Dungeon Bringer 1

by Nick Harrow

  “Same to you, pal,” I snapped back. I could’ve rushed across the distance between us and cut the little bastard in half with my khopesh, but I wanted to flex my muscles a little. Thanks to the power of my crown, the sorceress wasn’t the only one who could fling spells. I pointed a finger at the little prick and barked, “Hellish Rebuke.”

  Much to my surprise, the syllables that left my mouth sounded nothing like the words I’d said.

  Strange, creaking noises and a braying trumpet’s wail burst down the length of the hallway, and the short dude shrieked in surprise. A cloak of flames encircled him and instantly scorched black bands across his face and hands. His chain mail glowed orange as its links heated from the flames, and his flowing white hair burnt down to black stubble across his scorched scalp in the blink of an eye. The gnome’s eyes rolled up into his head and he toppled backward, an endless scream tearing itself free from his lips.

  Before the dying priest hit the floor, he vanished in a burst of red light. All that remained of him was his mace, his still-red-hot chain mail, and the reek of his burnt hair.

  “Thanks for the loot,” I snarled and pointed my weapon at the surviving raiders as I stalked toward them.

  The sorceress tried to fling a spell in my direction at the same instant Peska panicked and turned tail. The half-demon ran smack into the dark elf, and the spell fizzled out in a wisp of foul-smelling purple smoke.

  I reached the duo just as the sorceress thrust the horned woman away from her and spat an angry curse. I couldn’t tell if the foul language was meant for her companion or me, but the dark elf certainly put a lot of venom into it.

  Before the horned woman could recover, I stepped up behind her and hooked my arm around her neck. With a deep-throated growl, I thrust the barbed tip of my khopesh through the half-demon’s back. The bronze blade exploded through her sternum and sprayed the sorceress with a fountain of gore. My victim vanished before I had a chance to withdraw my blade. Sparks danced in my eyes from the red flash of her exit.

  I flicked my khopesh over my shoulder, and the half-demon's leather armor that had been impaled on it flew behind me.

  The dark elf tried to cast another spell, but I snatched her left hand and pinned it to the door above her head. My khopesh’s tip dimpled the skin just below her chin, and her eyes grew wide as I increased the pressure. A single ruby red drop of blood oozed out of her and ran down the length of my blade.

  “Who are you?” I snapped. The urge to kill this one was strong, but I held back. She wouldn’t answer any questions if she were dead, and if I wounded her too severely, she’d vanish like the rest of the raiders had.

  “I am Kezakazek,” she said, and her amethyst eyes flashed with angry fire. Her breath was hot on my face when she spoke, and I felt waves of warmth wash off her body as she struggled to free her hand from my grasp.

  “Stop fighting. You’re not getting out of here,” I said. “I recognize your name from the list of hackers who attacked the cartel’s DECS network. You really, really fucked up this time.”

  [[[Kezakazek, 1st Level Drow Sorcerer, 8 Hit Points]]]

  The dark elf barely topped five feet and couldn’t have been a hundred pounds after a heavy meal, but she was strong and determined. She tried to wriggle her arm away from me and almost slipped free before I tightened my grip. We struggled like that for a few more seconds before she finally gave up and glared at me with so much hate I was surprised I didn’t burst into flames.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kezakazek spat at me. The dagger-like points of her incisors flashed as she spoke, which I found unbearably cute for some reason, and her barely covered chest heaved in the most distracting way. “The only thing I’m going to hack is your heart out of your chest if you don’t put me down immediately. I am a drow sorceress, and I will...”

  I stopped listening to the string of threats that poured out of her dark lips and reassembled my scattered thoughts. Kezakazek was the name I’d seen in the traffic logs, I was sure of that. But I was just as sure that the angry confusion I saw in her eyes was real.

  Kezakazek had no idea what I was talking about. She had been here, in this dungeon, hacking her way toward Nephket and the rest of the cat girls while I’d been trying to defend the cartel’s computer system. Maybe the orc’s final shot had punched my ticket, and all this was nothing more than hallucinatory sparks between my brain’s dying neurons.

