The Dungeoneers

by Jeffery Russell

  Ruby had made some tea and they sipped it from their wineskins. It was as red as wine and tasted of raspberries.

  “Do you mean the bone machine?” Ginny asked. “It seems to work well enough for moving hallways around but I have to think there’s more to it. Far too much effort for just a maze trap.”

  “No,” Ruby said. “The level of necromancy involved. We don’t know a lot about Alaham’s background. He was an obscure hedge wizard for most of his life until he suddenly rose up and took over Tanahael and then destroyed it. That right there was enough of a mystery to bring me on this expedition in hopes of solving it. No mortal should ever have managed such a feat of necromancy. But this…” she gestured around her. “Thousands of undead simultaneously animated. Only the Hermits have ever managed such a thing and even then it took three of them to work the sorcery and at least a dozen more to feed them power. Maintaining even a few dozen should be enough to have fragmented Alaham’s mind.”

  “Right, but the Hermits didn’t do the animating, did they?” Ginny asked. “They made that Bonebin fellow to raise and lead the army against the Daemon. You don’t suppose…”

  “That Alaham is actually Bonebin returned?”

  Ginny nodded.

  “The thought had occurred to me but, no, the Hermits laid him to rest and locked him away somewhere in case they ever needed to pull him back out. It requires three keys to release him and each Hermit faction only has one of the keys. It would require some threat grave enough to unite the Orders against it before there’d even be a chance.”

  “Maybe he figured out the spell they used. Or maybe he’s made some major breakthrough in necromancy.”

  Ruby was silent, frowning into the darkness much as Thud was, a quill in her mouth substituting for a cigar. Ginny sighed. They seemed out of her area of expertise at the moment.

  That was when the lights came on.

  Were the yellow orbs merely dim? Or was their light bright but simply lost in the immensity of the cavern? It was hard to say either way. They were affixed to the walls and ceiling of the cave, their sickly yellow light just enough to create a twilight luminance. It backlit the machine, turning the gears into huge silhouettes, their shadows methodically rotating across each other and stretched long on the cavern walls.

  Thud was instantly on his feet, crossbow in hand, provided ‘instantly’ can include a second or two of panicked scrambling and flailing.

  “What…” he began.

  “Hush,” Ginny said. She was in her element now, the workings of the machine above her laid bare. She began reassembling it in her mind, finding each gear’s purpose, the meaning of each belt of sinew. Her mouth moved, offering its own stream of speculation alongside the stream in her head. Her hands opened and closed, twisted, poked at the air, fingers circling to describe invisible axis and pulleys.

  “I didn’t ‘hush’ you while I were thinkin’,” Thud grumbled but then fell silent.

  “So sorry to interrupt,” a new voice said. They spun around.

  One of the nearby gears had detached itself, the circle unspooling into a long twisting tentacle of skeletons. It had extended down to them, a skull prominently affixed to the end, weaving back and forth with the bone tentacle’s snake-like undulations.

  “I have to admit,” the skull continued, “I’m rather impressed at your means of escaping the maze. If I’d known I was to have had visitors out here I might have dusted a bit.”

  “Alaham,” Ruby said.

  “Why yes,” the skull said. “Though I’m at a bit of a loss as to whom you might be. I don’t recall inviting any scribes. No matter, you are welcome all the same. Delighted to have a scribe here, really. Not inviting you was an egregious oversight on my part. Most welcome indeed. Though we can hardly have you perched up here in the rafters, as it were, where nothing of any interest seems to be happening or likely to happen, now can we?”

  Ruby yelped as another bone tentacle unfurled from behind them and grasped her around the waist, snatching her into the air. It passed her to another and then another, skeletal tendrils unfolding from the different gears to grasp her and carry her along. Within moments she was gone. Thud spun back around and fired his crossbow bolt into the skull’s face, shattering it.

  Alaham’s laugh came from behind them. A new tentacle, a new skull.

  “Now that was a bit on the rude side, but, circumstances being what they are I suppose I can understand the decision, futile as it may have been.”

