The Maid Is Not Dead

I came to behold a wider channel cutting across the silent neighborhood, with a stout stone bridge across. This was the very place where I had previously encountered the odd dwarf ghoul, the armored monstrosity which had forced me to return. The memory of its heavy axe still made me shudder, but the old warrior was absent from its post today. Looking at the distance I had traveled that day and the gap still left between here and the exit, plainly shown to me by the map, I could see the full span of the madness that possessed me then. How close I had been to joining the ghoulhood.

Water ran fast in the brick-dressed canal below my feet, its steady gush and hum oddly soothing in my ears. It was natural noise, an innocent noise, which had no quarter for evil in it. All life was conceived in water, in the deep trenches of the sea, I was told, and perhaps there was still a part left in us that thought to find a cradle in it.

Nothing stopped me from continuing further, but this was quite far enough for the first day. Identifying a secure route to the far end of the first floor was a better result than I had dared to expect, and it would have been too greedy to wish for more. Before returning to the town, I still had to earn my daily bread.

Naturally, I had a plan.

Hunting ghouls one by one was as time-consuming as it was dangerous. And, as a rule, when a task felt like too much work, it was a sign that a better way existed. The world was made for the lazy, you could say—Or, to put it more virtuously, laziness was a smart person's asset to achieving effectiveness. It was the onus of servants to seek improvement to their master's benefit, and although I was only my own master in his Hades, it would have been unwise to forget that. So I sought to be speedy and effective.

I singled out a suitably narrow street in the vicinity, which I had spied from the rooftop before. A lane narrow by human measurements, clear of larger obstacles and smoothly paved, lined by still intact apartments on both sides, like an artificial ravine.

All the house entrances were firmly shut behind thick pine doors, the doors locked and barred, and the window holes rigorously shuttered. As if the residents had expected to come back soon, and didn't want thieves to break into their homes in the meantime. But ghouls cared not for the possessions of the living and were no good at picking locks, leaving the houses close to pristine.

Taking station at the mouth of the long street, a junction behind me, I took out the roll of tin wire and went on to draw it across the way at about knee-height, the other end secured on a lamp post on the right-hand side and the left end on the leg of a mailbox, taut as a bowstring.

I took a few steps back and watched that slim line of a silvery sheen blend into the dim streetscape to the point of turning invisible. Even I would have likely missed it, had I not known it was there. I had better take care not to fall into my own trap. It didn't need to be that well hidden; the opponents didn't have eyes, after all, but perhaps the same method could someday be used on the living, if need be.

I confirmed my exit routes, in case anything went awry, and then raised a finger to paint a figure in the air.

Elemental Gate: Lux.

"—Ghost Light."

A small flake of light appeared to hover above my outstretched palm.

The third in my arsenal of three signs. I had learned this Sigil solely because it saved candles and lamp oil, and had rated it the pinnacle of thaumaturgy for those merits alone. Anyone who had to go to the bathroom at night but didn't have a lamp at hand was sure to agree with me on the spell's excellence. It had saved me and my colleagues many times when there was work to be done late and the sun refused to wait for us. Be gone then, you pointlessly incandescent thing! I needn't beg you nevermore.

Who could have guessed I would one day hunt ghouls with the same magic?

Monsters were attracted to emissions of Power. The undead were especially sensitive to it, only able to perceive the world as fluctuations of energies—or so I had read. What was invisible to the living was the world for the dead. As such, they could tell no difference between living souls and sporadic flares of magic, if there indeed was any distinction to be found. But I didn't want to summon every corpse in the city to me, only a few nearest, at first.

Mindful of this, carefully managing the feed of Power, I kept the light small, as small as I could without letting it completely fade, about the size of a candle tongue and less bright than that. The magic light burned without color, flickering and slightly bobbing up and down in reaction to my shifting focus, and I briefly wondered if it was the shape of my own soul I had conjured.

I held still and waited.

I waited in silence, looking around, carefully listening. Nothing moved in the perpetuity of the underground night, and I only heard the water in the channel a hundred yards behind me. After counting quietly to fifty, I began to wonder if I should increase the output, when all of a sudden, several unsteady figures wobbled into view up ahead.

I had wished for one or two at first, to test the viability of the plan, but there were no less but seven of them, dragging their feet jerkily towards the glimmer of magic at the end of the lane. One tripped and fell flat on its face on the pavement, crushing its ruin of a face with a hollow smack, but, long beyond pain, it dragged itself frantically onwards using its elbows and knees, not at all like a man, but more like a crippled insect dressed in tattered rags.

Accelerating their chase as they neared, the dead scurried towards the ember on my palm—and ran into the wire pinned above the pavement.

One by one, the walkers came to a sudden stop, collapsing over the tin thread and landed no more gracefully than the one before.

I had originally bought the rope for this purpose, but the wire worked much better. It was possible the rope was too thick and flexible and would only arrest the foes in place instead of toppling them. In that case, approaching them would have been too dangerous and the rope would have been lost to me. But that problem was thus eliminated.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Before the nearest ghoul could climb back up, I hurried forward, planted my boot on its head and brought down my dagger on the back of the neck. I repeated the same, morbidly blunt surgery with the others, glad to find that the idea panned out no worse from my wishful imagination. The spinal column promptly severed close to the base of the skull, the ghouls ceased to move, restored to full deadness once more.

