The Dungeoneers

by Jeffery Russell

  -20-

  Alaham’s first attack had been a swipe across the dwarven line, leaving them scattered and rolling across the stone. Thud and Ginny had managed to scramble behind the altar. Thud had seen Mungo dive into the hole beneath the throne. He could see Gong and Cardamon in a crumpled heap next to Ruby who was dragging herself along on one arm. He had no idea where she was trying to get to but Alaham didn’t seem much interested in her. He’d seen Leery go sailing off into empty space but that was the sort of thing that often happened to Leery. She tended to survive so he wasn’t much worried about her. He couldn’t see any sign of Clink. There was a massive crash on the altar just above him and bits of shattered bone rained down. The altar was decent cover, sparse as that cover may be. No matter how many bones you bundled together and no matter how hard you swung them he didn’t figure they were going to do much to a slab of stone. It seemed Alaham had come to the same conclusion. The bone colossus was moving forward, its forelimbs on the dais, trying to heave itself up. Bones split and splintered with the strain. He heard a distant yell and the chunk of the ballista firing. It seemed that at least some of the other dwarves were still in the hallway. Unfortunately he knew that they’d just fired the last cluster of bolts and whatever damage it may have done didn’t seem to have been enough to even grab the monstrosity’s attention. He did, however, still have the crossbow he’d commandeered from Mungo and he could see one weak link that he could still exploit—the dozen chanting withermen remaining on the dais. He took aim and fired. One of the withermen slumped forward with a sigh, its chanting silenced. He began cranking another bolt into place.

  Next to him Ginny had her mace out. They both cringed as the next swing landed against the side of the altar, as if trying to dodge it. If the thing managed to climb up onto the dais the altar would no longer be much of an obstacle. Until then, however, it seemed enough to keep them alive. Ginny clambered to her feet, brandishing the mace. She let out a yell and charged one of the withermen as Thud fired his bolt at a third.

  ᴥᴥᴥ

  Far below them Durham was progressing across the cave floor, looking for the pool of water that he’d fallen into earlier. It had been right next to the door to the sitting room which had, in turn, had the door to the hall where the closet with the vases had been. It was where the new phylactery had been kept. Perhaps it was where the replacement was kept as well. There were skeletons everywhere, watching him with their hollow eyes, making it difficult to move faster than a slow jog. They were shuffling en masse towards the massive bone thing that dominated the middle of the cavern, adding themselves to it, their rusted bits of armor clanking and rattling, bony feet scraping along the cavern floor. Durham had to shoulder his way through them, fearing that at any moment Alaham would notice him and send the command and he’d have hundreds of bony fingers clutching at him. None of the skeletons were of the neat and clean sort that he’d seen in an apothecary’s office. They had varying amounts of dried fleshy bits still attached to them, wispy hair and beards, claw-like fingernails. Durham was trying not to focus on the rancid dried meat smell, figuring that stopping to vomit wasn’t going to be of much help. Squitters gamboled back and forth through the sea of legs, occasionally pausing to tear a dangly bit of meat off of one of the skeletons to happily chew on. That was enough to finally make Durham stop to vomit. The macabre horde pressed on around him.

  ᴥᴥᴥ

  Thud was just sighting in on a fourth witherman when things took a turn for the worse. Skeletons began appearing at the edge of the dais. They’d climbed the walls of the stalagmite, dozens of them, crawling at last over the edge, standing and tottering forward from all sides.

  “Fall back!” he yelled.

  “Fall back to where?” Ginny asked. There was a note of panic in her voice. A note the equivalent of a major chord being played by a symphony orchestra. “They’re everywhere!”

  “Regroup on me!”

  Gong began rolling toward them, apparently having decided it was more expedient than getting up and running. Cardamon, however, didn’t move. Hopefully he was just napping. Ruby either hadn’t heard or had her own plan—she was still crawling slowly across the floor in the opposite direction. Whatever status Alaham had commanded on her as a scribe still seemed to be in effect. The wave of skeletons reached her and ignored her, stepping over and around. No sign of Mungo. He’d disappeared into the hole under the throne, giving Thud the notion that it might be a way out.

  Gong came to a stop against the side of the altar with a clang and an oof.

  “Ooh, dizzy,” he said. “How’s things over here?”

  Thud shrugged. “Three dwarves against an army of skellies, half dozen necros and a giant bone monster. Not bad, all things considered.”

  “Aye, good. Was almost worried.” He scrambled to his knees and Thud handed him his mace. He fired his last crossbow bolt at a necromancer but couldn’t see through the skeletons to determine if he’d hit. He heard a crash of bones behind him, a thud from the top of the altar and Rasp fell into their midst.

  He made a noise vaguely akin to someone choking on an olive. “That big bony bastard packs a punch,” he said, his voice wheezing. “Ballista was done for so I came over to see what ya was up to.”

  “Four dwarves!” Thud said. “Now we’re talking! Form up!”

  They stood, shoulder to shoulder, keeping the altar at their backs. Skeletons advanced from all sides and the great bone thing loomed over their heads, its shadow falling across them.

