by DB King
Ben and Anja were being driven back, as their foe slammed blow after wooden blow into their defense. Its toothy mouth was wide as it reached for Ben.
Blood poured down Ben’s face from a wound to his forehead, and he was blinking at it, trying to clear his eyes. Anja looked grim.
A sudden thought struck Marcus.
“Anja!” he yelled. “Ben! Get back!”
They both obeyed his order immediately, leaping back from the tree-demon. Marcus accessed his summoning spell. He had remembered the traps that had been laid for him in the Pirate’s Cove dungeon, and the way the monsters had spawned had given him an idea. The Pirate’s Cove dungeon had featured a sinking pit, where the sand gave way and sucked the adventurer down into its dark, wet depths.
“Summon trap: sinking sand!” he said, and felt the spell gather around his free hand. Anja and Ben were retreating, and the tree-demon was lurching toward them. Marcus fired the summoned trap like a projectile from his hand, and it flew in the form of a crackling ball of white fire toward the feet of the advancing monster.
The sand opened beneath the tree-demon, and the monster was mired in sinking sand. It roared in anger, and tried to use its tentacles to pull itself back out, but the more it struggled the quicker the sand dragged it down.
As Kairn finished his enemy and looked back, Anja and Ben’s tree sank into the bubbling pit. The sand closed over it.
The adventurers, huffing and out of breath, gathered together and waved up at the strange audience, who were clapping and cheering.
“Is that it?” Ben wondered out loud, wiping the blood from his eyes with a rag.
As if in answer, the crowd above them faded. The noise quieted, and, like a mist being blown away by a breath of wind, the crowd faded into gray smoke and vanished.
From behind them, there was a clang.
They turned to find the gate behind them open, the stairs leading down. Beside the gate, gold bars were piled around a wooden box.
Their loot had dropped and the gate that led away was open. They had done it. They had defeated the Arena dungeon.
Chapter 12
Talking excitedly, Marcus’s adventurers gathered up their loot and followed Marcus down the stairs and out into the dungeon lobby. As he walked, Marcus felt the updates on his most recent spell use appear. This time, he chose to show them straight away.
At the top, he found his new dungeon master level. The dungeon creation resource had dropped 200% because he’d used that to create the Arena dungeon, but the fight they had just completed had added another 25%. With satisfaction, Marcus saw the new chamber displayed as part of the total, and the most recent fight added to that total as well.
Dungeon Master: Level 3
Dungeon Chambers: 5
Dungeon fights: 10
Progress to next chamber: 50%
Marcus dismissed this set of stats and moved to the next one. He had made gains with Fleetfoot and Hero’s Might. He had gained generous level ups from using Fleetfoot on everyone, and to good effect. The effect was even more pronounced with Hero’s Might, which he had used a lot in the battle.
Spell: Fleetfoot Level 2
Level increase: 12%
Progress to next level: 24%
Spell: Hero’s Might Level 2
Level increase: 25%
Progress to next level: 39%
He had gained some increase to his Elemental Water ability, but it was slow. He had come to expect that. The Elemental abilities had the potential to be supremely powerful, and that meant that it took a lot more work to level them up. Still, he had gained a 10% increase rather than a 5% increase, and that felt good.
Elemental Ability: Water
Current Mastery Level: Apprentice
Level increase: 10%
Progress to Journeyman level: 20%
Marcus let the spell updates fade away as he led his adventurers out of the corridor and into the lobby. Previously, he had felt almost an animosity from the dungeon, an awareness that it wanted them to leave quickly. This time it felt different. Marcus could tune his senses into the awareness of the dungeon system’s presence and mood, he found, and this time he felt a sensation of pride radiating toward him. The dungeon was pleased with him and his team, it seemed. He smiled, wondering if Ella felt the same, but when he looked at her she was chatting excitedly to Anja, proud of her brave kill of the tree-demon.
