by Nick Harrow
I had to come up with an answer to this problem fast.
While the looters searched the large throne room for traps, I pulled up the Tablet of Incarnation and reviewed my options. I didn’t see anything that would help me deal with the raiders, but I hadn’t expected the solution to my problem to leap out at me. To win this battle, I needed to be smarter than my enemies.
But hadn’t that always been my specialty as a gray hat consultant? I was the last line of defense against the bad guys, the clever bastard who confounded my bosses’ enemies. This wasn’t a dungeon lord problem.
This was a hacker problem.
“We’re here,” Nephket said. Her voice was as clear as if she stood right next to me, but it held a strange, distant quality. It was like listening to one of those old-school radio stations on the very edge of its broadcast range.
The Tablet of Engineering told me she was right on target. The glowing golden dots that represented her and Zillah overlapped with the stark white marker I’d placed at the Guild gate’s location earlier in the day.
God, had all this really only eaten up one day?
“Let Zillah take the lead,” I responded. “I’ll open a tunnel that leads up to the gate’s perimeter, but I need her to use her vibration sense to make sure you don’t run into a bunch of guards.”
“We’re on it,” Nephket said. “Let’s do this.”
I chuckled at the way the wahket had absorbed some of my lingo. She’d been so formal when we first met, but she’d loosened up more and more over the past couple of days. It wouldn’t be long before she was as sarcastic as I was.
I put part of my mind on the task of creating a corridor that sloped up toward the gate. It was large enough and the grade gentle enough that the wahket would have no trouble ascending it, and its slight curve would give them a defensive posture if the raiders tried to come down at them.
The rest of my mind was occupied with the raiders in my dungeon. I couldn’t harm them directly, as much as I wanted to. I didn’t have enough ka to incarnate, which would have solved my problems almost immediately. If I had more time, I could let Zillah and Nephket harvest some raiders for their ka, but that was a luxury I couldn’t afford. Any delay might give the raiders a chance to steal my core or let the extermination squad make it through the gate.
The answer wasn’t in my tablets, but maybe it was in my dungeon. There had to be something in here I could use, some way to kill the annoying dark elf and her idiot warrior friend.
I just had to find it.
The statue room was out, and even if it wasn’t, I had no way to lure the raiders back there to finish them off. The scorpions’ lair was also useless to me; Kezakazek would never go back there after what happened to Peska.
I went back to Zillah’s lair and took stock of my surroundings. Her bed and furs would provide a good ambush spot for the scorpions, but if they didn’t overwhelm the raiders, I’d lose more guardians. That was my option of last resort.
The Tablet of Engineering showed me that the raiders had left the audience chamber and moved on to the passage that led them to the scorpion queen’s lair. The duo had a thirty-foot crawl ahead of them, but Kezakazek’s determination would drive them through that inconvenience in no time.
“Shit,” I barked and stormed back to my burial chamber. The colorful tapestry that covered the doorway was purely decorative; there was no way to turn that into a weapon of any kind.
The sarcophagus was heavy enough to crush a full-grown man, but I had no way to rig it up to fall on the raiders at the right time. My cobra throne was impressive, but it wasn’t a weapon, and like the sarcophagus, I had no way to turn it into a tool of murder and mayhem.
That left the empty passage on the western wall that led down into the Great Below, the Guild’s gate, and my allies. Could I lure them down that way and let Zillah finish them off?
Maybe, but if Nephket and the scorpion queen were about to attack the gate, I couldn’t afford to distract them. It might be possible to lure the raiders down that passage and keep them busy long enough for the gate to fall and my allies to return, but that was a big gamble. If something went wrong, there was a very good chance we were all fucked.
Plus, I wanted the satisfaction of ending this drow myself.
She and Sheth had torn Zillah’s bed apart. The furs were scattered over a wide area, and Sheth picked through them in search of some bit of loot worth taking. It might take him another five minutes to dig through the hides, and then they’d head this way.
