Dungeon Bringer 2 Page 20

  “You let me deal with that,” I said. “Lead the way.”

  We stood together. Delsinia looped one arm around my waist and the other around my shoulders.

  I turned to face her, and her eyes were even with mine, her lips inches from my mouth.

  “I wanted you to know,” she said, her voice harsh with emotions she could hardly control, “my feelings for you have not changed. The drow damaged my mind, they turned me against you for a time, but now I am free and I can see clearly.”

  “I’m not the man you were in love with,” I explained. Despite that, my lips moved closer to hers, and the heat of her breath against my face lit a fire inside me. Memories of a time before, memories that didn’t belong to me, bubbled up through my thoughts. It was as if I’d known Delsinia my whole life.

  “You are not,” she said. Her lips closed over mine, and we kissed with bruising passion. She was nearly as strong as I was, and our embrace was tight enough to make both our ribs creak. Finally, she drew her head back and smiled at me. “But you are. And more.”

  She kissed me again, more lightly this time, and smiled. Then she led me out of the temple. As we passed through the ka refinery chamber, Delsinia ran her fingers across one of the rune-etched pillars. At her touch, golden light flared from the refinery’s surface and illuminated her features in stark relief.

  She was a fantastically beautiful woman, with stern, noble features. The faint green tinge to her skin did nothing to detract from that beauty, and the shimmering of scales on the outside lines of her forearms and thighs, and scattered across her belly and chest, only added to her allure. The bone chains that were her only clothing sparked and shimmered with every move and revealed far more than they concealed.

  I was a lucky, lucky man to have her at my side, even if it might only be temporary.

  Delsinia took my hand and pulled me away from the refinery and toward the room’s southern exit. Just outside the room, at the first right-angled corner in the passageway, she stopped.

  “This is where they will come through,” she said.

  I examined the wall, but my dungeon lord sight showed me nothing. When I examined the overhead map of my new territory, I didn’t see the wall at all. It wasn’t even made from the same material as the rest of the dungeon. Shit, Zillah had missed it, too.

  “The dark elves are very clever,” she said. “This wall is wreathed with many enchantments that make it difficult to discern. Even now that I know how to operate it, I sometimes forget it exists.”

  The strange wall was constructed from thousands of small stones, none of them larger than my thumbnail. Their colors and shapes had been arranged to create a spiral pattern that pulled at my thoughts when I looked at it for too long. Delsinia reached out and tapped three stones that, to me, looked exactly like the stones that surrounded them.

  A heavy, grinding rumble echoed through the dungeon’s walls, and I felt a momentary stab of panic at the thought that Delsinia might’ve just sprung some sort of horrible trap.

  “It is safe,” she said. “You will see.”

  The section of wall split down its center, from floor to ceiling. The two halves of the wall slid out and then apart to expose an unlit room beyond.

  “What in the hell is this?” I asked. The fact that I couldn’t see into the chamber told me it wasn’t part of my dungeon, and that raised the hackles on the back of my neck. “Are there any more of these little rooms tucked away at the edges of this dungeon?”

  Delsinia shook her head so hard her face was briefly obscured by the swirling strands of her emerald hair.

  “No,” she said emphatically. “This is the only one.”

  “Let’s see what these jerks have been up to,” I said.

  I extended my dungeon slowly, careful not to run over anything important. The glow from the walls of my dungeon let me see a few feet out ahead of its end, but no farther. That made my trip across this secret chamber more difficult and a hell of a lot slower than I would’ve liked.

  A few minutes later, I’d extended my dungeon twenty-five feet past the secret door and stood in front of the most bizarre contraption I’d ever seen. At first glance, its entire surface seemed to be just twisted rings and arcs of metal held together by nothing more than hope and spit.

  At the contraption’s center was a silver sphere that had been painstakingly polished to a mirror-like sheen. The curved surface caught the light from my dungeon’s mouth and twisted it into strange arcs that deformed my reflection into a funhouse caricature. My eyes bulged from their sockets like a pair of poached eggs, and my mouth and chin pulled toward the bottom of the sphere like molten wax.

  A pair of gears jutted from the top and bottom of the sphere, and the teeth on the interior of a pair of black rings meshed with each of them. The first ring, attached to the top of the mess, was the smaller of the two, and its circumference was only a few hairs wider than the sphere’s. The second and wider of the two rings was several feet larger than its smaller sibling but was otherwise identical. The interiors of both of these innermost rings were lined with twin tracks of fine teeth for thirteen other gears. Each of those gears was attached to a smaller ring, and those rings connected the inner and outer layers of the sphere’s construction in an elaborate tangle of eccentric orbits. Red, blue, and green orbs lay on even smaller spiral tracks within the smallest rings and performed an intricately choreographed ballet that made my eyeballs ache as I tried to follow them.

  “Do you have any idea what this is?” I asked Delsinia.

  “A planar gate,” she said. “It allows Kozerek and his people to travel from their world to this one.”

  That explained how the drow got here, but not how to stop them from coming back. If this mess of interlocking spheres was anything like the gate the raiders had come through, any attempt I made to destroy it might turn it into a big old bomb. This close to my dungeon, there’d be no telling how much territory or how many people I’d lose. The guardians would respawn, even from that messy death, but the wahket wouldn’t be so lucky.

