The crematorium shaft finally gets finished properly — a real cellar, a smell nobody wants to name, and a landlord who thinks a notice-of-works letter counts as consultation.
I. Foundations
The crematorium had needed depth from the beginning, which UG had known perfectly well at the time and mentioned to nobody, on the grounds that nobody had asked. A furnace burning coffin wood at the rate his had needed somewhere for the ash and the heat to go that wasn’t directly into his own kitchen, and the simplest answer, back then, had been to sink the whole thing down a level and vent it properly rather than solve the same problem twice. He’d dug just far enough to make that work, and stopped, because stopping the moment a problem was solved was the only kind of restraint UG reliably practised.
“Just far enough” and “properly finished,” it turned out, were not the same hole. The crematorium’s shaft ran close enough to Lichmyface’s own room that UG had started noticing, on quiet evenings, exactly how little separated one from the other — a wall’s thickness of packed earth and not much else. If he was going to have a hole in the ground at all, he reasoned, he might as well finish the job: proper stairs, a proper cellar, something that actually connected what was already down there instead of leaving it all hanging off a service shaft nobody but Lichmyface had ever used.
Fixing that meant blasting through solid stone and sinking the whole structure down far enough to link up properly with what was already under there — Lichmyface’s room, and, somewhere past that, the church that wasn’t supposed to exist in the space it occupied, tucked into whatever fold of the world had let it in in the first place. None of that came cheap. Stone didn’t move itself, and the goblins who did this kind of work charged accordingly, with the confidence of tradesmen who knew exactly how badly a man wanted a job finished once he’d already knocked one wall down.
UG wrote to Nobbybanks that evening.
Nobbybanks,
Exciting update from the home front — we’re going properly underground. Turns out the crematorium’s been sitting on borrowed structural time for a while now, and rather than patch it I’ve decided to finish the job this time: full cellar, proper stairs, the works. This adds real value to the place, no argument.
While I’ve got you — there’s also been a bit of a smell coming up through where the old shaft meets the kitchen. I’m calling it a plumbing issue for now, and I’d rather we both left it at that until I’ve had a proper look myself. Same goes for a noise down there I’ve decided to blame on a pipe.
None of this should affect the timeline. Gold as discussed, usual account.
— UG
Nobbybanks’s reply came back the same evening, shorter than UG’s, and considerably less enthusiastic about the smell.
UG,
A smell that gets stronger the closer you dig toward a crematorium sitting on top of a graveyard is not, in my professional opinion, compost. I don’t say that to alarm you. I say it because at some point one of us has to.
The gold’s coming. I’d like it on record that I asked.
— Nobbybanks
Lichmyface, still a few days out at Dazar’alor, got his letter the same night.
Lichmyface,
Notice of works: the crematorium shaft is being extended into a full cellar, connecting through to your room and, I’m told, whatever’s further down past that. There’ll be blasting, so expect some noise and a bit of dust for a while. Try not to let it get to you.
You may notice the smell’s picked up. This is expected, and I’m assured it’s temporary. If it isn’t, we’ll deal with that when we get there.
While the crew’s got the wall open, seemed sensible to finish the job — proper stairs, and I want to run some old Lordaeron ironwork along the new stairwell. Good stuff, the kind that’s still standing outside half the ruined houses in the kingdom. I know you’ve got a contact in Undercity for that sort of thing. If you could pick up a run of it on your way home, that’d save us both a job.
Rent’s unaffected, obviously, seeing as there isn’t any. Appreciate your patience during this exciting period of improvement.
— UG
Lichmyface added the errand to the end of an already long list without comment, the way he added most things UG asked of him, and kept walking.
II. Delusions of Grandeur
The trouble with knocking one wall down, UG had discovered, was that it made every other wall look distinctly unambitious by comparison.
What had started as a practical fix — vent the crematorium properly, sink the shaft, connect it through to Lichmyface‘s room and whatever lay past that — had, somewhere around the third conversation with the goblins doing the blasting, turned into something else. A cellar, UG reasoned, was just a hole with a purpose. A proper entrance, a proper staircase, something with presence, was a statement. And a man who was about to have a below-ground level connecting his crematorium, his undead housemate’s private quarters, and — somewhere past that — a church that wasn’t strictly supposed to exist at all, owed it to the occasion to do the thing properly rather than functionally.
So the plans grew. The old cellar entrance, modest and square and serviceable, was coming out, replaced with something wider, taller, and considerably more inclined to announce itself. A proper staircase down — stone, broad enough for two people to descend without either of them turning sideways, the kind of staircase that implied you were going somewhere important rather than just fetching something from storage. Ironwork along the balustrade, which conveniently solved the problem of what to do with however much Lordaeron salvage Lichmyface actually managed to bring back. Sconces either side of the new entrance, because a hole in the ground with proper lighting looked like an architectural choice, and a hole in the ground without it just looked like a hole.