I was out of time. I needed a solution.
The only thing left in the room was the passage I’d created for Pinchy and her friends. That had been a giant pain in the ass, and I’d almost...
“Oh,” I said. “Oh, yes.”
A wide grin split my face, and I concentrated on the changes I needed to make to my dungeon. For my first trick, I created a three-foot-square vertical chute that descended thirty feet from the center of my throne room. I created another passage at a ninety-degree angle at the bottom of the chute and summoned Pinchy to help me figure out exactly how long I could afford to make that tunnel.
She was good at her job, but the whole process was so nerve-racking. If I screwed this up, my core was as good as gone.
The raiders crawled through the last fifteen feet of tunnel between Zillah’s lair and my chamber. They’d be in the burial chamber with my core in a couple of minutes, tops.
With my hopeful coup de grâce prepared, I scrambled to put the finishing touches in place. I converted some loose gold from Pinchy’s lair into a rope ladder, which I anchored to my sarcophagus. There was just enough time for the last step, and I really hoped I was right about this one.
I counted to three and reached up to the glowing orb clutched in the bared fangs of the cobra throne. The core throbbed like a ball of static electricity, and even though I was disincarnated, I felt a chill dance along my skin as my fingers reached out for the heart of my power. I closed my hands on either side of the glowing ball and lifted it free of the throne.
“Thank God that worked,” I said with relief.
The core weighed almost nothing, but it had an enormous gravity that pulled at every fiber of my being. I could walk with it held in my hands, but every step required concentration to keep moving rather than stop and stare into the orb’s glowing depths. A niggling fear at the back of my thoughts warned me that the core was dangerous, that the power it had given me belonged to it as much as to me. It needed me, just as I needed it, but there were powers within the core that I couldn’t even begin to understand.
“You’re the dungeon lord,” I said and stiffened my spine. “The core is a tool. Be its master, not its tool.”
“We’re there,” Nephket said. Her words were clear to me, but I could tell from the tone of her voice that she’d whispered them. “Zillah says there're no guards above us. We’re good to breach.”
“Here we go,” I said. I expanded the sloped passage the last few feet to the surface. I watched through Nephket’s eyes as she and the scorpion queen scrambled up into the late afternoon sun. Nephket swung her head from side to side as she surveyed the walls to the east and west. A pair of guards patrolled each of the barricades, but they were focused away from the gate. They had no idea of the threat that was behind them.
“Good work,” I said. “Let me see that gate so I can figure out how to shut it down.”
The truth of the matter was that I had no idea how to kill the gate. I hoped that once I got a good look at it up close, I’d find a weak point that we could exploit.
Nephket took in the massive framework that surrounded the shimmering gate itself, then focused her attention on a strange box attached to the bottom right side of the portal’s base.
The housing was a cube of black iron, its surface dotted with strange runes and patterns that reminded me of circuit diagrams. At the center of each of those patterns were gemstones carved into spindles that jutted from the box’s surface. The stone
s glowed with a clean, cold blue light that stung my eyes even secondhand.
“Is that a latch on the side there?” I asked Nephket.
“I think so,” she said. “Let me see if I can open it.”
She reached out and grabbed hold of the small metal bar on the right side of the gate’s box. It slid down, and the front of the box opened to reveal a set of carved silver dials attached by glowing copper coils to a massive purple crystal the size of my head.
“That looks like the power source,” I said to Nephket. “You should be able to disconnect it, and that’ll kill the gate—”
The priestess’s vision blurred as she swung her head hard to the right. A guard on the eastern wall had turned around and caught sight of my team. He jabbed his finger toward them and shouted to his companion, who rushed for a horn mounted on a wooden tripod at the center of the barricade’s walkway.
“We’re about to have company,” Nephket said. “Do you want us to retreat?”