  “What have you done with her, lich?” Thud spat out the last word as if it were a curse. He cranked a fresh bolt into place.

  “Not to worry, she is quite unharmed,” Alaham said. “I am just relocating her to where she’ll have something worth recording. Something other than watching you attempt to stretch your brain around your current predicament. You are but a tiny bit of grit amongst the gears. A leader reduced to one follower, your party scattered and lost.”

  “What do you mean, ‘invited’?” Ginny said, figuring it couldn’t hurt to interrupt. She knew that Thud’s ego tended toward the unassailable side but Alaham rubbing it in was unlikely to improve the dwarf’s mood.

  “Sorry?”

  “You told Ruby that you didn’t recall inviting her, implying that there was someone here that you did invite.”

  “Ah, yes, thank you so much for reminding me. Why, I invited all of you, of course. Except for the scribe, as I believe we’ve established.”

  “You didn’t invite us,” Thud said through clenched teeth. “We was hired by…”

  “’WERE hired’, I believe you mean. Really, dwarven accents are so tiresome. But yes. You were hired by a man in a black cloak with chalk dust on his elbows, claiming to be from the Royal Vault Keeper and presenting you with a sack of coins and a contract, yes? The chalk dust was my idea. Little details like that add so much to believability.”

  “Why would you bring us here?” Ginny asked. “We’ve sacked half of your tomb.”

  “Are you referring to that little play area I put in at the entrance? Oh yes, wonderful job with that. I brought you here as a means to bring Durham here, of course. He’s the one that I’m specifically interested in. Now that I have him the rest of you are largely irrelevant.”

  “What do ye know about Durham?” Thud asked. “Where is he?”

  “Oh, he’s perfectly safe, right where I want him to be. By the way, I may have left him with the impression that you were aware that it was I that hired you and that you’ve been in on the plan all along. I do sincerely apologize for any future awkwardness that may cause if you attempt some sort of rescue. Not that I expect that a rescue attempt would go well enough for it to even become a concern. Now, I’ve other things to attend too so I’ll leave you two to explore the many possible excruciating deaths the dungeon has to offer. Ta!”

  The long spine of bone twisted away into the murk of the machine, its laugh fading into the grinding of the gears.

  Thud’s fists were clenched and his face was a level of red that Ginny mentally placed as a tentative nine on the Thud rage scale.

  “Why, that…” he began and then launched into an amazing stream-of-consciousness mass of expletives.

  “Ermmm…” Ginny said.

  “…bilious crotchboil of a weevil ridden hag taint…”

  “Boss?”

  “…maggoty canker egg…”

  “Boss!”

  “…worm riddled ogre nipple…”

  “BOSS!”

  “What?” he roared.

  “Behind you.”

  Thud turned.

  It was made of bone, which came as no huge surprise. It was, however, the skeleton of no creature that Ginny had ever heard of. Eight legs ending in long, curved claws; three pronged scorpion-like tail; four heads that seemed to be largely comprised of teeth. It was the size of a catapult and half as user friendly. It lurked just at the edge of their lantern light, scuttling back and forth, taunting them to attack. Thud obliged. The thunk of the cros
sbow was followed quickly by the clatter of the bolt bouncing its way uselessly through the monster’s excessive number of ribs. It charged, scuttling forward with startling speed. Ginny dove to the side, realizing in midair that the edge of the platform preceded her estimated landing point. She flailed into open space, her stomach lurching with a wrenching twist. She drew in air to scream then landed hard, far sooner than she’d expected. Her breath poofed out of her in a cloud of garlic pupae scent. She bounced and was falling again, through one of the gaps in the horizontal gear she’d landed on, landing on a second gear below. It spun her swiftly around, feet first, below the hallway hanging above. She pressed herself flat as the gear just above her spun the opposite way, the bone struts a blur inches from her face.

  Her throat unseized and she was able to take in a deep gasp of air.

  “Jump!” she yelled.

