by Hugo Huesca
“Thanks, but let’s keep it simple. Add the best magical armor we can afford to it,” Ed said. “Maybe something that can tank a fireball at close range, if we combo it with my pledge of armor.”
“So you do have expensive taste after all. It won’t come cheap, but I agree with your choice. The Haunt needs you alive if we’re going to keep hanging out with horned spiders and vampires.” The blacksmith waved for a couple batblins to come closer. “I’ll have my apprentices go fetch your armor and I’ll head into the Netherworld as soon as possible.”
Ed thanked the man and sent a message to Kes to prepare a squadron to keep Heorghe safe. Then he activated his Evil Eye and created an Upgrade quest so Heorghe could get experience points for designing a way to mass enchant the Haunt’s gear.
That done, the Dungeon Lord returned to his top-down view of the dungeon, found his next stop, and headed out of the forge while the batblins ran in all directions, scrambling to prepare for their trip.
The seamstress had their own workshop inside the Haunt, a couple chambers with materials, looms, and assorted tools for them to practice their trade. It was the first time Ed had stepped inside the workshop since creating it. Tapestries-in-progress hung from wooden hooks, with rows of bundles of cloth strewn in a chaotic mixture of color and material by the walls. The spin of the wheels mixed with the cacophony of gossip and singing as batblins and drones entered in and out, carrying cloth or finished dresses and other garments.
Ed strolled past the dresses and tunics on display and reached the middle of a circle of women from all ages who were working and chatting among themselves. He stood there awkwardly for a few seconds until one of them raised her eyes and saw him. She yelped and jumped to her feet, probably ruining the sleeve she had been working on.
“Dungeon Lord!” she exclaimed. The surrounding chatter died, making Ed quite literally the center of attention. “What a pleasant, albeit unexpected surprise,” the seamstress went on. “The only member of your court that visits us with any frequency is Chronicler Alder.”
“What can we do to help you, your Maliciousness?” another seamstress asked. “Are you interested in a new tunic, perhaps?” She strolled around Ed in a playful, flirty way. “Black, perhaps, so it matches your eyes? We can get you some silver thread—that should do justice to someone of your station, my Lord.”
“Or perhaps are you interested in us, Dungeon Lord?” a third woman asked, batting her eyelashes. The others laughed and cheered her on.
Ed had spent enough time around the Starevosi to know there was no winning this war while he was so outnumbered, so he gave her his best innocent smile and decided to play dumb, while trying to remember her name. “Thank you, Viorica. Perhaps another time. Right now, I need all of you to help me with an experiment.” He gave them the small package he was carrying with him.
“Ah, a gift!” Viorica said. She hurried to open it while the others huddled around her to take a better look.
Inside, the package appeared to be a rough, very coarse sort of cotton-like fabric, gray and dirty-looking.
“What is this?” asked one of them, passing the fabric around her fingers. “It’s so ugly. Did you shear a batblin, my Lord?”
“Rodika! Don’t be rude!” Viorica exclaimed. Then she touched the fabric, looking both confused and disappointed at the same time. “But I do admit I have no idea what you wish for us to do with this, my Lord.”
“It’s thread made from spiderweb,” Ed explained. At once, Viorica removed her hand as if she had been touching acid without realizing it. “Back on my native world, people discovered that you could use spider-silk to craft a very lightweight armor that is also useful against impacts. The problem was, since Earth’s spiders are much smaller than horned spiders, creating a single vest is very expensive. So I figured, the Haunt needs a way to keep our minions safe… and we seem to have more than enough spiderweb to make into silk. So why not try it?” Hopefully, a spider-silk vest would be tough enough to withstand an arrow, yet lighter and less conspicuous than gambeson or plate.
The seamstress considered this, more than a few of them with a disbelieving, almost disgusted look to their faces.
“I’d rather not touch something that came from a horned spider’s behind,” Rodika said, frowning. “It’s so… unsanitary.” A few others nodded their approval.
