When his shift ended Jinx collected his things and bade his coworkers a good night. Those in his position were subjected to full body searches when they entered and exited the Triad. When this unpleasant necessity was done Jinx took a coach to Camshire Cemetery and began his walk to the tomb where he could pick up his work as he had left it in the morning. He was thankful to live in these quieter wards of the city. The Reaper had heard the ramshackle blight on the far side of this cemetery had suffered from wave after wave of plagues and riots. He once enjoyed going into the seedier parts of town before the war, when he'd drink and carouse and feel immortal. Since his return he cared nothing for those things. Now he had a new obsession that eclipsed all others, the ambition for true immortality and not the pale illusion of it that youth had brought.

A mourner in a black coat slowly walked toward Jinx from the opposite direction, the stranger's boots clapping the stone path. As Jinx drew closer he realized he knew the man's face—it was one of the Diluvian Inquisitors who had visited his home with Wral. Jinx saw another figure step out from behind a monument of winged children beset upon by sculpted demonic dogs. The newcomer was another of Inquisitor Wral's underlings. But where was the officer himself? Jinx felt someone's breath at his neck. He had not heard the stranger's approaching steps. Perhaps they had been veiled by a cantrip. Wral whispered into his ear and the Reaper remembered the phrase from his studies, always written but never spoken. They called such spells 'lullabies,' designed to instantly put the listener to—

— • —

Sleep. Precious and fleeting. Cut short too soon. Tusk woke with a scream. Something was on his face. A strange tugging. The ranger put his hand to his skin and felt a smattering of small scabs that now covered half his skull like a fixture of barnacles on the hull of a boat. The things were smooth on their backs and ridged on their edges, not unlike the scales Tusk had seen on many a beast. The scabs were on his arm, too. The Reaper glanced at sleeping Aoh. She was sheathed in the things. Tusk stifled another shriek and tried to brush the clinging objects from her leg. Not one budged. The animalist was baffled in his panic. Were they plants, insects, fungi, lichen? Were they venomous or diseased? Again he was at a loss when it came to the life of the deeper wastes. Aoh stirred at her companion's prodding and her eyes opened. She smiled at the sight of Tusk's face despite the parasites that clung to his cheek.

"They're all over you," Tusk whispered frantically. He reached up and pulled at one of the objects that clung to his own flesh. It held, pulling skin, then came loose with the slight sting of removing a tick.

"Be calm," said Aoh. "We call them 'night scales.' Your home does not have them?"

Tusk examined the thing he had plucked from his face. Its suctioned and toothy mouth was at the center of an underside ringed with tiny roving legs. A chitinous back like a beetle's. The Reaper flung the insect deeper into the hole in which the duo had slept the night.

"They will not harm you. They are patient. Like..." Aoh searched for the word "...vulture. They wait, and only eat you once you're dead. If you are alive, you are safe. This was likely their home. We are the invaders here."

"It does hurt a little," said Tusk as he plucked another scale off.

"Such a child," Aoh said as she gently removed one from her own skin, and then another. "Some see them as a blessing. Each night scale, when removed... the sting is like a kiss from our god."

They helped each other clear their bodies of the bugs. Aoh was right, Tusk admitted to himself, these 'night scales' were no more than a nuisance. After the painworks this ritual was no true ordeal. "I suppose every sort of wilderness has its own scavengers and parasites and predators," said Tusk. "And I'll take these over a swarm of plain mosquitos any day." These unexplored lands held a fascinating host of new species, however disturbing, for the animalist to discover. The back of his mind began to turn with the realization that he could now, thanks to this unlikely savior, allow himself to hope again in some remote way. He began to envision himself leading an excursion team back into these wastes someday, equipped for survival and study. With enough thought perhaps he could sell it to the Nation as an expedition that could be of benefit to the war effort.

Deciding it better to travel at night, the unlikely couple quietly redressed and mounted their beast and set out for Xul's Fall. The wasteland was parched and wide but in a few days they expected to find a multifarious landscape busy with broken terrain of ancient reefs and kelpwoods that would offer better places to hide. Somewhere far beyond that was the Broken Range and then the roughlands where the human frontier gave way to the ylfwoods, forests as deep and unknown to man as the bottom of the sea. Tusk longed for the scent of wet earth and the sound of the wind in the leaves.

