Incompetent and Vile

  By the time we reached the actual lounge, all semblance of normalcy had fled.

  From the moment we stepped through the door it felt wrong in a way that went past instinct and became almost physical, a pressure against the chest, a weight behind the eyes. The vague sense of wrongness Jaquis had mentioned in the hall had matured into something you could almost push back against.

  The room itself was ordinary by inventory. Plywood tables, chairs, shelves and cabinets along every wall, a couple of couches, a large patterned rug, a single halogen lamp overhead. But everything was subtly off in ways that accumulated. The room was too large for the footprint the school should have allowed. The rug's pattern resolved into spirals and suggestions of faces if you looked at it too long. The chairs around the table were wrong, heavy dark wood dining chairs that belonged in a grandmother's house, not a school common room. Every cabinet and shelf stood open a crack, breathing.

  The greenish tinge in the corridor lights had become dominant here. A smoky distortion layered itself across the view of the room, the far wall slightly soft at the edges, and there was an acerbic medical smell at the back of my throat. The silence was not the silence of an empty room but the silence of a horror film when the background music stops. The room felt tilted. Not visibly, not verifiably, but tilted the way a dream goes wrong before you know it's a nightmare.

  "Don't see any enemies. Sig, you first," Hannah said.

  "Ja, fraulein," Siegfried said.

  Floorboards creaked under his armor as he walked in and the rest of us followed. Nothing happened. We moved to the center of the room, and by the time I reached the table my heart was going hard and I was imagining things in every shadow, behind every cabinet door. But nothing came. So we started searching.

  I opened a cabinet and nearly said something out loud. Three old scrolls, rolled and tied. I checked the sigils quickly without letting myself slow down: Control Undead1, Curse of Misfortune2, Conjure Fog3. More situational magic, more support and control. I thought, not for the first time, that it would be nice to get a spell that just let me point at something and destroy it. I pocketed them anyway.

  The rest of the party had been finding things too, carrying them quietly to the central table. A cookie tin of silver and copper coins. Six small bottles of softly glowing blue liquid. A white-bleached skull. I added my scrolls to the pile and watched Jaquis pull out a sheet of paper, hold it up, and write in surprisingly beautiful handwriting: bad vibes source. He pointed to the far left corner of the room, past the door we'd come through.

  Hannah nodded. She pointed at Siegfried and herself, mimed walking, then pointed the rest of us to follow. We moved in the practiced cautious formation, ready to strike. I held my spellbook open to the barrier spell but kept the icicle incantation in my mouth. One or two monsters, hit them with everything immediately.

  "Maybe we should just go," Jaquis whispered.

  "We'll get out if it goes wrong. Keep your eyes open," Hannah said.

  I stumbled and felt sick.

  These people weren't quite as young as Brad and Clara, but other than that the situations rhymed in ways I didn't want to think about. Clara's screams. The light going out of Brad's eyes while he looked at me. I was following a new group into danger and we didn't have nearly enough information, and I had knocked a chair into a table and everyone spun to look at me. I shook my head and kept moving.

  There was nothing else to do. Every choice here carried risk, and we wouldn't have information without taking risks to get it. So I followed, close behind, as we reached the cabinet.

  It was larger than I'd registered from across the room. More of a wardrobe than a cabinet, large enough for four people to stand in. The smell of decay was clear now. We were not alone in this room.

  Hannah counted down on her fingers behind her back. Three. Two. One.

  She threw the door open.

  For the briefest moment it looked like a single pile of rotting meat and short fur. Then the dead muscles started moving with the sound of wet meat compressing and separating, and they resolved into four wolfhound-sized dogs with their ribcages showing through skin that had rotted away to almost nothing, jaws stripped of lips and cheek, all tooth and dry socket.

  The first one leaped before I could process it. I saw Brad. I saw the spike.

  But even as it took Hannah's forearm in its jaws and she screamed, Siegfried was already moving, barreling into the center of the pack exactly as he'd predicted he would back in the Guild. His armor was perfectly suited for this, teeth and claws finding no purchase. Hannah dropped to the floor sucking air through her teeth, one hand locked over the other, bone showing through the wound, and the rest of us came in hard.

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  Siegfried was the cornerstone of the whole fight. He just stood there and took it, the dogs dragging him down and tearing at him, covering his face with his arms while the rest of us worked from the outside. My icicles and Bella's sword accounted for them inside a minute.

  The last one stopped twitching. Siegfried pushed it off and said, "Thank fuck that's over, I never want to—"

  The crack of wood. Dead arms burst through the floor from beneath his prone back, three pairs, fingers locking into his armor and dragging him down. He screamed. And then wood began breaking all across the room, every plank in the floor a trapdoor.

  I learned something in the second I stood frozen. I learned how much a single second of hesitation costs at the moment it matters most.

  Bella screamed with fury and drove her sword down through the floorboards, stabbing in the gaps between the hands pulling Siegfried under. Siegfried screamed in pain and terror. Hannah and Jaquis worked behind me, trying to keep the undead clawing up through the floor from taking us from behind. The sound was overwhelming, groaning and screaming and the crack of wood and metal and bone.

