Between the stenciled signs pinned on almost every other wall and Viktoria’s guidance, it wasn’t difficult to find the furnace chamber. The horde of corpses and ghouls choking the corridor and battering against the makeshift barricade at its entrance made the search even easier.

Sadea bathed the dead in a sea of lightning, disintegrating the lot.

“Huh. Nice,” Raksha commented. He glanced at her. “You sure you’re alright? Your nose is bloody again.”

“Just a little brain-bleed. Happens when I start exerting myself.” Sadea threw him a grin. “Appreciate the concern, but it’ll take a lot more than that to get into my lingerie.”

He shrugged. “Just wanted to know if you’re going to die. I’ll cut off your head if you do. Don’t want you walking around and trying to bite people.”

“So sweet of you. And they say chivalry is dead.” Sadea leaned against the corridor. “But the joke’s on you. I already bite people. I even pay some of them to tell me they want me to.”

“Hello? a man’s voice said shakily from behind the barricade. “Are you human? Has help arrived?”

“Yes,” Raksha replied, approaching. “We’re here to help. How many of you are there?”

“Oh, thank God!” the survivor moaned. “There are two of us. My name is Dimas, junior necromancer-clerk.”

Sadea nodded in approval as she took a closer look at the barricade. Though improvised, it had proven to be extremely effective. The survivors had collapsed a heavy open-backed steel shelf across the doorway. The pasteboard door itself was long gone, likely shredded by ghoul claws or grasping corpse fingers.

A pale, bedraggled man clad in work robes was visible through the rows of the shelf. He wore his brown hair cropped close to his skull, and his lean features were haggard with fear and fatigue. An orange lanyard across his neck indicated his rank in the town’s necromantic office. He held an ornate spear in his hands, completing the picture.

The shelf’s length overlapped the doorway’s width, rendering it impossible for the dead to pull it away. Its considerable weight meant that it couldn’t be easily pushed inward, either. With the survivors keeping the dead at bay, likely by stabbing them in the head through the open rows, the shelf had served as an impassable and nigh-unbreakable obstacle, at least for as long the survivors’ strength and resolve held.

“Well done, Dimas,” Sadea said. “This is some good thinking. I’m impressed, really.”

“Uh, thanks?” the necromancer replied, before blinking, as if in recognition. “Hey, it’s you, Sadea!”

“Do I know you?”

“Yeah! Last week, you sat on my lap at the tavern all evening and forced me to buy you drink after drink,” Dimas said. “When I woke up in the afternoon, all hung-over, my coin purse was empty and my credit-chit maxed out!”

Raksha cast her a sideways glance that indicated just how unimpressed he was.

“Ugh. I don’t remember that.” Sadea tapped her war-staff against the barricade. “But that’s not important now. We—“

“A hundred and twelve credits, woman. Several months’ savings gone in a single night!”

“Talk about money later,” Raksha broke in. “There are maintenance ladders for the chimneys, right? Why haven’t you left yet?”

“If we did, the ghouls would have followed and caught us. Then they would have gotten outside through the chimneys. Can’t have that,” Dimas replied.

“Courageous, too,” Sadea said. “And acceptable in the looks department. Drinks after all this is done?”

“Not a chance,” the necromancer declared.

“Add wisdom to his list of virtues,” Raksha said.

Sadea drew back her foot to kick him in the ankle, but a wave of darkness swept over her vision, and the permacrete floor came flying up to meet her.

Something caught her before she fell.

“Woman! Goddamn it. I knew you weren’t alright!” Raksha’s voice was distant and heavy with echoes.

“What’s wrong with her?”

“Nosebleed, twitching brow.” Rough fingers pressed against her neck. “Irregular pulse.”

Her vision cleared just as Raksha pushed back her left eyelid with his thumb. “Bloodshot eyes.”

“Psychic fatigue,” Dimas said. “She should recover with some rest.”

“Huh.”

Sadea slapped Raksha’s hand away irritably. He’d been holding her in midair by the scruff of her neck. “What’s that supposed to mean? We’ve been fighting for hours. Who wouldn’t be tired? Aren’t you?”

“No.”

“Conserving energy by not thinking, eh?”

“Sure, Miss Brain-bleed. Whatever you say.”

“I’m going to put a lightning bolt right up your—“

“Why don’t you both come in here and catch your breath?” Dimas said, stepping away from the barricade. There was another necromancer behind him, a thin, stringy haired fellow who also held a spear in his hands. “Alexei and I can hold off the unsanctioned dead for a little bit more.”

“Sounds good.” Still holding Sadea in one hand, Raksha pushed the shelf back with the other. He stepped into the furnace chamber, dropped her unceremoniously against a wall, and put the shelf back into place.

“Thank you,” the martial scientist said to Dimas. “Is there a way to seal this chamber off, somehow? You should leave as soon as we do.”

“We could try locking the maintenance chutes behind us, but they’re pasteboard doors, like most of the others in this building.”

“I’ll just collapse the doorway behind us when we get going again,” Sadea said. “Corpses and ghouls aren’t going to get through permacrete.”

Dimas and Alexei looked doubtful, but Raksha nodded. “That should work.”