UG wrote to Nobbybanks with the revised figures, and made the mistake of using the phrase “modest upgrade to the original scope.”
Nobbybanks’s reply was, by his standards, unusually direct.
UG,
I’ve read “modest upgrade to the original scope” three times now, hoping it might mean something different on a fourth read. It doesn’t. You are describing a staircase. You are describing it the way other men describe a wedding.
I don’t doubt it will look impressive. I doubt very much that a cellar needs to.
The gold’s coming, because it always does, and because I have apparently decided that’s simply what this arrangement is now. I would like it on record, again, that I raised this.
— Nobbybanks
UG read this as broad approval, filed it accordingly, and got back to arguing with the goblins about the entrance itself, which the stonework simply wouldn’t allow to come to a point no matter how many times he asked. Wider, then. If it couldn’t be tall and dramatic, it would be wide and dramatic instead, an entrance a man could walk through three abreast without anyone ducking. A man only got to build one gothic staircase down to his own crematorium, and there was no sense doing it by halves.
III. The Goblins Have Notes
The goblins, it turned out, had opinions about staircases, and none of those opinions matched UG’s.
Their case was simple and delivered with the flat confidence of tradesmen who had built this exact argument before, for other clients, and won it every time. A narrow staircase between close walls was cheaper to cut, faster to finish, and — this was the part they kept coming back to, with what UG suspected was real relish — properly unsettling in a way his design wasn’t. Nobody felt a staircase in their bones by walking down something wide and well lit. They felt it walking down something that pressed in on both shoulders at once, straight and steep and just a little too steep for its own height, the kind of pitch that made a man grip the wall on the way down whether he needed to or not, and made looking back up from the bottom feel considerably further than the climb itself had actually been.
They had ideas, and once they started, they didn’t stop. A single candle partway down instead of proper sconces, guttering, doing exactly enough to see by and no more. A niche carved into the wall at the steepest point, empty, clearly meant for something that had never been put there. Pale roots already working their way through the mortar near the bottom, thin white threads that had no business being that far underground and every business being there anyway, given what was growing upstairs. UG asked, reasonably, whether that last one was structural. The goblins said it added character. UG decided not to press it.
He held out for the wide entrance for exactly as long as it took the lead goblin to point out that a grand doorway opening onto a staircase like the one they were describing would look less like architecture and more like a mistake, and gave up the whole gothic vision in one go rather than let that image sit in his head any longer than it already had. Wide at the top for the sake of the stonework, then straight down, steep enough to notice, narrow enough to feel it on both shoulders the whole way — exactly as the goblins had wanted from the start.
He went down it once it was finished and counted the steps on the way, for no reason he could name. He counted them again on the way back up. The two numbers didn’t match, and he decided, sensibly, not to check a third time.
IV. The Floor Wasn’t Supposed to Do That
The blasting had gone well, according to the goblins, who loved a good explosion and would have called something considerably worse than this a job well done.
The floor under the main hall had been sagging for a few days beforehand, a soft give underfoot in one particular spot that UG had noticed, prodded once with his boot, and decided wasn’t worth interrupting his evening over. He was still more or less deciding that when the floor stopped being a floor and became a hole, taking a decent stretch of flagstone and half a bookshelf down with it in one go. There was no ignoring that part. UG stood at the edge of it for a while, working out what had just happened, then went to find a lamp.
What the blasting for the stairwell had actually done, once he had light enough to see it properly, was crack straight through into old foundations nobody had known were there — proper stonework, load-bearing, built long before UG had ever owned the place, and never accounted for in anything the goblins had surveyed before they started. The collapse wasn’t a gap opening up from nothing. It was old stone giving way under new blasting it had never been built to survive, and UG’s dropped coin, when he finally worked up the nerve to try it, took an uncomfortably long time to land regardless of what had caused the drop.
He wrote to Nobbybanks that evening with the sort of opening line that experience had taught him rarely ended well for either of them.
Nobbybanks,
Small structural update. Turns out the stairwell blasting cracked straight into some old foundations under the tower nobody knew were there, and the floor of the main hall’s come down in one section as a result. I’m told this needs shoring up properly, which I’m further told means a new floor essentially throughout, rather than a patch. I appreciate the timing is unfortunate.
— UG
Nobbybanks’s reply took longer to arrive than usual.
UG,
I have now personally funded a barrel-dosing experiment, a decorative staircase, and — as of this letter — the structural integrity of the building you live in, which I would have assumed came first rather than fourth. I don’t have anything clever to say about that. I’m simply noting it.
The gold’s coming. Try not to find a second hole before the first one’s paid for.
