by DB King
“After all,” Strongfellow said, tugging thoughtfully at his elaborate mustache and stroking his mountainous expanse of beard, “there’s no earthly reason why men from the slums should not be paid as well as other men, or treated with the same respect.”
For the first time, one of the other Traders spoke up. He was a small, sly-looking man with a gleaming bald head and small, darting eyes in a cadaverous face. “Tradition has long held…” he began.
“Traditions change,” Marcus said, cutting him off curtly even as Strongfellow flapped a hand at the man to silence him. The treatment of the slum dwellers by the merchants over the years had been appalling, but Marcus was not here to try to right old wrongs. He wanted to change the future, not the past.
“Very well,” Marcus said after a moment’s silence. He stood, reaching for a paper. “I have drawn up a document for you to sign, detailing everything we have agreed here today. You will all sign, and will be answerable to me… ugh…”
A sudden wave of tingling rushed through his body, running from his feet to his head in a single, sizzling sweep. He gasped in a breath slumped forward under the onslaught.
“Marcus,” Kairn hissed, reaching out a hand to catch his elbow. “Are you well?”
“I…”
Power ripped through him. He felt as if he’d been impaled by a lightning bolt. He heaved in a breath, struggling to stop his knees from giving way.
Anja had picked up the paper and inkpot, and taken them to the side table where she ushered the traders up to sign it one by one. Robert Strongfellow signed first, and the others followed him one by one. Thankfully, they seemed too caught up in their own thoughts to notice Marcus’s sudden lapse.
Marcus watched this happening though a sparkling haze, feeling the power subside within him like a wave retreating from a sandy shore. He drew a long, slow breath, and straightened up.
He threw a glance over his shoulder and saw Ella’s face peering around the corner of her little alcove. Her eyes were wide and her mouth open, and he saw that she had also felt something of the sudden rush of power. It settled into his belly, and his vision cleared. His back straightened, and he smiled. He felt light, like a man who has put down a heavy load.
In front of his eyes, a message flashed, etched like an afterimage across his field of vision.
Crucible chambers: active.
Stasis Recovery Cycle: complete.
Dungeon chamber upgrade: complete
New chambers available: 2
Elemental upgrade available: 2
Marcus barely heard the empty pleasantries offered by the Traders’ Council as Anja ushered them from the room. He turned to see Ella fly out of her alcove. She darted through the air toward him and flung her arms around his neck in a quick hug before darting excitedly around the room.
“What is it?” Kairn demanded as the door closed behind the last of the traders.
“What’s with you two?” Anja asked.
Marcus laughed aloud at the look on their faces. Ella cackled her strange laugh. Hammer heaved himself up from the hearthrug and lumbered over, lolling his tongue and wagging his stubby tail.
“It’s the dungeons,” Marcus said. “The dungeons have awoken again, and they are upgraded! Friends, we’re back in business!”
Something made him glance up at the window. Something else had changed. What was it? For a moment, he couldn’t tell, and then it hit him.
The rain had stopped.
Chapter 3
For a moment, everyone was silent, then everyone started talking at once. Ella flew around and around the room at speed, laughing her tinkling laugh and causing the others to laugh and duck their heads to get out of her way. Hammer, infected by the enthusiasm of the moment, sat down heavily and barked loudly.
Marcus was grinning, letting the others talk, when Kairn decided he’d had enough.
“Quiet!” the dwarf boomed, banging a meaty armored fist on the wooden table. “Quiet, I say! It’s worse than the smithy, I can’t hear myself think with you all babbling! Shut up and let Marcus speak!”
Laughing, Anja, Dirk, Jay, and Hammer all obeyed the dwarf’s command. The humans fell silent, Hammer stopped barking, Ella stopped flying around and landed on the desk, her boots deftly avoiding standing on any of Marcus’s papers.
Everyone turned to Marcus the dungeon master, their faces expectant. He smiled around at his friends.
