It was pitch dark on the stairs, and so the first thing they did was light their glowbottles. Thomas looked at his bottle of activating fluid dubiously. It was now less than half full, and he hoped with all his heart that there would be enough to last. He had a feeling that the Maze would be bad enough as it was without their having to crawl through it in complete darkness. After a bit more thought, therefore, he decided not to use any more of the precious fluid for a while. Four glowbottles would be more than enough to light their way. He would save his for when the others had all run out.

     "What can we expect to find down there besides skeletons and zombies?" asked Shaun.

     "More powerful kinds of undead creatures, certainly," said Thomas. "Ghosts, spirits, that kind of thing, creatures that can suck the life right out of you. We'll just have to hope we can avoid them."

     "What do we do if we meet any?"

     "I may be able to handle any skeletons and zombies we meet," said Diana. "Father Bryon told me that they will flee from the power of Caroli if Her follower faces them with courage and determination. Father Bryon had quite a bit of experience in that area during the last Shadowwar, when the enemy used the animated bodies of the dead as shock troops to spearhead their attacks."

     "I've never seen an undead creature," said Shaun, "but I understand they can be terrifying to look at. Are you sure you'll be able to 'face them with courage and determination' as you put it?"

     "Pretty sure," said Diana confidently. "After all, I've seen plenty of dead bodies. I understand that we'll meet a few standing up and walking around, and although they might be pretty scary, I think I can control whatever fear I may feel. After all, My Lady is with me."

     "All right," said Shaun, but he still looked a little doubtful.

     Near the top of the stairs it wasn't too bad, but as they descended it grew cold and clammy. Strange slimes and fungi grew on the walls and stairs, disgusting to look at and revolting to touch. Beetles and creepy crawlies scurried away from the light, but they could hear hundreds more of them scuttling about in the darkness, chattering, chirping and rustling, and Lirenna shuddered at the sound. Her skin crawled at the thought of them so near, all around her, but she remembered that she'd been given the perfect excuse to back out and so said nothing, not even when she walked face first into a spiderweb, although she couldn't quite prevent herself from shrieking in shock.

     After descending about fifty feet, the stairs took them to an octagonal room with three corridors leading away from it, one leading straight ahead and the other two leading off to left and right, all of them wide enough for three men to walk abreast. The room contained nothing except scattered human bones, picked clean by the rats and beetles, and five more recent corpses in an advanced state of decomposition. A putrid smell rose from them, and wriggling movements came from beneath their clothes.

     "Careful," warned Shaun. "They may be zombies."

     "I don't think so," said Diana. "They look too... This is going to sound silly, but they look too dead. I imagine that Zombies would be more... I don't know. More terrifying to look at. These are just ordinary dead bodies."

     "You hope," said Shaun. He walked over to the nearest corpse and kicked it roughly. There was a squeal that made him jump back in alarm, but he gave a sigh of relief as a large grey rat jumped out of its clothing and scurried off into the darkness, making the others chuckle. They were all tensed up in anticipation of horrors to come, and the humour of Shaun's fright helped them to relax a little.

     Shaun looked annoyed for a moment, but then smiled in turn. "Just a perfectly ordinary corpse," he said.

     "Poor souls," said Diana. "I wonder if one day someone will find us like this."

     "You say the most cheerful things, my dear sister," said Shaun dryly.

     "I wonder who they were," said Lirenna sadly. "Where did they come from, why did they come here?"

     "The same reason we did, of course," said Jerry.

     "You know what I mean," said Lirenna, who stopped, unable to put what she felt into words.

     "I know what you mean," agreed Diana, kneeling down by one of the corpses to say a prayer over it. She was halfway through her prayer when the corpse slowly turned its head to look at her. Diana screamed in pure terror as the zombie came to life, testing each joint in turn. All her comforting words to Shaun about being able to control her fear were forgotten, drowned out in a tidal wave of soul destroying terror worse than anything she had ever thought possible. She'd thought she'd been terrified while in the power of the Mad Woman, naked and helpless and about to be butchered like a pig, but that was nothing compared to the terror she felt now. No matter how hard you psyched yourself up, told yourself what to expect and rationalised it all out, in the end nothing could dampen the impact of actually coming face to face with the living dead. She screamed again, jumped up in sheer terror and tripped over another of the corpses behind her, falling down and hitting her head on the slimy stone floor.

     The others stood paralysed in terror as the five corpses rose clumsily to their feet, joints popping and skin tearing. The one over which Diana had tripped climbed on top of her and put its bony hands around her throat and the young cleric, dazed by the fall and her senses reeling, could do nothing but stare at the slack jawed, maggot ridden face only inches away from hers as it began to throttle her.

     "No!" cried Shaun, his own terror forgotten. He drew his sword and ran across, but before he could reach her another zombie attacked him, swinging with a rusty sword. Matthew drew his own sword, and found himself paired off with the walking corpse of a once beautiful young girl, her skin now green with mold and her long blonde hair missing in places to reveal the skull beneath. The remaining two zombies advanced on the three wizards, backing them away to the stairs. Thomas broke away, trying to reach Diana, but a zombie caught his arm and he had to pull out his knife to defend himself.

