Guelder's gaze swept over the huge feasting hall, furnished with long tables and chairs of larger-than-human size. Now it was populated by corpses, some plopped awkwardly on chairs, others resting their upper bodies on a table while their lower parts were dangling above their seats, as if knocked out by booze, still others strewn under the table or at the feet of the columns. Guelder recognised a few of them by face, if not by name. The halfling innkeeper lady from Varnhold Town, called... Svelid? Also, her wife. The shady old vagrant that had tried to sell her some dubious-looking scrolls before the summit. The dwarven merchant introduced by Maegar as his favourite supplier and haggling partner. Idling, decaying peacefully. Still, there was no doubt that, at a wave of Vordakai's bony hand, they would all spring to their feet and come to feast upon fresh Nightvale brains.

  Considering her throbbing headache since her last use of Life Blast, Guelder was tempted to let them dine on hers. Soothbark just didn't do the trick, however diligently she was chewing on it. Once again, she found herself wishing she'd brought Tristian along. His scalp massage technique was beyond compare, and now that Amiri was resting in the Bag of Holding, he could fit into the team just fine.

  "I think we're about to meet Darlac," piped Linzi somewhere behind Guelder's back.

  "Impossible," snapped Hazel, quite a bit sharper than warranted by the situation.

  "Hazel, I get it's hard for you to accept, but can't you see the pattern? First came the Lord Regent as an introduction to what is to come. I had an impression that he wasn't very fond of us in his lifetime, so his fate didn't shake us that much."

  "Speak for yourself, Linzi," said Valerie. "I kind of liked him, in a way. He was a challenging negotiation partner. Kept me on my toes all the time. He was most certainly an evil bastard, but the interesting type of evil, not the disgusting type, if you take my meaning."

  Linzi didn't answer immediately. Instead, she began scribbling into a notebook.

  "Not... dis... gus... ting. Okay. Sorry, I'm just taking notes for his eulogy, in case we'll need to bury him and all these people."

  Ugh. Guelder physically felt the expansion of her task list in the form of another stab of pain behind her eye. What would she do with all those corpses after Vordakai had no more use for them, being permanently dead himself? The entire barony didn't have enough diamonds to resurrect them all. Digging graves in the dry, rocky soil of the Tors would be a nightmare. Building a huge funeral pyre from logs felled in the woodlands and transported here was an abomination in Guelder's eyes. Perhaps she should just let the Little Sellen's water burst in through those hatches and let the people of Varnhold sleep with the fishes. Still, she wasn't sure any of her druidic funeral ideas could provide a proper closure.

  She wasn't sure if anything could.

  Linzi chattered on.

  "The baron will obviously be the last foe, the punchline, right before Vordakai himself. So Darlac must be somewhere in-between. If I were Vordakai, I would deploy her here."

  "Indeed," said Valerie. "The best way to break us is to make us fight and kill our friends. First Amiri, then Darlac."

  "She. Is. Not. Here."

  Valerie rolled her eyes.

  "Calm down, Falcon... Hazel. Believe me, I hope you're right, as much as you do."

  Guelder touched her throbbing head and began to massage her temples. Her heart went out to Hazel. The thought of a fight against whatever remained of Darlac must be even more painful for them than it was for Guelder. She hoped against hope that Darlac was still out there somewhere, all the while knowing how daft that hope was, and consciously preparing herself for the moment she'd run her beloved friend's heart through with her spear.

  Someone pulled her sleeve. It was Harrim, calling her aside for a private discussion.

  "Your Grace," he said softly. "That last Life Blast you did..."

  "Do not even start, Harrim," said the baroness impatiently. "In these burrows there is too little life I can use. And I cannot tap into the life force of my companions, now can I?"

  "That's exactly what I want to talk about. You can't let that spell use up so much of your own life force. If you can't find enough critters to feed off of, I volunteer to donate my life force for blasting the zombies into next week."

  Brambles. And here she was thinking Harrim had found his purpose in life and got over his depression for good. Then again, could a priest of Groetus ever truly heal from depression? Wouldn't that be apostasy?

  "That is a bad idea, Harrim. I know you are itching to leave this world, but we still need you for whatever is ahead of us. Your healing, your unmaking, your grouchy wisdom. Perhaps even your snoring at night, although I am not entirely certain about that."

  "If you insist, you can still resurrect me, though I'd rather you didn't."

  Guelder heaved a sigh. Stubborn dwarf. She was saving that scroll for the eventuality of finding the baron dead or having to kill him. Or for Amiri, in case killing Vordakai would set her soul free.

