by Nick Harrow
The small war party hustled past the enormous fig tree that stood guard over the tomb’s entrance and clambered out to a rocky outcrop that jutted from the hillside and overlooked the valley.
Nephket looked down on the oasis, and the cool, blue waters glowed like liquid flames under the crimson rays of the setting sun. Smoke rose from the north side of the oasis in thick, black tendrils that clawed at the sky like bestial talons.
The land beneath that smoke was a black splotch against the pale sand-strewn hills that surrounded it. The site where the gate had once stood was the epicenter of a dark stain on the landscape. Despite the damage of the ka blast, though, I knew my final dungeon chamber still stood. It was damaged, but I could fix that.
“It killed her?” Nephket asked. Her heart ached for the drow’s sacrifice, and I shared her pain.
The drow had warned me that the ka detonation might wipe out even a dungeon lord. What chance did a single first-level guardian have against that kind of insane power?
“Yes,” I said. One moment I’d felt Kezakazek’s agony in my mind like a white-hot ball of steel, and the next moment it had vanished. “But she kept her promise.”
Nephket had no answer to that. She and the rest of the wahket stared down into the bowl of the oasis. Their keen eyes scanned the terrain for any signs of movement. They watched until the sun was so low on the horizon that its light no longer reached the waters of the Kahtsinka, and in that time, they saw nothing save the wind that rustled the reeds at the edge of the water, a few small rabbits scampering for the warrens, and the twisted eddies of black smoke that rose into the sky.
The raiders were gone. The blast had completely destroyed them.
“Come back,” I said. “We won. It’s over. It’s time to celebrate.”
“Oh, yes,” Nephket said, and I could feel the grin that spread across her face. “It is indeed.”
As my familiar returned with her retinue, I looked at the inside of my arm. There were twenty ka vessels there, and all of them were illuminated. Somehow, the detonation had netted me an enormous number of motes, and I wasn’t sure exactly how that had worked. Maybe there had been more raiders inside the chamber when the gate exploded than I’d thought. Or maybe the chamber had somehow captured some raw energy from the blast and funneled it to me. I really wished that Kezakazek were there to explain what had happened in those final seconds, so I could figure out how to net another big ka haul.
But you know what they say about wishing in one hand.
By the time Nephket and the wahket who had accompanied her had returned to the burial chamber, the celebration was in full swing. The wahket who had remained behind nursed their wounds with wine and fed one another slices of meat from the trays I’d laid out for them. They nibbled at the cheeses but seemed to find those more of an interesting novelty than actual food. Zillah, on the other hand, ate the meat and the cheese like she was afraid someone was going to take it from her.
You can take the girl out of the blighted grove of dead trees, but you can never take the blighted grove of dead trees out of the girl, apparently.
As Nephket pushed aside the tapestry and entered the burial chamber, her eyes burned into mine. There was a hunger in her gaze that matched my own inflamed appetite. Her hands stroked the heads of the wahket who sat on the divans between us, and her claws combed through the glossy strands of their long hair.
“Welcome back,” I said, my voice husky with desire. Somehow, despite the soot stains on her cheeks and the bandages wrapped around her left wrist, Nephket managed to look more entrancing than she had the day I’d met her.
She smiled, and her cheeks flushed a deep, dark red as she mounted the steps to the cobra throne. Her eyes stayed fixed on mine as she reached behind her with her left hand and untied the leather strap of her halter. The coins jingled and jangled against one another as the thin top went slack across the heavy mounds of her breasts.
Nephket stopped at the top step, her eyes even with mine, and slowly untied the second knot at the back of her neck. Her halter clattered to the floor between us, and a half-dozen coins snapped free from their threads and bounced down the steps with a series of musical chimes.
We said nothing as we stared at one another, and for a long moment we were the only two creatures in my dungeon. Her breath quickened as our gazes deepened, and her thoughts mingled with mind in a whirlwind of predatory hunger and carnal desire.
She flung herself at me, heedless of the other wahket and Zillah, who watched us with growing interest. Nephket landed with her knees straddling my hips, and her hands braced against the cobra throne on either side of my head.
Nephket’s tongue flickered across her lips as she thrust her head forward for a kiss.
But I raised my left hand and stopped her.
“You don’t want this?” she asked, a mixture of disbelief, disappointment, and quiet anger in her eyes.
“Oh, I want this,” I said. It took every ounce of willpower I could summon not to tear Nephket’s skirt away and bury myself inside her. “But not until you say my name.”
“My Lord—” Nephket started and then bit her lower lip. She shook her head, and a single bright tear carved a smooth trail through the soot on her right cheek. A faint, sad smile crossed the priestess’s face as she let go of one truth and embraced another.
She ground her hips against me, a slow, seductive dance to the rhythm of her pulse. Her eyes sparkled fever-bright, and the spicy cinnamon and honey perfume of her breath plucked at my senses.
“Say it,” I growled. My hands had found Nephket’s hips of their own accord, but I held myself in check. I wanted Nephket to see me for who I was, to understand that I was not some myth from her people’s forgotten past. I wasn’t a savior they were destined to serve. I was a man who wanted her, a man who would do anything for her.
