Dungeon Bringer 3

by Nick Harrow

  “Destiny?” That was the first I’d heard the old dungeon lord talk about destiny. And why had he pushed me to get closer to Delsinia? “My destiny is to find some way to chill out with my guardians and followers in peace.”

  “Peace is an illusion. You are a dungeon lord. Your destiny is conquest and death. There is no peace for one such as you.”

  “Maybe that’s how it shook out for you, but I’m not going down that road. Now shut up so I can find a way around this mess.”

  The passage had run into a section of stone that crumbled and flaked away so easily a cave-in would have been inevitable if I tried to push through it. I spent a good half hour working around the unstable pocket of stone, but I was proud that I’d navigated beyond the obstruction without incident.

  And then disaster struck.

  The first inkling of danger was a spurt of thick black goo from a crack in the wall ahead of me. The fluid had a strange, metallic sheen, and though it was incredibly thick, it squirted from a new fracture in the stone in a powerful stream. In the seconds it took me to understand I had a problem and react, the gunk covered a five-foot-diameter circle around me.

  The substance was eerily beautiful. Tongues of translucent light danced across its surface with an almost-mechanical movement that reminded me of water striders flitting at the water’s edge.

  No, that wasn’t light.

  It was flames.

  The fluid’s metallic sheen vanished behind a layer of fire that grew higher and hotter by the second. Even disincarnated, the heat was enough to make me shield my eyes and back away from the inferno out of raw instinct.

  “Hakhmet’s Blood,” Rathokhetra explained, sounding bored with the fire that surged around me. “It will burn as long as there is there is air to feed its flames, and the heat of its fury will melt even stone.”

  “Thanks for the warning, asshole!” I closed the end of the passage to seal the leak, but that did nothing to extinguish the fire already in the tunnel with me. The flames couldn’t harm me, but they had taken root and chewed through the stone floor of my passage. If I didn’t extinguish the blaze, and soon, I’d spend the rest of the night cleaning up this mess. I could not lose that much time.

  I willed the passageway beneath the burning puddle of Hakhmet’s Blood to plunge straight down, and the fire tumbled into the darkness. Unfortunately, new cracks appeared at the end of my passage and more blood gushed through them. The burning goo plunged into the pit I’d created and added fuel to the inferno. A pillar of heat barreled up from the pit’s bottom and filled the passage with heat that would have burned the flesh from my bones if I’d been incarnated.

  I reasoned that the pocket of blood I’d tunneled into was under tremendous pressure and trying to plug the leak would just create new faults in the stone and give birth to more fires. The only way to prevent a runaway fire that could endanger my whole plan was to alleviate the pressure and ensure the blood couldn’t find the fresh air it needed to burn.

  And maybe turn this mess to my advantage.

  I closed my eyes and shifted my view of the world to the overhead dungeon lord grid. Outside of my dungeon, the power didn’t provide me with any real detail, but it did let me zoom out and see where I was in relation to my territory and my guardians, all of which glowed a helpful golden color. The rest of my surroundings were shown as nothing more than black emptiness and the familiar electric blue grid, with a compass rose in the upper-right corner of my vision.

  I was south-southwest of the oasis and about a hundred feet below the surface. With my mind’s eye, I crafted a three-foot-by-three-foot tunnel that connected to the passageway I currently occupied. This narrow tube rose at a shallow incline to a point north of the oasis and stopped just short of the surface. It was all still inside the territory bounded by my steles, but only just.

  For my next trick, I created a passage that ran from the side of the tunnel I stood in up toward the oasis. I stopped that tunnel before it could breach the reservoir and cause a flood, then took a deep breath and moved on to the dangerous part of my game. If I screwed this up, I’d have a real mess on my hands.

  Before I came to my senses, I pushed the last passage I’d created into the side of the oasis.

  The results were instantaneous and impressive.

  Water rushed into the new tunnel with the force of a firehose. I felt the cool water inside the narrow dungeon hall and knew it would reach the end of the passage in a matter of moments. When it did, the flow would stop as there was nowhere else for the water to go.

  I crossed my fingers and drove the first small corridor into what I hoped was the center of the deposit of Hakhmet’s Blood.

