Dungeon Bringer 2 Page 14

  The injured cat women nodded gratefully and bowed before me. It felt strange to see that level of obeisance from these proud warriors, but I accepted their gratitude. Our relationship wasn’t quite master and servant, but there was a definite hierarchy here and I was at the very tippy top of the org chart. The wahket liked it that way, and I had to admit, so did I.

  I reached out and took the core from its place between the jaws of the cobra throne. It thrummed in my hands, a sound that was half contented purr and half anxious growl. It wanted to be with me, but it also knew I planned to haul it into harm’s way.

  The core weighed nothing, but it was roughly the size of a bowling ball, which made it hard for me to hang on to. If I had to incarnate and fight, I didn’t want to drop the ball on the ground to use my weapon. Frustrated, I stared at the core and willed it to show me a different option.

  The opalescent ball shimmered and floated out of my grasp. It floated up to a spot over my left shoulder and hovered there. I took a step, and the core followed me. Perfect.

  “Zillah’s out ahead of us,” I said. “And I can see everywhere in my dungeon. We don’t need to move cautiously or quietly unless I warn you. It’s less than a quarter mile to Delsinia’s dungeon, so let’s move quickly.”

  The wahket snapped to attention and then briskly marched through the doorway and into the Great Below.

  Nephket and Kezakazek fell in behind them, and I brought up the rear. We were on our way to kill the witch.

  I banished the undead bodies from the fight we had with the skeletons and zombies before we reached them because I didn’t want anything to slow us down. This attack relied on speed as much as strength. We had to hit Delsinia before she could rearrange her dungeon or summon new guardians to ambush us.

  “So this is new,” Zillah whispered in my mind. “That naughty girl has attached her dungeon to ours.”

  Chapter 9: The Raid

  IT ONLY TOOK US FIVE minutes to reach the point where Delsinia’s dungeon butted up against mine. I hated the strange merger the instant I laid eyes on it.

  While my dungeon corridors were smooth, almost featureless stone, Delsinia’s dungeon was constructed from a strange fibrous material that combined organic and inorganic elements. Chunks of ragged stone were held in place by patches of coarse vines that anchored themselves in dense pockets of moist, black soil surrounded by thick rings of moss.

  Pink worms as thick as my wrist undulated and wound their way through holes in the stones and gaps in the vines. Their bodies pulsed in waves as if they were trying to move half-digested food through their systems.

  “Can I keep one for a pet?” Kezakazek asked.

  She reached for one of the worms, but Zillah caught the drow’s wrist with her tail.

  “What if it’s poisonous?” the scorpion queen asked. “Or a trap?”

  “She’s got a point,” I conceded. My guardians and I were clustered at the edge of Delsinia’s dungeon. I had no idea what would happen once we crossed her threshold, but I didn’t think it would be good. “Let’s keep our hands and feet inside the ride until we reach our destination, all right?”

  Kezakazek huffed and pouted her bottom lip, but she gave me a sulky nod.

  “Fine,” she said. “But I’m taking souvenirs before we leave.”

  “We’ll find a nice pile of skulls for you to bring back,” I said. “But we have to kill her first.”

  And with that, I stepped out of my dungeon and into Delsinia’s territory.

  The instant my foot touched the rough floor of my enemy’s dungeon my strength began to fade. Though my core still hovered above my left shoulder, I felt as if it had somehow grown more distant from me. The ka was still there, I could still spend it if I needed to, but the core itself felt fuzzy and indistinct.

  “You all right?” Nephket asked me quietly.

  I realized that I had stopped dead in my tracks, and my shoulders were slumped. I straightened up and squared my shoulders. I wasn’t about to be cowed by this rival dungeon lord, no matter how creepy this all seemed. We’d come to kill her, and that’s exactly what I was going to do.

  “I’m fine,” I said, “I just had to adjust for a second. Let’s keep moving.”