“Shall we go to the Grove dungeon or straight back up to the study?” Kairn asked Marcus.
“To the study, I think,” Marcus said. “We’ve all had a bit of exercise and taken our minds off these strange dreams, but I have a feeling there are things to get on with upstairs. But first, let me see to your wound, Ben.”
Ben put down the wooden box he was carrying on the bottom step of the stairs. That was a strange piece of dungeon loot, Marcus thought as he glanced at it. He wondered what was in it, but he was sure he would find out in due course. For the moment, he told Ben to sit on the step beside the box and tip his head back.
“This might sting a little,” he warned as he examined the cut on Ben’s head. It was shallow, but it had bled heavily as scalp wounds are liable to do. It was dirty, as well, and was already swollen and puffy around the edges. Marcus did not want to see it infected. The sooner it was healed the better.
He had found out early on that his Elemental Water ability had the power to heal wounds, and he had used this to good effect in the battle of the Underway. Now, the others watched in silence as Marcus raised a hand. Water trickled from his palm. He increased the flow a little, and a steady stream of clear water splashed onto Ben’s wounded scalp.
Ben hissed in a breath between his gritted teeth as the water stung the wound. Marcus kept the flow going, and there was a bright greenish light rippling through the cut. It knitted up from both ends, like the regular healing process sped up to a matter of seconds rather than days.
When the cut had fully closed and the green light faded, Marcus took his hand away and ceased the flow of water.
Ben sat forward, wiping the water from his face and looking up at Marcus.
“It’s such an amazing power,” he said quietly. “Who would have thought that such powers existed in the real world, outside of stories?”
Marcus smiled down at him. “Who indeed? Come on. Your wound has healed. Pick up that box and let’s get upstairs. I’ve a feeling this day has more to throw at us yet.”
* * *
When they arrived at the study, they found Dirk sitting by the fire, which he had built up despite the day’s heat. He was scratching figures into an account book. He stood up as the adventurers piled into the room.
“Marcus,” he said, gesturing to the chair. “I hope you don’t mind me coming in. The guards said you’d gone down for a dungeon run, and I thought you’d be back here soon.”
“I don’t mind,” Marcus said. “You’re welcome to come in here any time. That goes for all of you. But is everything alright, Dirk? You look a bit troubled.”
Dirk sat down again. He snapped his pen and ink block into their little wooden case and tucked his book into a pocket.
“I’m okay,” he said, “but I’ve heard some troubling rumors in the slums. Things are going well there, overall, with work progressing on upgrading the buildings and the roads in the worst areas. Some of the dwellers have gone back to work on the docks and up in the Merchants’ Town already, and though there have been a few tense moments they’ve mostly been treated fairly and decently paid. Things are settling down. But there have been two killings.”
“Killings?” Marcus said. “What, connected to the new work arrangements?”
Dirk shook his head and frowned. “No… or at least, I don’t think so. They seem to have happened near an entrance to the Underway, a disused entrance that we hadn’t known about until recently. It’s up near the Middle Watch, in a part of the slums that is quiet and rarely visited.”
“And what is it about these killings that troubles you so muc
h, Dirk?” Marcus asked gently. Murders, though fairly rare, were far from unheard of in Kraken City, and the slum district could be a rough, lawless place.
The slight man fixed him with his pale eyes, and for a moment Marcus saw a flash of pure, unadulterated horror there. “Marcus, the bodies had been drained of every drop of blood.”
The others all glanced at each other, and Anja drew a breath to speak but Marcus held up a hand to stop her. “When?” he asked Dirk. “And how many times has this happened?”
Dirk raised a hand and pinched the bridge of his nose, as if his eyes wearied him. “The first seems to have happened two weeks ago, during the rains. When the body was found they started asking questions, and soon they realized that the man had been missing for a week already. After that, they kept a lookout. A strong group of armed folk got together and patrolled the area. The second victim was one of these guards. He had disappeared from his guard company and by the time they realized he was gone, it was too late. They found him in the morning, entirely drained of blood.”
