by Nick Harrow
“Good God,” I said. “I should have stuck an air freshener in here.”
The herdsmen were surprised by my sudden awakening and cowered away from me. The livestock, on the other hand, didn’t give a fuck about the dungeon lord in their midst. They were crowded around the troughs that filled the room from one end to the other, and they seemed to enjoy the supernatural grains, grass, and other vegetation that filled their mouths.
As with people, if you can keep animals fed and more or less safe, they won’t pay too much attention to their surroundings or who’s calling the shots.
“This is unnatural,” one of the shepherds complained. He was a big guy, with a shaggy beard and long bangs that reminded me of a sheepdog. He wore a simple shirt that exposed most of his shoulders and chest, and there was so much hair bursting from his skin I instantly became a firm believer in lycanthropy. If there was ever a werebear, this guy was it.
“I’m not sure if you have been paying attention the past few days,” I said to him. “But there’s a lot of weird shit going on around these parts. Just go with the flow, man. Your sheep and goats are safe down here, and there’s plenty for them to eat. All you need to do is make sure they don’t run off and get eaten by the monsters that live outside my dungeon.
“Also, get some shovels down here,” I said. “You’ll find holes in the corner. I want this area mucked out at least twice a day. My dungeon isn’t going to smell like goat ass.”
I quickly created the holes I’d just spoken about and glared at each of the men and women who gathered before me in turn to make sure they understood how important it was that they keep my dungeon as fresh as a daisy.
They all nodded and ducked their heads as if afraid I might chuck one of them down a shithole.
“As you wish, Lord Rathokhetra.” The herders mumbled their respects and thanks that I hadn’t killed anyone, then shuffled off to tend to their herds.
For my next trick, I zipped back to my burial chamber and reviewed the treasury. I could have done it from the Trough Hall, but it seemed rude to count my money in front of the help. I had well over nine thousand gold pieces available, which was plenty for what I’d planned.
I quickly reviewed goats on my Tablet of Guardians and realized that they were excellent pack animals. With their Strength of 12, they could carry one hundred and eighty pounds in standard saddlebags. That was a lot, but I knew I could do better.
It took me a few minutes to get my head around the idea, but once I understood the mechanics, I was able to move on to the next step of the plan in no time at all. In the blink of an eye I had five goat-sized carts in my burial chamber. It was a tight fit, but it was worth the effort. Each of those carts weighed one hundred pounds, but it allowed a goat to pull nine hundred pounds. The total cost for all five carts, including the bridles and harnesses, was only a couple hundred gold pieces. If the goats cooperated, just five of the little bastards would be able to carry two tons of cargo.
“This is new,” Kezakazek said from the western door of the burial chamber. “Something you want to tell me about?”
The dark elf was still thin, but she didn’t look as strung out or exhausted as she had before, and the snarky bite to her words warmed my cold, black heart. If Kezakazek wasn’t sarcastic, she wasn’t really the drow of my dreams.
“These are my goat chariots,” I explained. “You will be in charge of our cavalry, so you might want to see if you fit in one of them.”
Kez walked around one of the contraptions to get a better look at it. Her long, black-lacquered fingernails glided along the smooth wood until she reached the bridle and harness. She raised an eyebrow in my direction and lifted one of the leather straps.
“It’s a little small for me, don’t you think?”
I rose from my throne and crossed the small room to stand so close behind her our bodies touched. I reached past Kez with both hands and lifted the strap from her fingers, then pulled it back across her waist to pull her tight against me.
“I don’t know,” I whispered into the side of her neck. “You tell me.”
She turned her head to the side, and our lips met. The dark elf’s tongue flickered across mine like a flame, hungry and demanding.
“I found a secret weapon.” Her words were a breathy whisper that carried the faintest hint of smoke and a dark sweetness. “But it’s dangerous.”
The strap fell from my fingers and I coiled my arms around Kezakazek, crushing her against me. Her head fell back against my shoulder and I followed the curve of her neck with a line of fierce kisses.
“Dangerous can be good,” I said. “Is it worth the risk?”
