Mazerynth

by Jeffery Russell

  Contents

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Characters

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Afterword

  The

  Dungeoneers

  MAZERYNTH

  Jeffery Russell

  Copyright 2019 Jeffery Russell

  All rights reserved

  Cover title font by Anthony B. McElveen

  Cover header/footer font by Carlos Mario Peña Solis

  The first movie I remember seeing in a theater was

  “The Man With the Golden Gun”

  This one’s for Dad.

  The Dungeoneers:

  Command Team

  Thud: Leader of The Dungeoneers.

  Ginny: Leader of Trap Team.

  Nibbly: Leader of Acquisitions Team.

  Gong: Leader of Vanguard Team.

  Trap Team

  Mungo: Gadgeteer.

  Cardamon: Engineer.

  Acquisitions Team

  Dadger Ben: Public relations and requisitions.

  Leery: Inaccessible asset recovery.

  Tuft: Carrier of particularly heavy things.

  Support Team

  Goin: Animal wrangler.

  Gammi: Cook.

  Doc: Medical services.

  Gryngo: Demolitions.

  Giblets: Geologist.

  Ping: Logistics.

  Durham: Cartographer.

  Ruby: Scribe.

  Vanguard Team

  Clink: Siege weaponry.

  Rasp: Blacksmith.

  Grottimus: Special weapons and tactics.

  Keezix: Tactical weapons and tactics.

  Max: No one is quite sure what Max does.

  Chapter One

  It looked like a snake from a distance, fuzzy and brown, slithering across the golden ripples of sand. Any closer and the ripples resolved into dunes and the snake into a long line of camels plodding their way across, shadows stretched long and thin by the reddening sun. Their riders were bundled up in advance of the night-time cold.

  It was best to be on the first camel in line. One could determine a person's rank in a desert caravan by counting how many camels back in line they were. Galeppo was on camel number twelve. Not the best but a finer place than on one of the eight camels that followed after. Plus he had a true point of pride. While not among the higher ranks of riders he was, in fact, on the most important camel. He bore the djinn lamp.

  Bandits assumed that anything of importance was on the first camel with the highest ranked rider. So clever to put it on camel twelve instead! And all the other riders were sworn to defend him with their lives. Well, sworn to defend the lamp at least. And its bearer by extension. The djinn lamp was a hard lump of weight tucked into his tunic, resting above his belt on his right side. His arm obscured the bulge, at least enough that a casual observer would attribute it to a fold in his cloak. It seemed almost silly compared with the other precautions but everything helped. A lamp being moved was no small matter. Knowledge of a change in a lamp’s location was the sort of thing that caused armies to maneuver and gods to stay up late. There was a salt caravan over the dunes to the east and Galeppo’s group was meant to appear as one of its bands of outriders. This was again to give bandits a more obvious target and to make their own group one to avoid. And even now, far behind them in the city of Akhom-Te a more obvious caravan was being assembled. A false target to give any spies something to watch and report on.

  Galeppo was unnerved by the secrecy. Usually the movement of a lamp was a publicized event. It was a means for the Knearaohs to flex their muscles and apply pressure against an adversary. But moving a lamp in secret? That was trouble. That sounded like the sort of thing a Knearaoh might do if they were considering actually using it.

  They were skirting their way around the north side of the Reyah Oasis, far enough out to avoid the view of anyone camped there. The route of a salt caravan was a well guarded secret even when it wasn’t a ruse. As was written, ‘The value of gold is measured by salt.’

  He sniffed and frowned. The breeze had died and the residual aromas of the camels in front of him had thickened in pungency. The air was so still that it made the hairs on the back of his neck crawl like beetles. There was a muffled thump of noise from beyond the dune, followed by a creak and a clank. The ridge line of the dune hazed as something disturbed the fine grains of sand along the top. A stray breeze? Something shaking the ground?

  The storm came over the top of the dune with the shriek of a banshee.

  Angry, billowing clouds of sand came sweeping toward them. Galeppo scarcely had time to raise his mask before the storm was upon them. The camels turned away from the onslaught, eyelids dropping to guard from the stinging gusts. Galeppo lowered his head to protect his own eyes, raising one hand to ward off the wind. All he could see around him was a swirl of brown, the rest of the caravan as invisible as if they didn’t exist. The roar howling through his head broke apart any attempt to reason, whipping his thoughts into confetti. He clutched his arm tight to his chest, protecting the lamp as if it would blow away.

  What was that? Something moving, there at the limit of his vision. A shadow amid the sand. Another member of the caravan? The shadow rose high above him. He looked up in astonishment. The sand tore at his eyes and he had to turn away but that brief glimpse made his guts turn to mud. Two great eyes, glowing in the air above him, looking down.

  Galeppo jammed his heels into the camel but it was an unnecessary motivation. The camel hadn’t been keen on the giant shape in the sand either and was already galloping blindly through the storm.

  Too slow.

  Galeppo opened his mouth in a mask-muffled yell as an armor-clad hand the size of a hippo came out of the curtain of sand. It swept across the top of the camel, slapping him off the saddle and spinning him into the sky. The wind grabbed him and tossed him end over end.