There was no longer any sign of the raptors above. As they traveled Aoh told Tusk of the horrors in the Painworks he had not himself witnessed. As a Reaper, he had been spared the worst of it for his captors planned to keep him alive and sane long enough to extract all of his secrets. But the other prisoners saw no such mercy. They were subjected to countless physical torments and vivisections of warped imagination but even worse than those were the emotional atrocities delivered upon them. Men were forced to eat feces while sitting inches away from fruits and meats just out of their chained reach. Women were made to give birth and then helplessly watch their own newborns be dismembered or starved to death before their pried eyes. Set-Satemi was keen on this new aspect of sadism, seeking out novel methods of increasing the quotient of suffering extracted from their victims, which he hoped could be put to wicked use in the war against darkness and man and quicken the world's rebirth into paradise.

"You must remember," said Aoh, "to my people, these are holy acts. They see this as the best for all living things. Many tribes believe that there is only so much suffering in the world to be had, and that in time it will all be spent up, exhausted—and then paradise will come for all living things. The Zjhaki take this prophecy to the extreme. They believe they will get us all to heaven faster."

"Do you believe this?" asked Tusk.

"I have always struggled." Aoh was well-spoken in her own tongue and many of her words were unknown to Tusk, but in the light of context he clumsily parsed her meaning. "My own people, not of this place, believed other things. And you have reminded me it is not the only way. The twinning of our souls allowed me to feel what you feel, see the way you see."

"How many other prisoners are in Thajh?" Tusk asked.

"Hundreds, perhaps thousands. It has been an endless stream ever since the wars began."

"We need get back to my people," said Tusk, "and tell them of this place."

"And what of me?" asked Aoh. "Will I be accepted among your kind?"

"Their hatred runs strong. We have to be careful." Tusk did not want to consider his next thought but knew it might be the only way. "If I must return to my country alone, is there somewhere you can hide for a while? Is there anyone you can trust?"

"My tribe, the Kashto," said Aoh. "But it has been many years since I last saw them. Ours was a nomadic people. Our patterns of movement complex and unknown to outsiders. Even I cannot be sure if we will find them. The course was inspired by the legends we passed down from grandsire to grub, following the paths of great heroes and monsters, using the stars as signposts. But I do still recall much." She looked heavenward and pointed with her slender hand. "If I remember true, at this season they will be walking the Path of Ankhta, queen of scorpions, along the sun's anvil, until they reach a bottomless hole, said to be her lair." Aoh's finger moved along some invisible line tracing constellations in the stars that crowded the dizzying night sky as she remembered. "And... yes... there Ankhta will bite the heel of wandering Tekem, graceful thretch-father, who limped to the shores of the Dry Sea and lapped up the last of its waters before dying at its banks. There the pilgrimage will lead my people along his final poisoned path and to the shores of the Dry Sea. It all comes back to me. There is a ring of stones there. And a well to drink from. There, the shamans said, a great salamander ate from Tekem's bones and the journey continued across the dead ocean... and so it goes, in full circle, year after year, until the pilgrims are back where they started high atop the Great Raptor's roost and there the path begins anew."

"The cycle of life," Tusk said. He could appreciate the notion and the animalistic symbology used by Aoh's people. Fiction or no, there was no doubt that this religion had served the Kashto and other tribes well, allowing them to carve out lives in these hostile lands. Tusk thought again of hidden patterns, that perhaps these traditions had taken shape and adapted over time to match ideal weather cycles, animal migrations, and other natural boons—that an invisible arithmetic drove the true workings behind illusory things like senses and cultures. But he brought no such notions to his tongue. He didn't want to complicate the mood. Aoh was happy in her mythology. Tusk was miserable to the bone. Perhaps the lie was again the better way.

A warm wind gusted across the scraggy dunes and whipped their clothes into living things bothered by the waking. The balmy air was welcome but not the dust that came with it. Tusk and Aoh held scarves to their mouths and squinted to see and went on in silence through the storm. Along the way Tusk put his Reaper training to use to inform their trajectory across the landscape, using paths that would provide best cover and be less likely to host predators and pests. They wove their way around buzzing hives the size of manor houses and sidestepped pits from which stared manifold eyes. Tusk scoured the land for things to eat and with which to build a crude arsenal of weapons. He fashioned a petrified and hollowed reed into a blowpipe and made darts for it from the cured tails of scorpions. He filed a knife from bone and made toxins to coat it with from juices he carefully squeezed from the blistering warts of a spiny toad fished from the cracks of the earth. He dropped a sliver of ore into a pool of wrung animal blood to serve as a compass. He was at home again, wresting life from the wild. He sieved and purified some water. Raised to be chivalrous, he first offered some to Aoh. She sipped and gasped and pulled the skin from her mouth. Put her hand to her lips in shock as her onyx eyes widened.

