Dungeon Bringer 3

by Nick Harrow

  I eased Zillah off me and pulled Delsinia into an embrace. The soultaker brushed my cheek with the back of one hand and stared into my eyes with adoration that went far beyond the merely physical. Our lips met and a spark of passion leapt between us.

  “I have missed you, my love,” she whispered as we parted. The sadness was back in her eyes, though there was a glint of happiness there as well.

  There’d be time to figure out the complicated dynamics of our relationship later, after we’d killed all the bad guys.

  “Okay, ladies.” I put an arm around each of my guardians and pulled them in close. “I need you to guide the raiders back to the surface. Follow the tunnels the dwarves built, and you’ll find a passage back to the dungeon. When you reach the village, go see Nephket.”

  “Gotcha, boss.” Zillah flicked the tip of my nose with her tongue and headed off to get the raiders moving.

  Delsinia cast one last, longing look at me as she turned to leave, and a pang of loss pricked my heart.

  Charlie stood a few feet away, and the look on her face told me she’d heard the instructions to Zillah. It also told me she didn’t like what she’d heard.

  “Bug girl might not—” That was all the half-orc got out before Delsinia sprang into motion.

  The soultaker’s daggers flashed through the air, and the chain that bound them together had looped around Charlie’s neck before I could say a word. Delsinia twisted her blades and used the chain’s leverage to force the raider to her knees.

  Charlie wheezed and her fingers struggled to get under the chain, but her nails couldn’t find purchase.

  “Her name is Zillah,” Delsinia hissed. “You can also call her the scorpion queen if you prefer. But if I ever hear you call my sister a bug again, no power in this world or the next will save you from my wrath.”

  The half-orc nodded once, her eyes wide and bloodshot. The veins in her neck stood out from her green-tinged skin like black vines, and her tongue protruded from her open mouth. She begged me wordlessly for mercy.

  I said nothing.

  The raiders watched the scene unfold, uncertain of what to do next. Their boss was at death’s door, but none of them wanted to earn the wrath of me or my guardians.

  Zillah’s eyes darted from Delsinia to me, then back to the soultaker.

  “Let her go.” The scorpion queen’s voice was rough with emotion. Her tail circled around the soultaker’s shoulders. “Thank you.”

  Charlie collapsed when Delsinia uncoiled the chain from around her throat. The half-orc gulped in a whooping breath and leaned forward until her forehead touched the cavern’s floor.

  “As I was saying,” she croaked, and lifted her gaze to mine. “Zillah and Delsinia don’t need much rest, but my people do. How far will we have to march today?”

  “Not far at all,” I said. “But you have to leave now. Someone else needs to use the tunnel to the surface, and we can’t afford a traffic jam. When you get to the village, my people will provide beds, food, and fresh water.”

  The half-orc nodded, then turned sharply on her heel and called to her people.

  “Get ready to march,” she said. “Leave the tent but grab all your fighting gear. New boss says he’s got beds and food for us on the surface, so let’s get to it.”

  The raiders gathered their meager belongings and kicked their bedrolls out of the way. They’d clearly had enough of living in a cave and were ready for something—anything—better.

  Zillah kissed me on the cheek as she passed me, and Delsinia did the same. The guardians walked close together, their hands almost touching with every step. There was still a smidgen of tension between Del and the other guardians, but a few more displays like she’d put on for Charlie and that would burn off like the morning dew.

  When the last of the raiders had left the tent, I stepped outside. The cavern’s air was ripe with the stink of molten metal from the magma pit, but that was a huge improvement over the stench of unwashed bodies and bedrolls in the raiders’ tent.

  Kark spied me the second I emerged from the tent and headed my way from where he’d been standing near the magma pit. He looked very aggravated, but that could have been the combination of his craggy eyebrows and natural dwarven sullenness rather than his emotional state.

  “My people are wary, but they’ll follow me out of here,” he said. “You have a place for us to rest, too?”