  Mungo chose that moment to pop up from his hole. His beard was hanging from one cheek and he held a green mace aloft in his hand.

  “Behold the Mace of MacGuffin!”

  It was an awkward looking thing, head too big for the haft, twisting tendrils of green smoke wafting about it.

  Mungo took two running steps and flung it at Alaham’s massive form. The dwarves watched, mouths open, as it arced slowly over their heads. It fell woefully short and disappeared into empty space beyond the edge of the dais.

  “…and Mungo,” Thud said.

  Any response from the other dwarves was completely obliterated by an earsplitting crack of noise from below. The entire cavern shook, stalactites raining down. The bone colossus fell backward, out of view, its great arms waving wildly. The skeletons faltered in their advance and Mungo sprinted towards the dwarves, or whatever passed for a sprint with foot long legs. He was holding the loose side of his beard up with one hand.

  “What in the hells was that?” Thud asked.

  “The mace,” Mungo gasped. “Single application. Detonates.”

  “Did ye get im?” Gong asked. They popped their heads up over the side of the altar to look.

  Alaham was already rising, the lower limbs that had been blown apart in the blast already reforming. The skeletons surrounding the dwarves started forward again.

  The necromancer’s chanting abruptly stopped and was replaced with one continuous low tone, all of their voices in chorus. Alaham’s laugh filled the cave.

  “You’ve lost,” he said. “The ritual is complete. As soon as the fool’s heart is placed in the phylactery I will be born anew!”

  Thud patted Mungo on the back. “Well, it was a good effort, lad. Didn’t happen to find any other explodey maces down there, eh?”

  Mungo shook his head sadly.

  The skeletons arrived and after that everything was swinging maces, crossbows and fists and splintering bones.

  ᴥᴥᴥ

  The shock wave from the explosion had sent Durham sailing through the air. He landed, once again, in the icy pool of water he’d been looking for. He came up spluttering and then yelped as a six foot long stalactite crashed into the water next to him. He looked back in the direction of the dais, where the explosion had come from. Whatever had caused it had lain waste to the cavern floor at the foot of the dais’s stalagmite. Pieces of skeletons were raining down across the entire cave and Alaham seemed to have had his legs blown off. It wasn’t slowing him
down much, however. Skeletons crawled across his surface like roaches, clumping back up, forming new limbs. The rune overhead was so bright it hurt to look at, crackling arcs of light rippling, their intensity leaving after-images in his eyes. There couldn’t be much time left. He wondered how Squitters had fared through the explosion. More worrying were the half dozen withermen necromancers that were running in his direction. Someone, apparently, had finally noticed that he was on his own, beating heart still secure in his chest.

  Durham splashed to his feet and ran through the doorway in the side of the cavern, promptly stepping on the cookie platter which slid out from under him sending him face first into the musty couch. He pushed off with his feet and half rolled, half fell over the top of the couch then did a graceful combination of running and staggering to the far door.

  And there was the room, just to the right, just as he remembered. He noted with no small amount of amazement, that Miss Cluck was there. She’d collected straw from the floor and made herself a nest and was now clucking away happily, one beady eye fixed on him. The phylactery was next to her, tall and slender, crusted with jewels and with a mouth and neck wide enough for a heart. Durham picked it up and flung it against the wall, hard. It gave a loud clang and fell to the floor, undamaged.

  The bastard had made it out of metal.

  There was a noise behind him. Durham spun around in a panic. The withermen were there. He slammed the door shut, pushing his shoulder against it. It shook with blows from the other side as the withermen attempted to break through. Taps, really, more than blows. The scrawny old men were not well suited to door bashing. Durham frantically looked around the small room, hoping for something that could be used as a weapon. The phylactery, possibly. Miss Cluck had laid an egg which, amusing as it might be to throw at the necromancers, probably wasn’t going to be of much help. He doubted he had the time or…resources, as it were, to poop in the replacement phylactery. He picked it up by the neck and stepped away from the door, holding it ready to start swinging at whatever came through.

  ᴥᴥᴥ

  Ruby’s arm and shoulder were numbness with a burning edge of pain. Her good arm wasn’t doing much better. Writing in a journal was poor preparation for dragging oneself across a rough stone floor or, for that matter, getting impaled by a ceramic shard. She tried not to think about what sort of grime might have been coating the outside or, worse, the inside of Alaham’s phylactery. The front of her robe was torn and black with dirt and her fingertips were raw and bleeding. She’d felt at least three of her fingernails break off and suspected that the others had as well and just been more polite about it. Ruby was wire and leather, however, chewed by thousands of hours on the road into pure gristle. Her original idea had been to simply move out of the center of the dais, going by the instinctive notion that this would make her less of a target. Crawling across the ground to do so had seemed like a manageable plan at the time but, she had recently been informed by her wounded shoulder, she hadn’t been thinking particularly clearly when she’d hatched that part of the plan. Perhaps shock from the unpleasantness of being recently pierced, her shoulder went on to suggest politely. Alaham hadn’t killed her earlier when he’d had her completely captive and she was hoping her immunity still held. The skeletons seemed to have ignored her when they’d charged the dwarves but they were marionettes under old orders and there was no certainty that Alaham wouldn’t have reconsidered her status since then. It was either stand up to keep mobile or stay put and avoid getting stepped on. Now she was near Alaham’s throne. Between her and the throne lay the pile of twisted rags and scatter of bones that was what remained of the lich’s original body. A shadow fell across her and she glanced up just in time to see Alaham’s arm coming down, not attacking but reaching for purchase in the spot where she happened to be.

