“Done,” I said immediately.

The gnome laughed. “Not that simple, Paladin. You must make a Blood Swear. After all, I cannot risk calling your friend back only to have you run off on your merry way without keeping your promise. Honor is in short supply among the Low-dwellers.”

“Fine. What do we have to do?”

“Mace,” Stephen said, “can we talk about this for a second?”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” I said, still staring at the gnome.

“Please,” Stephen insisted.

I growled my impatience and followed Stephen through the debris to Sonja’s body. I tried to avoid stepping in the thickening blood around her legs, but it was hard not to. It felt like I was stepping on her.

Stephen, Constantine, and I huddled against the nearby wall.

“Why do we even need to discuss this?” I asked Stephen in a rough whisper. “If we have to kill Trox to save Sonja, that sounds like a win-win to me. Hell, it was on our ‘to do’ list anyway.”

“That’s not what worries me,” Stephen said. “I don’t know a lot about this ‘Blood Swear,’ but I read a few things in my spellbook about making promises with your blood. If we swear upon our blood to do something, we must fulfill the promise or die.”

“Again, so what? I’m willing to risk dying to save a good friend. Aren’t you?”

“Of course I am,” he retorted, “but promises have risks.”

Constantine sighed through his teeth. “Right. The promise must be worded exactly, or we might be promising to do something we never intended.”

“Right,” Stephen said, then looked at me. “I need to be sure that you aren’t going to promise anything that will get us into more trouble. We must be careful to only promise to kill Trox so that we can bring back Sonja. And we have to be sure that it is Sonja who comes back to us; no zombies, no ghosts. We must ensure the promise is contingent on Sonja coming back exactly the way she was.”

“I wouldn’t promise anything other than that,” I said defensively.

Stephen raised his eyebrows. “So far, you’ve agreed to everything the gnome has suggested.”

“I haven’t….”

I felt even Mace nodding along in rare agreement with Stephen.

“All I’m saying,” Stephen said, “is that you keep your head and think about everything you promise. Got it?”

Nissa’s tiny voice floated from the door, “Your friend’s spirit will not linger much longer. You must make your decision now.”

Constantine and Stephen gave me severe warning glares. I sighed and said, “Fine, you all can do the talking.”

They nodded, and we turned back toward the gnome. Stephen said to Nissa, “We’ll agree, but she must come back the way she was or no deal. No undead, no alternate personality. She must be exactly the way she was before she died.”

Nissa waved her hand dismissively. “Of course, she will come back the way she was. It is her spirit that contains her personality. Once that returns to her body, she will be the same as before. However, you must heal her body. I do not have the magic for that.”

Constantine nodded, so Stephen said to the gnome, “We’ll make the Blood Swear to kill Trox. But know this: If Sonja does not come back the way she was before, with everything the same, then the Blood Swear will be void. Is that clear?”

Nissa grinned and nodded. “I will draw up the contract. Bring your friend and follow me, noble questers.”

With that, she hurried off from the entry. Stephen trudged over to the entrance to track where Nissa headed while Constantine helped me lift Sonja’s body onto my shoulders in a fireman’s carry. I hadn’t done a fireman’s carry since my police academy days, but Mace’s strength made it easy with Sonja. I quickly stepped through the debris and exited the ruined hut.

I heard Constantine pushing through some debris behind me, and when I turned back to see what he was doing, I saw that he carried Mourner.

He held it up and said, “She’ll be wanting this when she wakes up.”

Tears almost welled in my eyes. His optimism gave me hope that Nissa might actually bring her back. We both followed after Nissa and Stephen.

With the death of the goblins, the gnomes had organized long bucket lines from the lake to the fires. They’d done a remarkable job putting out most of the fires in the short time between me leaping into the building and exiting it with Sonja’s body. And there were far more gnomes running around than I thought could live comfortably in such a small village. They must’ve lived ten per building. They scurried about like ants with a purpose rather than the chaotic darting of a few minutes ago.

Stephen was already negotiating with Nissa, for when I caught up with them, the gnome was replying to something Stephen said.

