Dungeon Bringer 1

by Nick Harrow

  All the tunnels in the main part of my dungeon added up to a length of about four hundred feet. The spiral ramp I’d created to avoid obstacles was another three hundred feet long. The distance from my main dungeon to the chasm we’d reached was about twenty-six hundred feet, and I’d used up another seven hundred feet trying to reach Nephket.

  I needed to free up enough passage volume to cover the last seven hundred and fifty feet to the rendezvous with Nephket and then another half mile out to the gate. That didn’t even include how far down we’d have to travel to get around the chasm. That might be another hundred feet, or it could be a thousand. There was no way to know until we tried. At a minimum, I needed to reclaim thirty-five hundred feet of passageway, and the tunnel had to be at least five feet wide and five feet tall so the wahket could navigate it without crawling. That all added up to eighty-two thousand and five hundred cubic feet that I needed to find somehow.

  Because I had no idea that I could run out of passage space when I’d created my initial tunnels, I’d used the default passage measurements of five feet wide and ten feet tall, so every five-foot-long section of corridor burned up two hundred and fifty cubic feet of available volume. Shrinking those tunnels down seemed like the easiest way to free up some space.

  I started with the main part of my dungeon because there were no friendlies there, and I didn’t give a shit whether any raiders who came calling had a hard time navigating the tunnels. With quick strokes of my finger and some heavy concentration, I narrowed all the main passages in the dungeon to the minimum size of three feet tall and three feet wide. That gave me back a little over sixteen thousand cubic feet, which was only a quarter of what I needed.

  “I really should have studied more math in school,” I groaned to Zillah. “Remind me to hire a geometry wizard as a guardian.”

  “Oooh, a smart one,” Zillah said. “I hear there are demons that are good at math. We could go to hell and find some. That would be exciting.”

  “Exciting is one word for it,” I said. “But I’m in no hurry to visit hell.”

  “There are a lot of them,” she said. “Hells, I mean. Some of them are fun. There’s this one where you get to have sex all the time, but you don’t get to pick your partner. It’s a surprise every time!”

  “We definitely won’t be headed there,” I said. “Ever.”

  “Jealous?” Zillah asked. I thought she was teasing at first, but one look in her eyes showed me just how serious she was.

  “Very,” I said. I wasn’t proud of it, but there it was. Zillah was mine, and I wasn’t into sharing. Not to mention that I definitely wasn’t into being shared by a bunch of demon dudes.

  “Good,” she responded and curled her arms around my neck and back. She pulled me closer, and I banished the tablet to get it out of the way. I looped my arms around her waist and squeezed her tight, then lowered my mouth to hers.

  Zillah’s passion engulfed me like a firestorm. For an endless moment, the heat of her mouth against mine devoured all my concerns and worries. When we parted, I felt energized and ready to take on the world.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I needed that.”

  I debated where to find the other sixty-five thousand cubic feet of passage volume that I needed before I finally decided the simplest option was the best option, even if it would make a retreat almost impossible.

  I commanded the Tablet of Engineering to reduce the spiral ramp and the passage to the chasm to their minimum size. That reduced my used space to roughly sixty-three thousand cubic feet and gave me a little less than one hundred and forty thousand cubic feet to work with.

  That’d do.

  I reached out to Nephket to see how she was doing and caught a glimpse of the hills as she ran through them. I had no idea where she was headed to rendezvous with the rest of the wahket, but I hoped it wasn’t far. Something told me we didn’t have much time before the raiders had our backs to the wall.

  I focused on the tablet and willed the passage to push ahead to the spot I’d marked for Nephket. Once I had that out of the way, Zillah and I could turn our attention back to reaching the stele. With any luck, the wahket would have joined up with us by that point, and we could storm the Guild’s gate and shut it down.

  I still hadn’t figured out how we were going to kill off the rest of the raiders, but I was confident I’d think of something. As long as the Guild couldn’t bring in a pack of high-level assholes to wipe out my core, I could deal with the rest.

