The Dungeon Con: One Foot in the Grave ( Hank Grave Book 1): One Foot in the Grave (Hank Grave series)

by Marty Myers

  Alaster walked up to Hank and put his finger to his lips as if to shush him. You know Hank this bond they installed between you and I? I have been trying to figure it out. It is different than the familiar bond in some ways, for one thing, neither of us is the master of the other which is good. It’s a power-sharing construct that carries essence, magic, and emotions between the two of us. Simultaneously inside Hank’s head, he heard Alastor’s thoughts. “ It also apparently lets us share our thoughts.”

  “ Don’t ever say what you just thought aloud Hank, the chances that we are being spied on by one or the other of them are just too good and your words would earn us some dire punishment for your intention to get revenge. I agree with you but I don’t see how we could ever do more than manage to escape and truthfully that was before they bound us to each other and to this place. Please don’t do anything rash. At least wait and learn and figure out how to control your powers and what your limitations are before you do.”

  “ For instance, try leaving this place.” Hank looked over at Alaster and put his hand up to the cave wall. He felt the barest hint of resistance to his touch before his hand sunk into the stone. He willed himself forward and passed through several feet of the stone before it became harder to move forward. He tried going further and managed another couple feet before he came to a stop. It wasn’t like the stone was becoming solid before him or that he was either. It wasn’t even like there was a force field or wall of some sort blocking him. It was more like he had nothing propelling him to move forward after a certain point. The cord behind him also felt heavy as if he had a large rope tied off somewhere back there and he was supporting its weight as he tried to move forward again. After several minutes of trying and failing to go any further, he gave up.

  On a separate note, he thought it was weird that he could actually see through the stone in a small area around him as if it were a lite fog instead of solid matter deep under the earth and there was some kind of light source here too instead of the absolute darkness that should be inside a solid object. It seemed to be shining equally from within every place all around him. Maybe the light was coming from the very stone itself he thought.

  Alastor’s telepathic voice sounded in his mind interrupting his train of thought. “ Come back here Hank I think I have discovered something else.” Instead, Hank turned to the left and floated through the stone of the cave in a rough circle checking out how far he could go in any direction and just what more there was to the cave. It wasn’t as uniform as it had first appeared to him with a branch going off in another direction and narrowing some 30 feet further into the mountain before it opened up into another smaller cave. He was relieved that he could actually flow down this passage instead of coming up short like a tether ball around the altar room.

  He looked back and saw dim glimmers the same color as his own essence everywhere he had traveled sinking down into the stone where the color of the light he saw changed just a little bit. Somehow he knew that this was him claiming the space as the dungeon guardian of this place. He was seeding the stone with his aura or essence and would be able to more freely work his will upon the stone from here on in. This was entirely different than how his dwarfish memories told him their magic worked. Theirs was a purely earthen magic and he somehow felt he had only some small affinity to work with the earth’s essence. That did explain what the light was he was seeing was in the stone though. It was the natural essence of the earth in its own element.

  Having made a quick tour he flew back into the main cave that contained the altar room and back to Alaster who he could feel and then see was just finishing teleporting two more piles of bones down here. Hank was surprised how clearly he could now sense Alastor and his magic’s. Their bond seemed to be strengthening now that they were both trying to use it. Sensing what Hank was thinking. Alastor said, “ Hank, I want you to know that right now it’s very important how we treat the bond between us. It’s new and still settling in, we could damage it depending on what we do with it and how we treat one another. However, it is also malleable while its fresh, before it totally sets, ans hardens between us and that has some possibilities we could explore. With your permission, I want to try some things out.” Hank nodded and motioned at him to continue.

  “ Okay, Hank, I want you to come here and recast the same spell you did a minute ago to raise the skeleton right here, you should be able to raise and command two skeletons with the amount of necromantic essence thats circulating in you now.” Indeed Hank could see that there was quite a bit of necromantic essence flowing from his real body in the altar room up the silver cord and into his astral self. He already regained whatever he had used to animate the first skeleton at this point.

  The spell came to mind even faster the second time around. As Hank began to utter the spell he felt Alastor grow very close through their bond and he too echoed the words and gestures in time with him. Essence from both of their bodies reached out from them to each pile of bones which both drew themselves up off the cave floor and stood whole in front of them. The only difference was that these two glowed with an odd combination of blue red and black essence mixed together throughout their bones.

  “ Yes, Alaster shouted! This is unexpected. For untold years I have been bound to necromancers and liches and had their essence and magic’s flowing through me. It has even built up in me due to so much exposure. I have watched them cast countless spells but never was I in a position to learn much of their magic’s, now as the grimoires knowledge flows through your flesh and mind and I can share your thoughts. I can finally make use of this necromantic essence inside of me. You see you and I and the book and the dungeon are all so closely interconnected, its as if I am getting an echo of its knowledge. It appears it is enough not only for me to help you as our master has ordered but maybe, no I say it is enough for me to learn it and cast it myself. Hank we are going to make a great team!” This was the happiest I had seen Alastor and I couldn’t help but to share in this moment with him.

