Dungeon Bringer 1

by Nick Harrow

  I narrowed the passage behind and expanded it ahead of us as I charged for the gate, and a few minutes later I raced up the ramp and straight into the jaws of hell.

  The wahket had held the line against the raiders, but the cost had been high. Several of the cat women had retreated to the mouth of the ramp to bind their wounds and take a moment’s rest.

  The raiders had gotten wise to the cat women’s tactics and turned the tables on them. The adventurers had retreated through the breach and used their own missile weapons to attack the wahket behind the barrier.

  The spear women used their shields to deflect the majority of the missiles that came their way, but a few found their marks, and wounded wahket cried out in pain. I winced at their pain and hoped they’d all pull through. Unlike my guardians, and despite their feline appearance, the wahket had but a single life to lose.

  “You’ve done well,” I said as I activated The Dungeon’s Visage ability and appeared before my troops. “I’m here to help, and together we’ll finish these raiders.”

  The wahket gawped at me, and I wasn’t sure if it was my sudden appearance in their midst or the naked drow over my shoulder that held their rapt attention. I know which one I’d be staring at if the shoe were on the other foot.

  “Disarm the gate. Now,” I barked to Kezakazek and plopped the dark elf down next to the mystical portal.

  “What in the actual fuck?” Zillah asked. She parried a crossbow bolt with the thin chitin shield on her left arm, glared at the raider who’d fired at her, and then turned her incredulous eyes back to me. “Isn’t this the bitch who tried to kill a bunch of us?”

  “That’s the one,” Nephket said and planted her feet between the drow and the gate. Somewhere along the way she’d found a wickedly sharp dagger, and she brandished it at Kezakazek. “She must have charmed Lord Rathokhetra. We should—”

  “Everyone calm down. She’s with us now,” I said. “Long story, baptism by fire, mid-battle allegiance switch. Blah, blah, blah. Let her work on the gate.”

  My familiar and the scorpion queen eyeballed me dubiously, but they didn’t try to stop the drow as she knelt before the glowing crystal and went to work.

  Another volley of missiles and hurled spears bounced off the wahket’s shields, and they responded with a flurry of crossbow bolts from our side of the barrier. A few more raiders stumbled away from the breach as the withering fire punched through their armor.

  I felt a pang of regret at the ka lost when those bastards died outside my dungeon, but there was nothing to be done about that. As long as the wahket kept the raiders away from the gate until Kezakazek had finished, I didn’t care how the bad guys died.

  “She’s kind of hot,” Zillah said to Nephket. She eyeballed the dark elf and licked her lips with a lascivious grin. “In an evil, I’ll-eat-your-gizzard-before-you-wake-up-the-morning-after kind of way.”

  “Never was a big fan of gizzards,” Kezakazek responded. “Though I do like a good blood sausage.”

  “Naughty,” Zillah said with a smirk. She whipped her tail past the defensive barrier and through the breach. A raider screamed in pain as the scorpion queen’s stinger punched through his chest and burst from his back. Zillah snapped her tail left, then right, and the two halves of the raider splattered on the ground outside the breach.

  Nephket failed miserably to conceal her own laugh as she began to sing a song that filled the wahket with energy. The cat women all cheered as a golden power flowed into them, and another burst of fire from their crossbows pushed the raiders clear of the breach. As long as nothing came through—

  The gate’s surface churned and an angry red glow spread across it like oil over water.

  “That is not good,” I said. “How can this damn thing operate if we’ve disconnected half of its power supply?”

  “It only needs one cell connected to transfer its targets,” Kezakazek said. Her pointed nails worked feverishly at the fourth power connection. “But the fewer connected cells, the longer it will take them to get a fix and pass through the gate. Keep an eye on its shade. It will go the colors of the rainbow, starting with red and ending with violet, and then the extermination squad will arrive. We probably shouldn’t be here when that happens.”

  “I’ll take that under advisement,” I said.

  A quick look to the breach told me there were still plenty of raiders out there. Those dicks were up to something, but I couldn’t tell what. I saw a lot of torches, despite the fact that the sun was still well above the horizon, and I didn’t like the implication of that one teensy bit.