  [[[Obstacle in path. Manual passage guidance required.]]]

  A string of curses burst out of me. I really did not need this mess right now.

  “Come with me,” I said to Zillah and headed off to complete the wahket’s rescue tunnel.

  It was difficult going, and what I’d thought would be a simple walk of twenty minutes or less turned into what felt like an endless ordeal. Zillah and Pinchy used their vibration senses to guide me around other monsters and away from open caverns and other hazards. The process burned up valuable space and time, but we didn’t have the manpower to risk fighting our way through a straighter line.

  While I struggled to reach the rendezvous point, I couldn’t spare concentration to reach out to Nephket. I also didn’t want to discourage or distract her with the news that it would take us much longer to arrive than I’d thought. She had her own worries, and I needed her to concentrate on them instead of wasting time giving me status reports.

  Finally, the tunnel breached the hillside. A gust of fresh air washed over Zillah and me, and the last rays of the setting sun cast a bloody red light into the passage’s mouth.

  “I thought you said there’d be sexy cat girls here,” Zillah said.

  My heart fell. I’d expected to be greeted by the exuberant wahket and my determined familiar, but there was nothing in front of us but more hills and a few scrubby trees. I double-checked the tablet, but, no, we were in the right spot.

  Something had gone wrong.

  “Are you okay?” I asked Nephket.

  “The dark elf,” she answered after a long, panic-inducing silence. “She intercepted us. She’s with a patrol group of raiders, and we can’t get around them to reach you.”

  “Shit,” I said. The Tablet of Engineering appeared in my hands instantly, and I zoomed out until I found the glowing green dot that represented my familiar.

  She was almost two miles to the west of me.

  “Are the raiders to the east of your position?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Nephket responded. “Our scouts think the dark elf’s forces are about a half mile away from us in that direction. I don’t know how we’ll reach you.”

  “You won’t,” I said. “I’m bringing the dungeon to you.”

  Zillah frowned at my words and tapped the dungeon’s floor with her spear.

  “How are we going to reach them in time to stop the raiders from using their gate to summon the extermination squad?” Zillah asked. “It took most of the day to get this far.”

  “We had to work our way up through the Great Below to get from the chasm to this point,” I said. “And as far as I know, there’s nothing that says my dungeon’s passages have to be buried. I made a path across the open cavern, so I should be able to shoot one through these hills without much trouble.”

  “You keep getting smarter,” Zillah said. “Let’s go fuck up some raiders.”

  Shooting the passage across the surface saved us from subterranean dangers, but we weren’t out of the woods yet. The biggest problem we faced was the sheer distance. Two miles of standard corridor would eat up more than a half a million cubic feet of volume, which was way beyond my limit.

  But there was no rule that said the corridor had to stay the same size while I pushed it. I narrowed the tunnel behind us to its minimum size, then began the taxing process of covering way more ground than I should have been able to.

  My plan was to shrink the passage behind us to the minimum size as we went. Zillah and I would have a comfy ten-by-te
n cube to walk in, and I’d choke it down to the narrower size as we moved along. It was hard work, but there was no other way to make it work. I just hoped we didn’t get ambushed while I had my nose buried in my tablet.

  Zillah and I rushed headlong down the new passage, its leading edge always just a few feet ahead of us. The scorpions weren’t fast enough to keep up the pace, and so they rode on Zillah’s tail, which dragged on the ground behind us because she didn’t have room to curl it up above her head like she normally carried it.

  “This is exciting,” Zillah said. “I hope we don’t all die.”

  “I second that,” I said.

  I didn’t get tired from all the running, which was a nice side effect of having no real material body. I was still limited to a running pace, though, because I had to constantly concentrate on keeping the passage ahead of us open, choking it down behind us, and my eyes peeled for trouble. If I ran us into the raiders, we wouldn’t have much warning before they were on us.

  Fortunately, that didn’t happen. We did run into the lair of some terrifying beast as we shot through a hill, though, and I was very glad that the monster who’d bitten the back half off an eight-foot-long rat was not home when I drove a freight train of a dungeon tunnel through its territory. Something big was out here, and it was awfully close to the surface.

