Dungeon Masters

by Mike Wild

  Cries of alarm and agonised screams from around the crypt confirmed her fears. The sound of weapons shattering against foes, of shields being pummeled and swept away, of flesh and bone being rended, pulped, and crunched, all attested to what they faced. Trix staggered and fell as the broadsword came at her again, scrabbled to evade the assault. She managed to land some blows with her staff, but they were next to useless. Batted away by an armoured fist, she went into a roll and took in a series of tumbling vignettes of the battle: Yuri, bestriding two sarcophagi, axes swinging to release jets of black blood, spilling dangerous amounts of his own; Ralph, repelling attackers with his magic shield, crackling and weakening under blows; Ian, hobbling to help a soldier in distress, then taking a blow to the side, falling and skidding in blood; Jentiss, sweating and wild-eyed, yelling desperate orders as she fought to hold back the horde.

  Warriors smashed and bashed until stamina was gone. Archers and mages let fly volleys of arrows and bolts, but the enemy’s fighters barely faltered in their tracks.

  More screams, blood. Trix saw how hopeless things were becoming. Then she felt a raw tingling as a loomingly tall form strode unhesitatingly by her towards the centre of battle. It was Torb, radiating power. She’d somehow always suspected the giant magic wielder would return, but what she didn’t expect was for him to recruit Ralph as he batted away attackers and swept on by.

  “Earth-mage, I require your aid.”

  Ralph shot a puzzled glance at Yuri and Trix, then followed. From the slight twitch of his lips as he turned, Trix could tell he was rather taken with the name ‘Earth-mage’. She sighed, knowing damn well that if they got out of this alive, he’d want to be called it all the time. Yes, Earth-mage. No, Earth-mage. Cup of tea, Earth-mage? It didn’t bear thinking about. She hoped she died.

  She spun, roaring in defiance, to deflect a blow with her quarterstaff.

  ‘Earth-mage’, meanwhile, found himself with other mages in a position similar to those who had supported their fellows in the battle across the chasm, placing his palm on Torb’s back to reinforce his energies. But he was not the only aid to whatever it was that Torb intended to do. The towering Yillarnyan had thrust out his arms and, with robes flapping, seemed to be the centre of a gathering storm. A network of wavering, barely visible lines of energy, like heat hazes, tied him to the fighting forms of the Five Hundred, and he pulled the lines towards him, into him, seeming to grow in stature as he did. The Five Hundred staggered, not so much weakened as confused, as if some of their drive had been taken away. Ralph and the other mages continued to support him, but their features had become haggard and drawn. Trix and Yuri watched with growing discomfort.

  “English, what is happening?” Yuri shouted as he embedded the blade of a battle-axe in the skull of what had once been a colourful-looking crossbowman.

  Trix twisted her quarterstaff and rammed an end into the face of her attacker, grimacing as it came out the back of its head, dangling brain. “I think he’s drawing Kh’Borian’s residual energy from the Five Hundred.”

  “But would that not mean—?”

  “Rough guess? Maybe Torb is descended from a godleech?”

  They stared at the gathering storm. It was whipping up into something of a monster. With its own lightning and all. After a second, they could hardly stand.

  “Oh, crap,” Yuri groaned.

  “Everybody down!”

  Heads snapped in the direction of Trix’s warning cry, saw what was coming, and dodged what were now rather clumsy incoming blows to take cover. Yuri and Trix opted for the nearest sarcophagus, leapt over it, and pressed their backs hard against its stone, keeping low, hunkering down. They heard lightning crack repeatedly behind them, felt the sudden and absolute change of pressure in the air, held their breath, then closed their eyes. There came a moment of absolute stillness and silence. Then the entire crypt—all the vastness of it—boomed.

