Dungeon Bringer 1

by Nick Harrow

  “You don’t have to,” Nephket started, but I cut her off.

  “I want to,” I said with a smile.

  I untied the knot at the top of her left boot and loosened the laces before easing her foot out of the leather.

  “Oh, that’s nice,” Nephket said. She flexed her toes and extended the razor-sharp black claws from their tips. “It was fun to dress up, but I’m really not built for shoes.”

  “You’re built for just about anything,” I said.

  The priestess let out a short gasp and then laughed. She rested her forehead against the side of my skull and sighed. Her hot breath tickled my ear and sent electric tingles down my spine. Very, very naughty thoughts cut through my mind like the fins of hungry sharks.

  “I have to say, you’re not at all what I expected,” Nephket purred.

  “Is that a complaint?” I asked. I worked the other boot free from her foot and dropped it on the floor next to the throne. My fingers found her sole all on their own and massaged her soft skin until a faint moan escaped the wahket’s lips.

  “Not at all,” she said. “I just thought you’d be more aloof. Imperious? I’m not sure.”

  “There’s not much point in being aloof or imperious,” I said. “I don’t lean on formality much. I like to work with people who know how to do their jobs and do them well. I meant it before when I said I wanted a partner, not a servant.”

  “You flatter me,” she said. “I don’t know as much as you think I do. Everything I’ve told you I learned from the ancient scrolls and legends. I wasn’t even sure the ritual to summon you would succeed. I was desperate, not wise.”

  “And yet, here I am,” I said. “Whatever you did worked. That’s what counts.”

  Uncomfortable with my praise, Nephket changed the subject.

  “What about the fallen statues?” she asked. “Won’t those tip off the next raiders that something’s amiss?”

  I didn’t want Nephket to leave my lap, but she was right. I needed to reset the trap I’d laid or none of this would work.

  “Let’s go see about that,” I said and helped her to her feet. I was pleased that she took my hand when we headed toward the audience chamber.

  The sight of all those statues tumbled down into the chasm I’d created was impressive, if I do say so myself. Bloodstains marred the narrow channel’s walls with vivid red streaks and splatters that clearly illustrated where each of the dwarves had died. There was no way even the stupidest raider would willingly walk into that mess.

  And even if some exceptionally stupid raiders did stumble into the chasm, without the statues in their proper places the wahket wouldn’t be able to finish them off.

  I snapped my fingers to summon the Tablet of Engineering, and the golden slate appeared in my hand. When I stared at the hall of statues, I saw the schematic had been updated to show the fallen statues where they had tumbled off their pedestals and shattered. I imagined them back in their rightful places, and the lines inscribed on the tablet’s face began to change.

  The heavy statues floated, light as a feather, out of the chasm and reassembled themselves in their original positions. The channel’s stone walls shed a surface layer of fine, gray dust, and the bloodstains vanished completely. In seconds the chasm had transformed from a slaughterhouse into a boring walkway that wouldn’t have alarmed even the most observant raider.

  “That was impressive,” Neph said. “I suppose you won’t need me to clean up after you.”

  “I’ve got mad skills,” I said with a grin. “And this will make everything a lot simpler. If I reset the dungeon that quickly between bands of raiders, I’ll be able to reap a lot of ka in a little time.”

  “I wonder if the raiders will catch on and start to avoid me,” she said. “Or if the large number of beat-up treasure hunters will tip off the raiders that something’s not right up here.”

  “That’s one of the reasons why I went with this plan,” I said. “No weapon wounds on the fallen raiders. They’ll look like they got caught in a cave-in or fell down a ravine. Based on what you showed me of your village and its surroundings, that could’ve happened to anyone who wandered off the beaten path in search of another dungeon, right?”

  “You really did think of everything,” Nephket said. She squeezed my hand and looked at me with those emerald green eyes in a way that made my heart pound. I wanted to wrap my arms around her and—

  I took a deep breath and turned my thoughts away from all of the many, many things I wanted to do with Neph. There wasn’t time for that, not yet. But once I’d sent the Raiders Guild packing, things would get very, very interesting between us.

