by Nick Harrow
Nephket’s thoughts pressed against mine for a moment, but I couldn’t tear my concentration away from Zillah.
“Ready or not,” the scorpion queen shouted, “here we come!”
Zillah took the corner into the dungeon passage so sharply that her feet almost shot out from beneath her. Their pointed tips scraped the floor as she threw her body into the passageway and spun around, spear raised to strike.
“What did you bring?” I asked.
“Something dead,” she said. “Which is a huge bummer, because I’m still hungry, and I can’t eat that.”
Pinchy and her friends jumped off Zillah’s tail as the scorpion queen turned back to face the monster. Zillah swung her tail out in front of her. Its tip weaved in the air like a cobra ready to strike.
A moment later a scrawny, bearded man shambled into view. The armor he’d once worn had rotted away long ago and left behind only dried leather straps and a few chunks of rusted metal that did almost nothing to cover his desiccated body. His skin was pulled tight over his face like a leather mask, and his eyes were little more than sunken pits lit from within by chips of unholy green light. Unlike his armor, the two swords the creature wielded looked as sharp and polished as the day they were made. Whatever this was, it still knew how to take care of its blades.
[[[Wight, Medium Undead, Evil, Challenge Rating: 3, 45 Hit Points]]]
“He’s a challenge-rating-three undead,” I informed Zillah. “Watch yourself.”
“You watch me,” the scorpion queen scoffed. She flexed her arms, and the sleek muscles under the flawless skin of her naked back rippled. “You’re going to love this.”
Pinchy and her friends hurried past Zillah to greet the undead creature as it rushed to the attack. They darted between its slapping feet and stabbed its ankles with their stingers. The scorpions’ tails punched through the dried flesh like ice picks through a rotten apple’s shriveled skin. Poison splashed into the wounds they created, but I knew it was pointless. This undead thing was far past the reach of Pinchy’s toxins.
Zillah’s tail struck at the creature, and it jerked its head to one side. Her stinger whiffed through the air, and Zillah barely got it out of the way before the wight could slice it off with his swords. The thing was far faster than it appeared.
“This one’s feisty,” Zillah said. “Miiight have bitten off more than I can chew.”
“Why didn’t you just let it go if it was too strong?” I asked.
The wight lurched into the passage with its swords raised. Both weapons lunged toward Zillah with far more speed and strength than I’d imagined possible. It was a withered husk of a humanoid. How could it be so damned fast?
Zillah thrust her spear up to catch the wight’s blades across its haft. The instant she parried the assault, the scorpion queen spun her weapon like a deadly baton. Her unexpected move threw the undead warrior off-balance, and for a moment both of his weapons were out of position.
“Gotcha, ugly,” Zillah snarled as she plunged her forked weapon into the wight’s rib cage. The impact slammed the undead creature back into the passageway’s wall, and it unleashed a bloodcurdling moan of either pain or anger. Sparks of nauseating green light glimmered in its eye sockets, and I smelled the stench of its rotten breath even at this distance.
The undead slashed at Zillah with both blades, but it couldn’t reach her past the spear that held it pinned to the wall. When it realized its predicament, the wight dropped its blades and grabbed the haft of Zillah’s forked spear with both hands. The monster’s withered muscles must’ve been stronger than they looked, because Zillah struggled to keep the beast trapped.
“I don’t suppose you could stab this thing?” Zillah asked.
“Not at the moment,” I said. “But Pinchy and her friends will help you out.”
My scorpions were most effective when they could use their poison, but they weren’t defenseless without it. A hundred tiny cuts could kill their enemies just as dead as one large one; it would just take a little longer.
The scorpions swarmed up the wight’s legs and onto its arms. They focused their attacks on the creature’s wrists and chewed away at them like a swarm of tiny jackhammers. The sharp stingers stitched a ring of small holes around the flesh of its left wrist, and soon the dried tendons snapped and separated.