“Yes, yes, I know you saved our village from the goblins. My people and I are grateful, which is why I’m offering you my help at all. This ritual is expensive and trying. I could use those resources to rebuild my village, but instead, I’m bringing your friend back to life. So I’d say it is you who should be grateful, wizard quester.”

“Why do you keep calling us ‘questers’?” I asked.

She looked up at us. “You are Updwellers, yes? You have come to kill Angelus, yes?”

“Um, yes.”

“Then you are ‘questers.’ We see your kind every year or so. You come through our village, purchase supplies and information, and then move on to the lower levels.” She narrowed her eyes. “And we never see any of you again. There are things unimaginably viler than Trox and his thugs in the lower levels.”

The last thing I wanted to hear at that moment was a reminder of just how much further we had to go to get home. And that this was supposedly the “easy” level.

“As I was saying,” Stephen said with a warning glare aimed at me, “three goblins brought all this destruction. Hunting down Trox—a powerful wizard on his own—and his cohort will be expensive and trying for us. Any aid you can give us will greatly increase our odds of removing his ever-present shadow from your village. Surely you have come across valuable spell components, weapons, or armor sold to you by these questers during your time in this dungeon.”

“Dungeon?” Nissa said, looking up at Stephen with an offended expression. “This is no ‘dungeon.’ This is my home! How would you like it if I called the home where you spent your lifetime a dungeon?”

Stephen sighed. “Forgive me, I misspoke. What do you call this place?”

The gnome lifted her chin proudly and said, “Dungeontown.”

Stephen opened his mouth to say something but then shook his head.

Nissa waved her hand dismissively. “We might have old quester armor or weapons lying about. I will ask my generals if they can spare any.”

“And perhaps spell components?” Stephen asked.

She sighed heavily. “I cannot make any promises!”

Nissa led us through the village center, past small buildings being doused with water. Some had collapsed in on themselves after the fire had burned through the flammable material. Many gnome bodies lay about, and equal numbers were crying over the bodies.

Some gnomes had already begun piling bodies into carts drawn by the largest tortoises I had ever seen: Each was about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, had a dark green shell, and a sharp-beaked mouth. The efficiency and focus demonstrated by the gnomes were incredible. It made me wonder if this was not the first time they’d sustained an attack by the goblins. Mace’s instincts told me it probably wasn’t.

We stopped at a circular stone building that the flames and goblins hadn’t touched. The building was large by gnome standards; it was probably fifty feet in diameter and had two stories. I was confident I could vertically jump and tap the top of the second story.

Nissa pushed open a large wooden door and entered. I had to stoop down to enter it, which I managed to do while carrying Sonja. We entered a small stadium with an open roof above us. The seats were simple stone benches carved from the existing cave like an amphitheater. Small lanterns emanating harsh white light hung from posts that overhung the center of the arena. They illuminated a round quartz dais upon which sat a stone table about the height of a coffee table.

When I looked closer at the lanterns, I almost tripped over my feet. Inside were tiny, glowing filaments, and each lantern had a copper wire coming out of the bottom. The wires snaked up around the lanterns' posts, converging in a bundle at the top of the stone wall before disappearing through a hole.

“Are those lanterns electric?” I asked Nissa.

Nissa was scurrying down the stone steps toward the quartz dais. “If you are referring to the magicks of lightning, then yes, they are. You wizards need divinity and components. We just need moving water.”

They certainly had the water in the lake, which I now guessed they were pumping through those massive pipes to some sort of electrical generator in another cavern. I glanced at the copper wires and made a mental note not to get anywhere near them—they were exposed and likely pumping unknown quantities of electricity between the lanterns.

Gnomes, I thought. These guys are as crazy as the ones in my favorite RPGs.

“Lay your friend on the table,” Nissa directed as she went past the dais toward a tall cabinet with dozens of labeled drawers outside the illuminated area.

Constantine and Stephen helped me gently lay Sonja’s body onto the table. She looked like she was lying on an autopsy table in the harsh light. Her skin was so gray where it had once been a healthy bronze. I reached up and closed her half-open eyes and tried not to look at the terrible wound in her thigh that had taken her life.

