I was shivering by midnight when we crested a ridge that was covered in snow. The upper reaches of the Fountainhead Mountains were shrouded in it all year long, the melt slow enough in summer that the heavy winters’ snowfalls were enough to last the whole year. I was used to cold weather as a woman of the mountains, but no one was mad enough to live past the snow line, so I hadn’t been braced for the frightening chill that engulfed us as we steadily climbed.

  Grace stood tall on the ridge, pulling a device that looked sort of like two short spyglasses paired together and holding it up to her eyes. “What’s that?” I hissed, mindful of how my voice carried in these barren mountain heights.

  “Binoculars,” said Grace, much less mindful. “They let me see things farther away.” She pulled the “binoculars” down, a grin crossing her face. “Hey, I think we made it! Take a look!”

  She held the device out to me, and I took it with a dubious glance. But when I held it up to my eyes, it worked just like how she said it would. The far mountainside was brought near, and I could make out the obvious contours of what must have been the temple grounds she had spoken of. Several buildings, most boasting fortified parapets and tall steeples adorned with the holy crux of the Luminary Church, clung to what flat ledges existed. Long white banners hung from their austere brown stone walls, flapping gently in every little breeze that came through. Squeezed into nooks between mountain and dwelling were a number of gardens; most were rather small but one near the highest structure was expansive, filling the entire rest of the cliffside ledge that the temple clung to. Streams of water ran through these gardens, stemming from a falls tumbling down from the highest yard, and ultimately collecting back into a single flow that cascaded into the valley below.

  There was no sign of movement on the outside of the temple. There was only cold, crumbling stone and a handful of birds perched on the upper battlements. Yet the low shrubs and bushes that filled the gardens weren’t covered in snow.

  “I don’t like the look of it,” I muttered, passing the binoculars back to Grace.

  She frowned. “Why not?”

  I pointed towards the suspicious gardens. “See, where they’ve planted those flowers?” I said. “There’s no snow. We’re above the snow line up here, so either something is magically keeping the gardens warm, or someone’s been by to clear them out since this past winter. Which is a lot more recent than the war you’re saying this place was ‘abandoned’ after.”

  Grace looked again, squinting at where I’d pointed. “Eh,” she shrugged. “I bet it’s magic. The Church uses a lot of blood, they’re bound to have some little bits of magic in their big temples that they’ve just forgotten about, I’m sure.”

  I sighed. It felt like she was grasping for something that might prove her right, but one of the few things I was sure of about magic was its five pillars: apotropaism, communion, malediction, restoration, and pyromancy. Pyromantic magic could definitely keep a garden warm for years—so long as the ritual had fuel to keep burning. It was a stretch, but technically within the realm of possibility, and I had to admit, Grace’s optimism was starting to catch. The monastery was a lot bigger than I was expecting, and in better shape, too. There could genuinely be priceless valuables down there, if we could only collect them.

  “Listen,” said Grace, holding up a conciliatory hand. “If it turns out there are still monks up there, I’m sure that they’ll just turn us away. I doubt it’s a bandit camp or monster den or anything like that; it’d be pretty weird for bandits or monsters to claim the place just to shovel the gardens, right?”

  “I guess,” I said. There was still an air of doubt in my words, and in my mind. Something didn’t sit right about this whole place, but apart from those damned gardens, I couldn’t find any evidence for the feeling, so I locked it up for now. Whatever happened, we’d deal with it as it came.

  “Good,” said Grace. “Let’s go, then.”

  We kept walking, down the ridge and across a narrow passage that led down into the valley before passing over a large stone bridge that ran right up to the gate of the monastery. I elected to go first, carefully picking my way past holes in the decaying floor and short walls of the bridge and tapping at anywhere that seemed unstable before taking each step. A few pebbles broke loose and clattered noisily away until they fell into the snow-filled valley maybe forty feet below us, but nothing large enough to deem the bridge impassable.

  The gate itself was a large, wooden affair, set into a hard stone arch that connected to the low walls that bordered the monastery ground wherever they weren’t hemmed in by the mountain itself. The gate was still small enough for ordinary handles, though they were chained together and sealed with a large iron padlock.

  “Damn,” Grace said as we drew up to the gate. “Locked.”

  “That’s why you brought me, right?” I asked, already bending down to give the lock a closer look. It was old and rusted, but it should still be passable. Best case it was intact enough to pick, worst some mechanism inside had disintegrated from rust, but we might still be able to brute force it off the chain.

