by DB King
Marcus stood and pushed the perfectly balanced stone door shut with one hand. It swung closed silently, and something clicked as if a lock had snapped into place. Raising his mace, he pointed it at the closed door and let the dungeon power flow through him again.
“Crucible: Begin Gestation Phase!” Light blasted from the dungeon mace to the door, running across the stone like water and lighting up the amazed faces of the Akhians. The light ran up to the edges of the stone and flowed through the cracks, and as it did so they all heard a low bubbling noise from behind the door. It sounded like a pot of thick stew simmering, and Marcus smiled in satisfaction at the thought of the new dungeon that would arise when the gestation process was over.
Marcus turned to his friends. Kairn and Ella had moved away and were conversing with each other quietly, but Isa and Amun were staring open-mouthed at Marcus.
“It’s amazing!” Amun said. “From that, a dungeon will be created?”
“That’s right,” Marcus said. “Tomorrow, I’ll open this door and there will be something completely new behind it, with monsters, traps, and an environment. Hopefully, because of the ingredients used, the dungeon will have an Akhian theme. Perhaps it might even resemble the tombs that you said you are fond of adventuring in, back in your homeland.”
“I would be honored to see it,” Amun said fervently.
“Well, it shouldn’t take too long,” Marcus said. “We’ll find rooms for you to stay in tonight, and in the morning the gestation phase should be done and we can have a dungeon run. Perhaps Kairn can come with us and satisfy his desire to bash some heads.”
“Morning?” a voice croaked from behind them. “There will be no dawn. Can you not feel his coming?” The strange, hoarse voice made them turn sharply. At the side of the dungeon lobby, a little door led down to the Gutter Gang’s underground lair. A pale, ragged figure with black hair falling down past her shoulders stood in that doorway. Her bare feet were unnaturally white against the dark granite of the lobby floor.
Kairn gave a shout of alarm and grabbed his axe from his belt, and the Akhians reached for their weapons, but Marcus held up a hand to stop them and approached the ghostly figure in the doorway.
“Daya,” he said, holding out a hand to the vampire woman. “You surprised us, but I was going to come and meet you here soon anyway. So you’re awake. And your brother?”
“I am here,” said another creaking voice from behind Daya. Max, looking as ghoulish as his sister, came up the steps behind her.
“Come out here, both of you,” Marcus said. “It’s night above, and you have nothing to fear.” He turned to the others, and gestured to the vampires. “These are my friends,” he said firmly. “They are the vampires Daya and Max, who helped me fight my way through the wights, and who have sworn to help us. I know they look strange, but we should not judge anyone just by that. We can fix their clothes for them at least, so they will look more like us.”
“Ah, hmm, of course,” Kairn said, getting a hold of the tremor in his voice. “I ask your pardon,” he said to the vampires. “You startled me, that’s all.” He extended a hand to them in greeting, and gestured up the stairs. “If you’d like to come with me, you’ll find that it’s night outside and perfectly safe for you. I can find you some fresh clothing if…”
“Do you not hear me?” Daya croaked, interrupting the dwarf. “Can you not feel it? The enemy approaches!”
Marcus could not feel anything unusual. He frowned at the vampires. “You’re sure?” he said. “You’re telling me you can feel his presence?”
“Getting ever closer,” Daya moaned. “He approaches. You must arm yourselves and get ready for your doom! There is little time left now. The Corsair is coming for his prize!”
Chapter 25
“Right,” Marcus said, breaking the tense silence. “I can’t feel it myself, but I believe you. But we need to take this one thing at a time. Max, Daya, you don’t look well. Do you need to feed?”
Daya’s red eyes lit up like burning coals under a bellows at the suggestion. Max let out a long, animal hiss from between his sharp teeth that made the others step back.
Marcus rolled his eyes. “I’ll take that as a yes. Come on, I’ll open the Arena dungeon for you, and you can drink your fill. Then you’ll be in a position to help. Kairn, go to the guards and see that all is as ready as it can be for an attack. Specifically, I want as many fire arrows as possible prepared and ready on the walls, but I also want plenty of regular arrows too.”
