by Nick Harrow
“Fool.” The hand of Selician’s giant meat puppet swung toward me, but he was too big, and I was too small for an accurate strike. The mutant fist missed me by a few feet and crashed into the giant’s belly just below my legs.
I wrenched my khopesh free, dropped onto the creature’s arm, and scrambled into the relative shelter of its misshapen elbow.
Enraged, the flesh construct raised its arm into the air to find me. Its other hand slapped at its forearm, bashed its bicep, and swept past me without touching a hair on my head. For once, being the little guy worked to my advantage.
Selician was powerful, but he was slow. I banished my khopesh, dug my fingers into the raw meat in front of me, and climbed up to his shoulder before he knew I was on the move again. With a thought, I called my hooked sword back to my hand and charged across the meaty surface toward the giant’s throat.
“I will destroy you and all you hold dear.” The enraged king’s voice boomed over the desolate battlefield. “There will be none to remember your name when my vengeance has scoured you from this world.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. I took a two-handed grip on my sword and swung it like a lumberjack trying to take out a redwood with a single swipe of his axe. A wound three feet deep and two feet wide opened where the monstrosity’s carotid artery should’ve been, but the gaping hole revealed more bits and pieces of bodies. Because, of course, what else would there be in there? The bastard didn’t have any vital organs; he was a magical hodgepodge of bodies he’d gathered together.
The dragons screamed past me and unleashed another barrage of lightning. They coordinated their attacks, and blistering streams of power severed the behemoth’s right arm at the elbow. Blood boiled and steamed away from the ferocious assault, and the blue attack wing roared victoriously and sailed back into the night sky.
It had been an impressive attack, but the hand was already reforming. This fucking thing sucked.
“Need some help?” Tyrilese landed next to me. She twirled her oversized sword in one hand like it was light as a baton, then struck at the same wound I had created. Fire raged and cauterized the edges of the gory channel, but it still wasn’t enough. “Sisters! Attack this foul abomination!”
The Order of the Winged Blade descended from the skies like a blizzard of Ginsu knives. They chopped away at the undead with flaming swords that raised gobbets of meat and fountains of blood in a grisly cloud, and in seconds they had removed the top quarter of the giant’s head.
Unfortunately, there was no brain in there, just more meat. More bodies. More mindless, crawling flesh eager to destroy us.
And, to top it all off, I’d burned about half of my remaining ka. I had another minute before I ran out of gas, and then this mortician’s wet dream would be free to rampage through the oasis.
“Hey!” Kez shouted from the top of the wall. She looked impossibly tiny, a small dark figure against the white stone, one hand raised over her head. She held a staff of some kind. “I brought you something.”
“Bring that to me!” I jabbed a finger at the staff in Kez’s hand.
Tyrilese nodded and hurled herself off the flesh giant’s shoulder. She plunged like a shooting star and flared her wings at the last possible second. Before the startled Kez could react, the angel snatched the weapon out of the dark elf’s hand and soared back into the sky. She dodged a swipe from Selician’s hand, but her maneuver brought her within range of a much more dangerous attack.
I watched in horror as the giant’s mouth gaped wide and then closed on Tyrilese’s legs. The angel screamed as her thighs shattered and her broken bones punched through her flesh. Her wings went limp, then guttered and vanished. She lacked the strength to hold on to her greatsword, which plummeted to the earth below.
But she held on to the spear.
“Take it!” she shouted to me.
I was out of time for smart decisions. I charged toward Tyrilese, my feet splashing through puddles of blood. I launched myself at the giant’s cheek and found a handhold in a space between the bodies of two of my own soldiers. That brought me close to the wounded angel, but not close enough. With a desperate shout, I swung like a monkey from one handhold to the next and landed on the edge of the giant’s bulging lower lip.
The creature opened its mouth wide, ready to grind the angel and me into paste.
