by Nick Harrow
One of the serpent’s eyes, a blazing orb of crimson fire set into an iron socket, glared at me from a few inches away. The creature hissed with a sound like the rattle of an unlubricated diesel engine, all clanks and groans and crashes of metal against metal. With a shriek of tortured steel, Vexxilor ripped its head to the left, then back to the right in a desperate effort to shake me off or get me into its mouth.
The assault went on for what felt like an eternity. I knew if Vexxilor got his fangs into me, it was all over, and that gave me the strength to hang on with the tenacity of a tick on a hound’s neck. My fingers might as well have been welded to that metal plate for all they moved, despite my opponent’s increasingly frenzied attempts to dislodge me.
Exhausted from its struggles, the creature’s body shook with a visceral convulsion and slammed its entire length into the cavern wall. Rocks tumbled from the ceiling and crashed around us, and the impact’s vibration rang through the snake’s body like the world’s biggest, ugliest tuning fork.
And still I hung on.
Vexxilor threw its body in the opposite direction and the sudden maneuver flung me into the air. My fingers slipped a fraction of an inch but didn’t slide off the armored plate.
The plate, though, tore loose from Vexxilor with a metal scream and we both sailed through the air like a stone from a sling.
Chapter 14 — Iron Exchange
I TUMBLED LIKE A RAG doll on the wrong end of a three-year-old girl’s temper tantrum. Fortunately, my disincarnated body suffered no damage from bouncing off the rocks at the end of my flight. I rolled down the slope and landed on the bottom of the cavern, disoriented but still in one piece.
The ragged section of Vexxilor’s skull plate with its glowing amber centerpiece lay a dozen feet away from me. While Vexxilor was certainly dazed and unhappy with the damage I’d inflicted, yanking the godmarrow hadn’t quite killed the fucker. Convulsions tore through its body, and its head dislodged rocks from the ceiling while the iron coils of its body hammered the cavern’s floor. Shards of shredded metal flew away from the creature as it damaged itself, and chunks of stone the size of cinderblocks plummeted to the floor in a deadly hailstorm.
Rathokhetra moaned at the back of my thoughts and a burning need rose inside me. He wanted that godmarrow more than he’d ever wanted anything.
And I wanted it every bit as much. That glowing amber gem throbbed with unbridled power. I wanted to add it to my arsenal for the coming battle, even though I had no idea what it could do.
Before Vexxilor could turn its attention back to me, I scrambled across the floor toward the godmarrow. Its light no longer tried to batter me away. The amber glow called to me, and my disincarnated body soaked it up like a lizard sunning on a rock. The godmarrow wanted to be mine. I felt it in my bones.
Vexxilor cried out in agony and its death throes slammed its snout into the ceiling. Jagged cracks zigzagged across the ceiling away from the point of impact to form a crazy quilt of yawning gaps.
I was no geologist, but it looked like any more damage to the ceiling might bring it all down in a catastrophic cave-in.
I doubted that would inconvenience me for more than a few moments, but it would bury the godmarrow, and even the dwarves might not be able to dig it out from the rubble. Tons of rocks might even be enough to break the amber gem, and that was a loss I couldn’t bear. I snatched the skull plate only to find it was too heavy to carry in one hand and too bulky to clutch against my body. I raised it above my head with both hands and prayed the ceiling wouldn’t collapse on top of me before I escaped with my prize.
Vexxilor’s baleful eye fixed on me, and it unleashed a scream of hellish fury. With a tornado siren’s wail, the iron snake hurled itself at me.
Stones from the damaged ceiling bounced off the creature’s hide and crashed to the ground all around me as I ran. I was only a few yards away from the safety of my passage, but Vexxilor’s lunge had brought it nearly into striking range, and it gained ground with every second. The metallic beast’s jaws were opened wide enough to swallow me in a single gulp, and heat wafted from its gullet in oppressive waves.
