Dungeon Bringer 1

by Nick Harrow

“I will do whatever you need,” she said. Nephket moved closer to me and put one hand on my shoulder. She glanced at Zillah and then stared deep into my eyes. “Anything.”

  Well, that was interesting.

  “I need to see the Guild’s gate,” I said. “Don’t get too close to it, but I need your eyes to help me triangulate the position of my new dungeon room. It’s the only way I can accurately target the new construction.”

  The cat woman threw her arms around my neck and rubbed the stripes of fur on her cheeks against my throat. The smell of cinnamon and honeysuckle filled my nostrils, and it clung to my skin like cologne.

  As much as I wanted to believe she was just being friendly, one of my former girlfriends had had a cat. They don’t do that little trick where they rub their faces against yours because they like you. It’s how they mark their territory.

  Zillah eyeballed me while Neph hugged me, and I wondered how these two would get along.

  “I have to go now, then, before the guards can set up outside the dungeon,” Nephket said. “I’ll think about you when I’m there.”

  Before I could say anything, the priestess hightailed it out of the tomb. I felt an ache at her absence, like a part of me was missing.

  “She the jealous type?” Zillah asked. “I’m not, just, you know, so we're clear. I like having fun, but I’m not grabby.”

  “It’s not a problem,” I said optimistically. “And we don’t need to worry about it now. Let’s focus on our bigger problem.”

  “My last dungeon lord never tried anything this ambitious,” Zillah said. “You must have a very large territory if you think you can add a room a mile from here.”

  I headed for my burial chamber, where I felt most comfortable. There was something about being near my core that settled my nerves. Zillah followed me, and we continued our conversation as we made our way through the dungeon.

  “Honestly? I have no idea,” I said. “I’m new at this.”

  “I can tell,” Zillah said as she threw an arm around my waist and curled her tail over my shoulder. The stinger so close to my face made me nervous, but I didn’t shy away from it. I was the dungeon lord. Zillah wouldn’t sting me. I didn’t think so, anyway. “Where’s your stele?”

  “My what?” I asked.

  “Your stele,” she continued. “You know what I’m talking about, right?”

  “Why don’t you tell me what you know so I can make sure we're on the same page,” I bluffed.

  “Clever,” Zillah said and leaned up on her tiptoes to give me a kiss. We reached the burial chamber, and she waited for me to take a seat on my throne before she followed me into the room. Zillah’s body was slim and petite, but her tail circled around half of the room. She leaned back on it and looked up at me. “All this information is secondhand from my last dungeon lord, and I only sort of paid attention to him when he was rambling, so, you know, don’t blame me if I’m wrong.”

  “Any knowledge is good knowledge,” I said. “I won’t hold it against you if you make a mistake.”

  “That’s very nice of you,” she said. “The whole world is wrapped up in these geomantic power lines, like a crazy magic spiderweb.”

  “I’m with you so far,” I said. “Go on.”

  “Yeah,” she continued. “Those lines are like arteries filled with ka. When two or more of the geomantic lines intersect, you get what my old boss called a nexus. Magic is stronger there, and ka leaks out of those intersections and into the world around them.”

  Ancient memories swam up out of the darkness of Lord Rathokhetra’s mind to fill in the blanks. Dungeons could only be founded on a nexus where the ka was concentrated and gave the dungeon lord his power.

  I’d lost the trail of Zillah’s description while I’d integrated those old memories, and it took me a few moments to catch up to her.

  “...and the First Gods marked every nexus with a Divine Stele, stone plaques or pillars with runes on them, so people would know they were dangerous and to stay the fuck away from them, so they wouldn’t get eaten by monsters,” she said. “Kind of a dick move, I say, because the gods made monsters, too, and why should we be hungry all the time, right?”

  “Thank you,” I said. “That explains a lot. I’m going to try something, but I need quiet for a minute, okay?”

  “Sure,” she said. “I can be quiet. I’ve got a lot of energy, and I like to talk, but there’s...oh, I see. Sorry.”

  Zillah blushed and covered her face with her hands.

