Walking through Heaven’s Falls with an artisan zombie in tow didn’t surprise as many people as I expected. Some pointed and whispered to their companions, but no one objected to our passing or asked us about Oliver.

  Following the roads to the city’s street level took us past shops, markets, and storefronts. My guess about gnomes eating less was correct, and restaurants chiefly catered to human, dwarf, and deep elf clientele.

  Fabulosa interrupted our search for an inn with a tap on the shoulder. “It looks like Duchess reached Oxum. Check the group chat.”

  Duchess’s dot moved to the northwest as we entered Heaven’s Falls.

  Audigger stood midway between Hawkhurst and Basilborough. Once she reached the river, she’d move quicker, although I doubted she wanted to catch up with Toadkiller.

  Duchess Hey Audigger, when you reach Basilborough, check your mail.

  Audigger Will do.

  The brief message didn’t ignite a conversation about conspiracies for a change. Everyone seemed to have their game face on and avoided idle chatter as if Toadkiller and Audigger coming north instigated a decisive endgame.

  We found a mailbox near an inn called The Saltmarsh Tavern, whose seven-foot ceilings and hot stew silenced thoughts of looking further for a room. While Fabulosa rented two of their finest apartments, I got Darkstep’s letter by a small desk at the foot of the stairway.

  While retrieving the message, I noticed Oliver’s absence. “Our clanky friend is gone.”

  Fabulosa went inside the dining area to give me privacy. “He’ll come back. I’ll get some food. Go, read your letter.”

  It wasn’t long, and I finished it before spotting Fabulosa at a corner table with two bowls of food and a plate of crackers. She waved when I looked up from the letter. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost. What did he say—anything about me?”

  I handed her the letter and sat in front of my stew.

  Fabulosa frowned as she skimmed over it. When she finished, she pushed it back to me and pointed to the crackers. “He didn’t even mention me. Oh! Don’t forget to try these—they call them flatcakes up here. They’re good.” She sold her statement by taking a piece from the tray between us.

  “Didn’t you see what was wrong with the letter?”

  Fabulosa spoke with food in her mouth. “He knows everything about us and comes off a little snobby, but it’s what we expected, right?”

  “Yeah, but did you see the date? He sent this almost three weeks ago, a few days before I left Hawkhurst.” I’d received Fabulosa’s last letter hinting that she’d hidden the arrows, and with siege engines pounding our walls, no one had time to check the mail. How did he know we were going to go after Flagboi?

  Fabulosa snatched the letter from my hands and read the time stamp. “You’re right. This is 19 days ago. That’s before I even reached the coast. How did he do this?”

  “And he sent it before I left Hawkhurst as if he’d known I wouldn’t have time to check the mail.”

  Fabulosa reread the letter more carefully, shaking her head. “Who says untoward candor? He talks like Greenie.”

  Darkstep sounded more like Mr. Fergus or my sword, but Fabulosa was right about the tone feeling wrong. I tried to remember all the contestants in the keynote address. None of them looked more than a year or two older than me. Could Darkstep be one of the adults sitting along the sidelines? Were devs or executives playing the game? It seemed implausible that Crimson would violate the contest’s integrity. I knew from personal experience that students with broad vocabularies didn’t flex them unless they were trying to impress someone. Teenagers typically wanted to fit in with others their age.

  Darkstep knew we would follow Oliver almost a month ago.

  “How long has the zombie been following you?”

  Fabulosa’s eyes narrowed after she mentally retraced her steps. “I found him outside of Mains a while ago. But he comes and goes. I have no control over him. Is he seeing into the future?”

  I leaned on the table. “Dark also knew when Toadkiller cleared the dungeon and with whom. I’ll admit, the Improved Eyes might give him CCTV cams around the continent, but there’s no way he’s getting all this information from floating eyeballs.”

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  “He said nothing about Flagboi’s surprise.”

  I grimaced. “Eh, maybe it’s not important. Especially if Flagboi isn’t ready to fight.”