“And when did this most recent attack happen?” Marcus asked.
“Last night,” Dirk replied. “When I went to the slums this morning, the place was buzzing like a stirred ant hill. They say there are vampires on the loose, but that’s ridiculous, of course…”
This time, Dirk saw the exchanged glances between the adventurers. “What is it?” he asked. “What did I say?
“Dirk,” Anja said firmly. “I’ve something I want to share with you, and I think we need to ask if you’ve had any strange dreams of late.”
Once they had brought Dirk up to speed with the situation, the little man sat slumped in his chair, stunned and silent. They had explained the strange dreams that they’d had, and Anja had shared her secret and her limited knowledge of vampirism. Ben had told Dirk about how Diremage Xeron had left the city, and also that similarly exsanguinated bodies had been found in the Merchants’ Town.
They gave him a few minutes of silence to process it all. After sitting staring into the middle distance for a while, Dirk shook himself and looked at them.
“So,” he said, “perhaps the idea that vampires are on the loose is not so crazy after all. Anja, from what you say, it seems that vampires have been in existence in the Isles of the Sun as recently as your grandfather’s time, no more than two generations back. And what was the conclusion of the vampire wars? Were all the vampires destroyed?”
Anja shook her head and chewed a fingernail. “No. There’s no way to tell, for sure—the history is suppressed in the Isles. I was born and raised there, but I only learned about the old wars from my parents when I was a teenager, and they felt they had to tell me about my antecedents. As for the conclusion of the war… I’m not sure, but I think it more likely that the remaining vampires—the darklings—were banished from the Isles of the Sun, exiled rather than killed off. And there have definitely been people like me, human-darkling hybrids, who have turned and may have infected others before they were killed.”
“Hold on, Anja,” Marcus said. “Let’s be clear about this. The hybrids, when they turn, can turn others into full vampires?”
“I think so,” Anja said with a helpless shrug. “The hybrids certainly seem to gain the powers, strengths, and weaknesses of the darkling race, and one of those powers is the ability to turn a victim who is bitten and left alive. But the hybrids lack… they lack the intelligence of the real darklings. The vampire folk are a refined, intelligent, inquiring people—they are not monsters. But a turned hybrid lacks that. The hybrids become like rabid dogs, biting anything that moves, killing and rending. They… have no humanity left in them. A vampire is more human than a hybrid in that sense.”
She shuddered, and Marcus saw that she was having a hard time keeping herself together. “All right,” he said, laying a comforting hand on her arm. “I think that’s enough talk about this just now. Anja, I really appreciate how difficult this must be for you, and I think I speak for all of us when I say I’m incredibly grateful that you’ve chosen to trust us with this secret. It makes a big difference to have someone so knowledgeable about this in our midst.”
The others all murmured in agreement, and Anja sniffed and smiled at them. Kairn cleared his throat. “Changing the subject a little here, Marcus,” he said, “but when are you going to open that box?” He was looking at the plain wooden box that had spawned as part of the dungeon loot. It was sitting on Marcus’s desk next to the stack of gold bars that had also been part of their reward.
Ben chuckled. “You can’t keep a dwarf from the prospect of treasure,” he said. “No matter what else is going on!”
“Not this dwarf at least,” Kairn agreed, his eyes glinting.
Everyone laughed, and the tension eased. Marcus saw Ella whisper something in Anja’s ear, and Anja chuckled and said something back. Kairn and Ben walked over to the desk and examined the box with the practiced eye of experienced treasure hunters. Even Dirk, who had been sitting in his chair looking pale, gave himself a shake and stood up, his color returning.
“Well, let’s have a look at the box then,” Marcus said with a smile. He was glad to have this to distract his friends with. No matter how sinister the omens, there was no point dwelling on what it might mean.
“It’s got your name on it!” Kairn said.
“Whose name?” Marcus asked.
