Dungeon Lord- Ancient Traditions

by Hugo Huesca

  Back at boot-camp, we would’ve flayed whoever cleared those two for guard duty, Ria’s voice told Kes as she followed Heorghe deep into the forge.

  Have you ever wondered why there’s few professional kaftar armies but many mercenary bands? Kes asked, fully aware that she was technically speaking to herself. They would much rather find something to punch rather than sit down and listen to some old ass talk about hand gestures.

  If I shaped your rowdy ass into something almost resembling proper shape, then this should be easy enough.

  “Sure, Sarge, whatever you say,” Kes muttered, rolling her eyes.

  “Sorry, did you say something, Kes?” Heorghe asked.

  “So when are you expecting your first grandchild?” Kes hurried to ask.

  The rest of the trip was spent with Heorghe talking about family planning. By the way he spoke, Kes suspected that the Forgemaster believed conception involved him wanting it to happen strongly enough, with the newly-weds having little to no say in the matter.

  They arrived at a corner of the forge. “Here we are,” said Heorghe, grabbing one of the small brass chandeliers from the wall and pulling down. Gears ground and rusty iron screeched against rusty iron as a series of pulleys slid a section of the wall sideways to reveal a passage downstairs.

  “Secret door,” Heorghe explained. “Ed suggested a few mirage traps, but I have a love for the classics.”

  He brought her through a cramped passageway that ended on a heavy iron door. Kes could’ve sworn she heard a small explosion going off in the distance. Had the ceiling shaken just a little or had that been her imagination?

  “Here, put these on,” Heorghe said, grabbing a pair of thin devices from hangers on the wall and passing her one. It looked like some sort of tin diadem with a pair of leather cups at each end. “Cover your ears. Trust me, you’ll regret it if you don’t.”

  Kes did so and tightened a pair of straps so the cups fit snugly around her ears, dampening all sound. After that, Heorghe handed her a thick leather vest that made both of them look as if they had potbellies, and also a pair of thick safety goggles.

  After she was done adding protection after protection, Kes could barely see or hear, and had to shuffle her way because of all the padding she carried on her.

  “Is this all necessary?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “Is this all necessary?” she yelled.

  “Only on a good day!” Heorghe yelled back and grunted as he pushed the iron door open. “On a bad day we’re probably fucked, anyway. Hey, lads, you still alive here? Come say hello!”

  The room they stepped into was a long rectangle divided in half, with the farthest half mostly empty except for some training dummies in rough shape standing near the distant wall. The first half was cramped, with a pair of tables full of tools and wooden models, as well as chalkboards strewn with calculations, and even more tools and jars of oily ingredients arrayed disorderly on wooden stands all along the walls.

  Two old, bony gnomes barely raised their eyes as the Forgemaster and the Marshal entered. Kes barely recognized them as gnomes at first, they almost looked like fiends wearing their goggles and the rest of their safety gear. Both gnomes sat next to each other, working on different parts of a disassembled iron-gray tube.

  “Careful,” one of the gnomes said. “There are primed explosive runes in here. Don’t touch anything.” His long gray hair had a bald spot in the middle and was split into two ratty ponytails. As Kes carefully approached, she realized his chair was a sort of metallic contraption with wheels, not entirely unlike one of the Gray Highway’s wagons. He had a nervous air to him, as if he expected an explosion at any time, and was ready to make a run for it at the drop of a hat.

  “Actually, please do,” said the other. “Take me out of my misery.” A long burn traveled up the side of his face all the way to his scalp, leaving his remaining hair styled as a sort of war-crest. He seemed the nicest of the two. “Another week working on a dead-end and I’ll have enough of a mood to become a Dungeon Lord myself.”

  “And who are you two, exactly?” Kes asked, eyeing their handiwork. “And what am I looking at?”

  “Ah, is this a test of our progress?” asked the war-crest gnome. “Apologies, Ma’am, but there’s not much to show.”

  “Nonsense,” Heorghe said. “Kes, these two are the brothers Zeeves and Moog. Guys, this is Marshal Kessih. Zeeves here—” he pointed at the wheeled gnome “—is an Artificer with a focus on siege weaponry. Moog is a Wizard who specializes on explosions. They’ve been working with us since you left.”

