Things were cadavered across the plain where death had claimed them. Sunken and leathery husks calcified under the hard sun, picked clean of their organs by beak and talon. A monstrous array of scavengers skeltered across the barren ghostscape and sailed its featureless skies and even worse than the sight of such lifeforms were the tortured sounds they issued forth. A host of nightmares called madly in the stygian night, striking chords of terror in Tusk's heart as he traveled on the back of that stolen hofru with his improbable savior Aoh. Many of the natural inhabitants of this creeping beyond were alien to the animalist despite his instruction in all things zoological by none other than the esteemed Anatoli. Humanity had cocooned itself within its natural boundaries of mountains and thickwoods and crouched behind great walls as it licked ancient wounds. In that time the world beyond went changed. Quickened and mutated and worsened.

Aoh told Tusk of her life as they went through the arid hours like wayward ghosts. For her there was before and there was after. Before the Zhjaki imperialists came from the inner wastes and snatched her from her tribe and after the conquerors enslaved her in something more powerful than runery, and that was belief. Aoh's sisters in training had all been ready to die for their god and she came to hollowly embrace their ways but a small part of her soul remembered her birth-people and clung to their teachings. She had been gifted as a child and knew how to listen. Sat in the shadow of the elders when they gathered among the stone-ringed fires to adjudicate and prognosticate. Aoh remembered their words, kept them locked in her heart. She was gifted in her own tongue and was quickly grasping that of man's. Bloodnurses and painsmiths were allowed to study the languages of foreigners so that they may better interrogate and torment their subjects. This gave Aoh insight that many others of her kind never enjoyed. While the painsmiths were devoted to cultivating anguish and injury, the bloodnurses were taught to heal and even empathize. The intent was in the spirit of bolstering their captives for the taking on of yet more suffering, and to monitor their states of misery—but this new strategy had backfired with her. Aoh and Tusk combined had sparked a feeling she had never experienced. It was as if she had been waiting for this human to come from that faraway land to rescue her and not the other way. The truth was that they had each saved the other. Aoh expressed a readiness to abandon those dogmas and practices that had been forced on her. To now embrace the other ways of the world.

Their hofru stumbled. A spike of agony shot through Tusk's frame. He feared he would forever be broken after the tortures he'd withstood at the hands of Thajh's painsmiths despite Aoh's caring ministrations in the aftermath of those less tender. The Reaper could bear the road's abuse no more and begged his companion to stop the runed beast. He needed to stretch, work his muscles, get some rest. The horizon had grown pale with the promise of sunlight. Morning would soon come. Better to hide and sleep at day and travel under the cover of night. They hid behind a bank of stony coral. The land was flat with little cover. Aoh gave Tusk a skin of water that hung from the gruff beast's saddle. "We should keep riding," she said. "I am sure by now my masters know we're gone. There are lands toward Xul's Fall where there will be better places to hide."

"Xul's Fall," Tusk said, unsure what she meant. "What is that place?" He uncoupled the skin's lid.

"No one place," Aoh said. "Xul's Fall is always where the sun descends, wherever you are." She pointed. "So, that way."

"Ah," Tusk said. "We call that 'West.'"

"West," Aoh repeated, looking off.

Tusk drank and gasped. Whatever juice it was that Erumanir had kept in that vessel—or that Aoh had stashed in preparation for their escape—it was awfully foul and bitter. Like bile spiced with hell-peppers. Every sensation for these people was thorned in some way. But in his state Tusk could act no beggar. He drank and fought down the stuff and was thankful for the replenishment it indeed gave him. The Reaper realized upon a flood of new energy that the mixture probably had restorative properties not unlike his or Shroomer's own elixirs despite its disgusting taste. He handed the vessel to Aoh and she drank without a wince. Tusk had the skills to collect water in his own lands and knew the means to purify it. But he had not a clue whether a clean drop could be wrung from these parched and poisoned lands.

His gaze paralleled Aoh's as he looked out toward Xul's Fall. The direction of home. Tusk thought of his Reaper brothers and hoped Team 3 still ran strong together. Perhaps they even looked for him now. The time after his own capture was darkness to him. Threats of battle had loomed over Fort Nothing but the animalist had no knowledge of what had transpired after he and Risper had been ambushed by those stealthed hobgoblin rangers. Finely skilled, those wasters had been, to gain the initiative of the seasoned Reaper scouts in their own element. The stalkers had used sorcery to disguise their movements and seemingly stepped through the shadows among the trees. For all Tusk knew, Fort Nothing had fallen to the enemy after his capture and his teammates were all now dead or themselves captured. Entire Reaper teams had been wiped out in the beat of a heart before, and certainly would again.

— • —

A hooded man knelt in the Hinterlands with a blade to his throat. He was blinded by the mask and the world was blinded to his face, but the scythe-and-snake tattoo on his arm betrayed him as a Reaper. The leathered knifeman who stood behind the captive was a Reaper as well. He had no mask. It was Vulture, grinning with sadistic pleasure at having this poor blinded soul under his power.

"Please, good Reaper! Don't cut me down!" The kneeled one begged in a feminine falsetto. "I'll do whatever you want, sir... whip out your pink soldier!" The voice that issued from under that hood was that of Thirteen. Blacwin and Riddle watched the cackling blood-junkies play their twisted game of chicken with shared derision. Nail and Jasha were on patrol in the unseen dims beyond the firelight. During a heated match of cards Thirteen and Vulture had each dared the other to take turns under the hood with knives at their jugulars. The antics of bored and crude minds. Blacwin shuddered at the thought of undergoing such a mock execution himself. For one thing he could not blindly trust his life to any man in such a manner, Reaper teammate or no. For another, he couldn't bear imagining the final thoughts of those whom he had executed himself in similar fashion from his early days—and those doomed souls knew it was no game they played. Blacwin banished the dragons and watched on with revulsion.

