The room was as large as the one housing the vampire and had the same shape. It appeared we were travelling the outer edge of a pyramid.

  A pair of rubies decorated the floor, modest riches joined by a funerary bouquet, a shovel, and a pick. All tools of a grave-robber, even the bouquet. Vampires could be laid to rest with such things. At least for a time.

  To our left a fountain was set in the wall.

  I went over and tasted the water. It was freshwater, pure and good, as all water should be now that the pixie was free. I took the opportunity to refill my empty skin.

  “You should wait,” I told Attar, “on the off chance it was poisoned, I can heal myself in a number of ways. We will see what happens before we recommend this bounty to any others.”

  I doubted it was poisoned. It had tasted as clear as a mountain spring. My life sight hadn’t seen anything other than the ambient spores of life which settled on everything. Not deadly, not diseased.

  I strapped the shovel and pick to Attar’s pack and took the bouquet for myself. I’d probably have more trouble with the undead than him.

  The pixie led us past the open archway which lay at the end of the room, and around the corner to the left, up to a portcullis in the upper right corner.

  “The path leads through here, sirs. If you would be so kind.”

  It was roughly 15 minutes from one end of the room to the other. By the time we’d made it to the portcullis, especially after factoring in our time spent with Shining Power, my spell sword had vanished.

  Attar’s ghosts could be hurt, but my spells were slow to return. If there were no traps on the portcullis, it would be better that he open it, otherwise, it was better I did it myself. My ring revealed no traps after a careful scan of the frame and surrounding area.

  Attar summoned his ogre tore through the rotted wood with ease, though he made an awful racket.

  The racket was answered with the ceiling falling on him.

  A stone, perhaps ten by fifteen feet plummeted from just outside the reach of my ring and wrapped itself about the ogre like a blanket.

  Attar and I winced. A blow with enough force to fold a stone like linen wasn’t one the ogre was walking away from.

  The ogre collapsed in a boneless heap, which made sense, given that it was a ghost. The smothering embrace of several tons of stone had been too much for him. We couldn’t even see his feet. Somewhere on the other side of the dungeon, a suit of armour had just flattened and a spear had snapped into several pieces.

  It was a sobering reminder of the dangers of the dunge—

  The stone rippled, then surged away from us, heading for the open doorway its victim had created.

  Attart appeared, standing between... between whatever that stone was and our little party. I doubted her stone could freeze it, but it was worth a shot.

  For myself, I was already wishing I had a second barricade spell. I doubted even my strongest push spell could budge the thing.

  Thankfully its retreat seemed real rather than feigned, and the strange stone shuffled off down the hallway past the door and around the corner.

  Nothing remained of the ogre in its wake.

  “Last Ride,” Attar whispered. Attart vanished, which was to my relief though not without a sense of longing. The sight of her hadn’t diminished in potency.

  “Stars fall from the heavens.” I agreed. I tried to. I wasn’t sure what Attar’s expression referred to, but I could sense the sentiment.

  There were still creatures in the dungeon who could kill us accidentally, carelessly, and there was little we could do about it. Little we could even do to see them coming.

  Perhaps the racket to avoid traps was not worth it.

  ***

  The pixie led us down the hallway after the creature. Attar and I followed with great trepidation. To our immense relief, he stopped halfway rather than following the creature around the corner and indicated the portcullis to our left.

  Given that the creature might be nearby, though the ceiling was low enough for my ring to penetrate the stone, I first carefully scanned the portcullis with my ring, then lifted it myself.

  The pixie merrily skipped under the gate and vanished.

  Attar took a breath steadied himself, and vanished after.

  I followed, lowering the gate behind me.

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  The statue slid smoothly back into place and his sword righted back into the locked posi-

  I squeezed my eyes shut. My ring detected something very different on the other side of the door than the place I’d just come from.

  This was going to give me a headache.

  People were chained to the wall. Some moaned, some howled, others scraped at the stone with broken and bloodied fingernails. There was also a vial in the centre of the floor, but it hardly registered against the tableau of suffering.

  Attar grabbed my shoulder, “They don’t have souls. They are ghosts. Phantoms. The linger remnants of pain. They’re already dead.”

  And yet, they suffered.

  “What can we do?”

  Attar understood. The soul was not the sum of existence. Nothing was so tidy.

  “Lay them to rest, as we did the vampire.”