  The bond between us flowed both ways with each of us getting a share of everything it seemed. As I stood there thinking about that the beginnings of an idea came to me. Alastor would you please show me how the scrying pool works and show me the outside and inside of the castle again. I want to be sure to get an idea of where we don’t want to dig towards when we get too close to the mountainside of the pass. Alaster could feel my excitement and happily complied. He walked over and we both stared down into the water as I tried to see what he did to activate it this time. I got information on scrying both from watching him do it and from the Grimoire and focused on learning it. I learned that scrying a nearby and familiar place was easier than looking far away or trying to see someplace you weren’t familiar with. There also seemed to be something that made it easier to see a place if your essence and what was there were similar enough essence wise. So for us looking at the castle above us was fairly easy.

  Once I had gotten a handle on how this worked I had Alaster stop so I could try it out and found I could do it but I wasn’t as adept at it as him. “ Hank, I am actually pretty impressed you managed it at all the first time you tried,” Alastor said. “ With practice, I think you will get to be really good at this. It’s probably due to your condition boosting the mind, spirit and soul path allready. “ I had to agree as again the grimoire fed me information into my mind.

  Now I thought to try something else. I scried around until I had found many more piles of bones upstairs. I focused on a couple of them in a room off of the kitchen. I wondered where they had all come from but then put that thought aside as the grimoire began feeding me some more ideas about their use. It really didn’t seem to have any off switch, it just kept trying to download information into my mind whenever I saw or thought about anything that vaguely corresponded with its necromantic knowledge. If this was how it was going to be from now on I really hoped it wouldn’t end up driving me insane with its constant badgering. This time I let it run its course before I con
tinued on with my own thoughts.

  “Alastor I asked, here are some more bones upstairs in the castle will you bring one set of them down here for me?” He looked at me but then focused on the scrying pool and then on one of the piles I indicated. As he did so I tried as hard as I could to sense just exactly what he was doing and how. It was a long shot but I figured if he could learn from me through this bond maybe I could return the favor. I quickly began to feel miserable, I almost stopped what I was doing as I felt all kinds of weird and wrong vibes fluttering in my nonexistent stomach. Then I felt one last push from Alastor and I gave it my all too to push along with him. Suddenly both of us were doubled over swearing as two separate piles of bones came clattering down from the ceiling. “ What the hell did you do Hank,” asked Alaster from his bent over position? “ I am still sore from that butchery last night. I can’t believe you tried that.” After some time recovering he grinned and said, “ I can’t believe that worked.”

  I looked up and saw the red and black cord between us wasn’t nearly as thin as it had been the last time I had looked at it and there were more pules of light and energy flowing back and forth between us as we struggled to recover. My stomach, or at least the place where my mind insisted my stomach should be, felt like I had eaten a dozen ghost peppers. Alastor was looking at me intently. “ Look that is an amazing trick if we can pull it off again. But let’s not do it for a while, your astral form may not be able to take much more demonic energy flowing through it so soon after all the other shocks that it’s had in the last day. Instead, why don’t we get these bones moving on widening that other section you found” Alastor smiled at me as he stood back up. “ And just so you know your not the only fast learner around here.” I think I am actually getting to like this guy Hank thought.

  He just smiled and began willing a skeleton to pick up a tool and come with us. Hank floated along as Alastor walked with the two skeleton crew back around the cave until they were at the natural passage he had found earlier. He could see the floor was roughly level for the first 20 feet but would need to be smoothed out a bit here and there. The walls, on the other hand, meandered back and forth with projections coming out haphazardly. Many of those could be broken off, to begin with. But more serious stonework would be needed as it got much narrower further along.

  Hank looked at the skeleton and began trying to get it to chip away at the rock. At first, it was very jerky and clumsy in its movements and Hank winced to see it when compared to his memories from the dwarf he had been fed during the ritual that made him. Alaster’s skeletal miner wasn’t doing any better to start off with but in a few minutes time, they each began to move a little more smoothly and surely. After a couple of hours, they had almost reached the next area where the cave widened again and they became competent enough that they could stop focusing solely on every movement of their two miners.

  They had even brought another two skeletons over to move the excess rock waste from the tunnel floor. : Alaster what are we going to do with all the waste rock we are making. We don’t have a shaft up to the surface and I don’t think we should as it would be a straight shot into here for anyone who gets here before we finish this place.” Alastor thought about it for a minute and then smiled. “ I got an idea, what if I can teleport it out of here? And I might even have an idea for a great place to put it too.” They both stopped what they were doing and relaxed their wills over the skeletons who slowly came to a halt. Then they went back to where they had been having the skeletons pile it all up at the back wall near the altar room. It was a good thing they had decided to deal with it now because it was starting to fill up the space between the cave wall and the tunnel they were digging.