The wight’s left hand went limp and hung useless from its perforated forearm. The undead warrior bucked against Zillah’s forked spear, but it couldn’t free itself from the weapon’s cold steel grasp.
The scorpions moved on to the creature’s right wrist and repeated their savage attack. Rivulets of green poison gushed from the new holes in the wight’s dead gray skin, and its hand twitched and jerked under the attack.
“Time for some bigger holes,” Zillah grunted through the effort of holding the wight in place against the wall. Her tail scraped against the tunnel’s ceiling as she rammed its stinger into the wight’s face. The impact crushed its left eye socket and tore the dried stub of its nose clean off its face. Venom oozed up through the wound and boiled from the creature’s mouth as its head filled with Zillah’s poison.
The creature wailed and thrust itself forward in defiance of its own impending second death. The sudden move caught Zillah off guard, and for a moment the creature freed itself from the wall. It drove the scorpion queen backward, and she slammed her tail back to the floor to brace herself against its unexpected lunge.
Zillah went with the momentum and leaned back onto her tail. She lifted the end of the spear, and the wight rose into the air like a pole vaulter. Pinchy and her friends clung to the wight with their claws and continued their assault with frenzied resolve. The scorpion queen twisted a section of her weapon’s haft, and the forks slammed together with a resounding clang.
The wight’s lower torso and legs fell to the stone floor, and the light in its eyes went out. The top half of its body fell to the floor next to its legs with a meaty thud, and scorpion venom oozed from its wounds. The creature twisted and writhed on the cold stone for a moment, its severed legs kicked fruitlessly, and then it lay still.
The scorpions scurried back onto Zillah’s tail and clambered up her body. They poked and prodded her with their pincers, as gently as they could manage, and she endured their attention with a grin.
“I’m okay, little cousins,” Zillah said. She nudged the wight’s corpse with the toe of her boot. “Did you at least get some ka?”
I checked the inside of my arm. There was indeed one more blue sphere lit now. One ka wasn’t much, but it wasn’t nothing, either. In our current situation, I’d take what I could get.
“I did indeed,” I said. “Nice work. Next time maybe figure out exactly what your target is before you attack.”
Zillah dismissed my concern with a snort. She shoved the undead’s desiccated corpse off to one side of the tunnel and motioned for me to follow her to the end of the passage.
“We’ll have to go deeper into the Great Below before we run into something I can’t kill,” she said. “But there’s something you should see.”
“Lead the way,” I said.
When we reached the edge of the natural cavern, Zillah pointed out the path I should take. I pushed the passage ahead of us in that direction, and smooth stone walls formed around us.
We didn’t go far before Zillah stopped at the spot where Pinchy had gotten her attention earlier. I felt like I was playing a real-life version of the snake game. It was kind of neat, but I didn’t much like the idea of this passage winding its way through the cavern. What if some asshole found it and decided to punch a hole into its side to come looking for trouble?
“This is what I wanted you to see,” Zillah said.
I joined her at the end of my crafted passageway, and a sick lump of dread formed in the center of my chest.
The arched vault of a vast cavern rose one hundred feet above us, and its walls circled around an open space hundreds of feet in diameter. The floor ahead of us sloped down ste
eply toward a deep chasm that my dungeon lord senses told me was one hundred and thirty-three feet wide. We couldn’t see the bottom from where we were, but this great fissure cut the cavern neatly in half.
“What the fuck is that?” I asked Zillah.
“A big hole,” she said. “A very big hole.”
I summoned my Tablet of Engineering and tried to force the passage from my current location to the opposite side of the chasm. Maybe this wasn’t a big deal. Maybe I could just walk across this, and my problem would be solved.
[[[Selected path invalid. Insufficient support.]]]
“We can’t stay here long,” Zillah said. “Wights are not common wandering monsters. There’s a good chance it came from a nearby necropolis.”
