The door was jammed.

  Of course it was; Dalliance had watched as Fallowfield and Zenith had put considerable effort into jamming it.

  The smell was unbearable.

  "I can't see," Dalliance complained. Charity was still retching in the dark.

  Dalliance fumbled for the matches and his remaining torch. His first three strikes produced nothing.

  Did they get wet?

  They were going to choke there in the darkness of the closet, futilely.

  All the while, Circe called for help from the next room over. Dalliance had heard Effie earlier, but now it was just Circe, shouting for someone to get out of the way, followed by calling for Sterling. For Dalliance. For anybody.

  Then the match caught, and a blue flare surrounded it. The flash of flame was as big as Dalliance's own torso, an expanding fireball engulfing hand and face with the smell of cooked meat and burnt hair. A flash of sullen blue light rose to yellow, and the flame was in his hand. The torch caught with another thump, more muted this time, and the air was full of stinging, choking smoke.

  And it smelled better.

  Dalliance tried not to think about the fact that the cooked flesh he was smelling was what he was standing in.

  His shoe squelched.

  "Give me your knife," he asked Fallowfield. Earnest had taken off the hinges of the cultist's chapel. And the hinges were on the inside . . .

  Dalliance jerked on the handle first, hard, even pressing against the wall with his feet. Even one point in Might would have done it, he thought. But no.

  He hammered the torch into the wall with a blow, then went about lifting the hinges. It only took one pin to do it, and the door shuddered in and up, the hammered chair legs falling free as the door swung open, the nailed board swinging in with a groan instead of coming free entirely.

  Dalliance took in the scene at a glance. Earnest, lying unconscious. Circe, standing in front of him, his bow in her hands, shaking wildly. Zenith, with her spear, looking lost. Effluvia. . . .

  Effluvia was just standing there, staring off into the darkness of the hallway, to the servant’s quarters, swaying slightly.

  She’d met its eyes.

  But how did it get there?

  If he left the closet, it’d see him too.

  He didn’t know exactly what the curse did, but he knew enough to know he had to avoid be doing that.

  "Charity!" he hissed, grabbing her arm. "Effie’s just forward and to the left! Keep your eyes shut, grab Effluvia's wrist and turn both of you around!"

  Charity looked at him, startled, but the urgency in his voice cut through her fear. She nodded, squeezed her eyes shut, and moved blindly into the pantry.

  Dalliance waited, heart hammering. He’d told her to do it because if he used [Locomotion], it would waste precious Mana, and if he got caught . . . well, if he got caught, he wouldn't be able to save himself, but if she got caught he’d still be able to save her. Maybe.

  Charity and Effluvia stumbled back into view, the spell apparently breaking as her line of sight was severed. She looked furious.

  It worked.

  “Hand over your eyes!” Dalliance yelled.

  Effie’s face hardened, and she raised one hand, voltaic energy already crackling between her fingers, even as she raised the other to shield her own sight.

  Dalliance almost had time to comment before she let off the first blast. In the confined space it was too loud to even think.

  Again and again and again, so loud the rolling thunder in the tiny room. She wasn’t casting a prolonged shock spell anymore, someone had taught her [Lightning] or similar and she was USING it.

  Dalliance ran out of the room, grabbing Charity’s arm as he did, head turned to shield his sight as he ran to put his back against the wall next to the doorway to the servants’ quarters.

  He stumbled against a basket full of something heavy and clinking, and it fell, spilling jars of preserves across the floor. Then they were against the wall.

  She stopped, at length, and sat down with a thump that made the wall rattle a bit against Dalliance's back, but which he certainly didn't hear. She tried speaking, but the world was a rush of nausea and tinnitus, an incessant high-pitched scream.

  Circe removed her hands from the sides of his head. The sound rushed back in—the crackle of torches, the ragged breathing of the group.

  ". . . and it was flowing back into shape as I hit it," Effluvia was saying, her voice trembling with revulsion, "like the skin was made of goo. What does that to itself?"

  She looked genuinely disquieted.

  “Who,” Charity said quietly.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  Dalliance nodded. First form of a lich was a ghoul. Gobble up lifeforce, turn into a lich once bloated as a tick. *That* they’d been told.

  “When she stopped moving, I didn’t know what I was going to do,” Circe admitted. “But I think it can only really focus on one of us at a time.”

  They sat in silence with that for a moment, Dalliance feeling at his mana. It wasn’t dropping. It’d retreated.

  “It’s gone to ground,” he said at last. "But . . . how did it *get* there?”

  “There’s a hole in the ceiling in the kitchen by the stove. It just dropped down and ran through the room.” Zenith's voice was subdued.

  “Inches across. How . . . but it’s dark in there. So that’s what they meant about moving in shadow. I’d thought it just couldn’t pass through light.”

  “I think it just doesn’t like light,” Circe said grimly. “Or maybe it can’t use spells or things in the light. It didn’t attack us until it was in the darkness again.”

