The entrance to the catacombs is a gaping hole in the rock, and Casavir closes his eyes in a short prayer before he ignites his torch and enters. Inside, there is debris and a scorched circle of a campfire. Daylight stays at the threshold as if afraid to follow the paladin.

Casavir looks around the cavelike anteroom, searching for any signs of recent intrusion, but the remains of the camp look like they can be six months or sixty years old. The rocky ground remembers no footprints, so he takes a deep breath and descends into the deeper passages.

Catherine must have had either a lot of courage or no brains to go here alone to find out whatever restless souls provided the undead visitors to the desolate timber mill nearby. Several manufacturers united their efforts to set it to work again, for there is a convenient river to float the logs down. The unexpected guests ruined their work, and they called for a paladin. Casavir has a better reason to enter – he is looking for a specific person who was swallowed by this place six months ago. So far, he had followed his mentor to Thundertree, then seven days up the river through the virgin forest, and then here, into the place that gives him a chill.

Every instinct of his screams that he should not be here. The burial site of an old civilization is hosted by the mines of an ancient one, and Casavir sees how rows of tombs were added to the high alcoves left by some people more sophisticated than the ones that followed. The air is stale, and the torch burns dim. Shadows creep in the corners and the darkness itself seems to contemplate the intruder that checks every nook, leaves chalk marks on the turnings, and dares to bring light with him.

Casavir suddenly feels very insecure, his knees go weak and he draws his sword almost instinctively. A second later the tombs on his right rattle and a skeleton in a rusty coat of mail lunges at him with no success. Two more excavate themselves from their graves as the fight comes to its end. Casavir drops his backpack and chants a divine spell that makes his aura flare around him and give him the courage he does not feel. He can do it; he was born and taught to fight these unholy creatures.

The mines wind deeper and deeper into the ground. There are larger rooms and low-ceilinged halls with ugly statues that make his flesh crawl. He must have travelled for many hours: his limbs burn and his eyes itch with invisible sand. He detests the idea of sleeping in these pitch-black bowels, but there is no turning back now, so he chooses a small unspecific room with a relatively sturdy door that opens in, searches it thoroughly and barricades the entrance with a couple of empty iron chests. He measures the wood he carried with him and resolves to sleep with a barely burning torch. He cannot wake up to this suffocating darkness. He discards the most uncomfortable parts of his armour, chews some dried meat and stale bread slowly and lies back.

He reasons with himself that he must sleep to be able to fight tomorrow, and descends into a shaky, troubled dream on the brink of a nightmare he often sees when he is not safe. In the dream, he is walking through an overgrown bog, and the ground sucks at his feet greedily, so he has to pull forward with effort; he is following a dark-haired girl in her teens who treads light and runs along as if the bog does not exist. Now and then she looks back and he is spurred on by her regal, serious expression. Casavir never gets to the end of the dream – the bog shakes and goes up in a mist, he is pulled back to the surface of his mind, and he is always haunted by the echoes of this fruitless chase.

This time is no different, and Casavir wakes up with a gasp. The flickering torch is dying, and he lights another one hastily. It is time to move on.


After the second night in the catacombs Casavir makes a full circle of the deeper tunnels and he is almost relieved when the torchlight reflects off his own chalk marks on the wall. The darkness behind him seems all the more hostile. He came across two more undead today, they put up quite a fight, and otherwise the day was calm – but the presence of an evil force is pressing down on him. He has missed something, so Casavir steels himself for another circle. He has torches and food for three more days, and more outside the catacombs.

This time he moves faster along the tunnels but inspects every little corner for hidden doors and disguised passages. His unease grows and Casavir stands still for a while listening for any obscure sound. The silence of the caves is not as deadly as he had expected: there are falling drops of water far in the distance, some bugs screech under his feet, the fire cracks at his movement, and Casavir can hear his own breath and his own heartbeat. There is a black shadow pulling at his core of divine strength. He can hear it hiss in annoyance when its tendrils touch upon him. Casavir has never been good at magic, but he knows the basics well. Anyone probing your heart with dark magic is a threat. He makes several wary steps, and the dark presence stays with him. He follows it like a thread and in about two hundred steps it leads him to a room he had seen before: a small square hall with remains of a carpet in its middle. Casavir worries the decrepit threads with his sword, and the blade clings on steel. There is a trapdoor underneath. Its heavy lid gives in reluctantly.