  The entrance to Delsinia’s lair sloped downward as we headed deeper into her territory. Pinchy and the other scorpions ranged out ahead of us, their tails raised high and their claws spread wide as they searched for enemies or traps. I trusted their vibration sense would detect any change in the floor or walls before we triggered a trap even if that meant we had to slow our pace.

  We hadn’t gone more than thirty feet before we reached our first obstacle. Delsinia had sealed her dungeon with a wall of thick, black bars. They reminded me of wrought iron and were spaced about six inches apart across the five-foot width of the corridor. Through the gaps in the bars, I could see the tunnel continued straight ahead, while another tunnel branched off to our left. I could still see in the darkness, but my eyes weren’t as sharp as they were in my own dungeon. It was a frustrating limitation, and I wanted to be rid of it as soon as possible.

  Unfortunately, the only way that would happen was if Delsinia was dead and I claimed this place as my own.

  “Can you get through these bars?” I asked Zillah.

  I flattened myself against the wall to let the scorpion queen slip past me. Her tail brushed across my waist as Zillah passed me, and its tip flicked at the lower edge of my breechcloth. She winked at me, then reached out and grabbed a bar in each of her hands.

  “Weird,” she said. “I thought these were iron, but they feel like something else.”

  Zillah drew her mancatcher spear and rested its crotch against one of the bars. Her right hand twisted the back section of the spear’s haft, and its complex mechanism went into action. The spear’s tines slammed together with a sharp clack, and the bar between them snapped in half with a brittle crunching noise.

  Blood, thick and such a dark red that it was almost black, oozed from the fractured ends of the bar and puddled on the floor.

  “Was that bone?” I asked.

  “Yep,” Zillah said. “Delsinia is one creepy little bitch.”

  Rathokhetra’s laughter rumbled through my thoughts at that. There was a hard edge to the sound, and it reminded me of the rasp of a knife drawn across a whetstone.

  While Zillah cleared the rest of the bars out of our way, Pinchy and her friends slid between them. Two of the scorpions headed off to our left, while Pinchy and a pair of her siblings went straight ahead.

  Both groups of scorpions sent back a nervous alarm within seconds of their departure. They weren’t in any immediate danger, but whatever they’d seen had them freaked out.

  Big surprise in this place.

  I pressed the scorpions for more details, but they were unable to convey any new information other than a strong sense of wrongness. We’d have to be careful moving forward.

  “There, that should do it,” Zillah said.

  She’d hacked the bars off to within a few inches of the ceiling, and the dungeon floor was littered with broken black bones and puddles of sticky blood.

  “Good work,” Nephket said. “Gross, but at least the path is clear.”

  “I’ve seen worse,” Zillah said. She swept a hand toward the opening she’d created. “But let’s find this bitch and kill her so we can get out of this dump.”

  “It won’t look like this for long,” I said as I stepped through the gate. “Redecorating is high on my to-do list after we’ve cleared this hellhole.”

  As I passed through the broken bars, a high-pitched titter echoed through the dungeon all around me. It was a childish, unnerving sound that made me hesitate for just a moment before I took another step. Nothing had attacked me, I didn’t sense any danger in my immediate vicinity, and the scorpions hadn’t found any traps, but I was still freaked out. That creepy little kid laughter had messed with my head.

  “What was that?” Zillah asked from behind me. She sound
ed shaken, and that made me nervous. I’d never seen Zillah afraid of anything. If she was freaked out, then the rest of the guardians and wahket were probably pissing themselves.

  Clearly, Delsinia was good at playing on our fears.

  I couldn’t let that stop us. It was time for a dungeon lord team-builder speech.

  I activated The Dungeon’s Visage, and...

  <<<>>>

  Ability unavailable.

  <<<>>>

  What the fuck?

  I activated The Dungeon Speaks...

  <<<>>>

  Ability unavailable.

  <<<>>>

  With an aggravated grunt, I reached out for the Tablet of Incarnation to see if it could tell me what the fuck was going on here.

  But my trusty tablet refused to appear.

