REAPERS - Book Two: The Hunger and the Sickness

37

Tusk and Aoh reached the shore of the Dry Sea and walked along its dusty bank. They had journeyed for many days and nights and had begun to run low on supplies. The vast beige plain humbled them as they walked what felt like the very edge of infinity. Aoh explained that the graceful horned thretch came here to the Dry Sea to die, as a rule, leaving their bones scattered across the parched bed—a fact that Tusk presumed had likely inspired the particular myth of the thretch-god Tekem that legend held had died on these very shores. A bag at his hip held material things. Dried clippings from the scrabby vegetation of this greedy earth and pryings from the corpses of those beings that skittered and slithered cross this acheronian wild. This meager collection he kept for future record, if a future indeed waited for him at all.

Aoh prayed that she was correct in her memory of her people's routes and that nothing had changed in the years since she was sent away at a very young age to serve the empire's needs. She knew not what to expect from her tribesfolk once they did arrive. They would not recognize her but for the brand on her back. She'd been given the mark upon birth. At the mention of this Tusk remembered the burning on his own back during his psychedelic vision of rebirth thanks to the blood orchid. Perhaps he had been reliving Aoh's birth as well, on some mystical level, because of the twinning runes.

The Reaper and the bloodnurse saw the sacred Stones of Tekem jutting from the distant shore like the cuspids on a titanic sandman's jaw. The ring of time-worn monoliths marked the terminus Aoh's tribe would reach at the end their pilgrimage honoring the thretch-lord's fabled journey. The Reaper and the bloodnurse had beat the nomads there and now it was time to wait for their arrival. The duo had been contending with a death-march of their own, barely a living breath left in their bodies, when they reached that promised henge of stones. Tusk felt a final jolt of adrenaline at the sight and realized it was more his lover's excitement than his own. With restored vigor Aoh raced down the slope toward the holy grounds like a madwoman. Upon reaching the ceremonial stones she flung herself into the dirt, laughing wildly, and then she grew still and sighed and looked into the sky. Tusk walked to her side and collapsed there with her. "More lunar than a hatsmith," he said.

Aoh had only a vague memory of the Stones from her childhood before being carted off to Thajh to serve, but she recalled there had been a well nearby that cut deep into the earth where some last remnants of the dried sea still lingered. After some time of searching under the hellfaced sun across the scattered bones of the thretch who went to die upon that bitter patch ("So many," Tusk remarked upon seeing of the legion bleached and splintering dead), they found the hole and lowered a hollowed and treated skull into the vessel and brought forth an ochre water from the darkness. They each allowed themselves a mere sip to wet their mouths, careful to spit it back out without swallowing. They would sterilize and purify the rest before drinking it. Tusk set a fire with the help of the sun and a shard of sandglass and set the water for the boiling.

"We should find a place to hide in the hills," Tusk said, scanning the craggy rocks and boulders around the site. "Wait for your people's arrival from a place of safety."

"The safest place we can be is within that ring of stones," Aoh said. "My tribe considers the site sacred and are sworn to never shed blood inside its circle."

"Let us hope their tradition still holds," Tusk said.

Aoh walked back toward the monoliths. "In the safety afforded by this place, the custom is to sit and speak candidly about the tensions among the tribe. Once those were aired and solved without violence the festival would begin. There would be singing and dancing and feasting in the name of Tekem's spirit."

Tusk joined Aoh there and they camped and waited and survived—until one dark night they heard approaching voices and saw the flicker of torches. Sandfolk gowned in silk and leathers came chanting out of the desert on the backs of humped bactrians and approached the edge of the sacred henge. There they stopped when they noticed the strangers waiting for them at its center. Many of them drew their spears at the sight. In the darkness the collection of bodies seemed a single freakish beast adorned with feathers and thorns and eyes of flame, bristling with deadly tension.