As Gilead continued to search the corpse, he found another, smaller object, tucked away into a pocket of the dead man’s trousers. This one, finally, he could recognize. It was a tinderbox, crude wood and brass hinges enclosing a flint, a steel, and a few scraps of char-cloth.

  (Matches were expensive and unreliable. And a good thing, too, for if the dead man had been carrying matches, Gilead would have been totally stumped. He was born in a time when the windmill was the cutting edge of technology.)

  That the man was carrying tools for ignition meant one of the two objects Gilead had found must have been meant to be lit. Even figuring out which one it was was a lengthy and involved process, let alone actually lighting anything. He turned the glass globe and its steel frame over and over and over in his hands, straining his memory as he was forced to keep track of which pieces were where and did what. All the while, the threat of another monster sat just behind his back.

  Eventually a spark caught, and the char-cloth lit up. Gilead sheltered the little flame, barely enough to illuminate his palm, as though it were a newborn, shepherding it carefully to the lantern’s wick. He even held his breath for fear of putting it out. Then the wick caught and brilliant flame spilled forth, larger than any candle Gilead had ever seen and only growing brighter as he levered the globe back into place and the air-vent mechanisms set to work. The odd lamp shed its light all the way down to the next corner of the corridor, bright enough that Gilead spent the next few seconds totally blind.

  He still had no idea the purpose of the other object, so he held it by its thinnest part, the heavy forward curve of the handle making for a decent club. He rose to his feet, slowly recovering from his dazzled state. His entire body, he realized, was painted red.

  Part of it was the blood, of course, but Gilead had made sure not to let the blood spilling down from his shoulder and chest spill onto his arms, and his arms were still red. Careful examination showed that most of it was powdery in texture, the feel of brick dust… or rust. Gilead cast his mind back to the brittle shell he’d been encased in when he’d initially woken up. That must have been the armor which he’d been interred in, reduced to powdery rust by the passage of untold years. How long had he spent dead this time?

  He could ponder that question once he had escaped from the catacomb. With a source of light, navigation became infinitely easier; but the creatures of the underground were not going to let him out so easily. While he had only faced one attack in that unknown span of hours creeping through the abyss, once he had a lamp, the crypt-things attacked relentlessly.

  The light also allowed Gilead to understand what it was he was fighting. The beasts had long arms and short legs, manlike hands meant for grasping, barrel chests. Their postures reminded Gilead of the scampering monkeys kept as pets by merchant sailors, but bloated to tremendous size and imbued with immense strength. The head, though, painted a very different picture. It was a wolfish head, a thin triangle with huge fangs meant for rending flesh and crushing bone. Most unnatural of all their traits, though, was the skin: it was milk-pale and completely hairless, an uncanny smoothness giving it the impression that it was a liquid merely painted over the underlying musculature.

  Though they were horrible, impossibly resilient, utterly ruthless, and eerily cunning, there was one thing that those dwellers of the underground absolutely were not: demons. Gilead had encountered demons too many times in his questing to make that error. Demons, though long twisted, still held some spark of their long-forsaken divinity, if only in their ability of speech and the ineffable way in which they combined forms, echoes of divine creativity applied to spiritual matter. These things were made of flesh. Gilead was not in hell; he had just been resurrected into a waking nightmare.

  They attacked from every angle, before and behind, sometimes even in pairs, every time seeking the same end: to tear open Gilead’s throat with their teeth. With his club (revolver), he found it easy enough to beat them back. The light, too, did something to them, sapping them of some fraction of their supernatural willpower and making the creatures far more likely to retreat. They feared the light. And so it was that when the crypt-creatures suddenly ceased their assault, leaving Gilead bloodied and scarred but breathtakingly alive, he knew he must have been close to the exit.

  It felt as though eons had passed in the dark when Gilead at last found the stairway to the surface. He climbed the stairs up as fast as his weakening legs would allow, and with a grunt of exertion shouldered through the wooden hatch at the top. It was late in the afternoon, but even the dim sunlight took several seconds to adjust to.

