It had the look of a wound, that clutch of life in which Team 9 hid. A strange and swampy oasis upon the desert's pale fringe. Most of the patch's razored flora, adulterated by the ill soils of the deeper crust, had leaves nigh black. Their fronds forked with dendritic veins which was fitting for their sap tasted of ferrous blood. No form of life here was known to their animalist Jackal. All was alien and hostile.

Their headsman Castle now had four people at their knees. All blindfolded with bloodied rags, all afeared. Three of the bound were hobgoblin and one was man. Team 9's other men, Freek and Jackal and Demon and Darling, loyal to death and bone, each stood behind a captive, Reaper knives to their pulsating necks. The hostages' chests heaved in want of life. The creatures of the night pulsed in a throaty chorus beyond the firelight, guttural with lust and woe.

Castle regarded the kneeling hobgoblins. "You piss-drinkers pine to suffer slow-drawn deaths, to suffer for your god. Well, I deny you it. You end quick, here. In the dark, away from His shining eye."

Castle nodded and his loyalists followed through on the cruel promise. Unfixed the sandmen's souls in fast and brutal fashion. Lowered their gushing bodies to the earth. Their black pools mingled. Jackal made a noise akin to laughter. A compulsion that had emerged in recent weeks. The scrawnster had been first codenamed after his signature titter, but in those days it had only come at the ends of jokes. Now the cackle accompanied each sickshow such as this, and things more mundane aplenty, ghastly punctuating every last piss and shit and fart. Castle knew the source of Jackal's perpetual mirth. It was nerves unbundled. A collapsing self. A sign that Jackal was slipping, had no recourse to the horrors he'd been made to witness but laugh in the Old Trickster's face. How long before the scout felt compelled to madly bark at the wrong moment and lose Nine their cover when most crucial? Castle would have to get Jackal to cut it with the cackling—one way, or some other.

Castle reached his hand into a blazing pit and drew forth the handle of a Reaper longblade primed with white heat. He turned to his last captive. This was a man Castle knew. It saddened him to find this fellow Reaper on their tail. Betrayed again by those he once served. Castle ordered the prone man's mask removed so that they may converse with gazes in concert with words. For the eyes too could speak.

— • —

Cricket was rimed in a fevered sweat. Felt the Old Harvester at his shoulder, scythe poised for the fatal strike. He'd heard the wet and gasping slayings of the others. Knew not from where the gobs had unluckily come and did not care. Their yarns had unraveled, but his own story had some left to tell. He, its most eager listener. All his efforts, to only be captured by the Reapers he'd come to aid. Cricket had urged a hard journey across these chaotic vistas in his mission to seek out Team 9 at the behest of Commander Barda and dear Gossom. Braved roving bands of wasters. Evaded slow digestion in the camouflaged suckpits that lurked under the sands. The evercursed naked sun, how it had him suffer. Yet the hardest struggle in those lone reaches had been to hold his mind fastened. Strangeness troubled Cricket's sanity along the surreal course. He'd witnessed grand storms of red lightning arcing across charcoal skies, observed stones that breathed and screamed and wept as if alive, encountered a cult-camp of dwarfish unfolk who chattered with invisible demonics. With those tetched pagans he traded for gritwater that tasted of sulfur and doubt, and a modest supply of waste-jerky that was tough and calcined and not easily passed. From the ruddy cliffs muscled furions brandished their fanned pricks (their nethers all the colors of tropic birds), jeering from their cavefronts in crude warning to dare not draw near. The lone Reaper bade the territorial simians' advice. Evaded those brutes and all threats he could on his journey to seek out Company Nine. Roguecraft was his trick, not battle. Let others risk their blood without warrant. Cricket was of shadow and sleight, one who deftly slipped from Fate's cold hand but made friends of her chicanerous sire. But Team 9 hunted and trapped him with ease. The moment they descended on Cricket he knew they'd been watching him for nights, stalking, biding the sandglass. The waste-mad assassins fell on him when he slept. Roped his limbs and threw him in a plagued hole. Now that the addled crew had dragged him from that place, he wished back in.

— • —

Castle put the blazing metal to Cricket's leg. His flesh hissed like a riled snake. A leathered hand covered the prisoner's mouth, stifling his screams. Cricket could taste the murder on Freek's war-calloused palm.

"What master sends you, spy?" asked Darling, kneeling at Cricket's side. "The gobs? The djinn, those catfucking schemers? Or separatists from Toloy? Speak... and we may yet spare you."

"Again and again... I've already told you... the bare truth." A wash of darkness overtook Cricket. He chased after it, bidding refuge from the pain and exhaustion. But the hurt came again with another touch of that whitehot weapon in Castle's corded grip. Cricket channeled all the will he had left to his ragged being. Raised his head and stared Castle in those knowing infernal holes, those dishes of madness, his eyes. "We all know what war and the wilds can do to a man, brother. As I said... Barda didn't trust a chatter bird to these skies. Sent me. You'd gone dark... we assumed the worst."

"Coffers," said Demon. "We've been trading messages with Fort Nothing for weeks. Just got a birdie last night. And you know what it spoke, direct from the Rooster's beak? We got a spy in our soup."

Cricket shook his head. "No. Someone must be intercepting you... sending false chatter. Trying to throw you. Barda's in charge now, not Rooster. Fort Nothing is no more."

Jackal's cackling again. "Madder than we. Either a spy, or he ain't. No way to know for sure." He licked his teeth. "So we gotta."

"Castle... please," Cricket pleaded. "We have history, brother. Our lives... are owed to the other. Entwined by past fate. Remember Hastia... the coup at Thesseq. We did good work... shared a true passion for our cause... Barda and Gossom... knew this when they sent me. Why I was... glad for the task. I love you boys, we all do. And we want you home. These lands... have twisted your souls—"

"Grab down there and find the gut of you, deep, deep, where the pain don't pry." Castle's eyes took the shine of a basilisk's. "There you'll find peace, old friend. Set him free, Demon."

The runebreaker did as commanded and drew his blade across Cricket's neck. Sent his victim back to that expanse he'd not met since he flowered into very existence from the warm and beating womb of his mother. Her face was the last thing his mind conjured before it dove into the final pitch.

They burned Cricket along with the slain hobgoblins in that tower of hungry fire. Left their bodies a charred puzzle for those unfortunates who would next greet that damned pit.

— • —

REAPERS - Book Two: The Hunger and the Sickness is available for sale on Amazon: http://a.co/1h72Xrk

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