  Above her she glimpsed an airborne Thud through the blur of the gears and had a moment of gratification that he trusted her enough to leap into the darkness. She twisted to see where he’d landed and her beard got caught by the gear above with a huge yank of pain. It instantly pulled her beard up over her face, clogging her mouth and nose, covering her eyes. She was dragged across the bone gear below, bouncing across its knobbles and knuckles. Her beard smelled and tasted like her shampoo, Eau de Mouse. She grabbed at it, tugging it with her own hands like it was a rope, pulling herself up to relieve the drag on her chin. She had a panicked flash of an image of her head getting caught against a strut of the gear below, folding her in half backwards and promptly focused her efforts at trying to keep her head up. Both wheels jolted to a stop with a great crunching noise, bringing an abrupt end to her predicament. Momentum kept her moving only until she reached the end of her beard length where it jerked her to a halt, yanking her mouth open with a crack of her jaw hinge and a rip of pain from her chin.

  “Oo,” she said.

  She took a shaky breath and scooted down just enough to allow her to close her mouth and tried again.

  “Ow,” she said.

  Her back felt like she’d shoved it into a bad pair of boots and marched twenty miles on it. Her face felt like it was what had been marched on.

  She arched her head back to try and see in the direction from which she’d heard the crunch. Thud was wedged upside down between the gears, a twisted cluster of broken bones around him from where the gears had cracked around him. He grinned at her. Since he was upside down and she was looking at him upside down the grin was right side up.

  “Ow,” he said. “Guess I was a tougher piece o’ gristle than what they kin handle.”

  Ginny nodded in agreement, which turned out to be an awkward thing to do while laying on her back and looking above her head.

  There was a crash from immediately above her as the skelescorpiarachnohydra thing landed on the gear above. It reached down with three of its claws, They scratched and scraped, trying to reach her.

  Ginny saw Thud reach down and grab hold of the gear she was laying on. She quickly rolled over so she was face down, knowing what he was about to do. Thud tugged hard, pulling himself free from the gear above, barely clearing the break before the top gear spun back into motion. The monster was carried with the gear briefly until it met up with the side of the hanging hallway with a clatter like a bundle of canes spilling on marble. It was knocked down between the gears and promptly ripped into shards between them, pieces of bone clattering across the gears.

  “Hold tight,” she heard from Thud’s direction. She heard him pulling himself along the gear, crawling until their heads were together.

  “Conference time,” she said.

  “Not quite yet,” he said, and pointed. Ginny looked to see more bone creatures moving toward them, climbing spindles, hopping across gears. None were as large as the first but all were strange, malformed accretions of parts that had no place in nature. There were at least a dozen.

  “Starting to think he don’t like us,” Ginny said.

  “No accounting for taste,” Thud said. “Got your mace?” he asked, gesturing with his as if she might not know what one was.

  She felt at her belt. “Yeah, never even got a chance to draw it on that last thing.” She pulled it out, the weight and solidity of it a comforting feel in her hand.

  Thud had crawled to the side and was peering over the edge. “Walkway below us. Less claustrophobic.” He heaved himself over the side and was gone.

  Ginny decided to look before she leapt. Her mind was still chewing on the machine. It was something she’d always been good at—looking at things and being able to discern how and why they did what they did. The scope of the boneworks was too vast and shadowed to grasp the whole of it and she had not even the faintest idea of the overall purpose of the thing but she’d seen enough to have a good grasp of how the parts she could see fit together and worked with each other. She could see that Thud was not so much on a walkway as on a gear track which made it a likely sort of place for a gear to come rolling along before too long. The first of the bone things had arrived in front of him, hunched low, claws clutching the narrow rail, spikey knees jutting out to the sides.

  “Hot spot!” she yelled. It was a dwarven term, used to announce a location that was safe for the moment but very soon wouldn’t be. Demolitionists used it when they lit the fuse. Smelters used it when the molten iron was about to be poured. Soldiers used it when the shadow of an incoming catapult stone fell across them. Ginny used it now to tell Thud to move, fast, because now she could see the gear spinning its way toward him. It was about all she could do for him as two more of the monsters were closing in on her fast.

