chapter one: merest mask of gloom

Just a week from home, the woods began to wither and die. Mighty forest trees, some hundreds of years old, gave way to vile things with twisted, ashen trunks and leafless branches that clutched at Bulma's hair like the curious appendages of bats or crows. She had always associated the woods with solitude, but in this lifeless landscape devoid of songbirds or small woodland mammals she realised what she had enjoyed was in fact quiet companionship.

They saw their first one in the evening, as they set up camp, a pathetic husk of a man clawing over the wet leaves with fingers already worn to dust. It looked at them and gurgled and Bulma's breath hitched in her throat audibly. Goku — that was the tall one's name — dispatched the monstrosity with a single stroke of his sword and Krillin — that was the little priest — looked at her sympathetically.

"Don't be scared," he said. "We're here to protect you."

"Oh," she replied. "Thank you." She was excited, not scared, but admitting so would make her seem perverse rather than brave. These boys were younger than her, but worldly, and they wouldn't understand how a sheltered academic might feel anything but terror at sighting her first undead.

He knelt over the corpse. "Skeletons," he announced after a brief inspection.

Bulma scoffed. "That is clearly not a skeleton. It has flesh."

"For now." He lifted the creature's wrist so Bulma could see the bones protruding from the tips of papery fingers. "But we're in for true skeletons as we get closer. They rot fast."

"Aw man." Goku kicked a stone on the ground. "I hate skeletons. Do you have any idea what it's like to try and cut something without muscle or skin?"

The two warriors could not have looked more different next to one another. Krillin, half Goku's size, wore shining metal armour decorated with religious pennants and although his gear was clearly more expensive, Bulma found more comfort in Goku's battered leather armour, moulded to his body as only time and use could do. But she noted Krillin's mace was well-worn and there was nothing so uniquely useful as a priest when faced with the prospect of the undead. She was paying him more than Goku, accordingly, although she hadn't told Goku that.

"Should we still camp here?" She asked, resting a hand on a blackened tree trunk. "Will there be more?"

"Skeletons don't necessarily travel in groups," Krillin replied. "And we can expect any others to be in a similar half-formed state. Goku and I will each watch half the night and there won't be any problems."

"I still think I should take a watch," Bulma replied, but she put her staff down against her bedroll and unbuckled the leather harness in which she carried her spellbook. They'd had this argument each night and she didn't expect to start winning now.

"This is what you hired us for," Goku replied cheerfully. "You rest so you can enjoy your adventure."

Bulma had tried to word her advertisement clearly so that any sellswords would understand well that she was an academic on a mission of research, and an experienced wizard who could hold her own in the field. As soon as these two had laid eyes on her, though, it was apparent they thought she was a young thrillseeker looking for a ride through the outskirts of dangerous territory before returning to the safety of her tower and her books. At nearly eighteen, she probably was unusually sheltered for her age, but regardless of how far she may or may not have ventured from her home in the past, she was a talented magician and had a lot to offer. And they were wrong if they thought they could get away with showing her a few measly skeletons then turning back.

"I don't want you boys too tired out before we even find this necromancer." They smiled at each other indulgently. She considered throwing some of their firewood at them, but either could catch it easily so she just made the fire and settled in for the night.

Bulma got her first chance to show off just a few days later. They had seen more skeletons since, of increasing sophistication and decomposition as the woods grew blacker and more twisted. But skeletons, she had learnt now, were fairly solitary creatures unless kept confined such as in a crypt. They had only seen one or two at a time and they had fallen to sword and mace before Bulma had even gotten her bearings.

By now there were no leaves remaining even on the ground, which was a damp dark earth which sucked greedily at the three travellers' boots, although there had been no rain for a week. The sky here was fairly dark all day, neither with storm clouds nor the blanket of night but a night time purple fog that hung denser and denser ahead of them. There was light enough to see without a torch, still, but it was weak and heavily filtered as though passing through a purple curtain into a darkened room. They were getting close, and when they found themselves passing through another tiny, empty village, Bulma was surprised to see movement in a doorway.

"Someone's alive," she said, for the movement was not similar to the way the skeletons lurched and shambled. The two boys stopped staring at the sky and were instantly ready in fighting stances, stepping in front of her with their weapons in hand. Goku held out his left hand, palm facing her.

"Don't come closer."

"We don't know who it might be," Krillin added.

They moved forward at a steady pace, cautious but unafraid. Bulma ignored them and followed. When the figure leapt from the doorway it took her a moment to realise it wasn't a real person any more, but the boys had no such hesitation. As soon as it was within reach Krillin cracked the grey figure around the knees and as it stumbled sidewards Goku slashed across its belly with his shortsword. The thing tumbled to the ground bonelessly.

