by Nick Harrow
“Let’s do this,” the drow said. “All this tension is making me itchy to kill something.”
She relayed my instructions to the wahket within earshot, and they echoed them for those farther back. When I was sure everyone had heard the instructions, I crooked my finger at Kezakazek.
“Let’s go,” I said, and led her to the hill of coffins.
“All clear,” Zillah called from the exit when she saw that we’d reached the top of the earthen mound. “The straight shot from the hill to the exit is safe.”
Our little group made its way across the respawn chamber, and Zillah headed off down the hallway ahead of us, still careful to check the floor with her spear before she took a single step. Pinchy and the other scorpions joined her and checked the walls and ceiling for any hidden dangers that might lurk there.
The passage took a sudden sharp turn to the left ten feet past the respawn chamber. The similarity to the kill chute I’d created to deal with the drow invaders gave me pause.
“Zillah,” I said. “Let the scorpions take the lead here. I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
“As you command,” Zillah said with a sarcastic grin. “But I don’t think we’ve got anything to worry about. I think Delsinia shot her load already. We should move ahead and stab her guts out.”
“I’m not so sure she’s out of cards to play,” I said. “I’d rather not rush into an ace she’s been holding.”
“Safety first,” Kezakazek said. “But for the record, I think you’re being paranoid.”
“I don’t,” Nephket whispered into my thoughts. “Let your guardians do their job, and we’ll all be much better off for it.”
We waited for a few moments as the scorpions scuttled past Zillah. Each of them gently brushed her tail as they passed and then clicked their claws when they were ahead of her.
Pinchy and her allies returned to give us the all clear a minute or so later, and we wound our way through the snaky passage. The tittering laughter grew louder with every step we took, and the walls themselves groaned as if offended by our presence. The wriggling worms multiplied in number until the walls were nearly covered with their undulating pink forms. The air, already thick and moist, became oppressively warm.
For the first time since she’d fled my dungeon, I felt Delsinia’s thoughts. They crashed into mine like a splash of acid that scoured the inside of my skull with its raw intensity.
Delsinia was enraged at the losses she’d suffered, and her need for vengeance burned bright and hot as a blowtorch’s flame. Her emotions made it hard for me to concentrate, and Rathokhetra responded with grumbles and growls that didn’t help the matter even a little bit.
With a concerted effort, I was able to shove Delsinia clear of my thoughts, but I couldn’t silence her and Rathokhetra at the same time.
I really needed to get these assholes out of my head.
The scorpions had stopped ahead of us in a round chamber fifteen feet across. Four pillars, spaced equidistant around the room’s center, stretched from the floor to the ceiling. Unlike the rest of the dungeon, the columns seemed to be made of solid stone. They bore no ornamentation, and their very ordinary appearance made me immediately suspicious.
“Avoid those pillars,” I said. “They could be a trap.”
“Or they could be hollow,” Kezakazek said, “and filled with treasure. Let’s crack one open and see what’s inside.”
“There’ll be plenty of time to gather up loot after we finish her,” I said. “And everyone will get their share.”
There was a passage ahead of us, and another off to our left. The one to the left seemed to open into a chamber of some sort while the one straight ahead took a hard curve to the left.
“Pinchy, take your team and scout that hallway.” I pointed ahead of us. “Zillah, check that chamber off to our left there. Make sure there are no traps or hidden bad guys.”
“I hope there’s a monster,” Zillah said. “A big, scary fucker with fangs, claws, the whole shebang. I need a fight. A good, bloody, knock-down, drag-out fight.”
“If you could stop wishing murder and mayhem on the rest of us, that would be awesome,” Kezakazek said. “I’m as bloodthirsty as the next girl, but fair fights suck. And fights where I’m the underdog suck even more.”
“I don’t know,” I said as Zillah snorted and left the room. “The last fight where you were the underdog worked out all right for you, didn’t it?”
Kezakazek put her hands on her hips and leaned forward.
“I was not the underdog in that fight,” she said. “You just got lucky. Very lucky.”
I hooked one arm around her waist and pulled her close. Our faces were only inches apart.
“I’m not the only one who got lucky, if I remember correctly,” I said.
“All clear,” Zillah called from the other chamber. “But you should take a look at this.”
Kezakazek grinned at me and slithered out of my grasp. She headed for the next chamber, and Nephket and I followed in her wake.
“They certainly are a handful,” the cat woman said. “Just don’t forget who brought you here.”
She gave me a quick pinch on the ass and then scooted away before I could pinch her back.
“Tease,” I called after Nephket, and she threw a laugh over her shoulder as she entered the next room.
“Whoa,” I said as I caught up to my guardians.
“Right?” Zillah said. “This is really something.”
The chamber wasn’t terribly large, merely fifteen feet wide and about as long, with a recessed pulpit on the end opposite its entrance. While the size was modest, the furnishings most definitely were not.
Two neat rows of golden pews flanked a central aisle like ranks of armored guardians. Their arms were carved into leonine figures with blazing sapphires for eyes. Strange glyphs were inscribed on the backs and sides of the pews in a repeating pattern that was both dizzying and hypnotic.