  The bouquet would work, but only for a single corpse.

  A pyre, then.

  Fireball III

  It was slow going. It wasn’t worth the risk to unchain them, so I burned them one at a time. Their flesh was drier than it should have been. Once one lit I moved to the next, and the next, and then next.

  And then the next.

  And then the next.

  And then the next.

  ***

  It took two hours all in all. The first hour spent lighting the bodies. The second on letting them burn.

  The pixie led us between the rows of ashen, warped, and melted chains to the door on the far side of the room. The door was iron, and didn’t open when the pixie tried the latch. That stumped him. Few doors failed to open to a pixie’s touch.

  I approached the door to study it with my ring but I couldn’t determine the cause.

  The other side of the doorway was an empty hallway or narrow room. I could teleport myself and Attar across, but I wasn’t sure the pixie could follow.

  “Can your ogress get the door?” I asked Attar.

  The ogress appeared and struck with all her might. The door didn’t so much as shiver. I doubted my swords would fair much better.

  Dark magic undoubtedly had an answer, but the battle with Dave had turned me firmly back on the path of nature where at all possible. It was time to finally use the Dead King’s gift.

  The lancegay leapt forward with a mind of its own. It wanted to be used. Striking directly at the lock was effortless, my hand merely needed to follow the spearhead.

  The iron door parted as if it were made of flesh rather than metal. The lock crumpled. The spell binding it in place bled out through the wound. Where the spear passed it left a trail of orange rust and the smell of blood.

  The pixie ambled forward and shoved the door open with his shoulder.

  “Nice spear,” he said, “would you like me to polish it? It is soon to fall apart. And it stinks of blood.”

  “I think it is supposed to. It was a gift from the Dead King.”

  The pixie shuddered, “He is the reason I will stay on the fourth floor and do not dare the fifth. Without him I’d spend my days in the caverns below.”

  “You know of him?” I’d thought the pixie had been frozen for the entirety of his stay in the Bleak Fort.

  The pixie nodded, “Like lodestone. We are opposites. True opposites may always sense one another, even if blinded or deaf. No pixie comes to the Bleak Fort willingly.”

  The inevitability of death, and the immortality of the pixies were both parts of nature, but so were fire and water. Enmity itself was natural.

  The hallway was thirty feet wide and ten feet deep. Two doors were set in the opposite wall, one straight across one at the far end to our right.

  “Either will do,” the pixie said. He danced forward and pushed open the nearest. Attar and I scrambled for cover.

  A moment later we were “rewarded” with the sound of a barrage of needles bouncing off the wall, floor, and ceiling.

  The pixie giggled, “That tickles.”

  I carefully edged into the room, Attar in tow.

  The floor was covered in metal shards, the pixie was stuck like a hedgehog, though only his clothes had been penetrated.

  He also had clothes again, though we’d only lost sight of him for several seconds. Elves were unknowable by nature so I didn’t bother asking.

  A channel ran straight down the centre of the room, directly between the two doors. Water flowed happily along it. Two parallel rows of melted wax puddles flanked the channel, four on each side. Had the candles still been lit this room would have been a welcome reprieve from the darkness and deprivation of the rest of the dungeon. If you discounted the needle trap, of course.

  “Right this way,” said the pixie, turning, as he said, right. He hopped the little stream and strode over to the wooden door without his head held high. He didn’t even stop to brush the needles from his clothes. The door slid easily open to the side, like the flue of a chimney, which may have explained why so many doors I’d encountered were “stuck.”

  Something scuttled out of the sudden sweep of my light. The pixie cheerfully danced forward. He was joined by the statue guarding the room beyond. There was something... hypnotic, about the way it moved.

  I found myself moving forward, drawn to the dance. It contained an echo of that fateful dance I’d shared with Gunhild. Something which couldn’t be reclaimed, but the memory, the memory burned bright enou—

  “Stop!”

  I froze. Attar still held the stone. His power was weak, he was no warlock, but it was enough to bring me back to myself. I tore my eyes away from the statues, shut down my ring, took several deliberate steps back.

  She was gone.

  “Stop.”

  “Stop.”

  “Stop.”

  “Stop.”

  “Stop.”

  “Stop.”

  Attar’s voice, coming from six different directions. His lips hadn’t moved. The sound was from the room beyond.

  Great.

  More spiders.