REAPERS - Book Two: The Hunger and the Sickness

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When Dimia's consciousness returned the first thing to greet her was the stench of her own vomit admixed with that of the sewers and the dead. Mercifully there was some light from torches and melting candles placed on broken ledges and inserted into cracks. Dimia got her sorts. The trauma she'd suffered. The physical ordeal of riding under Bramble's arm as he carried her deeper under the city through a forever of darkness. The mental anguish of not knowing what the golem's intentions were. Her captor remained silent through the journey except for its animal grunting and panting. Dimia emptied her stomach many times along the way as she faded in and out of consciousness. Her head throbbed and she felt near death. And was ready for it, if that was Fate's choice. She welcomed an end to this suffering. She wanted to sleep forever but felt cursed with unrest as if she were herself one of Skelen's rotters.

The chamber they had arrived in was slanted and shattered and dripped with slime and shitwater. Hints of ancient symbology blanketed the eroded stone. Structures with purpose. Urns and fallen shelves. A ruin of a ruin. Old catacombs shattered by the recent rupture that had rocked the capital. Dimia's tutor Yulis had taught her that the metropolis perpetually sunk and its citizens constantly built new structures atop the old ones. Camshire was deep with cities, one stacked atop the other. There were whispers of whole communities that lurked down here in these reaches abandoned by society, those who wished to go unseen.

Dimia gasped for through her adjusting eyes she saw that there were dead bodies lined against the walls. All the revenants stared at her in silence. Some had shields and weapons, ancient soldiers prodded from their subterranean graves. Others were simple dead, commoners given unlife and robbed of their eternal rest. One of these stood at the center of the room in funereal wear that was smeared with dung and slime and blood. It was the thin pale boy she had seen at her window before Bramble had come for her.

"Put her down," the cadaver said in a hoarse voice that rattled with loose teeth and decayed cords and a disobedient tongue.

Bramble did as commanded and released Dimia. She sunk to the wet floor, her legs numb. The girl coughed badly and felt a stake of pain in her chest. The pervasive sickness of this place was working itself into her. "Who are you?" Dimia managed. But she somehow knew in her heart who this was even if he did not bear the man's face.

"It is Skelen," the corpse answered. "But this body before you... is only my voice."

Movement above. Dimia looked up to see a figure step out onto a crumbling balcony. It was a face she had longed to again confront and watch the life slip from as she drove a knife into his breast. Her most hated enemy, her nemesis, slayer of her family and people—Skelen the Stitcher. His true mouth did not move. He only wore a thin smile upon his lips to accompany the voice carrying from the undead Speaker at the room's center. Skelen was using the corpse as a mouthpiece like some twisted ventriloquist.

"I still live," the Speaker said. "But I need another's tongue... to speak with. My captors... took my own." At this Skelen held up a pale hand and mimed scissors snipping before his open mouth to demonstrate the removal of his tongue. The necromancer was charading his own words that were spoken by another's body's mouth. Sorcery was madness, Dimia concluded. The warnings were right. "Perhaps the Diluvians... pickled it like a pig's... as your father would have done had he gotten his way, along with his conspirators in Marrow."

To add to the surreal scene, Skelen raised up his arms to reveal why his hand had appeared so oddly white. "The Diluvian butchers also... took my hands," said the Speaker. "So I had to get... new ones." Skelen opened and closed his fingers. His hands had indeed been hacked off—only to be replaced by new ones, stolen from some cadaver and stitched onto the mage's singed stumps. "It is a world... of butchers. These Diluvians... the swinesmiths... me."