“Huh, never expected them to have gardens here.”

Vergil had a subtle talent for somehow understating the obvious. How he managed that, Sil would never guess.

They were visiting the place Tallah had sent them to, after having followed indications from Miks. Regardless, it would’ve been impossible to miss the place even as it squatted at the farthest reach of the settlement.

Some food was being grown there, but nothing that would sustain an entire community. Bushes of night’s blood berries, beneath a complex lattice work of lamps burning an acrid-smelling oil. Smoke drifted diffuse among the rows of unkempt and overgrown plants.

An odd berry to grow anywhere, much less in an underground settlement such as this.

“Again, would have expected mushrooms,” Vergil said as his stomach growled. Luna dropped off his shoulder and went to inspect some of the overripe fruit.

Sil nursed a hangover and two shades of a headache. Her right eye throbbed where that elendine hussy had punched her. They hadn’t had any sort of meal, Miks’s options too disgusting to consider.

The place was bloody garden that hadn’t been maintained in what looked like an entire season. Dried berries rotted on the ground, fallen from the bushes to make room for others.

“What is it with you and mushrooms, bucket-head?” she asked in response to her stomach’s protestations.

“I’m craving some.”

“Dig in your boot. I can bet you’ll find plenty.” She raised a hand before Vergil had a chance to answer. “I know you can find a suitably disgusting retort. I’d rather you didn’t.”

He shrugged and went on to knock on the building’s door. There was a sign up front that read Liandra’s Apothecary Supplies, but which looked to be falling into a state of disrepair in the same way as the garden’s rows.

Nobody answered.

Sil peered through one of the window, cupping her hands against the light of the torches. The inside was filthy, a ruin of a place that didn’t look to be inhabited.

“You have any idea what Tallah wanted us to do here?” Vergil asked as he knocked again. “Give them pointers on how to grow crops underground? I don’t think we can make the kind of light the spiders used in Grefe.” He placed crouched and extended an arm as Luna returned from its exploration. It was munching one of the berries, finishing before climbing back on Vergil’s shoulder. He scratched the spider softly. “I don’t assume you know the secret of those crystals, do you Luna?”

“This one knows not,” it answered. Was the creature purring? It made a cooing sound that was somewhere between a purr and a growl, reacting to Vergil’s touch. “This one has Knowing of what is needed to make the crystals, but not of how to achieve it.”

“You can give us the formula for the crystals?” Sil asked. “Why didn’t you say earlier?”

“Friend Sil never asked. This one has much Knowing of many things worth knowing. This one was gifted with more when leaving the city of the Kin.”

Sil groaned, the headache only deepening by the passing heartbeat. One day, when the peril of death would go down to a more manageable level—such as an impending meteor about to strike Vas off the face of Edana—she would need to sit down with the spider and really consider what the creature knew. Now it had the formula for light refracting crystals that didn’t lose any of the qualities of direct sunlight. Maybe if she asked the right questions she’d discover the spiders knew how to brew the elixir of immortality, or held the secrets of turning gold into platinum.

You can trade it the knowing of how to silence the voices of your crimes, a traitorous voice needled her. Do you think that would be worth much to it?

She’d been keeping the voice quiet with the aid of enough beer to make her piss like a horse. Now, however, she was stone cold sober, and Dreea’s memory grew bold.

And the bloody bastard whom Tallah had sent them to find wasn’t answering the bloody door.

She created a tether to Vergil and he looked back at her, alarmed, hands flying to his weapons.

“What?” he asked, breath turned to a quick pant.

“Kick down the door,” she instructed. “If they’re in, I’m waking them up. If not, we’re done wasting our time.”

The boy, to his ever-mounting credit, obliged. Two good kicks against the door’s lock sent it to splinters that burst out of the frame.

Inside, the place stank. It was a familiar stench that sent her immediately on alert, chasing whatever shade of Dreea’s kept trying to bugger her.

“Smells like death in here,” Vergil said. He had drawn the silver sword the soldiers had gifted him. “I can bet there’s a corpse attached to the stink.”

“Became an expert, have you?”

She reeled in her tongue before saying some other inane thing. Vergil was right. That smell could only be a corpse, and one that had been baking in its own juices for quite a while. For the first time she took stock of where they actually were.

The gardens lay at the far edge of the Rock’s settlement, built into a hollow dug into the mountain’s innards. Pools had been dug in layers, and filled with the normal mixture of soil, water and manure, everything needed to grow the night’s blood berries. The lamps let out the soft light the bushes needed, and the acrid smoke they fed on. It was as far from the city as one could get without digging farther into the rock, a feat that only dwarves had accomplished with any reliability.

The smell of the lamps hid the sickly sweet aroma of death. Now that the door lay ajar, the mix sent her bile up her throat. She pressed her sleeve to her mouth and stepped inside.

