by Nick Harrow
I sketched a picture of the bed on the tablet’s golden surface. I transformed one of the greataxes to pay for the new bed, and it vanished off the list of treasures on the right side of the tablet.
Zillah clapped her hands and pointed excitedly at her new furniture.
“That’s perfect!” she shouted. She pounced onto the bed, and its frame groaned as she burrowed beneath the loose furs. She pulled the blanket over her head, then peered at me from beneath its edge.
“Welcome to my lair, dungeon lord,” she said. “Come closer. I wish to show you something.”
I laughed and walked over to the bed. I’d positioned it against the far western wall, giving Zillah some privacy from those passing by the entrances to her room and providing her with a good spot from which to launch an ambush. I considered adding doors to the room but decided against it. I didn’t want anything to deter raiders from coming into this room.
“What did you want to show me?” I asked.
Zillah’s hands shot out from beneath the edge of the blanket and wrapped tightly around my waist. She pulled me forward as her tail flung the blanket up and over our heads, and velvety darkness descended around us.
“My happiness,” she whispered. She bit my lip just on the right side of drawing blood and flicked the tip of her tongue across mine. “I think I’ll be very happy here.”
Zillah leaned back onto her tail and hooked her human legs around my waist. She wrapped the fingers of her left hand around the back of my neck and pulled her face close to mine. Her other hand clawed lightly at my back, and she moaned hungrily as she kissed me again.
I wondered what dungeon lord HR would say about this.
“Hey,” I said pulling back slightly. I brushed a loose strand of hair back over her ear and hooked one arm around her waist. “You don’t have to do this.”
“I want to,” she said. Her voice was raw-edged with a primal need. “I have been in that cold, dead place for far too long. I want to be warm again.”
We kissed again, and the last barriers between us fell. We twisted and writhed and pulled at one another until I couldn’t tell where one of us ended and the other began. We went at each other like savage beasts, on and on until dawn approached, and Zillah finally curled up next to me and faded off to sleep.
I stayed with the sleeping scorpion queen for an hour, then left her on the bed, a faint smile on her lips. I returned to my burial chamber and felt good. Energized. I was ready to make plans for the day ahead.
I should have known everything was about to go to shit.
Nephket entered the tomb just after dawn on a whirlwind of fear and anger. I felt her thoughts as clearly as I’d felt Zillah pressed up against me and flew off the cobra throne to meet her in the audience chamber.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“The Raiders Guild,” she gasped.
Nephket struggled to catch her breath, and I clasped both hands to her shoulders to steady her.
“Slow down,” I said. “Breathe, then talk.”
She gulped a few lungfuls of air, then started again.
“The Guild interrogated the elf with the mohawk after their healers healed him,” she sobbed. “They’re sending guards up to block the entrance to the tomb.”
She stared at me, her eyes filled with tears.
“They’ll be here soon,” she said. “We’re trapped.”
Chapter 8: War Council
NEPHKET WAS SO SHAKY and terrified, it took me almost a minute to calm her down enough to get more details out of her. While I soothed my familiar’s nerves, I reached out to Pinchy to make sure there weren’t any raiders on the dungeon’s doorstep. Fortunately, the only vibrations my favorite scorpion felt belonged to our group.
Pinchy couldn’t talk, but she was able to communicate in her own way. The scorpion made it clear she would warn me long before any enemies got near. She seemed almost possessive of the dungeon, and I found her attitude comforting. It’s good to know someone’s got your back.
Nephket’s distress, on the other hand, was anything but.
“Slow down.” I pulled my familiar into a tight embrace. She burrowed her face into my shoulder and clung to me like a drowning woman holding on to a life vest. After a few minutes, her wracking sobs subsided, and I thought she was ready to tell me the rest of the story. “What happened?”
“Some wahket have pretended to be friendly with the raiders since the hateful beasts arrived at the oasis,” Nephket said with a shaky sob. “Mostly my people just talked with the raiders, plied them with drinks to get gossip and find out what the Guild was up to.”
