It got colder the deeper in we went. I wasn’t sure about why that was, and thinking up theories kept me occupied for much of the descent. Perhaps the dark in here was acting as some sort of heat sink, or maybe parts of the fort dipped below the earth.

  Maybe it was dark magic I was feeling, and I was stumbling into the lair of a warlock coven. A few months ago that thought would’ve had me shitting myself, now I just took it on the chin and started imagining how I’d save my skin if that turned out to be true.

  Of the group, Bakeswill seemed the most like me. I didn’t have his deranged sadism of course but both of us, I suspected, were similar orders of coward. I wasn’t sure how I knew that, perhaps some instinctive feeling. The gut knowledge that I was near a kindred spirit.

  What it meant was that when things went sour, I could rely on him to do as I would and scramble away. He’d want a distraction so he could flee in peace, and shoving me at whatever came for us would make a perfect one.

  This is, of course, a lot of inference to be heaping atop so quick a judgement, but I somehow felt confident in it all. Like calls to like after all.

  Of the rest of my group, I was less certain. They were mostly seasoned soldiers, which meant more for their ability to march and obey orders than fight. As I gathered all but two of them had fought in a battle before now. It was those two that hadn’t who I was more concerned about, experience had taught me that amateurs could be disastrously unpredictable when threatened.

  So I kept my eye on them as well as Bakeswill while we ventured deeper.

  The corridors were different than I’d grown used to during my brief time within castles, probably a product of when this one was built. They all struck me as narrower and lower, almost compressive, and I found myself picturing what a terror it would be to storm such a structure with numbers.

  Already, with only ten of us, we were forced to make our way down the lengths in multiple rows each. A hundred would be that much worse.

  Doors lined the corridors, all of them big and heavy wooden things that had probably weathered the centuries of rot through sheer thickness. We shoved them open as we moved past purely to keep from being attacked from behind as we went. Soon, though, the darkness took its grip.

  Near the outer walls, there was enough wear and tear in the fort that light oozed into it through the countless holes time had provided. Here shadow prevailed.

  In hindsight it was probably worse for the soldiers than for me, my night vision was quite good compared to most peasants and I was far less impeded by the gloom. I could hear the breathing get heavier around me as men grew closer to panic, and only Bakeswill piping up to jeer and bully them back in line kept a retreat from coming.

  It was another few minutes before anything of note happened, but when it did…it was explosive.

  The creatures that leapt out at us are, I know now, referred to as ghuls, or ghulah for the rarer female specimens. Nasty fucking things they are. They eat corpses, and actually prefer older, rotting ones to recently-living flesh.

  One look at them as they swarmed out at us made that terribly apparent, their teeth were needle-pointed and numerous, features pulled back and tight, fingers tipped with talons and bodies thin with wiry muscle. But they were humanoid, too.

  Ghuls are—were—people, twisted and driven mad by magic powerful enough to change them, but too weak to fully kill them. They’re halfway between rotter and human, with all the feral strength and resilience of the former and all the agility and cunning of the latter. These ones were armed, too, closing with improvised weapons that seemed to be torn-off furniture limbs or edged glass shards.

  Fortunately, not a one of them was equipped as well as the soldiers.

  Unfortunately, they’d taken us by surprise and were a lot more enthusiastic about the fight. Shields came up and swords poked out and ghuls charged through both without really seeming to care, slashing and clawing at the wielders as our whole group was forced away. There’s a terrible strength to the undead that is felt nowhere so clearly as when a pack of the fresh, human-mobile ones comes your way. We were giving ground despite our equivalent numbers simply through a gap in strength.

  Giving ground doesn’t mean losing the fight, though. Not always. I was learning with increasing detail, the more fights I got into, that it was often the frenzied attackers who ended up dead. Though we were backstepping and straining to stave them off, our superior weaponry and training meant that the ghuls were taking gashes with every moment. Each of them demanded more killing than most any human, but not an endless amount.

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  They were dying. Dying slow and clumsily, with thrashing limbs and gurgles of bloody mouth-foam as eyes rolled back and tongues lolled out and nails scraped on steel, scraped on flesh, scraped on nerves. But they were dying, and we were living. It didn’t take long to clear the corridor out and leave ourselves standing over piled bodies, the air now reeking of meat-rot and gore-spill.

  Despite my present company, I seemed by far the least affected.

  “What the fuck was that?!” one of the soldiers croaked, already trembling and twitching. The others joined him in panicking, with even Bakeswill showing a measure of fear by being uncharacteristically quiet and inoffensive. Only I kept some semblance of calm.

  Which, I should note, surprised even me. What surprised me more was my own spontaneous decision to step forwards and take command.