  She saw a counter-weight the size of a barrel drop past and realized that it was descending on a chain. She holstered her mace and leapt for it, grabbing the chain in a full body hug. The chain swung out from her impact causing the counter-weight below her to swing out of place and miss its slot. The chain went slack for a moment as the weight stopped, giving Ginny an abrupt jolt when she hit the end of the slack. She lost her grip with her hands but managed a death grip with her feet to keep from falling. This promptly swung her upside down on the chain. She was briefly annoyed with herself that her first reaction was not toward self-preservation but to grab the hem of her kilt between her knees to protect her modesty and then annoyed with herself for much longer when she saw her mace go falling past her head. She grabbed on with her hands again and let go with her feet, swinging down to grab hold again just as the weight began its ascent. Some part of the machinery above was pulling it, bringing it up faster than it had fallen. The original drop had carried her far enough below the two skeletal creatures that had been coming for her that they had turned their attention to Thud. Now she was rising fast and she could see one of them above her, crouched on a cog as if to leap. She swung out with her feet as she soared past it, catching it in the chin with a high speed kick. Its skull sailed off into darkness, the rest of its body collapsing below her as it dropped out of her view.

  She’d caught a glimpse of Thud, jumping from the rail and hoped that there was somewhere for him to land. One of the creatures had latched on to the counterweight below her and was starting to climb up. Another came skittering down the chain toward her from above. Ginny saw a spindle go past and grabbed for it, swinging all the way around it just in time to catch the creature on the weight with another swinging kick, scattering it.

  The impact was enough to knock her from the spindle, however. She landed on a row of vertical cogs, each the size of a wagon wheel, with teeth made from what looked to be scapula. They were all spinning the same direction, meshing with another row of cogs just to the left and beneath. Ginny scrambled to her feet, trying to run in place and maintain her balance against the rotation. The skeletal thing above dropped onto her back. It seemed to be made mostly of arms and legs, sharp fingers clutching at her.

  She fell backwards, keeping it between her and the grinding point between the cogs below, bridging the gap between the cog rows, half
turned over with her head and shoulders on the lower spindle and her feet on the one above, the conflicting rotations trying to fold her in half and feed her through. Her shred of hope was that the thing on her back would choke the gears for at least the briefest of moments. There was a sharp clattering as the skeletal horror got pulled between the cogs. As she’d hoped, they seized for one brief, merciful moment. She shoved hard with her feet, sending herself sliding over the lower cog spindle, into the unknown darkness beyond it.

  ᴥᴥᴥ

  Thud had landed on a narrow wooden catwalk in his leap from the rail. It had seemed a thin place of relative safety, an illusion broken quickly as the bone monstrosities began arriving on the walkway as well. He wondered how Ginny was doing, how many she’d taken down. His advantage so far had been that the things weren’t sapient enough to know their own weak point and went to no extra effort to protect their heads. He’d bashed in three of them but the fourth and fifth were coming at him simultaneously, one from in front and one from above, achieving a semblance of strategy through the sheer accident of their timing. He lowered his head and charged at the one in front of him, his mace arm cocked behind him. Horrific looking as the things might be they didn’t have much in the way of mass. He knocked it back, all six of its legs splaying out, then swung forward and caved its skull in as the one from above landed on him, sinking its claws into the meat of his back. He roared and jumped into the air, flipping himself over to bring his full weight down on top of it. It broke apart but its stabbing pincers went even deeper with the impact. He lay there a moment, gasping for breath, a white spear of pain stabbing at his thoughts. He didn’t seem to be able to move his arms. Another skeleton monster came into his view, looming over him. Its shape reminded him of a mantis, legs straddling the catwalk rails. Its arms began unfolding, pincers poised for the strike.

  And then it was gone. He’d had just a brief glimpse of Ginny, sailing past in its wake. He rolled over to see Ginny and the creature roll off the end of the walkway, landing back on the rail. She’d had just enough time to get to one knee when the great gear came rolling past. There was a spray of red and when the gear rolled out of view both Ginny and the skeleton were gone.