  “Yep,” I said. “Soon. For the time being, though, I need you guys to hang out down here. I’ll need every scrap of iron you can get out of the vein you’re working, and I need some help tearing down a critter I killed.”

  “We aren’t butchers.” Kark crossed his arms over his chest.

  “This thing was solid iron, near as I can tell. I want it broken down and readied for transport.”

  “A beast of iron?” Kark looked dubious. “I want to see this thing before I make any promises about what my men can do.”

  “You’re gonna love this. Come with me.”

  The dwarf followed me to the tunnel where his people worked and selected two of the oldest dwarves to accompany us deeper into the passage.

  “Feast your eyes on this, gentlemen.” The door opened with a wave of my hand.

  The dwarves eased up to get a look. One by one, they let out long, low whistles, tugged on their beards, and stepped back. They conferred together in a language that sounded like an avalanche while I waited patiently for their decision.

  “That beast is not iron.” Kark looked at me like I was either stupid or the world’s biggest liar. “But we can salvage most of its body and head.”

  “If it’s not iron, what the hell is it?”

  “Heartsteel.” Kark watched my face for signs of recognition that never came. “It’s a rare metal. Some say it comes from the bodies of fallen gods.”

  “Of course.” I was starting to think this whole dungeon lord business was just a glorified recycling project. “What’s it good for?”

  “Everything.” Kark jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “The lads want a cut of this monstrosity for themselves. Every other dwarf on the team will want some, too.”

  “You get a pound each. No more.” If this stuff really did fall off a god, I wouldn’t part with any more of it than necessary. “Fair?”

  Kark gave me the hairy eyeball, but he didn’t gripe about the amount. Too late, it occurred to me that I could have probably gotten off with a lower first offer. Ah, well, live and learn.

  “Done and done.” Kark thrust his hand out to seal the deal and frowned when I didn’t accept his grip.

  “Sorry, can’t touch anyone. Dungeon lord rules.” I wasn’t about to waste five motes of ka to shake the dwarf’s hand.

  “Tough luck.” Kark tugged on his beard. “Must make it frustrating to have all those ladies around, and nothing to do with them.”

  “Could be worse. I could be stuck with a bunch of grumpy dwarves to look at all day.”

  “Good point. Where do you want us to put the iron and the heartsteel we can salvage?”

  “Right here.” I motioned with my left hand and a section of hallway opened on the far side of the passage. “Stack it up in there. Someone will be along to collect it shortly.”

  “Fair enough.” Kark barked something to his people in the language of grinding rocks. “We’ll get on it. Good working with you.”

  “And you.” I gave the dwarves a goodbye wave, but they’d already turned their backs and headed back to work. They were rude but industrious little fuckers, I’d give them that.

  It was still a few minutes before dawn, which gave me enough time to do absolutely nothing. I let out a deep sigh, weary to the bone, and closed my eyes to meditate for a second.

  I hadn’t even gotten through my first round of pretend breaths when the bad news came.

  “Clay,” Nephket’s thoughts got my attention with the immediacy of a hot poker in the ass. “Lexios is coming.”

  Chapter 15 – A Polite Conversation

 
; I RETURNED TO NEPHKET’S side in the blink of an eye. Sometimes, it was super convenient to be a dungeon lord.

  “Hey,” I whispered into my familiar’s ear.

  Nephket jumped away from me, spun in the air, and landed in a crouch with her claws out, ready to fight.

  “Kezakazek warned me about that.” Nephket stood, retracted her claws, and let out a shaky breath. “It was still scary as hell. Are you going to make a habit of popping in and out without warning?”

  “Definitely. How else am I gonna keep you all on your toes?” I looked around and realized that Neph and I weren’t in City Hall. We were somewhere on the north side of the oasis, near the wall.

  The wall that was much taller than it had been the last time I’d seen it. It stretched almost thirty feet into the air, and enormous towers dotted its length at regular intervals. Guards patrolled the wall, and ballistae bristled from the sheltered parapets at the tops of the towers.

