“Of course. It’s one of my duties as the baron’s aide to oversee the security of his person.”
“Not doing a lot of that at the moment, though,” Vanderjack said and pulled on the iron bar. With a creak of metal, it came free, and Vanderjack almost tumbled backward into the darkness.
“Was that it?” asked Theo from nearby.
“Pretty much, yes,” Vanderjack said. “Now what?”
“In an ideal world, Theo would be in that cell, not you,” said Gredchen. “However, as ample proof has already indicated, this is not an ideal world. Pass the bar through to Theo. If you work together, you should be able to lever it horizontally through the bars on the front of his cell and pop a couple of them out. Then he can squeeze through.”
“This isn’t a very secure dungeon,” Vanderjack noted.
“The baron didn’t anticipate a lot of residents,” Gredchen said.
After a few minutes of blind fumbling around, the banging of iron against iron, and some curses from both the gnome and the sellsword, the plan went into action.
“Ready, Theo? Pull!” Vanderjack threw his weight into the effort. He heard the gnome do the same, which only reminded him of just how strong the little gnome was in proportion to his size. He’d seen Theo wrestle with Star the saber-toothed cat many years before. Although Star was twice Theodenes’ size, and probably three or four times his weight, Theo had been an equal match for the cat.
The bars of the cell creaked and groaned, grinding together with a rasping sound that might have been heard all the way up the stairs into the castle. Vanderjack didn’t want to waste any time, so with one final shove, he pulled on the iron bar and heard the loud
“Theo!” shouted Gredchen, trying to be heard over the clatter. “It’s up to you! Get through the bars and then up to your left at the end of the hallway is the door out, which should be unlocked. Once you open that, there will probably be a torch or lantern or something lighting the stairway up.”
Vanderjack heard Theodenes moving around in the darkness, then a deep creaking of wood shed light into the dungeon. Vanderjack squinted as his eyes readjusted; he saw for the first time what the cells around him looked like and just how fetid and awful they were. He wouldn’t even keep a gully dwarf down there. Though a gully dwarf might like it.
Theo stood silhouetted in the warm, orange glow of the doorway. Gredchen had been right. There was a torch mounted in a bracket outside, close to expiring but still serviceable.
“Great, Theo,” said Gredchen, who was covered in muck herself. Not all of it looked like it came from the cell. She looked as if she’d fallen into a pig’s pen face-first. “The next thing to do is open the cell doors. There should be a series of-”
Theodenes made a sound of excitement. “By the Great Engine! Levers!”
“Yes,” continued Gredchen. “Those. Another of the baron’s design specifications. He thought keys would only get lost.”
Theodenes manipulated a few of the large brass levers by the door. The sound of more metal against metal echoed around the room, and the cell doors in their group of cells swung open.
“That was easy,” Vanderjack said, frowning suspiciously. “In fact, too easy. I have to say I don’t think I’ve ever escaped from a cell as easily as that since the time I was locked up in a Qualinesti elf hut and got out through the hole in the roof where the smoke went up.”
Theodenes waited by the door as Gredchen and Vanderjack stepped out of their cells. “Nonsense,” Theo said. “I was present at that great escape, in case you had forgotten. We were freed because one of your companions lowered a rope down into the hut. And this only after a long, argumentative conversation about how you could just force yourself out because you were a mighty sellsword who could take on as many elves as the Speaker could throw at you.”
“Now why do you have to go and ruin a perfectly good anecdote like that with the truth?” Vanderjack said, grinning, and looked around for his sword. Finding it absent, he cursed and scanned the dungeon hallway for something that he might use instead. There wasn’t a scrap of wood or metal anywhere, other than one of the long iron bars, so he picked that up and motioned for the others to follow him up the stairs.
The dungeon stairs led up in a spiral, the stones slick with moisture. Building a castle in the middle of a rainforest wasn’t the most sensible of ideas, Vanderjack thought. His head was feeling somewhat better, but he felt something deep in the pit of his stomach that wouldn’t go away. It was like being hungry for a side of beef at a Majerean monastery in Khur, where they ate only rice and the shoots of plants.
“Where are we headed?” Vanderjack asked over his shoulder.
“This comes up where the stables once were, but shortly before the dragonarmies invaded, the baron sealed those up and turned them over to storage,” Gredchen said. “Even the windows were bricked up. It smelled like horse for such a long time …” Her voice trailed off.
Theodenes came up near Vanderjack and sniffed at the air. He was also carrying the torch, so Vanderjack had to lean out of the way to avoid being singed. “Watch where you put that!” he said, putting his back against the wall of the stairs. “Are your amazing gnome senses telling you anything?”
“Still smells like horse,” the gnome said and fell back in line.
At the top of the stairs, the trio stepped into the rear of a large stone area lined with many stalls. In many of the stalls were wooden crates filled with dry goods, bundles of woven cloth, casks of Southlund wine and Palanthian brandy, and what appeared to be a set of four earth-filled wooden troughs. Each of those was more than six feet long, set two abreast within a pair of horse stalls just to the left of what Vanderjack thought was the stable entrance.
“Mushroom gardens?” Theodenes asked, pointing at the troughs.
“I have no idea what those are,” Gredchen said, “other than horse troughs filled with soil. I can’t think of any reason to do that.”
“There’s plenty of wine at least!” Vanderjack grinned, fetching up a wineskin and filling it from one of the barrels. Gredchen made no move to stop him, so halfway through the process, he looked over his shoulder and said, “You don’t mind?”
“Those aren’t the baron’s,” Gredchen said simply.
“Ah. Must be the spoils of war for our friend Rivven Cairn and her highlord masters. Theo, maybe you should poke your head around the corner of that entrance and see what’s what.”
Theodenes gave the sellsword a scathing look. He placed his torch into a bracket on a nearby horse stall and strolled over to the large wooden gates. He pushed one of them just slightly ajar, enough to stick his nose through and get a good look at the hallway outside.
Gredchen cried, “Watch out!” and Vanderjack spun around, almost dropping the wineskin. He followed her pointing finger toward the dirt-filled troughs, which were only about a dozen feet away from the gnome. Bodies, still somewhat caked with soil and dirt, had sat up from underneath a cover of earth with their pasty white features bearing expressions of utmost malice.
Vanderjack’s hands gripped the iron bar tightly. It was about seven feet long, so it would make a handy quarterstaff, but it wasn’t Lifecleaver. That knot in his stomach turned and throbbed. He looked around and saw only the gnome, the baron’s aide, and the four figures pulling themselves into standing positions from their troughs-no ghosts, no Sword Chorus.
The gnome dropped into a rudimentary fighting stance of his own. With no weapon, he raised his fists in a show of bravado, but Vanderjack had the feeling that anything that had at one time been dead and was moving around would not be intimidated by a gnome. Theo needed help.
Vanderjack sprang forward, charging across the stable’s main floor toward the stalls that housed the troughs. But he didn’t feel strong, he felt overwhelmed by the smell and the odds. He thought he might throw up.
The corpses, exposed once they had climbed fully out of the dirt, were remarkably well preserved. These weren’t mindless undead, the kind of thing a necromancer animates to perform his household chores. They were definitely intelligent, with empty eyes that seemed to emanate wickedness and tongues that slavered from their rictus grins, barbed and wormlike.
“Ghouls!” screamed Gredchen. “Like those in Willik!”
“Why didn’t you mention ghouls before?” Vanderjack said, choking down the rising bile and bringing the iron