“Come on, ladies,” Viorica chided them. “Our Dungeon Lord came to us asking for a personal favor. It’s our responsibility to the Haunt to do our best, no matter what the favor is,” she said with another suggestive glance Ed’s way. “How else are our brave warriors supposed to head into combat against the dreaded Light without knowing we’re here, safely waiting for their triumphant return and doing our best to protect them?”
“You’ve spent way too much time with that Bard, Viorica,” the third seamstress told her. But she regarded the spider-silk fabric with less obvious animosity. “Look, just keep those spiders away from me and I’ll try to help out.”
“That’s the spirit, Narcisa,” Viorica told her friend.
“How did you make this first batch?” Rodika asked Ed.
“Well, I transmuted it into thread using spiderweb,” Ed explained. “I figured that there’s some kind of procedure for making it into useful fabric, but I’ve got no idea what that may be. This was my second-best option.”
Rodika shook her head and lifted a strand of gray thread. “A fine idea, my Lord, but I’m afraid it won’t work. This thread lacks the quality we need to make it into a vest meant for combat. It’d fall apart. See?” She pulled the thread with little force, and it immediately broke.
“We’ll have to conduct many tests,” Narcisa said, but smiled at her own words. “Just like Master Lavina. It sounds fun, actually. Perhaps you could make it into a quest, my Lord? Reasonable people like us don’t run around hitting monsters with heavy sticks, so experience points are scarce.”
Ed nodded, happy that the seamstress were now in his side. It’d take time, but hopefully the next time an ogre clubbed him he wouldn’t even get a bruise. And if the vests saved even one life, the effort would be well worth it.
Ed sat alone in his dimly lit quarters, enjoying a quick dinner while his drone butler hung by a corner and glared at him.
“Come sit if you want,” Ed offered the drone. It was a chat they’d had many times. The drone’s response was always the same, a half-assed curtsy followed by an obscene gesture when he thought Ed wasn’t looking.
“Suit yourself,” Ed said, chuckling. He wondered how close the drones were to imps, in nature, and where the hell they came from. He suspected it was one of those things where the truth was best kept under wraps.
He was eating with the door to his back. When it opened, he didn’t bother to turn around. “Kaga, Andreena. I was expecting you.” He smiled to himself. He’d been dying to say that line since he saw them leave Andreena’s potion labs.
“Ah, yes. The vision thing,” Andreena said as Ed turned to face them. “Thanks for reminding me I need to cover the ceiling with clothes if I want to take a bath.”
“I—I don’t think that’s how it works,” Ed said. “But thanks for the vote of confidence.”
The herbalist shrugged. “Eh. I’m old enough to be your mother, so I probably have nothing to worry about. The Head Researcher, on the other hand—”
“So what do you guys want to talk with me about?” Ed asked in a hurry.
Kaga, who had spent the length of the conversation chuckling to himself, stepped forward. He was holding a small vial in one hand, and he set it on the table in front of Ed. It was filled with a sort of brownish-yellowish liquid. “We’ve made a small breakthrough in the hell chicken project,” the Monster Hunter explained. “We figured you may want to hear about it.”
Ed glanced at the Monster Hunter, and then at the Herbalist. “What’s in the vial?” he finally asked. Something about the way Andreena smiled made him dread the answer.
“Before I tell you,” th
e Herbalist said, “let Kaga here explain what he found out about our very own giant, murderous chickens from Hell, all right?”
“What’s in the vial—”
“It always interested me,” Kaga started, “how the hell chickens are pretty much willing to murder everything—including each other—no matter the size or the threat. Pretty much only Lavy managed to earn the respect of one of them, and we haven’t been able to replicate her results. But,” he said, raising a finger, “they still live in small groups. They don’t eat their offspring—not that often, at least. There must be a way for them to regulate their aggression, right? In fact, there may be several ways. This vial over here is the result of me putting that theory to the test. Do you know what pheromones are? My clan learned about them from a Witch Doctor who was also an expert in an almost extinct style of martial arts. Pheromones are a creature’s way of telling friend from foe, and hell chickens work the same way. This vial is full with pheromones.”
