Dungeon Bringer 3

by Nick Harrow

  I’d seen a tent like this one before.

  It had belonged to the Raiders Guild.

  Shit.

  Chapter 7 – Three Problems

  WE WATCHED THE RAIDERS for a solid fifteen minutes while I tried to figure out what to do about this mess. The way I saw it, we had three problems to deal with and they were all knotted together like the tangled tails of a rat king.

  First off, we had the blood gnomes and their gruesome diet of villagers. Without their natural prey, the cannibals would be a constant thorn in my side. It would take more manpower and more time than I could afford to hunt these creepy fucks to extinction, and if I couldn’t find some way to satisfy their hunger, my people would be at constant risk of attack.

  Second, that tent was big enough to hold a couple dozen raiders. My previous experience with the dungeon hunters told me they were ruthless and extraordinarily dangerous, and they’d stop at nothing to get what they wanted. Their camp was less than a day away from my dungeon, and every day the raiders were down here was another chance for them to figure out just how close they were to a dungeon lord. A force this large wouldn’t hesitate to come after my core, and while I could probably kill them, it would be a hard-fought battle that would cost me a lot of resources I couldn’t afford to lose while Lexios the Fuckwit was camped outside the oasis.

  Third and finally was Lexios himself. He’d been polite enough to not immediately try to raze the Kahtsinka Oasis, but that courteous facade could crumble at a moment’s notice and reveal the iron fist inside the velvet glove. The full force of his army was only a few days away according to what Del had told me, and then he’d have the lever he needed to pry open my vaults no matter how I felt about it.

  If I couldn’t figure out some way to deal with all three of these problems, my people were fucked.

  The complex problem threatened to overwhelm me until I fell back on my meditation practice. The steady rhythm of Zillah’s breath surrounded me, and I focused on it as a way to ground myself and stabilize my thoughts before they could run away with me. The only way I’d conquer this dilemma was to break it down into bite-sized chunks.

  First, I needed more information about the raiders. There was no way to get that data from our vantage. We couldn’t see inside the tent, we couldn’t pick out their leader, and I couldn’t use my dungeon lord senses to gauge the strength of the bozos I could see.

  I needed boots on the ground. I needed a spy.

  “Del,” I whispered to my guardian, “can you get close to that tent without being seen?”

  The soultaker’s green eyes flashed with fiery intensity as she surveyed the cavern below us. After a few seconds of scrutiny, Delsinia gave me a slow nod.

  “If I skirt the cavern’s perimeter, I can reach the tent,” she said. “Do you want me to kill everyone inside it?”

  “Maybe.” If Delsinia could pull that off, it would put a huge dent in the raiders’ force. “But, first, do some reconnaissance. We need to know how many raiders are down there and what they’re up to before I decide how to handle them.”

  “Done.” Del crept out of our hiding place. Despite her pale skin she blended perfectly with the shadows at the edge of the magma pool’s light. Within moments, it was almost impossible for me to see her even though I knew where to look.

  “We could have just gone down there and stabbed them to death,” Zillah thought to me. “No reason to send the new girl on her own.”

  A thin seam of burning jealousy ran through the scorpion queen’s words, and I knew I had to put it out before it became an emotional forest fire.

  “We’ve all got our jobs to do,” I said. “Del is stealthy and the best guardian for recon, but if we have to fight, trust me, there’s no one who can do that better than you.”

  It was strange to feel Zillah’s smile from inside her body, and almost as strange to feel the turbulent burble of her thoughts smooth into a placid stream of pleasure at my praise.

  “Hungry,” the blood gnome muttered. “Take one rock boy?”

  “You don’t eat anything else?” I asked. Maybe the blood gnomes were only cannibals because they didn’t have a choice. I could summon enough food to keep them fed for a long, long time if that was the case.

  “Humans. Elves. Most two-legged meats.” A thick stream of drool leaked from the left corner of its worm-like lips. “So hungry.”