  “Undead,” I told the group at large, “and rather dangerous ones, faster than most rotters.”

  I had no idea why I was talking the way I was. In retrospect it was probably some sort of nervous tick, just natural instinct. I lied because that was what my brain did when it was shaken by a surprise and near-death experience.

  And I was grinning, of course, with the same terror-widened intensity I always did. Put together, I suppose those two idiosyncrasies made what happened next almost inevitable.

  People started listening to me.

  “You’ve fought these things before?” one of the soldiers asked, falling into his natural instincts of nodding and deferring to another like some dumb sheep.

  “I have,” I confirmed, falling into my own natural instincts of lying through my teeth and doing whatever I could to take advantage of the situation around me, “or rather, things like them. Rotters mostly but undead are undead.” I said it with a forced smile, trying to look nonchalant and keep anyone from questioning whether I knew the first bloody thing about undead.

  Feigning that knowledge lit the fuse on a powder keg of questioning, much to my surprise. Curiosity, in my head, was not a thing for the peasants. Theirs was a lot of labour and obedience, that they might wonder about the world seemed…odd, and unnecessary. Surely people who questioned things so eagerly couldn’t be content to sit around toiling in a field all day.

  Like so many of my epiphanies, this one was a thing I merely came within proximity to before soaring right past. I shrugged and chalked it all up to a random quirk of chance and circumstances that these particular poor people were behaving so contradictory to stereotype.

  “We need to head deeper,” I said at last, “if we leave now we’ll have explaining to do, and our explanations might not be accepted.”

  I was talking fully out of my backside, but like all confident declarations made by a perceived authority it was accepted eagerly.

  Eagerly by most, that was, but Bakeswill clearly saw a danger in what I was suggesting. Which was fair enough, because that was more or less the extent of it.

  “You don’t think we should bring back word of what we’ve seen?” he asked, face twitching and body shivering as he spoke. An older man, Bakeswill had been serving for easily two decades and was actually among the most veteran fighters in the whole guard.

  He’d achieved this through sustained cowardice, naturally. Which was a big problem for me now that I was trying to urge him and the others on.

  A dangerous problem, I realised then, because if he contradicted my word to delve deeper and the other men took his side instead of mine, they’d naturally fear my snitching on our officers about what had really happened. The results of that would be bad for them.

  Which meant I would be killed to keep the secret of their own cowardice. Funny how jaded I’d become in so little time.

  And convenient for staying alive. I suppose cowardice was a thought process I could wrap my head around more.

  Fortunately, Bakeswill was not suggesting an outright abandonment of our mission just yet. Which meant that I still had a brief window before any words were exchanged that would give my allies a vested interest in inserting something into my back. For now. I thought fast to try and avoid that unfortunate eventuality.

  “If any of you want to run back alone then you can feel free, how about you, Bakeswill?” It was actually a stroke of genius on my part to make the suggestion, and I watched Bakeswill’s beady little rat-eyes light up in realisation as he soaked up what I was saying.

  Of course, given a chance like this, he would jump on the chance to save his own skin. So there was no surprise when he nodded sharply and practically sprinted back down the corridor without another word.

  The other men were far from pleased by the fact, in their eyes Bakeswill was…well, the most senior man present. Truth be told, I wished he was still with us too.

  What I wished for more, though, was to be out of the army, or at least out of its lower dregs. And the way I saw it my best chances of managing that were to seize control of this little mission and make myself the one whose name was credited for everything that came of it.

  So with a projection of non-existent confidence, I ordered the remaining men down into the fort and had them continue doing exactly what they had been before. Not a one of them seemed to notice how all of my orders were simply recycled from our original approach, and as usual the credit flowed right upwards to me.

  What also flowed up to me was the danger of attack, because leading meant I had to put myself at the front of the group. The back would’ve let me keep an eye on the men more seamlessly, but at the cost of having them between me and any more attacks. That would be remembered if we talked about them later.

  On the other hand, being between my allies and the attacks meant that I was…between my allies and the attacks. If something dangerous came for us, it’d be reaching me first and I’d not have the room to retreat with all those bodies behind me.

  I thought, however, that this was a completely acceptable risk. After all, I reasoned that with all the noise our initial attack had made there were better than even odds we’d already seen every threat this fort had to offer. Those ghuls would surely have gained the attention of whatever else was lurking in the dark, right?

  That line of reasoning proved its folly soon enough, unfortunately. Our group came to a larger, more expansive room that allowed us to spread out more—though still, of course, remain locked in formation—as we examined it.

  Stone statues, stone carvings on the walls, decayed tapestries, burned out fires. And movement in the dark.

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