REAPERS - Book Two: The Hunger and the Sickness

39

Aoh had been right. It was worse than the painworks. Worse than anything Tusk had ever felt. Nerves only ran so deep. Samkra reached deeper. The pain was so strong it blinded him with a brilliant white light. He understood why the sandmen believed this experience was to touch the very face of Xul. The concoction burned into his being and pinched every fiber of the fabric that composed his form. All of existence was an inferno that broke Tusk's soul into a million slivers of glass and somehow, minute by minute and hour by hour, the soulfire grew ever stronger and more agonizing. If Tusk could see or move he would have found a knife and ended it all. Stopping this pain now would be worth all of his remaining days.

Aoh had been right in other ways as well. To come out on the other side was to be stronger, to know life better. And although Tusk was not convinced he had been touched by god he sure as stars felt like a god himself when he finally snapped out of the maelstrom and after the pain subsided like a throbbing tide. When the Reaper finally walked out of that tent the next day he found he had not been bodily harmed in any way. There were no lingering aches, there was no loss of motor control. Tusk was light of step, buoyant, alert. The mere absence of the pain he had not long ago been steeped in made him feel like a new man.

He was also seen as a new man by the Kashto. They honored him in the next night's ceremony with a horn fashioned from the tusk of a long-dead elder. Fitting, given his Reaper name. The elders told him that in the case of last distress he should sound the horn. Any member of the Kashto or their allies that heard its call would come to his aid, and if all who heard the sound were enemies or predators they would at least soon come put him out of his misery.

The Kashto taught Tusk to throw a spear with an atlatl and took him on excursions to hunt. Though the animalist felt more welcome and accepted into the tribe now he was always aware of the distrustful eyes of a few. Chief among the aloof and cold, still, was Aoh's brother Uata. The buck was emerging as a leader, someone who might be groomed to be an elder if he ever saw such an age, and he gave Tusk every disadvantage he could whether it be in sport or labor or his cut of the kill. Tusk knew this was Uata's way of making the Reaper earn his place at their side, to pay his dues, and that the sandman was being protective of his sister and people. It was the role of the younger men to distrust outsiders for the protection of their tribe. If Tusk planned to stay long, he would perhaps say something, challenge Uata on his misgivings during one of their ritualistic airing of grievances and settle the matter. The Reaper had taken his samkra and proven himself in front of Uata again and again. But Tusk would be leaving soon and he saw no reason to cause a stir among the Kashto. He would miss these folk, he thought, as he sat and ate the thretch that had died that morning at the tip of Uata's spear. His eyes went to Aoh, whom he would miss most of all. A cauldron of emotion suddenly took him by the gut, feelings that had been locked up from even before his capture, before even Scratch's death and the horrors of Edsohonet and Marrow. Those things were terrible indeed, but they could coexist with the heady stirrings of hope and love that still clung to life in Tusk's breast and even threatened to overtake his being. He watched these people, who would be spit on and jeered at and even murdered by the masses of his own Nation, and saw they truly loved one another.

Tusk also learned that the Kashto would rather die than join the Zhjaki, the empire thriving in the southern deadlands that embraced a more fervent and popular denomination of their faith. The Reaper had heard accounts of human villages raiding their neighbors over some slight disagreement regarding particular interpretations of the stars and it seemed the hobgoblins shared the same divisions that pitted tribe against tribe. Tusk sensed a fear in these people's hearts, particularly through his spiritual link to Aoh... they knew the Zhjaki Empire was growing at an alarming pace and becoming ever more fanatical in its drive to bring the world to utmost holocaust and awaken their cosmic god. It was only a matter of time before the fascist zealots came to annex these long-forgotten territories into their dominion—or the Nation sought to make it a stronghold.