by Nick Harrow
“Looks boring,” Zillah said.
“It’s not as exciting as a fight,” I admitted. “But it is very important to get this right.”
I imagined a half sphere with a ten-foot radius. A little mental math told me the chamber would take up about twenty-one hundred cubic feet, which was big enough for me and Zillah, and maybe even her tail.
The Tablet of Engineering shimmered for a moment, but my room did not appear on its golden surface.
[[[Invalid Location]]]
“You have got to be kidding me,” I groaned. The error message from the tablet was less informative than the garbage error codes my old PC threw when it was in a bad mood. “Fine, I’ll walk over there and then make the room.”
I used my finger like a stylus and drew a straight line from my cobra throne to the stele. The line pulsed with a soft golden glow when I lifted my finger and then vanished.
[[[Obstacles between passage entrance and exit. Manual routing required.]]]
I cursed and restrained myself from throwing the tablet across the room. Why couldn’t anything ever be simple?
“Did you break it?” Zillah asked. “My old dungeon lord broke his shit all the time. He spent a fortune on wizard fees to fix things.”
“I didn’t break it,” I said. “There’s something blocking the passage. We’ll have to make the passage as we go.”
Maybe the hour I had before Nephket reached her goal wouldn’t be enough to reach the stele.
I tapped the Opener of the Ways ability on the tablet to see if I could figure out what might be blocking me.
[[[OPENER OF THE WAYS
Duration: Permanent
Cost: 0 ka
All dungeon lords are granted this ability at the moment they attain that title. This ability allows the dungeon lord to create new dungeon chambers and the passageways to connect them. Chambers and passages must be entirely contained within the perimeter of the dungeon lord’s territory, and no single room may occupy more than 250,000 cubic feet.
Dungeon lords may craft statues, columns, or other items integral to the dungeon, but furniture, treasure, and other removable items must be purchased or otherwise created.
Passages cannot be routed through hazards (water, lava, open space), and must be at least 3 feet wide and 3 feet tall.
Passages and chambers cannot be created in or overlapping space occupied by living, animated, celestial, infernal, or undead creatures. Furthermore, the dungeon lord cannot change the portion of a passage or chamber currently occupied by a living, animated, celestial, infernal, or undead creature, though they can modify the space around such a creature.
For example, if a raider is standing on the dungeon floor, the dungeon lord could create a wall in front of that raider, but he could not create a pit trap on the floor where the raider is standing, nor could he fill the space occupied by the raider with solid stone.]]]
“Son of a bitch,” I snarled. It seemed like the most likely thing that could be blocking me was a living creature. Or creatures. “Looks like you might get a chance to fight sooner rather than later.”
Zillah bounced with excitement in a way that made me want to halt all our plans and spend some quality time reenacting our fun together the previous night.
“That’s a good idea,” Zillah said as if she’d read my mind. “A little of the old in-and-out purges the nervous energy, you know. We’ll be more relaxed, less likely to jump at shadows. Come on.”
With a lascivious grin, the scorpion queen grabbed my hand and pulled it toward her chest.
“After,” I said. She pouted and then arched her back with her hands on her hips. It was an alluring pose, but we had other problems to deal with. “Nice try. Believe me, there’s nothing I’d rather do right now, but work first, play later. Otherwise, we’re going to end up like your old dungeon lord.”
Zillah’s flirtatious manner withered instantly at that comment.
“I’m not going down like that again, and neither are you,” she said. “What do we need to do?”
“First, we need some scouts,” I said. Pinchy responded instantly to my summons and rounded up the rest of the scorpions to join us in the burial chamber. “Then we have some walking to do.”
“I thought you said there’d be fighting,” Zillah grumbled. “I’m hungry, and now I’m all excited and you’re not going to take care of it, so there’d better be fighting.”
“Trust me, the way this has gone so far, there’s definitely going to be fighting,” I said.