The dark elf curled her arms back over her shoulders and knocked my headdress away. Her fingers curled in my hair and pulled my mouth to hers. She nipped my lips, bit the tip of my tongue, then kissed me with the hunger of a starving lioness.
“Yes,” she said. “If it works, you’ll run circles around Lexios.”
Kezakazek whispered the layers of her plan to me as I unspooled the ragged black cloth she wore. It was a good plan, but Kez was right: it was very dangerous. Whoever executed it would be in grave danger that I might not be able to protect them from.
“I’ll consider it.” I lifted the dark elf into my arms and carried her to the cobra throne. There’d be time to refine our plan later, but now was the time for another kind of action.
Our cries of passion echoed through the empty halls of my dungeon, until the drow collapsed against me, her arms curled around my neck, her cheek on my chest over my heart. She slept with a faint smile on her lips, and I let her rest.
Chapter 12 – An Example
ZILLAH’S MIND GENTLY probed mine to pull me out of my reverie. I hadn’t lost time; I’d just been so relaxed I hadn’t wanted to move or think until I had absolutely no choice.
“Sorry to disturb you, boss,” the scorpion queen said, “but we’ve reached the raiders’ camp. Things are a little tense. You want to have a word with these assholes?”
“Standby for reentry,” I whispered into Zillah’s mind.
“Ready, willing, and waiting,” the scorpion queen purred. “You should just stay inside me. We’d both be happier.”
I left my body behind, arms curled around Kezakazek to hold her on my lap, and plunged into Zillah’s thoughts.
She greeted me with a drink of whiskey that coated her throat in liquid warmth. The liquor had a rich, smoky flavor, with a surprisingly mild bite and almost no aftertaste. Had I known the Spirit Mount would allow me to once again enjoy the flavor of booze, I would’ve gladly paid one hundred ka for it.
“My. Fucking. God,” I moaned in Zillah’s mind. “Take another drink.”
“I’ve already had three,” she muttered as she lifted the glass to her lips. “I guess one more won’t hurt, but I need to slow down before I get tipsy and do something silly.”
The taste of the booze flooded Zillah’s mouth and into my thoughts. It was heaven, pure heaven. I savored the flavor, then let out a long, mental sigh and got down to the task at hand.
“Fill me in on what’s happened,” I said. “The highlights.”
“The raiders aren’t happy with the plan their boss agreed to, but they aren’t willing to go to war over it, either.” Zillah turned the bottle of whiskey between her palms. “The iron dwarves, what the blood gnome called the rock boys, are a little more pissed about the whole thing because they want the raiders strung up by their pink parts for offending ancient dwarven codes of honor.”
That made sense. The raiders had enslaved the dwarves, after all, and there’d probably been some violence in the process. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if the dwarves demanded a blood price. Unfortunately, while that would’ve been just, I couldn’t let the dwarves claim their pound of flesh. I needed the raiders alive.
“Let’s get their attention,” I said. It was time to get down to negotiations.
I took control of Zillah’s body and eased the whiskey bottle onto
the small table near her right elbow. We were inside the raiders’ tent, which was larger than it had appeared from the outside. Small braziers held smokeless fires that provided light and spread gentle warmth throughout the tent’s interior. Comfortable slingback canvas chairs dotted the interior of the tent, as did a handful of small tables that supported mostly empty platters of drinks and food. There was plenty of the former, and very little of the latter. It looked like the raiders were down to their last and least desirable provisions: jerky, hardtack, and a few small piles of dried fruits and nuts dotted with fuzzy patches of mold.
That explained why Charlie had been willing to make a deal with a dungeon lord. Her people were about to starve to death.
Zillah and Delsinia were seated next to each other in the tent, close to its center. The half-orc and what must’ve been her most trusted lieutenants had gathered off to one side and stood in a tense circle around one of the food tables. None of them had drawn steel yet, but their hands were perilously close to the pommels of their weapons. If the raiders’ leader couldn’t talk the other treasure hunters into cooperating, the rest of my plan would unravel in a big old hurry.