  “Crossbows, get ready. Something bad is about to happen,” I said. “If you see someone with fire, any kind of fire, shoot them.”

  If there was one thing I’d learned during my time at the Dungeons & Dragons tables, it was that adventurers despised a fair fight. They liked dirty tricks, and the granddaddy of all dirty tricks was the old flask of burning oil.

  If the raiders started chucking Molotovs in here, they wouldn’t have to get past the barrier. They could smoke us out or turn this chamber into an oven and broil us alive. All the crossbow bolts in the world wouldn’t be enough to stop a fire.

  “You need to get this done fast,” I said to Kezakazek. “That stupid portal is already yellow. I thought you said it would take longer with fewer power cells.”

  “It is taking longer,” Kezakazek said. She licked her lips and twisted a screw with her fingernails. “Gate transport normally only takes a few seconds.”

  She didn’t look away from the device in her hands, but she didn’t have to for me to feel the heat of her rage. The dark elf was the smallest of my guardians, if you didn’t count Pinchy and her friends, but I found myself a little nervous around the drow. She had a lot of anger trapped in that little body, and I needed to make sure it was channeled in a constructive direction.

  “You’re doing fine,” Zillah said. To my surprise, the scorpion queen wrapped her tail around the drow’s shoulder in a comforting gesture. “You’ll get it done. I have faith in you.”

  Nephket didn’t stop singing, but she raised an eyebrow toward me at Zillah’s comments. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who found the sweet and kind turn from the scorpion queen to be a little unnerving.

  I gave Neph a shrug back. I wasn’t going to pretend that I understood Zillah at all. She was practically a wild creature, and if she felt some sort of strange kinship with Kezakazek, well, I guess that was the way it went. It certainly wouldn’t hurt to have someone I knew I could trust working with the drow on her anger issues.

  Outside the breach, the raiders made all my fears come true and flung the first volley of oil flasks at the hole in the chamber’s wall. The wahket were fast enough to shoot most of the glass flasks out of the air, but a few escaped the blistering spray of crossbow bolts and shattered inside the chamber. The spilled oil was still on the far side of the protective barrier I’d created, but it wouldn’t matter. A big enough fire on that side would suck the air out of our lungs, and that would be the end of us. The execution squad would arrive to find nothing in here but a bunch of broiled wahket. The fact that the fire might kill them, too, was cold comfort, indeed.

  Torches followed the oil flasks, and though several of the wahket managed to hit those as they sailed into the chamber, the crossbow bolts didn’t have enough mass to deflect the fiery projectiles. The flaming brands rolled into the oil, and flames spread across the floor and up the walls of the chamber with alarming speed.

  “That’s five,” Kezakazek said. She dropped a long, silver screw on the ground between her feet and lifted the wire it had held in place free from its bracket.

  Then she glanced up at the gate and groaned.

  When I followed her gaze, I felt a sick ball of dread drop into my gut. Blue light swirled across the gate’s surface.

  Only indigo and violet remained before the extermination squad arrived. It wouldn’t take more than a minute for the gate to get through those colors at the rat
e it had been cycling.

  “I can’t do this,” Kezakazek said. “The last connection is the one with the booby trap. It will take me at least five minutes to disarm it, and we don’t have that kind of time.”

  Nephket had stopped singing, and I couldn’t blame her. I didn’t see much point in pumping everyone full of stamina if the fight was almost over.

  Zillah licked her lips and put an arm around the priestess’s waist. Her tail tightened and pulled Kezakazek closer to her.

  All three of them watched me with wide, expectant eyes. They didn’t have the answer to our problem. That’s what they were looking at me to provide. The flames licked at the walls of the chamber, and waves of heat washed over us. Shadows moved in the depths of the gate, and I glimpsed the outlines of well-armed figures headed our way. The time for indecision was over.

  It was time to be the boss.

  “What happens if the booby trap detonates?” I asked Kezakazek.

  She glanced down at the crystal in her hand, then peered deeper into the guts of the iron box attached to the side of the gate.

