A sharp crackling in the distance drew their attention, as virulent cracks appeared in the sky, spreading ugly green and purple bruise-like fractures. The air turned thick, then, and brought a bitter taste to Cleo’s mouth. Kalak turned and spat to the side.

  “Chaos storm’s brewing,” he said. “Now what the frak are we supposed to do?”

  Chaos storms? Add that to my many unanswered questions.

  Rosalia held her hand up, fingers spread, as if calculating the distance from the lurid fissures in the sky to the ground. “Maybe. It’s high up, but it’s the last thing we need right now so we’d better get moving. Less yapping, more running.” She finally took her own weight and stepped away from Cleo, though she grimaced and her face was etched with strain.

  “Right you are, boss,” Kalak said, then he closed his eyes and whispered, “Elusive Cloak.”

  To Cleo’s surprise, Rosalia and Kalak both flickered, then blurred, their figures becoming a transparent haze. She gasped and looked at her own arm, seeing that it too had the same camouflage effect.

  “Oh, cool! How does it work? Does it bend light?”

  “No idea,” Kalak said. “Now shut up and let’s get out of here before we’re swarmed or a chaos storm erupts over our heads. I don’t fancy getting torn apart and I’m sure you don’t either. The cloak doesn’t last long, but it’ll be enough to get us out of danger. For now, anyway.”

  Kalak’s hazy silhouette strode away, his tread crunching on sand and rock fragments. He descended the slope on the other side of the hill, down into another valley devoid of undead. A short while later, Cleo and Rosalia joined him, Cleo marveling at the stealth characteristics of Kalak’s spell. When he was standing still, waiting for them, she wouldn’t have known he was there at all if she couldn’t sense him in her party. A part of her wondered how she’d counter such an effect, if she had to. Firey balls like Rosalia could cast, probably. Area of effect destruction had a lot going for it. Her to-do list kept growing.

  The trio trudged along in silence, Kalak setting a punishing pace, until the carnage and smoke from Rosalia’s spells faded into the distance—as did the bitter, poisonous taste of the budding chaos storm. Sweat dripped from Cleo, forming trails in the dust on her arms and legs, and she thought she’d never perspired so much before in her life. Her lupus meant she’d avoided exercising too much, since she fatigued easily. Already, her lungs were burning from their forced march, and a stitch pained her side.

  They slogged over sand and rocks and more sand, and passed fossilized tree roots and stumps. On one distant hill, Cleo saw a leafless tree that looked as dry and gray as ash-covered bone.

  Then, without warning, Kalak and Rosalia materialized as the cloak spell failed.

  “Good enough,” Kalak said. “Can’t use it again for a while, so we best be careful. At least the husks have lost our scent for now.”

  “We’ll be fine from here on out,” Rosalia said.

  Kalak only snorted. “Princess here looks like she’s about to collapse. You’re not going to faint on us, are you?”

  “I’m fine,” Cleo said, gasping for breath and hoping they’d take a break. If she could find alchemical or magical means to control her disease, then she’d need to take up regular exercise. She was sure that an unfit adventurer was a liability, and probably a dead one.

  “I’ve recovered enough to take over scouting,” Rosalia said. “I’ll stay relatively close though. We don’t want to get separated if we can avoid it.” She left them and strode ahead, dust swirling in her wake.

  Cleo wrinkled her nose and sneezed, feeling crustiness in her nostrils. She really needed to blow her nose, and she was sure that all the dust had packed it with slimy gray snot. Again, she wished for a handkerchief the same as Kalak and Rosalia wore.

  In the distance, a horde of undead wasn’t making for their group, but heading towards the setting sun. Rosalia set a course to avoid them.

  “Where are the undead going?” Cleo asked Kalak, glancing at him, then wincing as pain flared in her left ankle. Not now, lupus. She sighed, knowing she would pay dearly for pushing her physical limits. There was only so much she could do before her body fought against itself. “The ones that can’t sense us look like they’re all heading in the same direction.”

  “To the corruption. To their makers.”

  “Makers? Plural?”

  “Didn’t they teach you anything where you’re from?”

  “I grew up somewhere far away. Where there weren’t many undead.”

  “Must have been nice.”

  She remained quiet. Kalak still seemed to suffer from Scrubby's loss; he was surly, though pragmatic so far. Maybe that was his usual outlook. After a few moments, she realized he wasn’t going to answer her questions, so she left him to his thoughts and concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other and trying not to breathe so hard.