  Luckily my skills were still with me, and it turned out that the best case was reality. A few quiet clicks later, and there was a louder, satisfying clank as the mechanism slotted into place, and the lock came undone. I hauled the chain off the handles, and set all the metal slowly and gently down on the bridge before heaving one door open, having to push hard against the weight of built up snow on the other side. Once it was open, I turned back and ushered Grace forward with a slightly smug bow.

  “Good work,” she said without any more acknowledgement before heading into the temple. I shrugged, hefted my pack, and followed.

  The verticality of the grounds was even more obvious from inside them. The buildings around us up on the cliffs seemed to stretch into the sky, even though they were no more than three storeys high. The lack of sound was also more obvious, and more ominous. There was only the hiss of blown grit impacting the stone, the cry of the wind driving it, and occasionally the crunch of a small animal in the snow.

  We walked right up to the door of the first building that crossed our path: a squat two-storey hall situated horizontally across the path forward, with a low, wide portico in front and battlements on its roof. Grace lightly stepped up, pressing her ear against a thin-looking wooden door and closing her eyes. After a moment, she pulled back, shaking her head.

  “Quiet as a graveyard,” she said. “See, I told you this place was abandoned. Nothing to worry about.” She pushed the door open, and led the way into a dark, dark room. I could guess that it was a prayer hall of some sort; it stretched from end to end of the entire building, and the ceiling was as high as the roof, with the first floor consisting exclusively of a balcony that ran around the perimeter of the room, accessible via stairs on the far wall. Windows placed sparsely around the first floor let some moonlight filter in, but only enough to make out the general shape. There was a musty odour in the air, not unlike other old, untended buildings that I’d visited before.

  Grace retrieved a lantern from her own much smaller satchel and quietly cursed for a moment as she fumbled the ignition, before she finally got the wick to light and shed some light on our surroundings.

  I almost wished the room had stayed dark. I was right about it being a prayer hall. A rectangular stone church altar stood at one end of the chamber, covered in a tattered red cloth and bearing a crux, the upside-down Y-shaped cross that was the symbol of the Church, in the midst of a number of half-melted candles. Incense holders sat on small tables at intervals underneath the balcony, with long benches in between them, while much of the floor only had a long red rug as furniture.

  But it had more than just furniture. All around the room were what were evidently corpses. Decayed arms and legs protruded from lumps covered in threadbare brown blankets. Most laid beside one another, crammed against the walls, but some were stacked atop each other, as many as three bodies piled up, each sagging from the weight of the one above. Whatever purpose this hall had served before, it was now a charnel house.

  “Good saints…” Grace muttered, covering her mouth in shock. “What in Gideon’s name happened here?”

  “I’m guessing this was the real reason they abandoned the place,” I said. “Disease, maybe?”

  I stepped forward towards one of the bodies. That musty scent didn’t seem to be coming from the corpses, at least, so I surmised they must have been prepared and cleaned somehow. I slowly lifted the shroud off one to get a closer look. I was no trained apothecary, coroner, or undertaker, so all I was expecting was a desiccated corpse five years old at least, maybe infested with insects or fungus that we’d need to steer clear of to avoid infection.

  Instead, I saw a person with scales. Or rather, their skin had scaled and turned grey in patches around their head, arms, and back. Their eyes were fully open, maybe without any eyelids at all, and their irises were larger than seemed natural, almost filling the entire socket, and the pupil inside had seemingly grown and deflated into an amoebic grey mass inside the eye. Their lips were pulled back, revealing sharp, needle-like teeth, and now that I was close, I could see that their fingers and toes had grown curled, sharp claws.

  I reeled back from the body. I had borne witness to disease before, but whatever had happened to that person was the work of no disease I had ever known, and the wrongness made me retch for a moment. Grace held back a gag herself as she leaned towards it to look.

  “What the hell is that?” I hissed.

  “I don’t know,” said Grace. “It’s not a disease, I think.”

  “You don’t say!” I spat. Less gracefully, I pulled the shroud from another body, only to reveal the same symptoms. This one had a slightly different pattern of scaling, but the broad strokes were the same; grey, scaly skin, sharp teeth, messed up eyes, and claws.

  “Do you think it’s a curse?” whispered Grace.