“This man was to be responsible for the crops here,” she said, remembering what Miks the tavern master had told them. “He’s taken to drinking after his mother died. Night’s berries only ripen early thaw, so they gave him space to mourn during the winter.”

“What are the fruit good for?” Vergil asked, stepping gingerly past the splintered wood, sword held loose in his hand.

“Alcohol. You make a lot of it from even a small batch. It explodes if left unattended.”

“Why do you suppose Tallah needed that?”

She thought back to the conversation with Kor and their dwindling medical supplies. They had the alcohol they needed to brew the medicine they could. And they’d been too busy surviving to worry over getting more.

On the walls they preferred to loose arrows. Without the proper containers, anything distilled from night’s blood was pretty much a disaster waiting to happen.

What would Tallah want with it?

It took them no time at all to find the corpses.

Four in total, revealed by Sil’s sprite several rooms into the dwelling.

Three men. One woman. All of them nailed to the inner walls, black metal spikes driven through their hands and feet. They had all been flayed. Their skins lay discarded on the bed, almost whole, looking like deflated people laying about.

Innards had spilled to the floor, rotted and burst apart to reveal their filth. Mouths were gagged tight, cloth stuffed deep into the throat. Loose jaws had detached while the corpses had rotted, but Sil could see clearly the rags dripping down with the victim’s putrefied tongues.

It was a scene that, less than a season prior, would have turned her stomach inside out. After the horrors she’d witnessed in Erisa’s castle of webs, this merely made her queasy. Vergil let out a small noise of disgust but was otherwise as inured to horror as she.

The skins drew most of her attention. It was impossible not to notice how they had been sewn back together, like grotesque suits ready for wearing. Though, how one would go about donning the things…

Vergil’s voice was quiet as he poked one of the corpses with the tip of his sword. Meat slid off bone and splattered on the floor. “Been dead a while. Shouldn’t they be only… you know… bones?”

“They should be, yes.”

She cast a glance about, checking for other signs of what had transpired there. The skins were important.

A memory floated up to the surface of her thoughts, along with a formula. She barely recognized her voice when she spoke. “You can’t skin a person neatly. They need to first be fed a solution of beaster’s salt, dryad’s bane, field mousker kidney, and bloodberry. Mix in with rust off an iron spike soaked in the victim’s blood. If you do it well, the skin and meat will toughen. It will be excruciatingly painful but the skin will not tear under the flaying knife. The corpse will take much longer to rot.”

She shook her head to chase away the memory of her own hands measuring ingredients and lighting the burner to prepare the concoction.

In spite of knowing better, she closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. The stench hit her like a fist below the ribs. She gagged. But, right enough, beneath all the stinks of death, there was the unmistakable tang of dryad’s bane. Her sprite lit up several jars of the poisonous plant, dried leaves shining with a glossy sheen.

“I don’t want to know how you know that,” Vergil said, nonplussed. He walked farther inside, both weapons drawn, Luna at attention on his shoulder.

From the outside the building hadn’t looked big, but she knew there had to be a distillery farther back, where the alcohol would be produced. There would be more rooms waiting ahead. Her fists tightened on her staff, though she barely trusted it for one good swing against any opponent.

“Sil, come and see,” Vergil called out.

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She reluctantly turned her back to the sewn-up skins and headed to the sound of his voice.

Right, here was the distillery. She could make out in the gloom all the apparatus that would’ve been needed to boil the fermented sludge to obtain the final brew. The room was large, tall, and had several fire pits over which the cauldrons would’ve been set to boil. There were vents all around, that would’ve guided the fumes out.

They were all stuffed with straw, linen and various clothes, as if to seal the stench of death inside.

And, in one corner of the room, where Vergil waited, there was a hole. The sprite’s light showed it digging deep into the rock beneath, only to angle away several tens of meters below ground.

“Well…” Vergil said as she approached. “Want to bet a tankard of beer this is where daemons are coming in through?”

“Bad bet,” Sil said. “I’ll drink just to forget what I saw back there.”

“This isn’t happenstance, is it?” he went on, sword clinking against the armoured heel of his boot. “Like, daemons didn’t just burrow in here and conveniently killed those people behind us, right?”

She shook her head. “Definitely not happenstance. This was planned.”

Smoke drifted up from the hole, black and ominous, curling around the lip of the pit. It flowed close to the floor, as if afraid of rising into the air. Sil stepped aside as it passed her feet.

“Sil?” Vergil was looking out the narrow, grimy window. “Who’s been keeping the lamps lit out there if the people in here have been dead so long?”

That was a terribly good point. And a worrisome one. Vergil, again, understated the obvious. The smoke in the room thickened, swelling out of the hole like water up from a well.

“We need to get out of here.” There was her own bit of self-evident understatement. “We need to get Tallah.”

