We returned to the now open door two hours later, gas free and none the wiser. Less wise than I’d hoped, anyway.

  Brace hadn’t had to deal with the undead using anything more than a bundle of steady nerves and enough torchlight to avoid their grasp. They’d all been chained.

  That had jogged my own memory. The collapsed ceiling and broken chain the undead Gunhild and I had faced. The volcanic eruption had freed the undead and made them a threat they hadn’t been before.

  That raised some questions.

  Did my memory serve for finding our way to the fourth floor? Gunhild and I had travelled through fissures and chasms opened by the volcano. The routes might no longer exist.

  I could teleport us (in theory), but the going would slow and there would be no clear path for others to follow.

  Time would tell. There was no sense reaching that far into the future.

  Attart gasped as my light filled the cave.

  “This is magnificent! Even the Deep Well of the Star Chambers back on the Bronze Coast do not match it. Your light barely reaches the ceiling.”

  I looked up, far far above, a hundred feet over my head where that chute lay set in the ceiling. If only I could fly I’d see where it led. It was too close to the Rift to be out way out, but perhaps it had been one once. Maybe it had even been the original way in, which allowed the builders to carve this cave.

  Soldiers’ Swords

  “Tear down the gate.”

  My swords flew across the room and began hacking at the iron portcullis with zeal. A normal sword would break before it succeeded. A normal man would tire. My swords had no such limitations. Each stroke was as sharp as the first. Each as powerful.

  The noise risked attention over simply lifting the gate, but this way the path could be followed by those without my strength or spells.

  People such as me, after fighting a warlock.

  It was good fortune that I did destroy the gate; a heavy blade fell from the ruins when the swords were done. A large pendulum set to swing as the gate was lifted, large enough to cleave a man in two.

  Clearly, not all traps of the warlocks were designed with capture in mind.

  “Perhaps the warlocks also struggled against the creatures wandering their halls?” I mused as we stepped over the wreckage.

  “Or they also struggle to walk the dungeons trapped by whoever walked before,” said Attart.

  Beyond the door was the “tiny” ten foot by ten foot room. To our right, a wooden door gaped open.

  “Drag along the threshold.”

  My swords moved to obey. Neither they nor my ring nor my eyes found any traps, so I led the way through.

  The room was long and tall. Nearby, a staircase led up to a catwalk which split like an ‘H’ to hug both the left and right walls. Straight ahead was the door which presumably led to the room of many voices. Up on the left hand side of the catwalk was the only other door, made of wood.

  Had I been here before? I had no memory of the place. Where I’d normally blame the failing on my mind, I instead had to wonder: How different was this new time from my own?

  “Destroy the door at the top of the alure.”

  The door popped open with the first blow rather than breaking, at which point my swords began to hack and chop at the now open frame.

  “Stop! Wait for me on the other side of the door.”

  The swords were making far too much noise for my liking. I didn’t know what wandered down here, and I didn’t want to meet it if I could avoid it.

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  I waited at the threshold while Attart made her slow way upward. When I normally said someone climbed the stairs I meant it figuratively, but in her case it was a literal ascent. If she’d had a pack she’d also need picks to keep her pressed against the face of the stairs.

  I was growing somewhat concerned.

  Surely we should have found the undead by now? Had I remembered the path wrong?

  I consulted my memory, literally consulted. I had a perfect memory of the stairs burned into my brain after a...

  It had faded. As had the memory of the merman and the false Push rune.

  When had that happened?

  The corridor ahead twisted, right, left, and then forked one path going straight, one path to the right.

  Had the volcano offered another passage? I should have asked Conan for a map, assuming this time still contained his map. I’d stolen the mercenaries’ waterskins after all.

  “We’ll take the first path on the right. It will be easier to trace our path back if we are wrong.”

  “You do not remember the way?”

  “The path may have changed. I am not sure right now.”

  The corridor was long and winding. Ten minutes of echoing footsteps and whispering moans. Lamentations and creaking chains which grew louder as we walked.

  We were on the right path.

  The corridor ended in an open archway which itself led into a tiled room with alcoves in the walls and a bookcase in one corner. The bookcase was empty.

  Everything clicked into place.

  This was where Gunhild and I had fought the undead. The long corridor we’d just been down was where she’d hid after I’d killed her. I was now standing only a few feet away from where I’d nearly drowned on my golden lungs.

  There was only one exit to the room, a sturdy looking wooden door to my left. I could hear the faint clank of manacles beyond.

  Attart was staring at the alcoves with wide eyes.

  “What have they wrought?” she whispered.

  She looked horrified.

  I activated my soul sense and move in range of the nearest alcove.

  “Maggots on a flower! By all that is pure and strong!”

  The alcove was filled with a solid mass of souls. They pressed against one another until it was almost as if their flesh had melted. Cheeks pressed into armpits, legs wrapped around necks, hands and arms twisted to the breaking point so they could weave through whatever gaps remained.

  It was a mass grave for souls. No care had been paid to laying them to rest. They’d been stuffed there simply to get them out of the way, with less care than I showed my over full pouch of treasures.

  It was pretty easy to deduce where the souls had come from.

  “We must lay them to rest,” there was no hesitation in her, nor room for disagreement. Attart was in full governess mode.

  She strode swiftly to my side.

  “I need candles. And my skull. Blood will do, but I need something from the grave.”

  I eyed the door where the howling was continuing unabated, “I can get you a corpse.”

  “That will do.”

  She didn’t even bat an eye.

  It was good to remind myself that she was a necromancer every once in a while.

  I pointed at the door, “Knock it down.”

  Attart and I retreated while my swords got to work. The door was strong enough it took several minutes to bust open, in which time I thought the racket would wake the whole dungeon, yet nothing stirred. The corpses beyond didn’t even react.

  ***

  It was different seeing them there, chained rather than dead. They’d been in chains last time, and they certainly were not alive now, but there you had it.

  Sad, weak, pallid, broken men, still straining against their chains in the dark. It was all they had left to them. Not even their souls remained.

  My light was the first thing they truly reacted to.

  A howl spread from one set of lips to the other as light fell across their faces. Efforts to break free redoubled. They had more than freedom promised to them now. They had vengeance, if only they could wrap their hands about my neck.

  The anger and the desperation nearly broke my heart.

  I’d been cavalier about fetching Attart a corpse, but I was no necromancer. A corpse was more than a corpse.

  These were men. Men who still moved and pleaded. Men who had fallen afoul of the warlocks much as I had, with far less fortune to their name.

  They scared me nearly as much as they caused me pain.

  Sword Storm III

  “I’m sorry.”

  One by one the links of the runed chain snapped.

  The men slumped. Some to their knees, some still held aloft by their chains, some all the way to the floor. At rest at last.

  “Forgive me,” I told the man who I’d killed twice now, once in both timelines. He didn’t protest my touch as I cradled him in my arms and lifted him to be brought back to Attart. He didn’t need to.

  Mine were enough.