“That’s good thinking,” I said appreciatively. “Did they hear something new?”
“There was a lot of commotion early this morning,” Nephket said. “The elf with the mohawk, he’s the one who tipped off the Guild that something was strange about your dungeon. He’s a coward, and his recall amulet was set to pull him out after he’d suffered far less severe wounds than most raiders. That’s how the healers got him back on his feet so fast. He told the Guild everything.”
I was really starting to hate elves.
“What, exactly, did he tell them?” I asked. “He couldn’t have seen much before he popped out of here with his tail between his legs.”
Nephket gave me a squeeze and then stepped back to wipe the tears from her eyes and straighten her clothes. She took a deep breath and paced in front of my throne to burn off the nervous energy that coursed through her veins.
“He told them this place has a dungeon lord,” she said with an angry snort. “I think he guessed that part, because you were in the burial chamber and he never reached that section of the dungeon, but the Guild believed him. They issued an edict that barred all raiders from your tomb until further notice.”
“All right, so we won’t be getting any more fresh meat,” I said. “Or at least the Guild doesn’t think we will. Didn’t they already ban anyone else from coming up here after I kicked that dark elf’s ass? Because we certainly didn’t have any trouble convincing a bunch of those punks to break the rules for a shot at some gold and gems.”
“This time, they’re enforcing the ban on further raids with guards,” Nephket explained.
That sucked. I’d counted on a stream of ka from morons to strengthen my dungeon for Kezakazek’s inevitable return for vengeance, and now that cowardly elf had taken that off the table.
I did already have a boss monster, something Nephket didn’t know about yet, which would be a challenge for even a more advanced set of raiders. Zillah was a deadly encounter for a level-two raiding party, and she’d still pose a decent threat to even a level-four group of treasure hunters. From what I’d seen of the raiders, I was confident Zillah and the scorpions would be able to hold off anything the Guild could throw at us on short notice. It wouldn’t be easy, but they could do it.
“We’ll just have to make do with what we have,” I said. “Tell the wahket to stay at home. I don’t want them getting mixed up in this. It might be a good idea to send them away—”
Nephket interrupted me with a deep breath. She tilted her head back and wrinkled her nose. She leaned close to me and sniffed at the hollow of my throat.
“What is that smell?” the priestess asked. Her nose crinkled again, and her eyes narrowed as she concentrated on the scent. “Did you get more scorpions?”
“There’s something I want to show you,” I said. Nephket followed me to the formerly empty treasure vault.
“What is that?” Nephket jabbed her finger toward the fur-covered bed in the corner of the room.
“My new boss monster,” I said.
My thoughts brushed against Zillah’s slumbering mind, and she came awake almost instantly. Her tail flung the pile of furs to the foot of the bed, and she reared up and stretched her arms wide. A tremendous yawn escaped from the scorpion queen, and she wiped the sleep from her eyes with the back of one hand.
“Is it morning already?” she groaned. “I don�
�t feel like I slept at all.”
Nephket stared at Zillah for a moment, took a deep breath, and then looked back at me.
“That’s what you did last night?” she asked.
“You bet he did,” Zillah said with a smirk. “Are you one of his recruits, too?”
The scorpion woman jumped out of her bed and bounded across the floor to Nephket. For a moment, I was sure Zillah would kill Nephket. Then she crashed into the priestess, threw her arms around her, and squeezed Neph so tight she couldn’t catch a breath.
“He’s a pretty decent dungeon lord,” Zillah said. “You’ll like him. Did he make you a bed, too? Did he—”
Nephket looked startled and a little amused. She tried to pull away from Zillah, but the scorpion queen kept right on chattering and didn’t seem interested in releasing her hug.
“There are so many things we can learn from each other,” Zillah said. “I was stuck in that grove for ages. My last dungeon lord, he was awful. You know many times I died? Let me show you.”
