I turned to follow Wren into the corridor when Usim told Tansy, “It’s okay, I can walk now.”

“Are you refusing to ride on ollieback?” she demanded.

“Um, no, I just--”

“You’re breaking my big brown heart!” she said, with a tragic sigh.

“Are you sure?” I asked him.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Stay close to Tansy. She’ll grab you if anything happens.”

“I’ll grab you at super-beaded speeds,” she told Usim. “My toe-ring is at your service.”

“What’re you so cheerful about?” I asked her.

She wrinkled her trunk. “I don’t know, boss. Uh, we survived? That’s nice. Also, I’ve never been this deep in the Old City before.”

“Which is a good thing?” Usim asked.

I smiled at him. “Not if you’re sensible, like us.”

“Like we,” he said.

“Like we what?”

He twitched a smile. “Sensible like we are. Not sensible like us are.”

“Ha!” Tansy nudged him happily, if slightly too hard. “You showed him, little man.”

“Usim,” his mother said, from the shadows ahead. “Stop being charming. Let’s move. Quietly.”

“I’ll take point,” I called back. “I’m good in the dark.”

“You’re human,” she scoffed. “Just keep my son ... just watch him. Please.”

“Okay,” I said, and started up the hallway after her.

We moved in silence for about five minutes before I murmured to Tansy, “So if you wear like five blackbeads will you be strong as a gemmed?”

“Nah,” she said.

“That’s now how it works,” Usim told me. “For two reasons. First, you can’t wear five blackbeads at once. They interfere with each other. You can use one and maaaaaybe two if you don’t mind the interference. But that’s all. And second, gems don’t just grant powers, they increase your baseline. Your speed, your strength and toughness, your senses, all of that. So even before they grant a power, they already act like a bunch of blackbeads.”

I grunted. “Oh.”

“Like I told you,” Tansy said. “‘Nah.’”

“Shh,” Wren whispered, from the edge of my webtouched range.

As I approached, I felt her crouching in place, a few feet before the tunnel opened into a wider space. I stopped beside her and focused. In front of us, the Old City became city-like again. Well, first the tunnel fed into a squared-off space, almost like a warehouse, except missing the far wall. But then the ‘warehouse’ opened into underground streets in which crumbling, tilted houses stood beneath a high ceiling that glimmered faintly with skystones like distant stars.

“Now what?” I asked.

“Look for the tallest building,” Tansy said, crunching to a halt behind me. “A lot of the time there are ways upward from inside them, or around them, or something. Or, uh, so I’ve heard.”

“Anyone have a better idea?” I asked.

Nobody did, so we headed onward. At first, the street ran through mounds of mushrooms that grew around columns of what looked like petrified trees. Then we headed between the remains of ancient houses and shops. I kept my Treasure senses alert, in case I felt something worth looting, but we slunk three blocks before anything happened.

Wren lifted a hand in warning and whispered, “A pit.”

“You mean like a sinkhole?” I asked, wondering why she’d mentioned it.

“I mean like a wraith lair. They live in pits.”

“Oh. Shit. So what do we do?”

“Be very quiet. Wraith’s aren’t so easily roused. And if we see movement, we run. You take point, I’m staying near Usim.”

“Oh, now I take point?”

“Exactly,” she said.

I shot her a look, but did what she told me. Apparently wraiths were so bad that she wanted to stay near her son even though she didn’t trust my human senses in the front. Of course, she didn’t know that I also had webtouched senses. So I gritted my teeth at the pain in my leg, and sidled past her. I saw an ordinary-looking street in front of us. Well, given the crumbling underground buildings and the rubble-scattered cobblestones. Yeah, the streets were cobblestone here, beneath scraps of broken wood and shattered glass, and the strange subterranean lichen that grew in thick clumps. Many surfaces still glowed a faint white, but not the windows that gaped like eye sockets, or the holes in the ground that looked like mortar craters.

Except obviously not, in a world without mortars. So maybe they looked like ‘fireball’ craters?

I clocked two normal holes before I saw the pit. Except it was clearly a capital-P Pit, because it looked like a black circle scooped from the ground by God’s own hole punch. It was the size of, I don’t know, a kiddie pool or a ... a completely circular SUV. The shape looked far too regular, and I found the regularity unsettling.

Taking great care not to kick any of the rubble, I backtracked a few steps then leaned close to Wren’s ear and whispered, “That’s the Pit? The lair? A wraith is in there?”

She nodded. “Wraiths usually stay close to their Pits. Once we’re twenty, thirty yards past, we’re safe. Probably.”