  Soon, I promised myself and dragged my attention back to the work ahead of me.

  “Planning out ways to cover your tracks is all part of being a hacker,” I said. “Even if no one notices all the baby adventurers getting whacked, though, we need to move fast. I want to upgrade the dungeon before Kezakazek comes back.”

  I tried not to think of the drow, because she freaked me out. She seemed to know as much about being a dungeon lord as Nephket, maybe even more. The way she’d threatened to come after my core hadn’t seemed like the kind of idle threat a dying adventurer would toss off.

  It sounded like a damned prophecy.

  “Shouldn’t be a problem. Greed is powerful,” the priestess mused. “I flashed a few coins and those raiders followed me straight to their doom.”

  “Booze and money have been the downfall of many men and women,” I said. “We’ll take advantage of it for as long as we can.”

  Nephket chewed her lip for a moment, then threw her arms around my neck and pulled me into a tight hug.

  “Thank you,” she whispered into my ear. “For everything. For the first time in a very long time, you’ve given the wahket hope. You showed me the world doesn’t have to be a place of darkness and fear. Thank you for returning to us.”

  My arms curled around the priestess’s hips and back. I returned the hug, and she melted against me. Her faint sigh caressed my cheek.

  In that moment, the Earth, the cartel, and my theoretical billion dollars seemed like the least important things in my life. I’d spent my career saving the computers of dirty people from the hacks of even dirtier people. I’d rescued a few billionaires from digital predators, and I’d almost become a billionaire myself in the process.

  But all of that felt meaningless compared to that one moment with a trembling cat woman wrapped in my arms.

  My last lingering thoughts about getting home to my mountain of money melted away in the warmth of Nephket’s body pressed against mine.

  I was already home.

  “Get some rest,” I said quietly to Nephket. “We have a lot of work to do, and tomorrow will be here soon.”

  Nephket rubbed her cheek against mine, and the soft bristles of her fur stripes left a musky scent on my skin. Then she stepped back, her fingers trailed over my shoulders and down my chest, and she smiled at me.

  “Tomorrow,” she said, “we will teach the raiders the meaning of fear.”

  Chapter 6: The Ka Must Flow

  AFTER NEPHKET LEFT, I sat on my cobra throne for a few hours and tried to sleep. It didn’t work.

  Fun fact, kids. Apparently, dungeon lords don’t have to sleep.

  At all.

  We also have a pretty good sense of time, so I know it was around three o’clock in the morning when I wandered over to the scorpions’ lair for a look at my new pets.

  I’d never been a big fan of bugs, but these were my bugs, and that made all the difference. Each scorpion’s body was about as long as my forearm, with curved stingers that could extend almost three feet in any direction. They were quick, too, and I spent a good chunk of the night racing them back and forth across the length of their lair.

  To the untrained eye, all of my tomb scorpions looked the same: scary and ready to sting your eyes out. But I could already tell them apart by their subtle differences. My favorite was not the fastest,
but she was close. She had a triangle of darker dots on her left claw, and her stinger carried a wicked little barb at its tip that the others lacked.

  “I’m going to call you Pinchy.” I gently stroked her back with one knuckle.

  Pinchy’s stinger coiled defensively over my hand, but she didn’t try to run away. She shifted her many feet and pressed her golden carapace back against my knuckle as if she enjoyed the one-finger massage. She grew bored after a few seconds of that and scuttled back to her scorpion pals.

  While I waited for the sun to come up and Nephket to return with a new batch of victims, I called up the Tablet of Engineering and made a few new modifications to the dungeon.

  My first change was to add a very small tunnel between the scorpions’ lair and the burial chamber that would let the stingers move from their home to mine by the shortest route. I tried to make the passageway a foot tall and a foot wide, but the Tablet of Engineering had other ideas.

  [[[Minimum passageway size is three feet wide by three feet tall.]]]

