Jinx kept his secret lab in the cellar of his brownstone on Battery Lane. Here he'd stashed the stolen tome and conducted his forbidden research, experimenting on frogs and toads he'd bought in some back alley from an old haggard who seemed to be wholly spun from rags. Presumably most of her customers bought the small animals for food but the rune man had other designs. Consulting Skelen's necromantic book, Jinx carved runes into the specimens' tiny legs and warty backs and soft, white membranous underbellies. He'd made good progress in good time. Got the undead toads and frogs to leap and stop on command—but he'd not perfected his runecraft yet. At times the creatures would reanimate on their own volition. Or refuse to stop when he uttered the phrase that should, if properly articulated, still the bodies of the risen amphibians.

An abrupt knock-knock at his front door. His concentration faltered. Jinx snapped from the trance. He often fell into that hypnotic state down there where it got quiet as a coffin and the book's teachings cast their spells. Who could it be at the threshold? The Reaper had shied away from social pursuits thanks to his newfound obsession. He never entertained guests of late, particularly at this hour. Many of his old friends and flames had simply vanished during his time out in the field with Team 3, swept away to serve by sword or worse. Most of his acquaintances were other students of thaumaturgy, a dangerous occupation. The 'Torchers,' so the Diluvian Inquisitors were called for reasons obvious especially those who burned at their pyres, had made many sweeps of the Nations' halls of study, rounding up those undesirables they felt might be dabbling too eagerly in the forbidden. Or at least that had served as the Diluvians' excuse to silence those with whom they did not see eye to eye. Jinx no longer mixed with women, either. He had become lost to the necronomicon at the expense of all else. More seductive than smite, that water of gods. Soon his teeth would unfasten and his flesh would rot. Jinx knew this, but still went on. The Truth was worth the price. Same old story, told again. He would fall. He knew but did not care. Perhaps the secrets to be found within would save him in the end. Let his body crumble. The soul lived on.

The knocks came again and with more force. Voices shouted but Jinx couldn't make out the words. He quickly slammed shut the book and shoved it into a trunk which he frantically locked with trembling hands. He crisply spoke the arcane word to stop the motion of the reanimated frogs. All but one ceased their twitching and hopping in their cage. The pounding at his door went on. Jinx spoke the sorcerous word again and finally the last frog stilled.

Jinx shoved the cage under the desk and covered it with a black cloth and went up the stairs and through the trapdoor into the main hall of his home. His legs ached as he climbed thanks to the hit they had taken in the arcane blast that had killed Rancent in Fort Nothing and consigned Jinx to a desk job at the Triad until he could, if ever, recover. This and other previous injuries—to include the groin wound he'd taken in Krakenbone—was a prime reason Jinx sought necromancy's secrets at all. Perhaps therein laid a way to forever avail himself of physical pain or injury. Could the sciences taught within help heal and animate the living as well as the dead? All the killing Jinx had seen in his career as a Reaper also played its part in his mad desire to understand death and perhaps find a way to somehow conquer it. He closed the trapdoor that led into the cellar and it blended perfectly with the woodwork of the floor. He slid a rug over the space.

Jinx gently crept to the front by way of shadow, a Reaper to the marrow, and peered through the window as the knocks and voices clamored outside. His heart skipped a beat when his eyes caught sight of the figures lingering in the rain's gloom. The Diluvian officers in long wet coats knocked again with authoritative fists. "We know you are in there, Reaper!" barked one. "Throw wide your door!"

He reminded himself that he was a Reaper and that was enough to reclaim his nerves. The mage stilled his shaking. He'd faced worse. The hard knocking came again.

"Patience!" Jinx yelled. "My limbs ache from wounds of war." He got to the door and pulled it open.

The head Diluvian officer sauntered in and flashed a badge that displayed a shield emblazoned with the angry face of a dragon. "I am Inquisitor Wral and this is an inspection of your domicile." The two enforcers followed their boss inside. Opened and slammed cabinet doors, overturned furniture, rifled through drawers. The Torchers all wore high black boots and long black coats slick with rain. Swords at each of their hips.

"Why did you take so long to answer?" asked Wral.

"The same blast that fucked my legs," said Jinx, "made me half-deaf to boot. But I don't mind it so much when my mother stops in."

This got a wry smile from Wral. Jinx pondered the cause for this late interruption. At his security clearance level as a Reaper and employee of the Triad he was subject to such invasions, but he had not been scrutinized since his return to Camshire and thought he had nothing to fear. The recent bombings by anarchist mages had caused the Diluvian machine to crack down harder. Some even claimed the people in power had orchestrated the bombings themselves to advance the reach of their draconian powers and justify their own hawkish ways.

Rooster had warned him to expect scrutiny from their enemies, political and otherwise. Was this some part of those games? Perhaps the commander had even made the recommendation Jinx had asked for, a chance to meet again with Skelen and pry his mind, and this was the first step in the Diluvians' vetting process. What had Jinx been thinking to work his black craft right here in the house his employers knew he lived in? His obsession had eclipsed his sense of caution. He was no more than a smite addict. Now it might be too late.

There was a very subtle thump from below. Scissors, thought Jinx. The frogs. The unliving specimens were spontaneously animating again. Jinx coughed to try and cover the sound. All three Diluvians sharply looked up and stepped back.

"Are you sick?" inquired Wral. The Black Rot and other plagues had been vicious that season and the worry on the faces of the Diluvians was clear. Some pockets of the city had been nearly decimated by pestilence in recent weeks. There was no understanding the Rot. The disease seemed to choose its victims almost at random. Officials claimed it was not contagious. It just happened. Though one could never be sure, and many a charlatan made a fine crown on selling wards and trinkets said to keep the Rot at bay. Wral had no interest in finding out himself. He had seen what happened to its hosts. Their blood turned into curdled pitch and the eyes went black and then finally came sweet merciful death. The contagion had been around for as long as anyone could remember, though rarely had it ever been this bad. People blamed the hobgoblins for the Rot. Saw the similarities in the black blood and eyes. Perhaps there was something to that logic, despite the protestations of the Anatoli.