  The blood burst free of its pressurized confines, spurted into the tunnel I’d created for it, and slammed into the water I’d released. The two forces battled against one another for a long second, and then the blood forced the water to slowly retreat. The new path had relieved the pressure, and the burning blood that had gushed through the unstable stone and into the pit I’d created slowed to trickles, then dried up altogether.

  With a wave of my hand, I sealed up the end of my passage over the fractured stone and crossed my fingers. When new leaks of the blood didn’t ooze around the edges of the wall I’d just created, I closed my eyes and used my dungeon lord’s senses to check on the other tunnels I’d just crafted.

  Without air Hakhmet’s Blood wouldn’t burn, but the pressure behind it was strong enough to force the water back into the oasis until the narrow tunnel I’d created was completely filled with the thick, black ooze.

  Before the blood could taint the water in the oasis, I sealed off that passage. That left me with a single narrow tunnel from the heart of the deposit to a few feet from the surface, and that tunnel was a pressurized tube of Hakhmet’s Blood.

  Unfortunately, the pressure from the deposit continued to build. In a panic, I widened the three-by-three throat of the passage to five by five, and then ten by ten, to give the black goo enough room to expand.

  That did the trick, and the blood’s pressure reached an equilibrium with the space I’d created for it.

  “Look at that,” I said. “Perfect in every way.”

  “That was needlessly risky.” Rathokhetra’s voice was thick with disapproval.

  “I don’t remember you offering any better solutions.” I took a deep breath, then redirected a thin flow of water from the oasis into the pit I’d created earlier. “Sometimes you gotta improvise.”

  When the water had filled the lower section of the pit, I sealed it off from the rest of the dungeon and allowed myself a sigh of relief. The Hakhmet’s Blood fires were out.

  As long as nothing happened to the pressurized passage filled with the stuff, I wouldn’t have to worry about it burning my dungeon into slag.

  “Ever the optimist.” Rathokhetra’s dry chuckle grated against my nerves like sandpaper.

  The sarcastic ghost didn’t have any other pearls of wisdom to offer, which was fine with me. The Compass of Power glowed like a white-hot coal, and its tip didn’t waver in the slightest. I had to be close to the source of power it had detected.

  A faint vibration, like the rumble of a passing truck, passed through the stone under my feet. I froze in place and braced for another tremor.

  Nothing.

  I moved my passage ahead at a leisurely pace and searched the earth ahead of me for any signs of danger. If I’d passed near a fault line, there was a good chance I’d caused the tremor, and I did not want to repeat that mistake. It would be just my luck to bury or destroy the source of power with an earthquake.

  Paranoia slowed my progress to a crawl. I paused every few yards to examine the way ahead for any hints of danger. My memories of a college geology course raised their ugly heads and whispered warnings about poisonous gases, continental plates, and magma vents.

  One moment I was locked in deep thought on the many ways my dungeon could be destroyed by a natural disaster, and the next my whole body
ached, a chunk of my passage had been reduced to shards of rubble, and my head was filled with a high-pitched ringing.

  I hadn’t incarnated, and yet I was flat on my ass, half-covered with rubble and almost certainly suffering from a concussion. What the fuck had hit me?

  “You have trespassed in the territory of Vexxilor, the Iron Serpent, dungeon lord.” The voice rang through my passage with a crash like a struck gong. “Your life is forfeit.”

  “I’ve heard that before, inchworm.” I summoned my khopesh and struggled to get onto my feet. A wave of vertigo swept over me, and I had to brace myself against the wall of the passage to maintain my balance. The asshole had rung my bell way harder than I’d thought. “I don’t know who you think you are, but you’ve got the wrong tiger by the tail.”

  I hoped my voice sounded stronger than I felt. My whole body ached like I’d walked in front of a bus, and a high-pitched whine between my ears made it hard to focus. It would be fucking awesome if Vexxilor decided to crawl back into his hole and let me get on with my day.

  An amber glow oozed through the hole in my passage and grew brighter by the second.

  Something was coming.

  I poked my head around the ragged hole in the tunnel’s wall to see what I was up against. What I saw forced a pained groan from my battered lungs.