— Nobbybanks
The spiders turned up within the week, climbing out of the collapse itself rather than the walls, which UG found considerably more alarming than anything the staircase alone would have produced. These weren’t the ordinary sort either — bigger, quicker, and possessed of a stillness beforehand that ordinary spiders didn’t bother with, the kind of pause that suggested they were deciding something rather than simply resting. UG took to checking the steps before he used them, which was, he reflected, not a habit a grown man ought to need in his own house.
He went down on the Rustbolt Jetpack rather than bother with stairs he’d already had one bad experience with that week — a strange little contraption bought off a robot who introduced himself, without a trace of irony, as J-3T 3000. It did exactly what it said: strapped on, good for a day, tailored strictly for use in the house and grounds. Steering it turned out to be a skill in its own right, one UG did not have, and he spent the first few seconds of the descent overcorrecting in both directions at once, delighted with himself the entire time. There was something properly exhilarating about it, once he stopped fighting the thing and let it fling him roughly where he wanted to go rather than exactly where he wanted to go. He hit the floor harder than planned and stayed there a moment deciding whether anything was broken. Nothing was, and he was still grinning about the flight down when he checked.
The flying took some getting used to over the following days. Good for some jobs — he could hover dead level with a high shelf and set something down without a ladder, which had never been true of anything he owned before — and hopeless for others, since holding still long enough to do delicate work turned out to be exactly the one thing the jetpack didn’t want to do. He’d spent most of an afternoon zipping the length of Founder’s Point just to see what the place looked like from a height nobody was supposed to see it from, and privately thought there was something fitting about it: gnomish machinery built by his own people’s stranger, more committed cousins, the ones who’d looked at the Curse of Flesh that turned mechagnomes into gnomes in the first place and decided, centuries later, that the correct response was to go the other way and turn themselves back into machines. UG had never had the nerve for that kind of commitment himself. He was, apparently, willing to strap one of their inventions to his back and let it fling him round his own garden, which felt like as much ambition as he had in him.
Azkin drifted down after him at a more sensible pace, unbothered, the way Azkin was unbothered by most things that had just gone wrong.
What the light actually showed him, once they’d both landed properly, wasn’t what he’d expected. This wasn’t rough-cut support stone, thrown up quickly by whoever built the tower and never looked at again. Someone had put real money into this room once — carved stone pillars holding up a ceiling of heavy wooden beams, the same beams that formed the underside of his own floor above, arched stonework along the back wall with the kind of detailing a man paid for because he wanted it seen, not because a building inspector made him. Which raised the obvious question of how a room built to be seen had gone this long without anyone seeing it. UG had a guess, and didn’t much like it: whoever had built this — the same hand, probably, that had shaped Lichmyface’s coffin room and whatever lay past it — had never meant for it to be reached this way. There would be a proper door somewhere, a real way in, tucked into some stretch of the dungeon nobody had mapped yet. What UG had just fallen through was a hole in the ceiling of someone else’s front room, not the front door.
The floor hadn’t survived the shock either. A long crack ran clean across the stone underfoot, the kind that made a man wonder less about what had already fallen through and more about what hadn’t yet.
V. The Claim
The Lightbloom, when he found it, was almost beside the point. It had taken hold around one dislodged beam in the far corner, a single thread pushed through a gap that hadn’t existed before the goblins started work, winding round the timber and reaching down into the room the way the rest of it upstairs reached toward light. Further back, half-hidden behind the same beam, a pod sat pulsing gently in the dark, pale in exactly the way the Lightbloom was pale, large enough that UG had no idea how long it had been growing before he’d finally gone looking. He stood and looked at it for a while, Azkin’s light throwing everything into sharp, unhelpful relief, and revised his opinion of the whole situation considerably. This wasn’t a structural problem with an unfortunate side effect anymore. Whatever was happening down here, the Lightbloom was clearly enjoying it.
It hadn’t caused any of this, though, and that much UG was fairly confident of. The cracked stonework, the dislodged beam, the crack now running through the floor itself — all of that had a much simpler explanation, and the explanation was standing several levels above him arguing about staircases for a living.
That, at least, gave him something to write to Nobbybanks about that wasn’t another request for gold outright.
Nobbybanks,
Update on the situation below the tower. Turns out there was an old room down there nobody knew about — proper stonework, real craftsmanship, clearly built by whoever put in Lichmyface’s quarters originally. The blasting crew have gone and cracked half of it loose, floor included. This is their doing, not mine, and not the Lightbloom’s either, for once. I’d like to make a claim against whichever cartel they’re operating under. If there’s compensation to be had, I trust you’re better placed than I am to actually get it out of them.
In the meantime, given the extent of the damage, I’ll need to keep proper access to the site to assess it fully. Purely for the claim.
— UG
Nobbybanks’s reply, when it came, suggested he’d read that last line for exactly what it was.
