My hands very shaky, I drew the map out of my apron pocket and studied it with great care in the limited light.

Not that it could tell me anything I didn’t already know.

It was the common map supplied by the Guild and only displayed the safe route and its immediate surroundings, and little else. No other bridges across the Earth Vein were marked in the straightforward graphic. But surely there had to be other bridges. The idea that this one slim strip of stone had been the only connection between the two halves of the vast dwarf domain was absurd!

If the map was of no use, then I could only depend on my own counsel.

Time after time again I had been warned against leaving the charted route in Baloria, and I had regurgitated the same words to Ray not three nights past. But there were times where caution turned against wisdom. These guidelines were devised to reduce needless deaths among fledgling travelers and were not doctrines to religiously follow. I was an E-rank adventurer. It was not the first outdoor excursion in my life. I knew what I was doing.

The Earth Vein itself served as a prominent landmark. As long as I kept within view of it, I could find my way back here easily enough, if need be. Not to brag, but I had an excellent sense of direction too. Like birds, I could always tell which way was north and which way was south, and orient myself accordingly. Yes. There was no reason to panic. All hope was not lost yet. Following the gorge, I was guaranteed to come across another bridge sooner or later, and then I could find my way back to the safe route on the south side.

A small detour, a delay, that was all this meant.

Eastward, the district appeared to run into a dead end, so I set out to the west instead. A clean street accompanied the canyon’s course, like a comfortable riverside boulevard, only the river had no water and was godlessly deep. Even the desolate buildings along the way reminded me of harbor facilities and warehouses so commonly seen in Valengrad and Granrik, and other cities built along the long course of Eisne. Straining my imagination a little, I could almost see riverboats drift by on top of the shadows.

In half an hour, I came to a wall.

I assumed it was the wall parting the district of Qiln from the next one in the west. I didn’t know the name of that district, it was not on the map. Following the wall, I should eventually find a gate, and could keep heading deeper westward from there. But that expected me to leave the Vein behind. The hard rule I had set for myself not ten minutes previously, I was breaking it already.

Was there no way around along the canyon side?

A tall fortification stood perched in the corner of the district, like a rocky bird of prey overlooking the depths. If there was a way around here, it would be through that facility. It was also a fit nest for goblins to dwell in, remote and protected by high walls. The gate was broken in and trampled and coated in fine dust. I drew my dagger and went in.

There were no goblins inside. There was nothing. The fort was still fairly close to the safe route and the exit. Other adventurers and soldiers had cleaned up what little the dwarves had left behind long ago. Only barren rooms of stone remained, occupied by miscellaneous litter. Exercising a lot of wasted caution, I made my way through the lower floors and up along stairs to the south side bulwark, which provided me with an excellent overview of the nothingness spreading ahead.

I was very close to the joint of the Y-fork in the Vein. Across to southeast spread the dwarf burg of Taun with its sloped terraces and heavy pillars, deceptively, temptingly close. But I would not fly over six hundred yards of clear air even if I had wings on my back.

I gazed west instead. My eyes met nothing but steep cliff that way. It was not a built wall there, but the natural side of the mountain the dwarves had left unworked when they had built their city. The gray, naked face of stone carried on at least six hundred yards westward, where the buildings of the next town over could faintly be seen peeking past the corner. Attempting to climb over this way was madness. I didn’t have mountaineering gear with me. There were mainly only toiletries in my small backpack. I was wasting time.

I had to go look for the gate.

It was fine. I was thinking too rigidly again. Once I found the gate, I could follow the wall back to the Vein again. Getting lost was impossible. I hated how many additional steps this forced me to take when my endurance was finite and every hour of daylight was precious, but the plan was secure. I set out at once.