Nissa opened a drawer and grabbed a scroll of paper from it. She found quills in another drawer and brought everything up to the table.

“We must hurry,” she said, handing a pen to me, Stephen, and Constantine. “The glory of the Eternal Realms tempts even the spirits of the Warriors of the Crimson Leaf.”

I stared at the pen and got an awful feeling of déjà vu. It looked like the pen Barney had made us use when we signed our Character Sheets just before we woke up in this RPG world. It had the same silvery metal base with engraved swirls. The black feather at the top looked natural, but it had a red sheen to it, depending on how I held the quill in the light.

Constantine just frowned, and Stephen rolled his eyes.

Nissa spread the scroll upon the table next to Sonja’s head and then weighted the edges with four small metal bars.

“Now then,” she said, standing back and looking at each of us, “write your promise onto this scroll and sign your names beneath it. While you’re doing that, I will gather the components I need to retrieve your friend’s spirit.”

She hurried off to the cabinet again and pulled items out of drawers.

I looked at Stephen. “Okay, how do we word this? You’re the accountant in real life. Don’t you know how to draw up contracts?”

“Accountants don’t draw up contracts, dumb ass,” Stephen whispered harshly. He looked at Constantine and said, “You’re a car salesman. Don’t you draw up financing contracts all day long?”

He shook his head helplessly. “My finance director does that. I just schmooze and negotiate the sales price.”

“It can’t promise anything other than killing Trox,” I said. “Maybe something like, ‘If you bring back Sonja’s spirit exactly the way she was before she was killed, we promise to kill Trox.’ ”

“What does ‘exactly the way she was before’ mean?” Stephen asked. “Does she come back as a child or the adult woman we knew?”

“And who is ‘you’?” Constantine asked. “Is it Nissa or a zombie necromancer she brings in to do the ritual?”

I gave them an exasperated look. “It was a rough draft, okay? What do you guys suggest?”

After a few more minutes of quietly arguing back and forth on the wording of the promise, we finally came up with:

If Nissa Understump of Dungeontown returns the spirit of Sonja, Warrior of the Crimson Leaf, to the body lying on this table to the satisfaction of the undersigned, the undersigned agrees to kill Trox the Goblin Wizard in an expedited manner. After Trox is dead, this contract will be considered fulfilled, and no further obligation will be expected of either party.

We weren’t happy with it and knew it likely contained unforeseen loopholes, but we were pressed for time. And Nissa stood near the cabinet, tapping her foot and waiting for us to finish.

Stephen volunteered to write the promise and did it with whatever ink flowed from his pen. He signed the scroll, as did Constantine and I.

Being the last to sign, I held the scroll out to Nissa. The gnome shuffled forward, took the scroll, and read it. She thought about it a few seconds, then said, “I have one change.”

She produced a pen, crossed out a sentence, and wrote her own. Then she handed the scroll back to me. I looked at her change and sighed. She had crossed out “in an expedited manner” and wrote, “within one week.”

“‘Expedited manner’ is too open to interpretation,” she said with a scowl. “I’m generous and will give you one week to accomplish this task.”

I looked at Constantine and Stephen. The dwarf shrugged and said, “Seems fair.” Stephen said, “Whatever.”

I nodded to Nissa. “Agreed. One week.”

The gnome put the scroll on the table next to Sonja’s head and signed her name with a flowery script. Then she used the pen to poke her thumb. A tiny bead of blood appeared, and she pressed her thumbprint onto the scroll next to her name.

“Now you,” she said. “Come, come, hurry, hurry. I fear we may have already wasted too much time.”

I immediately poked my thumb and left a print, praying that I didn’t get sucked into another alternate world like I had the last time I’d signed a scroll. After Constantine and Stephen left their thumbprints, the gnome took the scroll, rolled it up, and stuck it into the satchel she wore over her shoulder.

My forearm itched, and I looked down to see a pop-up:

You have accepted the Quest, “Kill Trox the Goblin Wizard.”