Since my troops didn’t respond to the guards’ questions, they formed up into a shield wall. They went four across and pulled out swords. They started to yell, and I knew that this wouldn’t get better.

So I sent all the zombies forward at once. None of the guards seemed to be casters, so I popped off a festering wound at the back line. One to each of the men. I didn’t want runners.

Then my zombies hit the shields. It wasn’t normal what zombies could do. Shield walls are great because they help keep back other people who don’t want to die. The problem for the guard was simply that my zombies were already dead. So when three of them threw themselves onto one shield, it came down and forward.

Sure they took hits, but while they couldn’t heal, they also weren’t bothered by small things like gut wounds. Likewise, missing eyes didn’t bother them. Only big things like the loss of a leg would put them down in a fight that would only slow them down.

So the middle guard died quickly. Then the two zombies that weren’t holding the shield down tacked the guards next to them. The other three got back up and split up to attack as well.

The guards weren’t slacking but what they thought was going to be a more protracted fight turned into a slaughter. They managed to kill one of my zombies before we overwhelmed them. It was fast and ugly, and the back row tried to run, but I had taken the time to pelt them.

Then to replace the one zombie I lost, I added 4 more. Two of them just wouldn’t do as they had lost mobility. I took the brief amount of time needed to search for keys and coins. I came up with neither, and so we went into the room the guards came from.

It was in there that I found the set of keys I was looking for. I also found some more coins and a few potions. Two were stamina, one was cure disease the last was a potion of owl vision.

I kicked myself again for not having my tools with me. If I could have, I would have socketed all of the potions right then so that I would have them longer. The owl vision was something that I would have loved to have had. But I would keep it safe because it would get a core just as soon as possible.

I left the room and pressed us on. I knew that I was leaving loot behind, but I just didn’t have time to do a full sweep. Plus, there was only so much that I could feed to the equipment that I had with me. All my armor was maxed out, and my weapons that weren’t were waiting to be used enough.

It took another two minutes before we got to a large room. The room appeared to be a training room as there were over a dozen men working out. Some were with each other, but most were hacking at dummies. They didn’t turn when we came in, but when the nearby ones yelled as we charged, the rest turned.

If the dozen had been close to each other and formed up, they might would have won. They at least would have put up a fight. As it was, we overcame half of them before the rest even got close. They formed a circle since they were in the middle of the room.

I didn’t feel like attacking the circle with my zombies, so I broke it with magic. I fired in festering wound over and over until I had dropped two. Then we charged. When we left the room, my horde had grown to 14.

Room after room, we pushed through the bottom levels. I was happy and surprised that a general alarm hadn’t been sounded. By the time we found the steps heading up, I had swept most of the basement area, and my numbers had reached 30.

Most of the area that we went through seemed to be warehousing. There were rooms full of fabric and others full of art. However, there were also rooms that were clearly used for torture. The manacles, whips, and blood were enough to tell me. Then there were the bodies of those they beat too far.

Those bodies I took the time to lay to rest. While I could have used the extra forces, I didn’t feel like it was right to take them. Sure they had passed along just like the others, but it felt wrong for what had happened to them.

We came up the stairs, and our advantage of surprise ended. The stairs we came up were a main set, and there were servants who yelled and ran. My lead zombies were looking the part now with bloody bodies that had drained of most of their blood.

I didn’t feel like chasing the servants, but the guards that came were fair game. It wasn’t much of a fight at first until the real guards showed up. Up until this point, we had been dealing with the bandit class of guards. However, the house guards came in. When they did, I could tell the difference and knew that the ten that showed up would win the fight with the zombies.

They marched in full plate armor. The lightly armored zombies were going to have problems breaking through the plate. Worse than that, my zombies didn’t really have anything that was meant to take out this kind of foe.

I sent out to Blink. “I got a problem here. How are you doing?”

Blink responded. “Readys to goes.”

I thought back as I moved around the edge of the fight. “Out the basement or out the front?”

I saw the image of the gate that I had come in. She was ready to come this way which meant I needed to somehow finish off these guards. I sheathed my sword and pulled out a wand from across my back.

I didn’t carry many wands, but since we had left the trees, I kept my stone-to-dirt wand and my dirt-to-water wands with me. So I smiled and started to turn the floor to dirt. The whole place was built with stone.

It only took a moment before the dirt that was no longer interlocking stone to fall. Of course, when it went down, the zombies and the guards went with it. Good for my side but bad for them. The 14-foot or so fall rang the bell of most of the guards. However, the zombies didn’t care. I just told them to go for the eyes. To rip off the helmets.

It wasn’t pretty, but it did what I needed. I brought the last 6 of my functional zombies back up and sent them down the hall that the knights came from.

I thought to Blink. “I have the stairs on the first floor cleared.”

I heard some running, and from the left, I saw a group of about 200 hundred coming around a corner. Most of them were worse for wear, and most, if not all, were women. Kasidy was in the front, and beside her was Iris.

I smiled and waved at them to come over. “Kasidy this way. We can go out the basement. I cleared it on the way in.”

She flashed me a smile, and we headed down the stairs. As we went down, I dismissed the zombies in the basement. I didn’t want to scare people more than they already were. Full plate could be nice, but I relied so much on movement that I didn’t think I would like it. Worse yet, it would take too long to get the equipment off. But it was something that I thought about.

Many of the women in the front grabbed daggers or swords from the dead as we passed by. Others just spat on them as we pushed forward. I told my zombies up top to come back to the stair and not let any guards through. My hope was for a delaying action since I knew that the manor had many more guards than what we had dealt with.

As I headed out, I thought up to Blink. “Where are you?”

I got an image of Blink firing her crossbows at guards as she chased a group. “Hunts! Hurts Kasidy. Hunts hurts them back!”

I felt rage from Blink as she showed me. She had followed around and found who was reporting to who on her way up. Then she saw who she was looking for. I don’t know how I knew it was the guild master, but I could tell, and so could she. He was a pudgy short man who was wearing too little clothing. It looked like his guards had just pulled him out of bed and made him run.

I wanted to watch her finish the guy off, but Kasidy grabbed my hand. “Arn which way?”

I pointed to a door and yelled. “Follow me. I’ll show you the way out!”

* * *