Onward the boneframed wagons rolled, ever deeper into the creeping wastes. Time lost its meaning to Tusk but for the rhythmic complaints from the procession's loping wheels and the occasional steady report of a flagellant's cane. The cruel sandmen threw rocks and cacti and rotted things into the caged vessel that held the animalist and his comrade Risper. The wasters afforded their captives no blankets through the long frigid nights. The men were exposed naked to the sky when the sun reached its scorching zenith so that they could cook and bask in the glory of the zealots' cyclopean and radioactive god Xul.

Rare sparkling oases, green and inviting, sometimes punctuated the journey. The hobgoblins only regarded such places as evil islands of temptation tainted with the twin wrongs of comfort and abundance and thus gave them no pause or regard. From his cage Tusk masked the dismay he felt as he watched those emerald clutches fade into the shrouds of dust that smeared the retreating horizon. He tried to shut out the thoughts of how the water that fed those lush mineral springs would taste on his tongue and feel as it splashed into his parched mouth and blossomed in his droughty breast. Struggle as he might, Tusk failed to banish away the intruding visions of swimming in a lake clear as crystal and listening to fronds flapping in the warm winds like the sails of ships as he sucked manna under the palms.

Instead of such choice fare, the captive Reapers had been fed stuff gathered and scraped from the desert floor by their sunsick keepers. Tusk had no guess as to the origins of many of the things he took into his gut on that baleful journey and much of it did not stay in his belly for long. The men were given just enough water to cling onto wretched life. They suffered frequent blackouts from the sun's dehydrating barrage. What little piss trickled from Tusk's pecker was the color of purest yellow gold and then soon came flecks of red.

Bereft of locomotion by his captors, Risper was of abysmal spirits. This formerly virile man, once a storied swordsman and dancer and lover—now this. He had made it as far as solving his own cage's lock with a bonepick lifted from the hair of one of his tormentors before being caught and dealt with in severe fashion, every ligament and tendon in his body surgically severed by the monsters. His wounds were then crudely sutured and dressed and he was thrown into this crippled wagon. Tusk learned that he'd avoided the same fate himself only because he had not also attempted escape from his foul coop. Risper began the subsequent journey in quiet melancholy with his tongue claimed by yet another kind of paralysis, that of despair—but as time rode on the prostrated man grew irritable and bitter and, to Tusk's chagrin, far more verbose. Only after untold hours of moaning and cursing did Risper's voice finally grow dry and weak. Tusk knew peace again, if but for a while.

After some days of it Risper asked Tusk to kill him. Of course the animalist refused and instead plucked and swatted pests from his fellow Reaper's body to help alleviate his suffering. The poor man was covered in bites. Tusk knew formulas of beast sweats and musks that could ward off the nuisances but he had no access to such remedies from this cage and in these strange environs where the life was so alien and sparse. He did his best to preserve the dressings on his comrade's wounds but feared infections would soon take root.

"Don't bother," Risper said. "Let the pests at me. I am numb to them. Or do the right thing and just kill me as I asked." On this last word his throat again seized and he retched and coughed violently.

"And how would I?" Tusk picked up one of the many rocks that had been cast at him by the sandmen. "With this?" He tossed the stone from the cage.

"Put your hand over my mouth," Risper said hoarsely, speaking to Tusk as he would a child. "And pinch my nose, and I'll be ferried to the stars before you know it. Worry not, your scales will not tip. It would be an act of mercy."

"I need you to stay alive," replied Tusk. "If not for you, for me."

"I'm touched that you find me such pleasant company," said Risper as he hacked dry phlegm. "But this is my choice to make, brother."

"Not if it is my hand that must carry out the deed," said Tusk.

Risper's eyes took on a new level of desperation. "I outrank you, Reaper! Give me sweet death! I order it!"

Tusk shooed with futility at the business of flies. "You may have been robbed of your limbs, man... but you still have your mind. Are you not still a teacher?"

"And what would you have me teach?" asked Risper. "How to swing a sword?" He spit.

Tusk looked ahead at the hobgoblin zealots that rode on the spines of their bactrian steeds, their thighs worn raw and black with blood and their toothy spears pointing sunward. Their leader, the one wearing a robe stitched of human faces whom Risper had overheard the others call Tecneli, rubbed sand into his own inflamed eyes and uttered a jangled prayer.

"Teach me," said Tusk, "how to better speak their tongue."