  Rathokhetra grumbled at the back of my thoughts, and bits and pieces of knowledge filtered up from his memories into my brain. We weren’t in my dungeon any longer, which meant most of my powers wouldn’t work the way they were supposed to.

  “You should be able to incarnate,” Rathokhetra groaned from his resting place in my thoughts. “But abilities that rely on your dungeon will not function here.”

  “That would have been nice to know before I started out on this little expedition,” I thought back to the old bastard.

  This was very bad news indeed. I wasn’t sure what powers I’d have available when it came to the showdown with Delsinia, and I doubted my guardians and the wahket would be able to defeat her by themselves. This had just gotten a lot trickier than I’d planned.

  I composed myself before I turned to Nephket, careful to keep my nerves from showing on my face. No sense making everybody nervous because I was gimped.

  “Neph,” I said. “Tell the wahket they don’t have anything to worry about. The creepy laughter and weird shit are just for show. We already wiped out Delsinia’s forces. She’s trying to rattle us so we’ll leave without a fight.”

  A curious smile spread across Nephket’s face.

  “We aren’t nervous,” she said. “At least we wahket aren’t.”

  Kezakazek raised an eyebrow at that and crossed her arms beneath her breasts.

  “You’re not?” she asked. “Because I grew up with the most evil motherfuckers in the known worlds and this has me on edge.”

  Zillah didn’t say anything, but she chewed her lower lip nervously and gave me a single slow nod of her head.

  Nephket spread her arms and looked around the grimy dungeon.

  “The wahket do not fear this place,” she said. “This was foretold in our prophecies. It was promised that our lord and master, Rathokhetra, would lead us safely through this hell. Once we have passed through the darkness, we will be restored to our rightful place at his side.”

  I raised my eyebrow at Nephket but didn’t say anything. I didn’t really have an answer to an ancient prophecy. It was nice that the wahket were all cool with this shitshow, but their total faith in me felt like a heavy weight on my shoulders.

  “Good to know,” I said. “Onward.”

  The recon from the scorpion team told me that the passage to the left looped around to connect to the same chamber as the passage ahead of us, so I led us straight forward.

  Twenty feet past the bars, we ran into a wide, six-sided chamber that was fifteen feet across and twenty-five feet wide. In the center of the wall across from us I saw another five-foot-wide passage that led into the darkness beyond.

  A foul fog covered the floor and made it impossible to see the floor. The concealing vapors churned and roiled as if stirred by spectral hands, and half-seen shadows skittered through the swirling layers of fog.

  “That doesn’t look good,” I grumbled.

  Pinchy and her friends apparently agreed with me because they had taken to the walls to stay out of that reeking miasma and had fanned out around the room’s perimeter to keep an eye on things. If any bad guys approached, we’d have a heads-up long before they reached this chamber.

  But we still didn’t know what was actually in the room.

  The fog complicated things. I didn’t want the scorpions down in that mess because there was no telling what sorts of nastiness Delsinia might have hidden in here. But I also didn’t want my people to discover any traps that might be hidden on the floor the hard way.

  “Zillah,” I said. “Take the lead. Poke the floor with your spear as you go. I don’t want us to stumble into any traps.”

  “Got it, boss,” Zillah said. She blew a kiss to me as she passed.

  The scorpion queen thoroughly poked and prodded the floor just inside the entrance of the room. She leaned her weight on the spear with every new section she checked, and when nothing tried to kill her, she moved ahead.

  Zillah reared up on her tail as her rear legs carried the stinging appendage into the room. The tail occupied the area she’d already cleared with her spear, and she leaned forward to test the ground ahead.

  “Nice moves,” I said.

  “I’m pretty slick like that,” Zillah said. She continued her search of the room with painstaking care until her spear hit something with a metallic clink. She slowly leaned her weight into the butt of the spear, but it didn’t budge.

  “What did you find?” I called to her.

  “Not sure,” she said. “Something metal, but I can’t see what it is through all this damned mist.”