As I went further from the Vein, the natural light from the gaps above waned in kind, until I could see hardly ten feet ahead of me. The elaborate architecture was reduced to a collage of grainy, blurry-edged, washed-out patterns, of which my eyes failed to make heads or tails. There could have been a dozen goblins squatting in the obscured tavern doorways, behind the loading docks and barn drains, and I would have been none the wiser. I didn’t have a lantern, not even a candle. The soldiers carried such things.

I did have Lux, but I was told monsters could sense the shaping of power and it lured them from afar like the smell of a decomposing carrion. Relying on magic light here would have been my last mistake. Instead of my eyesight, I trusted my ears, the faint echo of my footsteps, how it rebounded off the walls and rang along the streets. Where the knocking of my heels came back clear, there was a hard surface, and where it was muffled had to be something soft and absorbent, wood, cloth, or perhaps flesh. Most of the time, it turned out to be an abandoned cart, a fossilized knapsack, or a pile of sand.

I came across the gate almost by accident.

Had the high door been closed, I would have happily marched past it, but the way was thankfully unobstructed. The gate was too heavy to operate by hand but required the work of heavy machinery—which appeared broken beyond repair, leaving the way wide open. On top of short stairs opened a high vaulted corridor, through the far end of which a pallid light could be seen, and the tops of residential buildings. The neighboring district.

I passed through the corridor and came to stand on top of a handsome balustraded terrace.

Ten yards below opened a circular, neatly tiled plaza, and from there began another dwarf town, a district very different from any of the other parts I had seen thus far of the realm. Above in the ceiling was pierced a large shaft, through which fell a phantasmal spear of light, showering the clearing and the nearby roofs with a dreary, bluish glow. Under the better light, I took out my map again and marked down the approximate location of the gate, relative to the zone behind me.

Just in case. I hoped very much to not come this way again.

I stepped down long stairs to the plaza and in front of the houses which stood like a theater audience in attendance. Everything looked at peace, but I had an unpleasant feeling. A chill. Every hall in the dungeon was cold, but this was a different sort of chill, the kind that gnawed at a person’s courage instead of her meat. This wasn’t a silence resulting from the absence of sound, but the sort a carnivore exhibits the moment before lunging at its prey. Hair stood on the back of my neck. I had never felt afraid when surrounded by nature, or natural forces, but there was something else at work here. Something inherently sinister and not of this earth.

I shrugged it off and went on.

I came to a short bridge raised over a rainwater channel and found corpses lay there strewn about. There the aged remains of a human male, fallen to eternal rest against the bridge’s stone-made guard rail; there another, fresher body, with a helmet still on, sprawled on the porch of a house by the street. More of them along the narrow street ahead.

Strangely, most of them were human. They weren’t casualties of the dwarves’ old war with the monsters. They were adventurers and would-bes, some of them still gripping rusted steel and wearing decayed armors of varied fashions.

It made sense that there would be casualties left in a district that adventurers excluded from their regular patrols, why so many in this particular place? What had killed them? Unable to see any obvious cause unnerved me. I drew my dagger and proceeded slower, warily.

Halfway across the bridge, the dead man leaning on the side suddenly jerked, like tugged by an unseen string. As if done with its afternoon nap and resolved to return to work, the withered corpse wrung itself up onto its shaky feet and turned its empty eyesockets at me. Given there the answer to the earlier mystery, I sighed faintly in relief.

“I see. So undead it is.”

Nothing worse than that.

It was a common plague in places where the dead couldn’t be properly buried. Those killed by unnatural causes were especially susceptible to rise again. The kind of dead you had in abundance in dungeons. The curse of the Rower would reanimate them to seek vengeance. If only their vengeance were limited to those who had done them harm in life, but, alas, the gods were not famed for fairness. All living shared the guilt, for allowing unjust killings to happen, and the punishment as well was collective. There was no reasoning with the dead.

These monsters could sense the presence of the living, if you strayed too close, and would then have you join them posthaste. Even without eyes, the dead adventurer dragged itself steadily across the bridge my way.