  And after the time I’d just spent with the cat women, I would not allow them to die.

  All of that assumed I could destroy the bomb. From what Kezakazek had told me, the drow were sneaky fuckers, and there was no telling what sort of safeguards a prick like Kozerek would have placed around a gate this important to him.

  “How does this work?” I asked Delsinia.

  “I will not pretend to know all of its secrets,” she said. “But from my studies of this device I can tell you the gate activates on a regular schedule based on the movement of the spheres.”

  She pointed toward one of the small globes on a spiral track. It was about halfway from the outer edge of the circle to the end of the spiral, and its surface glowed a fiery red.

  “When this sphere reaches the end of its track, the gate will open,” Delsinia said.

  I studied the globe for a moment and counted down the seconds in my head. After ten seconds had passed, the orb moved forward with a faint click. It hadn’t traveled very far, just one tooth on the grooved track, but it didn’t have far to go before it reached its goal. A quick calculation told me the orb would reach the end of its trip in two hours, maybe a little less.

  That didn’t give us a lot of time to make our plans before the dark elves showed up, but at least the drow weren’t already up my ass. I studied the contraption and weighed my options.

  We could set up an ambush here and attack the drow as they came through the gate. That would give us home-field advantage and the opportunity to pick off the dark elves before they could mount a serious offensive.

  But I had no idea what lay on the other side of that gate. There could be an entire drow army encamped not too far away, or a massive dark elf city filled with potential recruits. Kozerek also knew something had gone sideways with his little plan, so he might be mustering a damned invasion force right now. If that was the case, our ambush could quickly turn into a slaughter for my people.


  Before I could commit to a course of action, I needed better intel.

  “Delsinia, do you know what’s on the other side of this gate?” I asked.

  “I never ventured through it,” she said.

  “That sucks,” I said. “I need to see what’s on the other side so I know how to prepare for these assholes.”

  “The gates are timed, but perhaps you could interfere with that timing,” Delsinia said.

  “That’s an excellent idea,” I said. “Maybe if I just turn this a little...”

  The smallest sphere moved easily when I grabbed hold of it and tried to rotate it toward its destination. The thought did pass my mind that this might raise an alarm on the other side of the gate, but it was a little late for second thoughts.

  “Rise and shine,” I called to Nephket while I fiddled with the gate. “Naptime’s over. Rally the troops and come to me. It’s time for a field trip.”

  Nephket came awake in the blink of an eye. One moment she was completely asleep, and before I’d finished my thought, she was awake and on her feet.

  “Kezakazek won’t be happy you’ve interrupted her beauty sleep,” my familiar said, “but we’ll be there soon.”

  I wondered if Nephket really needed to sleep, or if she did it out of habit. If my familiar shared my perpetual insomnia, we could get a lot more done while the rest of the crew was catching some z’s.

  While I waited for my guardians and the wahket to arrive, I studied the gate. It didn’t have the control box that I’d associated with the booby trap on the raiders’ magical portal, so that was something. I rocked the little globe on its track and found it moved as easily backward as it did forward. It also didn’t zap me with some kind of booby trap.

  I’d call that a win.

  “You going to get hurt playing with other kids’ toys,” Zillah said. “What is that thing?”

  “It’s a gate,” Kezakazek said. “But that is a very unusual design.”

  “It was made by drow,” Delsinia said with a frown.

  “It was not,” Kezakazek said. “Trust me. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say it was demoncraft.”

  Well, wasn’t that interesting?

  And disturbing.

  “The drow might not have made it,” I said. “But they use it to get here. And now we’re going to use it to go there. Wherever there is.”

  “If it’s demoncraft, doesn’t that mean the other end of the gate could be in a very bad place?” Nephket asked. “Let’s just seal it up outside your dungeon and call it good.”

  “I’m not sure that would work,” I said. “Kozerek doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d be stopped by a few walls. I think we need to deal with him in a more permanent way.”

  “He also seems like someone with contingencies for his contingency plans,” Kezakazek said. “What if we go through the gate and find ourselves stuck in a drow fortress?”

  “There’s my little optimist,” I said to Kezakazek. “Look, I understand this doesn’t seem very safe. But we have to see what’s on the other side of this thing. We can’t just wait for Kozerek and the drow brigade to come on over and fuck up our shit.”

  “I do prefer to do the fucking,” Zillah said. “When do we leave?”

  I extended and widened the passage to engulf the gate and still move around it without brushing against its slowly rotating rings. The walls of my dungeon butted up against the back wall of the room the drow had created for their gate. Anyone who came through the portal now would find themselves trapped in my territory unless they could burrow through the solid rock behind the gate.

  Maybe the drow had some black magic fuckery that would let them escape another way, but that was a problem for future me.

  I put my fingertip on the fiery red globe and rolled it slowly down the track. As it clicked through each tooth, tendrils of static electricity crawled up my arm like veins of blue power.

  “Wow, I do not like the looks of that,” Kezakazek said. “You all right?”

  “Peachy,” I shot back. “But be ready to yank me off this thing if it lights me up.”

