Dungeon Bringer 2

by Nick Harrow

  The skeletons tried to scramble up and over the shields, but the press of undead bodies at the front line was too close to allow that trick to work again. Bony feet slid off rotten shoulders and moldy scalps, and the skeletons were crushed between the weight of their allies at their backs and the unyielding line of shields shoved in their faces.

  The wahket’s training had seen them through the worst of the fight, it seemed, and now it was just a matter of time before the dead died once more. It was grim, ugly work, but it was just work.

  The middle ranks of the undead onslaught were likewise without challenge. There was no strategy here; the undead moved forward until they couldn’t make any more progress. When a living corpse in the front fell, the next one stepped up to take its place.

  If the undead smelled flesh, or detected life, or whatever it was they used to find their prey, they snapped and clawed in a vain attempt to get some life into their cold, empty bellies. It was gross, but it wasn’t much more dangerous than the mosh pit at your local black metal music festival.

  The problem was beyond the fight. More zombies and skeletons headed toward the battle every minute. They were slow and shambling, sure, but they’d wear the wahket down eventually. Nephket’s voice would wear out, or a shield would break, and then...

  “I’m going to incarnate,” I said. “It’s the only way—”

  “Give Zillah a chance,” Kezakazek said. “She’s been gone less than two minutes. Let her do what she’s best at.”

  “Killing things?” I asked.

  “You know it,” Kez responded. That even earned a wink from Nephket.

  “Have it your way,” I said. “But I’m going to watch this from the front row, just in case.”

  I strode through the wahket and the mess of dead and undead bodies. From my vantage point, I saw the source of our problems.

  A twisted black lump of a zombie crouched deeper within the necropolis. Its mouth hung open impossibly wide, and where its tongue should have been the creature sported an enormous trumpet-like fungal growth. Black light poured from the deformed creature’s eyes, and an even darker cloud of spores drifted from the mutant fungus that jutted from its jaw. The spores attracted hungry undead like the smell of sizzling burgers attracted hungry stoners to their local In-N-Out.

  That disgusting piece of shit had turned our leisurely undead killing field trip into a clusterfuck. He had to go.

  Zillah should have found that little asshole and popped him like a zit in no time.

  So where the hell was she?

  “Zillah!” I called out to her mind. “There’s an asshole at the back of the pack. He’s ringing the dinner bell for his buddies.”

  “I know,” she thought back at me. For once, she’d actually been listening when I called. “But I need to plug this hole or they’ll just keep coming.”

  “That doesn’t sound good,” I thought to her.

  This time, there was no answer. But I felt her strain in my mind, and then a wave of relief washed out of her and into my thoughts.

  The wahket shouted my dungeon lord name again, and the tide of battle swirled around me. Their shields rang with blows as the zombies and skeletons pounded at them, and gobbets of mutilated flesh rained down around the wahket. They were holding up their end of the deal, but they were flagging. There were limits even to Nephket’s magic.

  “Now I’m starting to worry,” Kezakazek said. She prepared an acid sphere. “Is she all right?”

  “I guess we’ll see,” I said. “I’m going to bite the bullet and incarnate to clear these bastards out of here.”

  “So much ka,” Kezakazek muttered, then flung her corrosive ball through a zombie’s left eye. It burst out the back of the critter’s head with a gruesome splash.

  “I don’t see that I have much of a choice,” I said.

  And then the necropolis came tumbling down.

  Or at least a big portion of its southern end collapsed even more.

  Boulders the size of city buses back on Earth crashed down with a roar like thunder. A cloud of dust billowed toward us from the south end of the necropolis, but there was no sign of Zillah.

  “Get back here,” I demanded. “Now.”

  No answer.

  Had my deadliest guardian buried herself in a cave-in?

  If she had, I’d find some way to bring her back and kill her again for making me worry.

  The cloud had reached the freaky zombie trumpeter, and Zillah still hadn’t appeared.

