently lowered her spellwracked body to the ground and then the rush hit the Reaper too like a chemical wave and swept his mind away to dimensions unknown. He reckoned with all the ugliness he had been made to witness in the course of his onerous existence. Life eating life in the wooded reaches behind his childhood cabin. The murder of his parents for their sheep. The brutal career of a Reaper. The slaughter of Edsohonet. The liquidation of Marrow. The grisly Painworks. And these very wastelands that boasted countless new and undiscovered forms of hungry and selfish life. Tusk noted vestigial hints of oceanic forms in the creatures out there and saw in his mind's eye the few survivors of whatever catastrophe took place ages ago wriggle from the cracks and slowly evolve into new forms more suited to their changed habitats. How many turns of the sun must it have taken for these permutations to occur? And what drove them? Was nature's own cutting edge the responsible engine, callously discerning between fit and unfit for survival? Was this an endless arms race atwixt all fauna and flora in which the losers were dead ends, unable to procreate and pass on their flaws, leaving only the mightiest and most cunning to mate and pass on their heritable traits? Each lifeform grew and changed over its existence, as did all life on the grandest of scales. It was as if life itself had a life all its own. The cascading thoughts ran on as Tusk regarded Aoh's comatose body. Could man and hobgoblin share some common ancestor eons before their environs split them into two species and turned them into what they were today? Did they share the same blood, tied together in some lost primordial echo, a distant knot of mutation?