  “I want to fight whatever did that,” Zillah said as we passed the giant rat’s corpse. “I’d be willing to die for that experience.”

  “I don’t want you to die at all,” I said.

  “I know that,” Zillah said as we raced along. She seemed to have no trouble keeping up with me, and I wondered if it was her extra legs or some supernatural reserves of stamina that helped her maintain that pace as we ran. “But as long as I’m in your dungeon, there’s no danger of it being permanent. If I take a bad shot, I’ll be back the next day at sunset.”

  “And what happens if you’re not in my dungeon and something goes wrong?” I asked.

  “Oh,” Zillah said. “Then I’m just dead. Really, really dead. I might end up back in the grove of withered trees, but I’m not certain. My memory’s a little fuzzy about how that works.”

  A cold tingle of dread crawled up my spine as she spoke. She’d been outside my dungeon when she’d gone after the wight. If it’d been more powerful than she’d expected...

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Zillah said. “And it never would’ve happened. I’m really tough. Trust me.”

  I hoped she was right because something told me we were in for a hell of a fight over the next few hours.

  “They’re getting closer,” Nephket said. “I can hear their picket. They’re not even trying to be quiet. We don’t have long—oh, no.”

  “What is it?” I exclaimed as I tried to move faster.

  “It’s the dark elf,” she said. “She’s on one of the hills above us. Her eyes are glowing. She’s casting a spell.”

  “We’re almost there,” I said. “Get your people ready. As soon as you see the passage, get your people inside.”

  We were minutes away from the wahket, but it felt like I was already hours too late. Nephket didn’t say another word, but my thoughts were still with hers, and I felt the tempest of emotions churn inside her mind. She hoped I would be there to rescue them, but she feared the dark elf would reach them first.

  “When we get there,” I said to Zillah, “if the dark elf gets close to the dungeon, I want you to kill her.”

  “Oh, a drow?” Zillah asked. “They’re so sexy. It’s almost a shame to kill them, but they do tend to be evil bitches.”

  “We’re almost there,” I said. “As soon as the passage opens, cover the wahket until they can get inside.”

  I hated to put Zillah in that kind of danger, but I didn’t see an alternative. The wahket weren’t fighters, and I didn’t think they had any weapons to speak of. Their only chance of survival lay in getting into the tunnel before the raiders or the dark elf reached them. Zillah was the only chance they had.

  And then, before I could worry about the situation any more, the passage burst into the valley where the wahket huddled. Zillah charged past me with her spear raised high overhead.

  “Get in here!” I called to Nephket.

  But by the time I’d finished my sentence, the first wahket had already entered. They passed through me in a warm rush and shivered as my essence caressed each one of them. It was a strange experience, and I caught flashes of their memories as they moved into and then out of my body. They were all terrified, but they were all confident that their dungeon lord would save them.

  For the first time in my life I understood what it felt like to be a hero. Not just the glory, but the weight of its responsibility. These beautiful women trusted me. They needed me. I couldn’t let them down.

  Zillah was perched on a rocky outcropping to the north of the passage’s opening. She held her spear across her shoulders and scanned the horizon for trouble.

  “The dark elf’s up there,” she said. “The tallest hill to the northwest. I can feel her casting a spell, but I don’t know what it will do. She’s still moving, so I don’t think she’s in range yet. You want me to get up there and ram this spear so far up her ass she can taste the dead wight on its tips?”

  I couldn’t help but chuckle at Zillah’s gleeful hunger for violence. She was wild and untamed, a creature built to live a brutal, violent life, but she also relished every moment of her existence. Though we hadn’t met very long ago, I couldn’t imagine my life without the scorpion queen in it.

  “Hold your ground,” I told her. “I don’t want you to get separated from us by the raiders.”

  “Fine,” Zillah grumbled. “But if I see a chance to take a shot at the drow, I’m going for it.”