“That’s not a problem,” Kairn replied stoutly. “I’ve seen to it that teams of fletchers have been working in shifts for the last few weeks, so we have an almost unlimited supply of arrows.”
“Good, good,” Marcus said. “We’ll be able to make flights of arrows our main line of defense if they come to attack the stronghold.” He turned to the Akhians. “Amun, Isa, will you stay with me and help me to defend my stronghold and my dungeons from the Corsair? I know you’ve already encountered the Corsair, to your loss. I also know that you didn’t sign up for any of this. If you choose, you may leave, but since you’re here now and you’re both capable fighters, I’d be honored if you’d stay and lend me your aid.”
“I will gladly stay and help you, Marcus,” Amun said. “As you say, we’ve encountered the Corsair and his forces before. He and his deadly crew killed many of my friends. With your help, perhaps I will be able to take my revenge.”
Isa nodded. “I will gladly take my revenge against the Corsair too, if I can. I will help you.”
“That makes me glad,” Marcus said. “I’ll be proud to fight alongside you. Thank you both. Now, I need you to go find Anja and Ben and alert them to the threat. They will both have work to do, seeing to the defenses. If one of you goes with each of them, you’ll have the chance to get a better look around the stronghold, and a more detailed idea of the defenses. That may be valuable later.”
The Akhians nodded and turned to follow Kairn up the stairs.
Marcus turned to the dungeon faerie. “Ella, you’re with me. Let’s get our friends here a meal.”
Ella looked at the vampires dubiously. Marcus caught her look. Max and Daya certainly were a dreadful sight, haggard and hollow-eyed, with their drab gray rotten clothing hanging off their stick-thin limbs.
“Amun,” Marcus called up the stairs after the Akhians. “One other thing. When you find Ben and Anja, ask them to arrange for some new clothing to be found for these two. I probably have some spare clothes that will fit Max. Anja is a bit shorter and broader in the shoulder than Daya, but I’m sure she can arrange something for her as well. It might not make much difference to the vampires, but it will stop our people from thinking they’re ghouls.”
“Got it,” Amun said with a smile. “Any other messages before I go?”
Marcus thought for a moment. “Yes!” he said. “If you see Dirk, get messages sent to the slums and the docklands. I want to know if there’s anything out of the ordinary happening. We don’t know how the Corsair will arrive or what form his attack will take, but it would be good for the City to be alerted that there may be a threat approaching.”
Amun nodded and hurried up the stairs.
Marcus turned to the vampires. “Come on,” he said. “We don’t have a great deal of time, but I need you two at your best, and that means getting you some food.”
He drew his mace and turned to the wall. “Crucible: Place Arena dungeon!”
The massive bronze door appeared immediately, and Marcus opened it. He was going to take this opportunity to practice his control over the arena. In the previous fights the dungeon had always spawned enemies straight away, but last time Marcus had been able to suppress the dungeon’s spawning of the second wave. This time, he hoped to suppress even the first wave, and to take complete control of the spawning process within the arena. After all, when he had initially begun the Arena dungeon, Ella had said that the whole point was that it would eventually be under the complete control of the du
ngeon master.
As soon as the heavy door swung open, Marcus sensed the creative upswell of energy that signaled the beginning of the spawning process. He reached out for it with his will and pushed at it, blocking it off like a man plugging a leak in a water barrel. At first, he felt pressure against his effort, but after a moment that pressure subsided, and he felt a quiet watchfulness from the dungeon.
The vampires had immediately moved toward the door, and they were now staggering up the steps, moving like sleepwalkers up toward the big, barred gateway that led into the arena. As he followed them, Marcus was struck by the effect that their lack of food and their long sleep seemed to have had on them. They were both a wreck, nothing like the alert, awake people they had been when he’d first met them. Well, he’d have the opportunity to ask them about that later. For now, he had to concentrate on maintaining his control of the arena.