I cut the heads fully off and kicked them farther away, still slightly worried about their teeth, and then took a closer look at the catch. It was not an appropriate way to handle dead people, by any means, if not outright desecration. Yet, viewing monsters as anything more but a vile sort of fruit in a dungeon was a terminal flavor of sympathy.

Of the seven walkers, four were adventurers, judging by the outfits, one rotten beyond recognition, and one a fallen soldier of the King's expedition. One was a civilian, maybe a participant in a past merchant caravan, or the like. I gathered the adventurers' tags and fingers, but there appeared to be very little else of value on them. They had left life never knowing success. The civilian had but the decayed clothes on her, and looting the soldier was not a good idea, with the town full of his still fresh-faced companions. They might recognize the dead man's belongings and weren't necessarily familiar with dungeon code, in which case I would be in for a lot of trouble. It was unfortunate, but I could only leave him as he was.

But, as I told Ray before, you could get by with less than gold and jewels.

The adventurers each wore armorings of sorts; sallets, pauldrons, vambraces, shin guards, and steel plates sewn onto the boots. One even had a kite shield banded onto his arm, still stubbornly holding on, despite the arm itself being nothing but ashen bones bundled in dried sinews. The equipment was not perhaps top quality, but the metal itself was not without value. The Guild scarcely accepted salvaged gear, but the town blacksmith should welcome raw materials. And Gods knew I could use the copper.

I meticulously stripped the steel off the bodies. There was perhaps not enough to outfit an army, but it still resulted in an astonishing load crammed into my troubled backpack. Another grain in there, and the stitchings were sure to give. Which brought about a whole new problem.

"Hm."

Somehow, the loot having mass never entered my calculations.

They never wrote about this part in the books. I wouldn't be hopping on rooftops while under such a load—as much came immediately evident. Neither could I march very long distances with nearly my own weight strapped to my back. Maids were not built like mules.

There was no helping it. Seeing how well the ghoul trap worked, I'd hoped to stuff my pockets with decomposing fingers, but could only end the day's excursion early. I unraveled the wire and reeled it back in a roll, and then a higher instinct made me glance up.

More dead came down the lane. I'd dispelled the light long ago but the memory was not so fast to fade from their degraded brains. The ghouls had picked up the flavor of magic from surprisingly far away and were merely slow to arrive, given their troubled agility.

I stuck the spindle of wire in my apron pocket and turned to head along the right side path I had reserved as the escape route—and stopped short.

Where previously extended only an empty alley, a number of silent figures had appeared to loiter, as though idly killing time on an impromptu holiday. I turned around towards the left-hand path, but glimpsed yet more movement in the deep shadows that fell on the stones. The lighting on that side was poor and I couldn't accurately count how many opponents awaited on that side. But the darkness was an enemy of its own. I couldn't go that way either.

In short, before I knew it, I had wound up trapped myself.

If I didn't know any better, I might have thought the dungeon wished me dead.

I reluctantly faced the main lane again. There were several foes directly ahead, but at least I could see them clearly, and there was more room to maneuver on this side. But that wasn't to say taking them down was going to be easy. In the time it took to eliminate one, the rest would surround and overwhelm me. No, fighting was a poor idea. I had to avoid getting tangled with them at all costs and only focus on running. But the overweight knapsack slowed me down.

Would I have to abandon my hard-earned loot?

The thought felt abominable to me, like I was a raven holding a sparkling spoon. All this profit and my costly supplies? I could just as well throw myself away. No, now that it had come to this, I could only be brave. Either I made it with my belongings and all, or I didn't. There was still a trick I could try.

"If it's my magic that you love so much…"

I conjured the Ghost Light anew. Unlike Water Sphere, the light could be moved at will, within a limited range of the caster. If sent too far, the faint, ethereal link connecting the spell to me was severed and the light could get no fuel to burn. Roughly four yards off was my limit, but the street was not even eight yards wide, anyway.

Operating the white glow with one hand, I herded the approaching dead towards it and away from me, and slipped through where gaps emerged in their disordered ranks. If I sent the light too far, the walkers would disregard it and chase the heat of my flesh instead. I had to keep the spell close enough to confuse them which signal was the maid and which the magic, while steadily injecting more Power to keep the latter more appetizing.

But I couldn't amplify the magic too much either, or else I could run out of Power before I was out of the danger zone and draw yet more monsters to me. Balance was the key. I held that speck of light as a matador would the scarlet cape, to swing it aside in the last possible moment to elude the charging hornhead. Well, the ghouls were still a small menace compared to what they staged in the Gaulean shows, though I had never seen them with my own eyes.

Step by step, I waded through the over-ripe ghoul field.

As soon as I was clear of the main group, I killed the light and left them to blindly grope about and ran, if it could be called running, a sort of spirited jogging, or maybe trotting, or a heavy sort of skipping. My breathing grew awfully labored by the time I crossed the length of that one street, and there were regrettably many more streets still left between this place and the town of Faulsen. Not that complaining about it was going to make the trip any shorter.

If Vera were to see my pickle then, I was sure she would say that mine was purely a problem of career choice.