  Was he flying? Would he ever come down?

  No and yes, as it turned out. Sand is surprisingly hard when encountered at high speed. He groaned and rolled onto his side, trying to curl himself into a ball around the djinn lamp.

  The great shadow with glowing eyes stood above, looking down. It reached for him with its gleaming hand.

  ***

  Count Vimple slipped down the hallway like a shadow floating between moon-beams. He could smell the blood. Warm and heady, a perfumed trail. It tantalized and teased and he was oh, so hungry. His long, pale fingers flexed at his sides, as if imagining themselves wrapped around a neck. The hall was long and gray with gauzy white curtains that billowed in an unfelt breeze.

  They were close. He could smell them.

  Not human though. Definitely not elf. A dwarf, perhaps. Yes. The smell of stone and beard. He’d not had dwarf in decades. You had to kneel down to get a good bite in, resulting in an undignified event for all concerned. People had expectations when it came to vampires, and crouching and gnawing like a dog wasn’t one of them. At least not for a proper vampire. He couldn’t speak for the newer, lesser vampire generation. Barbarians, the lot of them.

  No, it was the old ways for him. He’d been around long enough to have invented some of them. Pouncing from the shadows with glowing red eyes and long finger claws? That was a Vimple original.

  He came to a halt, the cloaking tendrils of shadow flickerin
g and twisting around him. He’d come to the end of the hall and the room beyond had been tampered with. It was one of many studies. They all had names that he couldn’t be bothered to learn. This one was decorated in cobwebbed green and had two doorways leading out. One of them had been doused with holy oil.

  They knew he was after them. There was more than one smell drifting from beyond the oil. Definitely dwarves. The holy oil was a futile gesture. There were many ways to traverse Vimple Hall. He let out a gurgled chuckle and edged through the other door. It creaked open onto a narrow passage with a red carpet patterned with black bramble. He caught a flicker of motion at the far end. A dwarf, darting out of sight. Count Vimple gave chase. The prey was so close. He reached the end of the corridor and stopped at the corner. Perhaps this was some sort of trap? He crept forward, holding his cape in front. There. Braids of garlic criss-crossed the hallway. Ridiculous. And not something that was going to stop him. The thin door to the left led to one of the servants’ stairs. He’d be the spider in the ceiling above. He swirled up the stairs in a billow of smoke, coalescing in the attic above, sniffing. They’d not been up here. No one had been up here since the roofing crew a month before. This was his game once again. He crept through the room. No board would creak beneath his feet. No skittering rat would give him away. This was his family Hall and he moved within it as if it were his own form. There were secret gaps in the floor throughout the attic. They allowed someone who knew their placement to spy on any of the rooms below, an unseen phantom that knew all. He made his way between the stacks of boxes and furniture that had accumulated over the years. At least a few of his secret peepholes now had couches on top of them.

  He took a deep sniff, focusing his concentration on any whiff of scent from the rooms below. The smell of blood was one that he could pick out from the faintest of traces. There. Toward the far end of the attic. Different, though. Gnome blood. He licked his lips. Gnomes were even shorter than dwarves but you didn’t have to bend down to bite them. A gnome was small enough to pick up and eat like a melon.

  A note of suspicion chimed in his head. The roofing team from a month before. There had been a dwarf and a gnome, had there not? Yes, and a human as well. He remembered because the gnome had been wearing a flagrantly false cat-hair beard. And now a gnome and a dwarf had invaded his manor. Was there a connection? Was there a human lurking around somewhere as well? Had they been thieves all along, searching for ways to break in and for things to steal?

  He neared the source of the scent and caught a whiff of cat. He didn’t have any cats as they got along poorly with the rats and the bats, not to mention the wolves that lurked in the woods beyond. He doubted that burglars would have brought a cat with them. Not every train of logic ended with a cat-fur beard as being the most likely cause of anything but this was where he found himself. The smell of warm gnome blood and musty cat fur. Definitely the odd little fellow with the goggles from the roofing team. He’d had some sort of wind-up hammer that he’d used on the roofing nails.

  The peephole at the far end of the attic was next to the trap-door that allowed attic access from this end of the manor. He leaned forward to peer through it with a pale eye. There, at the bottom of the stairs. The gnome, crouched down, his back toward the count. It was fiddling with something on the floor. Another pathetic “vampire-trap,” the count suspected. What would this one be? The wooden-stake crossbow? A silver holy symbol on the floor?

  Irrelevant now. Count Vimple flowed through the peephole, becoming the lurking shadow at the top of the stair (another Vimple original). These foolish thieves had the gall to think they could come into his manor and defile his home? Now came the repercussions. It was time for the Vimple Classic. He poised to spring, his fingers elongating until his hands resembled clawed spiders. His eyes gleamed red, leaving ghostly traces in the air as they moved. He opened his mouth and bared his teeth, the drool already dripping from the barbed fangs. He was going to hit that gnome hard enough to crack it like a blood-egg.

  Below him the gnome glanced about through a set of goggles that looked heavy enough to cause neck pain. Were the hairs on the back of its neck tingling? Wrong species, Vimple corrected himself. Gnomes didn’t grow hair, apart from occasional cat-hair beards at least.