He jogged up the stairs after the vampires as they headed toward the closed gate, and as he did so he felt the swirl of creative energy from the dungeon welling up again. He caught the energy and kept it in check. As the gate at the top of the steps opened with a clang and the arena beyond was revealed, Marcus drew on that creative welling of energy and instead of suppressing it, he channeled it.
The whole library of monsters that he could summon floated at his fingertips. He first reached toward the standard arena champions that the vampires had fought previously, but he changed his mind. Instead, he summoned two of the wooden men from the first chamber of the evolved Harpy dungeon. When he’d fought them before, he’d noticed that they bled like ordinary humans. Time to put that to another use.
When he leaped through the gate into the arena, something strange struck him. For a moment, he couldn’t place it—then he realized. Of course! There was no crowd!
When he had suppressed the dungeon’s natural instinct to spawn monsters here before, the crowd had been swept away and vanished. This time, it seemed they had not spawned at all. Marcus felt sure that was a direct consequence of him being in complete control of the dungeon.
“It’s so quiet without the crowd,” Ella said in a low voice. “Could you summon them if you wanted to?”
“Probably,” Marcus said, “but I choose not to just for the moment. Right now, we have a very specific job to do here.”
The silence in the arena was eerie, with only a hiss of wind across the sand as the night breeze moved through the empty, silent space.
With a twist of his magic, Marcus summoned two of the wooden men.
Two black clouds of smoke appeared at the far side of the arena. He heard a pop pop as a wooden man leaped out from each of the clouds. One wooden man was armed with a sword, and the other with a big axe, but neither of them were a match for the vampires—especially not when they were this hungry.
Marcus had noticed before that the prospect of food seemed to give the vampires a new rush of strength. It was no different this time. With the speed of springing cats, the two ragged figures leaped upon their prey.
The wooden men tried to resist. The axe wielder swung a blow at Max’s head as the vampire descended, but Max batted the blow away with his forearm and the axe dropped to the ground. The vampire dropped his teeth to the wooden man’s neck, and the two went down in a heap with Max on top.
Daya’s prey fared no better. The wooden man managed to get its sword up and swing at her, but she barely even noticed. A thin hand shot out and caught the wooden man’s wrist, twisting so the blade fell to the sand. She pushed the wooden man to the floor and sank her head to feed.
“Well,” Ella said quietly, “I guess it beats having them hunt out in the slums or in the Merchants’ Town.”
Marcus gave her a rueful smile. “It’s a bit grim, I’ll admit, but they’re excellent fighters and despite their strangeness, I like them. They’re not evil people, not really. They just have an evil curse on them that makes them how they are. As far as I can gather, neither of them are vampires by choice.”
“So what happens next?” she asked.
“Next,” Marcus said decisively, “we go scouting. We don’t know how the Corsair is going to attack, but we know he’ll be coming on a ship. That gives him three options, as I see it: he can attack the harbor directly, or he can try to dock up there in the guise of an honest merchant. Or, of course, he may try to land at one of the smugglers’ entrances to the Underway and come in by stealth.”
“He’d have to have inside knowledge of the Underway to do that,” Ella said.
“Yes, but don’t forget that he was buried here for a long time. He managed to get out of the tunnels himself, and get away from Kraken City undetected, so we don’t know what he will do. As for landing at the dock as if he were an honest merchant ship, I don’t think that likely. From the sound of it, his ship is crewed by awakened hybrid vampires, and they are only held in check by some magic that he wields. It seems hard to believe that even that magic would be enough to disguise the nature of his crew from any who saw them.”
“So that leaves the stealth option, or the option of an open frontal attack on the docks.”
“That’s right,” Marcus said. “And that’s where you and I come in. The way he comes is going to depend on how many ships he has at his disposal. Now that I have the power of flight, you and I can go together and scout the seas around Kraken City’s coast. We can fly over and look for him. If he comes in a fleet, we’ll see him. Perhaps we can even catch him if he’s sneaking up in a single ship. Either way, we’ll be able to get advanced warning of what he’s doing.”