  Fabulosa crossed her arms. “He told you to go Oxum, but we came here instead. Now, he’s telling us to follow Oliver to find Flagboi.”

  “Except ‘now’ is 19 days ago when he wrote this letter before he told me to go to Oxum.”

  “Dancing to someone else’s tune bothers me. It’s a little…”

  “Presumptuous?”

  “Yeah, something like that. It’s like telling someone to sit moments before they do. It’s rude. We would have figured out how to follow the zombie to Flagboi. It’s obvious that Oliver wants his eye back.”

  “Oliver disappeared before I retrieved the letter. How are we supposed to follow him?”

  Fabulosa waved her hand. “I bet he’s nearby somewhere. But that’s beside my point. Now that he’s telling us to follow Oliver, I don’t want to do it.”

  “And why doesn’t he say anything about you?”

  Fabulosa snorted. “I’d be lying if I said that didn’t make me a little nervous. Even Oliver got a mention.”

  “If he can see the future—”

  Fabulosa rolled her eyes. “I’m not getting knocked out by someone named Flagboi.”

  I turned to my stew before it got cold.

  As Fabulosa predicted, Oliver stood sentry in front of The Saltmarsh Tavern in his usual slumped posture. Fabulosa addressed the zombie without expecting a reply. “Hey, Big O, you feel like hunting down an eye thief?”

  Without acknowledging her, the artisan zombie turned and walked away from us, heading away from the waterfall, which we both wanted to see, and toward the town’s outskirts.

  Fabulosa turned to me. “Aww. He’s heading into the mountain. The views won’t be as good in there.”

  Further from the city center, limestone encased many of the basalt pillars, reducing the number of facades, streets, and people. In a hundred years, gnomes might expand and develop these columns into free-standing structures.

  Oliver stopped on one such deserted street. Great limestone walls stood between the towers of basalt—some of which bore architectural features.

  The street wasn’t the only dead thing nearby. Planters filled with dead flowers stood out as a red flag, making many apartments look neglected.

  Fabulosa murmured to herself. “Hmm. No foot traffic and withered plants—if I were a necromancer in Heavens Falls, this would be my neighborhood.”

  Oliver stopped at a porch that tunneled into a basalt wall surrounded by limestone. A few crude windows opened above our heads a hundred feet above us, but the pillar stood lower than other apartment buildings elsewhere. Chips of basalt and flakes of limestone surrounded it. It looked to be under construction.

  Fabulosa cast Heavenly Favor. “I reckon this is the place. Oliver doesn’t go inside buildings.”

  I did the same and added Presence to give us some light.

  The doorway was crude and unadorned by decorative frames and niches for pictures. Someone had stacked deep elf-sized buckets and shovels on the stairwell’s lower level, but the stairs only rose three levels.

  Fabulosa led the way with her Phantom Blade, reaching her fingers to graze the ceiling. “It’s human-sized. At least we don’t have to hunch over.”

  I followed and drew Gladius Cognitus, who left behind a blue squiggle of light. The place looked deserted, so there didn’t seem to be much chance anyone would follow. Without lights, wall torches, chandeliers, or sconces, whoever used this place either carried a light source or didn’t need one.

  We took care to climb the stairs. The limestone steps had already worn down despite their recent construction. At the top of the stairwell, a wall of limestone with a locked metal door barred any further exploration.

  Detect Magic showed no hexes or curses, so I fired up Mineral Communion to see who lived here. I sensed the area was much newer than other interiors I’d explored, so the stonework’s memory banks were far shorter. Scenes of deep elves casting spells and removing rock appeared before me. Their carving magic produced jagged outcroppings, which other deep elves chipped down and carried away, but the process seemed much easier than using picks to carve through rock.

  I pointed to the thick metal door. “Did you notice they carved the stairs out of limestone and not basalt?”

  Fabulosa hummed. “Yeah. The other buildings carved the limestone away.”

