It took Krav the rest of the night to fully recover from the battle at the gates of Kiva Noon. All of the defenders had spent that evening beneath knife and needle as medical personnel closed wounds and bound them with care. They were unwilling to pay too much attention to any one patient, but they took special care with Greenblatt, recognizing him as a member of the clan. They took their time stitching his wounds and asked about his tattoos, which he kept the truth of close to his chest. For Ulrich, the Pit Lord, they barely did so much as a patch job.

  In the morning, chaos again erupted when rumor spread that Greenblatt was to be crowned as the new Warlord. Whispers of his name travelled between the ears of the older, wiser tinkers of Kiva Noon. They knew that name like a long-forgotten lover. He was the returned kin, and he was travelling the markets for provisions. There was tell that he was going on another great journey that would see Kiva Noon without a leader. He was able to gather up some supplies and load them onto the pack beast with the help of Ulrich and Krav before being swarmed by the townsfolk.

  They begged him to stay at first. Their hands reached for the saddle of the pack beast to try and impede it. Groans and pleas left their mouths like mournful dead unhappy with their karmic justice. The three of them rode through the gathered residents as Greenblatt’s bodyguards motioned them away with the edges of their blades.

  “Don’t abandon us!” someone yelled.

  “You can’t leave us to die! What will we do when the Bone Eaters come back?” shouted another. The trio ignored them. Krav and Ulrich had no ties to the town of blood and metal, and Greenblatt had killed his last connection to the place. It was no longer his burden.

  They reached the gate and met with a blockade. The men and women who weren’t lobotomized stood there shaking as if he might smite them. These were the guards who had remained on the walls and within the city while the Bone Eaters had threatened to spill in and force themselves upon the populace. They were cowards, all of them. All except for the red eyed woman who stood in front of them. She had her jaw set and her back straight as they approached. Greenblatt allowed the pack beast to slow to a stop.

  For a moment they watched each other. Then, Greenblatt spoke up. “You know who I am.”

  “Yes, lord,” the woman said. Her lips spread into a thin smile. “You are the Iron Baron, Albert Ibrahm Ao Dominus-Greenblatt.”

  He nodded. “Then you would allow us to pass.”

  “I would. However, I took an oath to serve Kiva Noon. Not the Black Thumbs. It wouldn’t be in service to my city if I let you leave. We would be better protected with you here.”

  Greenblatt looked over those she commanded. The brave were now the infirm, and what was left to guard the gate were puppy dogs and children. The Bone Eaters would have this town if it meant they were the ones who met them at the gate. But this was no longer his city to protect. They were no longer engineers and philosophers. They betrayed their own standards to survive, and in doing so, they had devolved into flesh traders and mad scientists. Sinestra have mercy on his soul, but he would not defend the filth that permeated here.

  “If the Bone Eaters are who you’re afraid of, I’m on my way to deal with them now. You’ll have two weeks at least before they come back for their tribute, and by then, I’ll have sorted this out.”

  “And what will we do without a warlord to govern?” she asked. She had no eyebrows to raise, but the creases in her forehead told that she still tried.

  Greenblatt whistled and one of his tall bodyguards stepped forward. The defenders flinched, and stepped aside. The red eyed woman said nothing as the pack beast trudged along towards the gate. “Do as you please. You haven’t had a warlord for some time now.”

  He removed the master code from beneath the leather mask and ordered the lobotomite at the gate controls to open it. They didn’t look back on the town as it disappeared beneath the horizon.

  The journey towards the Bone Eaters would take them a day and a half on the back of the pack beast. It was decided that dealing with them would be like killing three birds with quite the stone. Mac needed to be rescued, according to Greenblatt. Ulrich and Krav didn’t care to save her, but both agreed to go for their own needs. Krav for Rufus’s skull, and Ulrich for payback against Garth.

  They spent most of their time hungry and scorched beneath a merciless sun. Krav dreamed of the legs of a desert carpet, imagining the satisfying crunch and meaty insides. It was almost unheard of for someone to stumble upon one during the daytime, but he still hoped that they might. By the time the sun was preparing to set over the horizon, it was almost unbearable.

  He passed the time by talking to Ulrich. The large, bearded man was quiet for most of the trip, but he would eventually relent and began to converse when a question demanded his attention.

  “What’s it like being a shit lord?” Krav asked. He was staring up at the sky, expecting more silence from the beastly man.

  “Pit Lord. We’re called the Pit Lords. On account of being from the Pit,” Ulrich said. Krav and Greenblatt watched him like he was a dog that had just spoken. He shrugged his wide shoulders. “It’s alright.”

  “Well, what do you guys do? Black Thumb guys turn people into robots, Bone Eaters eat bones, and the Gordo clan scab heads kidnap little brothers. What about the Pit Lords?”