“I see you,” she whispered and lowered her head until our foreheads touched. “I see you, Clay Knight.”
She rose above me for a moment and then sank down in a smooth, silky motion that bound us together. Our minds had been joined for days, but our bodies were new to each other, and every motion was a new territory for us to explore together.
Time passed in a blur of sensation so exquisite it was almost pain. The wahket around us joined together in mutual celebration and comfort. They cried out as their wounds were jostled and then moaned as pleasure replaced the pain.
“Room for one more?” Zillah asked after what seemed like a blissful eternity.
Her tail coiled around the back of my head and hooked itself around Nephket’s waist. The scorpion queen’s human body slid in next to the cat woman, and her hands curved around our shoulders. The chitinous bands that had covered her were gone, and she seemed proud of her exquisite nudity.
Honestly, she had a lot to be proud of.
“Always,” Nephket said. She kissed me, then turned her head to the side to meet Zillah’s lips.
“How about you make room for the respawned guardian who saved all of your asses?” Kezakazek asked from the entrance to the burial chamber. She shivered as she looked around the room where she’d almost died, but then she straightened her spine and stalked toward us with every bit as much grace as the cat women who filled the room with their passionate cries.
“Oh, yes,” Zillah said. “Get that sweet drow ass over here. Now.”
To say that I was glad the ka detonation hadn’t destroyed Kezakazek was an understatement. I don’t know how I knew it, but my instincts told me I’d need the dark elf in the not-too-distant future. And not just as a sacrificial lamb to set off a suicide bomb. She was important to me. I just needed to figure out how.
She was also dangerously attractive and brought a dark intensity to our mutual passion.
The rest of the night flowed around us as thick and sweet as honey. The heat of my guardians’ bodies warmed me, and I did my best to return the favor. We became one in what seemed like a never-ending series of configurations, our bodies mergin
g and parting only to merge again.
Although they couldn’t touch me, the wahket joined us in spirit. They did their best to keep up with my guardians and me, but we outlasted the cat women. It was long after the last of the wahket had curled up in a sleepy ball that my guardians collapsed in a heap around me.
The ladies slept the guileless slumber of the exhausted, and I watched over them.
Chapter 17: The Message
“CLAY,” A GRUFF, FAMILIAR voice called to me from outside my burial chamber. “Clay Knight. I’ve got a message for you.”
For a moment, I couldn’t believe I’d heard the words. None of my guardians had stirred, and Pinchy hadn’t warned me of an intruder’s approach. Whoever was out there was one sneaky badass.
My hackles rose as I extricated myself from the entwined bodies of my guardians, but none of the women stirred.
I almost woke them but then chose not to. I had a vague sense that whoever had come knocking on my door wasn’t a threat in the immediate sense of the word. If they were sneaky enough to get into my tomb without raising any alarms from my guardians, they could have sneaked into the burial chamber and really caused a problem. The fact that they hadn’t seemed to indicate they were more interested in talking than fighting.
Plus, if I needed them, my guardians could be by my side in the blink of an eye. In the meantime, I’d let them sleep. After their energetic exertions of the night before, they’d certainly earned at least forty winks.
As I left my burial chamber, I decided to update my look. There was no point in appearing to visitors in my simple loincloth and headdress. Instead, I’d appear in a manner more befitting my kick-ass station.
My headdress changed into an impressive enameled cobra’s skull. Its eyes glowed with a venomous green fire and its scythe-like fangs framed my face while the spine ran straight down my neck to my shoulders.
Golden armor encased my naked torso, the shoulders tipped with curved spikes the size of a bull’s horns. A thick serpent-hide belt wrapped itself around my waist and fastened in place with a heavy golden clasp. Fine scale mail covered my legs, and heavy boots with steel scorpions for heels encased my feet.
“All right, motherfucker,” I muttered. “You better have a damned good reason for calling me away from that cuddle puddle.”
My gentleman caller paced the floor in front of the throne in my audience chamber. He wore an elegant three-piece suit that barely contained his bulging muscles and did nothing at all to hide the heavy pistol that printed against his jacket. He didn’t notice me when I entered, and I chose not to get his attention until I’d taken a seat on my imposing throne.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” I asked.
He jerked around and stared at me. I felt a cold pit open in my stomach when I recognized the guy.
“It appears your circumstances have improved, Mr. Knight,” the orc thug said. It was the same asshole who’d kidnapped me three days before. The same orc who’d threatened to kill me if I didn’t do the job for his employers.
My fingers tightened on the arms of my throne, and I leaned forward to put as much force behind my words as possible.
“Did you come here to die?” I asked. “Because that’s what’s going to happen in the next few seconds unless you give me a reason not to have my guardians pull you apart and decorate this place with your guts.”
The orc thug raised his hands and offered me a toothy grimace that he must have thought was a smile.
“I’m no fool,” he said. “I didn’t come here to threaten you. In fact, I’m not really here at all. But I bet you’ve guessed that already.”
“All right.” I pretended I’d figured out his game long before he told me. “If you didn’t come here so I could kill you, why are you wasting my time?”
