by Lee Duckett
She paused to pop the fourth, this one leaving nothing in its wake. “And if they see living people, especially people that shouldn’t be there, it angers whatever's left, so they go. . . rabid. But if you kill them, like we did. . . well, that happened before so they just. . . reset. Like they did the first time. They’re rare, but they happen, and are only a danger if you don’t have a cleric. They’re like physical ghosts, but they come back a lot faster. It’s-”
“Wait,” Badger interrupted, hand raised. “What happens if you don’t have a cleric?”
“They just keep coming back,” Aria shrugged, going pale the same time as her husband. ~Fayne!~ they both sent in unison, to receive no response.
~Fayne, are you there? The undead get back up if you kill them!~ Badger sent frantically. Rurik wasted no time on words and was out the door in an instant, the couple hot on his heels as they received nothing but silence from Fayne.
Chapter Seventeen
The Best Laid Plans
Fayne left of the rest of the party behind in the forge room, ready to go ahead and kick some more undead heinie. Every time she got hurt in combat, it was because she was trying to run damage control after someone else kicked the hornet’s nest. Her memories of her character’s scout training where the exact opposite of what they were doing. Stick to the shadows instead of tromping around with a giant ‘shoot me’ target of light around your head. Strike fast, then fade instead of fighting each battle as if it was a last stand. Constantly move instead of buckling down and meeting the enemy head on.
Rurik would charge in and be unable to handle what he found or to escape. She wouldn’t make that mistake she promised herself. The third door, the one opposite of the entrance of that half-buried room they’d come into, was a large stone thing, the symbols of Andruft carved artfully into it. A quick once over showed it could be trapped, but those hadn’t been activated.
Slipping inside she found a long hallway of doors and nothing else, the silence almost oppressive. Sidling up to the first, and finding it not trapped, she opened it a crack, peering inside. A zombie dwarf was at a desk, quill in hand, writing uselessly on something that wasn’t there. Zombies don’t write, was her first thought, but she reminded herself that these weren’t the movies she’d seen at her friend’s house, where the dead just rose randomly out of their graves. Magic was involved, which on one hand was just. . . so cool! On the other, it meant that she didn’t really know how anything worked, and her character’s memories were spotty on the subject. In an elf forest you had to deal with the fay, and they occasionally went a little. . . wrong, but undead really weren’t a problem.
Heck, she knew more about dragons from reading the Dragonarium she’d borrowed from Max before they ever got to this world, because dragons, than she could remember anyone in the collective Fayne grew up in ever knowing. Fayne had never even heard of things like Styx or Shadow dragons, and those were just scratching the surface!
Focusing on her task, she knew some undead could think, others couldn’t. Sometimes they just. . . happened, though never in her forest, and some had to be made. Either way, most of them still died when you took off their heads, assuming they weren’t all head, which sometimes they were. Then there were the ones like ghosts, which you needed a magic weapon for, which she had, so she was completely prepared!
The zombie pretending to be a scribe didn’t notice her silent musings, continuing to write on something that wasn’t there. She strung an arrow as she opened the door a bit more, ready to put it out of its misery. Unfortunately, facing the door like it was, it noticed and looked up, vacant expression twisting hatefully on its mummified face.
Before it could react Fayne sprung into the room, stepping to the side to get a shot at its neck that wasn’t screened by dwarven zombie beard. A sharp crack rang out as the arrow struck true, decapitating the zombie. It dropped to the ground, at peace and in pieces. She held still for a moment, ears cocked and trying to hear if something else had heard her. The arrow’s electrified impact had been loud in the space, but that might be because of the enclosed nature of the room, all the furniture stone or old hardwoods, not a single sound-dampening piece of fabric in sight.
Peering outside, nothing was happening. Nothing had opened its door to look out, and the same silence continued. Right, Zombies aren’t inquisitive, she thought, probably. Poking around the room she was glad she’d taken Dwarven as a language, as it let her understand the strange symbols on all of the cabinets. This office seemed to handle. . . nails. That was it. Different types of nails in different sizes, configurations, and materials. “But not screws,” she muttered to herself, “let’s not get crazy!” She rolled her eyes, “Dwarves.”
Slipping out of the office she snuck across the hall and down it a few feet. Opening that door brought her face to face with. . . another zombie dwarf, this one examining a bit of ore. Another quick ‘open, dart to the side, and arrow’ put it down. The arrow had caught it a bit high, so the blow wasn’t as clean, but it did the job. Between the bow, the lightning enchantment, and her ability as a scout to be extra effective in combat by darting around her foes to strike at weak points, she was doing mucho damage, enough that she was one-shotting these things.
Curious, she looked at the ore it’d been examining, and had no idea what it was. Copper maybe? It was that kind of orangish brown. But why hadn’t it oxidized? Maybe something about zombies stopped it? That might be how you could have a walking corpse for weeks without ending up with a really messy skeleton. She’d thought about becoming a forensic scientist, as had everyone who watched CSI, and she’d learned enough about decomposition to know that she didn’t want to be around that on a weekly basis.