  There was a cavern attached to my tunnel through the hole created by my new nemesis. The chamber was a smooth sphere fifty feet in diameter, its walls polished to a black sheen.

  A twenty-foot-long serpent slithered along the cavern’s smooth wall. It clung to the stone ten feet off the ground and moved with a sinuous grace despite its massive size. The beast’s body gleamed like polished iron, and an amber jewel had been set into the broad scale between its eyes. The gemstone throbbed with unearthly power and gushed an unwholesome light in all directions.

  Rathokhetra groaned in awe, and I didn’t need him to tell me what that gemstone was. The amber light it shed had an almost physical presence that made my eyes sting and my gut ache with a supernatural hunger.

  Godmarrow.

  “Your presence offends me,” the creature hissed as it approached. “You ache like a splinter in my mind’s eye, a wound that will not heal. I will not rest until your kind has been purged from every thread of reality.”

  “Oh, hi.” My legs were still on the wobbly side, but I had plenty of sarcasm juice left in my smartass tank to hide that from this jerkoff. “You could have just asked for an appointment to see me. You didn’t need to wreck my tunnel if you only wanted to bitch and whine.”

  Snake Boy hissed like a steam engine’s pressure-release valve and picked up the pace. Its long body writhed with irritation, and it wouldn’t be long before that gleaming head was within striking range of little ol’ me.

  I didn’t trust my woozy brain to cast spells, and my khopesh was worthless at range. Fortunately, my headdress had a couple of spells I could trigger at will. It was time for Vexxilor to get a taste of my Eldritch Blast.

  Twin bolts of absolute darkness burst from my open palm and streaked toward the creature with unerring accuracy. The serpent’s undulating movement didn’t make it easy for the black bolts, but they stayed on target like a pair of homing missiles. Both blasts slammed into the creature’s polished scales and exploded in puffs of black smoke.

  The damned things didn’t even leave soot marks where they’d struck the serpent.

  “You are a fool, dungeon lord.” The snake wound its way around the room toward me, and its head swayed from side to side. “You should never have intruded upon my domain.”

  “Well, somebody had to do it,” I said. “You were stinking up the place.”

  Vexxilor covered the distance between us with a stunning burst of speed. The glow from the godmarrow set into its forehead pummeled me like the shockwave pushed ahead of a supersonic fighter jet. The godmarrow’s presence battered my flesh and twisted my thoughts as it poured over me. Images of horrific creatures locked in a titanic battle above a battlefield strewn with shattered warriors filled my skull. The stink of blood and rot invaded my mind, and the world was veiled in a fire that burned without fuel and would never, ever be satisfied. I knew none of this shit was real, but it still took every ounce of willpower I could muster not to fall to the floor in a whimpering heap.

  I was halfway through a pivot away from the attack when the side of the iron serpent’s snout brushed against my left leg. The impact threw me into the back wall of my tunnel with such force I rebounded from the stone and tumbled down Vexxilor’s arched body to the bottom of its lair.

  If I had been incarnated, that would’ve been enough to do me in. As it was, the snake’s attack hurt but was hardly fatal, and the pinball action off my passage and the rock didn’t affect me at all. That meant there was something about Vexxilor itself that allowed the fucker to hurt me, and I’d have bet my ass that something was the godmarrow set into its forehead.

  “Your power will feed me,” Vexxilor crowed and looped its body around to face me in preparation for another attack. “Now that I am free, all of Soketra will bow before my might.”

  I had a snappy rejoinder all set to go before Sexy Vexxy interrupted me with another rude attack. His head rose almost to the top of the chamber before he dove toward me, jaws spread wide, scimitar-long fangs ready to impale me on their glittering tips.

  Despite my super-keen dungeon lord reflexes, I knew I wasn’t fast enough to dodge that lightning strike. Instead, I gripped the khopesh’s long handle in both fists, braced myself, and thrust my hands over my head.

  Honestly, this move wasn’t much of a plan, and if I didn’t have split-second timing and land my blow dead on, I’d be a snake-fang shish kebab.