I weighed our options. If they retreated, the raiders would certainly try to follow them. I could seal off the passage, but then our enemies would probably just come back to the dungeon searching for me. If they all swarmed the place at once, there was almost no way I could protect the core from them. There was also the very real chance that the extermination squad was about to come blasting through that gate with a serious hard-on for collecting the bounty on my head.
“Stay put,” I said. “I’m giving you some cover.”
Before Nephket could respond, I summoned my dungeon’s final chamber. I squeezed four walls and a ceiling inside the box formed by the barricades and the hills that surrounded the Guild’s gate. Inside that chamber, I created a half wall around the room’s perimeter. The barrier rose just above Nephket’s waist, which would provide the wahket with almost enough cover.
I then summoned a second barrier from the ceiling to provide even more defenses for my people. That left a gap a little more than two feet wide that my team could shoot or stab through if the raiders broke into my dungeon.
Shadows shifted in the passage on the wall across from me, and I saw Sheth’s head emerge from the darkness. My time was up.
“I have to deal with the raiders in my dungeon now,” I said to Nephket. “You and Zillah put your heads together and figure out how to bust that gate. Whatever it takes, you have to get it done. If the raiders figure out some way to break through the walls of the chamber I just created for you, bring the rest of the wahket up and fight them. We have to kill that gate.”
“We’ll take care of it,” Nephket said. As the connection between us faded, I caught a glimpse of the glowing crystal as she knelt down to get a closer look at it.
I wish I had more advice to offer to them, but I had to focus on Kezakazek and Sheth.
My thoughts raced as the raiders dropped into the room. While I had no problems holding the core, I wondered if Kezakazek could just tear it out of my hands.
That would be embarrassing.
“There it is,” Kezakazek gasped as she dropped into my burial chamber. She couldn’t see me, but she could clearly see the core in my grasp. To her, it must have seemed as if it floated a few feet off the floor just on the far side of the yawning black pit before her.
“I don’t like this,” Sheth said. “Why isn’t it guarded?”
“Because fools like you pose no threat to it,” I said and punctuated the words with a wicked chuckle. “You’ll never be able to catch it.”
With that, I stepped over the edge of the pit and vanished into the darkness.
Chapter 14: Thicker Than Water
MY DESCENT INTO THE lowest level of my dungeon wasn’t exactly like falling, but it was pretty damned close. I didn’t have a physical body, but the spiritual essence I did have seemed to pay at least lip service to the laws of physics as my mind understood them. Fortunately, I didn’t splatter all across the bottom of the chute when my feet touched down. I just stopped moving.
The raiders tested the rope ladder I’d left anchored to my sarcophagus. Kezakazek shouted something at Sheth, who shouted back at her, but their words were indecipherable to me as Nephket’s voice broke into my thoughts.
“We think we figured out all the ways this crystal’s connected to the gate,” she said. “We can just yank the wires out if you want, but I don’t know what will happen.”
“No,” I responded. “See if you can figure out how to separate the crystal from the gate without damaging either one. There’s powerful magic there, and I want to study it after we’ve dealt with the raiders.”
I hated to add an extra burden to Nephket, but that gate was more than a weakness. If we could figure out how to take it apart and put it back together, that damned thing could be my ticket to anywhere I wanted to go.
“I’ll do my best,” Nephket said. “But it will take some time. And I’m not sure how much of that we have.”
“The raiders haven’t broken through the wall, have they?” A fist of panic suddenly closed around my throat.
“No, no,” Nephket said. “But Zillah said she can feel something heavy approaching. She thinks they’ve got a battering ram.”
As much as I hated them, I had to hand it to the raiders. They weren’t all idiots, even if their lust for treasure did make them my mortal enemies.
“All right,” I said. “I trust your judgment. Do what you can. But if it looks like they’re going to breach the wall and the wahket can’t hold your position, yank the power supply and head back this way. We’ll deal with them in the dungeon.”