A warrior accustomed to living people, or the agile goblins, would laugh at the sluggish movements of the dead and enter the fray without fear—and that was the surest way to add to their numbers. The undead moved slowly only because they didn’t have a clear idea where or how far the target was. But if you hit them the wrong way—even just brushed them a little—they would at once launch into a frenzy and give it their all to hack you apart. Which was why they tended to pile up like this. Those killed by the vengeful dead were nearly guaranteed to become undead also. Every time someone failed to clear them out, the obstacle would grow more formidable.

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There were very few certain ways to put them to rest.

Have a priest absolve them, use blessed water to purify the curse—or else lop off the head in one clean strike without giving them the chance to retaliate.

I weighed my dagger and waited for the walker to come nearer. I had seen undead before but never fought one personally. A dagger was not the ideal weapon for cutting off heads. Then again, the corpse was rather withered, there was little more left of the neck but the backbone and hard-dried strips of skin.

The longer you hesitated, the more certain you were to fail. Now committed to strike, I stepped up and past the dead man, low and quiet, avoiding noise. Striking from behind, I was at less risk of being hit in case I botched the cut. I reached over the forward-groping arm, placed the blade under the jaw, and cut, cut forward and up, at the same time turning, leaning my whole weight into the swing. not pushing or pulling but cutting, letting the blade do the work.

The rotten muscles offered no resistance to the weisteel edge, but the ligaments underneath were a different matter. They were startlingly fresh, flexible, and surprisingly tough. I failed to find the gap between the vertebrae and only scraped along the bone. It was nothing like a long-decayed person’s spinal column, but seemed almost as good as new—no, even more durable than the neck of a living man.

Halfway through was not good enough. As long as the spinal column remained intact, the undead was still active.

Not feeling any pain, its hand jerked at once into a reflexive strike, a rusted saber hard in its grip, and I winced, expecting pain. But the cut fell generously wide. It had reacted as if the attack had come from the front. Minding my positioning had saved me. Not waiting for it to keep going, I cut again in a hurry, this time from behind, aiming at the same wound from the opposing direction.

What was half-done was finished, and the dead explorer’s head fell onto the bridge with a blunt rattle. I kicked it into the channel and knocked the decapitated remains away.

This was not good at all.

I was making too many mistakes and miscalculations today.

How many adventurers had the luxury of adjusting after their first failure? And how had my breathing grown so labored after only two quick cuts? I was much too tense, not pacing myself. Who was E-rank? Had I truly taken pride in such a meaningless letter, even aware it was only for show? What had I done but run errands and hand in papers? Dispatch a handful of pests in the safety of an armed guard? All I had was book knowledge and hearsay. I had never actually put my neck on the line and fought for a living. There were beginners with more wisdom out there.

No, forget about it. Don’t think about that now. If you let every little setback get to you, it’s over before you know it.

I was still alive, I could do this.

I sketched the new areas into the map as I followed along the narrow alleys southward and east, and back towards the Vein. Mindful of the fearsome distance yet to go, I gave up on clearing out the undead to save my energy, and sneaked past them where possible. Some stirred at my passage, but if only I put enough distance between us, they would soon give up the chase and return to rest.

The unknown town was more laborious to navigate than the ones before, with more cluttered architecture. The houses were tall, but also thin and packed closely together, so that you couldn’t go through, or around, or over. They trapped you in their shadowy maze and always led you away from where you wanted to go. Even the streets seemed to fight against you, the blocky cobbles sticking up unevenly from the floor to trip you.

In half an hour, I came to another brick-sided channel and another bridge across it.

This bridge was somewhat wider and longer than the one before it.

There were a lot of channels and aqueducts in this part of the dungeon. The dwellers had needed a way to control the meltwater from the outside slopes that inevitably flooded in. Rather than trying to block it out altogether and patch every conceivable crack in the range, it was wiser to gather the streams and let them pour into the endless Vein.