UG,
I’ll write to the cartel. Structural negligence by a licensed blasting crew is a real claim, and I intend to make it one, because unlike some of your requests this one has merit. Expect this to take weeks rather than days — cartels do not pay out quickly, and they pay out slower still when the claimant is a gnome with a documented history of asking for gold to fund questionable experiments.
“Purely for the claim” is doing a great deal of work in that sentence. I’ve decided not to examine it further.
— Nobbybanks
VI. Uninvited Guests
The gargoyle had picked the roof ridge directly above the graveyard, which UG had to admit was a better instinct for the job than anything he’d have thought to give it credit for. It sat there for most of the first day doing nothing in particular, and then, the moment UG stepped underneath it to get a proper look, jumped straight up and came down again with a wet, satisfied gurgle, as though the whole point of the perch had been waiting for exactly one person to walk past so it could do that.
He tried to shoo it off. This achieved nothing whatsoever. It watched him wave his arms with what UG could only describe as polite interest, gurgled again, and did not move an inch. He went and got the jetpack, on the theory that a man hovering at eye level, present in three dimensions rather than one, would carry more authority than a man standing on the ground shouting. This also achieved nothing. If anything it made things worse — the gargoyle seemed to find a gnome bobbing unsteadily in midair considerably more interesting than a gnome standing still, and jumped twice more in quick succession, gurgling both times, delighted with the new game. UG gave up, landed badly, and decided the roof was the gargoyle’s now, on the grounds that arguing with something that couldn’t be shooed, bribed, or embarrassed was not a fight worth losing twice.
He came back that evening with nothing better to do and no real plan, and found himself talking to it anyway. He told it about the graveyard below — his, in the sense that he’d moved into the house and the plot both came with it, though he’d made it his own since: a set of Gilnean Stocks by the front path, a Gilnean Problem Solver tucked in near the back fence that he was fairly sure counted as a statement piece rather than a threat, various effigies dotted about that he’d added one at a time until the place stopped looking like somebody else’s cemetery and started looking like his.
The gargoyle gurgled back at him, low this time, nothing like the jump-and-gurgle it had greeted him with earlier. It sounded, if UG was reading it right, almost like agreement.
“You planning on staying, then?”
Another gurgle. It shifted its weight on the ridge, settling rather than repositioning, the stillness of something that had already decided and was only now getting comfortable with the decision.
“Suppose somebody ought to keep an eye on the place,” UG said. “I’m not down here as often as I should be.”
He hadn’t expected to mean that as much as he did once he’d said it out loud. The gargoyle didn’t answer that part either, but it didn’t jump this time, and it didn’t gurgle, and the silence that followed felt different from the one before. UG stood there a while longer than he needed to, looking at his own crooked stones, his own stocks, his own ridiculous guillotine, with something watching over all of it that hadn’t been there a fortnight ago, and found he didn’t mind the company nearly as much as he’d expected to.
He started leaving it scraps of rubble from the site most evenings after that, more habit than plan, and never saw it actually take one while he was watching. They always went missing by morning regardless.
VII. What the Second One Was Guarding
The second gargoyle hadn’t settled into anything. It prowled the top of the cellar steps in short, aggressive bursts, wings half-spread, throwing itself at whichever spider came closest and backing off just as fast the moment it didn’t land clean. UG watched it lose two rounds and win a third from a safe distance and worked out fairly quickly that there was no grand purpose behind any of it. It had woken up hungry, made it as far as the top of the stairs, found the spiders were the first thing in its way, and simply started fighting them, the way anything hungry and irritable does when the nearest available target happens to be smaller than it.
The crates explained the rest. UG found them wedged behind the old room’s collapsed far wall, three of them, splintered clean open by the same blast that had brought the floor down — proper cargo crates, old enough that the wood had gone soft, with markings stamped into the lids that meant nothing to him but meant something to Lichmyface, who stood over the broken slats for a long moment before saying, in his own way, nothing at all. Stone fiends weren’t native to anywhere near Founder’s Point. Somebody had shipped these two in, packed and crated like cargo, presumably meant for some purpose that had never got as far as unpacking them, and left them exactly where he’d left everything else in this room: unfinished, unexplained, and sealed in the dark for however many years it had taken the goblins to blow the crates open by accident.
UG felt, on balance, that being crated up for years and then freed hungry into a room full of giant spiders was a fairly reasonable excuse for a bad mood.
UG was due back at Zul’Aman before long, and had no particular plan for what to do about either gargoyle before he left, beyond hoping they’d still be there when he got back. He mentioned as much to Lichmyface on his way out, in the tone of a man discussing a mild inconvenience rather than two crated house guests he’d already started thinking of as his.
“Keep an eye on the pets while I’m gone, would you?”
Lichmyface looked at him for a moment, said nothing, and went to go and find out what a gargoyle actually ate.
Leave a Reply