After miles upon miles of trekking deeper into the Hinterlands Team 3 rose a hill that finally put Catatonia in their sights. The Reapers approached the town as they would any place of unknown character—with planning and caution. They had been traveling parallel to the main road between Vacancy and Catatonia and now went further from it and came at the town from its side. Nail sent Blacwin ahead to appraise the scene solo for he was the quietest and, like Scratch, worked best alone. Had another man been with Blacwin in Vacancy, the scouts might have been spotted by the invading wasters. Instead Blacwin had managed to slip away and warn the approaching team. Nail had also seen Blacwin's intervention between Vulture and Thirteen in their game of mock execution and recognized a sense of fairness in him that was rare in this damnable world. There was a shade of men like Halo and Tusk in Blacwin. Those with hearts. As Nail watched the scout disappear over the next hill he reflected on the dawning prospect that there was credence to the theory that persistently intruded on his mind regarding the fledgling Reaper. He had witnessed signs he couldn't ignore. The extraordinary senses, the lightness of sleep and step, the low heart rate, the slowness of healing. All signs that Blacwin had the blood of an ylf. Did the scout even know this about himself? He must. And if Nail's suspicions were true... what then? Ylfs were banned from serving in the Nation forces. Considered enemies by most, to include Nail himself—though he of course recognized that Blacwin could be an exception. If the soldier was indeed a 'taint' and were to be exposed, the Nation likely would not trust him to live. Reapers knew too much.

— • —

The scythes and sickles and sawblades claimed to have been wielded by the First Reapers in their frontier war against the ylfs were now displayed on the walls of an enormous wing of the Triad, a vast triangular complex that stood somber and proud in the heart of Camshire's ruling district. Each of the building's three arms was dedicated to a different aspect of Diluvian rule over the city and its Nation—the Shield, the State, and the Coin. At its center where those wings joined was a vast three-sided chamber. There the high triumvirate of Ministers regularly convened and discussed and voted on the country's greatest matters. As with most Diluvian structures the Triad was plain and solid in its build, unlike the Julian palace and the ornate spires and temples and other such examples of exquisite craftsmanship that riddled the surrounding wards. The fascists' newly erected buildings were feverishly constructed seemingly overnight after the party's seizure of power, on top of entire impoverished neighborhoods that had themselves been deadened like those northern wildlands to make way for the new. The Diluvian architecture was formidable. Sober gray walls of flat stone and squared windows and undecorated metal doors. Function trumped form. The only ornaments to be seen on the Triad's exterior were the icons over the entrance to each wing bearing a symbol that matched its domain. A coin. A star. A shield. And the stark black and white flags that perfectly distilled the Diluvian view of the world. Law and chaos. Good and evil. Patriot and traitor. Us and them. Nothing between.

Jinx quietly worked in a blast-proof chamber deep below the Hall of the Shield with two other rune-ciphers named Vail and Nikolai. The walls of this subterranean and windowless room were carpeted with the skins of dead raptors that had been splayed wide, their wings outstretched, in order to display the hobgoblin runes on their backs. The thaumaturgists used strange geometric tools to measure the fine sorcerous calligraphy of the enemy and transcribed their decoded messages onto scrolls spread out on great flat tables. Jinx and his coworkers employed arcane compasses for the drawing of vectors and amplituhedrons and elaborate bronze sextants designed to navigate projected geometries that occupied thought alone and not true space. This was dangerous work, considering what had happened to Rancent at Fort Nothing and other rune men who had been too careless in their trade. One slip and the wrong ward could be triggered, sending all three men in this subterranean vault and their clandestine work to oblivion. But the runists had grown more careful and methodical in their treatment of such things. They now better knew the hobgoblins' arcane tricks. Jinx had even concocted a countermeasure that would involve rewiring the runes on the birds to have them detonate when they returned to their sorcerous masters but the Reaper could not bring this plan to his superiors for they were all forbidden to create new runework under the rules of the Covenant. It was dangerous to even mention such ideas to the wrong individual. The Nation runists were only permitted to destroy and deactivate the glyphs their enemies used. Their foes, however, cared nothing for treaties and covenants and fully embraced the dark powers made available to them by the arcane laws of nature or their gods. Jinx believed the Nation armies needed to carefully defy that treaty themselves if they were to have a chance at succeeding against their sorcerous enemies but he had to be careful about raising such possibilities. Not only did the Covenant forbid such talk, the Diluvians and the masses were fiercely unforgiving when it came to the use of those outlawed arts.

Beyond the many applications of war, there was the excitement of discovery itself, the sheer wonder of unlocking the universe's secret codifications. It was as if sorcery were the language of reality's architects as they attempted to communicate through the ages and planes. New theories were emerging that described an inner gearworks that drove existence itself, complexities that only the highest thinkers had the minds to grasp. The Nation's intellectual elite had begun to suspect hidden patterns behind the constructs of flesh and bone and all other things, a secret calculus that informed all matters of life—a perspective in direct conflict with the traditional accounts of seers and priests with their antiquated myths of demiurges addicted to creation and destruction in equal measure and of ancestors risen again as gods after their souls were reforged in the stars.