  While it sucked that I couldn’t convert the blood gnomes to vegetarianism, the fact that they’d eat pretty much any humanoid was very interesting. A dark and interesting scheme hatched from a shadowed corner of my mind.

  “I’ll set your people up with a whole buffet of two-legs,” I promised the little guy. “But you’ll have to be careful.”

  “Quiet like mouses, sharp like kniveses,” the blood gnome replied in the singsong voice of a child’s nursery rhyme. “No one catches us.”

  “I did,” Zillah smirked.

  “Lucky,” the blood gnome muttered. “Most not catches.”

  “We’ll work this out later,” I said. “As soon as we deal with the raiders.”

  My thoughts reached out for Del, and I found her just a few yards away from the tent. She was faster and quieter than I’d imagined, and her thoughts were as still and calm as a deep lake on a windless day. All her energy was focused on the task at hand, and she wasted no emotion on worries about the future or fear she’d be caught.

  “There’s space behind the tent,” she thought to me. “A secondary cavern, twenty feet across. I smell lime and shit. Their latrine must be back here.”

  That was luckier than I’d hoped. The latrine itself wasn’t much use to us, but the fact it was isolated from the rest of the cavern and the raiders in the tent made it the perfect place for an ambush.

  “Open your secret room near the latrine,” I said. “Watch and wait.”

  “As you wish, my love,” Delsinia responded. “I await your command.”

  “I’ll be back in a bit,” I thought to Zillah, and then to Delsinia, “I’m coming in.”

  The jump from the scorpion queen to the soultaker was not as disorienting as I’d feared. One moment I had eight legs and two arms, and my senses were so sharp the whole world was a fascinating buffet of sensuous experiences. The next I was down to the normal number of limbs and every sensation was constrained by an emotional firewall.

  The world outside Delsinia was cold and harsh, but her heart burned with an intense flame that she constantly struggled to control.

  “Are you disappointed?” Her thoughts trembled like nervous birds. “I am not like the others, I know.”

  “Of course I’m not disappointed. Your differences from the others are what make you special to me.”

  “I would imagine so.” A thread of relief unraveled from the tense shadows in Delsinia’s thoughts. “I am glad you find me pleasing. I will leave you to your observation. Use my body as you will.”

  Delsinia’s Room of Bone and Shadow offered me a decent view of the long, thin cavern. There was no magma pool to provide light, but the raiders had lined the trail from their tent to the latrine with evenly spaced stones that emitted a warm, white light. I’d played enough Dungeons & Dragons to know someone had cast a light spell on those rocks. Raiders were full of tricks.

  “What’s happening?” Zillah’s thoughts pressed into mine. “Shouldn’t there be dead people by now?”

  “Patience,” I said. “There’s no one to kill yet, and we need information more than a slaughter at the moment.”

  “I always need a slaughter,” Zillah said.

  “Hang in there,” I thought to her. “I’ve got a plan.”

  “You’re good at that,” Zillah said. “I’ll be patient. For a little while.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “With any luck, it won’t be long.”

  I was in almost as much of a hurry to wrap this up as Zillah. Every minute I spent down here was a minute I couldn’t keep an eyeball on the settlement. I was confident that Nephket would alert me if ba
d shit started up there, but that didn’t make me any less nervous there was something I’d missed, something only I would notice but wasn’t there to see.

  “Ask the gnome what the mean woman looks like,” I thought to Zillah. “I want to be sure we don’t miss her.”

  “Two and half of meez,” it told the scorpion queen, who relayed the information to me. “Part orc, part skinny. Gross hair tied in knots. Holes in her ears with stuff in ‘em. Inky skin.”

  I interpreted that as a tall half-orc with braided hair, earrings, and tattoos. But it could just as easily have been a tall, skinny orc with dreadlocks, wax in her ears, and dark skin. The gnome’s dialect left his description open to interpretation. I settled in and waited for a likely target to walk by.

  That’s when the boring part started.

