“There it is,” Harmut said, pointing up into the dark.

It all just looked like smeared black to Lemon. “I don’t see it.”

“Well, it’s there. You’ll see it when we get closer.”

They were standing at the base of a cliff, one that was many dogs tall, maybe even more dogs than she’d seen in her entire life. Harmut seemed to think they were going to climb that, but Lemon wasn’t so sure.

“You can fly, right?” he asked.

“I can levitate, but that is strictly straight up and down.” She’d found that out the hard way when she was younger and had fallen into a ravine with a big scary river at the bottom. Up and down were the limits of the charm’s power, and Lemon had floated miserably above the water, unable to escape without dunking herself and trying to swim to shore, something Hogarth had practically screamed at her not to do. He refused to tell her why, even to this day.

“Oh. I was kind of, you know, hoping I could get you to tie this to something so I could climb up. Stupid plan, now that I think of it. You don’t even have hands.”

“I can tie it. I have magic for that.”

Harmut’s face lit back up, and he nodded. “Good to hear. Looks like we’re in business then. This here is one hundred feet of rope. It’s a bit thin, but it’ll hold my weight. I want you to float up, find a good spot to secure it, and then I’ll climb up after you. This is going to save us half an hour of climbing the trail, plus a two mile hike up the valley to the base. And Hollington won’t be expecting us to come in from the back.”

That all sounded good, so Lemon took the rope in her mouth and started floating up. She found a spot where a piece of stone jutted out at an upwards angle and looped the rope around it with Wizard’s Hand, then tied a knot in it and called down for Harmut to climb up while she floated in the air, two dogs length away from the wall and unable to get any closer without Harmut’s help.

He reached the top of the rope and clung to the stone, then turned to give Lemon an incredulous stare. “This is your idea of secure?” he demanded in a hiss, giving the knot one swift tug. It unraveled, and he held up the rope to shake it at her angrily.

“What? I never said I was an expert knot-tier? I do a lot of amazing things, but even I have limits.”

“Come here, dog. I’m going to show you how to properly tie a knot so I don’t fall to my death.”

“My name is Le- Miss Lemon.”

“Right, well, Miss Lemon, come here so I can show you how to tie a knot.”

“I… I can’t. hand me the rope please. I need you to pull me in.”

Lemon kicked her paws at the air in a swimming motion to demonstrate that it got her nowhere, then used Wizard’s hand to snag the end of the rope from Harmut. After she got her teeth around it, he gave it a tug to reel her in, though a bit faster than she wanted, which resulted in her crashing into the wall. It was like being a puppy and not being able to stop in time all over again.

Harmut showed her how he wanted her to make the knot, then had her do it. When she messed it up, he showed her again. After the third time, he gave up, knotted the end for her, and left the loop extra wide. “Just pull here to tighten it down once you put it around something, okay?”

“Okay!” Lemon’s tail wagged behind her as she floated up again, the rope loop held between her teeth. She pretended not to hear his muttering, as it was beneath her dignity to take notice of such crude remarks.

She managed to get the loop around a small tree growing out of a crevice in a rock, tightened it down, and then called for Harmut to come up. By the time he was halfway, she noticed the tree was starting to sag, its roots now exposed as they popped out of the crevice one-by-one. Lemon hurried to reinforce it as best she could with Wizard’s Hand by taking some of the weight off the rope, but she only managed to slow it down.

That was enough, thankfully, though when Harmut reached the tree and examined it, he gave her the look, the one she got sometimes when Hogarth thought she was being a bad girl. Lemon didn’t like that look. An involuntary whine formed in the back of her throat and her tail stopped wagging.

Harmut just sighed and shook his head. He slipped the knot free and held the end of the rope out for her to snag so he could haul her in, this time much more carefully. “Last section,” he said as he reknotted the loop. “Something sturdier this time, please.”

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“Got it!”

She found the perfect thing at the top. It was an old wooden post, one of a pair with scraps of rope hanging off it. Lemon looped the rope around it, tugged as hard as she could to make sure it didn’t wiggle, and tightened it up. Harmut did the last chunk of his climb, nodded his approval when he got to the top and saw what she’d used, and dragged her in from the air.

“I forgot there used to be a bridge across the canyon here.”

“Whew. That was fun, but also really hard. Levitating for that long makes me want a nap,” she said once all four paws were back on the ground.

“No time for that now,” Harmut said. He pointed a hand into the darkness and said, “Look, there. Hollington’s castle.”

Now that they were at the top of the cliff, Lemon could see it. Calling it a castle was being generous, in her opinion. It might have been, a long time ago, but now it was a ruin. The walls had collapsed. Most of the buildings had collapsed. There were a lot of piles of rock, and not a lot of things to live in. The only thing left was a tower in the middle, and even that had holes all over it.

Hogarth’s tower was way better, and probably cleaner too. Definitely not spooky like this one.