“Because, Mr. Knight,” the orc said, “you saved the Inkolana cartel a great deal of embarrassment when you stopped those raiders from looting this place. They sent me here because we owe you a billion dollars.”
My thoughts swirled around the implication of his words. Was my tomb some part of the DECS system? It made sense, in a crazy kind of way, but if that was the case, I wondered what that made me.
I almost followed that line of reasoning down into a deep, dark rabbit hole before I thought better of it and turned my attention back to the orc.
“You have the money with you?” I asked. “Honestly, I’m not going to take a check or a bank transfer. I’ll need it in gold coins.”
The orc chuckled at that and shook his head. He raised his palms toward the sky and gave me a little halfhearted shrug and a rueful grin.
“Unfortunately,” he explained, “when you left Earth, you stepped outside our immediate sphere of influence. The money is still there waiting for you in a secure account if you ever come back for it. But somehow I doubt you’ll ever leave all this behind for something as simple as money.”
At one time that ridiculous sum of money would have been enough to make me do almost anything. I’d have cut off one of my balls and eaten it for a billion dollars. I’d have left my only friend, my favorite dog, and my mom behind for a stack of bills that tall.
But now, I just didn’t fucking care about the money.
Going back to Earth meant leaving behind Nephket, Zillah, and even Kezakazek. It would mean giving up my position as a dungeon lord and all the responsibilities and privileges that entailed.
“You’re right,” I said to the orc. “I don’t think I’m going back to Earth. Did you just swing by to taunt me with money I was never going to get my hands on?”
“Not at all, Mr. Knight,” the orc said. “I’m here to offer you something my employers hope you will find almost as valuable as the money would have been in your previous life: information.”
The orc reached into his jacket with his right hand, and I tensed on my throne. He held his left hand up in a placating gesture.
“This is a map of Soketra,” he said. He pulled a golden tablet from his jacket and tossed it toward me. It hung in the air a few yards away, and I summoned it with a thought.
The tablet’s surface was engraved with a highly detailed map of Soketra’s four continents and vast, island-dotted seas.
A bright golden orb on the southernmost continent marked what I instinctively knew was my dungeon. A series of smaller orbs radiated out from that location in a pattern that reminded me of the intersections of the threads in a spiderweb. They were almost even, but not quite, and without the map it would’ve taken me a hell of a long time to find them.
And beyond that web of white sparks, isolated networks of red dots smoldered like embers across the map’s surface.
“Those white dots are geomantic nexuses,” the orc said. “They’re ripe for the taking. All you have to do is claim their steles.”
If what he said was true, this map was extremely valuable. The ability to claim more steles and expand my dungeon would make the central tomb more secure and safer from intruders. If there were other villages of cat women out there that needed to be liberated, I’d be able to find them with this map.
My thoughts drifted toward Rathokhetra’s memory of an empire that held all of Soketra within its bounds. Could I do that?
Did I want to?
“And the red dots?” I asked, though I dreaded his answer.
The orc let out a long, gusty sigh and shrugged again.
“I think you already know,” he said. “Those are other dungeon lords. Your enemies.”
“Thanks for the warning,” I said. “But I don’t really want to fight other dungeon lords. It seems like a huge waste of time and effort. I’ll send a messenger to them. We could make a big dungeon lord circle, sing Kumbaya. Hell, if a few of us put our heads together, we could use our powers to make one hell of a new world.”
“I like you, Mr. Knight,” the orc said. “But you have a lot to learn. Powerful people usually want to become even more powerful people. They only cooperate if they think it gives them an upper hand ove
r those who seek their help. And that’s in a world where open warfare with your neighbors is frowned upon. Here? Every dungeon lord on Soketra wants the same thing.”
“And what is that?” I asked.
“Everything,” the orc said with a smug smile. “Every goddamnned thing they can see and a bunch of other things they can’t. Most of those red dots won’t be happy until they have every stele under their control, and every other dungeon lord on this little world is dead.”
“Why are you telling me all this?” I asked. “What’s in it for your bosses?”
The orc raised one finger and made a motion as if tallying my point on a scoreboard.
“Now you’re thinking like a dungeon lord,” he said. “My bosses think you’ll be useful somewhere down the road. I don’t know how, and I don’t know why, but their sources tell them it’s better to be on your good side than the bad. And now that I’ve delivered my message and the map, it’s time for me to go. Best of luck to you, Mr. Knight.”
The orc’s body grew fuzzy, and its outline came apart in fuzzy streams.
“Wait!” I shouted.
Now that the orc had cut our conversation short, a thousand questions pushed their way to the front of my mind. Why did the Inkolana cartel have orcs on the payroll? Were they somehow connected to another dungeon lord? I wanted to know how the Inkolana thug had found me here. I wanted to know why a bunch of criminal masterminds thought I’d help them down the road. And more than anything, I wanted to know how he’d come to Soketra from Earth, and whether it was a trick we could do in reverse.
Just in case.
But I never got a chance to ask any of those questions. Before I could form another word, the orc was gone.
In the dead of the night, I sat on my throne and studied the map. I wondered about those red dots and who was behind them.