I knew just enough Latin from my days listening to heavy metal and playing role-playing games to understand that a necropolis was a city of the dead. On Earth, that just meant a big old graveyard. On Soketra, it probably meant a giant pyramid that swarmed with undead monsters who feasted on living flesh.
“Well, we can’t get across the chasm. I suppose we could try to go around it, but fuck,” I said. “It could run thousands of feet in either direction. It could take us days to route around it.”
“Maybe we should go down,” Zillah said. She tapped the stone with her spear’s butt. “It would be dangerous, because there are more monsters the lower you go, and they become more powerful. But if we’re close to a necropolis, and you start building passages every which way trying to find a way around that chasm...”
“Yeah,” I sighed. “I need to think about this for a second.”
And of course, that’s when Nephket reached out to me.
“Did you find it?” I asked my familiar, careful to keep the tension and worry out of my voice. Nothing freaks out employees faster than learning that their boss doesn’t know what he’s doing.
“Yes,” she said. “I can show it to you.”
“Do it,” I said. And then to Zillah, “Watch my back for a second?”
“Can I touch it, too?” she asked with a wicked leer.
I closed my eyes and instantly transferred my point of view to Nephket’s. The priestess was crouched on a sandy hillside, her position hidden behind a dense thicket of thorn bushes.
Fifty feet below her, the Raiders Guild had set up a fortified blockade across a narrow valley’s floor. They’d erected heavy gates that completely blocked the valley on the east and west, and steep hills formed natural walls to the north and south. Guards stood at the gate on the side I could see, and I was sure there were more on the side I couldn’t.
But the most impressive sight was what lay between those two barricades.
A gleaming basalt archway rose above the desert valley’s floor. Its surface was inscribed with glittering golden runes that shone like firelight even under the bright sun. The air above the arch shimmered with undulating waves of heat that obscured everything beyond them in a hazy mirage.
The space beneath the arch was filled with a roiling purple cloud. Streaks of vermilion lightning chased one another across its turbulent surface, and even at this distance I felt the powerful magic that fueled it.
I fixed the gateway’s location in my mind and commanded the Tablet of Engineering to mark it so I could reach it with my next dungeon expansions. It was far outside my territory, but if the stele we were headed for unlocked as much area as I currently controlled, we’d be in striking distance.
Maybe. I had no idea how strong the new stele was. If it was any weaker than mine, we’d be in trouble.
But before I could consult the Tablet of Engineering for more details on distance and area, my familiar’s emotions demanded my attention.
Nephket’s hatred for the archway leaked into my thoughts. The people who’d ruined her world had come through this portal. And even though their arrival had brought us together, that was small consolation weighed against what she’d lost. A lifetime of peace and quiet had been washed away on a tide of greed and blood.
“We’ll get them,” I said to Nephket. “We’ll kill them all.”
“Good,” she said. “Because we have another problem.”
As I listened to Nephket, my annoyance turned to horror. Things had just gone from bad to fucking terrible.
Chapter 10: The Great Below
“THE RAIDERS SACKED the oasis,” Nephket said.
Her thoughts were in turmoil, and I caught flashes of burning buildings and twisted columns of smoke that rose from the windows of the villagers’ hillside homes. In Nephket’s memory, the raiders had been transformed into leering demons that raced through her former home with flaming torches and bared weapons.
A cold fist of rage curled around my heart as I imagined the pain and panic of the once-peaceful wahket.
“Are your people all right?” I asked. A pang of guilt stabbed me in the gut when I remembered Nephket’s earlier attempt to contact me. She must have seen the raiders attack while she moved into position to spy on the gate.
“What’s happening?” Zillah asked. Her tail squeezed me tighter, and she leaned in so close I could feel her breath against my face. “What are the raiders doing?”
I touched a finger to her lips and gave a slight shake of my head. I had to deal with Nephket first, and then Zillah and I could figure out our next steps.
“They’ve evacuated,” Nephket said. “We planned for this, so they know where to hide, but I won’t be sure of our losses until I rejoin them.”