"Alright, blood, you've had your fun," Thirteen said. "Your turn under the veil." Vulture yanked off Thirteen's mask and stepped back and gave Thirteen a shove with his boot for good measure. They traded places and accoutrements, echoing the traditions of sandmen reversing the roles of sufferer and tormentor. Now it was Vulture who kneeled and Thirteen who held the weapon. Thirteen pulled the hood over Vulture's head and bound his teammate's hands. Put the knife to his throat.

"One flick of my wrist, blood," Thirteen said as he held the blade's edge against the other man's rough skin. "All it would take. Wouldn't that be lunar? Why not? Could 'make you mine,' yeah? Give me another 'hole to play with?' Who'd miss ya?"

Vulture grit his teeth. "Do it and I will haunt you to your grave."

"Maybe I ought to flip a coin to decide if you live?" said Thirteen. "Anyone got a spare?"

"Enough," Blacwin said. "Cut the dogplay."

"I don't take orders from you," said Thirteen.

"Blacwin may not outrank you," said Jasha. "But I do. Stand down, that's an order."

Thirteen sneered and dug the tip of the blade into Vulture's neck, breaking skin, and then stepped away. Vulture snarled. "Ylfsucker!" he exclaimed and spit. Thirteen backed away, tittering.

Blacwin stood and strode over and drew his own knife from its sheath. Took hold of Vulture's wrists and cut his bonds. The animalist yanked off his hood and put his hand to his neck. Saw blood on his fingers. "You son of a cunt," he said to Thirteen with hexing eyes. "I'll cut you in your sleep!"

"What the hell is going on here?" It was Nail, back from his patrol.

The men stiffened. Thirteen and Vulture shared a loaded look. Blacwin could see there was something unsaid between them. These shenanigans had been about some other matter. The grim transpirings back at that farmhouse, most likely. Was that why Blacwin's half-ylfish nose detected the odor of sex on Vulture and not the other man?

"Hit your bedrolls," Nail said. "Enough with the goddamn games."

— • —

Skinner had a lick of luck at Mother Blacklove's Home for Lost Children. (Lost indeed, those kids he had been charged with finding or avenging.) In that old groaning complex the repeater encountered an old prioress named Sister Chalice who had been a young woman when Varga lived within those walls as a boy. She had been easy to spot thanks to the enormous growth on her cheek that Skinner had always found difficult not to stare at as a child. As a grown man he discovered that still to be the case. The wart his eyes kept wandering to seemed to have another face all its own, the miniature visage of a frowning drunkard.

Sister Chalice did not initially trust her strange visitor but the nun's memory was jogged after Skinner described a few of his more rambunctious infractions during his time there. Baring his ass to the whole dining hall from the rafters had been his crowning achievement. They laughed now but back then there had been no smiles and only hell to pay. The school's philosophy was that a child was spoiled if it was not made to cry at least once per day. And that was for the well-behaved.

"Do you still have that awful little fearbabe?" Skinner asked. "With its ugly little beard and teeth." He mimicked something dreadful. Chalice had used the thing to scare the foundlings into compliance.

"Some miscreant stole it years ago." The gray woman said. She walked Skinner through the halls and he saw that little had changed other than some creeping signs of decay. Cracks in walls, peeling paint.

"Maybe I can come back and do a bit of work on the place for you," Skinner said. He had no such intentions but thought the offer might help butter the lady up. "Fix a thing or two."

"That would be gracious of you," said Chalice.

Skinner was surprised by the nostalgia that washed over him as he walked through doorways that seemed to have shrunken over the years. He looked down the long tables of the dining hall and saw the crowded bunk rooms and walked the aisle of the chapel. Mother Blacklove was about the closest thing Skinner had to a home. His earliest memory was standing at her gates in the rain. But the time he spent here had been no paradise. He'd suffered bullies and bland food and curfews and banal studies and worst of all the beatings. Skinner's ass met many a paddle in those severe halls, often administered by this very woman's hand.

"So sad about all those missing boys and girls," the repeater said, looking through a window at a gaggle of youths playing in the courtyard.

"Between the runaways and the perverts, we've always had trouble with disappearances," said the nun. "But it has become so much worse of late."

"I heard Strotham Yard ain't done much, neither," Skinner said. "So I decided to have a look into the matter myself."

"Then you were told a lie," said the matron. "In fact, an investigator by the name of Valen just stopped by yesterday. He checks in often and his efforts to find the snatcher have never waned. I have no doubt the Yard is doing all they can."

"Maybe I could be of some help." Skinner said. "I know certain people."

"I'm sure you do." Sister Chalice's patience was clearly growing short. "I appreciate your concern for those little ones. But Inspector Valen insisted that I speak to no one at length about this. I've probably already said more than I should. Perhaps you should seek him out if you want to know more."

Not likely, thought Skinner. He thanked the prioress for her time and went on his way, glad to be out of those old corridors and the mixed memories they held. He left the place feeling cold and empty as its halls, remembering rumors he'd heard as a child that the place itself was a lich haunted by the soul of its old founder, Mother Blacklove herself. A vexing thought. Skinner put it aside and thought of his next destination. Beggar Bridge, another place he knew better than he wished, rife with the temptations of smite and skin. Only by plunging into the city's most vile cracks could the desperate attain the feeling of being a god. Beggar Bridge. Full of vulgarians and anarchs and old bedfellows the repeater would be happy never to see again. This investigation was truly a walk into Varga Skinner's own miserable past. He only hoped this jaunt down memory's maze didn't lead him to the dead end of his old ways.

— • —