  Alastor tried teleporting about a quarter of the pile away and after a few moments, it disappeared. Hank said, “ Alastor how come you didn’t have to use the scrying pool to see where to put that?” “Ah well,” he replied, “ you see an imp can teleport to somewhere he has already been to fairly accurately, without being able to see it. So I sent the rocks on down the mountain pass not far below the castle. There is already a sizable rock slide blocking the pass above the castle that has never been cleared and now with this excess rock maybe we can close off access to the castle from this side too. Even if we don’t entirely succeed in blocking it on down there, it will make some kind of hindrance to anyone wanting to come investigate the castle and our dungeon.” “ That’s a good idea, let me go activate the scrying pool and you can show me where you’re dumping the rock at then I can try it too and see if I can pull your trick off now that I am a bit rested from the first time.” Alastor agreed and they went over to look through the pool. When they did they saw the rocks had indeed appeared over the trail up the pass and fell a few feet to scatter around on the path. Hank and Alastor then both focused on roughly half the pile that was left and sent it raining down onto the path. Hank thought it was a good start.

  They also raised another skeleton a piece and each tried controlling even more skeletons at the same time. This proved a lot harder for them and strained their concentration and necromantic proficiencies to their limit. After a while, Hank noticed he wasn’t getting tired in the traditional sense, but the long hours of strenuous mental activity were starting to give him a headache. “ Hey Alastor, he said, “ let’s take a break for a bit.” Alastor agreed and they stopped working the skeletons and looked around at the newest cave their crew was shaping and smoothing. Hank flew through the cave walls again and got an idea of what was around them and if there were any more natural passages to be found in the stone. Again his essence merged with the stone of the newly widened tunnels and rooms as he passed through. Looking around he found that there was a very tight passage leading off to another small cave directly off of the cave they were working on. He came back and gave Alastor the news.

  “ Other than that I think we may have run out of caves here in the immediate vicinity,” he said. “ Which means we will be tunneling through solid rock from here on out. That is going to slow our progress quite a bit. But I think we need to stop for the moment anyway.”

  “ I need to think about developing an actual plan for this dungeon complex before too much longer. I have some ideas I want to talk to you about. The dwarfs memories have a lot of ideas we could use too, but this dungeon we are working on has a different purpose than some of the tunnels and mines he built. For one thing, I don’t think there is a good reason to make all the rooms, halls and floors connect with each other, not even through secret doors and hidden passages like in many of my gaming dungeons. Those were designed to be hard but not impossible for a group of adventurers to beat because a game isn’t entertaining if there is no way for the players’ characters to win. Instead, we want our dungeon to be too deadly to even try and absolutely impossible for them to actually beat.” Hank grinned a nasty grin and after a second Alastor did too. “ Yeah that sounds about right the imp said while thinking about it.”

  “ I have another question for you Alastor,” Hank said. “ We are going to need to have some metalworking and woodworking done to craft stout doors and hinges for the doorways and we will need the inner workings and springs for traps and such made here or are we going to need to buy such things from someone and then have them transported here? Did you and Provoas have a plan set up for that or am I supposed to master all of those trades as well and learn to make the skeletons smith and carve for me? I would still need specialized tools to set up a forge and seasoned wood and bar stock loads of metals brought here to work with. If we are buying that stuff off of someone then with you now bound down here how are we going to get it? And come to think of it how are we going to pay for all of that stuff?”

  Alastor said, “ I don’t know for sure. Originally I was probably going to be sent to fetch many of those things we couldn’t easily make down here. Now I don’t know, maybe Lord Provoas plans to use bone craft to make the doors and hinges and some of the trap mechanisms.” “ Whats that,” Hank asked? “ It’s a mo
re advanced necromantic path that combines parts of each of the three basic paths to create objects made of bones and flesh infused with some necromantic essence or even inhabited by bound spirits. For example, in my last master’s crypt, there was this big door made up of huge bones fused together with a wyvern’s skull and spine set into its center to act as an animated guard. Boney arms and hands acted as the hinges and the locks.” Alistar explained. Surprisingly no further information popped up in Hanks mind at this mention of a new type of necromancy. Maybe that was because the grimoire he was learning from didn’t have anything written in it about this path? Hank didn’t know.

  Meanwhile, Alastor continued speaking. “ I am not sure Lord Provoas has even really considered what tying me down like this to this place has done to limit his options in that respect. The same thing goes for paying for anything. I think he had intended to send me back out to retrieve a hidden cache of his previous master’s treasure to cover the costs of this project and to pay you once your work was done.” They both grew quiet at this reminder of their rotten circumstances.

  To change the subject Hank said, “ I sure could use my backpack and graph paper that I had with me to work on some plans for the dungeon.” Having said that Hank focused on them and they popped into being at his feet. He used one of the skeletons he commanded to pick up the pad and pencil and tried using it to draw in place of his own hands. Alastor looked on in surprise at how adept Hank was getting at teleporting and summoning already. It must partially be from the rituals that were performed upon him for no regular necromancer or dark adept would have made such rapid progress like he had done today.