  I replaced the shroud, stepping several paces away from the nearest corpse. “Could be,” I said. “Whatever it is, I don’t think we’re the ones who are really qualified to find out.”

  Grace shook her head in agreement, slowly pulling the blanket back over the face of the first corpse. I took the opportunity to sidle up to the altar and snatch the chalice into my pack. Like most Church communion chalices, it was made of silver, and this one had a few tiny grains of gemstones embedded at the base of the bowl, so it should be worth quite a bit.

  “There isn’t anything in here but the dead,” I said to Grace. “We should get out of here, quickly. Cursed or not, we don’t want to breathe in the miasma of corpses for too long. Unless, you know, you want to get viciously ill.”

  “No,” said Grace. She affixed the lantern to her belt, and headed for the stairs up to the balcony. “Definitely not in the mood for that….”

  I followed behind her as she pushed open the exit door, and we came into the lower garden. Flowering bushes were spread out around pathways made of beaten-down grass. Most bore red blossoms, a signature colour of the Church alongside white and black, and several lined a small stream that flowed through the middle of the space, spanned by a tiny, arched wooden bridge at the centre. A cluster of little stone statues stood at its side, the tallest a mere three feet in height. I recognised the first as Saint Gideon, founder of the Church, holding his hand up in a symbol of wisdom as sacred blood seemed to flow from his arm. The others I didn’t know, but could guess that they were other saints or Church hierophants, all in a procession before Gideon and bearing chalices in their hands. Only one statue seemed out of place: a bipedal, beastly creature with wild fur and wicked claws, kneeling at the end of the line and looking away as though at watch.

  Surrounding the plaza were three buildings, all of similar make to the one we just left, though these had merely one storey. Two laid to the left of the yard, up against the cliffside, and the third was to the right, beside the wall, and distinguished by its squarish frame, sloping roof rather than fortified battlements, and small clock tower that rose from the front.

  “Looks like there’s stairs back there past the bridge, set into the cliff,” I said, peering out at the open space. “Where should we go? Check these buildings here, or just onwards to the main temple?”

  Grace rested her thumb on her chin, thinking for a few seconds before pointing towards the structure on the right. “That one seems like it might be significant,” she said in a hushed tone, finally making an effort to keep her voice down. “Let’s start with that.”

  I nodded, taking up the lead and creeping through the taller brush towards the chosen building. The alarm bells in my head that I had silenced started to sound again as we made our way through the snow-free garden and felt air filled with the same chill as everywhere else. The theory that some long-term occultic ritual was keeping the gardens warm was losing credibility, and with that loss the desire to cut and run kept growing. But at that point, I was all-in. Or at least, Grace was, and I wasn’t going to leave her here alone.

  This door was also left unlocked, and we hurried inside, shutting it behind us. Again, much of this building seemed to have been dedicated to a single room, a long and tall hallway filling at least half the space inside. But this time, it didn’t look like there was any clerical function. Eight symmetrical, canopied beds each surrounded in a pale blue-white cloth veil were spread out in the open space. Every one had by its side an end table covered with small jars, bottles, and metal syringes filled with some powder or liquid I couldn’t identify on sight, alongside scalpels, forceps, needles, towels, and a litany of other medical instruments also piled onto larger tables in between. Opposite each end table was a glass jar hanging from a metal rack, connected to a long, thin, silver-thread tube that led underneath the curtains to each bed. The room smelled overwhelmingly of alcohol and iron, with an undercurrent of a sickeningly sweet, yet simultaneously acrid odour that I couldn’t place.

  Grace opened her mouth for what I guessed was another expletive, but I quickly held a finger up to my mouth, trying to get her to stay silent. She followed the gesture and leaned against the door frame, looking nervously around. I sneaked towards the nearest bed, taking slow and careful steps around to look at those hanging jars. They were full of a deep red liquid that faintly rippled with every minor tremor, like water.

  “Quickblood,” I whispered to myself. Blood refined by alchemists to be a purer source of magic than the “quiet” blood that was freshly drawn from the human body. I’d only heard about its occultic uses after the Council of Lords broke all the old empire’s regulations on bloodcraft, but I’d seen vials of “blood tonic” made of the stuff mixed with water and some kind of tincture in apothecaries’ shops since I was a child still interested in medicine. I’d always been a bit sceptical about the claims of it being a miracle medicine, but evidently it had at least some real use.