"It's a simple cold, I'm certain," said Jinx. The Reaper believed he could hear more of the thumping below, fearing it was one of the disobedient dead frogs. But he couldn't be sure the subdued racket was not just the imaginings of his own paranoid mind. "The weather's been—" He faked another cough. "—quite damp." A thought occurred to him. An opportunity to shake these men, to urge them on their way. "But then... my cousin did die from a horrible case of sickworm not long ago," Jinx faked spasms as he pretended to struggle through the words. "Perhaps it would be best... if no one was near me."

Sidelong glances between the unwelcome guests. "Then perhaps we should simply have you placed in quarantine," said Wral.

"I live here alone," said Jinx. "This essentially is a quarantine... if I take no guests."

Inquisitor Wral smirked at the hint and took another final look around. "We have our eye on you, Reaper. We know you rune men are weak-willed and like to dabble in things best left untouched."

Wral led his Torchers to the door. The Inquisitor stopped at the threshold. A thought had come to him, it seemed. Jinx tensed. "Dryad root and willicker," suggested Wral. "For the cold. My grandmother's formula. Works like witchery." On this last word his eyes landed firmly on Jinx's. A moment they lingered. Jinx knew they smelled it on him and this was not done. And then the Torchers were gone, their boot steps rapping on the walkstones as they made their way through the drizzle back to their stagecoach drawn by dark huffing beasts of woe.

— • —

He waited until he was sure they were gone. Jinx pulled the rug away and ran back down the stairs to his cellar. Brought that cage of frogs up to his hearth and dumped them all hurriedly into the fire. As the creatures' runes were singed away their necromantic bindings became erratic and their bodies twitched before the glyphs were fully snuffed. The deadlings finally grew still for the burning. Jinx considered consigning the tome to the same fate. He held the filthy relic in his hands, his face and hair mad in the firelight. But he could not be its undoer. The book had its diabolical knives in him, a power of which he was greatly aware but had no means to sway. It was as if the thing had a mind, one that eclipsed his own. Jinx could not destroy the necronomicon—but it very well might end him.

— • —

The Reapers lined the surviving hobgoblins up by the road of packed earth and spun waste-glass the workers had themselves just laid. Thirteen moved down the line and executed each of the gobs in brutal fashion, cruelly jamming his bayonet into their faces. The man was a tutor in all ways to die, his victims the students.

Blacwin watched with disgust. It was his nature to place himself in the boots of those who suffered, and not those who inflicted harm. Blacwin imagined himself being one of those poor doomed sandmen. Hearing the sick smack as Thirteen did each of your fellows in... coming closer for you with each murder in the sick array. And before there is time to bring to closure any reckoning with guilt or god it is your turn. Thirteen above you in his smirking skullface painted with your own peoples' blood. That long unforgiving blade drawn back and then coming toward you with nihilistic thrust and no precision to its callous aim. The feel of the hard steel giving your anatomy no quarter, wedging between cheekbone and jaw, grinding through gristle and bone or blasting away a section of your cranium through which your final thoughts would leak. Vulture too participated in the butchery and he was a man of the hatchet. Blacwin shuddered and turned away from the atrocious scene and walked over to Nail who was examining the great fuming furnace that hung from the back of the hobgoblins' leaning forge-wagon.

"Those men take too much pleasure in it," Blacwin said.

Nail continued to survey the carnage. "Long as they get 'em dead I don't much care." Team 3 had done their work well and so their leader was satisfied and proud. In a span of minutes nearly all the roadmakers had perished or surrendered—guards and laborers and, despite Riddle's request, the overseer too, struck down by Jasha's riflebow in haste as the gob emerged from the main tent screaming words of sorcery that brought more angry swarms of locusts from the wastes. The pestiferous bugs bit at the Reapers but thanks to Vulture's warning to cover themselves they were spared much agony. Upon the plaguemancer's death the commotion halted as quickly as it had begun and the insects lazed back into the lifeless fringes. The Reapers picked through the remains and the pickings were few. The wasters' food was nothing a human would wish on his most hated foe. Their weapons were wicked but primitive. Their clothing was rough, chitinous. Built for the wearer's discomfort with barbs and tines on the inside and out. There was little of use.

Riddle emerged from the main wagon with leathery scrolls in his hands. "Boys, take a look at this." He dropped the inked hides onto the mudbrick road and rolled them out. Nail stepped closer. The scripts were fashioned from animal skins, perhaps human, and had branded upon them a series of glyphs that meant nothing to the officer.

"Disturbing." Riddle knelt and ran his fingertips over the markings. "These aren't roads the piss-drinkers are building. I can't believe it. They're runes. Gigantic runes that stretch for miles." He looked down the long roadway the hobgoblins had built. It looked as if it led to the very end of things. "The sandmen are carving an enormous network of sorcerous glyphs into the sands."

"Bleedin' stars," said Nail. "Dare I ask to what end?"

"It's anyone's guess," said Riddle. "It would take more time and more minds to decipher their ultimate purpose. This is just a fraction of what must be their greater designs. We need to get these plans back to Camp Nothing, quickly."

The Reapers' imaginations ran amok as they worked through all the nightmare scenarios. Were the wasters building some sort of doomsday weapon meant to blow Camshire into a smoking ruin? Constructing a gate to some other place from which the wasters would summon a daemonic army of extradimensionals, if such old tales were to be believed? Whatever the mad purpose this massive network of runes might serve, the Nation had to be warned.

— • —