"What is it?" Tusk rushed to her side, ignoring his own pain.

Aoh swooned. "Clean water. I have never tasted it before. We deny ourselves that pleasure. It is so..." She could only think of one word her kind knew to describe the sensation. "...sinful."

"Wait till you wet your lips with some fine honeywine," Tusk said. He grew excited at the notion of introducing Aoh to all the pleasures the world offered, forbidden no more. He himself had allowed no thoughts of such things and salivated at the prospect of again indulging in his senses once they were through this ordeal. "Or, better, until you get a taste of Shroomer's roasted pheasant."

"'Shroomis rowstead phessint,'" Aoh parroted. She knew not one of those words. "Your language sounds so strange." She drank again and looked at the waterskin with wonder, pondering her newfound liberation. They had each grown comfortable speaking in their own native language in a volley of two tongues. Each knew enough to parse and understand the meaning of the other. "Our religion teaches us that if one ever catches herself feeling pleasure, she must immediately take penance. I still feel I should throw sand into my eyes in atonement."

"That's behind you now." Tusk took her hand in his. "Free yourself. I said before I would tell you of the world. Now... you will see it yourself."

— • —

"Do you ever feel you are possessed by evil spirits?" echoed a voice in the darkness.

"Where am I?" asked Jinx. He was shackled to a chair. The room smelled of stone and dust. Like that tomb. But not. Some unknown place shut off from the world. "What do you want with me?" Simple questions, simply ignored. "Please. Contact Commander Rooster. He will straighten this out. I don't know what you think I've done."

"I'm sure you have an inkling." It was the voice of Inquisitor Wral that filled the room. "If you have been practicing sorcery it is a direct violation of the Covenant, Reaper. Punishable by death."

"Clearly you do not honor the treaty yourselves," said Jinx. "You used sorcery to capture me. Hypocrites!"

"Unwise to fling accusations when you have your own to contend with. Particularly at the man who controls your fate."

"What the hell do you want?" asked Jinx. "If I am to be tried, let it be done with."

"If you wish to survive this ordeal," said Wral, "you will answer our questions and ask none of your own. You have seen what we do with practitioners. It is not only within our rights to destroy you in as unpleasant a manner as possible, it is our sworn duty." He asked again: "Do you ever feel you are possessed by evil spirits?"

"No."

"Do you ever lie?"

"Of course. Everyone lies."

"Have you ever lied to a superior officer?"

Jinx's mind went to Team 3's commandeering of Fort Nothing. But that had been a mutiny, not exactly a deceit. "No." His mind went over his career as a soldier. Surely he'd told some small lie here and there but nothing grievous. Then he remembered the tome. Again, he hadn't technically ever told any mistruths about it. He just simply chose not to make certain things known. "Not that I recall."

Silence for a moment, then: "A scenario... you come to a beach and find two people drowning. One is an elderly human woman and the other a hobgoblin child. Who do you rescue?"

"The woman," said Jinx. "The waster child is already doomed to a life of pain and is better off dead."

"Are you a religious man?"

"No."

"Would it appeal to you to hunt dangerous game in Srarfa?"

"I... suppose that could be exciting. I fail to understand the point of all this."

"Would it please you to live in a utopia?" asked Wral. "No pain. No war. No conflict."

"Of course."

"Are your dreams often of sex matters?"

"How is that relevant?"

"Answer."

"Yes."

"You've researched the Khrem," said the Inquisitor. "Why?"

"A necromancer we captured had spoken of ruins that I believe were Khrem in origin. It is where he learned his art."

"Is that where Skelen found the tome?"

So they knew. Of course they did. It was the charge of the Inquisitors to know everything. These matters in particular. Jinx submitted. Bared them his soul. If he was to die, he thought, he may as well unburden himself of his sins. But anything he had sworn to keep secret in his duty as a Reaper he kept locked within. That he would never part with until he was on the other side of death and even then only under the power of sorcery. He had been so close to unlocking the most precious secrets of the tome's deeper meanings at the time of his capture. He had glimpsed something beyond its formulas and symbols. An intelligence emergent from the metaphysical geometries it described. The words themselves formed something of an artificial brain. Much like Skelen's golem, but far higher. More advanced and perhaps insane, whispering promises of immortality. The artificial entity had studied Jinx as he much as he did it. Each wanted to master the other. A competition of wills. Jinx thought he perhaps owed thanks to Wral. Had the Reaper not been stopped he would have surely been lost to the hungry mind in that tome.

— • —