  “Specialists?” Kes asked, interested. All specialists were in high demand in the Haunt. “Where did you come from, Zeeves and Moog? There’s not many of your kind in Undercity.”

  “That’s a long story,” said Moog sheepishly.

  “Give me the quick version, then.”

  “We hail from the Whyrias Archipelago, but that’s in the distant past. For years, we worked as… forceful associates in the fleet of the feared Captain Averof, father of Queen Pallia.”

  “You were slaves?” Kes asked.

  “Pirates don’t keep slaves. You are always free to leave,” Moog said. “As long as you don’t mind swimming a couple hundred miles to the nearest shore. In any case, specialists are treated well. We built explosive canisters for them, and as a reward they left us be. Until the incident—” he gave his brother a stern glance.

  “I told them not to touch anything,” was all Zeeves said, not taking his eyes off his work. Kes made sure to stay well away from his part of the table from then on.

  “In any case,” Moog went on, “Queen Pallia didn’t take well to the death of her father. She would’ve fed us to the sharks, had it not been for the fateful intervention of the heroic Bard Alder—”

  Kes blinked. “Wait, what? When was Alder messing around with Pirates?”

  “During your stay with the carrion avians,” Heorghe told her. “Did you think everyone just twiddled their thumbs waiting for you?”

  “You see, Ma’am, the Bard Alder was at the time a prisoner of the Pirates. Apparently, he arrived with the intention of, ah, earning the favor of the Queen. It did not go well.”

  “It went spectacularly bad,” added Zeeves. “Pallia hates musical numbers.”

  “He had no way of knowing that!” Moog said sternly. “In any case, Alder broke free of his bounds at the last second, and during the ruckus we managed to jump into his escape boat. We managed to survive the pirates’ arrows only thanks to Alder’s masterful display of illusions and escape skills—”

  “If by that you mean he screamed all the way back to shore—” Zeeves noted.

  “Bardic screams to mess with the pirates’ minds and throw off their aim, Zeeves, he explained it himself,” Moog said heatedly. “You know what? Whatever. I cannot tell a story with you jumping in every two seconds. In the end, Alder brought us to the Haunt, and we’ve been working here ever since.” He gave the worktable a dubious glance. “To be honest with you, Ma’am, I think Dungeon Lord Wraith is testing our usefulness by throwing us into hopeless research before letting us have a go at the real stuff.”

  Kes made a mental note to ask Alder exactly what in the Wetlands had he been thinking, trying to seduce a pirate that fancied herself a Queen.

  “Let’s see this hopeless research of yours,” Kes said.

  Artificer Zeeves reached for a hand-sized iron device carefully held by a wooden stand in the middle of the table. Kes thought the object resembled some sort of pocket cudgel an assassin may wield to smash someone’s back of the head. The way Zeeves held it was entirely wrong for that, though. “This is the Artifact that Lord Wraith brought to us when we first arrived at the Haunt,” Zeeves explained. “According to him, it’s devastating technology from his home world.” He examined the thing with a mixture of mistrust and admiration. “He called it a redoubler. It’s supposed to be some sort of projectile thrower powered by small chemical explosions. W
hatever it is, it is beautiful craftsmanship.” The gnome took an appreciative look down the hole at the end of the redoubler’s long tube. “Just look at these ridges.”

  “Some parts in that thing are very small,” Heorghe pointed out. “There is nothing magic about it, I could make one in a couple of months. The problem is the projectiles. According to Ed, they are the source of the explosions, but the redoubler was loaded only with four.”

  “So it is like a rune?” Kes asked.

  Wizard Moog shook his head sadly. “If only that were so easy. The projectiles use a chemical like the ones found in toxins or elixirs. Lord Wraith called it ‘fun powder.’ I like the name, I certainly would enjoy wielding it. It’s supposed to be a siege weapon on itself, capable of bringing down entire fortifications, and only a few dozen grains are enough to power the redoubler’s projectiles.”

  Kes raised an eyebrow. She had spent long enough around Alder to mistrust any tall stories about anything she hadn’t seen with her own two eyes. However, Ed had acted pretty sure about the redoubler’s capabilities. A weapon like the fun powder could help deal with the Militant Army, if they could make it in enough quantities.