Ed grimaced as he uncorked it. It smelled like it looked. Rancid and disgusting.
“It’s urine, isn’t it?” he asked, hurrying to cork it again. His butler hurried to grab a couple incense sticks and light them to mask the smell that threatened to fill the room.
“Oh yes it is,” Andreena said, her grin growing a few inches. “It’s urine gathered from a female hell chicken a few hours before she laid a fertilized egg. I turned it into a very potent concoction that will last a couple days.”
“Oh,” Ed said. He blinked as he realized what he was hearing. “Wait a second. How the hell did you manage to get… this?”
“Let’s not talk about it,” was all Kaga said about it, with the distant look in his eyes of a man who has seen and done terrible things. “In short, anyone that douses himself with the pheromones won’t be attacked by the hell chicken mounts. So far, it’s been the only way my Monster Hunters have made any advancements in the mounts’ training.”
Ed and the butler exchanged terrified glances. “So we need to cover ourselves in hell chicken urine if we want to be safe from them.”
“Safe is a… strong word,” Kaga said slowly. “I mean, as long as there are no nearby male mounts who are in heat… Now that I think of it, it’s mating season, so you probably don’t want to get near the breeding pens if you’re doused in pheromones.” The kaftar snatched the vial away.
Andreena lost it at that, and began to laugh big, booming cackles while she hugged her belly.
Ed looked at the vial and shivered.
Lavy and Pholk were huddled in front of the Head Researcher’s worktable, which was covered in strange tools, shears, engraving knifes, and other instruments, as well as a new dish like the first one the Witch had made.
Ed saw them long before entering the Research Laboratory, using his dungeon vision. When he reached them, the both of them turned to greet him. Lavy looked like hell—even paler than usual and with deep bags under her eyes.
“Ed!” she called. “Come take a look at this. We’ve made so much progress!”
The dish had its outer edge covered in tiny runic engravings, which came together to form an array of interlocking magical circles. It vaguely reminded Ed of circuitry.
“It looks finished,” he said, touching the glass surface with his finger. It was cold to the touch, with no visible signal of its purpose or design. It was strange to think that such a fragile creation could tip the balance of power between Dungeon Lords and Heroes if properly utilized.
“Only a few details to fine tune,” Lavy said. “We still need to test it, obviously, and figure a way to modify a Scrambler Tower to work with it. We’ll need to abuse Objectivity a bit to create the effects we require, as well.” She placed a hand on the spellbook on her lap. “Thankfully, I bought all the spells we’ll need already.”
Ed nodded. He was eager to start learning new spells with Lavy, but he’d had so little free time in the last couple of days… not for the first time, he wondered how days could pass by so quickly. If he weren’t sure it wasn’t the case, he could’ve sworn that Ivalian time happened faster than Earth’s, where his 9-to-5 work shift at Lasershark could pass by so slowly that he’d wonder if time hadn’t actually frozen.
I guess it’s different when you’re having fun… and fighting for your life and the lives of everyone you care about, he thought.
“Lord Wright, thank you for the opportunity of working on this project,” Pholk said eagerly. “It’s the chance of a lifetime, truly. For me to be a part of something this big, it’s a dream come true. I cannot wait until we start massacring the Heiligians after crushing their damn Heroes for the last time!” he declared, puffing up with pride and battle-lust.
Ed gave the intern an uncomfortable grin. Sometimes, he forgot that the new minions weren’t exactly the best of people. It was easy to forget, really. They acted so normal most of the time. Until they didn’t.
“The only problem I see,” the Dungeon Lord said, “is that we’ll have to test it the hard way, in combat against a Heroic team. We’ll need to hurry and create new disposable dungeons for our experiments, but that’s no problem.”
“Give it a month,” Lavy told him. “Then the Inquisition won’t even know what hit them.” She smiled, almost as fiercely as the abnatir.