“Will you attack him there, on his ship?”
Marcus shook his head. “I doubt we’ll be able to do that. It sounds like his ship is crewed with many of these awakened hybrids, and the Corsair himself may have unknown powers that we don’t expect. I won’t take that chance. Also, I can’t see a way to be able to use dungeons on board a ship. I want to have my dungeons available when it comes time to fight the Corsair. Whatever happens though, we’ll be ready to take any opportunity that presents itself. The most important thing is for us to be able to get a look at what’s coming, and to see him without being seen by him.”
* * *
The vampires had finished their feeding and now stood, dropping the limp corpses of the wooden men to the ground and stalking over to Marcus. He saw them glance at the moon, and Max muttered and grumbled in his throat, but they both clearly remembered that Marcus had scolded them before for howling at the moon after feeding, so they refrained this time.
“You both look better,” Marcus told them. It was true. After feeding, their bodies had filled out and the hollow look in their faces had gone. Apart from the extreme pallor of their faces and their ragged garments, they now looked relatively healthy. Their skin shone like polished marble in the moonlight, and their eyes glowed red.
“I feel much better,” Max said with a smile. “We had not slept after feeding for a long time. We had to stay awake in case we were hunted. Now that we’ve had the chance to feed, sleep, and now feed again, we’ll both be more able to think clearly.”
“I did wonder about that,” Marcus said. “You both seemed in a bad way when you woke up.”
Daya waved a pale hand dismissively. “That’s just the reaction after having not rested for a while. We’re both fine now, and ready to help you in any way we can.”
“Good,” Marcus said, pleased by the change in the vampires. He felt sure that they would be helpful. “First, tell me about this feeling you have. You say you can feel the Corsair’s approaching presence? Can you say how close he is?”
Daya looked abstracted for a moment, as if listening. “I can’t tell for sure. He’s near, but not too near, not yet. I think it’s the magic he uses to control the hybrids. That’s what I feel, rather than the presence of his person. I… yes, I feel it approaching steadily.”
“All right. I’ll want you two to join Kairn in looking at the wall defences. He’s a bit brusque, but he’ll treat you fairly if you show him re
spect. But first you go find Ben and Anja and have them get you some clothes. I can’t have you wandering about in those grave rags for the rest of the battle.”
The vampires both laughed. The sound was not quite right—eerie, like an echo of a laugh rather than a real laugh. Marcus glanced at them and gave them a wry smile. “And maybe keep that laugh to yourselves. That’s a bit creepy. Go on, now.”
He shooed them off down the corridor back out of the arena, and Ella followed them. He was about to go too when a prickling on the skin on the back of his neck stopped him. He felt the hairs on his arms stand up beneath his clothes and he shivered involuntarily.
What is it? he asked himself. There was something, but he couldn’t place it. It made him turn and look back over the empty arena. He scanned the wide arena and the empty stands. A sensation of cold rushed over the back of his neck.
There, among the rows of empty seats, stood a figure.
It was not one of the audience members—they were generally dressed in bright colors, and they never appeared alone. No, this person was dressed in long, wind-blown robes of black and gray, and they had long black hair swirling around their shoulders. There was no way to tell at this distance whether it was a man or a woman. Where the face should be, Marcus could see only a pale blur.
There was no question: This was the same figure he had seen in the rain, standing at the tideline in the Pirate’s Cove dungeon.
And it raised its hand.
“Ella,” Marcus called down the passage. “Ella, come here!”
But she was out of earshot. He tried to send her a thought as they had managed to do during their initial flight, but it didn’t work.
Wind swept across the arena sands and ragged clouds appeared in the sky, moving fitfully across the moon.
Marcus looked back up at the tall figure in the stands. It stood completely still, right hand raised in greeting. Slowly, Marcus raised his hand in return. It was impossible to be sure at this distance, and in the shadows of the moonlit stands, but Marcus had the impression the figure was smiling.