With a final burst of speed, I reached my passage. Vexxilor was hot on my heels, and the scorching heat of its breath on my back told me I didn’t have time to run farther down the tunnel in search of safety. It also told me that some residual magic from the godmarrow still resided in the beast, and it could still hurt me.
I had to do something, and I had to do it in that exact moment.
With a desperate shout, I twisted my body to face my attacker, lowered the skull plate, and leapt forward.
Vexxilor’s mouth was open wide, and every mechanical muscle in its iron body was dedicated to the single act of propelling it toward me with the power of a battering ram. Hellish light blazed from inside the snake’s gullet, and the intense heat that billowed from its maw made my stomach lurch and my eyes water. In the next few moments, one or both of us was going to die.
An incendiary flower blossomed deep within Vexxilor’s throat. Swirls of black, orange, and white twisted into an elegant, deadly display that fascinated me even as it threatened to destroy me.
My lunge carried me into Vexxilor’s mouth, mere feet from the gout of flame. I rammed the plate with its godmarrow gem as deep as it would go into the serpent’s gullet. My shoulder slammed against the barrier to seal it in place, and I dug in my heels to support it against the danger headed my way.
The flames slammed into the skull plate, and the iron barrier pushed against me. Thin tongues of flame leaked out from around my shield to lash at my face and arms. The improvised plug glowed so hot my flesh smoldered where I touched it. Pain flared through my body, and every instinct screamed at me to let go of the hot thing and run for the nearest pool of cold water.
Instead, I pushed back against the plate and the smell of my charred skin filled the air.
Just when I thought I couldn’t hold the skull plate any longer, a blast of back pressure rang the overgrown snake’s skull like a gong and clapped my ears so hard I doubted I’d ever hear properly again.
Vexxilor had finally gone boom.
Trapped within the confines of its throat, the overgrown snake’s blast of fire had transformed into a deadly explosion. The concussive wave split the serpent from end to end and scattered its scales through the air like iron leaves in Hell’s own hurricane. Its skull came apart at the hinge of its jaw, and the two halves slid away from each other with a car-wreck shriek of tortured metal.
The skull plate fell into the snake’s lower jaw and took a patch of skin from my shoulder with it. The scrap of flesh sizzled and popped as the iron cooled, and I had a sudden craving for bacon.
“I hate snakes,” I groaned. “I really do.”
A quick check of my injuries told me that I was battered and bruised but still very much alive no matter how shitty I felt. My disincarnated body healed at an incredible rate, and by the time the iron plate had stopped smoking, the wound on my shoulder had sealed itself and the red ring of my health was fully restored. You couldn’t even tell I’d been in a fight.
I reached for the skull plate and the godmarrow glow called to me with the allure of a needle to a jonesing heroin junkie. The amber light drilled into my eyes and my whole body trembled with need.
It wasn’t enough to possess the godmarrow. I wanted to consume it in a single gulp. It didn’t matter to me that the shard was the length of my forearm. I didn’t even care that the ends looked like the jagged throats of shattered beer bottles and would carve my mouth to ribbons if I tried something so stupid. I needed the power of the godmarrow inside me.
Now.
“Do not touch it,” Rathokhetra warned.
A mixture of fear and awe ran through the ancient ghost’s words like a poisonous thread. That was enough to hold back the hunger that burned inside me.
Barely.
“What are you talking about?” A convulsive swallow made my throat ache. “Isn’t this
the thing that everyone’s been chasing?”
“It is more precious than a mountain of gold,” Rathokhetra said. “But it’s worthless if you do not know how to control it. And you definitely do not know how to control it.”
“Then teach me,” I said, every bit as irritated as a kid who’d been told he couldn’t open his presents on Christmas morning. “Tell me what I need to do, and I’ll do it.”
“It’s not that simple.” The ancient dungeon lord’s voice sounded strained and exhausted. “Even with training, the power of the godmarrow is dangerous. If you took it now, you’d be like a child holding a dragon’s tail. You might fly for a time, and you might even enjoy the ride, but it would eventually turn on you and burn you to ash.”