A thick carpet runner covered the central aisle and climbed up the short steps to the pulpit. A highly detailed cobra was stitched into the fabric, and its sinuous body circled an ornate golden scepter that had been sewn with such care it looked as if I could have reached into the carpet and slipped it out of the serpent’s coils.
A trio of floor-to-ceiling stained glass windows were set into the side walls of the temple, and what appeared to be golden sunlight poured through them.
“This is remarkable magic,” Kezakazek said. She’d wandered over to one of the windows and held her hand in the golden light. “It’s warm. It even makes my skin ache like real sunlight. But we have to be hundreds of feet below ground. Most impressive.”
She pulled her hand out of the light and scrubbed it against the skin of her thigh as if to remove the warm taint of the sun’s rays from her obsidian skin.
“The designs in these windows are strange,” Zillah pointed out. “Why are there so many cat women in them?”
Nephket studied the windows and then frowned at me.
“These don’t look familiar to me at all,” she said. “They’re clearly wahket, but what are these cobras surrounding them?”
Rathokhetra howled in outrage as Nephket spoke. It was as if he didn’t want me to hear the words that came out of her mouth, or that they somehow offended him. Or maybe he didn’t want me to think about them too much.
Because I’d often wondered why the lord of the wahket had a cobra throne for his sphere. There was something here that I needed to get to the bottom of, but I’d deal with it after Delsinia was good and dead.
“That’s a puzzle,” I said. “But not one we have time to figure out now.”
“When we’re done here,” Nephket said. “We’re definitely taking this temple. It’s exactly what we need.”
“I agree, but we need to kill Delsinia first,” I said. “Let’s get on with it.”
Pinchy and the others hadn’t reported any traps, which didn’t make any damned sense. If Delsinia knew she was going to
war with me, then she certainly knew there was a chance her plans wouldn’t work out and I’d come down here looking to kill her for what she’d done.
And yet, we hadn’t encountered anything even remotely dangerous. Did this dungeon lord actually think those ghouls would respawn before I cut her heart out?
I stormed out of the temple before my doubts could eat me alive. I had no idea how to fight another dungeon lord, and no way to know how strong Delsinia was. She’d thrown a serious force at us, drow and ghouls and that weird zombie trumpeter thing, which meant she could easily be stronger than I expected. What if she didn’t have any traps or other guardians because she was such a badass she didn’t need them?
I shoved those thoughts aside. I had a trio of guardians, a small army of wahket, and a very bad attitude.
That would have to be enough.
I moved through the pillar room with my guardians trailing behind me. The wahket who’d gathered in this chamber followed us down the short passage and around its tight bend into a ten-foot-wide by fifteen-foot-long chamber in which the only notable feature was the complete lack of contents. The walls, floor, and ceiling were the same gruesome material as the rest of the dungeon, but the stink and worms didn’t bother me anymore.
“You have to do better than this bullshit,” I grumbled.
Pinchy and her pals had already left through the room’s only exit and scouted the next hallway before I arrived. I followed their lead and found an even more profoundly boring room at the end of that passage.
The chamber was a fifteen-foot square with only one entrance and no contents. It was completely empty.
We’d reached the dungeon’s end, but we’d found no core and no dungeon lord.
“Where the fuck is Delsinia?” I asked no one in particular. “And where is her goddamned core?”
Chapter 10: The Reckoning
I PROWLED THE PERIMETER of the dungeon’s final room with clenched fists. I was sure we hadn’t missed any chambers in Delsinia’s dungeon, but we were clearly missing something.
“Where the fuck is she?” I asked again. None of my guardians answered, but I hadn’t expected them to. If I couldn’t find her, how would they?
I probed the sore spot in my thoughts where the old Rathokhetra lived, but he kept his slithery, sandy thoughts to himself for once.
The haunting laughter continued, more bothersome than before. Delsinia was close enough she could see my frustration, and I could taste the strange madness that surrounded her thoughts. But she might as well have been on another planet for all of that.
My rage made it hard to think, so I wadded that emotion into a ball and chucked it out of my thoughts. My old life as a hacker had taught me to be methodical and approach problems without preconceived notions about their solutions. Getting pissed off had never helped me crack a system or dump an intruder. Emotions made things more complicated, messier than they needed to be, and they had no place in my brain when it came to the hard problems.
I continued my circuit around the empty chamber and concentrated on Delsinia’s thoughts. They grew stronger as I approached the back of the chamber, then waned as I moved away toward the walls or entrance of the chamber. There was something close, but I couldn’t find it.
“Zillah, take half of the wahket and search the dungeon for any secret rooms we might’ve missed,” I said.
“Delsinia might’ve just run,” Kezakazek offered. “She saw us slaughter the zombies and skeletons that her little trumpet boy set on us, knows that we killed her pet drow, and saw that we still had enough juice left in the tank to stomp the guts out of all those ghouls who came for your core. If my team got its ass kicked three times in a row, I’d pack up my shit and run like hell.”
“No,” I said. “She’s here, somewhere. She’s a dungeon lord. Where would she go if she left her dungeon?”
“Maybe she’s just hiding, then,” Zillah suggested. “She knows her ghouls will be back in a couple of hours. The drow, too. Everything will respawn, and if we’re still here...”