That was when the doors to the lab sprang open and Kaga rushed in. The kaftar had a maddened glint in his eye, and his tongue had lolled out from exhaustion. From the look of it, he’d sprinted all the way from the Haga’Anashi camp to here without stopping.
At once, Ed knew that something had gone terribly wrong.
24
Chapter Twenty-Four
Judgement
Gallio had a long, sleepless night where his mind took his body hostage and almost drowned it in a sea of vague guilt, where he swore he could hear the kaftars’ screams all the way from the underground prisons of the mansion, many feet below his cramped quarters. The shadows of the branches scraping his window took the shapes of iron comb, plier, and thumbscrew, and the screech of the wind through the crack of his door was like a drill going through his ears.
Still, when he blinked and the moonless night gave way to a gray morning, he wasn’t at all surprised by the heavy footsteps coming to the front of his quarters. In a way, it was as if he’d been expecting them all his life. It wasn’t the first time the Inquisition had come for one of their own.
He had enough time to dress with a clean linen shirt, trousers, belt, and shoes, when the pounding against his door began, growing more demanding by the second.
“Inquisitor Gallio!” called a man. “The Examiners demand your presence at once!” His tone left little doubt that the meeting was not optional.
Gallio’s trusted sword waited in its sheath by his bedside. It was clean, maintained in perfect condition, with a perfectly balanced weight to it. He reached for it and tied it to his belt as the pounding grew louder.
“Coming!” Gallio exclaimed.
For a brief instant, his gaze wavered between the door and his sword. He drew an inch of pale blue steel.
He knew he could take whoever was behind that door. If he really wanted to, he could clear a path all the way to the griffin stables and be well on his way to Galtia—or wherever—before the Examiners even thought of organizing a search party. After all, there was not a single other Inquisitor who could bring forth a sunwave in all of Starevos.
He even dared fantasize that he could land his griffin near Hoia Forest where, without a doubt, a grim-faced mercenary with black hair would welcome him into the small community growing out of carved rock and survivors like himself. Perhaps Gallio would get a reticent welcome to that place, but eventually people would forgive him. After all, he’d fought and lived among the community’s inhabitants for years. Some of them were like little brothers to him.
Maybe even Alvedhra would come along. She looked up to him. She’d listen, maybe. And then it’d be just like the old times. Kes, Al, and him.
“It’s too late for that
, old fool,” he told himself, chuckling sadly through his clenched jaw. He re-sheathed his sword and opened the door. Best to face the music with some dignity, he thought.
The Inquisitor they’d sent for him was little more than a young boy, fresh-faced with pockmark scars still red in his cheeks. Neither him nor the other two Inquisitors behind the boy could’ve stopped him, if he’d really wanted to run.
Instead, he pushed his hands forward and allowed the kid to cuff him with iron restraints. Each chain-link was engraved with tiny runes, to stop him from casting spells or using most magical talents.
“What am I accused of?” Gallio asked as his escort hurried him along the white corridors of the mansion. He kept his head straight and didn’t bother looking at the other Inquisitors and members of the Militant Church, but he could hear their whispering as he marched down the mansion.
“Quiet,” the boy told him. Gallio rolled his eyes. The griffin stables were on the floor below. He could smell the manure, like hot peppers mixed with wet earth. It’d only take a shove and a very brief scuffle… the three men were so close to him that him being in cuffs wouldn’t make enough of a difference.
Instead, he walked with them until they reached the mahogany doors of the Examiners’ courtroom. The kid stiffened his back and gave Gallio one last dirty look before knocking on the door and stepping away.
Gallio stepped inside the shadowy courtroom, whose windows had been covered by linen drapes. The three Examiners sat in their elevated chairs, only their frames visible in the dark. Harmon’s broad-shouldered figure was in the middle, with tall and slender Bartheny to his right, and plump Hatter to the left.
The doors closed behind Gallio, the three Inquisitors taking their spots behind him, their hands resting on the pommels of their swords.