  Anunaset took over for Zillah and barked commands at her sisters to keep them focused and raise their flagging spirits. She chanted a steady cadence and the second rank echoed the beats of her rhythm with blows from their clubs. They were exhausted, but they’d managed to drop enough zombies and skeletons to form a natural barricade in front of the first rank of shields. To reach the wahket, the undead now had to crawl over and slosh through a mound of corpse goo that slowed their movements.

  The good guys might just win this one yet.

  But would it be worth it if it cost me Zillah?

  Kezakazek sent acid spheres into the undead with a slow but steady rhythm. Her voice had grown hoarse from the effort of spellcasting, but she didn’t slow down or hesitate. Her seething missiles burned through their bodies and unleashed gouts of corrupt, black fluids from the craters they left behind.

  If I didn’t know better, I’d swear the rough edge to her voice was caused by the faint line of tears that leaked from her right eye.

  Incarnating wouldn’t save Zillah, but maybe there was another way.

  I shouted and stabbed my finger toward the growing cloud of dust. My dungeon shot forward and I raced along with it. The undead tripped and stumbled as the floor moved under their feet and the walls surrounded them, but I ignored them.

  Small rocks bounced off the top of my dungeon’s corridor, but I ignored those, too. I kept on moving even when the dungeon entered the dust-choked section of the necropolis.

  “Zillah!” I shouted. “Zillah!”

  “Here,” she coughed from ahead of me.

  I urged the dungeon forward and ran smack into the black trumpeter.

  I was prepared to incarnate to kill the damned thing, but never got the chance.

  Zillah burst from the dust and flicked a spray of disgusting black glue from the tips of her mancatcher spear. Tatters of rotted flesh dangled from her chitinous knees and hung from the tip of her tail stinger like sodden streamers. Her body was coated with vile smears, but her teeth gleamed white in a triumphant grin. This is what the scorpion queen was best at, and she loved it.

  “Hey, asshole,” she shouted as she landed behind the fungus-mouthed freak. It bleated in confusion, and the sound made Zillah wrinkle her nose in disgust. “Shut up.”

  The zombie caller swiveled its head to face the scorpion queen, which was the last thing it ever did.

  Zillah thrust her spear forward, and the serrated inner edges of the twin tines crashed into the vile creature’s mouth. The mushroom instrument crumbled apart in mealy chunks and black spores burst from the creature’s savaged maw in a gauzy black cloud. Zillah’s spear pierced the creature’s head and separated the top half of its skull from the lower jaw. The black body sagged as its head flipped up into the air.

  With a shout, Zillah snapped the spear’s tines closed, tossed her weapon into the air, and caught it in a two-handed grip. She swung for all she was worth and caught the head at the top of its arc. Her brutal, full-body swing sent the mushy skull out into the darkness beyond the necropolis. I thought I heard a wet splat as it found the ground, but maybe that was just wishful thinking.

  “Nice shot, slugger,” I said. “Took you long enough.”

  “There was a hole in the rubble back there. That’s where the undead were coming from, so I had to close it,” she explained. “Then I had to kill all the zombies and skeletons that came through the hole. Also, the ceiling almost fell on me.”

  “Excuses, excuses,” I teased her. “Let
’s get back to the wahket and see if they need any help finishing this fight.”

  “Go ahead,” the scorpion queen said. “I want to check something.”

  “Make it quick,” I said. “I don’t like the idea of you wandering around out here alone.”

  “Worrywart,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

  The fungus creature’s death had taken the wind out of the zombies and skeletons. They moved slower and their attacks were clumsier. By the time I’d returned, the wahket had beaten the last of the walking corpses into goo, and the skeletons were little more than splinters of bone. The dungeon reeked of decay, but the wahket grinned and slapped each other on the backs.

  I appeared before them as I appraised their condition. The wahket had suffered some minor wounds, but they’d slaughtered more than thirty of the undead. They’d acquitted themselves even better than I’d hoped. And I’d earned ten ka so far, to boot.

  The day was looking up.

  “You have fought well,” I said to the cat women.