I snatched the spear out of Tyrilese’s hand, and she went limp as if the last of her strength had been reserved for the task of delivering the weapon to me. With her purpose complete, her eyes rolled back in her head and the light of her armor went out.
A surge of power crackled through me the instant I laid my hands on the weapon’s iron haft. The tip of the weapon flared with amber light, and I realized what Kez had been working on.
The godmarrow shard she’d fashioned into a spearhead filled my head with a triumphant scream.
The beast’s mouth yawned wide to reveal the hideous mural of twisted flesh and cracked bones that was the roof of its mouth. I knew there was no brain above that arched dome, but there was something just as good. I rolled onto the enormous tongue of dead flesh and braced myself. This fight was almost over, one way or the other.
The giant closed its mouth, and I thrust the spear upward with all the strength I could muster. The splinter of divine power at the weapon’s tip shredded flesh and melted bone with no more resistance than a hot nail through a clot of lard. I drove the weapon up through the mass of corrupted flesh and prayed my aim was true.
“You do not know the forces you tamper with,” Selician screamed into my thoughts.
The corpse giant’s makeshift skull sloughed away from the blazing heat of the godmarrow to reveal the remaining eye of the King of Kyth. For one moment, the mirrored surface of the exposed eye showed me my enemy. He was little more than blackened flesh stretched tight over brittle bones. His arms and legs were folded to his torso, and he floated above the pentacle of an obsidian pyramid larger than any structure I’d ever seen in my life. A shadowy womb surrounded him, fed him life that was somehow channeled from countless enslaved followers through the enormous structure beneath him.
“Nope.” I readied the spear. “And neither do you.”
The godmarrow hit the last mirrored eye with a horrific wail. Reality shattered and my broken body plummeted toward the earth, along with hundreds of shattered corpses and a single wounded angel.
Chapter 26 – A Drink Before Bed
THE KAHTSINKA OASIS was a goddamned wreck.
It’d been most of a month since Lexios and his army had been destroyed, and my little village had grown by leaps and bounds. Unfortunately, that crazy growth had led to all sorts of bullshit problems that a growing dungeon lord shouldn’t have to deal with. Not even the time-bending, mind-twisting side effects of my dungeon lord city-management abilities had allowed me to get around the obnoxious problem of being in charge.
Do you have any idea how hard it is to convince people they can’t bury their loved ones anymore because the only ground that isn’t sand has to be used for farming? Converting a whole group of people from the time-honored practice of entombing the dead to the more expedient and much more economical practice of burning them was like pulling teeth.
And don’t even get me started on the economic problems my get rich quick scheme of converting raw iron to finished weapons to gold had caused. I still wasn’t sure how I’d work that out because I needed that endless fountain of coins to upgrade the oasis. Maybe after I reached level six, I could think about dealing with that issue.
Did I mention dragons eat a couple of cows every day?
We also had bandits to deal with now. They raided caravans coming into or headed out of the oasis and stripped them down to the wagon wheels. The wahket were doing their best to hunt the robbers down, but every time they got close, the brigands slipped away. Anunaset swore the outlaws were led by a half-orc with braided hair and more tattoos than naked skin, which didn’t do anything for my mood.
Fuckin
g Charlie. I should have known she was too tough for Lexios’s monsters to kill. And now I was on her shit list. Perfect.
The blood gnomes, at least, had returned to the Great Below with their bellies filled with dead soldiers from Lexios’s army. They promised they wouldn’t bother the oasis again, now that we’d chased the raiders out of their territory. I guessed they’d go back to eating dwarves or anyone else who wandered into their territory. Goddamned freaks.
Kark and his boys set up shop in the oasis for a week or two, long enough to break down Vexxilor’s body and earn themselves a few wagons filled with gold. They’d lit out after that with a promise to come back and show my smiths how to work the heartsteel. I still wasn’t sure they were telling me the truth, but I wasn’t about to keep the dwarves from their families. They’d been through some shit and deserved to go the fuck home.