  All that led to one obvious question. Gently, carefully, I pulled back the curtain to peek at whatever the solution was connected to. A person laid on the bed, dressed in the white gown of a surgical patient. Their hair was wild, all rigid and rough, like a mass of steel wool on top of their head. They had patches of scaly skin like the corpses in the prayer hall, but they weren’t nearly as widespread. Their eyes were closed and they were clearly sleeping, though they were disturbed by frequent twitching, and their jaw was clenched shut and their lips slightly pulled back to reveal pointed teeth, though they were more similar to the teeth of dogs or wolves than the frightening needles that filled the mouths of the other afflicted.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  I slowly let the curtain fall back in place, and stepped back towards Grace by the door. “They’re like the people in the prayer hall,” I said. “Still alive, though. Someone is giving them quickblood.” I glanced over my shoulder, suddenly paranoid that one of those people was going to wake up. “Said someone must still be at the monastery. We have to get out of here.”

  “Hold on, back up,” said Grace. “They’re alive? Are they asleep?”

  “Yes,” I hissed, lightly tugging on her arm to try and usher her towards the door. “But it’s not them I’m worried about. It’s whoever’s been doing medicine, or surgery, or whatever on them. Grace, this place is not abandoned. You said we’d leave.”

  Grace yanked her arm out of my grip, her eyes turning steely. “If it was bandits, then yes. If there were monsters here, maybe. But this..? This is not normal, and I don’t like not knowing what kinds of danger I’m dealing with.” She took a noisy step into the hall. “I’m going to get to the bottom of this.”

  I instinctively flinched back into the entranceway at the noise. “Grace, you can’t, you could die!” I whispered. “We should leave while we have the chance! If it really worries you so much, get some of your mercenary buddies to come with you tomorrow, but we shouldn’t be here alone!”

  “Risk or not, whoever owns this place is up to something bad, Belfry,” said Grace. “I’ll leave once I figure out what it is. Leaving and coming back wouldn’t be any safer if we don’t know what we’re dealing with!” She glanced over towards the beds. “And I’m not abandoning anyone who’s been harmed.”

  I stepped up and harshly grabbed hold of her shoulder. “Who gives a damn about them? You’re no good to anyone dead, Grace, so you shouldn’t—”

  “Belfry, no!” shouted Grace, turning sharply enough to force me to lose my grip and fall to the ground.

  The echo of that last word reverberated through the hall, like thunder before a storm. Grace stared at me hard, her gaze never leaving mine. But I stole a look behind her. There, silhouetted by the lantern light against the curtains, one of the patients sat up in bed. I sewed my mouth shut and repeatedly jabbed a finger in that direction, and Grace followed where I pointed.

  The figure in bed sat there, stock still and dead silent for a moment. I held my breath. Then, quick as a flash of lightning, they burst into motion, flailing their arms and legs around, tearing at the curtains like a rabid dog, and screeching so loud both of us had to cover our ears. There was a loud clang as their relentless thrashing knocked over the metal stand next to the bed, and the jar shattered with a crash against the ground, spraying broken glass and quickblood across the floor.

  Grace and I were both already making for the exit when the deep bong of a large bell within the hall’s clock tower began to chime. Again and again, that bell rang out mercilessly as we sprinted to the opposite end of the garden and dove into a patch of bushes beside the cliff, completely forsaking the subtlety of slow sneaking. Even out here we could still hear the patient’s maddened shrieks, but other voices, shouting distantly, began to sound over the grounds.

  I slung my bag to the ground and rifled through my things, using the bell and screams as cover for the sound of shifting equipment. Eventually, I found what I was looking for; a long rope, and a metal grapnel. I looped the rope through the hook, hoping that a quick and desperate knot would hold, and hurled it up the cliff, having to rely on hope that there was a wall or tree or something for it to hook onto up on the next level of the monastery grounds. Miraculously, it caught, and I let out a long and heavy sigh of relief before holding a palm up towards Grace, signalling her to wait.