  Trix and Yuri roared, uselessly digging in heels as the sarcophagus punched them in their backs, ramming them across the floor, the heavy stone physically shifted by the boom. They’d have been crushed against its neighbour had that not also shifted, and the next, and next, on and on—and had all in that moment not broken apart. The stresses of being ripped from their foundations shattered the sarcophagi into so many chunks of flying stone, joining the remnants of their lids in a lethal three-hundred-sixty-degree, hurricane-force rain. Trix and Yuri went foetal as the stone flipped and hurtled over their heads, colliding and smashing, and throughout the crypt everyone still able ducked or scrambled out of the path of certain death. Not so the grotesques Kh’Borian had made of the Five Hundred Heroes. The godleech’s possession dulled by what Torb had drained from them, they reacted too slowly and took the full brunt of what the mage had unleashed, their deformed, semi-rotted forms battered and broken by the flying stones, even as they were propelled through the air with them. Their fate was inescapable and inevitable—impact with the crypt’s outer wall at such a speed they were instantly pulped or reduced to skeletal shards, any part of them that survived pummeled further by the rocky rain that followed after them. The sounds of their destruction lasted for perhaps ten seconds, and then there was only the odd crack and faint ticking of settling stone. In the darkness of the crypt’s periphery, in shadowy sockets, flaming spheres flickered, faded and died. Then everything was still.

  Trix and Yuri raised dust-plastered heads. The centre of the crypt was a crater devoid of everything. The crypt walls were a dark-blooded smear. Bodies of their own, too late to save, lay here and there, and Torb himself was prone on the floor. Around him, the mages who had assisted him had dropped to their knees.

  “Ralph!”

  “I’m okay, Patricia. But Torb … I think he gave all he had.”

  Trix knelt by the other-dimensional wizard. She felt for a pulse, not exactly sure where to feel, but eyes staring without seeing told the truth of it. They were closed by Jentiss, who’d appeared by their side.

  “I never knew what he was,” she said. “He was my lieutenant for years, and he never said a word.” Jentiss’s top lip twitched with rage, and she thumped the floor with gauntleted fist. “I want Kh’Borian dead.”

  “You’ll get it. Yuri?”

  The Russian nodded and moved to the south wall. There he placed six charges of plastic explosive—quickly yet expertly—which blew with barely a bang, force directed inward, fracturing the stone. Yuri kicked, and it crumbled like plaster. Rank air—an almost visible miasma—escaped through the resultant gap. But rank as it was—making Yuri turn to half retch—it was a different kind of horrible from that, say, beneath the soulstripper. It reminded Trix of a hospital room in which a very old, very sick man had spent a very, very long time dying.

  It was disease. Corruption. The stench of something left to rot.

  Shen had been right—they were close to Kh’Borian.

  Trix stared back at the survivors of their group, then took it upon herself to go first, slipping into the darkness beyond the gap. It took her eyes some seconds to adjust to the gloom; she found it wasn’t total—there was a light source down here. As the others came through behind her, she moved inward, realising she was on a kind of pillared upper gallery, circular, with a circumference that would not have shamed St Paul’s Cathedral. Peering between two of the pillars, she saw, below, a vast bowl, a concavity of stone which was mirrored, above, by an equally concave ceiling. Suspended between the two, seething and roiling like an ember-red sun, zig-zag bolts of power discharging from it, was the source of the light.

  It was the maelstrom.

  Yuri spoke beside Trix. “That isn’t a bad guy; it’s a storm front. We’re meant to destroy that thing?”

  “Any ideas?”

  Yuri shrugged. “Combined assault. Throw everything we have at it.”

  “Stay your weapons. That is not Kh’Borian.”

  “Ralph?”

  “Follow me,” the old man said.

  They and the others did, fi
nding the gallery sloped some way along its length into a gently spiralling descent. As they followed it round, they came not only to the lip of the bowl but into view of what lay beneath the gallery they’d left—a number of boulder-sized metal orbs, one between each pair of pillars, which though clearly ancient and rusted, crackled still with energy. The zig-zagging bolts of power weren’t being discharged from the maelstrom; they were being fired from the orbs into the maelstrom.

  Whatever Yillarnyan magic or forgotten technology this was, things suddenly made sense. The maelstrom wasn’t Kh’Borian; it was what was being generated around Kh’Borian. This chamber wasn’t his prison; the maelstrom was. The bane of her nightmares, the focal point of her visions, every iota of the evil she’d felt during her visions and nightmares came not from the roiling mass but from what she could now see floating within it.