“Yes, Lord Rathokhetra,” Nephket said. Hearing another man’s name on her lips, even if he was technically me, pissed me off. I understood why she used it. To Nephket, that honorific was a symbol of her entire life. In many ways, this moment was what her whole existence had been leading up to.
But that didn’t mean I didn’t want to hear her say my real name like that.
“Wait for me, dammit,” Sheth called, and his words dragged my attention back to my more immediate problem. “I have to light a torch.”
The final passage I’d created lacked the torches of the upper area of my dungeon and was black as night save for the cold light of my core far from the bottom of the ladder.
I could see perfectly fine, and Kezakazek kept moving as if her eyes had adjusted to the perfect darkness. Sheth, on the other hand, stopped at the edge of the darkness and struggled to light his torch.
“Hold up, Kez,” he said. “Let me just get this torch lit.”
But I didn’t want the dark elf to wait for the warrior. I wanted her furious, beyond reason, and so enraged she wouldn’t think twice about attacking me.
I called forth the Tablet of Incarnation and invested my last five ka in The Dungeon’s Visage ability.
A cold wind ran through my body, and an exultant shiver shook me from head to toe as the ka settled into me. With a thought, I willed myself to appear and held the core out toward Kezakazek.
“Defeat me,” I taunted her. “Slay me with your puny spells and the core is yours. But if you fail, you will never leave this tomb.”
The sorceress didn’t disappoint me. She snarled mystic syllables and a globe of smoking acid surrounded by streamers of purple energy appeared in her right hand.
“Nothing can stop me,” Kezakazek howled. She hurled the orb at me, and I pretended to dodge as the attack passed harmlessly past my body.
Kezakazek’s magic couldn’t harm me while I was disincarnated any more than an arrow could harm the wind, but I didn’t want her to know that.
“I’ve already stopped you, dark elf,” I spat back at her. “You came all this way for nothing. Everything you’ve done, everything you’ve dreamed of, ends here. Now.”
“Never!” she screamed, and another globe of acid sailed down the hall and splattered on the wall behind me.
The corrosive fluid hissed and bubbled as it chewed into the stone wall at my back, but I didn’t dare look back to see how much damage it had caused
. Kezakazek was only ten feet away from me, and I needed all of her attention focused on killing me.
“That’s all you have?” I scoffed. “You, a first-level nothing, dare to challenge a dungeon lord?”
“You’re not much of a dungeon lord,” Kezakazek said. She summoned a globe of acid and hurled it at me. “Once I finish with you, your core will fuel my true quest.”
I laughed as the globe splattered on the wall behind me, and Kezakazek screamed in rage and lobbed another ball of acid at me.
“Kez,” Sheth shouted. He’d finally gotten his torch lit. He ran down the hall toward the sorceress and shouted a warning, “Something’s not right. You have to stop—“
“I can’t,” she shouted back and let loose with another sizzling ball of green death. “He has to die!”
I didn’t try to dodge this one. I let the amethyst and emerald orb shoot straight through the illusion of my body. It passed just beneath my core and slammed into the wall behind me with an audible crack. The acid sizzled and popped, and the thin wall I stood in front of finally gave way.
Kezakazek was less than two yards from me when a jet of water as big around as my thumb sprayed out of the hole she’d blasted through the stone wall and slammed into her chest. The gushing water ripped through the black rags that clung to her body and dragged them from her shoulders and hips. For a moment, the drow stood naked before me, her eyes wide as she stared up into my smiling face.
“Goodbye, dark elf,” I said. “You did your best.”
The force of the water ripped the wall asunder. Weakened by acid, the stone could no longer hold back the underground river that I’d almost unleashed during my earlier excavations. Freed of its prison, the water exploded into the narrow passage.
The flash flood knocked the dark elf from her feet and sent her tumbling down the stone corridor. She slammed into Sheth, who dropped his torch into the water. The torrent snuffed out the flames instantly, and the tunnel was once more plunged into darkness.