  Vexxilor had already committed to his blitz attack before he saw my defenses. His eyes closed and protective metal scales slid down over their black surfaces to shield his delicate orbs from the coming impact.

  A blast of amber light poured over me like a splash of boiling honey. I gritted my teeth against the pain and counterattacked.

  In the fraction of a second before Vexxilor would have plowed into me, I pulled the khopesh back over my head and leapt up and away. There was one moment when the snake’s mammoth head was level with me, and time seemed to freeze. A battle cry tore free of my lips, and I drove my khopesh into a layer of fine scales just behind the thick plates that covered the front of the snake’s skull.

  The force of my attack drove six inches of the khopesh’s blade into the iron beast’s head. The impact’s power rang Vexxilor’s skull like a bell and sent vibrations through my khopesh and into my hands. I braced my legs against the creature’s head and hung on to my vibrating khopesh for dear life.

  The giant snake’s snout slammed into the spherical room’s floor so hard one of its fangs sheared off and tumbled up the chamber’s side. The echoes of my attack faded away, and the only sound in the cave was the tink, tink, tink of the yard-long sliver of sharpened steel as it bounced down the sloped stone and came to rest next to Vexxilor’s still body.

  “And stay down,” I grunted as I tried to wrestle my khopesh out of the monster’s skull. The beast had been a pain in the ass, but at least I’d have a piece of godmarrow for my troubles. If I could figure out some way to pry it out without damaging—

  The iron serpent screamed and flung its head into the air.

  My khopesh was still stuck in the damned thing’s thick skull, and I was not about to let go. I clung to the hooked sword’s hilt as if I were a drowning man and it was the only life preserver in the whole damned ocean.

  “Your pathetic tricks will not save you, dungeon lord!” Vexxilor whipped his head hard to the right in an attempt to dislodge me from his face.

  I used the snake’s momentum to spin me around my weapon. I landed on the back of the beast’s head and dropped into a crouch behind my blade. My leverage was shit, but I put my back into driving the khopesh deeper into Vexxilor’s head. There had to be something vital in there
, right?

  The snake screamed again and drove its head into the ceiling in a desperate attempt to scrape me off. Too bad for Vexxilor I wasn’t an idiot.

  I threw myself flat against the iron behemoth’s skull a split second before the impact with the ceiling. My khopesh’s pommel slammed into the stone above me, and the impact hammered the hooked blade deep into the snake’s head with a metallic crunch.

  Vexxilor’s body sagged and its head drooped on its neck like a punch-drunk boxer trying to find his bearings. And yet, despite the three feet of dungeon lord steel buried in its brain, the snake did not fall.

  “Will you die already?” I grumbled and scrambled back to my feet.

  Before Vexxilor could recover, I secured my grip on the khopesh’s hilt, dug my heels in on either side of the blade, and threw my weight backward.

  “I cannot die,” the serpent shrieked. “I am one with the gods, and your soul is forfeit, dungeon lord.”

  The curve of my khopesh made an excellent pry bar. The thick plate of polished iron between the snake’s eyeballs shifted and raised a few inches as I pulled back on the sword. I gave it everything I could muster, then I gave it some more. My body, immaterial as it was, apparently did have some limits. The more strength I burned, the harder it was to hang on to my khopesh.

  Vexxilor must’ve realized what I was up to and reacted with blind rage. It flung its head from side to side, and when that didn’t shake me off, it drove its head toward the cavern’s stone floor and twisted the length of its body like a corkscrew.

  “Not today, Mr. Slinky.” I pushed against the khopesh’s hilt one more time, and the skull plate popped up a full foot.

  Unfortunately, that little trick also dislodged my khopesh. It tumbled out of my grip and vanished into the cavern’s shadows.

  With nothing to hold on to and Vexxilor’s body twisting under me like a rampaging water weasel, I found myself airborne.

  In the moment before I would have been flung completely free of the serpent’s head, my hand closed around the raised edge of Vexxilor’s bent armor plate. My body slammed into the skull plate so hard stars shot across my vision, and I nearly lost my grip on the snake. I grabbed hold of the edge of the armor with my other hand as my legs swung off the side of Vexxilor’s face and dangled dangerously close to his mouth.