Pinchy and the rest of the scorpions skittered out of the small opening I’d created on the eastern wall of my burial chamber. They scampered toward Zillah, tails raised apprehensively, and scuttled around the scorpion queen’s tail and insectile feet.
“Oh. My. God,” Zillah squealed with delight. She clasped her hands to her mouth. “These are adorable. Tell me you have more of them somewhere. I want them all to live in my bedroom so I can play with them whenever I want.”
“Just the ones you see, so far,” I said. “They’re going to help us find our way.”
Zillah scooped up one of the scorpions and held it in front of her face. She leaned forward and kissed it on the stinger, and the scorpion seemed to melt into the palm of her hand. It was as relaxed as any puppy or kitten I’d ever seen, fully confident that Zillah wouldn’t hurt it and loved it to pieces.
This job just kept getting weirder.
“Watch my back,” I said to Zillah. “I have to concentrate on this tablet to get it to work, and I can’t always see what’s going on around me. I don’t want to get a knife in the back.”
“We’re on it,” Zillah said. She chattered something to the scorpions, and they formed a quick perimeter around me. “I’ve never had minions before. This is going to be fun.”
I wanted to correct Zillah about whose minions the scorpions were, but there’d be a better time for that. For the moment, I needed to concentrate on guiding the passageway to my new stele.
The west wall of my burial chamber was the closest to our goal, so I focused my attention on it. I willed the tablet to create a passageway there, and it complied by creating a ten-foot-wide by ten-foot-tall by ten-foot-deep opening.
So far, so good.
That process worked for about a hundred yards, but I realized I couldn’t just keep heading west. I’d bust through the side of the hill, and then there’d be no end of trouble with the Guild’s guards. A little more concentration showed me elevation lines on my tablet, and I tilted our passageway down at a steep, but still manageable, angle.
We kept on like that for another two hundred yards, and then I realized that the oasis was wide, but it was also extremely deep, and the stele lay beneath its lowest point by a few hundred yards. We had to go much, much lower if we didn’t want to end up swimming to our goal.
No wonder the tablet hadn’t been able to figure out a safe route to the new chamber. It was far below us, and there was a metric shit-ton of water in the way.
I really needed to get a better handle on how to read the information I received from the Tablet of Engineering before someone got killed.
Someone like me.
It was time to change tactics. A ramp that would get us low enough would be too steep to walk, so I tried to visualize what I needed. It took me a few frustrating seconds to get moving again, which was apparently too much for the scorpion queen.
“Where are the bad guys?” Zillah asked. “I’m bored. I need to kill something.”
“We’ll find some soon, I’m sure,” I said. “I need to imagine a descending spiral tunnel in my head, and it’s harder than it sounds.”
That was the most nerve-racking part of this whole process. The tablet did a great job of creating the passages I directed it, and it even included supports and hardened the tunnel’s surface to keep it from caving in. But it was difficult to guide the passageway without knowing what was around us. It was like playing Minecraft without a torch. If I made the wrong move, I could open a
hole into an underground stream and drown us all.
Well, it wouldn’t drown me, but it would definitely drown Zillah and the scorpions. They’d respawn in their dungeon lairs at sunset, sure, but I’d promised Zillah I wouldn’t get her killed unnecessarily. I didn’t want to be that kind of dungeon lord.
The only way we’d survive this was if I visualized exactly what I wanted in minute detail, one small step at a time. My meditation exercises came in handy then, and I used them to clear my mind and concentrate on each specific moment.
Our progress wasn’t as fast as I would have liked, but I kept us moving. The passageway corkscrewed down into the earth at a steady pace, and I didn’t get my guardians killed.
Twice on our way down, I had to reroute the passage because drips of water or a stinking squirt of subterranean gas found its way into the tunnel. I sealed those hazards away before they could cause any damage, but they were good reminders that nothing down here was truly safe.
Not even for a dungeon lord and his crew.