  Over the course of an hour Del and I spotted five raiders we hadn’t seen before, which put the total we’d seen around twenty. We hadn’t seen the leader yet, though, which meant there were at least twenty-one raiders, and there could have been a lot more tucked away inside that tent.

  Too many. Way too many.

  “There.” Del’s thoughts stretched tight as a tripwire through mine. “She comes.”

  Sure enough, a half-orc woman approached the latrine from the direction of the raiders’ camp. Thick slabs of muscle bulged along the length of her bare arms and strained against the leather armor that covered the rest of her body. The light from the enchanted stones flickered over the heavy gold rings in her ears and seemed to bring her colorful tattoos to life.

  “When she passes below us, I want you to snatch her.”

  “She looks strong,” Del responded. “I look forward to the challenge.”

  The instant the half-orc was under us, the soultaker dropped headfirst from her hidden room with a dagger clasped in each hand. The bone chain that connected her weapons to each other slithered around the half-orc’s throat, and Delsinia twisted in midair to drive her knees into her target’s lower back.

  The half-orc groaned and tried to catch the chain before it could tighten around her neck, but she was too surprised and stunned by the attack to mount an effective response. Her fingertips slipped off the chain’s smooth bone links and her nails dug furrows through the skin on the sides of her neck.

  Delsinia twisted the chain tight around the half-orc’s throat and leaned back to increase her leverage. I felt my guardian’s surprise at the half-orc’s strength, and her own. With my power inside her, Del was much stronger than she was alone. That gave her the edge over her much larger foe, who stumbled, staggered, and then fell forward to the cavern’s stone floor.

  Down, but not out, the half-orc bucked in a desperate attempt to throw Delsinia off. When that failed, she swung an elbow back toward the soultaker, but it was a clumsy strike that had no hope of landing. Seconds passed, and the half-orc’s struggles grew weaker as the last of the oxygen that fueled her muscles was burned away by her struggles.

  “Don’t kill her,” I thought to Delsinia. “We need her alive.”

  “Never fear.” Delsinia’s thoughts were calm and cool, despite the life-or-death struggle. “She will live.”

  A handful of seconds later, Delsinia carefully removed the chain from the half-orc’s throat and looped it around her waist. She sheathed her daggers, then slid off the raider’s back. I watched through Delsinia’s eyes and waited tensely for the half-orc to spring up like a horror-movie villain, but the tattooed woman’s only movement was the labored rise and fall of her breathing.

  Satisfied her opponent was down for the count, Delsinia lifted the half-orc’s arm over her shoulders and began the perilous journey back to us. She remained as graceful and swift as ever, despite the heavy weight of the half-orc at her side. The soultaker darted away from the glowing stones that marked the path to the latrine and faded into the shadows around the edge of the main cavern.

  A wave of relief washed through me. That had been the riskiest part of my plan. Once Delsinia reached the passage, we could haul the half-orc away from this place and put some pointed questions to her.

  “Charlie?” A high-pitched voice echoed through the cavern. “You back there?”

  The name would have sounded boring back on Earth, but on Soketra it seemed strange and exotic. I’d have to have a conversation with the half-orc, when I had some free time. Which would probably be never. Delsinia was hidden in the deep shadows at the cavern’s edge, but she wasn’t very far from the raiders’ tent. If Charlie’s minions came out to look for her, my guardian would be in serious danger.

  “Hurry,” I whispered in Del’s thoughts.

  “I am.” Delsinia slipped through the shadows like a ghost, but she had to slow when she reached the southern edge of the cavern. Loose stones threatened to trip her with every step, and strange gray mushrooms splattered under her bare feet to create dangerously slippery patches of stone.

  Raiders emerged from the tent with their weapons at the ready. Several of them held long, metal rods with enchanted light stones attached to their tips. The treasure hunters fanned out and began the search for their leader.

  Delsinia didn’t spare a backward glance for the search party. Her attention was consumed by the treacherous footing and the need to remain hidden. Her breath gusted in and out of her lungs. Even with the strength she gained from my presence inside her, Del was running out of juice.

