by Hugo Huesca
He was midway through relieving himself when his acute avian ear, capable of picking up the screech of prey below in the middle of a tornado, caught a rhythmical, dull sound coming his way. Footsteps.
The carrion avian turned around, one hand fumbling with his trousers and a dagger in the other. “Who’s there?”
She appeared as if spawned from the very darkness, black hair like angry tendrils on the wind, febrile violet eyes like sullen gemstones cursed with madness. For an instant, Shrukew thought an apparition from the depths of the Netherworld had come to claim his soul. Then the woman stepped forward.
“Head Researcher Lavina,” Shrukew said. “What are you doing here?”
The human regarded him with cold eyes, and Shrukew had the worrisome sensation that she wasn’t seeing him at all. “Don’t point that thing my way,” she said at last.
Shrukew put his dagger away.
“The other one, too.”
“Oh. Right,” Shrukew said, fastening his trousers. “Apologies.”
The Witch ignored him. She carried what appeared to be a coil of copper wire fastened to a paper bat—which somehow wasn’t dissolving in the rain—with a metal disk engraved with runes hanging in between. “I figured it out,” she said, hollowly. “How Murmur made the fucking Tormegris discus cooperate with the thrice-damned Colcotar array.”
Both of them stood in awkward silence. Shrukew was the first to budge. “Ah, I have zero ranks in spellcraft,” he said nervously, wondering if it would be polite to scramble back to his tent. Lavina seemed completely unaware that it was freezing cold here, despite being dressed only in those scant dresses that non-feathered females wore in these strange lands. “So… that sounds like gibberish to me.”
“It wasn’t because of divine spellcasting,” she went on, his concerns utterly unheard, “at least, not entirely. Raw power does the trick. I need to hook my creation up to a powerful enough source.”
Shrukew glanced nervously at his tent for an instant, and when he turned back, Lavina was now almost right in front of him, violet eyes glimmering with fever and intensity. The carrion avian yelped and stumbled back. “Ah, don’t you—don’t you have the power of the dungeon at your disposal?”
Am I about to get my ass sacrificed for the experience points? was the question that Shrukew didn’t dare ask.
“The flow of the ley line is not enough—it is too steady, too… controlled. To start an explosion, a trickle of fuel is not enough. You need a spark.” She pressed forward and shoved the paper bat into Shrukew’s confused arms. She also got out a hammer and a huge iron nail from somewhere in her dress, which had no pockets whatsoever, and gave them to the man. “Hurry, the astronomical conditions may not be right again for months. Get the kite as high up the mountain as you can possibly fly, then coil a length of wire around the spike, like this—” she used spiral motions to tie the copper wire around the iron nail. “Hammer the spike somewhere solid, but make sure not to break the coil. Then come back. And quickly. It’s not safe to fly during a thunderstorm.” Rain dribbled down her cheeks and sloshed hair, yet she didn’t seem to notice.
“Of course it isn’t safe, have you gone nuts? I may get turned into roasted bird by lightning!”
“All worthy science has its dangers,” Lavy said. “If we are to tame thunder, we must risk thunder to lash at us in anger.”
“Tame thunder?” Shrukew hollered above the rain. “You come here out of nowhere to get me to fly into a thunderstorm? That’s not worthy science, that’s mad sorcery! You are mad!”
Barely contained Hex magic oozed and poured off the Witch in purple and green lashes that drove the stench of burnt ectoplasm into Shrukew’s nostrils. He could hear the distant screech of the spirits around him as Lavina’s power weakened the barrier between the living and the dead. “Only if I fail, my dear.” She gave him a smile full of teeth. “If it works, then I’m a genius.”
Roaming spirits manifested all around the carrion avian and the Witch, floating through lazy spirals that sizzled with smoke under the heavy rain. Shrukew stepped backward, wondering if the Witch was about to coerce him into doing her bidding.
“Sorry, but this is an order. You are a minion of the Haunt, and my interest is the dungeon’s interest. Don’t worry, though, my spirits shall guide you safely through,” she said. “Just follow in their wake.” She brushed her hands at him in a childlike gesture. “Now hush, off with you! I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s really fucking cold out here. Even my future intelligent zombies are cold up to their tits, and they haven’t even been born yet!”