“You’ve all waited patiently for my dungeons to return to me,” he said after a moment. “And you’ve all helped me to build this strong base, keeping faith that the dungeons would return to me eventually. It’s been a difficult time for all of us, I think. But now that the dungeons are back in play, we can again start bringing adventurers in to run them.”
“And we can start fighting them ourselves as well,” Anja added with a smile.
Marcus laughed. Anja had begun as an adventurer, living and working at arm’s length from Marcus and only crossing paths with him when it was time to run a dungeon for profit. Since the battle of the Underway, that relationship had changed and she clearly now considered herself not a random adventurer, but a member of the team. Marcus was pleased by that. He felt the same.
“You’re right,” he said. “And I’ll have the opportunity to start using some of my magical spells again. I’ve not had the opportunity to do much spellwork since the battle. I suspect I might’ve gotten rusty.”
“When will you explore the new dungeons?” asked Dirk Ninelives eagerly. Of everyone there, Dirk was the one who had the least experience with Marcus’s dungeons. Even Kairn, who had never actually fought in a dungeon alongside Marcus, had been around him long enough to have a good idea of what they entailed.
Marcus looked around his friends’ eager faces and a slow smile dawned on his face. “No time like the present?” he suggested.
The dungeons worked as mobile, transportable rooms. Initially, Marcus had relied on a magical ability to transform the dungeon chambers into indestructible globes of glass that were big enough to carry in his hand. As globes, he could carry them around easily, though once he had achieved four dungeons, he was beginning to wonder how many more he would be able to carry around before he had to start choosing between them.
All that had changed, however, when a mysterious stranger had approached him in the street and handed him an ornate mace decorated with a green crystal the size and shape of a large egg. This crystal, so it had turned out, functioned as a single repository for all the dungeons.
At the end of the final battle of the Underway, Marcus had held up his mace and the dungeons had been absorbed into the crystal. Now, he’d moved to the weapon rack at the back of the study. He reached out and clasped the handle of the mace in a firm grip, and the crystal glowed with a sudden flash of bright green.
“Let’s go downstairs,” Marcus said to his friends. “There’s a place prepared.”
They all followed him out of the study, with Dirk Ninelives, exiting last and closing the door behind him. Hammer, who did generally enjoy a fight, decided this time to stay by the fire. As they left him in peace, Marcus heard a sigh of contentment from the dog.
The group strode in single file through the narrow corridors and back out into the courtyard. The sun was blazing down now from a great rent in the gray clouds, and the accumulated damp of a month’s rainfall was beginning to steam from the stones in the bright, quickly warming air. Walking around the central tower, they came to an entrance that was wide enough for four men to enter side-by-side. Beyond the entrance was a masterpiece of Kairn’s stonemasonry, a wide, beautiful stairway, leading straight down into darkness.
They stopped at the threshold.
Dirk, standing at the back of the group, asked a question quietly. Marcus didn’t hear the question, but he heard Anja’s answer.
“As I understand it the dungeon entrances can only be opened underground,” she said. “That’s why the Underway is such a convenient place, and why we went to such trouble to extend
the stronghold down into the Underway. In time, adventurer teams from all around will come down these stairs into the Underway, and Marcus will place the entrances to his dungeon chambers for the adventurers to run.”
“They must be placed underground?” Kairn put in, overhearing the conversation. “I didn’t fully understand that until now. That seems like something of a limitation, Marcus.”
Ella spoke. “It doesn’t have to be like that forever,” she said. “There are tales of dungeon masters who managed to advance their power to have their dungeons available aboveground. And there have been what you might call ‘workarounds.’”
“Workarounds?” Jay said with a chuckle. “That sounds a bit technical for a dungeon master. Give me an example.”
Ella laughed. She and Jay were close friends now, and a bit of good-natured jibing between the two was fairly common.