  Or maybe I wasn’t in Kansas anymore, Toto. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. On the one hand, this seemed like a shitty primitive world without any modern conveniences. On the other hand, there was a whole pride of cat women who thought I was their savior.

  Decisions, decisions.

  “What were you trying to find in here?” I asked.

  “This is a dungeon,” Kezakazek said slowly as if explaining a very basic concept to a drooling toddler. “My companions and I are dungeon raiders. It’s our job to delve into dungeons and kill anything we find, collect all the loot we can lay our hands on, and kill the dungeon lord if we find one. But you weren’t supposed to be here.”

  The angry tone in the dark elf’s voice warned me she hadn’t given up on the idea of killing me and taking my loot, but I had a hard time seeing her as a brutal killer. For starters, she was so tiny I could’ve tossed her over my knee and paddled her ass without breaking a sweat. She was also stunningly beautiful. Maybe if she got to know me, she’d be interested in something other than ripping out my heart and stomping it into the dirt.

  “Too bad for you, I was here,” I said. “What was it you said during the fight about there being more treasure since I was here, though?”

  For the first time, the dark elf didn’t spit an angry retort into my face. She looked into my eyes for a long moment as if considering her next move. She took another distractingly deep breath and then blew out a defeated sigh. Her breath, which smelled vaguely of wintergreen, was hot where it brushed against my cheek. She felt like she was running a fever, though I had no idea what the normal body temperature of an evil drow sorceress was.

  “What kind of dungeon lord are you?” she asked. “Of course, there’s more treasure when you’re here. For starters, all dungeon lords guard dungeon cores, and those are literally priceless vaults of arcane power and forbidden knowledge. For another, dungeons with lords attract higher-quality monsters and those bring better treasures along with them. You do know that, though, I’m sure?”

  The dark elf’s uncertain tone told me she wasn’t sure that I knew how to find my ass with both hands, much less anything about being a dungeon lord. And maybe I was a pretty crap dungeon lord at that point in time, because I had no idea what she was talking about.

  But my hacker mind was top notch, and it had started to put the pieces of this puzzle together. According to the dark elf, the core contained valuable forbidden knowledge. That sounded a hell of a lot like the data storage I’d been trying to protect inside DECS. There was a connection there. I just needed to pull it out of the sorceress before she tried something dumb and I had to kill her.

  “Let’s pretend I don’t know anything about a core,” I said. “Educate me.”

  A sly grin quirked the corners of her full lips. Her skin was the color of anthracite, but her lips matched the deep violet of her eyes. Her pink tongue darted across them for a moment, and I could almost hear the gears in her brain turning as she tried to come up with a convincing lie to tell me. Helpless and totally at my mercy, Kezakazek still wouldn’t give up.

  I found her passion and drive frustratingly hot.

  “I can show you,” she said, her voice dropping into a low and sultry register that put my whole body at attention. “You can hold my hands behind my back if it makes you feel safer. Or maybe you’d rather put a chain around my throat and guide me like a slave. I bet you’d like to be my master.”

  When she put it like that...

  But, no, that was a trap. Granted, it was a trap that I’d almost be willing to wal
k into just to see how things worked out between the two of us, but it was still a trap.

  I leaned in closer until we were only inches apart and her hot breath washed over my face. Her eyes burned into mine, and a spark jumped between us. We were alike even if we didn’t know how just yet. Her breath quickened, and as she filled her lungs, the heat of her body grew tantalizing close to my naked torso.

  “Why don’t you tell me what I want to know,” I said, “and I’ll let you go. You promise to never return, and you won’t end up like your friends.”

  “Like my friends?” she asked and leaned forward until her lips brushed mine with every syllable. Her skin was fever hot against mine, and her touch quickened my pulse. “You really don’t know much, do you?”

  The dark elf crushed her lips to my mouth, and for a moment I was too stunned to react. She gasped, and her sharp teeth closed teasingly on my bottom lip.

  I tasted blood and realized it wasn’t mine.