  I tried to command the tablet to obey me, but every attempt to make a smaller passage ended with the same warning message. Here I thought being a dungeon lord meant I was the boss, but apparently the tablets had the final say as to how shit went down.

  “Fine, be a dick,” I said to the tablet.

  The golden slate didn’t respond, but I could feel its smugness.

  I created the yard-by-yard passageway and hid the opening behind my throne. If some raider made it this far into my dungeon, I wanted him to have a nasty surprise waiting for him.

  Once I’d created the passage, I went around behind the throne to take a look at it. The exit’s edges were smooth and perfectly square, and the interior was as smooth and seamless as a drinking glass.

  And a single bead of water clung to its side.

  “What in the hell is this?” I asked. On closer inspection, the passageway I’d just created had a hairline crack on the back side, just below floor level. The crack grew a hair wider even as I watched, and the bead of water became two, then three, then four.

  Shit.

  There was an underground river or spring or some shit right behind my throne. I hastily rerouted the passage so it would exit a yard to the right of its original location and held my breath.

  Once upon a time, the girls who lived in the apartment above mine had a teensy, tiny leak in their bathtub’s drainpipe. One day, I’d noticed a little brown spot on the ceiling of my bathroom. The next week the pencil-eraser-sized splotch had metastasized into a coffee-colored disk the size of my fist.

  And the week after that, the girls had a bubble bath party with five of their drunken friends, and all seven of them ended up in my bathroom. Along with their bathtub.

  Water was not to be fucked with.

  After a few minutes had passed and the back wall of my burial chamber hadn’t been breached by a flood, I relaxed and went back to work. But not before I made a very stern note to myself on the Tablet of Engineering that there was water back there.

  I made a similar tunnel that led from the scorpions’ lair to the statue room and hid its exit point at the top of the chasm near the middle of its length. That wasn’t perfect, but it put the scorpions above the heads of any raiders in the trench, which would hopefully give them the edge they needed to land some venomous strikes on intruders.

  The last of my scorpion trails led into the audience chamber and opened behind that throne, as well. Yeah, I know, hardly imaginative, but it would be effective.

  Those three passages would be a pain in the ass for any raiders to navigate, but Pinchy and her buddies could use them to move to any part of the dungeon with ease.

  I also created a larger passageway between the burial chamber and the raised area above the statue room’s chasm. The wahket could use that to retreat quickly to the burial chamber if needed, without forcing them to climb the ladder or get down into the chasm with the raiders.

  “Come at me, bro,” I said.

  Unfortunately, it was only four in the morning. There wouldn’t be any bros coming this way for at least a few more hours.

  I returned to the cobra throne to pass the time. I practiced with my khopesh for a while, but it didn’t feel necessary. The weapon was so fluid and well balanced it felt like part of me, and practicing just made me antsy to bury the blade in another raider’s chest.

  The crypt crown was also interesting, but I couldn’t cast any of its spells without a target, and I didn’t want to zap any of my scorpions. They’d respawn, but what kind of dick would intentionally kill his minions just because he was bored?

  The wahket had dumped the breastplates and weapons they’d scavenged from the dwarves into the sarcophagus, and I spent a little time cataloguing them. The breastplates were worth a whopping four hundred gold pieces, which seemed like an impressive amount for those dwarves to have been lugging around. The two battle axes were valued at ten gold pieces each, while the morning star and warhammer both came in at fifteen gold pieces.

  I let out long, low whistle. That was a pretty good chunk of gold for first-level adventurers. I sat on my throne and mulled over my options. The black iron armor wasn’t much to look at, but when I examined it in the Tablet of Transformation I saw that it offered significant protection for relatively low weight. That’s what made it so valuable to trained warriors. Sadly, the wahket lacked the skills to use the armor effectively.

  [[[BREASTPLATE

  Armor Class: 14 + Dexterity Modifer (+2 Maximum)

  Weight: 20 pounds

  Training Required: Heavy Armor]]]

  My couple couldn’t use the armor but the Tablet of Transformation would let me change it into a nice bit of bait. I just had to decide what would be most enticing to greedy little raiders.