  "We shall see," she finally said. "Thanks for your offer, Harrim. But do not rejoice as yet. I will only avail of your noble sacrifice in an ultimate emergency, and if I do, I will bring you back."

  Harrim shrugged. "I don't care either way. Should you decide to let me go, though, there's one more piece of advice for you. Make sure to find and destroy Vordakai's phylactery."

  The baroness raised an eyebrow. "What is a phylactery?"

  "An object the lich stores a part of his soul in."

  "How?"

  "Let me explain it to you in leaf-lover terms. Imagine a shrub. You cut off a bit, stick it into a pot of compost, then burn the original shrub to ash. The shrub is the lich. The pot is the phylactery. The cutting is the bit of soul stored in it. Except, for a lich, it takes a lot less time to regenerate himself than for a cutting to take root and develop to its original size. So you'll want to start with identifying what his phylactery can be, and destroying it right away."

  Guelder nodded, gritting her teeth as invisible blades sliced into her brain. Identifying the phylactery... Actually, she was confident she already knew what it was. The soul eater had asked if she was a lich. Did that mean Vordakai, too, stored a part of his soul in an animal? Could the raven be his phylactery? The bird had ceased to follow them around before the soul eater fight, but Guelder was sure they would meet it again in the final fight. And they all despised it enough to kill it first.

  Pangur's call of alarm awakened her from her musings.

  The noise of heavy footfalls sounded from the far corner of the hall, wrapped in gloom not penetrated by the light of the orb Harrim had conjured above Valerie's head. Lighter, shuffling footsteps joined in. Corpses slipped down from the table and chairs, getting to their feet and slowly drifting towards the adventurers, their ranks opening up space for their red-haired leader. She strode forward, proud and composed for a zombie, her muscles bulging under the weight of the greataxe she was carrying, her tattered skin a livid green.

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  Guelder clutched her spear in both hands, ready to attack, blinking away her tears. A quick end was the best she could give her friend at the moment. She would grieve later. Hell, how she would.

  "This is not Darlac," said Hazel from behind, softly, through clenched teeth.

  "What?" asked Valerie incredulously.

  "An illusion. A fey prank. I am not sure what it is, but certainly not Darlac. Dispel the magic or kill whatever is underneath, but do not believe it."

  "How do you know?"

  "Trust me, I do."

  Guelder's stomach twisted. She loathed to be reminded of the Nightvale–Varnhold summit's aftermath, even more so if such reminder involved Hazel's boasting about their tryst with the baron's fiancée. Every time it popped up, the memory filled her with devastating second-hand shame.

  Still, just because Hazel was a jerk sometimes, that didn't mean they couldn't be right. The baroness was starting to think they were. Darlac had never been particularly light on her feet, but those footsteps felt a bit too heavy even for her.

  "All right," she grunted. "Let us pretend we believe it, though."

  Valerie caught her eyes and nodded in agreement, lowering the visor of her helmet.

  "I'll deal with her. Make sure to keep her entourage busy, will you?" She stepped forward, banging her shield with her sword to claim the enemy's attention. "Come here, you pampered little gold-digger! Let's sort this out between us, paladin to paladin!"

  Apparently, Valerie did have a carefully hidden sense of humour. She had just as little right to be called a paladin as that other thing parading with Darlac's distorted features. The thing didn't respond to the taunt. It proceeded at an even pace towards Guelder. Valerie moved between the monster and the baroness, raising her shield.

  Linzi started to play her riverboat song on her harmonica, the one she'd composed during the Bloom – this time, thankfully, without the unsettling lyrics. Hazel nocked two arrows, eager to get the fake Darlac out of the way. Pangur snarled and bristled his fur. Harrim stayed nearby for the time being, waiting for further instruction.

  It was time to make the geography of the feasting hall a little more varied.

  Guelder removed her glove and slipped a hand into her pouch of spell ingredients, rummaging among a variety of items collected from nature. It was easy to find what she was searching for. A blob of tar stuck to her hand, volunteering to be first. She closed her fingers around it, and focused on the redhead and her immediate retinue. Black, sticky tar bubbled up from between the flagstones, making the shuffling steps slow down, gluing rotted feet to the ground. The heavy footfalls became more sporadic, too. Next, a handful of soil and a few drops of water, focused on the tar-free zone to the right. The corpses coming to unlife there had trouble getting to their feet, slipping in thick mud, falling back, thrashing around in a mud wrestling competition. And last but not least, a handful of gorse seeds scattered to the leftmost section and infused with life – a plant rightfully loathed by everyone but bees, goats and druids, prickly, tough, flammable.