“Those assholes,” I growled. I’d been worried that something like this would happen, but I hadn’t expected them to attack so soon. If that damned elf hadn’t been such a coward...
There was no sense in wishing things had been different. The wahket were in danger, and I’d sworn to protect them. I needed to do something, and I needed to do it immediately.
The cat women couldn’t return to the dungeon. Even if the guards weren’t there, some raider would spot them slipping into the tomb. That would likely be the final straw for the Guild. They wouldn’t wait for the extermination squad; they’d just storm the tomb and slaughter everyone inside. The wahket would be trapped, we wouldn’t be able to defend my core, and the raiders would wipe us all out.
Fuck that noise.
If I couldn’t bring the wahket to the dungeon, I’d bring the dungeon to them. I focused my attention on the Tablet of Engineering and zoomed in on the area surrounding my dungeon. The hilly region between the oasis and my dungeon’s front door was barren and of no interest to the raiders. If I could create another dungeon entrance in that area, Nephket could lead her people down to Zillah and me. That would kill two birds with one stone because it would keep the wahket safe and bring them closer to the gate for our attack to stop the execution squad.
“Can you get your people here?” I asked Nephket as I concentrated on a point in the hills south of the oasis. It was nowhere near my dungeon entrance and far enough from the village that I hoped the raiders wouldn’t be patrolling it. It was also close to my current location, which was under the deepest part of the oasis itself.
“I can, but there’s nothing there,” she said.
“There will be,” I said. “Let me know when you’ve arrived.”
“I trust you,” Nephket said.
Those three words spoke volumes to me. Nephket’s fear was as raw and painful as a bad tooth, but her hope that I would lead her and her people to safety was as bright as the noonday sun.
I couldn’t let her down. I’d do anything to save the wahket and defeat the raiders who threatened them.
“All right,” I said to Zillah. “We need to get ready for company.”
“The cat girl is coming?” Zillah said with an excited bounce. “I love her.”
“They’re all coming,” I said. “If I can make a passage to them. Keep an eye on my body while I take care of this.”
“When can I do something more than keep an eye on that body?” she asked.
“Just as soon as we deal with
the raiders,” I said. “There’ll be a lot of touching then. But for now, I need to concentrate. It’s very hard to do that if you get all handsy with me.”
“I’m holding you to that,” Zillah said with a fake pout. “And I want Nephket with us. It’ll be fun. I promise.”
“I’m sure it will be,” I said and struggled to clear that very enticing image from my thoughts. I stared at the tablet and commanded it to create a new passage between our current location and the rendezvous point I’d picked for Nephket.
A thin red line crawled across the tablet and then stopped halfway to its target. Red text flashed across the tablet’s surface, and I groaned. There must be another obstacle in the path’s way. Or maybe a swarm of monsters.
[[[Maximum passage volume reached.]]]
It seemed like I learned something new every hour doing this job, and I wished for a nice set of reference manuals to guide me along the way. Unfortunately, the only way I’d figure all this out was through trial and error. On the plus side, the more I tried, the more I learned. Even when I failed, it was a step forward and a mistake I wouldn’t make again.
“I thought I could create as many passages as I wanted,” I said to Zillah. “Did your dungeon lord ever run into a maximum volume problem?”
“Not as far as I know,” Zillah said. “But from what I know of dungeon lords, you’re pushing the boundaries pretty hard.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
“Most dungeons devote their space to chambers, not passages. I’m no expert, but I don’t think you’ll find many dungeon lords have created mile-long tunnels,” Zillah said. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but dungeons are traditionally defensive. Going on the offensive with them is an unusual case.”
“That’s a fair point,” I said. “Okay, now that I know there’s a maximum, let’s see what it is. Tablet, what is the current total volume of my dungeon’s passages?”
A red number appeared instantly in the upper right corner of the tablet. Two hundred thousand cubic feet. That’s what I had to work with.