Well, wasn’t that a motherfucker?
“There is another problem,” Rathokhetra said. “The instant you touch that, the people who sent you here will know what you have found. Any dungeon lord within a few nodes on the Solamantic Web from Soketra will also know what you have.”
Double motherfucker with a barbed strap-on. My earlier prediction to Charlie had been right on the money.
“All right, that’s a problem,” I said. “I already have one piece of shit riding my ass, I definitely don’t need any more fuckers back there.”
“You should hide it,” Rathokhetra suggested. “Take it to my tomb and leave it until there is time to turn it to your advantage.”
“My dungeon, you mean?” I corrected him. There was no way I was going to let him pretend like we were co-dungeon lords. I was the boss, and he was the annoying, and sometimes useful, back-seat driver who wouldn’t shut the hell up.
“As you wish,” Rathokhetra said.
With only a couple of hours before dawn, I didn’t have any time to get back to the dungeon and finish the tunnel to the raiders’ camp. I just couldn’t catch a goddamned break.
“Fuck it, I’ll do it the hard way.
Zillah and Delsinia were close; I felt them off to the southwest a bit. I’d have to leave the godmarrow here and come back to retrieve my loot later. Unless some blood gnomes or another giant snake ambled along, I shouldn’t have to worry about losing the godmarrow.
I dragged the iron plate down into the cavern and looked for the best place to hide the most valuable treasure I’d ever held. I settled on the blasted corpse of Vexxilor and slid the iron inside the dead beast’s splayed ribs. I half-expected the snake to spring to life when I released the godmarrow, and let out a sigh of relief when the shattered metal remained immobile. It took me a few minutes to camouflage the plate with pieces of burned and tortured metal, and a few more to cover it well enough to prevent even the smallest ray of amber light from escaping. It wouldn’t do me much good to bury the damned thing if it glowed like a beacon for anyone to see.
Out of curiosity, I checked the arrowhead. It still hung in the air in front of my core, but it had gone dark and no longer turned in search of magic. I fed it another mote of ka to see if it would find the same power source twice, and it immediately sprang to life and pointed straight at the godmarrow.
“Well, that’s a bummer,” I muttered. It would have been nice if the Compass of Power had sense enough to ignore items we’d already found, but I supposed that was a lot to expect from a magical floating arrowhead. I’d just have to be careful to only use it when I was well clear of known power sources.
As I moved away from where I’d hidden the godmarrow, though, I caught a glimpse of movement from the arrowhead. It no longer pointed directly at the godmarrow, but slightly to its left.
I retraced my steps, and the arrowhead’s tip aimed unerringly at the amber gemstone. Intrigued, I stepped off to the hidden artifact’s right side, and the arrowhead’s position shifted ever so slightly. It hadn’t been pointing at the godmarrow at all. There was something behind the snake’s skull plate.
I circled Vexxilor’s dead body and followed the arrowhead’s lead. It guided me to a spot a couple of yards deeper into the cavern than where I’d hidden the godmarrow. The tip of the compass aimed directly at the ground between my feet.
Whatever the compass had picked up was almost entirely covered in chunks of stone and shards of scorched metal.
Almost.
A faint row of runes etched into silver metal was visible through the gaps in the rubble. My heart soared when I realized what I’d found.
A stele.
I closed my eyes and checked the location of my dungeons relative to my current location. My original tomb was way too far away, but Delsinia’s dungeon was just inside my range.
With a relieved sigh, I summoned my tablet and immediately claimed the stele. Five ka was a pittance to pay to add this critical spot to my territory. With the stele under my control, I could now teleport from here to anywhere in my dungeon. That made things so much simpler.
I grabbed the godmarrow, bounced back to Delsinia’s dungeon just outside the gateway, then hauled ass to the Solamantic Web.
Pinchy and her family rushed out to greet me but froze as soon as they touched the edge of the godmarrow’s amber radiance. They raised their claws reverently and backed slowly away from me.