I was halfway across the bridge when a dark, bulky shape came barreling out of the darkness. And it was the strangest thing. A figure like an ornate, wide-girthed brass bell tottering on two stumpy feet, almost comical in its exaggeratedly mismatched proportions. But the fun ended in the looks.

In its short hands the figure gripped a hefty, two-sided axe. The tall pot helmet on its head and the frayed camail left a narrow gap in the front, through which showed a blackened, hard-dried face with empty-carven holes in place of eyes, and a filthy, moldy beard. I had never imagined the existence of such an abomination, and its uncalled-for appearance on the stage now took me entirely by surprise.

“An undead dwarf!”

Humans dying of unnatural causes was a tale older than time and they frequently rose as undead too. But dwarves were said to possess special resilience towards curses and other preternatural effects, and were not easily disturbed from their final rest. Whatever regret plagued this one had to be particularly deep.

The monster rushed across the bridge to greet me with none of the usual lethargy of the ghouls, producing furious grunts and snarls as it came.

Dwarves happened to be of hardier make than humans, as a rule. It therefore stood to reason that they wouldn’t be as quick to decompose either, and retained better musculature and bodily control even in death. The specimen in question indeed sported a rather lively gait. To make matters worse, the heavy armor this warrior had donned ere his end served him well even after turning into an enemy of the living. The heavy helmet and throat guard made decapitation unfeasible for my lightweight weapon.

I recognized I was in a lot of trouble. But I couldn’t give up here.

Difficult or not, I had to overcome this foe to get find my way home.

I pointed my finger at the approaching menace and drew speedily in the air.

Elemental Gate: Aqua.

“Whiplash!”

A trio of slim filaments of water shot out from the air in front of my hand and struck coiling at the approaching dwarf.

This manifestation of Aqua took dramatically more effort, which was why I generally disliked using it. Only one casting would leave me drained of power for the remainder of the day. A dagger tended to do the same job better, faster, and lighter. One aquatic whip alone would have been challenge enough, but the spell always conjured three simultaneously. The stream’s high speed also made aiming an agony. A pointlessly clumsy circus trick—but also the most potent magical attack I had.

I wanted nowhere close to the range of that axe. This was the only card I could play.

I aimed at the fine seams in the enemy’s armoring—but the targets were too small for my lack of fine control. One whip brushed off a part of the dwarf’s decayed waist cloth. One struck square on the left pauldron and didn’t leave a dent on the thick plate of engraved metal. The third hit very close, close below the right shoulder, and rent the muscles under the arm. A thin streak of tarry blood splattered the bridge stones. But a flesh wound wasn’t going to stop even a living dwarf, never mind one beyond death and pain.

My trump card barely gave it a pause. It came on.

Had I guessed I would one day be in a pinch like this, I might have committed more time to practice.

Looking mighty furious, the fiend rushed towards me with renewed zeal, and swung its axe with such a glee, as though I had slighted its beard and the beards of all its ancestors. But though it seemed more apt at sensing vital energy than the human undead, its aggression was much too undisguised, the intent clear from a mile away. I baited an attack, then leapt back to evade.

I wasn’t about to wait for more of the same, though.

It was there at last, having run face-first into that dwarf-shaped wall, that it dawned on me—the sheer lunacy of what I was attempting.

I had lost my companions. The tents and supplies were gone with them. I only had some seed crackers in my backpack. A sleeping bag. I didn’t have enough information. I had only studied the safe route, and everything else was a mystery to me. I had no idea where I was going, or what awaited me further down the line. No useful map, no light, not even a fire starter. I was in shock and not thinking rationally.

Somehow, I had imagined I could breeze through a dungeon spanning miles upon miles in every direction, as if taking a shortcut through Regent’s Park to the markets. I was desperate to get back to Ferdina, but at this rate, I was only in for an early grave.

There was only one sane thing left to do.

The most shameful thing.

I gave up on the battle, on home and duty—and ran.