"That's not a skeleton," she said.

Goku turned to her. "Bulma, you should have waited. It could have been dangerous. There could have been —"

"More!" Krillin shouted.

The village, more of a hamlet, only boasted five low buildings, but from each one and from the woods surrounding tumbled far too many pale-skinned and red-mouthed creatures, all descending wordlessly upon the three young travellers.

"Get back, Bulma!" Goku shoved her backwards with his body then leapt into the fray, swinging his sword quickly but cleanly.

She stumbled back and nearly fell, cursing Goku under her breath. Ahead of her to the left, Krillin fumbled through a key fob of religious symbols, snatching the one he wanted by feel and holding it up so that six of the things exploded in a flash of light that hurt Bulma's eyes.

But there were too many of them. More came upon Krillin from either side and he couldn't concentrate to communicate with his deities, reduced to swinging his mace and ducking the gnashing teeth and clawing nails. Goku was felling creatures speedily but, like Krillin, he was overwhelmed.

Bulma could help. She wasn't the silly little bookworm they'd assumed. She took her staff in both hands and planted it in front of her. She'd never done this when it counted, but she'd practiced plenty of times in the courtyard of her master's tower and it had always worked.

She uttered low a few words of an ancient language known only to wizards, and from the wet earth sprung up a ring of fire, encircling herself, Goku and Krillin with just a fraction of the undead forces upon them. The creatures kept coming, roasting themselves as they attempted to cross the fiery line. Two of those trapped within the perimeter detached from the boys and came towards her with surprising speed. She could see the pure black orbs which passed for eyes roll wildly, then lock onto her and a thrill of fear shot through her but Bulma steadied her breath, tilted her staff forward and uttered a single word, eyes widening in almost-surprise as the creatures combusted and fell to their knees as they burnt down to their bones.

From there it was quick work for Krillin and Goku to finish off what remained within the circle of flames.

"Ghouls," Krillin said in a shaky voice.

"Nice work, Bulma!" Goku enthused, and slapped her too hard on the shoulder. "I guess we should have believed you when you said you were a fighting wizard, huh?"

"I guess so." She stuck her nose in the air and transferred her staff to rest loosely in one hand, allowing the flames to peter out.

"You're sure there's just one necromancer here?" Krillin asked. Bulma was slightly annoyed that he wasn't congratulating her, too, but she just shrugged.

"That's what I heard. Holed up in the black keep we caught a glimpse of earlier. They say he's an ancient and powerful lich and has been taking the people from surrounding villagers to perform horrible experiments on them. Looks like it."

"No." He shook his head. "First of all, that's not what you told us and the three of us are not equipped to fight an 'ancient and powerful lich'. Secondly, these look like they fit with that story, maybe, but the skeletons don't at all."

"What do you mean? They're all undead." Bulma had been reading up on the undead but very little of what had been printed on the topic was considered appropriate, or even sane, for a classical wizard to look at. That was the whole reason she was out here. She needed to know more about the world and what lurked within it, and her tower was fast turning from a sanctuary of learning to a prison of tunnel vision.

Krillin sighed. "Look, these are ghouls. They've been turned recently after death, through one of a specific family of dark rituals. They don't rot, although they can starve, so they're more of a creature than a corpse. Skeletons are entirely different. They don't have to be turned immediately after death and they are literally animated corpses, they start out like the flesh creatures we first saw and gradually the flesh disintegrates from their bones and they become true skeletons. Their behaviour is different, their motivations are different and the magic used to create them is as dissimilar as you can get while keeping both within the school of necromancy. Something isn't right here."

"Maybe two necromancers are fighting each other," Goku suggested. "By the time we get to the keep they might even have already killed each other." He looked disappointed by his own suggestion. "Aw. We should probably hurry if we want a good fight."

"We should stay out of it," Krillin said solidly.

Bulma shook her head. "I decided I was going to save these villages from the necromancer and I'm going to do it. Besides, I need to see…"

"What do you need to see?"

She needed to see the necromancer's experiments, his notes and his research. She was not the sort of person who would mess around with necromancy herself, of course. It was wrong, and it hurt people, but she did want to understand it. She couldn't think of a better way to satisfy her curiosity and atone for it all in one step than by defeating a necromancer and having a bit of a snoop around his laboratories. When she returned to her tower triumphant nobody could lecture her about forbidden knowledge if she'd acquired it doing such a good deed.

"I need to see an end to necromancy in this world," she finished loftily. "I would have thought a priest would understand."

Krillin muttered something she couldn't catch.

"Yeah!" Goku pumped a fist in the air. "Let's get him! I bet if we walk for a couple more hours before we make camp, we can get to that keep tomorrow and then this lich is toast."

