by Nick Harrow
“Bastards,” Nephket hissed and then slinked away from the door and into the shadows of the sycamore fig. For a moment, I lost sight of the dwarves as Nephket turned her back on them to hide.
I opened my eyes and summoned the Tablet of Engineering. Golden dots that represented the wahket appeared where I’d stationed the cat women. Four red dots showed me where the dwarves were, and I found that if I focused my attention on those dots, my viewpoint shifted to the room they occupied. A little concentration allowed me to move my point of view around like my own personal spy drone.
As a dungeon lord, I had the best seat in the house.
Under Nephket’s guidance, the wahket had already lit all the torches in the statue room I’d modified earlier. The dwarves’ shadows jumped behind them like long, ebony cloaks as they entered that room and made their way down the steps to the bottom of the channel I’d created.
“Weird place,” the warrior in the lead said. There was just room to walk two abreast down the sunken pathway, but that would’ve put them shoulder to shoulder and at risk of hitting one another with their weapons if they had to fight.
While the dwarves were smart enough to walk single file, they weren’t smart enough to leave much space between them. In their drunken state the raiders had badly misjudged the situation, and there was no way they could recover from their foolish mistake in time.
When their leader was halfway across the statue room, the wahket sprang into action.
The cat women emerged from the shadows behind the statues and seized the ropes they’d rigged up earlier. Each of the ropes wound around the ankles of the statues, which I’d weakened with a little dungeon lord magic from the Tablet of Engineering. Groups of wahket on either side of the channel pulled on the ropes for all they were worth.
The first statue toppled from its pedestal and crashed into the five-foot-wide and ten-foot-deep channel. The lead dwarf heard the statue’s legs splinter and looked up just in time to catch a face full of falling stone. The impact crushed his nose and most of his skull, and he vanished in a burst of red light. The fallen statue wobbled for a moment and then fell back onto the next dwarf in line who thrust his battle axe up to arrest its fall and save himself from instant death.
He was stronger than he looked and used his weapon’s sturdy haft to catch the statue and keep its weight from crushing him. He grunted and groaned with the effort of holding up the massive hunk of stone, which put him out of the fight as surely as if he were already dead.
The priest who’d been at the rear of the dwarven marching order called for a retreat in a drunken, slurred voice. He took a step back to follow his own command, but it was already too late for him.
The rest of the statues fell like deadly dominoes. A perfect wahket stone breast slammed into the top of the dwarf priest’s head so hard it cracked his skull like a soft-boiled egg. The priest’s spine crackled like dry leaves in a campfire as the statue’s weight bore down on him, and then he, too, vanished in a crimson flare.
“Shit,” the third dwarf in line shouted. A chunk of statue the size of a car tire slammed into the back of his neck and damn near took his head off. Poof, he was consumed by a splash of crimson light.
The last dwarf trembled with the strain of holding the statue above him, but it was a wasted effort. Another statue fell across the first, and the weight was too much for him to bear. The thin bones in both of his forearms shattered with a sound like someone had just stomped on a sheet of bubble wrap, and an avalanche of stone slammed into his chest like a wrecking ball. His recall amulet flared with ruddy light, and he was gone.
“It worked,” Nephket cried. She’d watched the whole thing from the shadows of the entryway and rushed into the room with her fists raised above her head. “We won!”
The rest of the wahket answered her with shouts and cheers. Their eyes gleamed in the firelight, and I saw something dark and wild in them. The battle with the Raiders Guild had only begun, but already my followers were much different women than the beaten and scared creatures I’d seen when I first arrived. They’d drawn the blood of their enemies, and now they had a taste for it.
A dark grin stretched across my face as I leaned back into my cobra throne. Everything had gone exactly the way I’d planned.
The raiders were doomed.
Chapter 5: Dark Harvest
THE WAHKET DIDN’T WAIT for their priestess to tell them what to do next. They clambered down the walls of the audience chamber’s killing pathway and rooted through the rubble in search of loot dropped by the fallen dwarves.
They laughed and cheered one another on as they dug weapons and armor out of the rubble. It was like watching kids on an Easter egg hunt, if those kids had just murdered a bunch of armored bunnies in their quest for blood-spattered eggs.
So, yeah, maybe not all that much like an Easter egg hunt.
Nephket clambered up the ladder at the end of the channel and snapped her fingers to get the wahket’s attention.
“Bring whatever you find to the burial chamber,” she said. “And then head home and get some rest. You all did amazing work tonight.”
“As did you,” I told Nephket once she was alone. “You’re quite an actress.”
“I just thought about how much I wanted them gone, and it was easy,” she replied with a smile.
“How did the wahket get up to the statues?” the priestess asked when she entered the burial chamber. “Did they all have to climb the ladder?”
“No,” I explained. “I added a twisty little tunnel branch that leads from the hall outside the burial chamber to the upper level of the statue room. The only time any of us will have to use the ladder is when we enter or leave the dungeon. If the wahket need to retreat, they can escape through the tunnel and regroup back in the burial chamber.”
“Good thinking,” Nephket said. She pulled her cape off and draped it over the edge of the sarcophagus. “Can I keep the armor? I like the way it makes me feel.”