  Then his vision returned, and Gilead realized that he had been quite wrong when he had assumed that the beasts he’d faced down in the catacomb were the worst that nature had to offer. This monstrosity was shaped like them, being perhaps even of the same species, but something had made it worse. Even hunched over onto its knuckles it was almost two meters tall, its frame grotesquely swollen with knots of unwholesome muscle. Its skin was a dark grey, fading in places to the purple of inflamed, bruised tissue. Plates of bone protected its arms, legs, shoulders, head, and back; and the back had an extra layer of defense in the form of an array of razor-sharp quills, each easily a meter long.

  It was staring right at Gilead, a low growl arising in its throat and becoming louder with each passing second. Gilead suddenly regretted the vigor with which he’d shoved open the hatch over the staircase. If he’d been more careful, maybe he could have snuck past the beast: judging by the crude nest it was standing in, he’d probably woken it up. As it was… With his armor and a sword and shield, Gilead would have won. But he was naked, armed with barely more than a blackjack, and still losing blood.

  Gilead could not outrun it. To surrender would be to forsake himself utterly. And experience had taught Gilead that there were much worse things than dying in battle.

  “Death!” Gilead shouted, rushing headlong towards his foe. The monster responded in kind, with a roar like the screech of a hundred rats combined into one.

  A man of honor he may have been, but Gilead was not averse to using what advantages he had at hand, especially not against an animal. As the creature closed into striking range, Gilead swung the lantern into its face with all his remaining strength. The glass globe shattered, sending a wave of liquid fuel splattering across the monster’s face. A moment later, that fuel ignited. It screeched and screamed, clawing at its face as the flames licked at its eyes and boiled its mouth.

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  Gilead continued past it, taking advantage of the handful of seconds he’d bought himself by putting it in such agony. He knew that movement was his only chance: the lesser beasts were already nearly his equals in strength, so this monstrosity would crush him if given the chance. But as he moved past its shoulder, he took hold of one of the huge quills by the root, and pulled with might and momentum alike. Bereft of the lantern, Gilead needed a new weapon. This meter-long spine, with its flexible shaft and lethally-sharp point, would be just the thing. The quill ripped free, and Gilead brandished it like a broadsword.

  Gilead was able to get in a few quick, stabbing strikes with the stolen quill while the monster was distracted, but the creature’s frantic batting at its own face rapidly extinguished the tenuous coating of fuel. It charged, and even half-blind was possessed of an impossible speed that caught Gilead totally unprepared. Worse, there was a leaden weight in all of Gilead’s limbs, slowing him down more than could be explained by the amount of blood loss and fatigue he had suffered. Something was wrong.

  Gilead leapt to the side in order to avoid the monster’s headlong charge, but he was a fraction of a second too slow and the beast clipped his leg. He went spinning into the air and landed hard on his spine; before he could rise again the monstrosity was on top of him.

  He tried to use his legs to keep it away, but with one wounded by the fall, the other couldn’t manage it. Had it not been for the quill, the monster would have bitten down on Gilead’s throat and slain him there and then. As it was, his reflexes saved him, and he jammed the sharp end right down the beast's throat with all his remaining strength. It coughed and growled and snarled, batting away the arm holding onto the quill. Gilead’s other arm was already pinned. Nothing left to do but accept his impending death.

  “Caught you gnawin’ on the bloody newcomers, ya big bellend!”

  A voice came from somewhere behind Gilead, and both he and the monster stopped their fight for a fraction of a second to look in the direction it had come from. Then came the loudest noise which Gilead had ever heard, a deafening hammer-blow of sound that rendered even the loudest thunder quiet by comparison.

  When, half a second later, he regained his senses, the monster was suddenly in a very bad way. It was as though some enormous claw had reached out and torn away half of its jaw and a substantial chunk of the throat as well, leaving behind a mess of blood and gore. The monster leapt off Gilead and began to charge at the source of the sound. A second later, it happened again. This time, though, the enormous blasting sound was followed not long after by the pitiful thump of the monstrosity falling over dead.

