The nightmare began when, thinking someone had called out, she opened her eyes and saw the leathery face of a corpse as close to her as a lover's. She started up with a cry, heart pounding, certain she would find herself in her bed with her own warm and living lover. But she found only bony hands tangled in her hair, and the smell of cold decay.

She tried to jump to her feet, but beneath her dead men were piled up layer on layer and she could get no purchase. Whimpering, she clawed her way toward the only door of the dim chamber. Bones snagged her skirts, skulls rolled under her hands. At last she reached the doorway and fled up the narrow stair into darkness--

Rubble blocked the stair. She dug at the loose stones, breaking all her nails; she pounded on them, screaming for help. She screamed until she had no more breath. No one came to let her out.

Panting, she slumped against the wall. It had to be a nightmare that she had been walled into a crypt. But what nightmare was like this, with cold grinding into her bones and the smell of the dead as thick in her throat as temple incense?

A corpse shifted on the pile and she spun in terror. But the sound was just the disturbed bodies settling back to equilibrium.

Or was it? She stifled another scream as a skull tumbled down the pile, rolled leering to a stop--

Trembling, hugging herself, she slid down to sit upon a stair. The corpses gazed back at her. It looked as if years had passed since they had been laid here. Only scraps of dried flesh adhered to their faces. Their swords were broken, their armor rusted, the quilted leather of their jackets had rotted to fragments like old leaves. They lay with arms outflung and jaws agape, as if they had fallen in battle and been piled up before the first rigor of death passed off.

The dead lay still now, but as they stared at her, she became ever more certain that she did not imagine their restlessness.

They must, she thought suddenly, have been walled up to stop them walking.

An instant after that terrible realization, a much fiercer panic roared down on her.

Because why else would she have been buried with them?

She herself must be one of the dead, and only dreaming now that she woke alive.

But, but--

She tried to fling logic in the face of her terror: the restless dead could dream only of their former lives. She did not know this place.

And unlike the disconnected landscapes of dream, nothing changed in this crypt, not the blank stone walls, not the jumbled dead receding into shadow, not the pain from her broken nails or the gritty stone under her palms. Not the cold or the awful smell. How could she be dead and feel all that?

No, the dream had been that voice calling out to her, and now she was truly awake--whatever she had woken to.

She tried to calm her racing heartbeat and think. A powerful sorcerer, she had read--somewhere, some time--could create places beyond the Gate of the living world, necromantic tumors grown in the guts of the divine realm. That sort of place might not be governed by nature at all, but only by the sorcerer's caprice.

But still--