  “Based on the size of this crystal, I’d guess it holds at least fifty ka,” she said. “If it detonates, the explosion will flatten everything within a quarter mile. Whatever the blast doesn’t destroy outright will burn. There’ll be a scar in this spot for a thousand years.”

  The gate’s surface shifted to a deeper blue.

  Indigo.

  Shit. I hated to lose the crystal because I could do a lot with fifty ka.

  But not if I were dead.

  “Everyone out,” I barked. “Nephket and Zillah, get the wahket back underground. Get as far from here as fast as you can. Don’t look back, just run.”

  I could see in their eyes my guardian and familiar wanted to argue with me, but they bit back their protest. When push came to shove, they knew this was my call, and they didn’t have the luxury of disagreeing with it.

  “Pull back!” Zillah shouted at the wahket. “Down the ramp, now!”

  The wahket jumped to follow Zillah’s command and vanished down the ramp in a frenzied rush.

  More flasks shattered against the top half of the barrier, and a cascade of flame poured down. The air shimmered with waves of heat distortion, and Kezakazek flinched away from the attack.

  “You need to get the hell out of here, too,” I said to Kezakazek. The gate’s power source was in my dungeon, so I was confident I could handle such a simple task. “What do I need to do? Just yank this wire out?”

  “I’ll do it,” Kezakazek said. “I’m not sure you’ll survive a raw ka detonation.”

  I stared into the dark elf’s violet eyes and felt her thoughts churn like storm clouds on the horizon. Could I trust the dark elf to do the right thing?

  If Kezakazek did nothing, the extermination squad would arrive, they’d kill her, and then those assholes would tear my core apart.

  I’d be dead. There’d be no one to protect the wahket.

  If Kezakazek was so pissed she’d die just to see me dead, I was screwed. But if I didn’t show my trust in Kezakazek when she’d offered to make this play for me, I’d never have a chance to earn her trust. She’d fight me tooth and nail for the rest of her life.

  And if I took this choice out of her hands and pulled the trigger myself, there was a decent chance I’d end up dead.

  I weighed my options and decided to take the risk.

  “Do it,” I said.

  I turned to leave the chamber, but Kezakazek grabbed my hand and pulled me close. She stood on her tiptoes and hooked her arms around the back of my head. The dark elf pulled my head down toward hers and planted an open-mouthed kiss on my lips that stole the breath from my lungs.

  “You owe me,” she whispered into my mouth and pushed me toward the tunnel.

  I ran to catch up to the wahket. I hadn’t gone far before all hell broke loose.

  A sound like a thousand china cabinets being hurled down the world’s longest flight of stairs shattered the air above us. A light so bright and white I swear I could see through my dungeon’s rock walls flashed into the tunnel, and even my disincarnated eyes ached at its brilliance.

  The wahket yowled and dropped their weapons and shields as raw terror ripped through their ranks. Their padded feet slapped against the stone, and their arms and legs pumped for all they were worth. Nephket and Zillah were hot on the wahket’s heels, and by the time I caught up to them we’d almost reached the devastated scarabkin temple.

  The earth still shook violently around us, and I wondered if Kezakazek had dramatically underestimated the strength of that gate crystal. Throbbing waves of invisible energy coursed through me, and I felt like my immaterial body was tattered and torn by their arcane currents.

  If I’d been able to harness that ka...

  Shit.

  No use crying over the spilled essence of a few hundred raiders, I guessed.

  The earth still shuddered around us, but the wahket had to stop in the temple to gather their breath. They were ragged and shaking from their efforts, and even Zillah looked like she was on the edge of exhaustion.

  “She actually did it,” Nephket gasped. “I was sure she’d betray us. But she didn’t.”

  “The dark elf came through in the clutch,” I said. “I guess even a dungeon lord can be surprised once in a while.”

  “What if she hadn’t?” Zillah asked.

  “We’d all be fucked pretty raw,” I said. “But that isn’t what happened. We won.”

  But as we dragged our sorry asses back to my dungeon, I couldn’t help but wonder how I’d known that the dark elf wouldn’t kamikaze me and the wahket. Had it been something in her eyes? Or did I believe she was just too hot to be truly evil at heart?