“Well,” Ella replied, smiling, “the most obvious one would be to place the dungeon entrance against a cliff-face. You might be above ground, but if there is a cliff-face in front of you, anything beyond the outer edge of the cliff-face is underground. Do you see what I mean? After all, the dungeons are nothing if not technical and pragmatic.”
Jay nodded. “And just how underground would they need to be, do you think? Could you, for example, place a dungeon in the side of a shallow pit?”
Ella considered it. “I can’t say for sure, but I don’t see why that wouldn’t work in a pinch.”
“Hmm,” Jay said. “That’s really interesting stuff!”
Jay drew a breath to ask another question, but Marcus raised a hand and stopped him. “Enough theory, you two,” he said with a smile. “Are we doing this or not? There will be plenty of time for you two to discuss the finer points of dungeon placement theory later. It’s been a long month, and right now I feel like hitting some monsters. Who’s with me?”
“Aye!” roared Kairn. “My axe is thirsty!” The dwarf carried his huge double-headed longaxe with him everywhere, as well as his coat of ringmail, and he had stopped at the forge to grab his helmet on the way.
Anja slapped her sword belt. She was wearing the only armor she ever used—a coat of light leather armor, steel-buckled gauntlets, and heavy greaves and boots over her leather britches. “I’m keen to fight as well,” she declared. “I’ve been concentrating on keeping the supply lines open for so long that I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like to swing a blade.”
“I’ll come if I may,” Dirk said thoughtfully. “I’ve always been more of a tavern brawler than a straight fighter, and I’ve only my dagger to defend myself with, but I’d love to see the inside of a dungeon.”
“They can be dangerous places,” Marcus said with a smile. “But we’ll look out for you. You might find that there are things in the dungeon that you can use as weapons for yourself—the dungeons reward the use of the environment against the monsters.”
“Very well,” Dirk said. “That’s good enough for me. I’ll join you.” He looked nervous, but resolved, and Marcus admired his courage. He looked at Jay and Ella.
Jay shook his head with a smile. “I’ll leave you young folks to it, if you don’t mind,” he said. “I can fight when I’m put to it, but I’m not a man who enjoys fighting for pleasure. I have some work to do explaining the truce with the Merchants’ Town folk to the slum dweller teams, and thinking about how that will impact supplies. With your permission, I’ll see to that.”
“I think I will come in,” Ella said thoughtfully. Everyone looked at her in surprise. They had never known Ella to enter a dungeon fight before. Marcus had always considered her too precious to be risked, and her talent had always been more as an advisor than as a fighter.
“You’re sure?” Marcus asked, and Ella nodded.
“I feel… different somehow. Stronger. I feel like there is something in there for me. It’s not unheard of for faeries to accompany the dungeon master on a dungeon run. I’ll chance it.”
“All right!” said Marcus. When Ella had first suggested it, he had felt unsure, but now a sudden feeling of rightness filled him, and he smiled. This was the right thing to do.
As his abilities and affinities with his dungeons had increased, Marcus had become more and more aware of a feeling for the right action to take. At first, he almost hadn’t noticed it, but as it became stronger and stronger, Marcus had mentioned it to Ella, and they had taken to referring to it as his Dungeon Master’s Instinct. It felt like a power, this intuitive guidance toward the right action or away from the wrong one.
Ella had never heard of such a thing in all of her dungeon lore, but there was another factor to all this that Marcus and Ella had kept to themselves. They had told no one that Marcus’s abilities matched an ancient prophecy. Marcus had gained an elemental power—the power of water. That was not unheard of in the dungeon lore, but what had been unusual was the fact that the water Marcus conjured had a healing property. It could heal even potentially deadly wounds, though as far as he understood, it could not raise the dead.
Not yet, at least.
This power of healing through elemental magic was unique to the Eloran—the Dungeon Bearer. The word Eloran was a relic from an ancient language, and it meant Dungeon Bearer, a dungeon master who would be able to do more than just manage his own dungeons. This was a person who could transcend the limits that applied to most dungeon masters, and who might eventually transcend the limits of even death itself.