  “That they did,” Nephket agreed. Her voice was hoarse from the effort of chanting during the battle, but the priestess beamed with pride for her people. “Perhaps now would be a good time to head back and get some rest. I want to tend to these wounds as well, to make sure none of them get infected.”

  “You’re right,” I said. Dungeon lords don’t need to sleep or rest, but that didn’t prevent me from feeling wrung out and exhausted. The fight’s tension had drained me, and I looked forward to just chilling in my burial chamber for a few hours. We’d cleaned out the necropolis and earned a break.

  “Here comes trouble,” Kezakazek said.

  “Hey, boss,” Zillah called as she approached. “Got something to show you.”

  She tossed the blackened, blobby body of the decapitated trumpeter down in front of us. The wahket wrinkled their noses and stepped away from the mess. Even by undead standards, this one reeked. The spores that leaked from it released a bitter stench that chewed at my nose and throat like a whiff of battery acid.

  “If you’re trying to spoil my appetite, you succeeded,” I said.

  “You’re funny,” Zillah said with a wink. “But I know you can’t eat, so there’s only one appetite that I’m worried about. And I don’t think I could ruin that if I tried.”

  She took in a deep breath and arched her back to emphasize her point. Despite the blood splatters, the rags of rotten flesh snared by her chitinous armor, and the stink in the dungeon, she was right. Just the sight of her was enough to fill my head with impure thoughts.

  “What are we looking at?” Nephket asked. She had one hand over her nose and mouth, and her eyes watered. As bad as the dead thing smelled to me, it must’ve been torture for the priestess with her sensitive nostrils.

  “This thing is a problem,” Zillah said. She used the tip of her spear to pry the remains of its lower jaw away from its throat. The decayed flesh and brittle bone snapped off to reveal the gruesome stump of the zombie’s neck. A spongy white mushroom had grown to fill the entirety of the undead’s throat, and I imagined that repulsive growth had spread down into its lungs like an alien cancer.

  But the fruiting body wasn’t what Zillah wanted me to see. She fished something out of the ruins of its neck and held it out on the tips of her spear.

  It was a black iron collar.

  “What the hell is that?” I asked. Who would chain up a zombie? It didn’t make any sense.

  “That,” Zillah said with an exaggerated pause for emphasis, “is a dungeon lord’s slave collar.”

  “We’ve got a neighbor,” the scorpion queen continued. “And we’d better find him before he finds us.”

  Chapter 3: The Threat

  KEZAKAZEK PUNTED A fractured skull off the top of the mound of defeated undead. The yellowed bone wobbled through the air in an ungainly arc and shattered against the side of one of the mausoleum’s moldering tombs. It unleashed a cloud of off-white dust that drifted off to the west on a subterranean air current.

  “I take it this means our field trip to the Tomb of the Buried Kings has been canceled,” the drow pouted.

  “For the moment,” I admitted. “Looks like we’ve got bigger fish to fry, unfortunately.”

  “I don’t recognize this glyph,” Zillah said. She extended her spear to offer me the blackened iron collar that dangled from one of its tips. “But I’ve been out of circulation for a while. Could be a newbie. Or maybe an old dungeon lord who’s been hiding down here for a very, very long time. Either way, we’re going to kill him very, very hard.”

  If the scorpion queen didn’t recognize a dungeon lord’s calling card, I doubted I’d have much better luck. I was far newer at this than she was, given that my time on Soketra could have been measured in hours as easily as days.

  Still, it couldn’t hurt to examine it. I tried to scoop the collar off the spear for a better look, but my hand passed right through it. I wasn’t about to waste the ka to incarnate, so I leaned in closer to get a better look.

  The collar wasn’t black, as I’d first thought, but a deep crimson. Rust or, judging by the smell of the thing, blood flecked its surface in ugly patches, and the entire thing glistened with an unwholesome moisture. I tried to imagine this around my own throat and felt a pang of pity for my enemy’s slaves. The heavy metal would’ve chewed into the meat it surrounded, and every day the burden would have become greater.

  “Can you move it a little?” I asked the scorpion queen. “I want to get a better look at the inside of it.”