  She gave a series of quick instructions to push the advantage. Between two shots, Hazel threw a bottle of Alchemist's Fire into the tar pool, setting it ablaze. Valerie waited just outside the flame zone for her scorched opponent, shield at the ready. Harrim took position closer to her, channelling positive energy into the attackers. Many of those in the tar fell in smouldering heaps of decayed flesh and bone, and those struggling in the gorse were letting out annoyed rattles and gurgles.

  By the time Fake Darlac escaped the mire of flames, it was alone. Valerie would be able to handle it.

  Guelder unleashed the holy power of her spear at the gorse field, as thick and lush and irritating as its natural counterpart on the hills of Dunsward, making the entangled zombies shriek in agony. Then she reclaimed the life force coursing through the plants, and released it at the entangled undead. It only took a moment for the dried, withered shrubbery to go up in flames from contact with the tar zone, finishing off the last zombies standing, before they could extricate themselves.

  An axe blow from above put a chink in the upper edge of Valerie's shield and crumpled her left pauldron. Blood seeped through metal. The shield crashed into the flagstones. Her opponent lifted a foot and sent her to the ground as well with a kick, then trampled on her for good measure.

  How was that physically possible? Darlac used to be a fearsome warrior, but not this level of fearsome. Also, the axe had struck at an impossible angle. What was going on?

  Guelder visualised a bucketful of cold, cleansing water, washing away all that was layered on the target, carrying away buffs and illusions, leaving only the core of truth, unenhanced, unaltered. She targeted the redhead with it... and failed. Nothing changed. Whoever had made that illusion was a lot more advanced in magic than Guelder.

  The thing stomped on Valerie's prone body once more. More chinks, more cracks, more blood.

  "Hazel! Aim above its head!"

  The ranger complied. Lo and behold, their next double shot hit true, and the arrows remained floating in the air above the red curls, their heads buried in something invisible.

  "A cyclops!"

  Obeying Guelder's silent command, Pangur stopped roughhousing the zombies in the mud, and made his way up Fake Darlac's body and above, perching mid-air, atop its invisible head, letting the others make an estimate of its real proportions. Before the disguised monster would crush Valerie into red pulp between flat metal plates, the baroness grabbed her spear in a two-handed grip and thrust it into her illusionary friend's illusionary forehead. There was no cracking of bones, just the usual resistance of hide armour and a flesh wound leaking black ichor.

  The first wave of zombies made it out of the mud, mostly unscathed.

  There was no time to waste. Their last chance was another Life Blast... but there was no more life to use up. Worse, Valerie was down, probably with life-threatening injuries. Sucking out life force indiscriminately could be the end of her. And Guelder's head could only take so much pain.

  Guelder's eyes met Harrim's. The dwarf saw what she saw, abandoned his attempts to crush the cyclops's kneecaps for a moment, and nodded.

  "I will bring you back," she mouthed. She focused on Harrim and claimed everything he had to give, added some of her own, and released.

  There was a big thud, making the flagstones shake. Pangur's fangs had finally found the spine.

  Then there was silence... until Linzi started wailing at the top of her lungs.

  Guelder was on her knees, trembling, hugging herself, feeling a hundred invisible zombie teeth munching at the contents of her skull. A pair of strong arms wrapped around her shoulders, pulled her up. Hazel. Who else?

  "Linzi... The scroll..."

  Gently, Hazel led her to one of the huge chairs, previously occupied by a corpse, and settled her down. She curled up into a fetal position, squeezed her eyes shut against the pain, and listened to the voices around her. Hazel taking things into their hands, shaking Linzi back into shape and unfurling the valuable scroll for her to use. Harrim bitching half-heartedly about being brought back, then unmaking the armour trampled into Valerie's body, so that he could heal her up without leaving metal inlays in her flesh and bones. Her handful of companions were up and running again, with the sole exception of Amiri. But the scroll was gone, and with it, the almost guaranteed chance to reclaim Maegar Varn from Pharasma's court.

  No. She couldn't afford to waste her limited energy on crying. That would make her head split neatly in two.

  There were still some good things to focus on. This battle had proved that Darlac was not in Vordakai's power – the lich had to resort to an illusion to make them believe she was. Perhaps Darlac was alive, lying low, biding her time, getting ready to take the helm of the abandoned land and rebuild it all from its ruins. And if she did, Guelder would give her all the help and support she could, and then some. Varnhold would rise again, sprouting branches towards the sky, and birds would make their nests among its foliage.

  Hope will prevail. Life will find a way. It always does.

  The headache relented, ever so slightly.