The spirits lashed playfully at Shrukew. Their touch was cold in an entirely different way than the storm was. Like pressing naked skin against frozen metal. Almost out of instinct, Shrukew jumped up, and extended his wings, trying his best to take off while carrying Lavina’s kite and wire along.
Best to do what the crazy Witch wants, he thought, as he followed the spiral of spirits through a—for the moment—relatively tranquil air current. I don’t want to find out what she’ll do if I refuse. At least the spirits should keep him safe.
He was already inches off the ground when he felt the current turn suddenly violent, and then all pretense of direction was out of his hands—his body jerked forward, a leash in the wind, without any control at all. Only then did it occur to him to scream the obvious question:
“Can spirits really know how to dodge thunder?”
Lavina’s answer came faint and distant, masked by a crack of lightning above, “Worthy science is all about experimenting! So let’s find out!”
Lavy watched with satisfaction as the carrion avian disappeared into the storm, his face frozen between excitement and fear.
Wetlands, girl, said the Canopy of Quebenef from the leather bag that Lavy kept pressed against her chest to keep it dry. You all but strong-armed that poor sod.
“Well, this is the Haunt, so what did you expect, really,” Lavy said as she hurried back to the dungeon’s bowels. “If I had to always ask nicely, we may as well be called ‘Happy Underground Farm with Ed and Pals.’”
Oh, trust me, I intended it as a compliment, said the Canopy.
In any case, that’s what happens when someone makes Charm his dump stat, added Brief Intro.
The horseshoe drew a perfect arc as it left Ed’s hand. At the last second, it went wide, though, and way off the mark, bouncing against the small wooden post next to the one Ed had been aiming for.
“That counts for something?” he asked hopefully.
“Sorry, Your Accurateness, no points for hitting the wrong mark,” said the vendor with a nervous grin.
Ed glanced at his last horseshoe. He handed it to Klek. “Maybe you’ve better luck,” he told the batblin, although a part of the Dungeon Lord was sure the horseshoes were somehow weighted. He had spent eight red Bolt rings—the equivalent of three Vyfara cents—so far, with no success.
Then again, perhaps it was the Xovian wine. He finished his cup as Klek took position, his big round eyes glimmering with focus. The batblin took aim and launched.
“Well done,” Ed said. The horseshoe gyrated happily on its post. “I didn’t know you had such a good aim, Klek. Perhaps you should train with the bow instead of the spear.”
Klek shrugged modestly. “Bowstrings are too hard to draw for batblins. But I used to practice with the sling when I was young.”
“I’m not sure that shot counts, though,” the vendor said, scratching his patchy beard as he studied Klek. “Thanks to your height you only needed to throw in a straight line.”
“Nowhere in the rules does it say that a batblin cannot play throw the horseshoe!” exclaimed an angry villager nearby, pointing at the rule board atop the improvised stand. A few other bystanders cheered him. The vendor, seeing himself outnumbered, raised his hands in defeat and handed Klek a huge caramelized apple.
Ed and Klek left the stand and walked through the Highway, partaking in the games of the Spriveska. Alder joi
ned them at moments, only to disappear again, and reappear later, more drunk and disheveled. Klek proved his aim hadn’t been a fluke by winning round after round of darts, to the point that Ed and Alder made a nifty profit by betting on him. Later, the Haunt’s kids raced them on long wooden stilts. They reinforced a batblin team against a kaftar group on a tug-of-war competition and ended up face-first in the mud for their efforts.
At some point, there came a crack of thunder muffled by the stone above their heads, and the magical torches that lit the Highway all turned off at the same time, only to come back at full power a second before Ed could start to worry.
“How strange,” he told Klek. “For a second there, I felt as if the entire flow of the Haunt’s ley line had gone somewhere else.” Dungeon vision, though, showed that everything was fine, except for a pair of drones that had been summoned and re-summoned a couple dozen times as if glitched. He ended up chalking it up to the Spriveska’s mystical background. Supposedly, the veil between the world of the spirits was thin tonight.