  After more trudging across sand and rock, Kalak eventually cleared his throat and spoke. “They don’t know where the undead come from, not really, nor the corruption. Maybe the higher-ups in the Empire know—the High Command and the Empress—though if they do, they’re not telling. But a few hundred years ago, an undead army laid waste to a city up north, led by… something. People started calling it The Barrow King, and others claimed to have seen more of them, so they became The Barrow Kings even though a few of them looked like they were female. So they say. They’re carded, probably Legendary, and heavy magic users with a martial bent. But you won’t ever have to worry about them; it’s the Dark Ones you need to watch out for when we reach safety. Though safety’s a relative term.”

  Hundreds of years ago? How long had the fight against the undead been going on? And Saskia said they were losing. It seemed logical that they were currently in this ‘Empire’ that Kalak had mentioned, which was governed by a High Command and an Empress. More questions for later. “Dark Ones?”

  “Undead loving cultists.”

  Who would do that? “Why? I mean, why do they worship the undead?”

  “Not worship. Most are uncarded and spiteful and jealous, since being carded brings a lot of benefits. Others are carded and want more—more wealth, more power, more prestige. That’s the thing, see. When the other side offers power and eternal life, don’t you think some people would jump at the chance?”

  “That’s crazy.” Cleo could only imagine what would happen to you if you gave up your soul, and everything she came up with was disturbing.

  “Not to some it ain’t. Dark Ones. People of the Undead. The desperate and grifters and the discontented. Though some just want to dabble in things that are taboo. Them’s the really dumb ones.”

  “How many of them are there?”

  “Too many. Rosalia once guessed maybe one in a hundred, maybe one in two hundred. Hard to tell since they’re secretive for obvious reasons. Don’t get mixed up with them if you can avoid it. The Imperial Guard conducts purges sometimes, but they don’t catch them all. Cultists always seem to be springing up everywhere like weeds.”

  Cleo shook her head vigorously. “I won’t. Thanks for the warning.” Would it be too suspicious if I asked about the Imperial Guard? Probably.

  “You’re young. I wish someone had given me a few more warnings and a lot more advice when I was your age. And that I heeded the guidance I was given.” Kalak looked to have run out of words, for he ushered Cleo ahead and then dropped back to guard the rear.

  Rosalia led them through a maze of dusty, cold valleys, each one as desolate as the last. The air remained stale and musty, even though they were moving closer to the greenery outside of the Blighted Lands. Periodically she would hold up a hand and they’d halt and hide themselves as best they could, and observe as a group of undead passed by ahead of them. Single undead and small bands Cleo put down with curses, and they spoke as little as possible.

  Eventually, Rosalia slackened her pace until she came alongside Cleo and offered her a strip of jerky.

  “The way ahead is clear for the time being. It’s dried meat only. The undead can smell fresh meat, and you don’t want that happening out here. It gets them riled up and lively. Even the goblins don’t risk it, and they love their fresh meat, straight off the bone before they suck the marrow out.”

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  That was… oddly specific. “They can smell fresh meat over their own stink?”

  “Yes, you wouldn’t think so, would you? There’s a theory that it’s not a physical sense but a magical one. I couldn’t say either way, but it’s more than annoying when you’re out here. Tough jerky’s not my favorite, and the less said about oat porridge the better. Barley porridge is far superior.”

  “Scrubby would always buy oats,” Kalak said. “I think he did it to spite you.”

  “Do you? Huh. I thought he preferred them.”

  “He hated oats. But he was always one to laugh at another person’s misery, even if he shared it.”

  “True. He could be a right bastard sometimes.”

  Cleo declined the jerky, not hungry yet, but also not sure what type of meat it was, and red meat had a tendency to trigger her lupus. Perhaps Saskia had filled her stomach up or something weird like that, or the physical trauma of teleportation meant her body was somehow disturbed and needed time to return to normal. Though with the calories she was burning she assumed she’d be hungry enough to eat soon, if the smell of the undead hadn’t ruined her appetite for life. Rosalia and Kalak had chewed on jerky periodically throughout their walk. She wondered when they’d last eaten a decent meal. Maybe they’d been constantly on the run and hadn’t been able to pause to rest and recuperate. Whatever the case, they were certainly fitter than Cleo, and battle-hardened.

  Rosalia cleared her throat and swallowed a mouthful of jerky. “Are you running out of juice? Mana, I mean.”

  Cleo shook her head. “I’ve been able to space out my curses as we’re avoiding most of the undead. If I need to, I can cast once every few seconds, but—”

  “Seconds?”

  “Oh, er, a couple of heartbeats? If I cast as fast as the cooldown allows me to, I can’t sustain it.”