  The Pit Lords, as Ulrich described, hailed from the Pit. By the sound of it, the Pit was a theater of sorts. It was a place of entertainment and leisure that hosted some of the more affluent members of the wasteland. Often, they would patron neighboring warlords and merchant princes. Almost anything could be tossed in the pit, from an exotic menagerie to be inspected like a museum, to a bazar full of strange finds among the wasteland. They were known, however, for their gladiatorial combat that drew an audience from miles around. Often, the nearby clans and warbands donated their forsaken kin for execution after particularly egregious crimes. There, they would be forced to fight wild animals, other condemned, and the executioners of the Pit Lords themselves.

  Ulrich was an executioner. It was a rank bestowed upon the lieutenants who showed incredible loyalty to the clan, but had no leadership skills themselves. They were solo combatants, often rising the ranks due to their skill in battle. The flashier executioners haunted the Pit as main event battles, but others found themselves as independent agents working for the clan’s interests. That was what had brought Ulrich to Kiva Noon. He wasn’t one to put on a show, and instead he was sent to enact revenge on the leadership of the Black Thumb clan after their betrayal.

  Some months prior, the Pit Lords had contacted Kiva Noon about a job concerning their warlord. He had developed a fever that turned his body frail, and a clan like the Pit Lords couldn’t have a weak figurehead. The trade was one of the biggest the wasteland had ever seen, consisting of hundreds of pounds of salvaged metals, the location of a buried treasure hidden in a bunker to the west, and forty slaves collected from the Pit Lords’ own prisoners. Many reems of fabric and crates of medical supplies were added later, once complications with the warlord began to arise and the work became more dire.

  Eventually, their terrible work was done, and the warlord was made unrecognizable to his own clan. The Black Thumb engineers had cut away more flesh and bone than was originally discussed. Whispers spread through the Pit Lords that the deal was never made for metals or slaves, but for the unsatisfiable ends of the madness of the Black Thumbs. By the end of their experiments and manipulations, the warlord of the Pit Lords was left as nothing more than a chamber of internal organs, a spinal column, and a heavily augmented head. Even then, he didn’t wake up. His vital signs still showed him as alive, but his body remains interred upon his thrown at the Pit, unable to lead his clan.

  “He was a good man,” Ulrich said. He was staring out at the twin suns far to the west, avoiding the others gaze. Suddenly, he snorted, spit, and then put the entire story behind him. “What about you, boy? Are you a raider?”

  “No, but I think I’d make a pretty good one.”

  Ulrich nodded at that. Not in agreement or contemplation. It was the kind of nod a wise man offers his grandson after delusions of grandeur. By all means, Krav would make a good raider. But he would not last as a good raider for long. “Have you been in many fights?”

  “Tons. I’ve even killed a few people.”

  “Don’t brag about killing. It’s a bad habit.”

  “I tend to agree,” Greenblatt said with some solemnity. “There’s nothing in this world more valuable than a human life.”

  “Careful, Black Thumb. It was your clan that traded people to Bone Eaters in exchange for peace,” Ulrich said. He was still staring off the back of the pack beast, but the muscles in his back were tensing up beneath his vest.

  Greenblatt didn’t answer him. He kept his goggles pointed straight ahead. Straight into Bone Eater territory.

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  The Bone Eater Clan lived in cavernous hives carved into a towering rock spire. As Ulrich described them, it was a like a terrible needle that stabbed out of the earth and bore into the sky. It could have hundreds of entryways, and each one of those could contain a Bone Eater. Going to war with them had felt like fighting and unending army as they poured from their hive and fell upon their enemies in a trickling tide. Out on the horizon, the desert looked like a great knife had sliced through it. It slanted downwards into a dusty quarry, and at the center, stood the Bone Eater Clan’s ominous spires.

  The rock formation was positioned between enormous stone blocks and a treasure trove of dilapidated machinery. It was like the ancient tales of evil wizard towers, ominously watching the wasteland in its silent vigil. The green glow of the twin suns colored one side of it, and the other was bathed in moonlight. Small shadows danced around their entry holes. From where they were, Krav thought they looked like ants filing in and out of their anthill.

  From atop the edge of the quarry, they watched. Greenblatt passed the spyglass around to each of them. They had a good vantage point above the quarry. The cannibals below would have to spend valuable time climbing the cliffs to them, and by then, the bodyguards would have alerted them to their approach.

  “We'll camp here,” Greenblatt said. “Start setting up.”