  The withered thing.

  My god, Trix thought, so that was what two thousand years of imprisonment did to you. A form, once humanoid, so shriveled, blackened, and dried that flesh was merely a dark veneer on twisted bone; so shrunken and contracted that it resembled more insect than man. A beetle, perhaps, pinned in death throes by some long-dead entomologist or a mantis paralysed at the moment of strike.

  It was the vilest thing she had ever seen.

  The tiny yellow eyes in its shrunken skull were staring directly at her.

  So you found me, girl.

  “Yeah, I found you.”

  And what do you intend to do now that you have?

  “I thought maybe kick your sorry little arse from here to kingdom come.”

  No time for that, I’m afraid.

  Kh’Borian’s form seemed to flicker out of existence momentarily, and Trix felt a surge of rage. Realisation. Fear. “That’s what it was all about, wasn’t it? The collapsing bridge, the Five Hundred Heroes—you weren’t trying to kill us but delay us. The seventh suppressor’s through the rift, isn’t it? Garrison’s made it back.”

  Kh’Borian laughed his arrogant laugh.

  That would be telling.

  Trix roared and lurched towards the maelstrom, but the sheer force of it made her cower, held her back. As hair and clothes whipped about her, she squinted into the heart of the sphere of energy to see the godleech’s form flickering once more, except this time the effect was more prolonged, and when it ceased, Kh’Borian appeared less substantial than he’d been moments before.

  “He’s starting to phase between dimensions,” Ralph announced. “We need to get to him now.”

  “The orbs!” Jentiss Firemane commanded. “Destroy them! Destroy them all!”

  They tried. Mages, archers, and warriors tried. But even with all their magics, all their arrows, all their blows from axes, maces, and shields, the orbs resisted. Magics fizzled on contact, arrows combusted on impact, while warriors whose weapons struck home found themselves sent staggering back, their bodies lit to the bones. The orbs had been designed to imprison Kh’Borian, a godleech, after all, and were now, perversely, protecting him, and there was no bringing them down.

  Within the maelstrom, Kh’Borian’s form flickered for a third time and, upon its return, was as insubstantial as a ghost.

  “Fall back,” Ralph sighed. “There’s nothing we can do.”

  The message was passed from one to another, and weapons were lowered. The mood became uncertain, despondent. All eyes turned to the old man.

  It was Ian who spoke for them all.

  “Are you saying we’ve lost?”

  “We have lost.”

  Trix knew, without having to turn to the maelstrom, that the flickering within had stopped. Because in her head she heard the laughter and words she’d come to despise sent back to her through some unfathomable void.

  That would be telling …

  That would be tell …

  That would …

  That …

  Nothing returned from the flickering this time. And then there was only silence.

  All their efforts had been in vain. Kh’Borian was gone.

  XIX

  Boss

  A genocidal demigod on his way to Earth. Civilisation as they knew it about to end. And here they were, stuck like rats down a drainpipe in the arse-end of an other-dimensional dungeon. As far as Trix was concerned, this was turning into a right pisser of a day.

  She collapsed on her backside in the middle of the chamber, blood dripping from a wound to the forehead acquired in the crypt. Jackson butterflied it, but as he worked, neither of them said a word. Trix looked around at the others—Ralph, Yuri, Ian, Jentiss—all of whom were also slumped in defeat.

  The floor quaked beneath her. Everything she looked at fluttered and warped. For a second she could have sworn she saw the Magnet pub back home, but that was likely wishful thinking. She desperately wanted a drink.

  “Shen,” she asked wearily, “how long do we have?”

  “From the developing phenomena, I’d say about an hour.”

  “Phenomena?”

  Shen pressed a button out of sight. Voices that weren’t his were speaking. News reports in various languages. With considerable interference.

  “ … multiple sightings of strange creatures in Central Park … gas, electricity, and water services have been disrupted following the appearance of subterranean tunnels … the body was found with savage lacerations … video of something unidentifiable but massive in the river Thames … reports from the Vatican of figures—monsters—just walking through the walls … ”

  “It’s going to go from bad to worse, Trix.”