  She nodded, and we crouched low in the bush, watching the entrance to the hall. Three people came down the stairs at the end of the garden. All were dressed in the white-and-red vestments of most Church clergy, with the easily-distinguishable maroon, elbow-length capes falling over the shoulders on top of their white cassocks, and a silver pendant of the holy crux hanging around their necks. One stood separately at the back, walking with a metal cane and wearing a white, broad-brimmed hat. The other two were much taller, and instead wore a white cloth cowl that framed their gaunt faces and a much narrower-brimmed pale grey hat, around the crown of which was strung a cord with a silver bell at one end that dangled out over the hat’s brim and in front of their faces, jingling softly as they walked. Their eyes were covered with two thin strips of cloth, each folded diagonally around their heads, and their mouths hung in limp frowns pressed onto their strangely pallid, corpse-like faces, which were stretched vertically just a bit too much to seem natural. One of them walked with a long wooden cane and held a black ceramic oil lamp dangling from a chain, the other wielded a rifle as they made their way towards the hall.

  “Church,” whispered Grace, barely audible over all the sudden noise that had overtaken the monastery. “They must be with the Church.”

  I nodded, content to reserve my questions about the strange, bell-ringing tall men for later when we were a little safer. The three clergymen stopped in front of the door to the hall, and the one in the hat pointed towards the door with his cane.

  “Restrain the escaped patients,” he ordered. The tall men immediately obeyed, entering the hall gingerly with the commander close behind. The shrieks crescendoed as soon as they were inside.

  “Now,” I murmured, and beckoned Grace to follow me as I hoisted myself up onto the rope. I climbed quickly, in case whatever the hook had latched onto was loose or otherwise unstable, but it held fast, even with Grace clambering up behind me. I left the bag in the bush. The hit to stealth and manoeuvrability it required to carry wasn’t worth anything inside.

  We reached the top of the ledge, and arrived in another garden. This time, we were in the courtyard of the highest complex in the monastery. A large main hall hung with five banners all emblazoned with the Church’s symbols of the crux, a chalice, and a droplet of blood stood at the centre. Connecting chambers attached it to a series of long buildings wedged next to each other next to the mountainside, and to a tall tower that looked out over the ledge, towards the spectacular view of the mountains sprawled out beneath us. All of them had the same sloped roofs as the patient hall below except for the tower, and they were arranged in a horseshoe shape around the courtyard we were in.

  I didn’t bother counting how many different flowers I saw, but it was a lot. All of them were clustered into small plots amid myriad trodden paths that led to the porticoes attached to the buildings enclosing the yard, as well as to our right, where the stairs led down to the level below. A handful of white cloth mats were spread around the gardens. At the centre was a pool, from which flowed a stream that tumbled down the cliffside to the right. The pool held another statue, this one of Saint Gideon on the crux, nailed upside down to a stake with his arms splayed out in the characteristic upside-down “Y” shape. Crystalline water flowed from small holes in the statue’s arms, dripping down from the saint’s hands to fill the pool. I wondered where the water came from. Its pure and clear aspect reminded me of the snowmelt that sometimes formed fleeting streams in the Fountainheads’ spring months.

  “Stay quiet,” I said, “but I think we lost them.”

  “I bet there’s more,” said Grace. “I doubt the Church would have just one minister holding down the fort all the way out here.”

  “Probably not,” I agreed. I took a good long look in every direction, listening intently for any movement. I could hear some in the smaller buildings off to the right, but nothing from the hall in front of us. Below, the shrieking finally silenced, as did the ringing of the bell.

  “We need to move,” I whispered. I pointed at the long buildings by the cliff face. “I think those are living cells, so…not there. If you’re absolutely set on figuring out what the problem with this place is, we can take a quick look around the main hall, and then we’re out. We can climb down the mountainside if we have to, but we can’t stay. Okay?”

  Grace rolled her shoulders and nodded. “Okay. Let’s take a look.”

  I deflated a little at the continued insistence after what we just witnessed, but now wasn’t the time to fight over it. Based on its size, the hall—I hazarded a guess that it was the monastery’s church—was probably pretty empty. We hurried across the yard up to the portico, wary of the clomping of Grace’s heavy boots on the wooden boards.

  Once we made it to the door, I checked if it was locked, and seeing that it wasn’t, I cracked it open, just enough to peer through. The hall was indeed a church, with finely carved pillars and reliefs of saints and Church founders all along the walls, interspersed with four chapels whose small altars I couldn’t see. The altar at the sanctuary was elevated, and held a communion chalice like the one in the prayer hall. Behind it stood a wide board, on which seemed to be painted an altarpiece, but it was covered with a cloth. Moonlight streamed in from pale-tinted windows high up in the apse.