  With only a handful of teeth left, the resistance built up. A dozen lightning bolts crawled along my arm, and it took considerable effort to move the sphere any farther.

  “Shit,” I said. “This is harder than it looks.”

  “You can do it,” Zillah said. “You’re the toughest dungeon lord I’ve ever slept with.”

  “Technically, isn’t he the only dungeon lord you’ve fucked?” Kezakazek asked.

  “You don’t know that,” the scorpion queen shot back. “I’m an ancient force of terror. I could’ve been banged the legs off six or seven dungeon lords before I got to this one.”

  “You told me—” Kezakazek shot back.

  I shoved against the globe for all I was worth, and the orb moved through an impressive wall of flashing light and crackling thunder. And then all resistance vanished and the little ball click-clacked its way along the grooves until it reached the end and settled into place.

  I yanked my hand back as the inner and outer rings rotated into a new position. If I’d been any slower, they would’ve caught my wrist between them and banged me up something fierce.

  Blue lines of power crawled around the rings and arced between them as they aligned. The smaller rings rotated into place and locked their globes into position. Bolts of power flowed from the outer ring to the inner ring, and every one of the small globes blazed with blue light. Then, with a final electric crack, all that juice poured into the small sphere I’d moved.

  There was a terrific metal screeching noise and the mirror ball at the center of the gate flattened and widened until it filled the entire inner ring. Then with an almost inaudible pop, like a soap bubble bursting, it vanished.

  A very surprised-looking drow suddenly jerked around and stared through the circle at us. A single candle on a stand to his left cast enough light to show me his shocked little face, but the dark elf was surrounded by shadows that made it impossible to see anything around him. He could’ve been alone, or he could have just as easily been surrounded by six or seven hundred other drow armed to the teeth and ready to slaughter us all.

  The drow recovered from his surprise and barked a string of syllables in a language I couldn’t understand, but based on his tone and facial expression, I’m pretty sure he said, “What in the actual fuck is going on here?”

  “Boo, bitch,” Zillah shouted. Before I could say another word, her mancatcher shot past me and its tines hooked around the drow’s throat. The weapon’s sharpened edges sliced through the blood vessels on either side of the dark elf’s neck, and his hands flapped uselessly at the blood that coursed from his wounds.

  The drow’s knees went weak as the blood drained from his body, but before he could fall to the floor Zillah’s tail rocketed forward and her stinger plunged through the dark elf’s forehead with a sharp crack. The impact was enough to cause the drow’s eyes to bulge from their sockets and blood to drool from his ears.

  Zillah twisted her wrist, and the mancatcher’s blades snapped together with a grisly crunch. She pulled her tail back through the portal and dangled the dark elf’s severed head in front of me.

  “This one broke,” she complained. “Can we find some more to play with?”

  Chapter 13: Final Preparations

  WHILE I COULDN’T GUARANTEE there was an army of drow on the other side of the gate, the presence of one guard meant there’d most likely been at least a pair of them. And, like cockroaches, if you see two drow there are a few dozen more that you won’t see until it’s too late.

  It was time to get on with the killing.

  I thrust my hand forward and my dungeon burst through the gate with a sound like a fistful of forks caught in a garbage disposal. I wasn’t sure if that was an alarm, but it might as well have been. There was no way any bad guys within a hundred yards could have missed that din.

  The actual gate was only five feet wide and eig
ht feet tall, which forced us to pass through single file. But as soon as I’d moved the dungeon’s passage beyond that chokepoint, I widened the tunnel’s mouth to fifteen feet and ordered everyone through, wahket first.

  “Move! You see anything on the other side, stick a spear in it. If you can’t reach it, shoot it with your crossbows,” I shouted. “Zillah, back up the front rank and take command of the wahket. Nephket and Kezakazek, with me. Delsinia, get on the right flank and kill anything that gets in your way.”

  Rathokhetra approved of my plans, but I didn’t really give a shit. I was blind at the moment, and until I could see deeper into my enemy’s territory, this was the best plan I had.

  The wahket charged to the opening with their spears at the ready. The fifteen-foot-wide tunnel would give us an eight-wide front rank of spears and shields, a second rank of the same width and composition, and eight crossbows in the third row to help soften up any enemies that were out of melee range. Zillah’s tail could reach past all three ranks, and if necessary, she could scamper up the wall and across the ceiling to get at any spellcasters or missile troops that gave us trouble.

  I wasn’t sure what the hell to do with Delsinia, but she was more than strong enough to hold down our flank if anyone tried to get around us.

  “Hostiles!” one of the wahket called, and another of the cat women hissed in pain. The clash of metal on metal rang through the air, though it sounded strange and distorted as it passed the gate to reach my ears.

  Urged on by the sounds of combat, the last of the wahket charged through the gate and formed up with their sisters. My guardians were hot on their furry little tails, and the shit was well and truly on its way to the fan. With the last of my people through the breach, I raced forward to join them in enemy territory.

  <<<>>>

  Warning: Transdimensional expansion requires the expenditure of one ka per five minutes to maintain the connection with the home plane. Failure to maintain this connection will result in dungeon drift.