Casavir contemplates the unpolished stone steps descending into the darkness and every nerve of his screams against following them.

Of course, he does.


On this level, the damp earth swallows his steps, and his torch burns dimmer. The roughly cut corridor winds forward, and the air grows thicker as he proceeds. The corridor opens into a large chamber, larger than anything he has seen here, and he barely registers that the place looks much more habitable – there are stone shelves full of pale parchments – before a gust of wind extinguishes his torch and Casavir is left in complete darkness.

He has the presence of his mind to whisper a spell he has been saving. He strokes the blade of his sword, and the blade thrums to life. It starts to glimmer softly, and in this glimmer the paladin sees two bright red lights come to life in empty sockets of a skull. The red is reflected off the polished bones and the gilded embroidery on the tattered mantle of a skeleton.

There is a lich in the catacombs. Catherine Harkenhart has been taken down by a lich, and Casavir is about to follow, because the lich strikes its staff on the ground and hot orange fire streams off his extended hand. Casavir jerks back, feels the smell of singed leather and hopes it is not his skin. The few parchments on the shelves catch fire and make the lich pause. Everything Casavir knows about liches flashes across his mind and he jumps forward just as he realizes that his only chance lies in close combat. If the undead mage unleashes any other spells, he is dead.

Their fight is a whirlpool of blows that bite the air: the lich melts away from every attack, and though the monster is too preoccupied to cast, Casavir knows that he will inevitably tire while his opponent can go on for centuries. Three or four times he is fast enough to land a hit, but it does not do any damage. Five or six times he is not fast enough, and the lich lands a hit, and it hurts. Sweat is rolling down his face, he is already short of breath, and in a moment of despair Casavir decides to risk everything. He drops his shield and opens up, and the lich seizes the opportunity to land a crushing blow on his shoulder. Just at that moment Casavir strains the other arm and swings his sword to cut the backbone of the skeleton at its waist.

He stands on his knees by the heap of bones and fabric and takes panicked gasps of air. His left collarbone is broken and maybe worse. The pain catches up with him, and Casavir gives a hiss mixed with a whimper. He can barely move his arm, but not much blood is streaming down it, so he concludes it can wait. He runs his sword into the ground and uses it as a crutch to stand up. He finds his torch, lights it again, sheathes his sword and starts looking for the phylactery. This is the most pressing business, for if the lich keeps a spare skeleton close to it, Casavir is about to become the next backup corpse.


He has searched the three adjacent rooms when he hears a groan from the fourth one and his spirit sinks. He rushes to that room best as he can but stops at the threshold in utter astonishment.

There is no regenerated lich waiting for him here. Instead, Catherine is tied to a cold stone altar. Behind it, there is a gleaming golden box on a high pedestal. His mentor is alive, skeletally thin, and very pregnant. She turns her head to him and recognition sparkles in her large eyes. Casavir limps around the altar ungracefully, tugs at her strange thrumming tethers and raises his gaze to follow the strings to the phylactery. Catherine braces herself, closes her eyes, and Casavir pushes the lid open with the tip of the torch. The incantations inside the box are written on sheepskin; it wrinkles and smokes and burns. There is one less lich in the world now.

"Hello, Casavir of Tyr," Catherine sits up and rubs her wrists. "You can't imagine how glad I am to see you".

Casavir is so exhausted that he sticks the torch into a holder on the wall and drops to the altar next to her.

"Hello, Catherine of Tyr," he echoes in a small voice and fumbles with the strap of his leather pauldron blindly. Catherine assesses the situation, peels the soaked piece off and frees his shoulder from the fabric carefully. She raises her eyebrows worriedly.

"You took quite a hit. The bone is smashed, the tendon is ruined, flesh and skin… you get it."

Casavir takes a deep breath and runs his gaze along her figure.

"Are you wounded or in need of healing? I have my daily prayer left untouched."