“And how is that?” I asked.
“Stronger,” she said. “No, that’s not right. Safer?”
“Keep it as long as you want,” I said. “But try not to wear it in your village. The other raiders might start asking Peska questions you don’t want to answer.”
“True,” the priestess said. “How was the ka harvest?”
I’d been so wrapped up in the success of my plan that the ka had totally slipped my mind. I flipped my arm over to peek and cursed at what I saw.
There were two ka vessels on the inside of my arm, both bright blue and smooth as glass.
“One,” I grumbled. “Just one mote of ka. Shouldn’t there have been more for taking out all four of those stupid dwarves?”
Nephket crossed the room to look at the second vessel. She pressed her finger to its glossy surface and closed her eyes. She took a deep breath and wrinkled her nose like she’d smelled something foul.
“Ugh,” she complained. “It was the liquor. It weakened their lifeforce and diluted their ka.”
“Damnit,” I said. “I should’ve known. They were only first-level to begin with. All that booze I had you pour down their necks must’ve reduced their challenge to a level-zero party. They were hardly worth the killing. I’m just glad none of the wahket were injured.”
Nephket looked down at her feet while I spoke. She looked a little sad and more than a little embarrassed.
“This isn’t your fault,” I said. “I value your advice, but the plan was mine.”
One deep breath, then two, and I let all my anger and frustration go. I’d made a mistake, but there was no sense being an asshole about it.
“I know enough about how role-playing games work that I shouldn’t have screwed this up. It’s a mistake I won’t make a second time,” I promised.
“This isn’t a game,” Nephket said with a frown. “This is my life, Lord —”
“Clay,” I said. “My name’s—”
“—Rathokhetra. It is your life, as well.”
Nephket surprised me with a throaty chuckle somewhere between a purr and a laugh. She reached out and stroked my arm with her clawed fingertips.
“I’ve forgotten you have been elsewhere for so long,” she said. “You don’t know about the Godfall.”
That word triggered an avalanche of Rathokhetra’s memories. I reeled under the weight of the images as they crashed through my thoughts like a hailstorm.
Massive armies marched across one battlefield after another. The pennants of their faith snapped above their heads like the beating wings of enormous raptors. They clashed against their enemies again and again; they trampled crops into rotten compost, burned temples to the ground, and razed whole cities.
The holy wars left one world after another in smoldering ruins. As their followers perished, the gods fell from their high thrones and their bodies burned away to leave behind nothing but charred bones and the golden marrow within—
“Which is why there is so much ka in the world now,” Nephket said. “With no gods to harness it, the power materialized as the dungeon cores, and that gave rise to the dungeon lords who protect them.”
“And the levels?” I asked.
“That’s how dungeon lords interpret the world and its powers,” Nephket said. “The core helps you to quantify things in a way that aids you in making the correct decisions. The core wants to become more powerful, and it wants you to become more powerful as well.”
“But why?” I asked, not sure I wanted to know the answer.
“There were gods before,” Nephket said. “There will be gods again.”
Suddenly flustered, Nephket cleared her throat and wrung her hands. She turned away from me for a moment, then cleared her throat again.
“But for now, you need ka,” she said.
I wanted to find out more about this god business, but Nephket’s body language was tight and defensive. If I tried to force her to tell me anything else now, the pressure might push her away. Better to focus on the task of beating the shit out of the raiders for now. There’d be time for the rest later.
“We can’t bring in more powerful raiders,” I mused aloud. “First-level raiders are all we can handle until I stock my tomb with some guardians.”
Nephket nodded, and I could see some of the pieces of the puzzle starting to fall into place in her mind. I kept talking to help us both figure out this puzzle.
“Weakening the dwarves before they entered the dungeon must have been the issue,” I said. “I bet we can weaken them after they’re in the tomb and still get a full share of their ka.”
“That’s an excellent plan, but how will we get them to drink the liquor after they are already in the dungeon?” Nephket asked.
“There’s a saying where I’m from,” I said. “You can lead a horse to water, but if he won’t drink it, you might have to stick him with a poison needle.”
“We have a similar saying here, but horses are far too valuable to poison.” She gave me a quizzical frown when I laughed. “Did I say something wrong?”
“No, not at all,” I said with a wave of my hand. I snapped my fingers, and a golden slate appeared on my lap.
“How did you do that?” Nephket asked.
“Ancient dungeon lord secret.” I wiggled my eyebrows at her.
She stared at me for a moment before she realized I was pulling her leg. Then she gifted me with a cute little giggle that made me want to sweep her into my arms.
“All right,” I said. “Let me get down to business here.”
The golden tablet shimmered, and the hieroglyphics shifted and flowed into new patterns. There were slightly more monsters this time than there’d been previously, but even doubling my ka hadn’t gained me all that much. Two motes weren’t enough to summon any terrifying creatures. I needed to be clever, because there was no way I’d have the brute force to defeat unimpaired level-one raiders any other way. Even my statue trap might not be enough, because a sober raider might see it and make a break for it before the wahket could crush his skull.