  “You’re new to your class, so you’ll find you run out of juice often, and you really need to practice mana cycling. Daily, if possible. If you can’t handle the larger quantities of mana a higher tier class and skills require, you won’t tier up. And you’ll need to be proficient if you’re going to climb the Apexes with the others at the Institution. Anyhow, if the undead get too numerous, I’ll help out, but with the amount of them already following us we risk them swarming if they get too riled up.”

  “I thought they didn’t have our scent?”

  “They don’t, but they’ll follow the trail of corpses we’re leaving. We can’t see them yet, the group that’s amassing, but they’re there, following behind us. Did you see more corrupted?”

  I’ll ask how to mana cycle later, and try to draw her out about Apexes, whatever they are. “Not that we’ve seen.”

  “Good.” She looked Cleo up and down with a critical eye and laughed softly. “You look like a real adventurer now.”

  Cleo examined her once-white dress, now covered in gray dust and sweat stains and speckles of… scorched blood? Eww. Even the metal beads at the hem, and her armbands, were now a dull gray. As was, she assumed, the flat torc around her neck. The polished lapis and turquoise had to be worth something, if she was alive to sell it.

  “What’s the Silent Legion?” Cleo asked, trying not to think about her ruined dress and the endless dust and rock.

  “Undead, that’s what,” Kalak said from behind them. “Part of the Corrupted Scourge but vicious, nasty.”

  “Are they… quiet? Sneaky?”

  “Ha! Not sneaky, they just don’t make much sound, even when they fight. Most of the other undead make more noise. The Silent Legion is grimmer… like they just want to get the job done. And the job is killing anyone they can.”

  “They’re especially effective against mages, though,” added Rosalia. “Many of them have an innate resistance to elemental spells. And they can cast without vocalizing. So, quiet and deadly. The Silent Legion. Though they have been known to talk, so they’re intelligent, in a way.”

  Cleo was relieved that so far, she hadn't needed to speak to use her powers. If many of the mages did, then she had another advantage—not that she expected to be fighting against mages. “Um, do the undead eat humans? Do they need flesh to survive?”

  “Nah, well, only the really nasty ones,” Kalak replied. “Nasty undead, I mean. And we’re not likely to find any that powerful here, not this close to the line and Ankratur. Husks’ll kill you then leave you alone, then you’ll be tainted and join their ranks. Unless you’re lucky enough to have someone burn your corpse. Anyhow, along with the undead and corruption and chaos storms, it’s greenskins you mostly have to worry about. Filthy goblins roam the border of the Blighted Lands, picking off the weak and injured, and raiding villages. When a force assembles to squash them, they vanish into the Blighted Lands like smoke in the wind. They clear out some of the smaller dungeons and live there.”

  “The weak and injured. Like us right now?” Dungeons again. That had to be what Rosalia and Kalak, and Scrubby, had been doing out here—clearing dungeons. Dungeon diving? Dungeoneering?

  Kalak nodded. “Exactly. So, keep alert, and don’t let your guard down. At least there’s been no fully fledged chaos storms, yet. Thank goodness for small mercies.”

  The sun moved slowly as they eased around a particularly tall hill, but then Rosalia changed course and angled the group to the right of the pyramid in the distance—Ankratur, she reminded herself. Disappointingly, the structure only looked slightly closer, but now she could make out some details—it was definitely squatter than those in Egypt, and had crenellations on the edges, like it was a stepped pyramid.

  Cleo kept prodding at the irregularity she could feel in her chest. It had to be her mana reservoir; she just knew it. But how could she access it and gauge its strength? As she probed, she kept one eye on Rosalia in front of her, and another on her surroundings, which became more difficult to do as the harder she prodded the more distracted she grew, as did a pressure inside her skull, and sometimes her vison blurred.

  Somehow, despite Rosalia saying the undead should be gathering behind them, the number she could see following them had become less numerous. Kalak and Rosalia exchanged worried glances, more frequently as the number of undead dwindled. He nervously fidgeted with his spear and adjusted his leather armor, while Rosalia shortened the distance she scouted ahead and kept her wand in hand.

  Trouble was brewing. It didn’t take an experienced adventurer to see it.

  Sometime later, Cleo, still throwing out the occasional curse and vainly attempting to ignore her headache and aching lungs and legs and ankles, put down another undead almost at the edge of her range, and then realized there were no others close enough to curse.

  Cleo almost sighed with relief, but Rosalia and Kalak looked even more worried.

  “Let’s speed up a bit, shall we?” Rosalia said. “Kalak, you lag back a little. Make sure no husks have picked up our scent. The last thing we want is a surprise horde on our heels.”