  Grace suddenly took me by the shoulder, shaking my attention away from the church and back outside. That was when I noticed the quiet approaching thuds and tinny jingling, as I saw another one of those tall men walking along the portico outside the living cells, his face turned firmly to the side and fixed on us. This one had only a cane in its hand, the source of the thuds as it trod heavily forward.

  I immediately heeded her warning and ducked into the church with Grace close behind. I shut the door quietly, in the vain hopes we would go unnoticed by the tall man. Grace drew her spear, backing several paces away from the door before facing it, standing ready. I got my axe out, but took the opportunity to duck into one of the chapels in the aisles, out of immediate view of the door.

  “What are those things?” I hissed.

  “Church deacons,” said Grace. “I saw them in Kirkwall, and a few other places with bigger churches. I think they might be constructs, but they’re definitely not human. Normally they just do labour for the Church and menial tasks for ceremonies, but that other one was holding a firearm, so get ready for a fight.”

  I glanced around, evaluating the exit options. Both connecting chambers had doors leading to them in the aisles, but the living cells definitely were not safe, and we had no idea if anyone was in that watchtower, either. The thuds grew louder, and I rushed towards the altar to hide behind it instead, fumbling my weapons for a moment as I switched my axe for my pistol. In the choir behind the altar, however, I spotted another exit: a trapdoor set into the floor, painted to resemble the white tiling of the church’s stony floors, but still plainly visible from its handle. I allowed my attention to leave the approaching deacon and stepped back to pull the door up, straining for a second with its weight, and looked underneath. A ladder descended into darkness below. How far, I couldn’t see from the way the moonlight hit the passage.

  “Grace!” I called. “Back here! There’s another way out!”

  Grace glanced between me and the door. The jingling of the deacon’s bell was close enough to hear through the door. We didn’t have much time. Grace gave another, almost disappointed scowl towards me before dropping her stance and running over. She really wanted to get into a fight, but we did not have the time to waste right then, even if we could destroy the deacon without getting badly hurt.

  As soon as she started running, I heard the door burst open. I spent no more time delaying for her, and jumped into the passageway, sliding down the ladder as fast as I could and accepting the splinters that got caught in my hands from doing so. I slid maybe twenty feet before finally reaching the ground, where I stepped away to allow Grace to come down after, moving into the chamber we had now come to.

  It was a long and straight hall, the rounded ceiling only about seven feet over the floor. The walls were completely lined with shelves, and those shelves were full of wound scrolls. Everywhere, scrolls of ancient, ancient parchment were filed neatly next to each other, as far as I could see before the light of Grace’s lantern faded away. Despite the neatness, the wooden floorboards had signs of mildew and rot near the corners, and the entire room had a faintly damp atmosphere.

  The thuds abruptly ended overhead, and Grace leaned back to look up the ladder. “It’s coming,” she hissed. “Go!”

  “You first!” I insisted, sidling to the side so she could get by. “You have the light!”

  “Saints damn it all, just go!” said Grace.

  “Me going first won’t keep me safe from anything if I fall over a cliff I can’t see in the dark!” I said, frantically gesturing down the hall. “Don’t get all self-sacrificing on me now, it’s not the time!”

  Grace growled in frustration, looking up the ladder again uncertainly, before barging ahead and running down the hall. I went after her, only looking back over my shoulder once. The deacon had made it down into the hall and was now pursuing us at a steady, if slower than running, pace. His broad shoulders brushed the shelves at each side, and his head nearly touched the ceiling. As we sped farther away from him, he reached out to point one finger at us, moving his mouth as though uttering a condemnation, though no sound came out.

  Ahead of me, Grace came to a sudden halt, so fast that I almost collided with her. “What is it this time!?” I shouted, and leaned around her shoulder to get a look at what laid ahead.

  What laid ahead was a wall. The hallway merely ended, with solid cavern stone at that end. No door, no escape tunnel. No mercy from fate.

  Grace turned around, the spear back in her hands. “Alright, out of the way!” she cried.

  I would have, but the deacon had gained on us while I wasn’t looking, and was right on top of me when I turned back around. He raised his cane and swung it downwards towards my head. I went to the ground and held up my axe, catching the cane between the head and the haft. The force of the blow sent a shockwave like hot lightning through my arms. The sharp crack of wood on wood echoed through the tunnel. I reeled, scooting backwards to try and recover. Above me, Grace thrust the spear forward, punching the head into the deacon’s chest. There was an audible rush of breath out of his mouth, and the creature stumbled back as silvery-grey blood poured from the wound.