“Come on, we need to find Nemba. Getting her back is more important than killing the vampire. You see her, you get her out of here. Don’t even worry about me, okay?”

“Uh… no. I think Isana would yell at me a lot if I did that. Why don’t we just stay together while we find your puppy?”

“My what? Oh. Hah. Okay, but listen. Nemba is top priority. Do you understand?”

Lemon’s tail wagged uncertainly and she whined again. “I think so?” She didn’t, not really.

“Good enough,” Harmut muttered. “See if you can find Nemba’s scent and track her for me? It might not be on the ground, but if you can find it...”

They set off towards the ‘castle’ together, with Lemon running ahead and sniffing around. That cold, dead, hungry smell was a lot stronger now, and it was everywhere. She also smelled a frankly ridiculous amount of bat poop around the castle, which was especially thick under some of the roofs that were still upright scattered around the castle grounds.

Bat poop didn’t smell as good as a lot of other poops. In fact, it kind of stung her nose a bit. Lemon replaced her leash charm for her mask again, just to be safe. She was limited by how fast Harmut could follow her anyway, so that wasn’t doing a lot of good on this rescue mission.

She took her time sniffing around the buildings while Harmut lit his torch and looked for other signs. After a few minutes of work, they met back up. “Anything?” he asked.

“I think I smell vampire over there, but I don’t smell any humans besides you.”

Lemon led Harmut over to a collapsed archway and he peered into the wreckage. “There’s a tunnel under there,” he said, “but no way for us to get in. Are you sure?”

“That’s where the vampire smell is strongest.”

“He must have used magic to get through. We’ll have to dig our way in. Hollington is going to know we’re here, if he doesn’t already.”

They worked together, Harmut using pure strength to haul the larger rocks off the top of the pile and Lemon using Wizard’s Hand to clear out a lot of the smaller ones that were scattered everywhere. They made lots of noise while they were doing it, but no one showed up to investigate.

“Not a good sign, honestly. Hollington probably has a bunch of traps prepared for us. I’ll go first, you stay behind me. Can you carry the torch with your magic?”

“Okay!” Lemon picked it up and followed Harmut after he’d squeezed into the opening they’d made. It was easy enough for her to hop down, and the two of them descended into the dark tunnel, nothing but the torch to light their way.

“Oh, wow, it’s pungent down here,” Harmut said, his voice tense. “Must be some sort of catacombs. Watch out for undead.”

“What’s an undead?” Lemon asked, her tail wagging as she walked next to Harmut. She knew he was all serious and all, and that was fine, but she liked exploring.

“Possibly zombie thralls, or maybe reanimated skeletons. They’re dangerous if you’re not prepared for them. They can be strong, and they don’t stop or slow down, even if you injure them. Hollington could have made them with his vampire magic.”

“A skeleton is just bones, right?”

“Yeah.”

Lemon’s tail wagged harder. A whole person made of bones was the perfect prey for a dog. She would take it apart and chew on all of them, maybe even roll around in them. That would be so much fun! She hoped she got to see one before they found the Bad vampire.

The catacombs were made up of a lot of intersecting tunnels, all carved out of solid stone, and all largely looking the exact same in their flickering torch light. They were relying on Lemon’s nose to guide them deeper in, a task which she wasn’t thrilled about since it meant she had to focus on smelling all the interesting smells, but wasn’t allowed to go investigate any of them without Harmut getting mad at her.

“What does a skeleton smell like?” she asked, stopping to look back at him.

“How should I know? Bones, I guess? Maybe dirt?”

“Do they smell like cold?”

Harmut blinked at her. “What does cold smell like?”

“Oh, like when there’s snow on the ground and it’s really brisk, the cold is sharp and clean, and it takes over all the other smells. It’s really hard to smell interesting things when it smells like cold, but cold itself is also fun to smell!”

“Oh, okay. Uh, no, I don’t think skeletons smell like that.”

“Are you sure?” Lemon asked.

“Why?” Harmut said, glancing around nervously. “What do you smell?”

“Well, it’s not really cold. More like cold and wet. But, is that a skeleton?”

Harmut followed her snout as she pointed at something moving towards them in the darkness. With one hand, he reached up to grab his sword and draw it. “That is definitely a skeleton,” he said.

Lemon bounded forward, ducked under the skeleton’s grasping hands, and latched onto a leg bone. With a jerk of her head, she ripped it free from the rest of the body and tossed it aside. Soon, she had the other leg bone, and the skeleton fell forward to crawl with just its hands.

“I was right, skeletons are fun to play with!”

Then the skeleton grabbed her with one of its hands, and she discovered that hands hurt a lot more when they didn’t have the fleshy parts on them and they were digging into her sides. She yiped in pain and tried to break free, but it wouldn’t let her go.

“Not fun! Not fun! Heeeeelllppp!”