Zillah stretched one arm over her head and pointed at a tiny scar just above her left breast with the other.
“I got this one when—”
“We’re under a bit of a time crunch,” I said to Zillah. “The Raiders Guild has it in for us.”
Zillah groaned and released her hold on Nephket. She leaned forward and planted a more-than-just-friends sort of kiss on the cat woman’s cheek.
“We’re not done talking,” she said with a wink to Nephket. The scorpion queen yawned again, then turned her attention back to me. “I can’t believe the Guild still exists. They’ve always been a giant pack of assholes. We should wipe them out.”
“I’m with you,” I said. “But why don’t we listen to what Nephket has to say about the situation before we make a decision.”
I had Nephket repeat the story she’d told me, and Zillah’s frown became more pronounced with every sentence.
“This is bad news,” she said. “That’s how they busted my last dungeon lord’s balls. They locked us up behind a wall of guards to keep us from harvesting any ka, then sent in an extermination squad to finish the job.”
“That does not sound good,” Nephket said.
“It’s very not good,” Zillah agreed.
“I can seal the dungeon,” I said. “Let their guards sit out there until they starve, for all I care.”
But the more I thought about that, the worse my plan sounded. If Nolas the mohawked elf had warned the Guild about what happened in here, they knew the wahket were working with me. If I locked the raiders out of my dungeon, they’d just take it out on the cat women. I would be safe in here, at least for a while, but how would I live with myself knowing the people I’d sworn to protect were being murdered in my stead?
Nephket seem to read my mind and nodded solemnly as I blew out an angry sigh.
“You could try that, but it wouldn’t work,” Zillah said. “Extermination squads are all level ten or higher. You could put up a wall, but they’d cast Stone to Mud or some other spell and make it go away. Or they’d send up a company of miners to bust it down. Then they’d storm the place and gut us all like a bunch of fishes.”
Okay, that really sucked. Fourth-level raiders we could handle. If we really stretched it, maybe we could hold off level fives. But a whole party of tenth-level murder hobos?
Impossible.
“There’s no way we’ll be able to fight a group with that many levels on us,” I said. “But if they had level tens sitting around camp, why did they send Kezakazek up here first?”
“Oh, I know, I know, pick me!” Zillah bounced on her tail and raised her hand in the air like a kindergarten student who had to pee.
Nephket raised an eyebrow at me, but she couldn’t completely stifle the grin that tugged at the corners of her lips. Zillah was a handful, but there was no denying she was fun to have around.
A lot of fun.
“Go ahead and tell us,” I said to Zillah.
“After the Godfall, there were too many raiders,” the scorpion queen explained. “No government, not even those crazy Blood Thralls, wanted adventurers running wild in their territory on the hunt for marrow shards, so they wrote up the Raid Accords lickety-split and created the Guild. When a new dungeon is found, the Guild sets up a base and invites adventurers of an appropriate level, according to their diviners, to come and try their hand at cleaning out the dungeon. They draw lots to decide who gets first crack at the goodies, and that team gets three tries before they’re washed out and they give the next group a shot.”
“That still doesn’t explain the tenth-level extermination squads,” Nephket prodded Zillah.
“Oh, yeah,” the scorpion queen said. “Okay, so, no offense, but this was a pretty weak dungeon, right? Any level threes or higher wouldn’t waste their time or money paying for a Guild transport out here and waiting around to maybe get a chance at picking up a few dozen gold pieces. I’d be surprised if there were any raiders here who were above first level.
“But now the Guild is super pissed, and they’re gonna bring in the big guns. They’ll summon the nearest extermination squad and wait for them to show up.”
Nephket stopped pacing for a moment and raised one finger.
“That makes sense,” the priestess explained. “The Guild has a teleportation gate set up outside of the oasis. Right now, it’s tuned to the recall amulets. But if no one comes into the dungeon, they won’t need that. They’ll start the process of attunement to align the gate to summon the exterminators.”