It took them two further days to reach the keep, which seemed smaller up close and was partially caved in at the top.

"This doesn't look much like the home of an ancient and powerful lich," Bulma said uncertainly. "But this is where I was told."

"Necromancers are eccentric," Krillin said. "Sometimes these places have an extensive underground network you wouldn't expect. Be on your guard."

"Neat," said Goku.

The doors were barred, but it was a simple wooden barrier which gave when Goku and Krillin together heaved against the doors. The trio stood in the doorway staring into the dark of the keep. The dim, purple light of outside made no attempt to infiltrate the inky black of the entrance. Krillin lit a torch but when he held it out the darkness swallowed it along with his hand. He put it out and stowed it. Bulma said a few words and the blue crystal at the tip of her staff glowed with a blue light that pulsed against the unnatural blackness, casting a cool, dim light across the stone corridor ahead.

"I'll walk up front," Bulma said. She thought she sounded pretty brave for someone about to go straight from interpreting illuminated manuscripts to slaughtering an evil lich without any of the in-between steps a battle wizard was ordinarily required to master. Her fingers trembled slightly around her staff as she stepped into the dark, but a hand on each elbow pulled her back.

"No way," said Krillin and Goku in unison.

"Well I'm not handing over my staff and you can't get anywhere without it."

"Just angle it forward between us so we can see where we're going," suggested Krillin. "Worst case scenario, if anything comes at us down the corridor our light source is safely protected."

She made a show of huffing about it, but secret relief washed over her and she obliged. Krillin and Goku stepped down the narrow hallway ahead of her, each with his back to one side of the corridor, shuffling sidewards with her standing behind them, dipping her staff in the space between them.

"Why are you crab-walking like that?" she whispered after a few steps.

"I'm real bad at spotting traps," Goku said, "especially in the dark. But usually trap triggers are in the middle because that's where people step." He tapped his temple with one finger. "You have to think about these things."

Bulma gaped. "You didn't want to point that out to me? I've just been walking in the middle like an idiot! What would you have done if I-"

There was a clicking noise from the floor and everyone stopped moving. A second later came the sound of stone grinding on stone, and then Krillin was screaming. Bulma dropped the tip of her staff to the floor and lit up a trough in the floor where the stone tiles had dropped away to reveal a shallow pit of spikes, maybe a foot across and stretching across the whole width of the corridor. Krillin wrenched his foot out and crouched to inspect the damage.

"That's not designed to kill," Bulma said.

"Unless it's poisoned," Krillin added bitterly.

Goku dropped to his hands and knees and inclined his face towards the ditch to take a sniff. "It seems okay, Krillin. I've got a good nose for that sort of thing."

"Not sure I trust my life to the sniff test," Krillin replied, but he seemed relieved.

"Do you think this means the rest of the traps are easily avoidable, too? We could have just stepped over this if we'd spotted it. Or…" Bulma rubbed her chin thoughtfully. "Maybe it's a warning. 'Turn back while you can, the next test won't be so simple'."

Krillin groaned but got back to his feet, testing his weight on the injured one.

"Or the mark of the truly paranoid - all the traps have to be easily bypassed without disarming them so they can all be ready and armed all of the time."

They continued on with Bulma theorising about the nature of the traps in a soft voice while Goku searched for more by tapping the walls and floor ahead with his sword before each step. It was slow, agonising progress with no easy way to mark progress, for the doorway had been swallowed by the darkness almost as soon as they'd stepped inside, and the corridor was featureless.

"Where do you think the rooms are?" Goku asked after what seemed like hours of monotony. "I haven't seen any doorways and I swear we've been walking a long time. It's a round keep, it can't just be one long hallway."

Krillin and Bulma looked at each other in the faint light.

"Maybe we just haven't walked as far as we thought," Krillin said. "We're going pretty slow."

"But we went past two more traps," Goku whined. "They can't be that close together. And you've had time to stop limping."

"He's right," Bulma said hollowly. "We've gone straight for far too long without seeing any other rooms or corridors. The keep didn't even look big enough for a straight corridor this long."

They stood in silence for an unmeasurable moment.

Goku tapped at the floor and took another step to the edge of their circle of light. "I guess we just keep going."

"I guess so," Bulma said, and followed him, though she was starting to think they should turn around and leave. If she was right, and the space inside the keep was distorted to be bigger than the outside, that was magic far beyond the ordinary small-time necromancer. She wasn't stupid. She knew that any lich was too much for her to begin with, but she thought with a swordsman to fend off the shambling hordes and a priest to help her battle the undead wizard they would be able to at least escape with their lives and a few souvenirs. It was the souvenirs she was after, and she figured any lich twiddling his thumbs in this provincial location, playing around with village people, was new to undeath and still coming into his powers. They might be able to trick him.