  I pulled myself to my feet, holding my axe up, ready to fight—only to see that the head was missing. I glanced down. The deacon’s strike had fully snapped the weapon in half, and the iron head now laid at my feet.

  “Saints’ blood!” I cursed.

  “Move!” Grace shouted again, this time more desperately.

  “I’d love to, but I’m busy!” I retorted. At least my pistol was alright, and I held it out to get a clean shot at the deacon’s chest. The bang from the gunpowder going off was nearly deafening in this tight space, but two bullets ripping through the deacon’s cassock felt worth it. Blood spurted from a second wound, and the deacon reeled.

  Any normal person would have gone down for sure after that and Grace’s spear strike, from pain if nothing else. But the deacon stopped just a moment to glance at his wounds, before implacably marching forward again. Fear finally broke free from its quarantine in my mind, and my fingers shook as I desperately tried to reload.

  The cane came up again, this time with the pointed tip facing us. I ducked on instinct, dropping the bullets in my hands, but the deacon wasn’t aiming at me. I looked up just in time to see the cane slide around the haft of Grace’s spear as she held it up in defence and slam into her forehead.

  “Agh–!” she gasped, her head wrenching back and smacking a second time on the stone wall. Blood dribbled down her face, and she held a hand to her head in pain.

  Again, the cane raised to the ceiling, firmly pointed downward at me once again. I felt the walls around me close in. I had nowhere to dodge, and no weapon to fight back with. He was going to easily impale me, and Grace would have to watch. I never should have agreed to this. I cowered, hands behind my head, and braced for impact.

  “No!” screamed Grace. There was a hard clack, and I looked up just in time to see a glimpse of the blade of Grace’s spear slam hard into the top of the deacon’s cane. I thought she was trying to disarm him, but while the tip of the staff splintered and cracked, the deacon’s grip held firm, and carried the motion into the ground, right through my leg.

  Fiery pain erupted from where I had been struck, and warm blood flowed out onto the wooden floors. I couldn’t keep a scream from tearing its way out of my throat. Time seemed to slow as I pried my eyes open, my vision contorting with the pain.

  As the deacon struggled to reclaim its weapon, I heard another noise, more worrying than my screams or Grace’s desperate battle cries. Pops and snaps, coming from beneath me. I glanced down. Through the unfocussed haze of shock, I saw cracks expand across the floor, spreading out from where the cane had torn through the rotted floorboards.

  I reached out to grab hold of a shelf only just in time. With a tremendous crash, the floorboards fell away into an abyssal chasm below this secret chamber. The deacon lost his grip on his cane as the ground beneath him gave way, and he plummeted soundlessly into the dark.

  Grace hugged the dead end wall, and miraculously the floor beneath her held. I, on the other hand, was left dangling over the void, only the weak, pain-addled grip of my sweaty hand on the shelf beside me keeping me from falling. My legs could find no purchase on a stone, the floor, a cavern wall, or anything at all.

  Grace fell to her knees, reaching out towards me as far as she could. “Grab my hand!” she shouted.

  I was too low. I had to pull myself up to reach her with my one free hand. I flailed and struggled to rise. Every inch I lost on the shelf was another inch closer to a painful demise. I heaved as hard as I could to pull myself up to reach her, the throbbing pain in my leg flaring with every time my muscles moved. I threw my free hand up like it was a leaden lump, once, twice. First I was still too low, and then my fingers just brushed past Grace’s, unable to find a grip.

  Just my fingertips remained on the shelf. My breathing was hard and laboured. Every part of my body was ready to give up. But I had to try, I had to try and stay alive. I looked around me, trying to see if there was any way I could think my way out of this, but for once, I felt completely cornered. All that was left was to give everything I had for one last try.

  I yanked myself up, allowing my fingers to slip from the shelf as I threw myself towards Grace, hand outstretched. Our fingers just barely met, and we clasped our hands together. Hope blossomed for only a moment. Gravity reasserted itself, and as I began to fall again, my hand was wrenched out of Grace’s.

  “Belfry!” Grace screamed, her voice raw and grave.

  I sank through the air and into the pit. The light of Grace’s lantern drifted farther and farther away. I didn’t even have the energy to cry out in defeat.

  I hit the ground, and everything went black.