  It didn’t take them long, but as they finished Greenblatt returned to the cliffside just to check on the hive one last time before retiring. They planned to approach the hive come morning time, but beyond that, there was no plan. The Black Thumb contemplated this as he stared through his spy glass. Ulrich had suggested a challenge, using him as bait. The honor code among raider clans demanded they respect settlements made through single combat. But the Bone Eaters didn’t seem to have much respect at all. They were a feral clan who appeared to be more mongrel than noble. Krav had seconded Ulrich’s suggestion, of course he had. The only difference in his plan was that he would be the challenger.

  No, this demanded subtlety. This clan may be a conglomerate of animals, but that left an opening for deception. The gears in his head began to turn, and soon Greenblatt was scheming. He was so deep in thought, he didn’t notice the eyes that stared back at him from the hive.

  He was almost done weaving together the perfect plan when he was torn back to reality. Something was kicking his boots. When he turned, he saw Krav, and the boy crouched to whisper to him, as if the cannibals below could hear him. “So, who gets to fight their champion?”

  “Neither. I think we can do this without spilling any blood.”

  Krav frowned. “You really want to reason with those guys?”

  “No. But it’s better than trying to take them head on. We don’t stand a chance in a fight against an entire hive of them.”

  “I say we kill them all and chop down their ugly rock.”

  “Violence doesn’t solve everything, Krav. I hope you figure that out someday.”

  Maybe it didn’t, Krav thought. There was a hope to be found in believing that every problem could be solved peacefully. The boy wasn’t proud enough to think he was wiser than the warlord, but he found it hard to relate to the pragmatic values he held. It was something Lenny would have thought, and if his brother had been the one to chastise him, he would judged it as a weakness. He would have swatted him with a stick until Lenny was provoked enough to try and hit him back, then taunt him by gloating about how he was able to even make a weakling like him resort to violence. When he heard it from Greenblatt, however, he thought maybe that the man had lived too long behind the poleaxes of his guards. It was easy for a man like him to seek peace when he was protected by the threat of death by cyborg. For people like Krav, Lenny, and Rufus, preparation for combat was a way of life. He spent years of his life fighting the wastelands petty belligerents, and it had taught him that sometimes violence was the only answer. There were men who wandered this place with nothing but pain to offer the world, and those men only understood a world on fire. Men like Jackmaw Yapyap didn’t do diplomacy. They did executions.

  Ulrich held the same belief, though, and judging by the way he shrugged off even the most gruesome of blows, he was no weakling. His body was covered in scars, and even now he was held together with stitches and staples. He was like Krav in that he was always prepared for combat, but seemed to prefer peace, regardless of what their original meeting had made him think. Ulrich was a man trapped in melancholy, yet he fought like wild beast when provoked. Maybe that was the best of both worlds. To display strength through scars, to show wisdom in the fights you choose. If that’s what it meant to be a Pit Lord, perhaps Krav would like to be a decent raider after all.

  Without knowing it, Greenblatt’s spyglass reflected the twin suns. Their lights glinted against his device, and the figure watching him disappeared back into the hive.

  Deep in the spire, Mac was trapped in a wooden cage tied together with leather strips that she found wasn’t all animal. She rubbed up against a crowd of prisoners and hugged the bars of their cell. The smell of fear-sweat and panicked breaths filled the space that confined them. They were kept in the dark, left to rot in the cool cave.

  She didn’t panic like the others. The Gordo clan had taught her that raiders often took prisoners. Most of the time they were made to be slaves, carrying the excess luggage necessary to the clan’s ends. Others were anointed to join the clan as trial raiders. It was only the completely useless that were culled. She wasn’t in that camp, she could be quite the asset if there was anyone with any power in their hierarchy that had more brains than the one who had kidnapped her. Either way, she would join a new clan or become a slave, and lifting heavy objects didn’t sound so bad.

  What she failed to recognize was that Bone Eaters have another choice when holding prisoners. On a good harvest, the forty prisoners from Kiva Noon were never permitted to join the clan. And only the strongest among them would be worth anything as slaves.

  Suddenly, a light broke into the dark. Someone carried a lantern into the prisoner's area and those who had been there longer than her cowered towards the back of the cage. Pleas and whispered prayers rose all around Mac as she squinted and tried to see who had come to visit them. All she could see was the flame within the lantern and the silhouette of a large man. As he approached, there was a rhythmic clattering coming from his garb.

  “Who’s is this?” he growled at the cage. Other prisoners winced and tears began to flow. Mac couldn’t see a thing. “Speak up.”

  “What is it?” she asked. She stuck a hand out of the cage and tried to feel for whatever this stranger was talking about. She snapped it back in after something heavy and thorned smacked it. A throbbing pain remained and pulsed as blood began to form in fat droplets.

  “Use your eyes, not your hands!”

  “I’m not the one who turned off the lights in here! What the hell is it!”