  All of this, from the shattering of the lantern to the death of the abominable creature, had taken at most thirty seconds. Gilead, now sporting new wounds on his back and leg to match those on his chest, shoulder, and arm, took a moment to catch his breath and observe his surroundings. The catacomb had let out into the skeleton of a structure, its roof long since collapsed, half the walls missing. The only reason Gilead recognized it as a church was the remnant of a stone cross hanging on the back wall, though even that was weathered smooth. The great beast had made its nest out of the rotted remnants of the floorboards, leaving only dirt behind.

  And then there was Gilead’s savior. He was an old man with a bramble of a beard and sun-worn skin, bent by age but still visibly strong. His dress was utterly strange, even the very materials ones which he could not identify by eye (blue jeans and tweedy wool for his jacket and cap, all of them heavily patched). Stranger still was the thing cradled in his arms (a double-barreled shotgun), the forging of its composition so alien that it could only have been carved from some rare crystal. Only the fact that it still dripped smoke clued Gilead in that this was the weapon that had slain the beast.

  “Still kicking over there? Had to get a good angle on the bastard, else the buckshot’d bounce right off its back.”

  The old man spoke Saxon. Even through his exhaustion, Gilead became immediately paranoid. He was barely armed, and face to face with the natural enemy of his people.

  “I kicked the beast only out of desperation,” said Gilead, doing his best to conceal his Brythonic accent. “But I must give you my thanks for slaying it. I hold no doubt that I had taken my end had not you come to mine aid.”

  “Ah hell, one o’ them medievalites. The name’s Ben Gibson. Huntin’ ghouls like that is my job; that and helping out you backarounders.”

  Gilead realized that he was going to have to introduce himself. “You may call me Gilead. Gilead du Ceincture.” Best that he not reveal his true place of origin to a Saxon.

  Ben slung his weapon across his back, and with the free hand helped Gilead to his feet. “French, eh? That’s a new one.”

  “Only on my father’s side,” Gilead said. His mother was a Briton; but again, he did not wish to say so to a Saxon.

  Ben Gibson looked over Gilead’s shoulder, at the club (revolver) he’d dropped when the alpha had overtaken him.

  “Where’d you get that gun?”

  Gilead blinked uncomprehendingly at the old man.

  “Medievalites,” he grumbled to himself. “That thing you were holding when you came up, on the ground there. It’s called a gun. New kind of weapon that got invented after you went six feet under. Where’d you get it?”

  “I came upon it in the catacomb. There was…” Gilead realized a second early what sort of news he was about to deliver. “…a corpse. A young man. The flesh-eating beasts down there had torn him apart. I took from him the gun and that lamp.”

  Ben Gibson’s face, already hard and rough, became only harder and rougher. His eyes watered, but he refused to cry. He shoved past Gilead, nearly knocking him to the floor, and took the revolver, shoving it into his belt.

  “Passing sorry,” Gilead said. “Who was he to you?”

  “The lad was my apprentice. Mickey. First lad in ten years who was willing to do the work I do, living out here and keeping ghouls away from the catacombs, helping you fucking resurrected medievalites get on your feet.”

  Gilead wanted to say something, but not only was he terrible at matters of the heart, he was also struggling to remain upright as he limped after Ben Gibson. His vision was going dark, and his muscles were becoming increasingly stiff. It was all that he could do to keep walking.

  “Going to have to get you some clothes, some food,” Ben Gibson continued to grumble. “Going to have to buy a new lantern and restock my supply of antivenom, which ain’t cheap…”

  “Anti-venom?” Gilead asked.

  “Those bite marks came from a ghoul, didn’t they? There’s not any damned dogs down there.”

  “Yes, I was ghoul-bitten many times as I tried to escape.”

  Ben Gibson nodded. “Ghouls have venom. Nasty stuff. It’ll kill you if you’re not lucky, lay you out for weeks if you are.”

  Gilead stopped. He felt light-headed, and his heart was pounding just to pump blood to his brain. A powerfully venomous bite would go quite a long way to explain how rapidly his condition had been degrading.

  “Oh. Hell.”

  Gilead, relieved of any need to keep going, fainted.