“It’s just me, guys, no need to freak out.” Despite my reassurances, the scorpions stayed in the shadows.
I wasn’t sure what that was all about, but I’d figure it out later.
The web carried me to the fortress, and I did a little dungeon lord trickery to create a new room to hold the godmarrow. That would have to be good enough for the moment.
“How’s it going?” I called out.
After a few moments of silence, I poked my head into Kozerek’s study and was pleased to find it empty. Kezakazek had kept her word and gone off to get some rest. Good for her.
I snuck a peek at the notes she’d left scattered across the desk. Most of them were completely incomprehensible pages filled with arcane runes, and I gently lifted those for a look at what lay below them. I found a sketchy map of the oasis with ruler-straight lines splayed across the terrain from a dark spot on the lower-left side of the page.
Interesting. I’d have to ask the sorceress what she was up to.
But first, I had to finish my work. Dawn would come far too soon, and I wanted everything ready for my goat teams.
I bopped back over to my new stele and clambered out of the cavern and into my wrecked passage. It took me a few minutes to fix the damage that had been done and replace the hole in the passage with a door. Satisfied with my work, I focused on Zillah and Del until their locations burned brightly in my thoughts.
Fifteen minutes later, my passage opened in front of some very shocked dwarves. Their shaggy beards shed small avalanches of dirt and powdered iron as they jumped back and raised their pickaxes in surprise.
I realized none of these folks had ever seen me; they’d only been introduced to Del and Zillah. From the looks on the faces of the dwarves, they didn’t think I was anywhere near as fun to look at as my guardians.
“Relax, boys.” I showed them my empty hands. “I’m Rathokhetra, and today I’m one of the good guys.”
The dwarves didn’t relax, exactly, but they did back away from me and shout over their shoulders in a language I didn’t understand. They raised their hands in the universal stop sign and looked nervously back toward the raiders’ camp as if they expected Kark to come tell them what to do.
“I don’t have time for this crap,” I said as I walked toward them. They scurried out of my way, and by the time I reached the magma pool the ringing of their pickaxes sounded from inside the tunnel once again. The dwarves might have been jumpy, but they sure got over it fast.
The cavern was empty, which I took to mean the other dwarves and raiders were all sleeping or packing their shit. I’d promised them they had until dawn to get ready, so I felt a little bad when I rolled into the raiders’ tent for a wake-up call.
“Hey, assholes,” I shouted with all the dungeon lord volume I could put into the words. “Lord Rathokhetra calling.
Get the fuck up. Time to roll out.”
Groans and gasps erupted from across the tent in even numbers. A few of the raiders, including Sven and Charlie, popped up with weapons in hand, but the rest of the tent’s occupants were slower to respond.
“Slackers.” I snapped my fingers. “You guys would all be dead if I wanted to kill you, Charlie.”
“You said dawn.” She sheathed her sword and stifled a yawn with the back of her hand.
“I lied.”
“I liked you better when you were inside your guardians.” The half-orc yawned again. “You are fucking terrifying like that.”
“Thanks, I think.”
“Holy shit,” Zillah laughed as she and Del emerged from a corner of the tent. “You know how to make an entrance.”
“I’m a dungeon lord. Gotta keep up appearances.”
Zillah hurled herself at me and wrapped her legs around my waist and her arms around my neck. She smothered me with kisses and buried her face in the side of my neck.
“You smell so good.” She ran her tongue along the rim of my ear. “Taste pretty great, too. Can we come home yet? I miss you guys.”
“Soon,” I said.
Del’s eyes locked with mine, and a shadow of pain flickered across her face. She was a trooper and put a good face on things, but seeing her husband of several centuries get practically dry-humped by a scorpion queen couldn’t be easy for her. Even if I wasn’t the Rathokhetra she knew, I still had his face and body.
“Del,” I called to her.
She brightened visibly and crossed the tent in a flash. Her clawed feet stomped on more than one raider who hadn’t done the rise-and-shine thing in time. She smiled wider with every grunt and groan.