I guided Zillah’s body across the tent with exaggerated care. Her extra legs and the long tail they supported made this a trickier process than I’d imagined, and I only avoided knocking over one of the braziers through sheer luck.
The raiders turned toward us as we approached, and Zillah’s instincts overrode my control for a moment. Her tail flexed and tensed, though it didn’t rise into a stinging position yet.
“Just give the word,” she whispered into my thoughts. “I’ll kill three of these fuckers before they even know I’m mad.”
“This is a private discussion,” Charlie said. “Between me and my people. Take a seat. We’ll get back to you once we’ve reached our decision.”
“We don’t have time for this shit,” I said. “Look, I know none of your people want to work with the big scary dungeon lord. We’re notorious assholes, and it’s your job to steal our stuff and tell stories about how cool you all are for doing it, right?”
The raiders eyed me suspiciously. One of the men, a tall Viking-looking motherfucker with way too much beard and way too little hair on his head, rested his hand on the haft of an ax at his side and tilted his head like a junkyard dog who hadn’t decided whether or not to eat a trespasser.
“We keep monsters like you away from the good people we protect,” he said in a thick accent that mangled his words so badly I wasn’t sure what language he was speaking until half the sentence was already gone.
“Easy, Sven,” I said. “I’m not here to cause any trouble, and I’m not interested in any of the people you want to protect. All I want is for you guys to stab a few bad guys and help me protect a whole village of people who just want to live their lives in peace. You cool with that?”
“And what’s in it for us?” a heavyset gnome—not the blood kind—asked. His long mustache dangled straight down either side of his pursed lips to a knot that hung level with his belt. “I don’t believe you can send us home, no matter what Charlie says.”
“For starters, I can get you some food,” I said. I used Zillah’s hand to motion toward the nearly empty tables. “Which you look to be mighty short of.”
The raiders’ hands drifted toward their bellies, and at least one of them rumbled.
“I don’t know,” a woman with a vibrant peacock-colored Mohawk griped. “He’s a dungeon lord. We already know he has the soultaker and a bug girl on his side. Do we really want to get mixed up with that?”
I let Zillah correct the woman. “Scorpion queen. And my tail isn’t nearly as offensive as that mess on the top of your head.”
The raider with the ridiculous hairdo lunged forward, but the Viking put an arm across her chest to hold her back.
“I don’t like this either,” he said, “but I like starving a fuckload less. And if there’s even a chance they can get us off this godforsaken shard, I’m all about that.”
“Now you’re seeing sense.” I had no idea what he meant about Soketra being a shard, but I’d work that out later. For now, I needed the raiders to play nice. “I’m under a bit of a time crunch here, so let’s just cut to the chase. Are you going to help me out here, or are we going to hate each other?”
The raiders eyeballed their leader, and I honestly couldn’t tell which way they wanted her to jump. The gnome and the Mohawk girl seemed like the whole idea made them want to puke fire and shit blood, but Mr. Viking seemed good to go with whatever put some meat on his plate. I guess when you’re that big, you really, really like to eat on the regular.
“If we do this...” Charlie took a drink from her flagon, then pointed its mouth in my direction.
A rainbow blur flickered behind Charlie, and she gagged like she’d just swallowed a fish bone.
Nope, not a fishbone. A throat full of blood.
The Mohawk chick had decided she didn’t want to work for a dungeon lord and had made her move. She ripped her dagger out of Charlie’s back and tore out of the tent’s rear entrance like all the demons in hell were on her ass.
The Viking and gnome stared at their leader as she sank to her knees, their eyes wild with surprise. I didn’t know if they were half-drunk or just terrible at their jobs, but neither of them made a move to stop Mohawk.
I had to do everything myself.
“Fucking amateurs.” I jumped out of Zillah’s body and into Delsinia. The soultaker was closer to the side of the tent, and I used her mouth to shout to Zillah, “Go out the front and make sure she doesn’t try to escape around that way.”
Delsinia moved like the wind on a bad day, and with me aboard she had the energy to explode after her enemy.