  As Bella's blade found hearts and skulls below the floor, Siegfried's screaming became ragged breathing, became grateful, stunned words of thanks, even as he lay stuck six inches below floor level in heavy armor with no way to rise on his own.

  Then the horde came. Dozens. I saw denim and muslin and plaid, the clothes of my world, the clothes of people taken here exactly as I had been taken, and they were dead and ravenous and there were too many of them, and I still did nothing.

  Hannah was shouting commands I couldn't hear over the noise. Jaquis and Hannah held the front. Bella was trying to haul Siegfried up with one hand and fight with the other. The monsters already pressing past the front line were coming at me because I was the only one not already occupied.

  I got on the table. I cast the barrier beneath my feet as I jumped and got myself roughly five feet up, sandals at head height, and the zombies beneath me could not reach me and their skulls were right there.

  Kra-splat. The first neck snapped clean, and the body dropped, and I started kicking as hard as I could, my basic sandals becoming an implement of war coated in things I chose not to identify. Two down. Three.

  "No, no, no—"

  Jaquis went over. I saw it happen and couldn't stop it. He was swarmed before Siegfried, now hauled free of the floor, could cross the room. Siegfried roared and threw the monsters off by main force, one into a wall, one into a cabinet, one hit the ceiling. But Jaquis had stopped screaming. Jaquis had stopped making any sound at all.

  His head had been cracked open.

  I didn't look at it for more than a second. I cast another barrier as the first was expiring, shouted "Here, up here!" and timed the jump from one invisible platform to the next with my teeth gritted. Hannah was beside me. Bella hauled Siegfried away from Jaquis and toward us and I threw icicles at the horde at their backs, slowing and stunning the front rank long enough for them to make it.

  "Stay up. Kill them as they come. I'll keep casting walls," I said, and felt my own sweat on my forehead for the first time.

  I had read about the limits of spellcasting in the Journal. Chum had mentioned overchanneling. Neither had felt real until now. I wasn't exhausted, but I could feel the effort accumulating the way deep muscle fatigue feels different from surface tiredness.

  "Sorry, boss. I can't help with these," Chum said from my shoulder.

  Bella was the one holding us together. From the high ground with the greatsword she was in her element, cleaving through skulls, sometimes two at a stroke. Hannah picked off what she could from the flanks. Siegfried kicked, I kicked, I cast another wall and then another, my head beginning to ache in a way that had nothing to do with the noise. But we were winning. The numbers beneath us were dropping. Twelve, maybe fifteen remained. None of them seemed capable of adapting. A few more castings and it was done.

  A flash of black light.

  A surprised sound, almost gentle. Bella fell limp from the edge of the platform and dropped into the remaining horde without another word.

  A man cackled from the opposite end of the room. An exaggerated, theatrical, howling cackle that would have been funny at any other moment in my life.

  He was human, average height, gaunt, with a gnarled staff topped by a human skull and a pointed hat of green and black felt. His face was pale and hollow and on each cheek a brand burned with its own fire. I didn't know what they meant. But as I looked at them I heard the words in my chest, with a certainty that had nothing to do with reading or reason.

  Incompetent. Vile.

  "What greater joy is there in the multiverse," he said, his voice pitch and gravel, "than to rip the wings off of insects."

  My spell ran out. We fell.

  The screams from my friends sounded like Clara.

  1Control Undead, Tier 2, Rank 1

  Below is the sigil for the Necromancy spell Control Undead. This spell allows you to contend with the controller of an undead creature to take control over it. Upon casting this spell, gain control over an undead creature. You are able to issue the creature mental command which it will do its best to comply. If the creature is controlled by another, it will attempt to break free every 1 x Arcana seconds. The difficulty of the initial test and maintaining control is based on the Willpower attribute and the Mind capacity of both parties. Cast using the standard casting procedure. The incantation is Krov-Vec-Ny-Tyr-Ko-Nav.

  Requirements to upgrade the spell to Rank 2:

  Control a hordette of 0/5 undead simultaneously

  2Curse of Misfortune, Tier 1, Rank 1

  Below is the sigil for the Curse spell Curse of Misfortune. This spell allows you to bestow a curse upon an enemy that you can see. The spell will take effect after one hour after casting. The target will then suffer ill fortune for Arcana x 1 hours. Effects that include randomized damage or healing will always randomize twice, applying the worse result. The spell may have additional effects based on Misfortune. Cast using the standard casting procedure. The incantation is Hex-Te-Nil

  Requirements to upgrade the spell to Rank 2:

  Curse then defeat 0/3 enemies

  3Conjure Fog, Tier 1, Rank 1

  Below is the sigil for the Conjuration spell Conjure Fog. This spell conjures 10 x Arcana cubic feet of mist through a pseudoportal from the Elemental Depths. The fog lasts for 10 minutes or until dispersed by wind. Cast using the standard casting procedure. The incantation is Pos-Illy-Cor

  Requirements to upgrade the spell to Rank 2:

  Cast the spell in a combat situation 0/5 times