     Jerry and Lirenna split up, and the last zombie stayed with the demi shae, letting the tiny nome get away. He ran over to Diana, whose face had gone red and whose eyes were almost bugging out of her head. She was making no effort to defend herself, being simply too terrified to do anything, and the zombie had maneuvered itself onto her chest, pinning her arms to the ground with its knees.

     Jerry hurled himself at it, sinking his knife to the hilt in its rotting flesh. Yellow putrescence ran from the wound, making a smell so awful that he gagged and retched. The zombie took one hand from the cleric's throat to bat him away, and as it did so Diana came back to her senses, gasping for air and struggling to throw it off. Jerry picked himself up from the floor and jumped onto the animated corpse again, stabbing again and again, shredding the flesh of its back and shoulders but not appearing to cause it any real harm. He succeeded in attracting its attention, however, and, getting up off the cleric, whose badly bruised neck bled from two thumbnail wounds, it turned to face the tiny nome. As Diana staggered to her feet, gulping down air and sobbing hysterically, it swung a fist that knocked him halfway across the room, hitting the wall with a heavy thump.

     Shaun watched helplessly as it walked over to the nome, who appeared to have been stunned by the impact. He had inflicted a dozen lethal wounds on the zombie attacking him, but the thing just kept on coming, swinging its own rusty sword and forcing him to stand and defend himself instead of running to Jerry's aid as he desperately wanted to do. How do you kill something that's already dead? he wondered. He swung his sword again, opening another gash in its chest, but it paid it no more attention than it had any of the others.

     He was better off than Thomas and Lirenna, however, who had only knives to defend themselves against swords. Only their greater speed of reflexes had enabled them to survive this long, but even so Thomas had suffered a deep gash in his side and was bleeding heavily, and both of them were simply too scared to fight as well as they might. Even Thomas's firebolt spell had failed to have any effect, the bolt of energy simply disappearing into the corpse's flesh with a sizzling sound and a wisp of steam.

     They backed away a bit further to avoid the deadly swords and found themselves with their backs to the walls, unable to retreat further. They would both have died then if Matthew hadn't managed to join them, decapitating the dead girl with a wild swing of his sword and then running over to stand between the two wizards. The headless corpse wasn't finished yet, though. It seemed to know where the young woodsman was even without its head, and walked over to continue the fight.

     Diana, massaging her throat with both hands, retreated to the stairs and watched the battle in hopeless terror. She saw Thomas slump to the ground, weak with loss of blood, leaving Matthew and Lirenna desperately trying to hold off three zombies. She saw Shaun finally figure out how to incapacitate the zombie attacking him by chopping off its limbs and run over to save the unconscious Jerry from the one throttling him. This is all my fault, she thought, tears running down her face. I brought them here. They wouldn't be here if it wasn't for me. I knew they'd come when I offered to come alone. I should have insisted they stay behind. I should have made them stay, no matter what they said, no matter how much they argued and complained. They're all going to die, and it's all my fault.

     "Go away," she whispered, as one of the three zombies attacking Matthew and Lirenna saw her and came lumbering towards her. "Go away, go away!" It continued to advance, raising its sword above its head, ready to bring it slashing down. "Please go away!" One of her hands found her holy symbol, the silver caroli flower hanging around her neck, and she clutched it tightly. Strength seemed to flow from it into her body and suddenly her eyes were blazing with fury and a sense of outrage that such abominations should be allowed to roam the world that the Gods Themselves had created. "In the name of My Lady, the Lady Caroli!" she screamed at the top of her voice, "Go away! Leave us alone!"

     Amazingly, the zombie obeyed. Not only that one, but all the others as well. With a gurgling scream they dropped their weapons, turned, and fled, disappearing out of sight down the three dark corridors leading from the room. The others stood in amazement, unable to believe what had just happened, as the young cleric collapsed in a sobbing heap.

     She looked up when she felt someone shaking her. "Di!" said Shaun urgently. "You've got to help Tom. He's in a bad way." He pulled her to her feet and led her over to where the wizard lay unconscious in a pool of his own blood. Lirenna and Matthew were trying to stop the bleeding from the wicked sword wound in his side, but he was still bleeding from half a dozen other cuts and injuries. Pulling herself together, she knelt beside him and prayed to Caroli, feeling the power flowing through her into the wizard. Then she went to look at Jerry, who was just coming round and didn't seem to be badly hurt.

     "What happened?" asked Thomas, looking bewildered. "Where did they all go?"

     "Di made them go away," said Matthew, hardly able to believe it himself. "It was incredible! She sort of glowed all over and they just ran away! For a minute it was like Caroli herself standing there, in her place. I've never seen anything like it!"

    
     "Can you do it again?" asked Lirenna.

     "I think so," replied the cleric. "I think I can try it as often as I want, but there's no guarantee that it will work. We were just lucky this time."

     "Also," added Thomas, climbing back to his feet, "Zombies are one of the least dangerous kind of undead creatures. When we get to the lower levels of this maze, we'll probably meet creatures that will make us wish we were fighting an army of zombies."

     "Yeah," agreed Jerry, staring down the dark corridors fearfully. "Zebulon himself was scared of coming here."

     "Well, there's no turning back now," said Shaun. "We might as well make a move. Which way shall we go?"

     They decided to take a few minutes to gather their wits and catch their breath first, though, and then they took the corridor that led straight ahead, further into the Maze.