Looking around there were drawers with samples of ore, all oxidized to heck and back. Obviously, whatever stopped the ore in the zombie’s hand from doing so had a range limit. Could that be used? she thought, pack a few zombies with fast oxidizing metals to keep them, well not fresh, but intact? Reminding herself to ask Jack and Maggie about it, assuming that Maggie wouldn’t just go ‘Undead? Smash!’ about it because of her god. The same god that she’d met and had healed her. . . okay, maybe I shouldn’t ask, she thought.
The next three rooms were more of the same. Zombie? Kill. Office of slag reclamation. Zombie? Kill, needing two shots (gasp) as the first only creased it, still killing it before it could do more than snarl in animal fury. She was reminded of that other zombie movie, the one with the rage virus, but those were still alive and died of starvation, though realistically dehydration should’ve offed them long before that point.
Either way, it was the office for checking imported metals for quality, the place half-filled with cabinets of papers that made no sense to her even though she could read the language. Back on track: Zombie? Kill. Office of screws, bolts, and chains. What? She snarked internally, Nails get their own office, but screws has to share with bolts and chains? Straight privilege, she snorted. Going through all of this she was glad that elves weren’t so byzantine, having to have offices and documentation for everything.
Moving across the hall, the door was locked, which surprised her. Slipping out her lockpicks, it was the work of seconds to remove that problem. Checking the doorway, she found no traps and carefully opened the stone portal. The room was empty, but it wouldn’t hurt to make sure. She was two steps inside when the stone floor clicked underneath her feet and she leapt backwards like a scalded cat.
Instead of fire, darts, or anything else there was a prismatic flash of light which encompassed everything for a second. Backing down the hallway as she blinked her eyes clear she waited for something to happen. Nothing did. That means it was magic, she thought, checking herself. Bouncing on her toes, she didn’t feel any different, nor did she think that she was thinking any different, though she would think that if she was thinking differently, she thought.
Carefully approaching the room, she could see the very slight raised surface now that she was looking for it. Taking her d
agger, she worked it under the tile, flipping it over. The runes inscribed on the bottom of the tile and on the ground were set up for a fairly standard spell trigger. The weight of someone stepping on it caused the primed runic formations to complete an array, casting the spell, which could be primed or deactivated with a cantrip or a magic item. She couldn’t make them, but she could take magic items apart pretty easily. Turning it over in her hands she realized this one was for a Dispel Magic spell, causing her to grin.
She didn’t have any magic on her, except her gear, which would only have its properties dismissed for less than thirty seconds, maximum. Then again, if this trap was set when this place was active, then as many offices as there were, it’d take some magical help to sneak in without detection, and that trap would’ve made sneaking back out a lot more difficult. Checking the office and finding it to be the office of ventilation, which she’d like to have words with over their shoddy air-elemental containment, she realized she was wasting time.
It’d almost been four minutes and she had a lot more to go if she wanted to clear this place before Rurik came stomping in with his metal clad boots and got the attention of everything in this place. If the door was locked, then any zombie on the other side would have trouble opening it, so it wasn’t her problem.
Moving forward it she settled into a quick pattern. Try the door. If it opens, dart in and shoot the zombie. If it doesn’t die, shoot it again. Move on to next door. Rinse, repeat, and clear. She missed a couple of shots entirely, but her follow up shot usually did the trick. For the one it didn’t, the zombie tried to run around the desk to get to her, which gave her enough time to run around the other end of the desk and shoot it in the chest, solving that problem.
She was very glad she’d bought a ton of arrows before they came here, as all told she worked her way through two quivers worth of the dang things before she was done. Examining the door at the far end, it was neither locked nor trapped, but what was on the other side gave her pause. It was a large room, full of desks, with just over two dozen zombies at ‘work’. The walls covered with long, wrecked tapestries, and there were a couple of doors on either side of the fifty-foot-wide chamber, but she couldn’t be sure what lay behind them.
Did she want to go back? This kind of ‘no way to sneak’ combat was what the rest of the party was good at. But that was the thing, she thought, they weren’t. The number of times they’d gotten hurt boggled her mind, and without Aria’s healing magic they would’ve been boned. Max had tried to tell them, fight smarter not harder. Good tactics could turn a hard fight into an easy one, or bad tactics, like with the troglodytes, could turn a normal fight into a near thing. When the others had been in the water after Rurik had been stupidly overconfident, she’d taken on the rest alone.
She scanned the room. These zombies were decently fast, about as fast as the troglodytes, but she was faster. Faster than anyone else in the party. More than that she was sure-footed in a way that not living up in the trees just didn’t give you. The desks were a possibility, but her eyes focused on the cabinets dotted across the room. From what she saw the zombies went around instead of over as was faster. She, however, had no such compunctions and the cabinets, while not a problem for elves or humans, required the use of a stepstool to reach the top of for dwarves. Several such stools were strewn about the room, most not upright.
Even if the zombies could use the stepstools, which was a big if, it’d take them time to get them in position. Time she could use to move to a different cabinet. From there it was easy to make a mental path, criss-crossing across the room to make sure she was never moving towards the zombies after she jumped off a cabinet, and she was set. There was no way to open the door without at least a few noticing, so she didn’t even try.