  “Jesus. I’m sorry I let you down. Let everybody down.”

  “You did your best. You all did.”

  “What’s happening with DOME?”

  “The Oblivion Protocol is off-line. Garrison’s doing. I’ve warned Diablo, and they and some DOME personnel and civs are evacuating, but most are staying put—Kh’Borian’s mob, awaiting the coming of their lord …”

  “Poor bastards.” Trix paused. “Shen—eventually, will anywhere be safe?”

  “No, Trix.”

  “There’s nothing to be done?”

  For a second all Trix heard was background noise.

  “Shen? I know that silence …”

  “Okay, one thing. Maybe. While we can’t initiate Oblivion itself, it may still be possible to access the bombs manually. If they can be brought online, there’s a possibility of throwing a spanner in the works.”

  “A spanner?”

  “Look what’s happening. Two dimensions in a state of flux. Quantum instability—and DOME and Deephold at the heart of it. That’s our chance.”

  “Are you saying you want to blow both up?”

  “Not exactly. We use the bombs to target the phase itself. With precisely timed detonations, there’s a slim chance they’d disrupt it, stop it, perhaps even reverse some of its effects.”

  “And Kh’Borian?”

  “The added bonus. Anything in transit between dimensions would be shunted from both, trapped in a third, separate dimension. Basically, we’d remove him from the equation.”

  “Like sending him to the Phantom Zone? Cool. But will it work?”

  “There isn’t exactly a Haynes manual for this, all right? But I do know that if it works, sacrifices would have to be made.”

  “Sacrifices?”

  “DOME would be gone, obviously. Also, when—if—the phase is disrupted, pockets of each dimension would permanently displace the other. We’d be looking at some degree of worldwide—sorry, worlds-wide—translocation.”

  “Translocation?”

  “Physical interchange, Trix. No way to predict its scale—whole forests or towns could be transferred to Yillarnya, and vice versa, for all I know—but I do know the effect could be particularly heavy at the epicentre. The folk in and around Deephold should probably get as far away as they can.”

  Trix couldn’t answer for a second. What was being mooted was one hell of a responsibility—did they have the right to decide
the fate of, if not a world, at least parts of it? Did anyone? Could they sanction the deaths of those who’d fallen under Kh’Borian’s influence through no fault of their own? But what was the alternative? Sit back and lose everything to chaos?

  “We’ll try to get as many of them as possible out of here.”

  “All well and good. But there is one small problem.”

  “Which is?”

  “I can’t do this alone.”

  “Get Elly.”

  “I’ve tried, but she’s nowhere to be found.”

  Trix felt a stab of concern—that wasn’t like Elly at all; had Kh’Borian got to her? She forced her mind back to business. “Then it has to be me.”

  “We have an hour, not a week.”

  Shen was right—there was no way she could exit the dungeon in time, if she was exiting via the hole in the wall where the anomaly first appeared. But that wasn’t what she was thinking. She watched reality breaking down around her. One peculiarity of it was that the carrier wave between her magic mirror and Shen’s had become visible, undulating away from her like a see-through snake. As if in thrall to an unseen charmer’s flute, it vanished at the spot where Kh’Borian had phased, like a thread through the eye of a one-sided needle.

  “The link between us,” she asked, “it’s a wormhole, right?”

  “Yes. A mini-wormhole. Hence my calling it wormglass.”

  “Could you use it to bring me to DOME?”

  “Bring you to DOME?”

  “Yeah. Use it as a teleportal.”

  “Impossible … well, okay, maybe not impossible, just … oh, I don’t know … bat-shit crazy, maybe?”

  “Can you do it, Shen?”

  “Jesus, Trix! Theoretically, yes. A sympathetic vibration to simultaneously shatter the mirrors … collapse the singularity … it could open a momentary window … ”

  “Would it get me there in time?”

  “Remember that old joke about the last thing to go through a fly’s mind when it hits a car’s windshield? If you don’t, the answer is: it’s arse.”

  “That fast, huh?”

  “It won’t be an easy ride. It could kill you, Trix. Very likely will.”