  Sudden impending death often brings with it a moment of suspended time, one’s mind having decided that if this is its last moment that it might as well try and make it last. It is a moment of pure clarity, the mind burning everything it has to move at double speed, running through all of its options. Ruby used her moment of clarity to appreciate Alaham’s creation. There was a macabre beauty to it, elegant rows of teeth, skulls in sweeping ridges up its face, connected with patterned rows of straight bones. She wondered which of those hundreds of skulls Alaham had tucked himself into. Which eyes did he watch from as he came to take their lives? She rolled, every muscle wire coiled until just the right moment, the great grasping claw scraping across the stone where she’d been, each finger a cluster of a half dozen skeletons.

  Like everything else, it was a puppet. She could see from where she was that the head was as hollow as she’d expected. Just a giant shell.

  A thought occurred and she twisted her head around.

  She laughed.

  She’d seen what Alaham had overlooked.

  She’d found it right where she’d expected as soon as she’d thought to look for it.

  His discarded skull, his true skull, lay before her now where Alaham had abandoned it. It was on its side atop the pile of bones and rags, regarding her silently from hollow sockets. And atop it the crown. She reached out and gave it a tug with her hand, removing it from the skull. There was a brief cliche of crackling energy across its surface and then it went dark.

  There was a pregnant moment as the massive amounts of necromantic energy that had been gathered paused for thoughtful reflection.

  Then from all across the cavern came a wall of sound. A sound never heard before or since. The sound of tens of hundreds of thousands of bones collapsing onto a cave floor. Ruby would spend hours trying to do that sound justice in her journal but would never manage to come close to the sheer crackling thunder of that noise. She watched as the great beast of bone slid into chaos, huge masses of it breaking off and falling to the floor, achingly slowly, where they burst apart in great cavalcades of bone that looked like massive splashes of water. A group of bedraggled and bloody dwarves stood by the altar, looking about, mouths hanging open, utterly stupefied. Ruby grinned at them.

  She was premature.

  The last few withermen around the edge of the dais suddenly rose into the air, backs arching. The great black column of flies rose again from the wreckage below.

  “The ritual is complete!” Alaham crowed. “You have failed! The heart has reached the phylactery!”

  All across the cavern the withermen screeched as the great rune above crackled. The energy built up within it flared out into the cave, so bright Ruby could swear that she saw the dwarve’s bones through their skin. Arcs of energy sizzled through the air, drawing a searing line to each of the withermen, bursting them apart into dust and scraps like a long string of damp firecrackers. Another massive shock of noise came that threw them all to the floor and then, for the first time in centuries, the cavern fell completely silent.

  ᴥᴥᴥ

  Thud was at a level of confusion that he wasn’t particularly happy with but, due to the sudden lack of things attempting to kill him he decided that he could live with it for a moment. He saw Ginny’s mouth move but his ears were ringing so loudly he couldn’t make out a word of what she said. Somehow, against odds he wasn’t even going to begin to try to calculate, they were still alive.

  They’d won the battle but lost the war.

  Alaham had resurrected.

  Down there, somewhere, what had once been Durham was now the necromancer lich king. Thud walked slowly to the edge of the dais and looked down into the cavern. The cave floor was a great charnel sea of bone straight out of a poet’s worst fever dreams. But there, at the far edge, movement.

  Durham.

  Alaham.

  He walked toward them amongst the bones, his maniacal laughter echoing through the cave. Thud watched silently as the figure picked its way through the thousands of shattered skeletons. The other dwarves gathered around him, shoulders slumped. Ruby as well, propped up by Gong, ugly brown crown clenched in her hands.

  Dur
alaham? Aladurham?

  The thing was well on its way to looking the part. Its clothes were already ragged, its skin caked with dirt and blood, water dripping from it as it walked. For some reason that Thud couldn’t quite fathom it was carrying a chicken under one arm. It was still laughing, a crazed sound that set Thud’s teeth on edge. He clenched his fists, trying to fan his rage into enough will to fight again. He knew that they were hopelessly outclassed but at least they outnumbered the thing. For the moment. Could it just wave a hand and bring all of the skeletons back?

  It reached the foot of the great stairs and started up, kicking bones clear as it came. They clattered as they fell, the sound echoing through the great silent chamber.

  The dwarves backed up as a group as the lich-king reached the top of the stairs, keeping a healthy amount of space between them.