  Nephket urged the rest of her people to get into the passage. She watched as the sorceress descended the hill toward us, arcing strands of purple light darting between her fingers while strange and unholy words rolled off her tongue like the rattle of misshapen coins tossed into a copper bucket.

  I didn’t know what Kezakazek was up to, and I didn’t want us to stick around to find out.

  But as fast as the wahket entered the passage, I knew it wouldn’t be fast enough. I was close to the maximum volume, and I had to keep reshaping the passage to fit all the cat women inside. A traffic jam had formed deeper into the tunnel, leaving the last ten of the wahket stranded outside as Neph urged them to hurry.

  “Move!” I shouted.

  The dark elf flung her hands toward Nephket, and a ball of sparking energy streaked through the air toward my familiar. Droplets of acid sizzled as they struck the ground along the spell’s flight path, and I shuddered at the images my mind conjured of the damage that spell would do to Nephket.

  The priestess didn’t hesitate to follow my order. She flung herself to the side and dragged two other wahket to the ground with her. The sphere ripped through the space they’d just left and slammed into the hillside.

  “Zillah!” I shouted. “Stop the sorceress!”

  “On it,” Zillah snarled and threw herself off her perch. She landed hard a few yards away from the dark elf and scrambled across the sandy terrain as all eight of her legs kicked up dust and grit. Her tail curled into striking position.

  “Go,” Nephket pleaded with the wahket. “Keep moving.”

  Her words worked wonders on the cat women, and the line began to move again. She murmured to her people, keeping them calm and motivated, and soon they’d all vanished into the passage’s dark mouth.

  Meanwhile, Zillah darted and dashed around the dark elf as she sought an opening. Her tail whipped through the air, and I was sure the sorceress was about to die.

  “Shield!” the drow shouted in an arcane language I understood thanks to Rathokhetra’s memories.

  Zillah’s tail rebounded off an invisible barrier of magical force with such violence it twisted her body hard to the left. She swung her spear in a desperate slash, but the drow easily evaded th
e wild attack.

  “Fall back!” I shouted to Zillah.

  “I can take her,” the scorpion queen snapped at me.

  But it wasn’t just the sorceress I was worried about. Pinchy and the rest of the scorpions were agitated, and they crawled up onto the ceiling of the passageway. Their tails tapped out an angry rhythm that warned me we were out of time.

  The sorceress had showed herself as a distraction. She wanted us focused on her so we didn’t notice the real threat as it sneaked up the hill over the top of my tunnel.

  “The raiders are almost here!” I shouted. “Fall back.”

  Zillah shrieked in rage and took one last stab at the dark elf. She missed, but she’d struck with such force her spear kicked up sparks from the rocks near the sorceress’s feet and peppered them both with flying sand.

  The scorpion queen whirled away from her target and scrambled down the hill toward me. I’d expected the dark elf to hold her ground and fling spells at Zillah’s back, but instead she drew a dagger and charged after the scorpion queen. Her eyes were wild and purple flames streamed from them as she raced for the passage.

  The raiders jumped down from the side of the hill above the dungeon corridor and landed three feet in front of me. They were a motley crew of all races, armed and unarmored; some wielded bows, others prepared spells.

  Zillah’s feet skittered across the valley’s sandy floor as she changed course. The raiders were between her and her exit.

  “I’m coming for you, dungeon lord,” Kezakazek howled. “I will have your core!”

  Zillah doubled back and swung her tail at the sorceress. Its envenomed tip missed the drow, but the bulbous venom sac slammed into the dark elf’s shoulder and knocked her off her feet.

  Kezakazek grunted as her ass hit the sand, but she bounced up to her feet almost instantly. She slashed at Zillah with more ferocity than skill, and the scorpion queen parried the dagger with a quick flick of her spear.

  “Kill her!” the drow shouted.

  The raiders rushed forward at Kezakazek’s words. A half-dozen arrows and crossbow bolts slammed into the sand around Zillah, and she deftly switched positions to keep both the charging knot of raiders and the sorceress in view.