  “When did this happen?” If this was only two defensive upgrades, I wondered what I’d get for five or ten boosts. Maybe I could put a dome over the whole damned place. Add some air-conditioning to cool it off. So many possibilities.

  “Last night.” Nephket turned toward the heart of the oasis. “If you think that’s impressive, look behind you.”

  The pool of water at the center of the oasis was much wider and longer than it had been just days before. The settlement had swelled in size, too. The space between the shoreline and the wall was at least hundred feet wider than it had been, and the number of buildings had multiplied tenfold, as had the number of people.

  “All of this in two days?” It didn’t seem possible. “Is there anything else I need to know about?”

  Nephket took my arm and leaned against my shoulder. She guided me along the wall and gestured toward a tall building near where I knew City Hall lay. The structure’s stone walls were studded with stained glass windows, and a towering spire crowned with a cobra’s head flanked by a pair of roaring lions jutted toward the sky from one end.

  “That’s your temple.” The pride in Nephket’s voice was evident and so was a sense of awe. “It is almost as grand as you deserve.”

  “You’re going to make me blush.” A thought occurred to me, and I changed the subject. “Hey, if the city got bigger, what happened to the hills around it?”

  “Oh, they’re not hills anymore,” Nephket said. “When the settlement expanded, they became a ridgeline dotted with sycamore trees and what I think might be ebony. It’s quite an impressive change. You should see it from the top of one of the towers. I could take you, if you’d like.”

  As much as I wanted to go sightseeing, Nephket had called me back for a pressing reason.

  “Where’s Lexios?” I didn’t want to deal with the tax collector first thing in the morning, but I wouldn’t want to leave the meeting until the afternoon, either. Might as well get it over with.

  “He should be at the east gate soon,” she said.

  “Gate?” That was new. “We have gates now?”

  “Two of them. The west gate is where most of the trade comes through, or would come through if Lexios and his men hadn’t closed our supply lines. The east gate is closest to the collector’s base camp.”

  “Let’s go meet him,” I said. “I don’t want him marching a bunch of his men through the streets and freaking everyone out.”

  “That’s an excellent plan,” Nephket said. “I’d rather not disturb our citizens any more than they already are.”

  “What’s got them riled up now?” I didn’t have the patience to deal with the villagers at the moment, but if there was a real problem brewing, it would be better to know about it before it smacked me in the dick.

  “Pending war always makes people nervous.” Nephket squeezed my arm and leaned in to give me a quick kiss on the cheek. “And there are some who claim the little girl who lives in City Hall is some sort of ghost left behind after an attack by blood gnomes.”

  “I thought we’d kept that quiet.” It irritated me that rumors about the murders had spread despite my best efforts to prevent them. “Did someone spill the beans?”

  “The settlement changed so rapidly, it’s hard to say. Reality is stretched so thin here, Clay.” Nephket spread her arms to encompass the city I’d pulled out of the stuff of dreams. “It’s possible the knowledge just appeared in one of our new citizens’ minds.”

  That was a comforting thought. The reality distortion around village upgrades worried and intrigued me. I wished there was some way for me to gain control over how my changes impacted the rest of the world.

  “You always assume you can’t do something before you even try.” Rathokhetra’s dry chuckle was as irritating as ever, but he was right. I’d been thinking too small. Maybe I could dominate these changes and bend them to my will. I considered how that would work, and my thoughts chased one another down a hundred different paths.

  “Hey.” Nephket brought me out of my reverie with a gentle nudge. “We’re here.”

  The gate was closed when we arrived, but a word from Nephket and the guards scrambled to open it for us. It was an impressive structure, with heavy wooden planks bound together by thick iron bands and bolts as big as my fist. The mechanism to open it was hidden within the towers that flanked the gate, and it rattled and clanked as unseen guards cranked it open.

  A few minutes later, the east gate yawned wide before us. A stone road from the city passed through its doors and transformed into a gravel path a hundred yards later. A few hundred feet after that, the road became little more than a rutted, dusty trail strewn with drifts of loose sand and tufts of scrubby desert grass. Mirages danced between the hills that flanked that trail, which made it difficult to see. I wondered if it was the heat that made the air shimmer and waver like that, or the reality distortion of the settlement asserting itself on the world.