  The raiders, unfortunately, were well rested and didn’t need to be careful in their movements. They formed a grid of searchers, each raider within sight of at least two others, and went looking for Charlie. The hunters swiveled their heads from side to side in even, measured arcs that allowed them to examine broad swathes of the cavern with minimal effort. As they advanced, the grid expanded, and it wouldn’t be long before they reached Delsinia.

  The soultaker ignored all that. Her attention was focused on the ground ahead of her, and the most important thing in her life was the next step. She moved as quickly as she could without endangering herself or her cargo, and she didn’t let fear or doubt cloud her actions.

  “Let’s kill them all,” Zillah said. “We need to strike while we still have the advantage of surprise.”

  I tried to imagine a scenario where my team emerged from a fight with so many raiders alive, and couldn’t find one. An open battle was out of the question. Delsinia’s stealth was her only hope.

  “Pull back from the edge of the tunnel,” I thought to Zillah. “We can’t take the risk that the raiders spot you or our bony little friend.”

  “On it.” A tinge of frustration colored Zillah’s thoughts, but she didn’t question the order.

  Delsinia was close to our escape tunnel, but the raiders were even closer to her location. Their powerful lights chewed up the shadows at an alarming rate and, if Delsinia didn’t pick up the pace, they would spot her in a matter of seconds.

  A loose stone shifted under Delsinia’s foot as she made a desperate attempt to move faster, and her ankle twisted dangerously beneath her. She stumbled, and the dim fringe of light at the edge of the search grid lit up the cavern to her left.

  She was out of time.

  “Boss,” Zillah murmured into my thoughts. “Are you okay?”

  We weren’t. We were completely fucked.

  This was it. There was no way Delsinia could escape from the search party, and no way that I could risk Zillah in a vain attempt to defeat the raiders.

  “Get ready to run,” I thought to Zillah.

  “Boss...” A sadness filled the thought, and I felt the scorpion queen consider ignoring my command. She didn’t want to leave Delsinia behind.

  “Go, Zillah,” I shot back. “Get the hell out of here. I can’t lose you both.”

  And then a voice as coarse as two boulders grinding together bellowed from the center of the cavern. Another, much higher-pitched voice shrieked in pain a split second later. The unmistakable sound of clashing metal echoed through the cavern, followed by another scream and more bass roars.
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br />   Delsinia glanced over her shoulder and a surge of hope rushed through us both.

  The slaves had seen their chance, and they’d taken it. A small cluster of rock boys used their heavy chains as makeshift weapons and went after the overseers with a burning, righteous rage.

  While the overseers were armed and armored, they were unprepared for the attack and the surprise cost them dearly. Half of the raiders who watched the rock boys went down in seconds, their faces misshapen from the beatings they’d taken at the hands of the chained slaves. Blood flowed like water around the fallen raiders, and it glowed a hellish red in the light of the magma pool.

  The searchers stopped at the first scream and turned to see what the hell had happened. They shouted and pointed at the rock boy uprising, their voices raised in raw panic.

  Few things scare slavers more than the freedom of their slaves.

  “Go!” I shouted into Delsinia’s thoughts.

  She bolted forward like a bee-stung horse, all thoughts of stealth left in the dust. Her feet slipped over the stones with every third step, but the soultaker didn’t dare slow her mad rush. The slaves were strong, but they weren’t strong enough to overpower the full might of the raiders. It wouldn’t be long before the bad guys resumed the search for their leader.

  We had to be long gone by then.

  The stone was slick and damp beneath Delsinia’s feet, and what she’d managed easily when she had the luxury to take her time had become a struggle now that she had to rush with the weight of the muscled half-orc weighing her down.

  “Leave me,” she thought. “I have failed you.”

  “No,” I shot back. “You can do this.”

  I willed strength into Delsinia’s muscles with all the force I could muster from my dungeon lord’s brain. I would not leave her behind, and I would not let her fail.