  I grinned and put a finger to my lips, and she mimed turning a lock at the corner of her mouth and throwing away the key.

  The quick brush of my thoughts against Nephket’s showed me that she had avoided the guards on their way up the trail to my dungeon. She was still far from her goal, though, which gave me time to continue my experiment.

  “Show me the stele,” I thought and concentrated on the zoomed-out view of my dungeon that was inscribed on the surface of the Tablet of Engineering.

  A white dot, bright as a star, gleamed in the center of my map, right in my burial chamber. Of course—that made perfect sense. If you wanted to protect something, you’d stick it in the part of the dungeon that was hardest for outsiders to reach. I’d have to look around for the stele’s physical embodiment, but for now I was satisfied with knowing where it was.

  “Show me my territory,” I commanded the tablet.

  A white glow expanded from the dot and washed over the rest of the tablet. The glow expanded to the center of the oasis, and the same distance in every other direction on my tablet. My territory was about a mile in circumference, but that only got me halfway to the gate.

  This was going to be a much bigger pain in my ass than I’d anticipated.

  “Show me the steles nearest to my border,” I demanded.

  My view expanded again, and a series of small white dots burst to life in the darkness around my dungeon. Most of them were well outside my territory, but one of them was just within my reach. I wasn’t sure how much the new stele would expand my territory if I activated it, but that was a gamble I had to take. There was no other way for me to reach the gate.

  I lifted my head from my tablet to find Zillah so close to my right side her nose almost touched my cheek.

  “She smells so good,” Zillah said. “Does she taste that good?”

  Before I could answer, the scorpion woman laughed, and the tip of her pink tongue darted out to flick my nose.

  “Did you find what you needed?” she asked in a more serious tone.

  “I did,” I said. “Are you ready?”

  “Will there be killing?” she asked.

  “Oh, yes,” I said. Dark images of the raiders crushed beneath my statues flickered through my memories, and even darker visions of a future with the Guild in ruins rose up to replace them. “There’ll be lots and lots of death to go around.”

  “Then, yes,” the scorpion queen said with an excited shiver. “I am very, very ready.”

  Chapter 9: Expansion Plans

  THE TABLET OF ENGINEERING showed me that Nephket was still far from her goal. It was a mile from my dungeon to the Guild’s teleportation gate, but that was as the crow flew. Nephket not only had to dodge whatever guard patrols the Guild had established around the perimeter of my dungeon, she also had to navigate through the rugged hills that bordered the Kahtsinka Oasis. If it took her less than an hour to reach her goal, I’d be impressed.

  That gave me some time to flesh out the rest of my plan and establish our first foothold on the journey to take down the gate. If I could reach the new stele by the time Nephket showed me our target’s location, we’d be halfway to launching our attack and getting the Guild out of here for good.

  “Zillah, do you know what a stele looks like?” I asked.

  “Of course,” she said. “My last dungeon lord had me claim a stele once. That was a lot of fun. The goblins he sent with me weren’t very pleasant, but they were decent fighters. We killed so many—”

&nbs
p; “Can you help me find mine?” I asked.

  “Sure, it should be close to your core,” she said. “The core needs a lot of ka to hold itself together. My last dungeon lord once said if you could harness the same amount of ka that your core needed on a daily basis you’d become a god. He said a lot of things like that, though, and still ended up dead, so you might not want to take everything he said as the truth. Did I mention I hated him?”

  It was hard to believe the chatty woman who followed me from the audience chamber back to the burial chamber was the same killer who’d tried to rip me limb from limb when we’d first met. She’d seemed so stern then, so angry.

  I’d take talkative and cheerful over murderous and taciturn any day of the week.

  “This is the burial chamber,” I said and gave Zillah the lightning tour of my digs. “I keep my loot in that sarcophagus over there, that’s my core over there, and there’s a secret scorpion tunnel over there.”

  She nodded as I mentioned every feature of the room, then headed to the sarcophagus and poked her nose into my trove.

