The Maid Is Not Dead

I wouldn't have guessed it getting off the bed in the morning, but I ended up having to escort a witch through the dungeon.

Navigating those joyless halls was not a pleasure by my lonesomeness; having to manage this in the company of a frail maiden further embrittled by an involuntary fast of days was among the most nerve-racking experiences in recent memory. If I had to give a telling comparison, it was like carrying a soup pot loaded over capacity through a dining hall crowded by hungry guests, who, in an effort to forget their empty bellies, had done away with the punch bowl. I had actually witnessed such a disaster site once before, and would rather have dived into a goblin nest, frankly speaking. Then, as now, I could only wonder which should come first: my messy ruin, or the demise of that which I figuratively held in my hands.

I refrained from laying a finger on Lady Mariel, though, literally or figuratively. She wore the very distinct perfume of "three days in a dungeon", which didn't become anyone. As blasphemous as it was to suggest that a fine young woman could, in coarse words, stink—Do take my word for it; she was not akin to flowers then. I preferred to maintain a generous distance.

Further, judging by her manner of walking, I could quickly tell Lady Mariel was not the athletic sort.

You could deduce a great many things about another person purely by the fashion in which they put the left before the right. Did they embrace their lot in life in stride, so to speak, timidly on tiptoe, or shoe tips pointed in contrarian ways? The signs were many and plain for the observant to read. Over our long, shared hike, the damsel was wordlessly telling me her life's story.

Lady Mariel unmistakably had the stepping style of a highborn, who appeared to have employed her sticks in any which way except to stand on them. Every hop was a visible struggle for her, her enormous hat's gravity pulling her hither and thither. I fast recognized she would not be dancing with the dead in close proximity any better than she would in a ballroom with living men, wearing shoes of class. Neither could I picture her prancing along rooftops, unless heavily assisted by some fanciful magic.

This meant that my usual tactics were of no help to us. We could only take our exit of the dungeon by the universal fashion of wayfarers above and below: tricklessly down the road, feet firmly grounded. At the same time, our hope of survival lay in deftly avoiding contact with any dangerous elements, which happened to share the very same paths. Not the ideal combination.

Pursuing a very difficult goal by the means least suited for the task...What we were doing was stupidity itself.

But we could only try our best, as there was no other way.

The way was long and we took it slowly. Not so much out of caution, but forced by the client's needs. When we found no way around the ghouls loitering in the narrow streets of the dwarf burg, I could only temporarily leave my charge to rush ahead and eliminate the rotting obstacles posthaste, so as to not let Lady Mariel pause her already leisurely travel speed. Else, we weren't going to reach outside before nightfall.

This quickly began to feel like work.

In fact, it began to take genuine effort.

My non-adventurous occupation had taught me never to give my everything to a task at hand, because there was usually another task no less monstrous, if not worse, waiting right around the next corner. And then you would be failing splendidly, all spent, and the colleagues you previously scorned as slothful would be revealed to have possessed an almost sage-like foresight all along—Which was at least twice more galling than if they had been merely incompetent.

But now I could only give my hundred percent to the job. I gave it a hundred and five.

I allowed myself to think of naught else but cutting flesh. I turned myself into a spring-footed, bladed mechanism that existed solely to sever heads by the most efficient way possible. A student of the morbid science of decapitation.

Through the repeated exercise and observation, the arrangement of human ligaments became very familiar to me. I came to mark carefully betwixt which vertebrae and at which angle it was best to dive in for the greatest effect. The spots with the least obstructing tissue and nerves and foramen.

Unlike in a fresh body, the dry-aged muscle fibers of the undead became hardened as a sort of natural, leathery armoring, especially resilient in workers built for heavy burdens, and which easily ruined the edge of the blade if the cut was at all forced or poorly aligned. Due to this, it was easier to cut the neck from behind than from the front side, since the backbone ran nearer to the surface there, the bone steps and discs clearly in view. Maybe that was why executioners tended to favor this direction as well?

In time, I was making less mistakes. Thinking less. Hesitating less.

Move yourself behind the target and let fly downhill. Then onward to the next.

Describing it like so made it seem no different from picking up flowers. Perhaps it was not. When you got down to it, the only ones to insist humans weren't flowers were humans themselves. If you were to ask flowers, maybe they never saw any difference. There was only a thing being cut and a thing doing the cutting, and which was which boiled down to a coin toss. Who was to say any flower by the road couldn't have cut down a man, if only it chose to, but simply thought better of it, out of an inborn commitment to pacifism? Oh, I was thinking about a lot of nonsense again. Clearly, I was getting tired. Was the gate coming any closer at all?