  Ancient dungeon lord secret, I guessed.

  Chapter 16: Bound

  BEING A DUNGEON LORD could be a pain in the ass, but the perks were amazing. By the time we’d returned to the burial chamber, I’d used the Tablet of Transformation to convert it into the swankiest lounge this side of the Vegas Strip. Some of the gold I’d transformed earlier became a dozen plush divans large enough for three wahket to sit on comfortably. A few gems bought me low onyx tables, crystal flagons of fine wine, decanters of Gentleman Jack that I’d crafted through the Table of Transformation, and enough delicious meat and cheese trays to feed a small army.

  Which was good, because that’s exactly what I had on my hands.

  “You did all this?” Nephket asked when she saw my handiwork. “For us?”

  The Dungeon’s Visage was still active, and the wahket all had their eyes focused on me when I answered.

  “For all of us,” I said. “I helped to show you the way, but you ladies are the ones who shed blood and sweat to kick those raiders off your land.”

  My familiar’s eyes were wide and wet with tears she could barely hold back. Her lower lip trembled slightly as she crossed the room to me, clasped both of my cheeks in her hands, and kissed me.

  “There’s something I must do,” she said quietly when she finally pulled her head back from mine for a breath. She placed her soft hands flat against my chest, and the tips of her claws pricked my skin. “Something I have to see.”

  I knew what she wanted before I saw her thoughts. I wanted it, too.

  “Take ten of the wahket with you,” I said. “The strongest of them. If anything were to happen to you now, I don’t know what I’d do.”

  “We’d murder the hell out of someone,” Zillah growled. She curled her tail around her human legs and sat on its coils surrounded by fawning wahket. The cat women admired the scorpion queen for her fighting prowess and indomitable spirit, and I felt the same way.

  “I wish I could go with you,” Zillah said. “But, you know, our dungeon lord won’t let some of us leave the dungeon. We’re trapped down here with all these hotties.”

  “I know. I bet it’s killing you,” Nephket said with a wink. She passed through the crowd of wahket and gently tapped ten of them on
the shoulders. By the time she’d reached the other side of the room, a small honor guard of warrior women surrounded her.

  “Take these,” I said and transformed more of the gold into steel-tipped spears. Their hafts were ironwood, engraved with silver-inlaid runes that told the tale of our battle against the raiders. The spears appeared against the wall next to the exit from the burial chamber, and the wahket took them reverently from their resting place as they headed out for one more mission.

  “We really did it,” Zillah said to me. She had a wahket under each of her arms, and they nuzzled both sides of her neck as she spoke. “You know, when you first found me, I thought you were crazy.”

  “Maybe you were right,” I said with a wide grin. “And maybe it doesn’t matter.”

  Zillah chuckled and took a decanter of wine off the table in front of her. She tilted her head back and poured a thick red stream of alcohol into her open mouth. A few ruby red beads dribbled from her lips, and the wahket on her left licked them from off the scorpion queen’s chin.

  “Crazy always matters,” Zillah said to me. “If you’re smart enough to know when and how to use it.”

  “Am I?” I asked. I wanted that wine for myself but knew it wasn’t happening. Even if I could drink it, something told me it would be as flat and tasteless as water. Not disgusting, not even bad, just insufferably bland.

  I really, really hoped there was an ability that would let me eat and drink again hidden somewhere on the Tablet of Transformation.

  “I guess we’ll see,” Zillah said. “Why don’t you come over here and join us?”

  Her right hand slid under the strap of the wahket’s halter and slipped it free of the cat woman’s shoulder. It was an enticing invitation, but I wanted to see Nephket’s mission through first.

  “Soon,” I said.

  “Not soon enough,” Zillah growled. She nipped at the neck of the wahket on her right, and the young woman giggled and wrapped her arms around the scorpion queen’s head.

  I leaned back in the iron throne and closed my eyelids. My vision blurred and shifted, and then I was behind Nephket’s eyes. I’d already widened all the passages in the dungeon and shrank the tunnel that led to the scarabkin temple and the former site of the gate, so the wahket didn’t have to crawl when they left the tomb.