“Wait,” Zillah said. “There’s something moving nearby. Something close.”
The scorpions had reacted to this potential new threat as well. All of them faced the same wall, their claws raised for battle, and their tails poised to strike. Pinchy, especially, seemed agitated. She scuttled from one side to the other, but her tail was always trained on the same spot.
“How big is it?” I asked. As much as I didn’t want to pick a fight, I needed more ka. If this was a monster Zillah and the scorpions could battle, I wouldn’t turn down the go-go juice.
“Hard to tell,” Zillah said. “Its movements are very irregular, and it keeps stopping.”
“This direction?” I tapped my finger against the wall the scorpions stared at.
“Yes,” Zillah said. “You could open a passage, and I’ll—”
“You won’t do anything, yet,” I said. “But I’ve got an idea.”
I opened a hole in the wall the scorpions faced and pushed it forward a few feet. Then I reached out to one of the fierce arachnids and merged a portion of my mind with its primitive intellect.
“I’m taking this arachnid out for a spin,” I said to Zillah. It was challenging to split my mind this way, and I didn’t know how long I’d be able to maintain focus on both halves. “Keep an eye on me. Don’t let me fall over or wander off.”
“I’ll keep you very close,” Zillah said. She looped her tail around both of us and squeezed me tight to her body. “Very, very close.”
I had to admit, there weren’t many things I’d rather be pressed against than Zillah’s curves. The chitin that covered her breasts and other sensitive areas was far more flexible than it appeared, and she’d been able to retract it completely when we—
Back to the task at hand.
The scorpion’s ability to sense vibrations guided me as it inched along. It was a slow, painstaking process, but by following its lead I was able to create a small tunnel that led ever closer to whatever beast prowled nearby.
A few minutes later, my scout passage opened into a much larger tunnel.
Scorpions have terrible eyesight because they don’t need it. They hunt by vibration, and if something is smaller than they are, they try to sting it. Their lives, like their minds and their senses, are simple. Unfortunately, that meant I didn’t get a very clear picture of what we were up against.
Based on what my scorpion scout told me, we’d breached into an open space that was about fifteen feet wide and almost as tall. This new tunnel’s surfaces were rough and unfinished, and it meandered in a way that made me think that it must be a natural cavern of some sort.
The creature who’d been making the noise had moved on, but my scorpions still felt its footfalls through the stone floor. My scout could get a better picture of what we were trailing because his feet touched the same surface as the wandering monster. The vibrations the scorpion felt belonged to a barefoot creature a little larger than your average human, but that was as much as my arachnid scout could tell me.
I tried to use my super special dungeon lord powers to determine just how strong the bastard was, but that was a big no-go. He wasn’t inside my dungeon, so he might as well have been on the dark side of the moon as far as my dungeon lord powers were concerned.
“It’s just one guy,” I said. “Or creature? Not sure exactly what it is. It’s a little bigger than a man, and it doesn’t have shoes.”
“That narrows it down to all the humanoid monsters. I think there are only a few hundred of them,” Zillah said with a grin. “But I’m game to rip its heart out if you are.”
“All right,” I said. “Let’s do this.”
I commanded the Tablet of Engineering to expand the scout trail until it was ten feet wide by ten feet tall. It did so without hesitation, and within seconds Zillah, the scorpions, and I stood at the entrance to the natural cavern that held our prey.
As a dungeon lord, I had no trouble seeing in the pitch-blackness that surrounded us, and the scorpions didn’t need anything but their feet on the floor to tell where they were going. Zillah didn’t seem to mind the darkness, either, and I assumed she had some fancier version of the same vibration sense her smaller cousins possessed. That didn’t give us any advantage over the creature we hunted—it was obviously as comfortable down here as we were—but at least we weren’t at a disadvantage.
“Let’s get them,” Zillah said with a devilish grin. “This is going to be so much fun.”
Before I could tell her to wait until I’d moved the tunnel up to our target, she darted into the cavern, and the scorpions followed her on nearly silent legs.