In the end, sloshing with mud, happy, and bone-tired, they arrived at where they had started. The bonfire roared as the column of smoke disappeared through the carefully hidden vents in the ceiling, and the dancers seemed like vaporous spirits themselves, as the silken ribbons of their costumes fluttered through each step as their movements grew frantic.
The dance was meant to represent the changing of seasons, according to Alder, and the fire represented the sun itself. Ed sat and watched in silence, allowing the bonfire to warm his bones, his belly full of drink and festival sweets. If life was a string of hardship with periods of happiness in between, today was one of those happy breaks, and more precious for its rarity. Around him and Klek, people laughed, and sang, and wrestled. Giggling couples with cheeks burning with booze left hand in hand, looking for a private corner. A Witch Doctor’s rhythmic beating on a drum added a hypnotic pattern to the entire experience, making it dreamlike, separate from reality.
But it was the fire that claimed Ed’s attention, pulling him back every time he got distracted by the flurry of noise and sound. Although the sun in the Spriveska dance was meant as a benevolent entity that gave life, the Dungeon Lord found something bleak hidden in the flicker of the flames. He delved further into the shifting smoke, and the longer he gazed into it, the sound of music and merriment became muted, even twisted, dizzying notes that reminded him of a song he had heard a long time ago, back at the time when Kharon the Boatman had taken from him his human heart and replaced it with the black Mantle of a Dungeon Lord. Following this dark music he discovered a secret second dance that happened behind the performers, as their long, sharp shadows danced on the stone walls around them, like specters preying on the unsuspecting dungeon-folk, malformed claws reaching for the soft, pink necks, closer and closer…
Ed blinked. The shadows went back to normal. The music was cheerful and innocent. Children laughed and played. Alder’s voice joined someone’s song. But the Dungeon Lord was now a stranger in his own home, and there was a black, inky blotch poisoning the core of his joy. As he clapped to the beat of the dance of the young men and women that had been children when the Haunt was but a cave, his soul was prey to a deep sorrow he could not understand.
The Dungeon Lord took his eyes away from the fire, but its spell lingered. Next to him, Klek had fallen into a sort of happy trance, half asleep next to the fire, belly full and patches of fur sticky with candy remnant. Ed followed the batblin’s gaze. One of the she-batblins, the leader of the Brewers, dutifully guarded the barrels of wine as the rest of her team refilled the drinking horns that Ed’s drones carried around in tin trays. Sas, Ed recalled, was her name. Klek, Tulip, and Sas had fought together against Nicolai’s men during the Haunt’s invasion when the batblin quarters were breached.
Sas turned around and gave Klek a grin. The batblin turned away nervously.
“Go talk to her,” Ed told him, looking at the ceiling as if he had seen nothing.
Klek almost jumped, as if caught by surprise with his hands in a jar of honey. “What if she laughs at me?” he asked quietly.
“She won’t,” Ed said. “And even if she did, that’s on her, not you. There’s no shame in facing your fears, and any person worth their salt would at least respect you for trying, I think.”
With a careful motion, Klek tried to tame a shaggy patch of fur, only managing to make it sticky with molten candy. “But what do I say? Perhaps I should ask Alder for advice—”
“Let’s… better not, okay? Alright, tell you what. First you go wash your hands, then you go say hi. You’re the Adventurer Slayer, this is a worthy quest. You got this.”
Klek mulled this over, ears thoughtfully lowered, then turned to Ed. “But you will be alone if I go,” he said.
“Don’t worry about me,” Ed said, as he waved at the chatty crowd around them. “I’m never alone in the Haunt.”
“Sometimes, I get the impression,” Klek said timidly, wriggling his fingers, “that you think you are. You get this look in your eye—like you have right now—and you slowly inch away from everyone else, and you spend hours or days looking over the dungeon. Lavy says that you need time to be alone… but I think what you really need is a friend to make you company.”
