Fifteen minutes earlier — the dungeonAstrid Olofsdottir paced around the glowing pentagram.An interesting specimen, she thought.A clever solution. A stone saturated with death emanations...Crossing between worlds demanded enormous amounts of energy. That was why she'd ordered the fools on the Other Side to find subjects steeped in death.A properly prepared specimen carried enough accumulated death emanations to survive the passage between worlds. The stored energy fueled most of the ritual.Usually, though, it wasn't enough. The rest had to come from the subject's own life force.The weakling turned out to be far more interesting than expected. The fools on the Other Side had overlooked what they thought was nothing more than a trinket.It wasn't.The pendant was jet, saturated with death emanations so dense Astrid could feel them from across the ritual circle. Thousands of deaths had soaked into that stone over the centuries. Jet was one of the finest natural vessels for such en

I was still neck-deep in shit, except now Yuri wasn't here anymore... what was his last name? Streltsov? Something like that. Ah, right—Strelnikov.Yeah.Now I was completely on my own.I cracked the toilet door open and peeked into the hallway. The armed guards were gone. Good.There was a decent chance they'd gone to free their Hornless Mistress, which meant I needed to move before they came back.I shifted my grip on the wooden mallet and stepped into the corridor. It was a pathetic excuse for a weapon, but at least I knew how to use it. Give me a sword or a spear, and I'd probably end up stabbing myself by accident. It happens more often than you'd think—even to medieval reenactors.Back when I worked EMS, we picked up a guy who'd managed exactly that. Well, not stabbed himself, but close enough. He'd taken a swing at a target with some enormous sword—I couldn't tell you what kind—and the blade had rebounded straight into his forehead. Luckily, it was blunt, as the law required. E

About an hour later, two ruined buildings emerged from the gray wasteland. By my estimate, I'd covered another five kilometers. Adding that to the ten or so I'd walked before the darkness tried to lure me away, I was finally putting some real distance between myself and the Hornless Woman's estate."What do you think, Koshka?"The cat answered the only way he ever did. He walked straight toward the ruins.I shrugged and followed. Sometimes a ruin was just... a ruin. Unfortunately, someone else had gotten there long before me. Anything useful had been stripped clean. Not a scrap of metal remained. Not even a bent nail.I couldn't help thinking that throwing my dagger into that filthy outhouse had been an incredibly expensive mistake. Metal was worth a fortune in this world. Near one of the houses stood a well, half-buried beneath windblown sand.I looked inside anyway.Dry. Not even damp.Of course.I let out a weary sigh and sat on an old chopping block. Fishing a pack of Churchills f

"No."Provos shook one paw."First we negotiate compensation."I blinked."Compensation?""Three meals a day."One claw extended."Fresh water."A second claw."A suitable female companion at least twice a week."A third."No less than ten minutes of petting every evening."Another claw."And a sleeping place near your source of necro-energy."He thought for a moment."Given our current circumstances, we may temporarily invoke the force majeure clause and accept partial fulfillment of contractual obligations."He looked pleased with himself."Once conditions improve, however, both parties shall perform all duties in full."He looked straight at me."So... Do we have an agreement?"I couldn't help laughing."And what exactly do I get in return? And while we're at it, explain what this patronage business actually was.""I'll answer the second question first."Vopros sat with all the dignity of a professor beginning a lecture."Patronage is essentially this arrangement..."He smiled."...

I blinked.“The world itself is doing just fine. In fact, it's rapidly copying the Noosphere from the world it's latched onto.”I stared at him.“You lost me again.”“Portals!”Vopros practically shouted the word.“The portals didn't go anywhere!”“Right. Now I’m with you.” I nodded. “So what’s left here?”“The undrained remnants of a dead Noosphere. Technologies beyond anything we can comprehend, still lingering in the very air of this world. That’s what’s here,” the cat replied. “The Noosphere may be dead, but it still exists. And what kind of carriers does it have? That’s right—things that are dead, yet somehow still exist.”He paused.“And somehow, it’s connected to the three moons orbiting this planet.”“There are three of them?!” I blurted out.“Yep.”Vopros nodded as if that were the least interesting thing in the world.“I call them Yellow, Orange, and Red. Red is the most dangerous—it raises the dead. Orange increases plant fertility. And Yellow amplifies magic.”He spoke as