  The stranger brought the light close to the object. It was that one guy’s head. The one Krav never put down.

  “Mine! Can I have it back?” She said. She was licking the blood off of her arm like a dog licking its wounds.

  There wasn’t an answer. Metal keys clinked in the dark and then the cage felt like it depressurized as the door opened and the prisoners cowered even further away from the Bone Eaters. A large hand shot into the cage and snatched her, dragging her out.

  They led her through the hive on a leash and mask, but Mac was harmless. She was too interested in her surroundings to try and tear someone’s throat out with her teeth. The cave had the overwhelming smell of carrion, like it was a graveyard where the dead had gone unburied and left to fester in the sun. There was a good reason for the smell, however. Very near to their prison cells was a slaughterhouse. In the carved-out hovel, torchlight illuminated a row of hanging corpses. They were deathly still and missing their heads. Each was stark naked, and their skin went grey without any blood within them.

  She ignored them. She had seen plenty of headless corpses in the wasteland, that was nothing. What really caught her eye was the room next to that. It was empty besides rows of slabs carved from the rock. Most were empty, but she couldn’t see very deep inside. The ones she could see held carved bodies. Incisions were made down either arm and both legs. The chest cavity was sliced away and filled with soil that glittered like they were filled with gold dust. Along the incisions, bone was exposed, and something sprouted from the bone. It was a blue and pink mushroom, a very rare growth in the wasteland. If memory served her correctly, Mac had only seen it cultivated one other time, on a raid in the south. Those who had grown it called it Dead Man’s Delight. She licked her lips, eager to get her hands on it, but she was dragged away.

  The hive crawled with Bone Eaters. She had expected their base of operations to be fortified, but this was an infestation. Noises of snarling beast men and rattling bone garb echoed off of the stone walls. Flickering shadows revealed skulls hanging from the ceiling, hiding behind corners, and scuttling along the floor. Often, the skulls were occupied by the hungry eyes of a raider who wore the corpse bits as a mask.

  Navigating the hive was like crawling through a nest of spiders. Unseen appendages reached out of the dark to satisfy their curiosities. Mac felt their fingers like children’s hands touching hot coals, one moment they felt her like she was the only warmth in the damp hive, the next they were diving back into the dark. Men of inhuman quality skittered along the walls and ceiling.

  They made it into a large room that was lit by a smoldering firepit. As soon as Mac saw the council of elderly men and women, she knew where she was. The Gordo clan had their own tent for their leadership. It was a bit of an honor to be here now. Although, strangers who found themselves in Jackmaw Yapyap’s tent were seldom permitted to leave it alive.

  Gathered around a fire and sat on fraying blankets, the council of elders were a group of greying cannibals whose years of gluttony had rewarded them with transfigured forms. Teeth were ground away like obsidian chips breaking and reforming sharper. Dark circles beneath their eyes bore deep into their faces and sank their gaze with them. Translucent, sagging skin was revealed proudly and displayed scars and tattoos that portrayed many tales of the clan’s deeds.

  Their leader was an old man sitting at the precipice of the circle of elders. His bony chest was decorated with tattoos that looked like dripping ichor. The leader wore a human skin cape that reminded Mac of animals skinned in one complete piece. The hood of the cape still had dried, stringy hair poking from it and hanging in clumps. Within the hood, the leader had a blindfold wrapped over his eyes. Dark streaks like tears of oil dripped from the cloth binding.

  “Found her!” the prison master yelled as they entered. He shoved Mac forward and into the analytical eye of the council.

  The leader stirred from his mat and rose on a walking stick. It rattled from vertebrae tied to it with twine. Mac could imagine him stirring a large cauldron of human stew with it like a witch. He took a step forward and held his hand over the flame as if to cook it. “What is your name, miss?”

  “I am the great Macaw!” she cried on cue, then quieter, “But my friends call me Mac.”

  “I am no friend, great Macaw,” said the leader. He was smiling with his cracked teeth. “I am the insatiable hunger. I am the host of mad men and the harbinger of gore. I am carrion king, master of the flesh, and trader of the soul. I am Cathartes Voll, warlord of the Bone Eaters.”

  “Nice to meet you!” Mac said, and she took his hand above the fire and shook it. “Now we’re friends.”

  The other elders of the council gasped, and Cathartes Voll held his free hand up as if to hold back an unseen attack. He chuckled beneath his fleshy hood. “It would seem we are, wouldn’t it? Tell me, Macaw, how did you get this?”

  Cathartes Voll was pointing at something in the dark. The prisoner guard who had brought Mac to this place stepped forward and offered his master the black-eyed skull. As he held it over the flames for Mac to inspect, licks of flame reflected in its obsidian gemstones. She didn’t like to look into those eyes.