A cacophony of howls, growls, and screams of pain and surprise answered the opening salvo of the attacking humans. Charlie ran toward the camp full-tilt, racing to reach the first were-creatures before they could organize a response. He had been at the front of a charge like this twice before and knew that their success—and his personal survival—depended on speed. The risk of twisting an ankle on the uneven ground was negligible compared to the cost of rushing a prepared defensive line.

The enemy were terrifying monsters, certainly, but they clearly didn’t know anything about military discipline. Some rushed out to meet the attackers while others stood still, undecided. Still others were wounded, trying to back up to see to themselves or standing around haphazardly, as if in shock.

A vampire ran out to meet Charlie and he met it with the point of his bayonet. The weapon rammed cleanly into its chest, but it didn’t stop the creature. It backhanded him, flinging him back. Not so long ago, that kind of strike would have killed him outright, but things were different now. He was different. He hit the ground hard and it hurt, but nothing broke. Before he could get back up, the vampire was on top of him, seizing his head as if to rip it off. Shit.

Charlie scrabbled at the thing’s chest with his bare hands in a panic before remembering himself. He focused his essence in his hands, the ethereal substance pooling on his skin with an odd, oily consistency, and smeared it on his opponent’s skin.

Grow, he commanded it, neck muscles screaming as it began to pull.

With a hiss, the vampire released him, scrambling backward and looking down at itself, obviously unsettled. The black rot on its skin was in the shape of his handprint. It didn’t spread and kill the creature like it had the ghoul back in the village, but it was enough.

Just then, Em arrived, pulling him up by his arm. She was stronger than she looked and easily lifted him back on his feet.

“Up! Get up! What are you doing?” She shouted over the noise.

“Come on!” he blew out a breath and pushed forward. There were other soldiers all around now, engaging the enemy. Unlike the monsters, they were well organized, quickly driving through into the village and attempting to surround the more powerful vampires and were-creatures. The wights went down easily—they were fast and strong, and they could heal if they had an opportunity to draw essence from the humans, but trained soldiers with guns were still more than a match for them.

The were-creatures and vampires were another matter. Even when harried by several soldiers at once, they were devastating. As Charlie watched, the odd bear-snake creature wound itself around a dying soldier while chewing into the head of another attacker. Lieutenant Meuren took advantage of the distraction to line up a shot that took it through the eye, finally killing it. Maybe.

Charlie had a job to do, and they needed to hurry. The lich would likely return within a few minutes of the first shot that was fired.

Getting through the camp was easy once they escaped the initial fight—the enemy, even the prisoners’ guards, had deserted the camp to join the battle. It was sloppy of them, but Charlie wasn’t surprised. They were smarter and more organized than a scourge of maddened ghouls, sure, but they weren’t an army. They were monsters united in purpose under an even more powerful monster. There was no clear structure here and probably no real training.

In moments, they found themselves standing in front of the cages. They were solidly built, with heavy wooden timber framing and iron bars. They were also too small for the number of people that had been jammed into them. Most looked like regular humans, though Charlie noticed two troggs and a handful of revenants.

“Lonnie?” he asked as he put his hands on the timbers. He wiped his hands along the wood, corrupting it with decay as he went, one vertical beam on a corner, and a horizontal beam along the top. The wood gave off a faint crackling noise, like gnawing beetles and crinkling paper.

“Charlie? Gyirg’s rocky balls. What are you doing here?” Lonnie’s voice sounded exhausted, but clearly he was fine. Em sighed in relief, apparently coming to the same conclusion.

“Lonnie! What were you thinking, going after that vampire like that?” She scolded him, tone growing increasingly accusatory. “Look where it got you! You had me worried sick!”

For a disorienting second, Em reminded Charlie of nobody so much as his own mother. It made sense, in a way. Having died in his early twenties, he was likely the youngest revenant in the entire village by a decade.

Returning to the task at hand, he grabbed the timbers holding the cage together and tore the rotten wood apart like… well… rotten wood. Then he moved on to the next one as Em ordered the prisoners to get up and begin making their way out of the village toward the trees.

Just as Charlie was about to tear open the second cage, the massive boom rocked the cavern. Rocks crumbled from the nearby wall, cascading down to clatter noisily down to the ground. A cage clanged loudly as a rock fell on it, followed by a fist-sized light crystal that shattered in a blinding, heatless flash as it struck the rocky ground. Several of the prisoners shouted in surprise and one screamed, loud and high pitched. Sounds of impact echoed through the cavern.

Charlie finished breaking the beams out of the second cage and turned to find Em staring the other direction.

“That was from where the lich was with the others.” She looked at Charlie, eyes wide. “Do you think they survived that?”

“I don’t know.” Charlie answered. They had a job to do and had to trust that Hasan and the others were doing theirs. Get the prisoners out, keep the Lich on his toes to buy time for Duskhaven. “Come on, we need to get them out.”