Something scraped somewhere behind them. They both spun on the sound, Sil still trying to keep the hole in her peripheral view.

The smoke was flowing out the door into the home proper. And only through the door. It wasn’t flowing out into any of the other crooks of the room.

The door heading inside creaked open and a naked person walked out. Then another. In the surgical white light of the sprite, the sutures on the body were unmistakable. The skins walked on their own. Black smoke whirled around their feet and was consumed, seeping into the corpse, filling it up like a balloon.

Sil felt her face growing cold as the first body turned its grotesque head in her direction. The eyes were black swirls, boiling with intent as they regarded her.

Vergil was at her side, sword and axe drawn, posture hunched. She reached down to her thigh and pressed on her pouch. Still a couple bag of nettle dust in there, their weight a comfort.

A third body appeared in the doorway. Then the fourth, the woman.

“There’s a way out through the back,” Vergil said in a low voice. He was tensed for the fight to come. “I saw the door when we walked around the place. Move back slowly.”

The figures advanced on them. The smoke still lingered around the floor, like pooling shadows that seethed. It was climbing up walls in places. The four skins looked inflated to bursting as they advanced. Their lips hung loose, the inside of the masks as black as pitch. Tarry drool dribbled from their mouths.

Sil and Vergil retreated around the hole, step by careful step back. The skins followed, heads swinging from side to side, their movement unnatural.

“We killed a shadow monster two days ago,” Vergil whispered. “These may be similar.” His voice was as steady as rock.

His silver sword moved side to side as he retreated, the quiet dead following with clear intent. If not for the weapon, Sil had a feeling they might’ve pounced already. At least they feared the silver, which meant they were daemons still. But she’d never heard of anything like them.

The woman leapt. She cleared the entire span of the room, the nearly thirty paces that separated them, in a single, blurry bound. She crashed like a rock against Sil’s barrier, two meters off the ground and equally distant from Vergil. The barrier barely held, Sil feeling the shock of impact all the way into the soles of her feet. The thing slouched off and fell to the floor in a swirl of black. The thud sounded unreasonably heavy.

Sil wove more barriers to block their pursuers. Her back hit the wall. A single glance back showed they’d just cornered themselves. A heavy, rusted lock lay on the door, keeping tight in place a similarly thick and corroded black bolt. Tallah could blow through the door easily. Them, not so much.

The skins pressed against her barriers, eerily stopped in place and gazing out.

“Fuck,” Vergil groaned as he rattled the lock her. He swung his axe at the thing but it bounced off harmlessly with a dull clang. The door was thick and heavy, his axe useless in cracking it.

Around them there were the cauldrons and distillery equipment needed to make the alcohol. Everything had been made of aluminium or copper, too soft to use as a weapon. To the side, in the light of the sprite, Sil could spy another level and a ladder leading up to it. It ran around the entire circumference of the room, back towards the door on the far side.

One of the things pressed a hand to the wall and pushed. The pressure hit Sil like a stone and she felt the barrier feeding back her illum.. Hair-thin, shining cracks appeared in the air. Not for the first time, she tried to weave a barrier to cut, same as Erisa had. The weave failed before she could manifest it.

“Run to the side,” she gasped out. All four were now pushing. The first layer shattered with a noise like glass smashing. Blood gushed out her nose. “We’ll try and skirt around.”

Vergil growled at that and advanced on the enemies, ready to defend her. “You go,” he ordered.

She did. Wanted to object, but, rather than waste time arguing, she ran. Barriers went up as she headed for the ladder. The sound of bare feet slapping on the stone floor showed two of the skins running parallel to her. They barrelled through the apparatus, scattered it in twisted piles, their strength incredible. It was all she could do before she reached the ladder to keep her walls up. Vergil followed soon after, climbing quickly after her.

Before she could understand the supports available on the walkways and get another barrier set, the woman-shaped monster leapt. It landed in a crouch just in front of her. And she swung a fist straight at Sil’s head.

It was a heartbeat’s reaction that got a barrier in front of herself. The force of the impact shattered it to illum and the woman’s hand grabbed hold of Sil’s throat.

Her strength was that of a vice. Fingers like steel cables squeezes and Sil felt her airway giving, fragile cartilage crunching, the pain blinding.

Vergil’s axe flashed down onto the arm, burying itself into the elbow with a sound like splintering wood. The grip slackened but just barely. The boy drew out the weapon. Through the red haze of choking agony, Sil saw him staring at her, panic in his eyes, just before he swung two handed at the creature’s head. The axe buried itself right into the thing’s eyes. Before it reeled, the boy let go of the weapon, drew his sword, and slammed the blade down onto the arm to follow the axe’s cut.