— • —

And so Risper did. Tusk's more advanced instruction in the hobgoblins' language started much the same way Risper's own had commenced decades before—with crude jokes and curses and folktales translated from the human lexicon. The two even shared precious and fleeting moments of mirth, though they were forced to stifle their laughs lest their keepers take notice. Again, humor helped desperate men through the most desperate of times.

"Do you know any of their jokes?" Tusk asked.

Risper cackled and spit. "Gobs? You ever once seen those things smile?"

The lessons continued over the parched and dusty days. Tusk was surprised at the number of cognates between the human and goblin tongues, as if they shared some common and distant root. He'd observed similar dynamics in the animal kingdom. Fauna, too, appeared to share distant ancestors that broke off and diversified, conforming to the new environs and climates in which they found themselves. Did this speak to some common origin of the two races? Were they perhaps one people after all?

Beyond language, the comrades traded all they knew, passing the countless hours with lessons on the sciences of taxonomy and animal theory from Tusk and recitations of poetry and riddles and tales from other lands from Risper. Tusk described the ecologies of nonsense monsters whose teeth had teeth themselves and species that broke their own bones to use as weapons in last resort. The ranger recounted a parasite he'd studied that dissolved away the numbed tongues of their victims only to take the place of the organs so that they may for the remainder of their lives skim sustenance from the diet taken in by their deprived host. He told Risper of embryonic beasts that fought and ate one another while still in their mother's womb leaving only one to survive, the strongest, to be born into life already a seasoned murderer. The world was a mean one, all right.

The caravan lurched through the occasional waster settlement as it dragged the Reapers deeper into gob country. The natives gathered around and stared with their wide and curious black eyes at the strange men in the cage. Most of these people, the children especially, had never seen a human in all their lives. There were zealots and slavers and warriors among the sandmen, but most appeared to Tusk to lead prosaic lives, walking similar paths familiar to any common man or woman of the Nation. They were homekeepers, cooks, tailors, tanners, shepherds. Yet, despite all the similarities Tusk saw between man and gob, Risper was right—there was one stark behavioral difference that distinctly separated the innate character of the two species: never once had he seen a hobgoblin smile or laugh. The race appeared to be wholly devoid of humor. Perhaps the demands of their sadistic religion stripped the desert folk of any capability of experiencing joy. One bad idea could inflame a culture like wildfire no matter how absurd or dire its notions. There were humans of similar extremes, but the sandmen had truly made suffering a way of life. Their skin was marked with scars that accumulated like the rings of trees. One could almost count their years by them. Mutilations upon mutilations, and the eldest of the tribesfolk had no place left on their bodies untouched by whip or hook or brand. Their jewelry and clothing were designed to scratch and chafe at the skin. Many of the gobfolk were malformed from their very birth, with limbs missing and askew as they greeted the mad world. Tusk saw the disfigurements more and more frequently the deeper into the wastes they went. Beyond the teeth on their cheeks and necks and extraneous fingers and toes of some, a number of the indigenous folk of these outer reaches even spawned horns and tusks from their elongated skulls. What drove such a deluge of mutations in these parts? It was as if some vast corrupting force saturated the very air and land, twisting the bodies and minds of its inhabitants.

Tecneli of the Many Faces met with a gaggle of hobgoblin clerics there in the dusty square as the settlers watched on. Tusk listened to their speech, applying the knowledge Risper had imparted and what he had already gleaned over the course of his training and career. He had never been stellar with languages in school but found that now, when the words he sought to comprehend regarded the matter of his own life or death, extra dimensions of understanding presented themselves. Tusk gleaned from the wasters' talk that his group would soon reach a place called Thajh, for further "research." A troubling thought what such dark studies might entail in these "Painworks" the sandmen spoke of.

Tusk eyed Risper who had fallen unconscious in the sweltering heat and wondered whether he should honor his friend's request to die. On the journey's last leg Tusk had discovered a venomous stinger on one of the dead insects the sandmen had tossed into his cage and now kept it ready in his palm. It would be a simple matter to inject it into the necks of his comrade and himself and attempt to end their suffering. There was enough in there to euthanize at least one man, perhaps two in the state they were in. Death would be a welcome relief from this.

Their business done, the hobgoblins bit at their wrists in gestures of farewell. Tusk hid the scorpion's stinger away under a crooked stone near his head. He would bide his time and see this through to the bitter end—and perhaps take out one or two of these fanatics before it came to that. He was a Reaper. And he wanted to live. Death would come in its own time. Until then he would see where this hellish road would lead even if thanks to no motive beyond that of sheer curiosity. The wagons lurched forward and went back into the arenose terrains toward uncharted fate.

— • —