Of course, the merchants and tribesmen and everyone else with an axe to grind showed up every week so I could settle their arguments. The satyr had decided to put together a petition to convince me to grant him a license for a whorehouse. The little fucker had just about worn me down enough to let him have his way.
Honestly, some days I wished Selician would show up again, so I’d have something to distract me from my new duties as a boss.
“It could be worse,” Kez said as if she’d read my thoughts. “The spear might not have worked. Then where would we be?”
“Dead as fucking doornails.” Zillah grinned around a bite of a chicken leg. “You, especially.”
“What the hell does that mean?” The sorceress gestured toward the scorpion queen with a forkful of dripping red meat. “Why would I be any more dead than the rest of you?”
“Because you were fucking around with the godmarrow when you shouldn’t have been.” Zillah took another bite of chicken, then pointed the naked bone at me. “Did you ever spank her for that?”
“Been saving it,” I said. “She really shouldn’t have touched the godmarrow. It was literally priceless, and now it’s gone.”
No one knew what had happened to the spear after I’d used it to stab Selician. Rumor had it one of the angels had stolen it, but that seemed unlikely. Rumor also said that the angels had saved me from splattering on the ground, which I tended to believe.
I’d have loved to see Tyrilese and hear her side of it, but she’d been missing since the fight.
Kezakazek gaped at me and her fork dropped onto her plate, the meat momentarily forgotten.
“You’d be—” She spluttered, then started again. “We’d all be dead if I hadn’t made that spear!”
“Should have asked.” A wicked grin spread over Nephket’s features. “What if you had broken it?”
“But I didn’t! How many times are we going to go over this?”
“Another hundred or so times.” I reached out and took Kezakazek’s hand. “But you really should have asked.”
“You people are insufferable,” the dark elf groaned. “You’re not going to be back me up here, Del?”
The soultaker hid her smile behind a drink of her wine and winced as the demonic wounds she’d suffered throbbed at the movement.
Surprised Del’s still alive?
Not half as much as we were.
Turns out the Room of Bone and Shadow is really cut off from the outside world. After she’d shoved Neph up inside the hidey-hole, the soultaker had been overwhelmed by the demons.
But they hadn’t killed her.
Proving that she might be the bravest, strongest person I knew, Del had shimmied up her chain to join Nephket and sealed the room behind her. That’s why I hadn’t felt either of them at the end of the battle, and why Zillah hadn’t been able to find them until they’d limped into town deep into the night.
The bad news was that Del had been ripped up one side and down the other by the demons. We’d used magic to heal most of her wounds, but some of them refused to heal properly, no matter how many spells we pumped into them. She’d recover, but it would hurt, and it wouldn’t be fast. She had long weeks, maybe months, of recuperation ahead of her.
“You know how I am about rules, Kez,” the soultaker said. “You have to follow them to the letter.”
“Bunch of stuck-up, straightlaced, teacher’s motherfucking pets,” Kez muttered into her plate. She shoveled in a bite of prime rib, leaned back in her chair, and washed it down with a slug of wine that emptied her glass.
“You know what I want to do?” The dark elf’s cheeks were rosy from the alcohol, and her eyes smoldered with a hunger food would never satisfy.
“I could take a guess.” With a thought, I banished the food and drink from the table.
“I wasn’t done—” Nephket started, but Kez had already crawled across the table and pulled the priestess into a passionate kiss.
“That looks fun.” Zillah turned to Delsinia and hooked an arm around the soultaker’s shoulder. “Tell me if it hurts.”
“I am sorry,” Delsinia began. Pent-up emotions boiled to the surface and tears sprang into her eyes. She’d been holed up in the infirmary since the battle, and this was the first time she’d seen the scorpion queen since she’d crawled back home with Nephket over one shoulder. “If I ever made you feel—”
“No.” Zillah struggled to get the word out of a throat suddenly tight with grief. “I should never have doubted you.”