  “This is a start,” she said. “But if I didn’t like you so much, I’d be a little miffed. This isn’t what I’d call good loot. This is barely adequate loot. I used to have jeweled goblets and the prettiest earrings—”

  “There’ll be plenty of loot soon. I had a plan,” I said. “It was a pretty good one, too. Then an elf fucked it up.”

  “I’ve never liked elves,” Zillah said. She left the sarcophagus and made her way around the room. Her tail followed along behind her, curling around the chamber’s perimeter to stay out from underfoot. She poked her nose into the scorpion passage, then paused and tapped one finger against the wall directly behind my throne. “There’s water back here. A lot of it. Probably an underground stream, or maybe a spring? You should—”

  “Thanks for the warning about the plumbing,” I said. “I wish you’d been here when I made renovations earlier. Could have saved me some worry.”

  “It’s a good thing I agreed to be your guardian.” She clucked her tongue. “There should be a class you have to take before you become a dungeon lord. ‘How not to kill yourself and others in a terrible accident’ or something.”

  “Any idea where the stele is?” I gently prodded Zillah back to the task at hand.

  “Oh, it’s right here.” She poked a finger at the back of my throne. “It’s a nice one.”

  I stepped over the scorpion queen’s tail to peer at the back of my throne. A silver bar, three feet tall and one foot wide, jutted from the burial chamber’s floor. Whoever had created the throne had built the cobra’s curved spine on either side of the stele, which was why I hadn’t seen the damned thing before. It was almost invisible nestled in the throne’s dark stone embrace.

  Zillah leaned back so I could kneel down and get a closer look at the stele. It was hard to make out much detail without getting a torch to light the thing up, but I did see a dense maze of runes and symbols etched into the stele’s surface. The icons were so densely packed they looked like the walls of a very complex maze, and I found myself drawn to the design. It was the same feeling I’d had when I stood at the rim of the Grand Canyon when I was a kid. There was something alluring about those depths, a pull that begged me to just lean a little farther forward...

  “Whoa,” Zillah said. She grabbed my shoulder and pulled me away from the silver monument. “Be careful around these things. They’re tricky. Lots of power built up inside them, and I don’t think anyone knows exactly how they work. You looked like you were about to bang your noggin on it.”

  “They’re dangerous?” I asked as I regained my feet. I felt strange, like someone had scooped off the top of my head and a cool breeze blew across my brain. An involuntary shudder ran through my body. What would have happened if I had touched the stele?

  “Everything magical is dangerous,” Zillah said with a grin. She wrapped her arms around my shoulders and nuzzled against the side of my neck. “You should be careful. If you die, I’d be sad. Then I’d have to hunt down your ghost and kill it again for making me feel bad.” She took another deep breath at the hollow of my throat, and the warm tip of her tongue flickered against my skin.

  “Nephket smells feisty,” she said. Zillah’s warm body was pressed up against mine, and every one of her curves was a mesmerizing distraction.

  “She’d help me kill your ghost.” Zillah licked my throat again. “Delicious.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Now that I know what a stele looks like, how do I claim one?”

  “Your Tablet of Transformation,” Zillah said. “At least that’s what my old dungeon lord used. I don’t know the specifics...”

  While Zillah told me more about how much of a jerk her old dungeon lord had been, I freed one arm from her embrace and summoned my Tablet of Transformation. Between Zillah’s arrival and Nephket’s warning about the raiders, I’d been too distracted to look at the transformation options available to me now that I was second level.

  “Let’s see what we’ve unlocked,” I said. “I need to sit down for a second.”

  Zillah kissed me on the cheek and released me, then followed me around to the front of my cobra throne. I plopped into the seat, and she curled her tail up next to my throne to make a seat for herself. While I examined the new options available to me on the Tablet of Transformation, she leaned against me and watched attentively.

  She wanted to say something so badly she almost vibrated, but she gave me the quiet I needed to concentrate on the tablet.

  “Basic Transformation, Common Enhancement Transformation, Value Enhancement Transformation.” I skimmed the list of abilities to get an idea of what I could spend ka on in the future.

