"Maybe," Ruby says, sounding dubious.

They continue to walk mostly in silence, until a few minutes later the stairs finally spit them out into a circular chamber with a low ceiling. An unlit stone kiln can be found in the center, and there are three ways out of the room other than the one they just came in through: one barred by a locked door, one by a half-open metal grate, and one unobstructed.

There are no signs of draugar.

"J'zargo suggests we split up to cover more ground."

"No!"

"Absolutely not, that's how you get ambushed by five draugar."

"J'zargo can—"

"J'zargo cannot. We stick together and help each other."

Onmund summons a flame in one hand and casts Ironflesh on himself then leads the way into the doorway without a door.

And immediately takes a step back, grimacing.

The small side room is mostly filled with crumbled debris out of which sticks out the upper half of a desiccated corpse, looking old enough it should have been reduced to just bones by now were they in a less cold area.

Ruby pokes the corpse with Telekinesis, then throws a bolt of Lesser Turn Undead at it for good measure. Nothing happens, so he steps up to it and crouches down to take a closer look at it. Then he shrugs and turns around, standing back up.

The wooden door seems to be locked, so J'zargo leads the way into the half open gate, pulling it all the way open with Telekinesis.

"Should I use one of the scrolls of Detect Dead Colette gave us?"

"How does it work?"

"It makes the caster able to see all corpses and undead of any creature that has or used to recently have a soul or another form of animating magic. Uh, through walls, and within a certain maximum distance that usually depends on the caster's strength, but I'm not sure how the scroll works."

"It depends on the strength of the one reading the scroll. J'zargo should be the one to do it."

No one wants to argue with J'zargo about who the strongest of the four is so Brelyna just grabs one of the scrolls inside her expanded pouch and offers him it.

J'zargo sends a pulse of magicka into the scroll, causing it to crumble to dust. He looks around, then up, then down, then starts to lead the way.

Before they run into a draugr¹, however, they find a nest of ice wraiths², which Onmund in particular can help the most with via judicious and intense applications of fire.

(¹ Singular form of "draugar".)
(² Ice wraiths are ice elementals typically in the form of flying serpentine multi-segmented creatures.)

Ice wraiths can only survive around, well, ice, and the reason there's a nest of them there is that apparently there's a narrow hole in the ceiling that goes all the way up to the surface and which has allowed some snow to find its way there. Combined with the high amounts of ambient magic in and around the College, it's no wonder they formed here.

The first knot of draugar is sufficiently close-by, however that the noises of the fight attract them to this room.

Three of them, desiccated just like the corpse from earlier but with animating magic within that imbues them with inherent hostility. One is unarmed and tries to attack them with its bare hands, but the other two have old, rusted weapons, one a sword and one an axe. The one with the axe also wears a helmet, but the rest of its clothes are in tatters.

Brelyna starts sending bolt after bolt of Lesser Turn Undead at them, and the effects are immediate and obvious.

Turn Undead is an interesting spell family, and a more specialised version of a wider class of spells that stand out from most others: rather than attempting to use one's will to impose changes on reality from what it would otherwise be, these spells align one's will with reality. Dead creatures should be inanimate, and their souls should be in Aetherius*, so what these spells do is try to reassert these truths. Draugar killed using these spells typically cannot be reanimated with their souls, as the combined will of the mage casting the spells and of the souls themselves are typically enough to overwhelm any further attempts to call them back to the material plane.

(* Aetherius is the realm that surrounds Oblivion (which, itself, surrounds Mundus), and is where most souls that did not worship or work with Daedra go after death.)

But also: zombies are flammable. Burn.

Once the three draugar have been dealt with, J'zargo continues to lead the way towards more draugar, as the battles were quick enough his Detect Dead spell is still up.

"I kind of expected draugar to be... scarier than this."

"They vary a lot in power, depending on how they were animated and by whom, how powerful they were in life, and how long they've been dead for," Brelyna says, paraphrasing a book she's read on the topic. "The best way for a draugr to remain powerful is for it to be inside an enchanted tomb; since these are meant to have come from the ruins below the city, they've probably been out of their tomb for years, maybe hundreds of years."