"You need it more." Catherine shrugs and he can see her bones move under her tunic. He nods and collects his thoughts for a minute. She watches his fingers dive into the torn flesh and grip the shards of the bones. He blanches as he starts to chant the prayer that they all know very well. In several minutes, his shoulder is an ordinary wound: the bone is one piece again and the tendon is whole.

"You have come a long way, Casavir," Catherine measures him with a proud glint in her eyes. "Twenty-two, and already you heal your own fractures and take on an ancient lich."

"It was luck," he replies. "I was weaker. It had all the advantage. How did you survive?"


Catherine tells him the story in bits and pieces as they walk upstairs and back to the entrance. She was disarmed and prepared to face death, but the creature stunned her, and she woke up in the altar room. The undead mage kept her alive and leaked force from her for months. She was under impression it waited for the baby to arrive. Many dark rituals include a sacrifice of a newborn. They are both silent for a long time after that. Casavir thinks of the six months she has spent here and his hands ball into fists on their own accord.

They are both tired, but they do not stop for the nine hours it takes them to get out of this horrible place. He unties the rope that held his supplies high in the tree, they set camp by the river and reason to stay here for a full day so that he can recover a little. There is no way he can carry all the weight with his shoulder in such a mess.

They take turns to sleep. Catherine is relieved to bathe for the first time this year. They make fish soup, rest, eat, rest more. Casavir is not much of a talker, but Catherine pulls an account of his temple quest out of him word by word. It is peaceful on the high bank of the forest river now that the evil that was poisoning the land is dead again, but Casavir is anxious to set off. He steals glances at Catherine's swollen belly, and if his guess is correct, she is due soon. The way up the river has taken him seven days, and now they are slower.

For three days, they slog through the summer forest and every next league takes them longer. In the afternoon of the third day, it starts to rain – it is not a downpour, but a dull continuous drizzle than turns the path into mud. They make a halt early, spread the tent under two thicker firs, and Catherine sets down to the task of making a fire. Casavir goes up the hill to assess where they are. He pauses to stare at the overcast sky in the clearing. If the weather stays, it will take them a week to get back to Thundertree.

Back at the camp, Catherine wails as if she is gutted and Casavir's knees go weak. They are not going to have that week.


The baby does not like the world, the world does not like the baby.

"I did not know at the time I subscribed for this. If I had known I was with child, I would have made different decisions. If I had known this was not an ordinary case of some undead under the cemetery, I would have acted differently." Catherine's voice is still rough from all that screaming. She insisted they move on after a night's rest. So here they are: a foolish young man with too much load for his back, a deadly pale woman who bandages a vacated bag of skin to her stomach and wills her legs to walk, and a small red baby who is not strong enough to whine.

"However, I was with child and this was a lich, so I was stupid enough to be captured and kept here as a blood source for his rituals, arrgh. So yeah, dear student of mine, your mighty mentor made all the silliest mistakes by the book. I don't even mention the misjudged impulsive actions that have led to this child being conceived."

Casavir holds the baby very tenderly and is caught in the image that all those dark rituals could not but draw from the girl's life force. A shadow runs across his face. Catherine misinterprets it in her usual ardour to jump at defence when nobody was attacking.

"And don't you judge me, boy."

Casavir raises his eyes and tries to soften his face as best as he can.

"I don't. I am glad that you both are..." he probes for an adequate word. Healthy. Survivors. Out of that place. "Alive."

Catherine's anger dissipates in the air. She smiles an upset, crooked smile and scrutinizes the way his arm is bent to rest the baby's head in the groove of his elbow.

"I think you are much better at it already that I could ever aspire to be."

"What will you do when we return?"

Catherine shrugs.

"If the child lives, I will stay with her for several months, I owe her this. Then the chapterhouse will shelter her, and I will be back to my service."

That night, Casavir is lost in thought. His whole soul is filled to the brim with a fierce tenderness that floods him, melts his insides into a stream of selfless worry. He has discovered two things about himself. One: his omnipresent desire to protect is driving him like a whip when it is a child that needs protection. Two: he would like to have a child of his own very much.