  “What did you do?” I snapped and jerked my head out of her reach. Did she have some kind of poison in her bite? In her blood?

  “Escaped,” she said with a grin. She coughed up a gout of sticky red blood and sagged in my grip. “But I’ll be back for your core.”

  In the split second before her body vanished in a burst of red light, I saw the wound that had killed her. Her dagger fell from her nerveless fingers and left behind a nasty red hole in her side. The crazy sorceress had stabbed herself up under her own ribs, deep into one lung.

  I threw back my head and howled with rage. My pulse pounded in my temples, and I wanted nothing more than to storm out of this dungeon and find out where the damned raiders had escaped to. I wanted to find Kezakazek and squeeze her until the answers I needed spilled out.

  But, first, I had to lie down for just a minute. Or an hour. Maybe a few days. A wave of exhaustion crashed over me as my anguished cry faded away.

  For the second time in less than an hour, the world spun into a cyclone of darkness, and I fell into oblivion.

  Chapter 3: The Core

  I OPENED MY EYES TO find myself on the throne in the same room where I’d woken up in a sand-filled sarcophagus. Nephket and the rest of the cat girls sat cross-legged on the floor before my gilded chair, their heads bowed in prayer. Tears matted the stripes of fur on their faces, and more than a few of them let out pained sobs between verses.

  They clearly thought I was dead, or worse, and it gave me a warm fuzzy to think they cared so much. I soaked in their sorrow for a moment, like I’d spied on my own funeral and found out everyone said I was a cool dude who’d died way too young, and then cleared my throat to get their attention.

  “I’m not dead yet,” I said. “Though my brain feels like a pack of weasels used it for a chew toy.”

  Nephket’s head jerked up the instant the first word left my mouth, but the rest of the cat women didn’t seem to have heard me at all. I’d wanted to show them I was fine, and they didn’t need to be sad anymore, but I might as well have kept my mouth shut for all the reaction I got out of them.

  “Master!” Nephket exclaimed as she rose gracefully to her feet and rushed to the throne. She threw herself in my lap, wrapped her arms around my neck, and squeezed me into a hug so tight I was afraid she’d pop my head off. I returned her embrace, and she felt both firm and soft in all the right places.

  I could get used to that.

  Nephket turned her head to the side and tilted her face toward mine, and for a moment we were a hairsbreadth apart. She smelled like cinnamon and wild honeysuckle, a sweet and spicy mixture that I couldn’t get enough of. Her emerald eyes seemed enormous at close range, and their pupils gaped wide like mouths ready to swallow me whole.

  And then her coin halter and skirt jingled, and she almost tripped over her own feet as she scrambled out of my lap.

  “Master,” she gasped, her golden cheeks flushed where they peeked out between the tawny stripes of fur. “I forget myself. I was so excited that you’d returned I overstepped my position.”

  The other cat women had raised their heads to watch Nephket, their eyes wide with confusion.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I don’t know what happened after I defeated the raiders, but I think I’m okay now. And your welcome wasn’t out of place, at all. In fact, if you’d like to pick up where we left off...”

  Nephket blushed an even deeper shade of red at my suggestion, but I saw a hint of a smile pluck at the corners of her full lips. Flustered, she turned away from me to address the rest of her people.

  “My fellow wahket,” she said, her voice filled with awe, “Lord Rathokhetra has returned to us. He is here in spirit only, but soon he will incarnate to protect us once more.”

  The feline women clasped their hands together, exclaimed happily, and rushed to surround Nephket. They peppered their priestess with questions, and she answered them with a quick efficiency I couldn’t help but admire. Nephket was a hell of an ally, and I knew I’d be lost without her.

  “Wait,” I said after I’d had a few seconds to process what Neph had said about me. “I’m a ghost?”

  Nephket reassured the rest of the exuberant wahket that everything was fine and then returned to the throne to face me.