I mouthed ‘probably,’ at her, then turned back, eying the Pit and spreading my awareness around myself. Alert for the slightest twinge of spectral monster.

I said in my mind.

she said, serious for once.

I sent her a sense of negation. I couldn’t feel anything at all, except the ice-cold breeze rising from the Pit. Like I’d opened a freezer two inches in front of my face. But other than that, there was--

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

Princess told me.

I said.

I cracked my neck, then turned to wink at Usim. He rewarded me the long-suffering expression of a put-upon teenager, which actually soothed my nerves a bit. Then I took a breath and walked forward, slow and careful. One step, stop. One step, stop. I stayed close to the ancient, waterstained stone wall of a long-buried building. One step, stop. The chill grew as I neared the Pit. Another step. I thought I heard a hollow sound rising from the inky darkness, like the echo of silence in an abandoned building.

Another step, then another.

When I drew even with Pit, I found myself wanting to take three quick steps closer to peek inside. I suppressed the urge, but I probed with my webtouch senses. I couldn’t quite feel around corners--not yet--but when I focused I was able to guess at the Pit’s depth.

And to my surprise, it didn’t feel like a bottomless horror of an endless hole. It was pretty shallow. Maybe about five feet deep, with perfectly smooth sides and a rounded bottom. Like a giant had poked a hole into the street with his six-foot-wide pinky. Which happened to be perfectly circular.

Anyway. I crept past, to the blessedly non-wraithy road on the far side of the Pit, then turned and gave the all-clear.

Wren gestured for Tansy to follow me, which I found slightly surprising. Though maybe Wren figured that if a big ollie didn’t rouse the wraith, neither would she and Usim? Even more surprising, Tansy obeyed without a word. She slunk along the street, following my path. She crept noiselessly past the Pit, slinking to within ten feet of me, then she exhaled in relief--

A shard of painted pottery cracked under her boot. Loud as rifle shot.

She froze, staring at the Pit.

I exhaled, preparing myself to ... I didn’t know what. To do something.

One second passed, then another and another. Then Tansy took one more step toward me. A silent one, that time, thank the Billowing Ones. She joined me three seconds later, and we shared a look of exhausted relief before turning our attention on Wren and Usim.

To my surprise, Wren tapped into her gemmed powers. She grew less than a foot, took Usim in her arms, and waited. She waited so long that I wondered if she was just enjoying the excuse to hold her son. Which maybe she was, but eventually she decided that the wraith was still sleeping or dormant or whatever, and she started toward us.

She moved more quietly than I expected, considering her size and her burden, though I wasn’t sure why I was surprised. I’d seen her in combat. She’d moved like a dancer then, and she brought that same grace to bear now.

Sure enough, a minute later she and Usim joined us safely on the other side of the Pit.

“Well, that wasn’t nerve-wracking,” I whispered.

And by ‘whispered’ I mean fucking whispered. More quietly than a footstep. More like a ... well, a goddamn whisper. And yet that was what roused the wraith.

So, to sum up, I barely whispered, “Well, that wasn’t nerve-wracking,” and motion erupted from the Pit. An explosion of white eels spewed upward, that’s what my mind saw in that first horrified moment. Spectral white eels, braided and clumped together, erupting toward us.

Moving fast, too.

Too fast to dodge.

I almost turned to smoke ... and the clot of spectral eels slapped to the ground five feet in front of me. Oh. So it had speed, but not range. And that explained why Wren had gathered us at this point and not any closer to the Pit.

In a flash, Wren grabbed Usim and leaped away. The translucent white eels rose into a vaguely humanoid shape as Tansy and I scrambled for distance. I spared a moment to glance behind myself saw the wraith sort of ... sludging after us. Apparently wraiths didn’t have feet. Instead, it drifted along on those writhing eels, which meant that it moved pretty slowly after that first eruption.

“That’s a wraith?” I asked, as I continued backing off.

It didn’t move that slowly, after all. More like a normal walk than a jog, but still fast enough to cover some ground.

“You think?” Tansy said.

“How long will it chase us?” I asked.

“Probably not long,” Wren said, waiting for us to catch up. “Just stay out of reach.”

“Good plan.”

INTUIT: Wraith, Level 22

Twenty-two! Damn. That was the highest level that I’d seen anywhere.

“Its tentacle things can unfurl at you,” Usim told me, as his mother carried him to safety along the road. “That’s what I read. My father told me that wraiths are either the remains of an ancient race of traguld, or maybe of gemmed people, or maybe of gemmed traguld. Like, if a gifted dies to some special kind of magic, their gem turns them into ... that. A hungry spirit.”