“We all make mistakes.” Delsinia cupped Zillah’s face in her hands and kissed her. Softly, then with growing hunger.
“Hey,” Nephket said to me, her voice rough with desire. “Get over here.”
And so I did.
Chapter 27 – An Angel Calls
A GENTLE BREEZE OFF the balcony gusted into the bedroom, and a beam of silver light lanced through the gauzy curtains to sting my eyes.
“What the fuck?” I eased out of the pile of guardians in the middle of the bed and crossed the bedroom. I froze when I saw who waited for me on the balcony.
“That looks like fun.” Tyrsilene tilted her haloed head toward the bed.
“Angels can do that kind of thing?”
“You haven’t been paying attention to your priestess.” Tyrsilene moved closer to me, and the edges of her brilliant armor brushed against my chest. “The gods fell. Angels can do whatever the fuck we want.”
Her head darted toward my face and her lips bounced off mine. Hard. I felt like a chicken had just pecked my mouth.
“I didn’t say we were good at doing whatever the fuck we want.” Tyrsilene grinned at her own awkwardness and shrugged. “But we will learn. And I’m sure I can find some good teachers.”
Well, wasn’t that special?
“You sure you’re up for that?” I glanced over my shoulder at the bed. “Zillah can be a little rough, and the last time I saw you, a raw-meat giant had damned near chewed your legs off.”
“I got better.” Tyrsilene ran one hand down her thigh. “Angels are resilient.”
“That’s an understatement.” She looked like she’d never had so much as a scratch, never mind been bitten in half just a few weeks ago. “What brings you back? This place can’t have many good memories for you.”
“Why do you say that? This is where my sisterhood was reborn.” Tyrsilene leaned in, slower this time, and pressed her lips firmly against mine. “Better?”
“Much. What would you have done if I hadn’t given you the ten grand?” That question had burned a hole in my thoughts every day since we’d kicked the King of Kyth the fuck out of the oasis.
“King Selician is very wealthy.” I looked for a trace of humor in her eyes, but there was none to be found. “Rathokhetra—”
“Clay. My friends call me Clay.”
“Clay, my sisters are the most important thing in the world to me. In all the worlds, really. There is nothing I wouldn’t do for them, including enslaving myself to that hideous monstrosity atop the black pyramid.”
I tried to imagine Tyrsilene and her sisters working for Selician, and it hurt my brain. If she loved
her sisters enough to doom them all to servitude for such a monstrosity, just so they could be reunited...
“That’s amazing.” And it was. Not good, necessarily, but it was amazing that someone could love others so much that they’d make and expect that kind of sacrifice to be together. “What will you do now?”
“Things I was never allowed to do before.” She went in for another kiss, but I stopped her with the tip of my forefinger on her chin. I tilted my head slightly and met her halfway. “Oh, that is much better.”
“Why didn’t you just tell me you were an angel?” The question had bothered me for a while now. Things would have been so much simpler if Tyrsilene had been straight with me about why she needed the money and how helpful she could be if I’d just fork it over.
“I was broken. Forsaken.” She clenched her fists and furrowed her brow as she searched for the right way to express her truth. “When the gods fell, the angelic orders were destroyed. Our purpose, our very reason for being, unraveled and left us twisted. Technically, until I restored the Order, I was a deva.”
“What’s the difference?” I asked.
“Free will, for one thing.” A shadow of past pain flickered through Tyrsilene’s eyes. “I couldn’t tell anyone what I truly was. I could only hope the goodwill of others would convince someone to give me what I needed. I had a few trinkets—”
“Like the compass?”
“Like the compass, which was meant to track down my sisters.” Tyrsilene paused and touched my cheek with one finger. “And then you saved me. The ritual restored us to our former roles, and our minds were restored.”
She kissed me again, and she was much, much better at it this time. When I teased her with the tip of my tongue, Tyrsilene drew back.
“Well, that was different.” She licked my upper lip. “I think I like it.”