  Basic Transformation was a freebie that apparently all dungeon lords had, and that was what allowed me to change one item into another of equal or lesser value. Common Enhancement Transformation was a five-ka investment, but it would let me make potions and scrolls, and I could see all kinds of uses for that one. Value Enhancement Transformation was also five ka, but it let me bump the value of an existing item by a thousand gold pieces per dungeon level. There were other options, but I didn’t have time to go toy shopping; there’d be time for that after we had settled our beef with the Raiders Guild.

  “Here it is. Claim Stele. Looks like it’ll cost me five ka to use that ability. At least on this next stele. It goes up every time I claim another one.”

  “That sounds right,” Zillah said. “The old boss was always bitching about how much it cost to expand his territory.”

  “How’s it going, Neph?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer but showed me a glimpse of her current position. My familiar was still descending the hillside below the dungeon. She’d had to slow down to avoid the patrols but seemed to be making decent progress. We still had at least an hour before she’d reach a good vantage to show me the gate.

  I took a little of that time to review the other tablets. There were no new abilities on the Tablet of Guardians, and I’d already seen all the monsters it had to offer.

  The Tablet of Engineering did have something new to offer, namely traps. Spiked traps, pit traps, net traps, spring-loaded spears, alarms, and even a kick-ass statue of yours truly were all now available for the cost of five ka. I couldn’t play with those goodies yet, but after I’d dealt with the raiders and drained all their ka, there would be some big upgrades to Ye Olde Dungeon de Clay.

  I took a peek at the Tablet of Incarnation and liked what I saw there. All the available abilities cost five ka and enhanced my senses in one way or another. The ones that really caught my eye, though, were The Dungeon Speaks and The Dungeon’s Visage.

  [[[THE DUNGEON SPEAKS

  Duration: Permanent

  Cost: 5 motes of ka

  This ability allows the dungeon lord to speak directly to anyone who is physically present in his dungeon.

  The dungeon lord can choose who hears his voice, the language the listener hears, even if that l
anguage is not one the dungeon lord speaks, and the volume of his voice.

  Once purchased, this ability can be used at will without expending ka.

  THE DUNGEON'S VISAGE

  Duration: Permanent

  Cost: 5 motes of ka

  This ability allows the dungeon lord to appear to any or all creatures currently within the bounds of his dungeon. The dungeon lord can appear as any creature, wearing any armor or other gear he desires.

  Once purchased, this ability can be used at will without expending ka.]]]

  It would cost me ten ka to buy them both, but if I did, anyone in my dungeon could see and hear me. It would be nice to be able to talk to the wahket in person rather than having to push everything through Nephket.

  “So,” Zillah said. She batted her eyes at me. “About this killing I was promised.”

  I banished the Tablet of Incarnation and summoned the Tablet of Engineering with a snap of my fingers. I’d never get tired of that trick.

  “Let’s do this,” I said.

  “This is very exciting,” Zillah said. “Most dungeon lords just sit on their hands and wait for their enemies to come to them. I like the idea of pushing out and taking the fight to the raiders.”

  “Me, too,” I said. My life as a hacker had been much the same. I’d spend days, sometimes weeks, waiting for a client to call and tell me they were under attack. Then I’d swoop in and yank their fat out of the fire. It paid well, but it was all so reactive. “I spent too much of my life on the defensive. Being aggressive agrees with me.”

  I concentrated on the tablet and focused on the new stele’s location. It lay just inside my territory, so there shouldn’t be any problems in creating a passage between here and there. When I found the stele, I could create a new chamber around it to provide some protection while I claimed it. Should be a piece of cake.

  “Whatcha doing?” Zillah asked. “I thought we were going to go kill some things.”

  “I’m making a path,” I said. I zoomed in on the stele’s location and imagined a circular room around it. I decided to create a small room, which I could expand later if there was enough space and no natural hazards in the region. I was no geologist, but I understood that subterranean obstacles were numerous and not always obvious. If I walked us all into a pocket of methane or opened my chamber into a bottomless chasm, we’d all be fucked.