  “That is not technically correct,” she said with a faint smile. “You expended the last of your ka in the battle against the raiders and are no longer incarnated, but you are not dead. Once you restore your ka, you will have the power to regain your physical form for a time. Though this was your burial chamber, so I suppose you were, at least for a time, deceased.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that at all. It was bad enough that I’d been hauled to wherever the hell this was, but if I ended up as a chain-rattling ghost stuck in a tomb, that would just be too much. How could I hack if I had spectral fingers that couldn’t even touch a keyboard?

  “If I need ka to have my body back, how do I get that?” I asked. “And if I don’t have a body, how did we touch each other?”

  Nephket smiled at my questions and raised both hands with their palms facing me in a gesture that told me to slow down.

  “I have so much to tell you, but I fear we may have started at the end of the discussion rather than the beginning,” she said with a slight bow. “Come with me. I will show you your dungeon and explain to you the ways of the dungeon lords.”

  She extended one delicate feline hand, and I caught a glimpse of the black retractable claws that jutted from her fingertips. When I closed my hand around hers, the sharp hooks of those claws rested lightly against my skin. The sensation sent a shiver racing up my spine, and I wrapped my fingers tighter around hers.

  “This doesn’t feel like I’m a ghost,” I said as I rose from my throne. I lifted our hands to demonstrate my point. To my eyes, my body looked as solid as ever. There were even splashes of dried blood on the backs of my hands and forearms from my battle with the raiders. My feet didn’t sink through the floor, and Nephket’s hand was firm and warm in mine.

  “I am your familiar,” Nephket said as she led me out of the throne room. “Our spirits are bound together, so you are always in the flesh for me, and I for you. But for others...”

  With a start I realized Nephket had led me straight through one of the other cat women who remained kneeling before the throne. I expected to stumble over the kneeling wahket, but my foot and lower leg passed through her body with no resistance. I felt a rush of warmth through that limb, and she gasped as if someone had just poured iced water down her shirt. For a moment, my leg had vanished inside the wahket, and I did not like that at all.

  “That was deeply creepy,” I said. “This spooky ghost stuff doesn’t work for me. I beat your raiders. Let’s get my body back so I can go home before I lose it again.”

  Nephket frowned as we reached the far side of the room. She drew aside the tapestry to reveal the alcove where I’d dealt with the raiders. Someone had moved the fallen beam that had barred the door, and it now rested against the wall inside the
alcove. Blood from Sheth’s death stained its surface with dark, scarlet blotches.

  “My Lord, this is your home,” she said. “You are Rathokhetra, our god and master, the ruler of the wahket, the savior of Soketra. This is where you belong and the place to which you were destined to return. Are you so offended by my earlier impropriety that you would flee from us so soon?”

  Before I could answer Nephket’s question, she pulled me into the darkened alcove and the ornate cloth fell behind us. The small chamber was dark and cramped, and in the dim lighting I saw a pale blue glow where my hand still clung to hers. There was just enough light for me to make out a single tear that leaked from Nephket’s left eye and ran down her cheek.

  “No,” I said. “Don’t feel bad for that at all. It was a nice way to welcome me back to the world of the living. But I’m not who you think I am, and I’m not from here.”

  I reached out to brush the tear from Nephket’s cheek with my free hand. She trembled at my touch, and it took her a few deep breaths to compose herself. Her hand closed tightly around mine as if she we were afraid I’d run away from her if she didn’t hang on for dear life.

  “You repelled the raiders as only a true dungeon lord could. Let me show you the rest of your home and your dungeon core,” she said. “Perhaps it will help you remember who you really are.”

  I wanted to tell her that I knew exactly who I was. Clay Knight, hacker for hire, and now a fugitive from the Inkoklana Cartel. What I wasn’t was the ghost king of the cat women.

  Then again, what did I have to go back to? If I’d failed to stop the hack on the cartel system, I was as good as dead. As soon as I showed up, they’d put a marker out for my head, and every two-bit thug would try to cash it out. For all I knew, the orc boy gang was already parked in my apartment ready to gank me the instant I walked through the door.

  But if killing the raiders here had stopped the hack back home, I was a billionaire. Life would be pretty damned sweet back on good ol’ Earth.