Slamming it open, she was off like a shot, an arrow streaking off to hit the zombie closest to her chosen path, slamming into its chest and sending it sprawling to the ground, spasming as it fell behind its desk. The zombies looked at her as one, mouths open in dry animalistic shrieks as they charged around the desks for her.
She felled two more before she got to the first cabinet, only one dying. With a bounce off an overturned stepstool she leapt the additional five feet up onto the seven-foot-tall cabinet, firing off another shot, though this one lacked the extra oomph, having to stay stationary as she did so.
As she thought, when one of them got to the cabinet it just reached uselessly, but once others joined it, they tried to climb up the first zombie to get to her. She raised her foot to avoid a grab and sprang off, landing ten feet away on a desk and jumping to a second to keep her momentum going, skewering the one that reached for her in the back. It went down, but the others turned and charged her.
She almost tripped over the grasping hand of one that had gone down earlier, not having died like she thought, getting up just in time to intercept her. Dancing out of the way on one desk, she leapt to a second and put that zombie down, the time she took to do so giving the others time to get close.
Not bothering to shoot she bolted for the next cabinet, crossing the room to do so, Her path diagonally across the room let her move in a straight line while the others zig-zagged between desks, opening up a gap and letting her fire off another arrow, felling another zombie.
Whirling around to leap up to safety once more, she couldn’t help but smile. This. Walking the razor’s edge of danger, not succeeding through luck but skill. This was what Fayne, the character whose identity she’d taken over, lived for.
Her third and fourth trips across felled several more, over a third of the horde depleted. On her fifth trip something finally went wrong, landing on what she thought was a metal topped desk but instead was some sort of metal plate which slid across the stone furniture like a skate.
It carried her right off the desk as she her shot went wide and she tumbled, narrowly missing another and coming up hard as she bumped into a third, momentum gone. The horde closed but she thought fast, firing at the lead zombie’s legs, tripping it and slowing the rest. Others were coming the other way around the desk and she reached for an arrow, only to come up empty, the projectiles having spilled from her quiver as she’d rolled. She needed to get to a cabinet, fast. Leaping to a desk, one of the zombie’s hands grabbed her ankle hard.
She went down, rolling to her feet and away from the horde, hopping on her good ankle, and muttering imprecations against whoever or whatever made these damn zombies as she tried to make it to the semi-safety of higher ground. The only silver lining was that, injured as she was, she was moving just as fast as her pursuers now, and they were all behind her. ~Guys~ she sent, ~I’ve probably got it, but I could use some help right now.~
She received no response. ~Guys?~ she sent with a bit more feeling. Had something happened to them? Why weren’t they responding? Her mind flashed back to the dispel magic trap that’d gone off. She’d forgotten then but she had had magic on her to be dispelled, the telepathic connection they all shared. With the distance and the size of this room, even if she screamed they wouldn’t know she was even in trouble!
There was a flash of light as she presumably set off another trap and she wanted to yell It’s already gone! but that wasn’t the prismatic burst of a dispel magic, it was pure white. As she blinked her eyes clear she realized the monotonous shrieks of the undead cut off as the entire acoustics of the room changed, as if things had been moved about. Worse than that, she heard the sounds the zombies made when they first spotted prey, in stereo.
All around her were the zombies, both the ones she’d felled and the ones that’d been pursuing her, holding their quills as they stared at her. It was as if the fight she’d just been in had never happened, though she was still left injured and without her arrows, which just wasn’t fair. Is this how I die? she wondered, emotions oddly numb.
She holstered her bow without thinking about it, automatically pulling out her rapier as she realized she was surrounded. She wasn’t as used to this weapon, but she didn’t have t
he fifteen seconds it would’ve taken to restock her quiver, and with her ankle hurt she didn’t have the mobility to make that plan work anymore. Her hand brushed against the second, half-filled waterskin at her belt.
In their first adventure they’d found a fountain that, on command, dispensed Flame Breath potion, but they’d been idiots about it and only grabbed a single vial each, just like she’d been an idiot for not at least checking in with the others before she tried this stupid, stupid plan. Shino had filled a waterskin from it, getting over a dozen doses of the magical fluid, which he used to breathe fire and cover them in the run to the final battle. Before he he’d been taken by the riders he’d given it, along with everything else he had, to her with instructions to use it.
She didn’t want to, she wanted to give it all back to him, because it was his, and she was sure she was going to see him again, damn it. However, it was looking like that wasn’t going to happen. I wonder if these assholes can come back from being turned to ash? she thought idly, taking a swig as she looked at the furniture and stacks of papers all around her, the image blurring as her eyes wet with tears.
I’m sorry everyone.
Chapter Eighteen
Through The Fire And Flames
Badger ran as fast as his stubby legs could carry him, rushing after his son to help his niece, hoping futilely that they weren’t too late. His wife ran behind him, even weighed down by her armor she was still faster than he was, picking up his smaller form without missing a beat as they chased Rurik, who’d already made it to the end of the central room and the far door. The dwarf didn’t slow as he put his shoulder down and barreled through the closed iron portal, the sounds of undead shrieks and a raging fire filling the space as he did so.