The theorists and magisters were forbidden to practice the lessons in bending reality that emerged from their clandestine studies. Permitted to only understand, but never practice, for the good of the Nation. Cursed forever to observe and never indulge. Even that balanced tradition was now under threat for the Diluvians would suffer no mention of anything outside their strict dogma and the fascists promised a gruesome death to any intellectuals or freethinkers they deemed as dangerous to their vision of order. Jinx's mind returned to the brutal fate Skelen had met for such transgressions. He imagined the feeling of having his own tongue yanked out and his hands chopped off and singed at the stumps. The prospect of being tongueless and handless for the rest of his days. However, the Reaper understood the widespread fear of knowledge, particularly in light of sorcery's dark potentials. No one man should possess such power that allowed a single actor to snuff dozens of lives with just a few etched lines and incantations—no matter that every angle and syllable must be perfectly executed. The proof of sorcery's heinous toll was written in volumes of blood. Jinx's own granduncle had spoken of the atrocities of the wars before the Arcanum finally convened and drafted the armistice that banned all sorcery in civilized nations, and the old fables warned of much worse. Civilization depended on a respect for those ancient warnings. But humanity could not simply bury its head in the sand. Their enemies had no respect for treaties and covenants.

Jinx's thoughts returned to the teachings in the tome locked up in that crypt. When he peered into its pages it was if angels spoke into his ear, sharing the truths of the cosmos. It strained his faculties to comprehend the codex's deeper meanings. He began to suspect the people who had written its pages, the Khrem, had brains that far outstripped those of man. A new idea struck him. What if it were not their brains these ancients had relied on to calculate their thaumaturgical formulae? What if they had created other brains to do their higher thinking for them, employed minds greater than their own? Skelen's golem had a consciousness and it was created using nothing more than what could be found in that book. What was it Jinx had been missing? He was deflated at the notion that he may not have the intellectual prowess to wrestle with the book's deepest secrets, and that even Skelen, who had mastered it over many years, never scraped deeper than the surface of its profound teachings. The necromancer had mentioned eating psychedelic fungi during his consumption of the tome's theorems and axioms. Perhaps that was what Jinx needed for that next leap in understanding to occur. How could he get his hands on such drugs? Beggar Bridge? Perhaps some old friends he knew, ones he hadn't spoken with in years. It would be strange and suspicious to suddenly turn up on their doorsteps looking for psychotropics, but it may be worth the risk.

The other thing that lurked in the back of Jinx's mind but was refused acknowledgment by the front was the fact that the civilization that wrote that tome was dead. The Khrem were gone, and their sorcery had not saved them. Perhaps it had even destroyed them. Was some threat waiting to get out of those pages? Jinx guessed that the odds were low that this tome was special. There were stories upon stories of powerful artifacts left behind by the ancients across the world that were best left buried.

"Did you hear?" asked Nikolai as they broke for lunch in the Triad mess hall. "Vail is getting married. Again."

"Didn't you just wed that spicer's daughter?" Jinx asked as the three sat down with their food. The talk bored him but he had to maintain appearances.

"We're marrying again," said Vail as he tossed a satyr sprout in his mouth. "But this time around it is to be a Diluvian ceremony. Vows to country and wife. Ginevra's family history has finally been cleared and registered by the officials. She's now as pure in the Nation's eyes as she is in mine. As are her sisters, too, by relation, if you'd like to be introduced."

Jinx declined the offer. He had no interest in such pursuits, instead working to retreat as far as possible from social concerns to continue his study of the tome undisturbed. He felt a steady awareness of the sand slipping through the hourglass now that the book hinted at promises of eternal life. He would perhaps have to trade many delights of the flesh such as food and fucking for immortality—but his mind had already been reprogrammed not to care.

— • —

Blacwin saw a gaggle of structures at Catatonia's fringe. Barns and silos. Women worked the fields and tended the animals. It seemed a typical farming town on the prairie, much as Vacancy must have been before earning the irony of its name when the warthirsty sandmen came. But something was off. Blacwin realized what it was.

"There are no men," the scout said when he returned to his teammates. "All I saw were women."

"Their men must have all gone off to war," ventured Riddle.

"Bolts and thunder," said Vulture. "Ain't we lucky boys."

Thirteen spat. "Just don't let Vulure have first go if you ever want your shot."

Nail opted to approach the town directly, from the road, as friendlies. Jasha and Blacwin kept to the hills, ready to let bolts fly if needed. The other men made their way forward. They were spotted by the town's watchers who sent riders to greet the Reapers. As the trio rode closer the commandos saw that all three approachers were female. Two had their own crossbows ready to fire and the middle horsewoman kept her weapons sheathed and holstered. They all wore clothes of firm make, of hide and leather and fur and woolpack, a special sort of armor against the fickle elements in this extreme corner of human occupation.

"We're here on Nation business," said Nail, stopping at a safe distance. "Were told to seek out 'the Gray Mother.'" This was the code name Barda had provided for their contact.

"Follow us," said the head rider who said nothing more. The women turned and led the Reapers into town.

Catatonia paused itself and watched the Reapers enter. Faces in the windows, stopped brooms, stilled washbuckets. Again, all those who took any interest in the newcomers were women, save for a smattering of young boys and girls. A few men could be seen wandering about. They took no interest in the visitors, only ambled aimlessly and drooled into their beards. The Reapers' escorts took them to a gathering house at the town's center and led them inside.

— • —