“Come, see for yourself!” the dwarf said. He was holding up a little label made of stiff card, hanging from the edge of the wooden box.
Marcus walked over and looked. The box was rectangular, a foot high by a foot wide, and two feet long. It was made of plain, roughly finished wooden lengths, bound with iron reinforcement at the corners. On the label, written in the now-familiar cursive script that the dungeon seemed to be getting good at, was a name. Marcus the Dungeon Master.
“It’s for me!” Marcus said, feeling pleased. He had not let on to the others, but he had been unable to help feeling just a little disappointed when the others had all been granted custom dungeon loot in the previous run and he had not. Now, it would seem, it was his turn.
He grinned, examining the box as the others stepped back to give him room. The box seemed to have been closed with iron nails, the top tightly fastened to the body of the box. Marcus counted ten nails, three one each long side and two on each of the short sides. He took his belt knife from its sheath and quickly prized the wooden lid up. The smell of fresh straw filled the room as he carefully lifted the lid.
Inside, he found a long, curved dagger in a heavy leather sheath. It was packed tightly in straw, the way any delicate or valuable object might be packed to keep it from damage in transit. The handle was made of bone, carved into the shape of a leaping dolphin. Runes had been burned onto the leather.
Marcus lifted the sturdy knife from the box and unclipped the leather toggle that held it in the sheath. With his left hand on the sheath and his right on the bone handle, he drew the blade.
It flashed with white fire as the sun from the window caught the edge. The blade gleamed brighter than any steel, and the edge was so sharp it almost hurt to look at it. It was gracefully curved, with a deep cutting edge that tapered sharply to a vicious point.
“A silver knife!” Kairn marveled. “I’ve never seen workmanship so fine! We used to make blades like this in the Dwarven Realm, in the mountains of my home, but never so fine as this!”
Marcus turned the blade back and forth, looking closely at it. Kairn was right—it was pure silver. As on the scabbard, a line of strange runes in a flowing script was graven into the flat of the blade.
“What does it mean?” Marcus said quietly. He turned the blade in his hand, admiring the beautiful workmanship of the silver and of the bone handle, and admiring the perfect balance. The blade felt as if it had been made to fit his hand and no other—which, in fact, it certainly had.
He looked at the others. They were smiling at him, admiring the blade—all except Anja. She was staring at it grimly. “I know w
hat it is,” she said quietly. “And it means that the dungeon believes we will have something to do with vampires once all this is over.”
“What are you saying, Anja?” Marcus asked.
“Besides direct sunlight,” Anja replied, “a silver blade is the only thing that can kill a vampire.”
Chapter 13
The next week passed fairly uneventfully for Marcus and his team. Willing hands worked on the stronghold, and steady progress was made. Supplies were flowing in from the docklands and the boggy areas to the seaward side of the stronghold had been drained. Marcus had the workers set up an encampment, which quickly developed into a small town for them.
Marcus decided it was time that the Underway was better explored. Since the battle, he’d sent regular scouting parties out to watch for any resurgence of the ratmen, but there had been no sign of movement from them. They kept to their realm in the lower depths, and for a time at least, it could almost have seemed that they had never even existed.
The new scouting parties were given paper and charcoal pens, and their orders were to systematically explore, measure, and map the Underway, working their way outward from the chambers that had traditionally been the dwelling of the Gutter Gang.
Anja seemed to have shaken off her troubles and threw her energy into training Dirk in the use of his new sword. Since these were the blades that the folk from the Isles of the Sun traditionally used, she had been trained with them at a young age. Her skills were a little rusty, but she had Kairn forge her a sword on the same pattern, and she and Dirk could often be seen in the yard in the early morning, working through the graceful drills that would train him in the speed and maneuvers that were native to the Sun Islander blade.
Dirk picked up the skills quickly and was a good student. Anja seemed content with his progress, and the work gave her a focus that kept her distracted from her own problems.