“They only need a couple of days to do that,” Zillah said. “Once the gate is opened, the Guild will send a messenger back to their headquarters. It may take them another day or two longer to put together an extermination squad. The squad will teleport here. To kill you. And me. Probably cat girl, too, since I’ll bet a Guild spy saw her run up to the dungeon today.”
It was my turn to pace back and forth. I’d only been here for two damned days, and already I’d found myself in an impossible situation. My plan had been solid, and if I’d had more time to level up the dungeon before the Raiders Guild caught wind of what I’d done, who knows what we might’ve been able to accomplish?
But, no, that’s not how shit had worked out. I had a very short time to figure out how to stop a group of raiders five times my level from not just kicking my ass but also killing all the wahket.
And Zillah.
And Nephket.
“This gate of theirs,” I said. “How far away is it?”
Nephket squatted on the sandy floor and popped one claw from the tip of her finger. She quickly sketched out the ring of hills that surrounded the village, drew a smaller circle inside it to indicate the oasis itself, then added an X to mark my tomb. She drew a small cross on the far side of the oasis and circled it with her finger.
“It’s here,” she said. “The Guild support staff poured out of the gate the morning after your core activated and set up the camp before nightfall. Kezakazek came a couple of days later, and you know the rest.”
The cartel had told me that DECS had been active for an hour or two before they’d dragged me out of bed to stop the hack. The only way that would line up with my core becoming active and the Guild attacking was if time was very different here than it was back on Earth. Maybe it was. Anything was possible at this point.
I dragged my thoughts back to the present because we had much more pressing concerns than trying to figure out the time differential between my hometown and Soketra.
“Okay,” I said. My time as a hacker had taught me the way to tackle big problems was to break them down into smaller problems. “If we want to stop the extermination squad, we have to shut down the gate. How do we do that?
“I can’t incarnate, because I don’t have enough ka, and even if I did have the go-go juice, I can’t leave my dungeon. I don’t want Zillah and the scorpions to leave the tomb, either, because I need them here to help guard the core in case the Guild launches a sneak at
tack.”
“That’s true,” Nephket said with a frustrated frown. “I would lead the wahket on a raid against the gate, but we might lose more than we gain.”
“You’re brave,” I said, “but you’re not fighters. How far away is that gate?”
“Roughly a mile,” Nephket estimated.
That was a long hike through enemy territory for the wahket on the surface, and an impossible distance for me and my monster pals. But there might be another way.
“I reached the second level after we took out that last group of raiders,” I said. “Which means I can open two more rooms in my dungeon.”
“What good would that do?” Zillah asked. “If they posted guards outside the door, you aren’t going to get any more raiders in here. And two more rooms without any monsters or traps in them won’t even slow the extermination squad down for a minute.”
“That’s a good point, Negative Nellie,” I said. “But if the gate won’t come to me, then I will go to the gate.”
“You can do that?” Nephket asked. “I’ve never read anything like that in the old texts. Are you sure it will work?”
My pacing continued as I chewed over the dilemma. I hadn’t seen anything on the Tablet of Engineering about the maximum distance between rooms, but there had to be some limit. I knew that corridors didn’t count against the cubic footage of my dungeon, but could I really put a room a mile away?
I was sure as hell going to try.
The golden Tablet of Engineering appeared in my hands, and I willed its overhead view of my dungeon to zoom out until my tomb was little more than a tiny dot in the center of the tablet.
The tablet drew in the terrain and surface details around my dungeon in quick, efficient strokes. Altitude lines showed me the ring of hills on my side of the oasis as well as the depths of the water. But the map only extended halfway across the pool. I couldn’t see the gate at all.
Well, fuck.
If the tablet wouldn’t show me the gate, maybe there was another way.
“I think we can do this,” I said confidently. “But I need your help, Neph.”