Only one person had ever had the title of Eloran before—long, long ago—but he had come to a bad end. He had allowed base intentions to corrupt him, and he had used his immense power to a bad end. He had forgotten that intention was the basis on which his entire power was built. He used his dungeons to murder a woman who had rejected him, and his own dungeons had turned on him and destroyed him.
It was a powerful lesson for Marcus. No man, no matter how powerful, could be above the need to use his great powers for good and not evil. No dungeon master could be immune from the consequences of an evil act.
Because of his healing power, Ella was certain that Marcus was the Eloran come again, a dungeon master who might eventually hold all the dungeons in the universe in the palm of his hand. But that would take a long time. The Eloran had beaten death and taken many, many lifetimes to reach that level of power. Marcus was still young, and relatively newly started on his path as a dungeon master, and so they had decided to keep that secret just to themselves.
There might be someone else who knew, however. Before Marcus had discovered his healing ability, a strange, masked woman clad in crimson had approached him in the street and spoken to him of a prophecy. She had given him a gold ring with a black gem in it, and also she had given him the mace which had become his mobile dungeon library.
The mace he held now.
He raised it up, seeing the sunlight catch on the elaborate spikes and inlaid gold patterning. It was a beautiful thing, no doubt, but it could do the business when required as well. He had found that out in the battle.
It was a heavy, solid weapon, and seemed to take no scratch no matter what he hit with it. Ella had said she thought the mace was probably indestructible. Marcus’s Dungeon Master’s Instinct had told him the same, and so he had no hesitation carrying it into the fight.
The adventurers followed Marcus down the wide stone stairs. There were thirty steps, and they took them slowly, their steps ringing on the hard gray stone. The broad corridor plunged straight down, until at the end they came to a flat open landing and a blank, curved wall in front of them. Torches in sconces on either side of the wall lit the space with a flickering radiance.
This had been designed specifically for this purpose—as a place for adventurer teams to arrive at the dungeon entrances, a semi-permanent place for the dungeon doorways to sit. There was enough room for five dungeon doorways at least to sit here, and maybe more. Of course, Marcus would still be able to pick the dungeons up and transport them, either in his mace or as glass globes, whichever he chose. But thi
s ‘dungeon wall’ was going to be an impressive setting for adventurers to come to.
Marcus smiled and pushed his mace forward, toward the center of the wall. He had three combat dungeons that he could open, but there was no competition in his mind about which one he wanted to see.
He took a breath. Behind him, the others stood in a tight group, tense and hushed.
“Crucible,” Marcus said, feeling the magic flowing through him strong as a river, “Place Bladehand Chamber!”
There was a moment of utter silence. With a high-pitched cracking noise like ice breaking, a doorway was outlined in the stone before them. It was a high, broad door, and light shone from the cracks around it as it defined itself and swung outward. Beyond, a corridor lit by torchlight could be seen, winding away into the rock.
Of all his dungeon chambers, the Bladehand chamber was probably Marcus’s favorite. It was the first combat dungeon that he had created, before he’d had any idea what a dungeon would be, or what one could become. The bladehand was the name he’d given to the monster that occupied the chamber—a massive metal juggernaut with swords for hands on the ends of its gigantic arms.
Marcus took a step forward, glancing back at his companions. Anja was the only one who had run a dungeon before, and she had never fought the bladehand. Kairn had seen the bladehand and even fought alongside it when it had broken free of its dungeon and fought on their side during the battle of the Underway, but he had never come up against it.
“I think the dungeon is going to have evolved since the last time it was opened,” Marcus said to his companions. “But unless it’s changed completely, I think the bladehand is going to be vulnerable to fire. Remember that. It also is weak from behind—unless it’s changed a lot, the bladehand will not be able to defend itself from behind. We’ll take advantage of that, too.”