  Zillah tilted the ugly collar, and chunks of dead meat slithered away from it to reveal the intricate runes etched along its interior curve.

  Faint glimmers of magical power glowed in the depths of those glyphs like the yellow-green pulses from a firefly’s tail.

  “I don’t recognize this either,” I said. “Maybe there’s something around here.”

  I peered around the back side of the collar, just to be sure I hadn’t missed anything, and spied a spidery rune etched into the lock. Before I could even register what I’d seen, a flash of recognition slammed through my memories like a thunderbolt.

  My head filled with a ferocious din, like a junkyard dog was barking itself hoarse inside my skull. I didn’t recognize the collar’s rune, but the old Rathokhetra certainly did, and he did not like what he saw. A cold dread settled over me as burning letters filled my head.

  <<<>>>

  Delsinia, The Nightmare’s Bride

  <<<>>>

  Nephket splashed through the gory remains of the fallen undead to reach my side. The clawed fingers of her right hand wrapped around my forearm, and her other arm hooked around my waist. She shivered as if she’d sensed Rathokhetra’s disturbance.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  I draped my arm around Neph’s shoulders and squeezed her closer to me. Rathokhetra raged in my thoughts and unleashed an incoherent flood of raw vitriol that threatened to drown me in its ferocity. His emotions had no focus; I couldn’t even tell if he was pissed at this Delsinia or me.

  “I’m fine,” I said, which was technically true. Rathokhetra’s anger had knocked me for a loop, but it wouldn’t do any lasting harm. At least, I didn’t think so. “Just pissed. I thought wiping out the necropolis would give us some breathing room and buy us time to strengthen our defenses before a new pack of assholes showed up on our doorstep.”

  “Aw,” Zillah said with a smirk. She leaned on her spear and kissed me on the nose. “You’re cute. Dungeon lords always have someone they need to kill, or someone who wants to kill them. It’s fun like that.”

  “You need to upgrade your abilities,” Kezakazek chided me. “Your ka won’t do any of us any good locked away in your core if another dungeon lord steals it from you.”

  A seething spray of anger erupted through my thoughts at Kezakazek’s words. That she would dare try to tell me, her dungeon lord, what to do with my resources was unthinkable. I should have her flayed—

 
Whoa. Where the hell had that come from?

  I bit my tongue before I said something I’d regret and took a deep breath. I felt Rathokhetra at the back of my thoughts like a churning thundercloud of petty anger. He was still pissed as hell about, or at, Delsinia, and his wrath spilled over onto me every time I let my guard down. I needed to keep a closer eye on him before he goaded me into doing something stupid.

  “No one’s stealing anything from me,” I said with a warning glance toward the drow. I shifted my eyes meaningfully toward the cluster of wahket who waited on the other side of the pile of pulped zombie corpses and shattered skeletons. “We’ll deal with this threat and get on with our lives.”

  Nephket took my cue and gave me a quick hug before she returned to the wahket. Gratitude swelled in my heart as I watched her go, and I was very glad I didn’t have to give her explicit instructions to move the cat women away from us. Her thoughts buzzed in my mind as she urged the wahket to tend to their wounds and clean the mess off their gear.

  While the cat women were distracted, I motioned for Zillah and Kezakazek to gather closer to me.

  “I’m open to suggestions on what to upgrade,” I said. “We gained ten ka from slaughtering the bad guys, so I’ve got thirty motes to spend. I don’t want to blow it all on one thing, and I’d like to keep a reserve in case I need something specific to deal with a problem that pops up, but I’m willing to listen to your opinions.”

  “You could advance us,” Kezakazek suggested. “That’s a third-level upgrade, so it costs ten motes of ka. All of your guardians would be the same challenge rating as your dungeon’s level.”

  I summoned my tablet to confirm Kezakazek’s memories.

  “Nice try, Kez. That’s a third of my ka for not very much benefit.” I said. “Zillah’s already at the same challenge rating as my dungeon, and Neph is my familiar, not a guardian. The only one who’d get any benefit out of that ka is you.”