  She noted the amount of jars with murky ingredients strewn around the stands and the table. There was even a sack on the floor of something that she could swear was fertilizer. “So, can you make new fun powder and more projectiles?”

  “That’s the problem,” Zeeves said. “The secret of fun powder was closely guarded on Lord Wraith’s home world. It had to be, because he doesn’t have it—or is keeping it from us for some reason.” He pointed at one of the jars. “He claims it has something to do with sulfur, which makes sense because that’s as Dark an ingredient as they come, but also bat guano, and human pee.”

  “He has to be joking,” Kes said. “A fun powder made out of excrement? That’s something a batblin kid would come up with.” However, Ed didn’t really strike her as the kind of person that wasted people’s time on a tasteless jest.

  “Ed insisted,” Heorghe said, shrugging. “It’s not like he would hurt anyone but himself by wasting the gnomes on this instead of making him a trebuchet.”

  Not for the first time, Kes shuddered at the idea of the nonsensical rules that governed the world Ed had come from. The Plane of Earth, which consisted mostly of water, and whose inhabitants’ dung could explode at any moment. No wonder the Dungeon Lord of the Haunt had the reputation of an eccentric.

  “So, let’s assume Ed wasn’t hit in the head too hard during the Battle for Undercity,” Kes told Heorghe. “And that Zeeves and Moog figure out the secret of this dung powder. What does it do? Can you give me a tangible example?”

  Heorghe strolled past the wooden dividers that split the room in two, headed all the way to the end, and came back with a piece of armor that Kes recognized as Ed’s old breastplate, the one he had worn at Undercity during the fight with the Heroes. The old thing had taken hits so brutal that its enchantments had broken, and it was so bent and misshapen that it had been easier to just make a new one. The damage was the sign of an armor that had done exactly what it had been built for—saving the life of its user. “A direct hit from a redoubler does this.” Heorghe pointed at a small dent an inch off the heart area, almost invisible among the wreckage.

  “That’s… it?” Kes asked. In her mind, she raised the chances that Ed had gone slightly insane by a couple notches. “An enchanted arrow could do the same to an enchanted plate. Wetlands, add a Ranger’s talents and it would be much worse. How accurate is this thing?”

  “It has less range than a longbow, I’d say,” said Artificer Zeeves. “Also, when Lord Wraith spent a projectile to demonstrate what it could do, he didn’t seem very accurate with it. However, it’s very easy to use. He just took aim, pulled back the hammer—that’s this thing at the back—and pulled the trigger, like this—” Zeeves aimed at Kes’ general direction and pulled the wedge-shaped button at the front of the redoubler’s grip. There was an audible click. Somewhere in the back of Kes’ mind, Sargent Ria stirred uneasily.

  “If that thing is anything like a rune, don’t aim it my way again until you’re sure of what it does,” Kes said dryly.

  Artificer Zeeves shrugged and returned the device to its stand.

  “It’s unloaded—the projectiles are too valuable to leave around,” Zeeves said, although that did not ease Kes’ mood.

  “When Lord Wraith fired it, there was an awful lot of noise,” Wizard Moog added, tapping at his leather diadem, same as Kes and Heorghe’s. “Perhaps that’s the weapon’s true power. It deafens your enemies.”

  That didn’t make sense. There was noise enough in a battlefield already, like a thunderstorm of clashing steel and screaming. At first glance, Kes couldn’t think of any way the redoubler could be better than a longbow. Perhaps because it required less training? We have crossbows for that, she thought. Cheaper than a rune? No way, or at least not any time soon with the amount of research required.

  Then, what? What was Ed hoping to accomplish here?

  She gave Heorghe a dubious look, which the man understood at once. “Take a look at this,” he told her, walking back to the other side of the room. Kes followed him. Heorghe pointed at a meter-long tube of rough iron. It was like the barrel of the redoubler, but at a bigger scale. A small pile of misshapen lead spheres lay next to it.