Mohawk was a few yards ahead of Del, but the booze the raider had downed during her negotiations with Charlie had eroded her reflexes and made her clumsy. Her feet slid on the slick cavern floor and dumped her onto one of the enchanted light stones. The illuminated rock spun away from her and threw out a pinwheel of shadows on the cave’s walls. The raider rolled through her impact with the floor, bounced back onto her feet, and kept right on running.
Delsinia closed the gap in a handful of breaths and uncoiled her chained daggers from around her waist. With practiced ease she spun the chain over her head and whipped one of the knives at Mohawk’s legs.
The dagger shot past the runner’s lead foot, and the chain tangled on her trailing ankle. Delsinia expertly snapped her arm back and tightened the noose around Mohawk’s leg.
The raider went down hard. She didn’t have time to throw her hands out to catch herself before she slammed into the cavern’s floor and her skull bounced off the unyielding stone. Blood splattered the rocks in front of her, and the wind gushed from her lungs in a violent bark.
“Idiot,” I snarled through Delsinia’s lips. The soultaker pounced on her prey’s back, grabbed the raider’s ridiculous mop of hair, and bounced the traitor’s face off the stone with a sound like a tomato hit by a hammer. “You’re fucking up everything.”
“Nnngh,” said the raider.
“Don’t kill her,” I thought to Delsinia. A brilliant idea had just occurred to me, and I needed Mohawk alive to carry it out.
“By all rights, I should slaughter you here and now.” Delsinia struck the raider across the back of the head with the pommel of one of her daggers. “But Lord Rathokhetra is merciful today.”
Well, sorta merciful. If my plan for Mohawk went down the way I’d expected, she would have been much happier if Delsinia had slit her throat.
Satisfied that the raider was well and truly unconscious, the soultaker slung the limp woman over her shoulder and headed back to the tent.
Zillah let out a sigh of relief when Delsinia returned with Mohawk.
“Charlie will live.” The scorpion queen pointed her tail toward the leader of the raiders, who leaned back in a chair with a pained, but still very much alive, expression on her face. “But these
guys were just telling me that the dwarves would never go along with your plan. Something about a grudge over what the raiders did to them.”
“Great.” I took a closer look at Charlie, whose face was covered in beads of sweat. The half-orc’s eyes were squeezed tight against the pain. She’d be no good to me like that. “I thought raiders were supposed to be tough.”
“Fuck you. I got stabbed in the back.” The half-orc groaned from the effort of speaking. “Gods, that hurts.”
“What was that all about, anyway?”
“Some people feel very strongly about working with a dungeon lord.” Charlie motioned toward the unconscious raider slung over Delsinia’s shoulders. “She must have thought taking me out of the picture would keep that from happening.”
“It’s the hair,” I said with Delsinia’s voice. “When you don’t enforce a dress code, your employees get out of hand.”
“Ugh,” Charlie groaned. She writhed in the chair and pressed one hand to her back. “I need some whiskey.”
My dungeon lord senses couldn’t show me Charlie’s stats outside of my dungeon, but a single dagger stab couldn’t have caused that much damage to a seasoned treasure hunter. I waved a hand, uttered a magic word, and used one of my healing spells on her.
“Stop your whining. I need you on your feet, not curled up in a sick bed.” When Charlie still didn’t open her eyes, I nudged her with my foot. “Seriously. I just healed you. Get up.”
“What’s the point?” The half-orc sat up and nodded with approval at my healing job. “The iron dwarves are honor bound. They don’t take slights well, and they have memories longer than their lives. The grudge they hold against us won’t be satisfied until we’re dead.”
“Well,” I said, “you really fucked that up for me, didn’t you?”
“We didn’t have a lot of choice,” the half-orc barked. “When you blew up our gate, our only hope was to push on for the godmarrow and use it to escape this godforsaken sandpit.”
“Sorry not sorry about your gate. If you assholes hadn’t tried to kill the wahket and steal my core, there wouldn’t have been anything for me to blow up.” Another thought occurred to me just then. “How did you know about the godmarrow, anyway?”