  The man nodded and jogged back the way they’d come, while Rosalia set off at a pace that Cleo struggled to match on her aching feet, and she soon found herself lagging behind. Keeping to the shallow valleys and fissures between the hills, Rosalia quickly forged ahead and led them to the edge of a still lake, then slowed her pace to wait for Cleo to catch up. The water was dark and uninviting, but curiously, patches of an olive-green plant grew on the oily surface, and malformed dragonflies flew erratically above the plants—the first signs of life in this desolate place.

  The Blighted Lands, Cleo reminded herself.

  She stopped a fair distance from Rosalia and bent over to massage her aching ankles. It was about time to replace the rags on her feet, which looked shredded and scraggly.

  The air shimmered just ahead of her, and then Mau appeared out of thin air. The cat took one look around before crouching low, black-tipped, pale silver fur coat blending seamlessly with the gray sand and scree on the ground.

  “Bad time?” Mau said, voice barely above a whisper. “Yeah, terrible time, you’re in trouble! I’ll be back later.”

  “What? Saskia said you’d help me out!” To guide Cleo, if she recalled correctly.

  “A temporary demotion! You’re doing great, Cleo!”

  And before she could say anything else or grab Mau, the cat glittered and disappeared. “Mau!” Cleo hissed. “Mau!”

  She growled and clenched her hands in frustration. “That’s just great! Stupid cat!” Mau had left her alone, and she had hundreds of questions and no answers, and she was stuck trying to get through a desolate land filled with festering husks and maybe other undead and just possibly goblins—greenskins—and who knew what they’d be like, to a strange city shaped like a pyramid, with two companions who might just kill her for her cards.

  She turned back to find Rosalia staring at her from a few dozen yards ahead. When Cleo caught up, the woman said, “Talking to yourself?”

  Still fuming, Cleo snapped, “It’s the only way to have an intelligent conversation.”

  “Touchy. Having a bad day?”

  Cleo sighed, taking a few deep breaths and unclenching her fists. Rosalia was probably having a worse few days, having lost one of her companions and been desperate enough to use an expensive single-use help beacon artifact or something of the sort. “Sorry. I am having a rough day, and I’m a bit stressed. Someone summoned me into the Blighted Lands, I have no shoes, and undead are trying to kill me. It would make anyone irritable.” The change from her previous life to this one was almost too much to take, despite the fact that she really, really wanted magic. She needed time to adjust, or she’d lose her mind. I guess this is the ‘tempering’ Saskia mentioned.

  “Yes, well, I thought we’d get an adventurer with a touch more experience, so we’re both disappointed. I’ve half a mind to ask for my money back. Don’t worry, we’ll make it.” Rosalia placed a hand on Cleo’s shoulder and lightly squeezed. “Anyhow, the water here—don’t drink it unless you’re particularly fond of parasites eating you from the inside out, and stay alert. We’ll find somewhere close by to make camp. Traveling in the dark is a sure way to get killed. We’ll hunker down for the night and continue in the morning as soon as there’s light enough to see by.”

  “We might make it,” Kalak said, having caught up to them, but his tone was flat as if he didn’t believe his own words. “Survive the night, press on tomorrow, and with some luck we’ll be golden. But we still ain’t seen any greenskins, and that’s not great news. And the undead…”

  Rosalia grunted, but she said nothing.

  “Did the undead just give up on us?” Cleo said.

  Kalak snorted, still scanning their surroundings. “Maybe. Maybe not. My skill’s useful in giving them the slip, most times. But they could have found easier prey or were called off. Greenskins could have distracted them, too, but we ain’t seen no sign of them. And we would have heard a goblin war-band for sure. They ain’t quiet. And even the goblins' small patrols are rowdy. They ain’t too smart.”

  Called off… which means something out there can command these undead. Great.

  Cleo looked up and realized the sun was almost setting—she’d lost track of time. She frowned, trying to gather her bearings, then faced away from the lowering sun, looking to the east, where something itched at the edge of her awareness. In the steely half-light she could just make out a smudge of blackness that she was sure had moved slightly before freezing.

  “What’s that?” Cleo said. “There’s something there.”

  Kalak brought his spear to the ready, and Rosalia whispered a phrase under her breath, extending her wand.

  “Do we run?” said Kalak, as he squinted into the gloom.

  “Umm, I think it’s a little late for that,” Rosalia said, backing towards them, brandishing her wand and drawing a dagger from a thigh sheath.

  And then the first of the Silent Legion emerged from the shadows.