  She raised her spear and tested the floor to either side of where she’d heard the click. The weapon’s tip rattled against something with every thrust of her spear, but whatever was under there didn’t budge when she put her weight into it.

  “It feels strange,” she said. “Like cages, maybe.”

  “Can you lift one out of the mist?” I asked.

  “Good idea.” Zillah stopped pushing down on her spear. Instead, she shifted her weight and pushed down on the weapon’s butt end.

  She was rewarded with a metallic rattle that echoed through the chamber like the ringing of a cracked church bell. The tip of her spear lifted above the fog and whatever she’d hooked came with it.

  “It’s heavy,” Zillah grunted. She adjusted her grip on the spear and lifted one side of the item out of the fog.

  The object was composed of rusted iron that formed a sort of cage, but its dimensions seemed strange to me. Then it hit me.

  “That’s a coffin,” I said.

  “Gross,” Zillah shot back.

  “Neat,” Kezakazek said.

  I figured there weren’t any traps that could harm an immaterial dungeon lord in this place, so I stepped into the fog and headed toward Zillah.

  “The rest of you can hang back for a second,” I said as I approached the coffin. “I’ll let you know when it’s safe to move up.”

  The fog churned around my legs, and I felt a strange chill pass through me at its touch. That didn’t make any sense. I was immaterial. Why would the thick ground cover react to my presence at all?

  I took another step, and the floor shuddered beneath me.

  “Boss?” Zillah asked. “What did you do?”

  “Nothing, I just walked into the room,” I said. Before I could continue, the floor groaned again, and Zillah and her captive coffin began to rise.

  “You did something,” the scorpion queen said. “The floor’s rising under me.”

  “Is she okay?” Kezakazek asked from behind me. The narrow passage made it hard for anyone behind me to see what was going on in the room. “What’s happening?”

  I froze in place, but the floor kept on rising. Soon, a mound of dark earth dotted with eroded flagstones rose above the fog to reveal that the ironwork coffin Zillah had discovered was only one of a couple dozen others.

  “She’s fine,” I said. “I’m heading over there. Stay put.”

  I took a step, and when the room didn’t react to my progress, I took another. It only took me a few seconds to reach Zillah, and no traps or other mechanical oddities presented themselves on the way.

  The coffin
frames were covered with patches of rotted vines and crowns of bloated mushrooms, and each of them held a fist-sized floating ball of purple-black light surrounded by rings of curdled fog.

  What I’d thought were flagstones turned out to be tombstones that had fallen over. Their stone surfaces were covered in letters from a hundred different languages. Rathokhetra’s memories helped me decipher some names, but even that old fart didn’t understand all the languages written on those grave markers.

  The pieces fell into place for me, and I suddenly understood what was happening.

  “These are spawn points,” I said. “Those little balls there are the ghouls coming back.”

  “I thought guardians wouldn’t respawn if they bit the dust outside of their dungeon,” Zillah said.

  “That’s what I thought, too,” I grumbled. “Apparently there are some dungeon lord tricks that I don’t know.”

  That bothered me. A lot. If Delsinia’s guardians could recover from death outside the dungeon, they’d be back here when the sun set in a couple of hours. I needed to finish her before that happened.

  “Can we break them?” Zillah asked. “That would put a real crimp in the bitch’s plans.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. Rathokhetra grumbled his agreement. “At least not until we’ve killed her and taken her core.”

  “Oh, well,” Zillah said. “At least we have a couple of hours to take care of that before these pains in the ass come back.”

  “Might as well keep moving,” I said. “I’ll bring the others up and we’ll follow you.”

  “Gotcha,” Zillah said.

  With that, she marched ahead of me, tapped her spear on the ground between the rows of coffins, and headed toward the exit on the far side of the room.

  I retraced my steps to Kezakazek and managed not to trigger any more mechanical shenanigans. So far, so good.

  “Kez,” I said. “Tell the others to follow in your footsteps, single file. We’re going to get across this room, but I don’t want anyone to wander off track and set off a trap or something worse.”