Chapter 1-6: Questions, all These Questions... (1/2)

Now, there were plenty of ways to cover the weakness of Cantrips. I just wouldn’t be able to address any of them until the next Renewal, and then only to a limited extent.

So, if a powerful undead came this way, or Mithar help me, an energy-drainer, I was basically hosed unless I got lucky. Yay, me...

I sat down at the junction of the long hall, where I could look down it towards the garage, and see anything coming outside from the back, too. If it was just one or two zombies, I could basically get up and kill them within ten seconds, front or back. They would probably be drawn by the almost blindingly white ground outside of the fire door, stained by vivus and purified etherdust, which would fade slowly over the course of the night, and evaporated at sunrise or sunset, whichever came first.

My eyes went to the sky.

There was a Shroud here, and I was under it. That Trait of a Magical Lineage said I was Shroudborn.

Just looking at that dark and unsettling haze across the sky, I could feel the Curse attached to me thrumming in response. Its creator’s magic was up there, a part of the grand and horrible spell that protected the Cancer of Death, the great and unholy necromantic march across realities, subsuming and consuming worlds and making of them Deadworlds, shrines to nihility and oblivion, before repeating the process for more worlds.

This world was under the Shroud...

Why wasn’t it dead?

Why were all these zombies wandering around? Why hadn’t they been gathered up and organized by the lords among their kind? Why was the Shroud just this haze, instead of a brooding hellcloud of damned souls trapped for eternity, blocking away the gods and the afterlife?

I didn’t care what tech level this society was at. When a hundred-million-bodied Dead March got dropped onto an unprepared world, they were hosed!

Especially if magic came...

I thought about the pistols of the Warlocks, and the lights on the van. Obviously, science was still working here. That was different from back on Terra-Luna. Different universe, different rules; I could understand it. I didn’t know how different, but that was enough for now.

Logically, a Dark Minister should have come along, grabbed all these undead, and led them away somewhere to make more undead and promote them upwards.

It hadn’t happened. Why?

The question was going to gnaw at me, so I threw it into the back of my head to percolate, looking up at the sky again.

The Shroud cut off contact with the gods, but it also meant that magic was here. Those Warlocks could not have set up a Ritual to bring something in to Swear a Pact to. That meant that thing was already here, likely a Daemon of some sort, since they were Sinbound...

It also meant that the psychopomp that brought me here could not have done so! It wasn’t a psychopomp!

I inhaled sharply, wanted to jump to my feet in anger, stayed where I was as my gut protested any movement.

It had brought me here and dumped me here. It shouldn’t even have been able to perceive a world under the Shroud, let alone know a girl was getting sacrificed to take away her baby here.

So, either it was very powerful, knowing that the girl was here and would be a great place to stuff me, or it was something more simple.

It was the sponsor of the Warlocks, and naturally could tell what they were doing because of it.

Detective Traveler, that was me, working out the crazy shit...

Its reasons for bringing me here could not be random, if it could manifest here and go out onto the Astral Plane, too.

The fact I had Curse magic that reflected the Shroud? No? How had it sensed me? Randomly? I didn’t think so...

If it was ‘waiting’ for me, that meant it had seen where I came from. The only way it could see that is if it had seen Aelryinth, and that meant it would have had to have been watching the nameless world we’d rescued from a Dark Hierophant as we did so...

A world also under a Shroud, at least until we’d ripped it open with the death of every single goddamn one of the undead...

If it had seen us all free that world, it knew we were doughty undead fighters... terrifying, really. Why bring even a sliver of someone like that here, if it was a Sinbound Pact grantor?

Did it know where we had come from? From Terra-Luna?

Was this an Earth-alternate? It certainly felt like it could be...

I squinted at uninformative cement ceiling overhead, thinking, thinking, drifted to the sign on the wall I could barely make out.

They looked like random characters to me. I flicked my Assay up, and delved down into my Skills.

Languages were listed first. Aelryinth had known dozens, because he’d picked up Polyglot and made a habit of learning any new ones he ran across... including many of the ones of the old world, now out of date with the rise of Human.