  Count Vimple pounced. He sprang forward as a cloud of darkness, claws reaching out to grab, razor-filled mouth ready to rip and tear. He slammed into the gnome with the full force of an ancient vampire’s rage.

  He had long enough to register a moment of surprise as the gnome and the hallway shattered into a thousand pieces at the impact. Glittering shards spun away in the morning light, catching the reds and golds of the sunrise and refracting them into sparkles of brilliance as Vimple disintegrated into a cloud of flaming ashes. The cloud drifted out, spreading into a smoky haze of sunbeams..

  Mungo the gnome gave a satisfied nod from the hole in the side of the manor. They’d installed the mirror a month ago, placing it along the lower part of the wall where it reflected the matching wall opposite. A simple illusion that would have been easily spotted by anyone passing by. Unless it was a vampire and didn’t have a reflection to give it away.

  Cardamon, the source of the dwarf smells, stepped up behind him. Of the dwarves on the team he was the shortest, only a fistful of inches taller than the gnome. His nose poked out from the depths of his hood.

  “That him?” he asked.

  Mungo gave a grand wave of his arm at the drifting ashes. “May I present Count Vimple, the vampyre!” He thought it a rather clever pun and was disappointed when Cardamon didn’t react to it.

  “Why d’ya think the reflection of their clothes go invisible too?” the dwarf asked.

  “That’s your imminent concern?”

  Cardamon shrugged. “Something I was wonderin’ about.”

  “I believe it’s an aura they project. Being invisible in mirrors would be a significantly inferior quality if they had to be naked for it to function.”

  The breeze shifted. Cardamon coughed. “Probably shouldn’t breathe too much of him in, eh? Seems the sort of thing that would lead to a lung condition.”

  “Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovampireconiosis,” said Mungo.

  “Ha! A gold eagle per syllable over five. You know the rule. That’s…hmmm…”

  They started back down the hall to rejoin the team.

  “Lose count?” Mungo asked. “Well I’m certainly not going to tell you.”

  “There were at least three or four extras in there.”

  “I’ll happily agree to three.”

  “Oh? That means it was at least six.”

  Mungo gave him a wounded look, magnified by the goggle lenses and framed with his calico beard. “Fine, make it four then.”

  “Five!”

  “Deal!” Mungo began counting the coins out of his pouch.

  “I just got robbed, didn’t I?”

  ***

  The center of the town of Soara was a once-tasteful circular plaza of alternating red and gray paving stones. A fountain at the center featured a statue of a woman looking down, hands spread as if inviting passers-by to have a drink. Nothing but brown leaves and an old boot rested within the fountain itself. The statue’s hair was more moss than stone and brown grass outlined the paving stones.

  Thud the dwarf stood at the northern edge of the plaza, facing a wooden building that would have looked at home on top of a clock. The words ‘MASTRO HAU’ were burned into a plaque above the door. “Master House.” The Town Hall. Thud was wearing what he thought of as his ‘meet the locals’ outfit: the customary dwarven kilt and boots, his finest green shirt, blue scarf, embroidered red vest and black coat. Each piece individually impressive but together making a firm and bold statement. He had a bow tie on as well, completely hidden by his beard, and a scuffed top hat that added a foot in height to the four feet he’d come by naturally.

  His spokesdwarf Dadger Ben stood at his side. Dadger wore a tailored coat that, while more stylish, was n
owhere near as eye-catching. It was part of the point of having a spokesdwarf. Town officials always preferred dealing with the respectable-looking dwarf over the one that looked about to sell them a ticket to enter a tent.

  Nibbly was to his other side, wearing a blue robe and a matching turban with a green jewel that made him almost as tall as Thud with his top hat. His white beard was neat and square and his mustache gleamed with wax. Mungo hung back, seeming more concerned with why the fountain wasn’t working than with their impending visit to the mayor, the Hau-Maestrum. Thud brought Nibbly along whenever money was concerned and Mungo whenever math was concerned. Money and math were largely the same thing to Thud’s mind. He still held hopes that Mungo’s abilities with imaginary numbers and non-linear equations would someday work out to equaling more gold pieces than there should have been. Quantum accounting, the gnome called it.

  Thud stepped forward and knocked on the door, hoping that there would be an answer. The hour was beginning to grow late. A few lanterns had been lit around the edges of the plaza and a group of frogs had taken up a discussion somewhere nearby. It had taken extra time to haul the ballista to Vimple Hall and back. They hadn’t ended up needing it but having it loaded with a silver-tipped bolt of ash soaked in garlic-infused holy oil had been a good plan B.

  The top half of the door opened. The red-faced man behind it frowned at the absence of a person before glancing down and seeing the dwarves. His mustache was slightly off to one side as if it had been caught on its way somewhere.

  “Ah!” he said and beamed at them. He leaned forward and put his elbows on the door’s counter-top.

  “Good evening to you, sir,” Thud said. “Allow me to introduce myself. The name is Thud and I’m the leader of The Dungeoneers.”

  “A pleasure,” the Hau-Maestrum said, not looking at all certain about the honesty of that statement.