The grip loosened entirely and a deflated skin glove flopped to the floor, utterly separated from the body. Sil gasped for breath, hand flying to her throat and feeling the damage. She drew a laboured breath as Vergil swung the sword at the monster. It drew back. He grabbed the axe’s handle and wrenched the enemy back, his strength a match for it.

Thuds came and the platform shuddered with impacts. Two in front. Then a third, behind. Sil pressed her hand to her throat and pushed out the words to the healing prayer through gritted teeth.

Vergil held on to the axe and hacked at the skin-wearing daemon with the silver sword. Bits and pieces flew off it as it tried to shield its head with its remaining arm. He plunged the sword through the arm to skewer the chest, right where a heart would be.

The skin opened its mouth wide and screamed in a low, guttural moan that had no business coming out of that balloon-like flesh.

Two others neared from the back of the monster. The third was right atop them, hands reaching out to grab Sil’s hair.

She spun in place, pressed her hand to its naked chest, and prayed.

“This one requires aid.”

White light pulsed once from her fingers, fire burning in her veins with the effort. There had been no delay like in Grefe. The discharge happened the very moment she bit off the final word.

The skin disintegrated and the black smoke burned inside its shell. Like steel wool, the flame consumed it until only ashes drifted on the air.

Vergil wrestled with his foe, trying to dislodge his sword out of the screaming chest.

“Would you fucking die!” he bellowed and kicked out at the thing’s legs. He sent it down into a pile, the sword free of its chest, blade black with dripping tar.

“Down!” Sil screamed.

Vergil obeyed and ducked to the floor just as she extended her arm again. She had to hold it with the other, the pain unbearable. Skin cracked and blood dripped to the floor.

“This one requires aid!”

There was a short delay this time, as if whatever power Panacea had gifted her had needed several heartbeats to recharge. It gave the skins time to dodge.

Only one managed to get entirely clear of the flash. The second hadn’t been quick enough. White light errupted again from Sil’s fingers and skewered the monster from the side, punching in through its ribs and out the other side. It screamed.

Sil’s hand was flayed raw. She bled a river from the shoulder down, crimson muscles visible through the rents in her skin.

Vergil took the initiative while she was mute with agony. He scooped her up into his arms, took a running start, and leapt over his downed prey. He landed several meters away from where the second creature still screamed and burned, and then booked it down the walkway at full tilt.

Sil wrapped herself around her arm, her entire body seeking to encase the agonised limb as Vergil carried her at a dead run.

“Hold on!”

She didn’t get to react before the boy leapt from the walkway. They sailed through the air for a long, long, terribly long time.

He hit the floor below with a crack as his heels punched through the rotted floor. Sil passed out from the pain. And woke to another jolt of horrid agony as Vergil slammed through a door. His feet trampled the rotten bodies as he rushed through the curtain of smoke, through the empty rooms, and then out into the garden and its grey mist.

A crash announced the last creature giving chase straight through a wall. Sil saw it lopping at them like an animal, running on all fours, eating the distance that separated them. She focused the shreds of her concentration and erected walls in its path. They didn’t hold. The monster tore through them like so much fragile porcelain, each shattered barrier jolting Sil anew.

Vergil didn’t stand his ground. Instead, he ran, feet pumping like a blacksmith’s bellows. Sil fed the helmet as much illum as she dared, hoping it would be enough. Whatever these monsters were, they were far beyond anything else the soldiers had dealt with.

“Help!” Vergil screamed breathlessly as his run carried them into the city proper. “Daemon! Daemon within the walls!”

Men and women stopped and stared, then took up his cry. They drew back against their homes and pointed urgently.

“That way! Soldiers that way!” they all screamed at them. “Run! Keep going!”

The beast chased and did not care for the others. It was almost upon them no matter how many twists and turns Vergil took.

It leapt at them.

Sil screamed.

Vergil dropped to his knees and skidded along the smooth cobbles, sparks dancing off his shin guards. The monster sailed through the air overhead, arms flaying to grab at them. It crashed against and through a wall, sending up a blast of masonry and stone shards.

A group of soldiers appeared at the other end of the street, running towards them, swords out.

Silver glinted in the torch light. Runes burned even from afar.

Sil found her feet and willed all her illum into barriers. Without its insane inertia to help it, the monster couldn’t punch through as easily. She encased it in layer over layer over layer of illum. Air distorted around the dome she built.

It raged inside, slamming its fists against her barriers.

Blood flowed down Sil’s mouth and chin, staining the ground. Her head threatened to burst with the effort of anchoring one construct after another. Abject fear kept her focused.

The soldiers reached them. Vergil came to his feet, sword drawn.

Sil dropped all the barriers just as swords descended on the beast. It roared as it died, hacked to bits and impaled on murderous silver.

Others, somewhere behind, echoed the cry. Horns of battle filled the city with echoing calls to arms.