Getting the prisoners up and moving took longer than Charlie would have liked. He counted 22 people, not including Lonnie, who immediately made himself useful organizing the others. None had serious physical injuries, but many had been repeatedly drained, probably almost continuously for weeks. They were weak, confused, and a few couldn’t even walk without assistance. If they could get through to the revenants, he was sure that Reshid would be able to get them back on their feet. The man’s healing ability was enormously useful.

They started limping toward the treeline, moving alongside the cavern wall. The fighting had died down there, moving further into camp as the better-organized soldiers pressed their advantage. Judging by what he could see, the short battle had already caused hideous losses on both sides. Instead of going in first to break the soldiers’ ranks, the powerful vampires and were-creatures had backed up, forcing the weaker wights to absorb the brunt of the ambush.

The soldiers had cut down the wights fairly easily before breaking into organized groups to take down the more dangerous monsters. Bodies often lay in groups, circling a larger, monstrous corpse, brought down at enormous cost.

Too many bodies. They couldn’t afford so many casualties. Charlie looked toward the trees, wondering how long they had until the Lich arrived.

Just then, fire blossomed in the trees, not two hundred paces away. It spread unnaturally quickly, forming a wall of flame that raced to either side until, seconds later, it reached the cavern wall, cutting off their retreat. Charlies stopped, staring at the fire disbelievingly.

The Lich and his minions had moved too quickly. With that explosion, it wasn’t clear whether the revenants were alright, but it didn’t really matter. They wouldn’t be coming to rescue them—they would just wait for the humans to reach their lines.

What a stupid plan this had been. It was much too complicated. Hasan played at running a little army, sure, but there hadn’t been a real tactician in the room. Of course it couldn’t work. They were doomed.

Em stopped, shoulders slumping. Lonnie, who was supporting a small trogg, stopped and looked around wildly, as if looking for another escape. A moment later, he turned to Charlie.

“Charlie, where now?”

“I don’t…” Charlie started, before stopping himself. He did know a way out.

“Come on!” He turned and jogged over to the body of a dead soldier, looting a rifle with an affixed bayonet, a knife and a box of paper cartridges from a dead soldier. “Everyone who’s still mobile, spread out and collect as much ammunition as you can from the dead! I need to go find Lieutenant Meuren, or whoever’s left. If you see the enemy, run back as quickly as you can!”

If they could hold out a few more minutes, they might even be able to block off the stairwell.

–---------

As they emerged from the bowels of the earth, leaving their revenant guide behind, Frederik called a halt, summoning one of his officers with a wave. As the man approached, he handed him a fat purse.

“Find the nearest town and hire me a carriage. And if you can’t find a carriage, get a horse. No, two horses. One to carry word to Duskhaven, and another to get me off my feet. I didn’t become the city’s wealthiest man to wander the countryside on foot like a farmer.”

Agatha ignored her patron’s complaining, shading her eyes against the glare of the afternoon sunlight. While the caverns down in the Deep Paths were brightly lit by massive light crystals, the passages leading to the surface were often dimly illuminated, if at all.

Those enormous crystals, in stubborn contradiction of all essential theory, seemed to naturally grow from the cavern ceiling, even mimicking the natural day and night cycle of the world above. She’d read about it before, certainly, but seeing it was something else entirely. Then there were the new essences. Or rather, new old essences. Her experiments with the revenants, Charlie in particular, had shown that some essences could be synthesized through the combination of others. While this wasn’t a new idea by any means, she’d never read or heard of anyone actually proving it in practice. Not until she’d done it herself.

Well. No humans, anyway. Barty hadn’t seemed the least bit surprised by the discovery. That old trogg knew far more than he was sharing. He was miserly with his knowledge of essential mechanics and revenants in particular, but he also wasn’t very good at keeping secrets—for one very important reason. Barty didn’t realize just how little human civilization, or at least the corner of it that Agatha lived in, understood. In idle conversation, he often discussed new ideas that he based on what sounded like wild assumptions about the nature of essences—but which were clearly established facts to him.

One of her many pockets held a small notebook full of quotes, transcribed as precisely as she could remember them, along with her own annotations. There was so much that they still just didn’t understand. And instead of investigating these mysteries, she was again following Frederik around on another quest to save the city. Did the man realize what she might have accomplished by now if she was left to do her research in peace?

In theory, they might already have everything they needed to protect themselves from ghouls, enemy armies—maybe even a lich. If only she had the time, if she could share what she’d learned with the other researchers at the college, if she had the proper funding and resources.

Frustration welled inside her, but she pushed it down. She knew why Frederik had ordered her to accompany him back to the city. She couldn’t publish her knowledge or enlist the help of the academy without revealing her sources, Frederik’s resources were already stretched to their limit, and, worst of all, they were simply out of time.

Even if they reached the city tomorrow and the guardians could turn back the lich, it would only strengthen the priesthood’s political position in the city. Depending on what they and the other merchant princes did next, the city-state’s government could find itself destabilizing even as ghouls continued to ravage the countryside and Rhenish “peacekeeping” forces massed on the northern border.

If Agatha was going to be of any help, she needed to make do with the resources she already had, and she would only have a few weeks to deliver—at best.