“What kind of special magic?” I asked, as I trotted behind Wren.

“I don’t know. I don’t if anyone knows.”

“Why do you care, boss?” Tansy asked me. “You’d look good as a snake ghost.”

I grimaced at the wraith, which was swaying toward us from thirty feet down the street. “Well, if I turn into one, I’m not going to waste my afterlife lounging in a Pit. I’m going to haunt you personally.”

“Cause you love me,” she said.

“There’s a building a few blocks over that reaches the ceiling,” Wren said, trotting away from us with Usim still in her arms.

“How’d you see it?” I asked.

“When I jumped.”

“You can let me down,” Usim told her.

“Do I have to?”

He must’ve given her a look, because she set him on his feet and smiled, the first real smile I’d seen from her since the day she’d greeted him. Which apparently brought tears to his eyes, thinking about the future, because he took a shaky, shuddering breath.

“Okay, so what we need is a serious building!” Tansy said, clearly trying to refocus them. “Not a regular house with three floors. We need like a cathedral or guild hall, or a mansion or castle, if we want to climb higher. Something that might’ve stayed intact while everything around it fell apart.”

“Let’s get away from the wraith first,” I said, glancing behind us.

The eel-apparition glowed a dim white, but its ‘eels’ weren’t quite eels, or even tentacles like Usim had said. They were more like ... tendons. Like some unfurling interior organ. In the few seconds since we’d roused the creature, it had already started looking more human. Or more humanoid, at least. Two dark hollows appeared, like eyes, and a gaping, slime-spun mouth opened horrifyingly wide in what looked like a silent scream. Instead of arms, dozens of eel-segments reached toward us. Like ... like links of sausage. Except, y’know, nightmarish.

The chill hit me again. I looked away, trotting down the block with the others, thinking about hungry souls and level twenty-two. Even invulnerable crachen and electroshock governesses weren’t even rated that high.

“So wraiths are horrible,”I said, “but if they don’t catch you in that first lunge, they seem sort of harmless.”

“True,” Wren told me, from a few paces ahead. “They wouldn’t be much of a danger, except there’s no way to fight them. If you attack one, you injure yourself. If they touch you, even just brush against you, you start crumbling like a sheet of brittle vellum in an ollie’s fist. Then they feed.”

“Ah.”

“It’s not a good death. It’s so ugly that I wouldn’t wish it on my worst ... you.”

“Mother!” Usim said.

She cracked a smile at him. “I’m kidding, Usim.”

“Oh.”

“I would wish it on him.”

That time I smiled. “Huh. I didn’t know you had a personality.”

“Of course she does,” Tansy said, peering down the next block toward a wide rectangular building. “Her personality is ‘murderous.’ Is that the building you mean, Sixer?”

“It’s the highest one around,” Wren said.

“Worth a try, but it just looks like a tenement to me.”

We headed for the entrance, which wasn’t the real entrance—or the original entrance. The building had sunk at least one full floor into the ground over the centuries, so instead of a door we faced a row of empty, second-story windows. The remains of broken shutters and household crap littered the street, but I didn’t see any kobolds even after checking every suspicious lump twice. Princess didn’t detect them either, yet I kept gazing into the shadows.

“Kobolds won’t come this close to a wraith,” Tansy told me, when I explained what I was looking for.

“But we’re outside of its range, right?” I said. “They don’t go far from their pits?”

“Usually, the Sixer said. Which means sometimes. But never very fast.”

“Okay. You all watch the street.” I cracked my neck again. “I’ll check inside.”

“If you go inside, I go inside,” Tansy said. “I’m your bodyguard. That means I stay with your body.”

“A big curvy girl like you?” I eyed her up and down. “You’ll make every single floorboard creak.”

And she--I swear--she blushed. Her elephant-looking cheeks positively pinked. So apparently ollie women--at least one of them--understood that ‘big girl’ was a compliment. Which was, frankly, a lovely change from Earth women obsessed with being skinny. Though on the other hand, she didn’t really think I was flirting with her, did she? I mean, no offense to Tansy, but chicks with elephant skin and stubby trunks weren’t really my thing.

Well, not yet. Who knew what might happen after another few dry months.

“Guard him from here,” Wren told her. “Unless you trust us to raise the warning, so he doesn’t get cornered in there?”

Tansy grumbled but she agreed to stay behind while I climbed through one of the windows, then dropped to the floor inside.