For the next several days they travel on – slowly, painfully. The rains are chilling. The child is weak; every time she grabs Casavir's finger he can notice that there is less strength in that reflexive motion. He spends the days thinking if he can take several years off on the right of a veteran and keep her. Raise her. Love her like the bleak chapterhouse matrons never will. A child should not be left there so young. He understands Catherine: it is a difficult decision for him, and she would be judged worse. She has been earning her reputation for decades to ruin her mission by what she sees as mundane maternity.

It starts to drizzle in early afternoon again, and they both are mortally tired long before sunset. Casavir sets up a canvas to protect them from rain and wind, and a small fire warms the mood a little, if not much. He leaves to gather firewood to give Catherine some privacy; when he returns, he finds the child asleep on his cloak and Catherine struggling to improvise some soup of the dried meat and barley they have. Efforts of two cannot make it easier, so he picks the baby up and cradles her in his lap, humming some tune softly when she gives a stifled whimper.

Catherine pours a bowl for him and he turns his head sideways to sip at the empty soup carefully so that there is no risk to spill it. She gives him an amused look.

"You are wary as a father of ten, so much attention to little detail," she jokes light-heartedly. "Is there something I should know?"

"I used to have a little sister," Casavir says slowly, staring at the pink face of the baby. There should be more fat on this face. The girl looks like an ancient crone.

"Oh, that explains a lot," Catherine's smile is always in her voice; he does not need to look up to know it is there. "The way you are clinging to her people would think you intend to adopt her."

It hits too close to the truth. Casavir raises his eyes and Catherine blanches at his sheepish look.

"You cannot be serious." She shakes her head and corrects herself. "Yet you always are. You are indeed thinking about it."

Casavir nods and keeps silent. He has been caught thinking about taking a child from her mother; a mother who does not need her, but still. It is an ugly feeling. Catherine does not attempt to take her daughter from him like he would in her place. Instead, her voice sounds more concerned than angry.

"And did you think well about it? Do you realize this adoption will ruin both of our careers?" He stares at her in bewilderment, and Catherine groans. "Of course, you do not. Let me spell it out for you: I am your mentor, you are my apprentice, and one day we return after a long absence with a newborn child, and you take her in. Everybody is going to think you are the father; and this is not my weakness anymore, this becomes a public outrage to our faith."

Casavir is speechless for some time, and so many thoughts crowd in his mind that it becomes rather cramped in it.

"People cannot be that mean in their assumptions." He finally manages. "And it is not the truth. I cannot let this girl rot in the asylum for the fear of what they might be deluded about. They will be wrong, so it does not matter."

Catherine hits the ground with her fist and cracks the crust on her knuckles raw.

"I admire the clarity that must reign in your beautiful, structured mind, Casavir. It has been years, and yet you are the same sixteen-year-old boy who made everyone uncomfortable waving that letter in defence of Fenthick in front of their faces and thought he could save a betrayer by a paladin's oath."

"He. Was. Innocent." Casavir grits through his teeth; he tries to rein in his anger, but it boils and bubbles fresh as yesterday.

"He was dead. He was dead when he rushed after that Helmite into the portal. He was dead in his prison and dead at the trial. No one could save him and if his brothers and sisters vouched for him, it would damage the faith, for it would look like we demanded justice for everyone and covered up for one of our own. You, you did not care what it would look like; that mule's brain of yours sees injustice and fails to calculate the cost of your interference. I think I cracked you after all these years: you just do not recognize any authority from us mortals. Power is nothing to you; hierarchy and subordination are empty sounds to your ears; I doubt now that you even recognize the authority of the gods over you. Your healing seems all right, so it looks like Tyr puts up with your arrogance for now. Well, good for you, but I am different. I care what 'they' say."

Catherine exhausts herself and breaks off. Casavir looks at her and for the first time sees no experienced mentor, no paladin with enough strength to force a bull down, but a mortally tired person, a pale woman who has recently given birth, a proud warrior who had lost and was kept in captivity for several months without any hope to escape. He swallows her biting words and reaches for her hand.

"You might be right," he says gently. "And I will do nothing without your permission if it is going to hurt you. She deserves a good life, and you deserve it too. We will think more about it on the way."

Catherine looks at him as if he has grown wings, but nods.


The child saves them both from these hard choices. She dies quietly two days before they reach Thundertree.