**

Sadea swept her gaze across the furnace chamber. It was a massive space, with at least a dozen industrial-sized furnaces lit and roaring. The heat was intense, as was the greasy stench of incinerated carrion. Ten or so steel carts had been shoved into a corner. Amidst the dancing shadows born of the furnace flames and ceiling lamps, the contents of the carts twitched and moaned.

“The corpses here are simply in no condition to move,” she said. “Lucky for the both of you.”

“Yes, Alexei and I were on cataloging duty when the entire plant was flooded with unsanctioned necromantic energy and the corpses started rising and attacking everyone.” Dimas sighed. “We told the laborers to stay here, because it’s the safest place in the mortuary, but they didn’t listen.”

“What were you cataloging?”

“Personal effects and belongings of the dead.” The necromancer pointed to a fenced-off section of the chamber. “They’re stripped from the corpses in the initial intake chamber and brought here, so that anything classified as unsalvageable garbage gets thrown into a furnace right away.”

“Ooh, that’s interesting.” Sadea stood, shaking off the grogginess from her skull. “Let’s take a look.”

“Looting is a capital offense,” Dimas warned.

“Don’t worry. I won’t take anything.”

More unsanctioned dead had arrived beyond the barricade, and soon, a forest of gray, rotting hands were reaching through the rows of the shelf. Raksha took Alexei’s spear and thrust it into a corpse’s head, skewering its brain.

“This is a fine weapon,” he commented.

“It came from the initial intake chamber. Probably belonged to one of the recently deceased,” Alexei told him.

“Give me the other spear, too,” Raksha said to Dimas. “Get some rest. I’ll handle this.”

The necromancer gladly handed the weapon over. A spear in each hand, Raksha began lancing the corpses in the head. Dozens fell with every heartbeat. More surged forward, baying and snapping their jaws.

Sadea reached out to Viktoria, but the necromancer was unresponsive. The psi-link was still active, though, which meant that she was still alive but probably occupied with containing the dead that had to be breaching the mortuary doors by now.

Shrugging, she sauntered over to where the junior necromancers had been working. The area was lined with steel shelves similar to the one across the doorway, and they were filled with various items: pendants of polished stone, cheap tin jewelry, old boots and belts, and the like.

Of course. The majority of corpses sent to mortuary plants for rendering or reanimation would be serfs. In contrast, Hegemonic nobility and clergy were laid to rest in stately graveyards. Naturally, most of the items stripped off the corpses would come from the humble, if not impoverished or utterly destitute. Apart from the spears, the most valuable item the necromancers had been cataloging would be a partially filled glass jar of copper coins stripped from the pockets or pouches of the dead.

A gleam caught her eye, then, and she bent down to peer at something on the bottom shelf. It was a curved sword, similar in shape to Raksha’s but cast in a far more elegant fashion. Sadea gasped as she ran her hands over its sheath. The polished wood was studded with small sapphires. Grunting at its unexpected weight, she picked up the weapon and held it closer to the light.

Her jaw dropped open. Wrapped in gold-stitched leather, the hilt was gleaming ivory, and its pommel was a cage of platinum wire around a sapphire larger than her thumbnail. Unable to help herself, she drew the sword partially, exposing several inches of its blade. The steel exuded a cold, blue radiance, and small symbols from a pre-Hegemonic language she didn’t recognize had been acid-etched just above its round hilt-guard of elaborately carved silver.

It was an enchanted weapon, and a potent one at that. How did something so valuable end up here?

“Hey, Raksha!” Sadea yelled. “I found something!”

“Put that back!” Dimas snapped, rushing over. “It belongs to the Hegemony!”

“Come on, we’ll return it later.” Sadea patted his cheek.

“But…” The necromancer sighed. “You’re right. We should use everything that might help.”

“You said something, woman?” Raksha asked, spearing a dozen skulls with as many flicks of his wrists.

Sadea approached him and held the sword out. “This might be useful.”

Raksha spared her a brief glance. “Looks nice, but I’ve already got a sword.”

“Well, here’s a better sword, you idiot!”

“No. I’m not using that.”

“Good,” a man’s voice said from beyond the barricade. “Because it’s mine.”

Raksha paused his spear-work. Sadea raised her war-staff and stepped back, clear of the doorway.

The barricade hurtled inward, crashing into Raksha and sending the martial scientist flying into the far end of the furnace chamber. A robed figure stepped in. Before a heartbeat had passed, a sea of dead flesh surged forward, seeking to follow.

Sadea raked the top of the doorway with a bolt of lightning, shattering the permacrete and raining it down in shards upon the charging corpses. Dust billowed into the confines of the chamber. Growling, straining her reserves, she began to pull forth more lightning from her soul.

The robed figure had deftly sidestepped the falling permacrete from the collapsed doorway. She’d cut off the only entrance to the furnace chamber, but she’d also sealed something far worse than corpses and ghouls in with them.

It charged, reaching for Sadea with corpse-gray hands. She raised her war-staff instinctively, but she knew that her lightning wouldn’t come forth quickly enough.

Its face was pale and bloodless, with eyes black where they were supposed to be white, sporting irises of ghastly violet light. Long, white hair streamed from its scalp, and its lips were pulled back in a feral snarl.

The creature was a revenant, a powerful undead entity created from a corpse that had belonged to a mighty warrior in life.

Its fingers brushed her neck…