  Sterling and Immaculate came into sight at a run through the entrance from the dining room, spears in hand, that sword slapping ridiculously against the doorframe as Sterling negotiated the unwieldy spear.

  And Dalliance knew what he had to do.

  They’d known, Sir Worth and Mister Best, about the ghoul, known all year.

  They’d meant for it to be starving, but known it was dangerous.

  Mister Best had hammered home a rule: surround it with light. He’d given them torches.

  Mister best had given a class full of teenagers torches, and sent them into a house of bone-dry, dryrotted wood.

  Sure, they’d been told not to burn it down. But what would happen if they did?

  Sterling’s father had given him that sword.

  [Firestorm].

  Dalliance remembered having found the description of the blade’s enchantment, and how stupid it had seemed at the time he’d found it, poring over archive books with Charity.

  He’d been distracted by other things at the time.

  [Whisper] was just such a powerful spell.

  Whispering just required that he could see people. If he could see them, he could ‘ask’ them questions. That meant he could potentially abuse [Prediction] even worse by predicting what would happen if he asked a question of anyone in line of sight, all without ever making a sound. The spell had been on the 'abuse' list for [Prediction] for a reason.

  That, and the darker reasons. Alternate use cases for [Whisper], as intended by the designer. What if you made someone think it was their wife who had spoken in a dark room? It transmitted thought, not sound.

  Dalliance had originally been trying his best to come up with spell combinations for [Werewind], but the possibilities of using [Whisper] with [Prediction] were so amazing he got distracted.

  As wind, for the duration of [Werewind], Dalliance had neither a voice nor hands, so couldn’t cast. Any spell combined with it would have to be a spell that could affect him while he was wind, a spell that lasted for at least part of the ten minutes maximum he could stay in that form, and one that left him enough mana to cast [Werewind] in the first place. The more constraints Dalliance thought about, the harder the problem looked.

  Self-defense spells, he'd read, usually lasted longer than ten minutes. Not all of them, of course. Some short-lived spells, like [Blur] or the [Steelwind Aegis] he'd read about, only lasted as long as one maintained concentration. Others, like [Guardian], were so complicated or required mana of various types that he couldn’t source: they were off the table for the time being.

  Dalliance didn’t have Fire mana, for example. Though he was sure that [Firestorm] was, in fact, an excellent spell.

  'Your mana produces a raging inferno, which then sustains itself with mana from that which it consumes.'

  He had found the enchantment on Sterling’s stupid sword, noted it as a dungeon fire waiting to happen, and forgotten about it.

  This would be chalked up to an accident, rules of engagement or no. Sir Worth, or Mister Best, even, would be able to swear in a zone of truth to have adhered to the Auditor’s instructions.

  Heads would remain un-rolled, and the house would burn down. It was inevitable. Or would have been, if Sterling weren’t so cautious with the sword.

  Sterling at the beginning of the year would have burned the house down by now.

  It was so simple.

  They’d start the fire and get everybody out.

  It was only then that Dalliance remembered Woebegone.

  It would probably look pretty bad if he burned down the house with him inside.

  [Whisper]: “I need to get Lackey,” his spell said, fluffing out the hair from Effie’s ear and making her jump.

  His mind was made up.

  [Whisper]: “I have a plan. Just don’t die for like ten more minutes, and we'll get out of this alive. Don’t mention it, or the ghoul will hear you. Act scared.”

  It wouldn't attack anytime soon, that he could see. There was a little time.

  Still, as he broke into a run towards the entryway, he cast [Werewind].

  No reason to be stingy now.

  The cloud that had been Dalliance was halfway up the stairs when his prediction failed. In hindsight, he should have reused it before casting [Werewind]. Now he'd have to wait until the spell was completed.

  He tried it experimentally.

  No, the wind could not use skills.

  The last of the cloud that was Dalliance flowed out of the entryway into the hall, as the first wisps found the door in the hall with the light shining from underneath and began to flow through.

  It was harder than he expected, shifting all of his self through such a small opening. Last time he’d done it more slowly, and through more of them, maybe.

  An effort of will overcame that, though at the unexpected loss of several points of mana, and several things happened in the same instant.

  He became aware of the inside of the closet. Woebegone was in mid-air, hurtling back towards the back of the closet, hair plastered straight back to his head, cheeks deformed, eyes wide with shock and reddened, his stomach strangely flattened, clothes billowing sideways. All the torches were blown out in an instant, flames spluttering sideways for the briefest of moments before going dark, and then Dalliance-the-cloud was inside the room with Woebegone and the door blew off its hinges, taking the doorframe with it, the Lackey boy impacted the back of the closet with a bang, and the torches flared brightly back to life: so that was the purpose of those special alchemist’s torches.

  Dalliance-the-cloud became Dalliance-the-boy in a rush of wind and a billow of fabric, and a red-and-purple mottled, bruised and limp Woebegone landed in a heap, back against the wall towards the door, eyes already swelling in what would be black eyes, blood running from his nostrils and ears.

  Oh.

  Dalliance engaged [Predication].

  “This looks bad,” he tried. “But I’m here to help you.”