  I could’ve created some fancy weapon or maybe nicer armor from that amount of gold, but I didn’t want to take a chance on putting better gear in the hands of raiders in my dungeon. I also didn’t want the bait to be too specific, because wizards wouldn’t want swords and warriors wouldn’t give a crap about a magic staff.

  “Appeal to their greed,” I muttered and transformed one of the breastplates from a hunk of black metal into a sack of mixed coins and semiprecious gemstones.

  I used my special dungeon lord powers to drop the sack I’d created at the top of the ladder in the audience chamber, and it burst open to scatter gold, silver, polished obsidian marbles, smooth disks of turquoise, and some very pretty hunks of blue quartz that looked far more valuable than they actually were.

  Inexperienced raiders would see that gleaming pile of treasure from across the room and every cautious thought would vanish from their pea brains. The trap was set. I just had to wait for the mice to come along and spring it.

  In the meantime, I studied the orb clutched in the jaws of the cobra above me. It was about the size of my head, and it swirled with glowing, opalescent light. I instinctively understood it was worth more than anything else in the dungeon and that if it fell into the hands of raiders, I was as good as dead.

  But the longer I studied it, the more I knew that it was far more than just a trophy for raiders and an Achilles’ heel for me. As I gained more ka, the core would store vast quantities of the powerful energy. It also held the tablets while they weren’t in use and contained many more powers I hadn’t yet unlocked.

  Kezakazek’s threat to come for my core seemed a much graver danger now that I understood the orb’s importance.

  The next time I ran into that dark elf, one of us would die.

  If, that is, I could figure out a way to stop her from teleporting away as soon as she suffered serious injury. I wouldn’t be safe until she was dead, and I spent the rest of my night puzzling over how to kill her once and for all. A few hours of poking and prodding the problem got me nothing but the beginnings of a headache.

  I really needed to kill some raiders.

  At eight in the morning I reached out and gently prodded Nephket’s mind. As soon
as I made contact with the cat woman’s thoughts, the smell of bacon and eggs filled my nostrils. I wasn’t hungry, because dungeon lords don’t have to eat, but I still wanted those strips of crispy bacon and fluffy scrambled eggs. I wanted the sweet and salty crispness of the pork in my mouth, and the sumptuous feel of the rich egg yolks on my tongue seemed like a prized treasure just out of my reach.

  “Good morning,” Nephket said as she stirred the eggs in an iron pan over her hearth. “I hope you rested well.”

  “Not at all,” I said. “The good news is I don’t have to. Dungeon lords don’t sleep.”

  “Lucky you,” Nephket said. She stifled a yawn. “I was too excited to sleep much.”

  While Nephket ate her breakfast, we discussed our next steps. I outlined my plan, and she made some suggestions of her own. By the time she’d scrubbed out the pan with a fistful of sand, she was ready to get to work.

  “I’m afraid I have to retire the armor,” she pouted. “I went for a walk this morning and heard a rumor that someone had seen Peska.”

  “That’s not good,” I said with a frown. “Our plan relied on the Peska ruse to help you recruit more raiders.”

  “I thought of that,” she said. “I’m putting some of the other wahket to work. They’ll lure the raiders up to the dungeon so their sisters can help you kill them. If a new batch of looters arrives every hour or so, that should be good, yes?”

  Nephket impressed me with her efficiency and management skills. Before breakfast, she’d already gotten everyone organized and moving, and she did it all without making a big fuss or attracting any attention from the raiders.

  “You’re something else,” I complimented her. “There’s no way I could have done this without your help.”

  “Well, to be fair, you wouldn’t have needed to do this if it weren’t for me,” Nephket said. “But thank you.”

  Nephket left her house for a brisk walk around the end of the oasis farthest from the raiders’ camp and made her way up to the dungeon. The other wahket had already arrived and gotten to work by the time the priestess climbed up into the sycamore fig outside the tomb.