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I took a break at the end of the lane to steady my breathing and emptied my water bottle dry, waiting for Lady Mariel to catch up. In a while, she trudged into sight up along the smooth-paved lane, wearing a faint, weary smile.

"How you operate that small dagger is most fascinating," she commented. "Almost...magical."

"I do not think I'm able to provide any better service, no matter how you flatter me," I answered.

"How very cynical of you. To assume a person would only give compliment if they stood to gain of it."

"Naturally. Since buttering up someone already favorable towards you would be a waste of breath otherwise. The only step up from there could be marriage, and I doubt that is your endgame."

"My. Does that mean, Ms Maid, that you only ever do good unto others, if they hold something you desire of them?"

"No. I acknowledge I am still an unfinished piece of work as a human being. And oftentimes my inexperience drives me to act against better judgment. Such as today."

I expected she would take offense at my tone, but Lady Mariel merely smiled most unpleasantly.

"My, oh my. Whoever began the work on you must have sculpted your heart out of cold rock, Ms Maid. Or, is it perhaps a case of the world itself appearing desperately frigid in your frosty eyes? If so, then you have my pity. I am certain life yet has many more joys for one as young as you are."

"You may yet speak of the warmth of life after three days in the shadow of death?"

After this, she saved her breath. It was easy to speak of joy under a wide open sky, but here the word seemed inexplicably forbidden.

We continued on under the void, inexplicably condemning square stares of the windows above us, the houses reaching at the solid sky. I had just about given up hope on reaching the exit and began looking for a place to stay the night, when I thought to perceive in the looming dark ahead the wall of Taun, at once forbidding and welcome.

We were actually close to the exit now.

But as soon as I had thought that, we were given another reminder of the sort of place we were in. A place defined by treachery and vengeance, and a profound loathing toward all positivity.

"—?"

An unsettling rattle and rumble from behind coerced us to glance back, which we regretted just as soon. The wisest choice would have been to take off running the moment that unnatural clamor entered our ears.

"What in the world…?"

Sneaking up the street was the strangest contraption I'd ever laid eyes on, disquieting in its sheer volume. A shadow nearly as tall as the houses around it were high. It puzzled me how something so enormous and conspicuous could have made it this close without either of us noticing it any sooner, but now that we had indeed noticed it, we struggled to peel our eyes off of it.

In the dungeon's perpetual twilight, it took real effort to make out the details of the hellish form, to tell what precisely we were gawking at. The thing was so far removed from all naturally appearing creatures and shapes. Giving it my best, I thought to make out the shape of a great wooden wheel, like one that you might see power a riverside mill, or a construction site, where loads too heavy for hands had to be moved up and down.

But how could that be?

Surprisingly, my eyes didn't play tricks on me. Indeed, it was a prodigious wood wheel, a good six yards high, posing vertically in the middle of the slim dwarf street, nearly filling it from wall to wall with its breadth. Flat paddles were mounted along the run of the wheel's outer rim, as if in a crude, heathen imitation of the sun and its rays. I had never known wheels capable of such acrobatics unassisted, but this specimen appeared unusually talented among its kind.

Of course, there was no way waterwheels took evening strolls about the township, not in the outside world, and not even in the madness of dungeons. Something else had to be operating the thing. And that something was…

"——!"

I confess, a cold shiver passed down my backbone then.

It was the undead. Dozens upon dozens of ghouls, tightly wrapped, nailed, and braided along the curve of the great wheel all the way around, packed tight as sardines. The reanimated corpses were the ones holding the heavy frame upright and driving it on through sheer collaborative effort.

Normally, it was unthinkable for ghouls to showcase such sportsmanship and team spirit, but here the designer of the horror had put their single-mindedness to use. When the dead sensed the presence of their prey, they strove towards it with a monomaniac fervor, and thus complemented one another's meager might to keep the wheel turning.

How horrifying—and admirably functional.

By no means could I let the Chamberlain learn that ghouls could be utilized in such a manner, or else he was sure to replace the entire palace workforce with undead by the end of the week.

Of course, I knew at once. There was no chance such an abomination could spawn from human imagination. No. What we beheld was unmistakably the elusive Dreadweaver's response to the threat covertly culling its puppet population in the past days—myself.

No matter how you tried, you wouldn't cut off the many death's heads poking out of that wheel of misfortune and stop it from revolving. Approaching the thing would get you run over and crushed to a pulp, or else dragged into the collective and ripped to shreds by the innumerable hands groping and clawing for the warmth of the living.

Reaching this conclusion at last, I had but one thing to do.

"Hurry!"

I grabbed Lady Mariel's small hand and took off to run.