  “Perhaps the problem is size,” Heorghe explained. “The thing with Artificers and gnomes in general—they are used to working with very small parts, not like most Blacksmiths. But, judging from Ed’s description, his redoubler thing sounds simple enough that I can understand it. Big boom powder goes at one end, then you add a projectile, then you add fire, and now you have a controlled explosion.” He patted the great barrel. “If that’s true, then this baby right here should do the same that his redoubler does, but better. Maybe at this size we get something that Alvedhra’s arrows couldn’t do better, right?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. It’s hard to imagine it without a real example,” Kes said. “For all we know, the barrel could blow up. Even if it works, the weight would be an issue.” She knelt next to the barrel and studied it closely. “Perhaps if we added wheels we could use a dozen of them on the battlefield. Even better, we could leave them along the walls of Undercity and defend the port that way. Assuming we get the fun powder first, of course. And it still won’t do us any good during the Endeavor—it’s too unwieldy.”

  Heorghe shrugged. “So it’s a hard puzzle to crack. I don’t mind. These kinds of projects are all kinds of fun. But maybe you can figure it out, Kes. I am a Blacksmith, the gnomes are Artificers. This thing right here is the tool of a warrior. Maybe a warrior’s mind can solve the riddle.”

  Kes hunched behind the barrel and gazed at the end of the room, where the open end was aimed. One of the training dummies stood there, as if challenging her to take it down. What can I do that these experts can’t? “I’ll think about it,” she said. “But don’t expect any miracles.”

  Strange metallic contraptions clanked and whirred along the ceiling of the Research Facility, and the powered-off Hero Rylan Silverblade seemed as if to sleep peacefully under the care of the dozen or so researchers that studied the crystal vat that contained it.

  Alder had no idea what half of the vials or glyphs strewn along the floor did, but the bookshelves that littered the walls brought him a bittersweet memory of the Bardic School’s library, where he and the other students—his first friends—had spent many sleepless nights cramming for the next day’s test. That life was long done and over, but sometimes, just before he went to sleep, the Bard wondered how different his life would’ve turned out had he just traveled through the Heiligian countryside like most of the students.

  Instead, he had listened to the call of adventure, and the merchant ship he had traveled along had run headfirst into a bunch of pirates. Since then, life had been a constant adventure, for good and ill.

  He gave the books one nostalgic glance-ove
r. He probably wouldn’t understand them even if he tried. Only specialist Bards ever amassed the Knowledge: spellcraft ranks that these researchers had in their character sheets. A few of them even had talents that allowed them to remain awake longer as long as they were studying. Alder shivered. Studying had never been his forte, not even in Elaitra. That was more Lavy’s deal.

  Next to him, Klek looked even more out of place. One of the high-ranked researchers, a lizardman fiend from the Netherworldly region of Bregor, had tried to shoo the batblin out of the Facility before “the mammal dirtied something up.” His older coworkers had quickly explained that Klek outranked everyone there. Technically, with Lavy and Diviner Pholk off doing Murmur-knew-what in the Xovia citadel, Klek and Alder were in charge here.

  The lizardman, Churla, gave Alder a weary, resentful glance. “Is there anything we can help you with, Master Chronicler?” the fiend asked.

  Alder forced himself to take his eyes off the timid succubus doing some number-crunching near a corner. “Klek and I are here for a progress report. On the Hero research, of course.”

  “Of course,” Churla said. “No one ever wants to know about my additions to the Library’s classification system.” His black tongue flicked in and out of his mouth, tasting the air. “Very well. Follow me, Master Chronicler, Master Adventurer Slayer.”

  He brought them in front of the Hero’s vat. Alder saw his reflection on the glass, peering out with curious eyes.

  “On a general note,” the researcher said, “we’re doing fantastic progress on our studies. Our stands are filling with documents and blueprints on the inner ley lines of the Hero, or, using Lord Wraith’s terminology, its magical cirkuitry. Heroes are built mostly out of Ivalian technology—although a few of its protocols we haven’t seen before anywhere. Creating a Heroic body is not a huge problem… if you have the resources, the talent, and a preserved fragment of a Dungeon Lord’s heart.” The fiend shivered. For all creatures of the Dark, treating a Mantle like the Inquisition had been doing for years was akin to heresy. “To speak the truth, I think it was a good thing that the Militant Church made their Heroes so hard to capture. Otherwise a third kingdom could’ve stumbled into the secret and entered the war. That’s the last thing the Dark needs.”