Ed kept very still, feeling as caught as Klek had a minute ago. With a motion he hoped was discreet, he rubbed off a bit of ash that had somehow wandered onto his eye, making it water. “Thank you, Klek,” he said quietly. “Let’s say there are quests our friends must face on their own, and we cannot always be there for them.” He pointed a finger at Klek’s chest. “But we are anyway, where it truly matters. Even when I’m not with you, my strength is yours. And knowing you’re there for me, that makes me strong when I’m at my weakest.”
Very slowly, Klek stood up. Ed could see the faint glow of the Evil Eye, which he could never fully turn off lately unless he focused, reflected on the batblin’s eyes. “Alright, Ed. I trust you. I’ll go talk to her.”
“Good man,” Ed said. He clapped Klek on the shoulder and carefully fixed a couple of stray hairs on his neck. “You’ll do just fine, buddy. You’ll see.”
The Dungeon Lord watched as Klek made a bee-line for the Brewer, completely forgetting to wash his hands of the candy in the process. Sas watched the batblin with a small twitch of her ear. In the distance, Klek told her something. Sas gave him a confused look. Klek seemingly repeated himself, louder this time. Sas smiled, then answered. The two of them began to chat, awkwardly at first, but warming up to a friendly prattle fast.
Ed let out the breath he had been holding and got up to leave.
“Are you sure this is not just grape juice?” Ed asked, eyeing his empty cup with disgust. “Because I swear it’s not doing anything.”
The drone gave him a poignant look.
“Great, just what I needed. Now the drones are judging me.” Ed set the empty cup on the imp’s tray and replaced it with a new one. He took another sip. It tasted right. Then again, the rest of them had tasted right as well yet they had done nothing. He sighed and waved the drone away, who was happy to scurry off.
Music and the wavering lights of the festival came muted from a distance. Ed relaxed against the wall of the Gray Highway, alone except for the magical torches that extended through the tunnel as far as his eye could see. The air smelled faintly of tobacco and unstirred dust. He nursed his drink and sat on the cold stone floor.
The Endeavor was so close he could almost taste it—like an old copper penny on the back of his throat. The Dungeon Lord stirred, uneasy, and tried his best not to think about it, to no avail.
Despite the distance, he could still hear the hypnotic cadence of the Witch Doctors as they told ancestral stories of the region. He also heard laughter, and the sound chilled his bones. A baby gave a sharp cry of joy and Ed’s heart skipped a beat, filled with dread.
His cup drew an arc marked by a line of red wine as he threw it hard against the opposite wall. The cup clanked
and bounced on the stone, its contents glimmering darkly under the torches’ light like fresh spilled blood.
“That’s some good wine you’re wasting,” a man said jovially, way too close to the Dungeon Lord, who until then had been sure he was alone with his thoughts. He almost drew the dagger he kept hidden under his shirt, but the man next to him had a friendly demeanor, arms to his sides and palms open to show they were empty. He walked slowly and stopped a few paces away from Ed. He had come from the Gray Highway, away from the party. A late newcomer, perhaps.
Furthermore, Ed found something familiar in the man’s face. “You’re the owner of the Galleon’s Folly,” the Dungeon Lord said.
“Former,” the man said. “The Galleon found its final folly during the Battle for Undercity. Burned to a crisp.” His skin had the complexion of tanned leather, shiny and golden, and his auburn beard had many white hairs. Judging from his build, before being a barkeep, he may have been a mercenary or an adventurer.
Even though he sensed no danger from the newcomer, Ed kept his right hand on his knee, which he hugged to his chest so he could draw the dagger at a moment’s notice. “Sorry to hear that,” he said. “The Folly was Katalyn’s favorite tavern in the entire city.”
“Ah, I remember young Kat Locksmith,” the barkeep said. “You would’ve thought she hated the place, though, from the amount of fights she picked in there. She hasn’t been around in a while, though. The rumors said she was overseas. Do you reckon she’s still alive?”
“Unless someone else is writing letters with her handwriting, she is,” said Ed.
The man nodded. “Good. The world would be a less interesting place without her around.” He stretched and scratched his ass in the vulgar way of an Undercity dweller. “Do say, will I get stabbed if I sit with you for a few moments?”
