REAPERS - Book Two: The Hunger and the Sickness

46

Blacwin peered through his spyglass from the steep back of an ancient cataract where once a great waterfall raged. He and his Team 3 comrades observed the hobgoblin camp through the purgatorial gloom of the far hinterlands as the wasters recovered from the previous night's raid. The sandmen gathered their corpses and increased their patrols but by then their efforts were in vain for skilled Reapers needed to strike once and only once. Blacwin observed the enemy as they returned to their routines with their black eyes cast over their shoulders in fear and anticipation. The gobs soon went back to their digging. It seemed the zealots were not seeking some sort of religious artifacts or sorcerous secrets or toothfaced idol below the sands. They were extracting gigantic bones, the fossils and remains of sea beasts. Midwives to the rebirthing of ancient terrible dead. The Reapers watched the hobgoblin caravans that transported the great bones pull onto another of their great roadways, but this one had seemingly been built more for utility and transport than whatever witchery those other runed channels had been part of. To Blacwin's knowledge the Nation had yet to comprehend the meaning of those massive sigils carved into the sandscape. Why had this capable team been sent to retrieve captured troops in the Hinterlands while a threat of such unknown magnitude loomed in the Outer wastes? He understood that the Reapers left no men behind, but wasn't their greater charge to protect society from the calamitous forces always hammering and sniffing and clawing at its door? It seemed the leadership was either incompetent or uncaring, and Blacwin knew not which was the more damning.

The commandos kept to the hills and that was proven wise for soon they saw more hobgoblin soldiers and support units traversing the dusty road's length escorting great covered wagons of ominous intent. The members of Team 3 took great care in staying hidden and silent. To be discovered would be to die, or worse. The wasters and their vessels all bristled with bone and tusk. Together they were a quilled serpent that urged through the open wild.

In time the Reapers rose over another hill and saw in broad display the bizarre explanation for the heightened activity in this remote zone and the destination for the great ancient carcasses: Gargantuan nightmarish structures were being erected by cord and muscle into the ruddy sky by the sandmen. The skeletal constructs were held aloft by lengths of taut rope and rickety scaffolds upon which slaves and laborers and engineers braved their deadly trades. Floating globes of light illuminated the dusty air, brought forth by weird song that issued from great hollowed horns held to the pierced lips of sorcerers. The colossal skeletons of sea leviathans dug from the earth were reassembled upon the scaffolds in nonsense fashion, beaks and fins and stingers and tails arranged into new and mystifying forms. As an experienced animalist Vulture could see in a glance these were not the proper configurations of these bones. Perhaps the constructs were being built as religious effigies to their lesser gods, those of the earth instead of the sun. Great morbid idols to kneel under as worshippers broke their bodies at their calcified feet.

That theory was laid to waste when, with a sick kneading of his gut, Blacwin saw one of the abominations move its skull. He watched in horror as the great krakenoid took one awkward and imperfect lurch and startled up more dust. Two sorcerous controllers sat in the cavity of a monstrous beak at the front of the construct's weaponized head. The hobgoblins had created these mammoth amalgamations that walked on long and spindly legs of runed krakenbone for obvious dreadful aim, the purpose of war. The things had been roused and lashed together and given animation with sorcery not unlike that which had been used by Skelen to power his rotting dead but brought here to heinous and awful proportion. An arachnoid war machine snorted a breath of fire. Blacwin's instincts bade him turn away his eyes and flee. He could not. He was transfixed by the scale of the mad pageantry he witnessed in this unholy factory of hell-machines as his mind played unstoppable visions of entire Nation townships laid to waste in the shadows of those towering deathwalkers.