But not a power that could do something like this. She glanced backwards into the black and considered retreating, but if he could distort this corridor by stretching it, why not by twisting also? They were better continuing into the belly of the beast than living out their last days tormented into madness by a looping corridor with no escape.

She just had to hope they weren't already in that situation. Her only consolation was that the traps they were encountering weren't repeating. Yet. She decided not to share her concerns with the group.

"I've got an idea," Krillin said. "Goku, pry out a piece of stone next time you see one that's cracked."

Goku responded by slamming the hilt of his sword into the wall repeatedly until one of the stones began to crumble, then clawing out the loose pieces.

"Or that. Give me a piece."

Goku handed over a stone and Krillin threw it lazily ahead. It clattered in the darkness. Nothing happened.

"If we hear the stone hit something we'll know the corridor is turning about itself without us noticing," Bulma breathed.

Krillin gave her an odd look, distorted in the crystal light. "I'm trying to estimate how far away the stairs are." He threw another piece, harder, and it landed unremarkably. He threw twice more, then Goku took the last piece, wound his arm back dramatically and pelted it as hard as he could. It clattered to the floor in the distance, then fell again and again.

"Stairs," Krillin announced triumphantly. "Not as close as I'd hoped, and they're going down, but at least we won't be in this forsaken corridor any more."

Two traps later, one relying on arrows which had rotted in place to the point of uselessness, they were stood at the top of a staircase leading down into yet more darkness. It felt to Bulma as though they had been traversing this keep for the better part of the day, and she had no way to determine whether it had really been hours or merely minutes. She was only certain it hadn't been days by the fact that she didn't urgently need water or sleep, and even then that could be the magical effect of the place.

"We have to go down," she said in a bold voice that sounded like someone else's.

"Actually," Krillin said. "We could go back, if we wanted to."

"I want to go down," said Goku.

"Two against one," Bulma said, and started down the steps, leaving the boys scrambling to try and get in front of her.

There were traps here, too, but they weren't set, and as they descended the keep the darkness changed. It was no brighter by the time they reached the lower floor, but Bulma's crystal cast a wider light and the dark without it felt natural, the simple absence of light rather than the thick blanket of black they'd suffered in the corridor.

"Try your torch again," Bulma suggested, and lit it with a tap of her staff when Krillin held it aloft. It cast a natural, flickering light across a corridor with, blessedly, a doorway already visible from where they stood. She extinguished her own light, secretly growing tired from maintaining it, and the group set to exploring with a new vigour.

The doorway led to a little storeroom, dark and mostly empty. The food supplies in old crates were mouldy and useless. Everything else had apparently been ransacked by someone else. Bulma supposed liches did not have much use for worldly goods.

All the little rooms on this level of the keep were equally useless. Store rooms, a bedroom containing no personal effects, a little gaol cell with the metal lattice rusted away so that Goku could snap pieces off with his fingers. A further set of stairs beckoned at the end of the short corridor, framed by two stone bookcases holding, to Bulma's surprise, books which were well-thumbed but unruined, unmarred even by dust.

It was a curious little collection. There were a few interesting necromancy texts, which Bulma carefully stored in a canvas bag she had brought for this purpose, but the shelves were also studded with the sort of books she had mastered early in her own studies of magical theory. 'Introductory Ritual Design' did not belong in the same collection as a book of summonings bound in tattooed elf skin. She opened a few to see if the innocuous covers hid great secrets, but they were exactly as advertised. Somebody had made notations in them, in a script she didn't recognise. They were a beginner's notes, she could tell, with simple facts of theoretical magic underlined or circled and notes made on even the simplest rituals.

She was about to ask if either of the boys could identify the language when Krillin held up a finger to his lips in a hushing motion and indicated the stairwell before extinguishing his torch. Bulma frowned. They needed that light. But when she stepped up she saw his reason. The stairwell let down briefly to a wooden door, and below the door a slat of light glowed warmly. So, their lich was home.

Goku moved quickly and quietly in the dark, padding silently down the stairs to take up position at the door. He pressed an ear to it but apparently didn't hear anything unexpected, because Krillin followed, as quietly as he could in his armour, halfway down the stairs. Bulma waited at the top, hidden in the dark. Once the boys were in battle she would slip in and take stock of the study or laboratory as quickly as she could, sizing up anything worth taking before assessing whether the battle was worth fighting or if this would purely be a thieve and flee operation - assuming they could make it back out through that corridor with the lich operational and aware of their presence.

A flaw in her plan. She opened her mouth to tell the boys the books were enough and they should retreat before they got in too deep, but Goku had already shouldered in the door and both he and Krillin were charging forward with a unified shout.