That would put the cat women at risk, and there was no way I’d do that. They depended on me to keep them safe, not lead them to their doom.
I rejected bandits, guards, even kobolds and more exotic creatures like hobgoblins and half-ogres. None of them was right for the job. I wanted a small creature that didn’t seem dangerous on its own but could still weaken the raiders enough to let the wahket finish them off.
I traced my finger down the tablet and reviewed each of the monsters in turn before I found what I was looking for.
[[[Soketran Tomb Scorpion
Tiny beast, unaligned
Armor Class: 11 (Natural Armor)
Hit Points: 1
Speed: 10 feet
STR: 2 (-4)
DEX: 11 (+0)
CON: 8 (-1)
INT: 1 (-5)
WIS: 8 (-1)
CHA: 2 (-4)
Senses: Vibration sense 120 feet, Passive Perception 9
Languages:—
Challenge: 0 (10 XP)
These scorpions are natives of Soketra and are most often found in or around the tombs of the fallen God Kings. Though individually quite weak, the venom of these scorpions can make adventurers easy prey for more powerful monsters.
Sting: Melee Weapon Attack: +2 to hit. Hit: 1 piercing damage, and the target must resist or be blinded for 6 to 18 (Average 12) seconds.]]]
A dark smile crept across my face as I imagined the confusion and terror this little creature would cause. It was small and weak and would be hard to spot until it struck. The damage from its tail’s stinger was barely a scratch, but a blinded adventurer was a dead adventurer. This was the critter I needed.
I studied the tablet and learned that I could summon five of the tomb scorpions for a single point of ka. From what I’d heard the dwarf say before he walked in to his doom, raiding parties were made up of four people. Five scorpions would give this encounter one surprise shot at each member of the raiding party and two attacks on one member, but would that be enough?
“Never half-ass anything when you can afford to whole ass it,” I said to Nephket.
Two points of ka would summon ten scorpions. Two-on-one were much better odds for my side.
I closed my eyes and willed the creatures to appear in the eastern chamber between the hall of statues and the audience chamber. That done, I dismissed the tablet, and it vanished back to wherever it went to wait until I’d need it again.
I felt the click and scuttle of the scorpions’ claws against the stone floor as they appeared and scrambled around their new home in confusion. My mind touched their primitive thoughts, and the stinging arachnids settled into their new role.
“Hi, little dudes,” I said, and my new guardians focused their attention on me. Even though we weren’t in the same room, they heard my words loud and clear. “You’re my sneaky little ninjas, so no suicide rushes when the raiders show up. You’re free to skulk around and sting anyone who’s not one of the wahket.”
A wave of confusion rolled out of the scorpions, and I pushed an image of the cat women into the front of my thoughts. Little light bulbs lit up in their bug brains, and I knew the cat women were safe.
“All right, then,” I said. “You guys are free to chill out, eat smaller bugs, whatever it is you do. I’ll let you know when the bad guys arrive.”
A bemused smile crept across Nephket’s face.
“Who are you talking to?” she asked me.
“Oh,” I said. “Nobody you’d be too interested in. They aren’t great with small talk.”
Nephket took a seat on the arm of my throne so close I could feel the heat of her body. She adjusted her position. The soft leather armor creaked, and its blackened buckles made soft clinking noises.
“Lyin
g to your familiar isn’t very nice,” she said. Her pout was almost as adorable as the way she purred her Rs. “How am I supposed to help you if you won’t tell me your secrets?”
“I hear it’s best to keep the mystery alive in a relationship,” I said. “But I will say that I’ve fixed our alcohol problem.”
“Oh?” the priestess asked. “That was fast. What do we do next?”
“We’ll need more raiders.” I added my best supervillain laugh. “A lot more raiders.”
“Ambitious. I like it,” Nephket said. “Aren’t you worried that those dwarves will tell the Guild what happened to them after the healers put their broken skulls back together?”
“Nah, they won’t squeal,” I said. “They made a mistake when they came here, and I’m pretty sure they know it. Greed got the best of their common sense, and those dwarves broke their own guild’s rules. If they tell their buddies what happened, there’s no telling what might happen to them. From the sound of it, the Guild might punt them out. And I don’t think raiders have many socially acceptable skills they could use to find gainful employment at another job.”
Neph crossed her left foot over her right knee and reached down to unlace her boot. Her gloved fingers defeated her, though, and she let out an exasperated grunt as she struggled to free her hands from the supple leather. When her glove popped off with less effort than she expected, the sudden move threw Nephket off-balance.
I’ll admit it. I could’ve caught her the instant she started to fall, but I didn’t. I let her slip off the arm of my throne into my lap, and then I caught her before she could tumble to the floor. My left hand hooked around her waist, and my right snatched the glove before it slipped through her fingers.
A startled yelp escaped Nephket’s lips, but she didn’t try to scramble away from me this time. She settled back against me and raised her feet above the throne’s arm.
“These boots,” she groaned. “My feet weren’t made for them.”
“Here, let me help,” I said. For a moment I was worried I wouldn’t be able to touch the tight laces, but apparently Neph’s clothes counted as part of her.