  “The stair steps have round edges. They won’t last as long as the basalt buildings.”

  Fabulosa shrugged. “If limestone is easier to carve, this might have been a rushed job.”

  I scanned through more images. After workers finished construction, I saw other deep elves carrying dead gnomes. Blood on their clothes broadcasted their recent demise. A human with idealized looks appeared to direct both the interior construction and reception of bodies. He carried surgical tools instead of weapons and wore an apron covered in gore over an impressive set of leather armor. “Flagboi is definitely a necromancer—either that or he’s practicing medicine on cadavers.”

  Fabulosa shook her blade, and her knuckles whitened on its hilt. “If it leads to gross stuff like this, I’m glad no one in Belden used dark magic.”

  Using Magnetize, I studied the door’s mechanisms and unlocked it.

  The door opened to an open shaft barely wide enough to contain a tall basalt cylinder several yards wide. Tick bands of iron curved around the basalt, seemingly to reinforce it. The shaft around the basalt looked like an underground missile silo, except it housed a pillar of stone instead of a rocket.

  A heavy wooden plank bridged over the shaft, connecting the doorway to a hatch in the basalt cylinder. The hatch had rounded corners but featured no handle or unlocking mechanisms. Was Flagboi building a giant stone rocket ship?

  Presence provided illumination, but some daylight also filtered from above.

  The shaft that snugly held the basalt pillar wasn’t perfectly vertical, like an elevator shaft. Curving limestone walls blocked our view of the sky and the shaft’s bottom.

  Fabulosa balanced across the wooden plank, tried to push the hatch, and turned to me. “Someone fortified this from the inside. Do you know what that means?”

  “It’s designed to keep something in, not out.”

  Fabulosa nodded and admired the iron bands wrapping around the basalt. Iron studs punctured the stone, presumably from the inside. “It’s a more ambitious project than Hawkhurst, that’s for sure.”

  “I don’t know. You haven’t seen our castle in all its glory.”

  Fabulosa returned across the plank to give me access.

  I used Magnetize to study the door and noticed irregularities with the iron bands wrapping around the giant cylinder. “Those iron bands are hollow.”

  “Doesn’t that make them stronger?”

  “No, there’s gold inside.”

  “But gold is soft.”

  I nodded. “It’s malleable. This place must have cost a fortune. But it’s not strong enough to keep me out.”

  From Earthquake to my trident, I had noisy ways to bypass a door. Using Mineral Mutation, I created a fist-sized hole in the hatch by turning its metal into cotton. I pulled out the fluff and peered inside.

  My recoil from the odor of putrified flesh was so sudden that I almost fell off the wooden plank spanning the shaft.

  Fabulosa, who stayed on the ledge by the door, jumped. “What? What was inside?”

  “Ugh. I don’t know, but it smells awful. I think we found a necromancer’s workshop.”

  Fabulosa waved at her nose and made a pained expression. “Oh! This is worse than Ul Itor.”

  I backed away and applied Mineral Mutation to the mechanism that barred the hatch. When pieces of metal fell, the hatch fell inward. I expected it to land on a floor, but it clanked, rattled, and clattered inside the hollow basalt tower for several seconds before landing with a loud crash. It seemed this giant shaft of basalt was hollow, like a tube.

  I turned apologetically to Fabulosa. “So much for sneaking in.”

  Fabulosa smiled and shrugged.

  Scoping the tower’s insides with Magnetize revealed an interior mesh of latticework, but the bars and beams spanning its interior tilted at odd angles. Nothing inside used perpendicular joints. We would not enjoy the comfort of floors.

  Fabulosa handed me a scarf to cover my face. She wore one and spoke in muffled syllables. “Trust me, this helps.”

  As I wrapped it around my mouth, I accustomed myself to the stench while using Magnetize to scan the empty stairwell, hoping to thwart any surprise attacks from behind. “Oliver’s gone again.”

  Fabulosa shrugged. “Yeah, he does that.”