I wanted to call out to Zillah and tell her to come back to the dungeon but held my tongue. If the target heard me, that would put Zillah in even more danger than she’d already put herself in by leaving the dungeon. I needed her to come back so we could harvest the ka from whatever was ahead of us. Irritated, I stomped after her.
But the second I tried to cross the threshold of the passage I’d created in this subterranean tunnel, my body froze.
I could no more leave my dungeon than I could fly. The open passage ahead of me might as well have been a solid stone wall. I tried three times and cursed each time. It wasn’t happening.
Zillah, on the other hand, was so caught up in the hunt she hadn’t even noticed I wasn’t behind her. I reached out to her thoughts, but it wasn’t as simple as it had been with Nephket. Zillah worked for me as a boss monster in my dungeon, but we weren’t bonded like I was with my familiar, and her mind was far too complex to manipulate like I had the scorpion’s. There was a connection there, but it wasn’t an open stream of communication like I had with the cat woman.
I tried to force my way into her thoughts then, because I needed to make sure she understood the plan. If they killed the monster outside my dungeon, I got nothing, and this risk was all for nothing. She needed to lure it back here, so I could reap its sweet, sweet ka while she ate its heart.
“Come back,” I growled and hoped the scorpion queen heard me.
When Zillah didn’t respond, I took more drastic action. She might be able to resist my thoughts, but Pinchy certainly couldn’t.
I commandeered my favorite scorpion and took stock of the situation. Pinchy and her allies were gathered together on the cavern’s wall. I sensed Zillah off to their left, and the lack of vibrations in the floor told me she wasn’t currently moving.
Good.
I told Pinchy to scamper off the wall and head over to Zillah, and the scorpion immediately agreed. The sharp tip-tap of her chitinous legs against the stone floor was virtually silent, but the sound still made me wince. We had no idea what we were hunting. What if it heard that sound and attacked before Zillah could return to the dungeon?
My favorite arachnid reached Zillah’s tail, and I ordered her to climb it onto the scorpion queen’s back. At the same time, I pushed my thoughts toward Zillah’s mind to get her attention.
“Zillah,” I thought,
“lure the monster back here.”
Pinchy reached my boss monster’s shoulder and plucked at her earlobe with a claw. When that got no response, the scorpion waved the tip of her stinger right in front of Zillah’s eyes.
“What?” Zillah finally asked. “Don’t blow this.”
But Pinchy understood and wasn’t about to give up. She tugged at Zillah’s blond ponytail and clacked her claws next to the scorpion queen’s ear.
“Oh, shit,” Zillah said. “It’s the boss? Dammit, I’m all ears now.”
The connection between Zillah and me snapped into focus. Her thoughts pressed against mine, and for a moment her presence was so strong I could smell her as clearly as if she’d stood right next to me.
“You can’t kill whatever it is out there,” I said. “It has to be inside my dungeon, so I can reap its ka.”
“Oh,” Zillah said. Through Pinchy’s poor sight, the scorpion queen looked like an amorphous blob with a fountain of gold spraying from the top of her head. “Thanks for the reminder. We’ll be right back. This looks like your basic zombie. Nothing we can’t handle.”
Zillah patted Pinchy on the head, then stood up and hoisted her spear into the air. She clattered its forked tines against the stone ceiling so hard that chips of limestone came loose and clattered to the cavern’s floor around her.
“Hey, ugly,” she shouted. “This way.”
She was answered by a sound that reminded me of an old wooden door creaking open. A low, sepulchral moan followed that sound, and then there was a scramble of bare feet slapping against stone.
“Yikes,” Zillah yelped in surprise. “Climb aboard, scorpion friends, this is not a zombie.”
A few moments later I heard Zillah scrambling across the stone as she approached the passageway. Her insectile feet ticked against the floor with a sound like a hundred millipedes in a big, fat hurry.
