Wearing the Body

The tracks went in. They didn't come out.

He looked at them a long moment in the Produce Flame's light — the small prints, the claw marks that pressed deep and irregular — and then he kept moving. There was a cave-in to the left. The ground around it was stained dark red in a way that was obviously blood and not rust or water. He noted it and went right.

Oso moved through the tunnel behind them. He'd called her again before they went down — the hour from the previous evening was long spent, and you didn't take a known space without knowing what you'd brought into it. She came when called, the same cave bear as before, the same quality of something very large that had decided to be somewhere. Fabri had said to keep an eye out for shinys. He kept that in mind. He kept Oso toward the back.

The smell came before anything else.

Rot. Not the ordinary rot of a sealed space — that was already there, decades of it settled into the walls — but something specific and active, the kind that meant something had been dead for a while and was still moving around in it.

---

It was in the right passage.

Humanoid in shape. Rat-headed. Milky white eyes that caught the flame and gave nothing back. Claws raised. Matted fur over a body that was rotten in ways that didn't add up to anything still alive.

He swung first. Hit it in the gut. The smell that came off it was significant.

Cain stepped forward, announced that Kelemvor was truly guiding them in his service, and hit it with Toll of the Dead, which was the appropriate response. Then Cain looked around at the thing and said the vibe was wrong. Different from the fish-folk. Something about the specific quality of what they were looking at wasn't sitting right.

He was right. Vath didn't know what it was yet either, but he agreed with the assessment.

Then it hit him in the neck.

It hit him hard. He'd been hit before — this was not his first badly-placed strike — but not quite with that combination of force and placement that made the vision go gray at the edges and the knees consider options they shouldn't consider. He kept standing. He cast Mirror Image. Three of him and the real one, the decoys accurate enough that he couldn't always track which was which from the inside.

Victor's hand came out. The earth answered. An earthen grasp locked the creature into the floor, restrained, going nowhere for the moment.

Pedro stepped in. The strike landed on the neck — apparently where things were landing today — massive damage, and something in the creature's processing shifted. It was frightened of Pedro, which was a reasonable response to Pedro.

He hit it again. The head snapped back.

The creature slumped.

Then the tearing started.

---

He heard it before he saw it — a wet, structural sound, like something pulling itself out of a shape it had outgrown. The body lurched upward. An amorphous dark mass pushed through the torso and began hauling the body toward the ceiling the way you haul a coat off a hook. He watched it rise.

That's what's been living in there.

Cain said what they were all beginning to understand: not undead. Constructs. The blobs had been using the bodies the way you use a coat — put it on, do your work, take it off when done. Except the taking-off was violent, and it left two problems where there had been one.

The upper half of the host body swung at Pedro. Damage from something that should have been finished. He filed that.

The blob wrapped around Zephyr's neck.

Vath threw a dart. Missed. He healed Cain instead and kept his eyes moving between the two threats. Victor threw lightning. It went wide. Produce Flame, aimed at the blob. He worked out roughly mid-swing that this was as effective as a weapon attack. He'd remember that.

Pedro was dealing with both sides at once, which was the kind of situation Pedro seemed to have been designed for. Zephyr moved through space with Misty Step and came out somewhere more useful, then put a sword into the southern one and it stopped.

One remaining.

The blob — or what was left of it — reached up for the wire mesh along the ceiling above Pedro's head. He understood immediately what it was trying to do. Pedro was already in difficult terrain, the mesh was beginning to give, and whatever came next would be a problem for the person standing under it.

Victor's hand came out again.

Restrained.

Pedro started hitting it. It went down. It got back up. He kept hitting it.