Zillah had a good point, but she brought another question to mind. We’d found the spawn chamber for the ghouls, but I hadn’t seen anything that would spawn drow. We had to have missed something.
“That’s why we need to find her and end this,” I said. “You’re going to search this place top to bottom.”
“It’s going to take a while,” Zillah said.
“That’s why Kezakazek is taking the other half of the wahket and the scorpions,” I said. “Our best weapon here is vibration sense. Use it to search for secret doors, trapdoors, and hidden areas. We’re missing something, and I want you to find it.”
“Let’s do it,” the scorpion queen said to the diminutive drow. “I’ll head to the entrance and work my way back. You start from here and work your way toward the temple.”
The two of them split the wahket into two parties, then figured out how to turn everyone around and march them back through the dungeon without a traffic jam. It was a pain in the ass to move so many people around the narrow corridors, and I was glad we hadn’t been ambushed. If Delsinia had launched an attack on our rear, she might’ve been able to claw her way through the wahket, one cat woman at a time.
She still might if we didn’t catch her.
I stopped pacing while the bulk of our forces headed off in search of whatever we’d missed. I hoped they’d find something, and soon.
“That temple will save you some ka,” Nephket said. “Once you’ve taken Delsinia’s core, it will be consecrated to you. I can hold services there for the wahket. They can become your worshipers.”
My familiar’s soothing words helped keep my anger at bay, though it also stirred Rathokhetra back to life. The angry old fuck really did not like the fact that Nephket worked for me and not him.
“You’re sure that’s what they want?” I asked.
Nephket stepped up to me and put her hand on my chest. She stared up at me with golden eyes that seemed to glow even in the darkness.
“What else could they ever want?” Nephket asked. “You are our god, Clay. You will bring my people back to the greatness we once enjoyed. These wahket have waited for a very long time to serve you. We do not doubt our place in your life. You shouldn’t doubt your place in ours.”
The emotion behind her words hit me a little harder than I’d like to admit. I needed the wahket, and they clearly needed me, but this responsibility was an impressive weight to bear.
“You’re right,” I said. “This will be good for all of us. It’s been too long—”
“Three hundred years,” Nephket confirmed. “That is how long we have been at the oasis.”
“That long?” I asked. “But how did the wahket have children without men?”
Nephket laughed, a throaty chuckle that sent tingles down my spine. The tips of her claws caught lightly against my skin, and she pulled herself closer to me.
“How old do you think I am?” she asked.
I looked deeply into her eyes and, for the first time, I recognized the wisdom there not as a divine gift, but as something Nephket had earned over an unfathomably long time.
“That’s right,” she said with a faint smile. “The wahket who are still here were among those who first fled with Lord Rathokhetra. I was young, too young to remember many of the details. But it was my mother, and her siblings, who buried Rathokhetra’s body back in that tomb. The wahket you see have waited a very long time for your return, Clay.”
I wrapped my arms around Nephket and held her tightly as I let that sink in.
“Why did you wait so long to call back Rathokhetra?” I asked.
“That wasn’t my choice,” Nephket said. She rested her cheek against my chest, and I felt the faint moisture of a single tear. “We dreaded the coming of the raiders, but we also prayed for it. The prophecy said you would not hear our call until your tomb was threatened by those who would plunder it.”
Well. That was weird. According to Nephket, they’d bee
n at the oasis for hundreds of years. What kind of prophecy could’ve predicted exactly the right time to reach out to me? And how in the hell —
“What is that noise?” Nephket asked. Her voice was high and tight with stress, her eyes darted from side to side, and her ears twitched on top of her head.
A split second later I heard it, too. A faint grinding noise, not stone against stone, but metal on metal.
“A trap,” I snarled. I covered Nephket’s body with my own and summoned my khopesh. I didn’t know what good it would do against a death trap, but I felt better with it in my hand.
A heavy gate crashed down from the ceiling and sealed the passage out of the core room. Its bars gleamed, sleek and shiny as new stainless steel, each of them as thick as my wrist.
“What was that?” Zillah asked in my thoughts. “We’re coming back for you.”
“There’s no point,” I said. “Watch yourselves. Delsinia’s up to something.”
I didn’t know how many surprises Delsinia had in store for us, and I was afraid to find out.
“What do we do?” Nephket asked.
“I’ll incarnate and see if I can lift the gate,” I said. “Might not work, but it’s worth a shot.”
I reached out for the ka in my core to activate my Incarnate ability, and all hell broke loose.
A gust of cool, dry wind blasted down on me and sent a shiver racing up my spine.
My khopesh appeared in my hand in the blink of an eye, and I looked up to find the source of the wind. A wide hole yawned above me and a blinding silver light poured out of it.
A shrieking harpy plunged through that hole, straight at my face.
I tried to deflect her dive attack with my khopesh, but she had the drop on me. Before my arm was in position, she hammered an elbow into my forehead, slammed into my chest, and wrapped her arms and legs around me like a crackhead attack monkey.
And then she fucking bit my cheek so hard I was sure the next sound I’d hear would be the crunching of my bones between her powerful jaws.