  Whatever the mirages’ origins, they masked the approach of Lexios until he’d reached the gravel path.

  “He came alone?” Nephket released my arm and opened a little space between us for that professional greeting-party look. “He’s a confident man. Perhaps you should make him pay for that confidence by pulling his head off his shoulders and mounting it on a pike.”

  The idea appealed to me on a visceral level, and I imagined Lexios’s surprise when I offed him right outside my gates. As much as I wanted to do that, I also knew I couldn’t. The tax collector’s men would almost certainly come for us if their leader didn’t return to his camp at a decent time, and I did not have the manpower to deal with a full army.

  Not yet, anyway.

  Lexios strode toward the Kahtsinka Oasis like a welcomed hero, not an enemy general. He wore a black tunic embroidered with golden thread, a pair of soft leather breeches, and boots with sturdy heels more suited for horseback riding than trudging along the dirt trail. Despite the heavy black cape that dangled from golden pins at the shoulders of his tunic, Lexios looked as comfortable as any man I’d ever seen. The morning heat hadn’t wrung even a drop of sweat out of this asshole.

  “Ah, Rathokhetra,” the tax collector said as he approached. “How good of you to meet me. Would you rather we speak out here, or shall we retire to someplace more civilized?”

  “I’m not sure what a tax collector knows about civilization.” I gestured for him to enter the city. I wanted Lexios to see that I wasn’t afraid of him, and that our defenses had improved a great deal since he’d last poked his nose around. Maybe I could convince him it wasn’t worth the effort to fight me for some gold. “Since you were kind enough to show up without the goon squad, though, I’ll let you pick the venue for our discussion.”

  The tax collector tapped his chin with one long finger and considered his options.

  “Let us walk while we talk.” He approached like an old friend and stopped a few feet away from Nephket and me. “I find physical activity does wonders for the mind.”

  “Whatever floats your boat.” I turned on one heel and walke
d back into the city. Nephket kept pace on my left side, and Lexios hurried to catch up on my right.

  “I thought we might want to keep this private. Just the two of us.” He raised an eyebrow in Nephket’s direction. “If that is all right with you.”

  “I don’t like it.” Nephket’s prickly thoughts entered mine with all the subtlety of a cannonball. “I’ll call the wahket.”

  “No.” I did the best I could to calm Nephket through our connection, but it was like trying to convince a startled porcupine to put down its quills. “He came without guards. What danger could he pose to me?”

  “He’s full of tricks, Clay. You don’t know what he’s capable of.”

  “And he doesn’t know what I’m capable of. If I don’t incarnate, he can’t hurt me. Plus, I have better things for you and the wahket to work on. I need to find beds for a few dozen raiders and dwarves. And if you could have Anunaset round up all of the blacksmiths and their apprentices and park them near the town market, I’d appreciate it.”

  “As you wish, tax collector,” Nephket said aloud. Her anger filled the air like the scent of burned hair. I wanted to believe all that pissed-off attitude was for the tax collector. “I will prepare a light brunch for us to enjoy after you’ve completed your tour of the oasis.”

  The wahket stalked away from us without another word. The stiff set of her shoulders and hard sweeps of her tail emphasized just how pissed she was.

  “Of course, I’m pissed,” she thought at me. “You’re too trusting by far. It pains me to see you set yourself up for potential betrayal.”

  My heart wanted to put Lexios on hold while I dealt with my guardian’s anger and pain. My head knew that wouldn’t help anything.

  “She does not care for me,” Lexios said with a shrug. “I suppose she has her reasons.”

  “You’re a dickhead who showed up out of the blue to ask for all my money. Those are her reasons. And mine.”

  I directed Lexios along the southern side of the oasis because I wanted to show off some of my improvements. I also wanted him to see that we had a military ready and willing to put up a fight if he decided to throw down with us.