by Nick Harrow
Zillah glanced at me and rolled her eyes at the pathetic threat posed by the undead, and I felt her disdain for the loathsome creatures. She wanted to rush out and behead the lot of them with her snap-jawed spear, but she held her ground out of respect for my wishes. The scorpion queen lived to fight, and it rankled her to watch this one from the back row.
The skeleton shambled across the threshold of my dungeon, and the wahket kept their shields raised and weapons at the ready as the threat neared. They were trained to strike only when given the order to attack, and Zillah remained silent. Their apprehension grew as the undead clattered toward them, but they did not unleash their weapons. The front line did raise their shields and thrust them forward to hold the undead at bay, but their spears remained braced.
“Now!” Zillah shouted. “Right side, pin that dickless bone banger to the wall!”
Anunaset and Sabra moved as one. They pivoted to line up their attacks, then thrust their spears forward into the cage of the skeleton’s ribs. The sharp tips of their weapons passed between the curved bones and the undead’s spine. With a shout, the pair of wahket swung their spears hard to the right and smashed the skeleton into the dungeon’s wall with a sound that reminded me of biting down on a popcorn kernel.
The animated stick figure clacked its teeth together and lost a few ribs, but that didn’t slow it down. Its eyes burned with the eternal fury of the grave, and its hands scrabbled at the wahket’s weapons. It dragged itself up the wahket’s spears, one lurching step at a time.
Anunaset and her ally held their ground as the creature’s gnashing jaws drew nearer to their hands, and even I wondered when the scorpion queen would give the order to finish the fight.
“Back rank, strike!” Zillah shouted at the last possible second.
The two wahket on the right side of the second row, Nanu and Kissa, raised their weapons and brought them down in a pair of powerful overhead smashes. The skeleton’s skull exploded into a spray of brittle bony fragments, and it collapsed into a cloud of gray dust that smelled like old books and sea salt.
Before the wahket could celebrate their victory over the first undead, the zombies shambled into the fray. They’d been slower than the skeleton, but that didn’t matter up close. The living corpses hurled their bodies toward the front row of the wahket, and the cat women were forced to react before Zillah could bark the next set of orders at them.
As one, the wahket thrust their shields forward to drive back the undead. The first zombie stumbled back from the shield’s impact, but the second was smarter. The hideous monster clamped its jaws across the top of an iron-banded shield and dragged it down with the sheer weight of its body.
The sudden gap in their defenses might’ve been the end of the wahket, but they remembered their training. The cat women on either side of the gap thrust their spears forward, and the tips punched through the creature’s chest. The blow would’ve been fatal to a living man, but the zombie wasn’t even inconvenienced when his heart became a pincushion.
The animated corpse groaned and flailed its arms at the wahket, but the spears through its chest held it at a safe distance.
Unfortunately, that safe distance also put it out of reach of the clubs of the cat women in the second rank. Meanwhile, the zombie who’d bounced off the shields dragged itself back onto its feet and re-entered the fray.
“Second rank, spears!” Zillah shouted. She cursed when she realized she couldn’t reach past the tightly clustered wahket to attack the zombies with her own spear. “Now!”
“Dammit,” Kezakazek snarled. She wove an arcane pattern between her fingers and spat a series of guttural consonants. Her acid sphere was deadly, but it would take a few seconds to form.
A few seconds the wahket might not have.
The pinioned zombie groaned again and thrust itself forward. The effort was too much for its body, and the whole left side of his torso tore away from its spine and breastbone. Decayed organs slopped onto the floor in a disgusting puddle, and a horrible stench swept through the dungeon corridor.
Anunaset shouted in dismay as the now-freed zombie slammed into her shield. She drove her spear forward, but its haft couldn’t find purchase as it slipped through the ruins of the undead’s chest.
The zombie’s teeth gnashed together as it tried to pry the shield from Anunaset’s grasp. The creature wasn’t strong, but its weight was unwieldy and the grotesque stench that surrounded it made the cat women cough and retch.
“Second rank!” Zillah shouted. “Strike!”
While the front ranks of the wahket hacked and wheezed from the corrupt miasma that clawed at their throats and lungs, the second rank sprang into action. The two in the center of the formation had their spears free and thrust them straight into the zombie’s skull.
The rotted cranium shattered and sprayed bits of decayed gray matter in every direction like a bowl of Jell-O hit by a bowling ball dropped from the tenth floor. Smelly gore splattered the wahket, and for the briefest moment their battle line wavered.
The second zombie plowed into their ranks. With their shields in disarray and their weapons out of position, the wahket were unable to defend themselves against the ungainly attack.
“Form up!” Zillah shouted. “Remember your damned training, pussycats!”
Kez unleashed her acid sphere into the zombie’s face, and the undead staggered back. Half its face dissolved into a black-and-red slop that drooled onto the floor as its deflated eye dangled from its socket.
The wahket shouted in surprise at the attack but took advantage of the breathing room it earned them. They hauled their shields back into position and readied their spears once again.
“That was close,” Nephket murmurred so low only I heard her words. She fretted over her wahket like a mother lion over her cubs, but she didn’t inject herself into their battle. Zillah was the commander, and my familiar knew better than to confuse the cat women by adding her voice to the fray.
“They’ve got this.” I reached out to squeeze her hand. “Trust them.”
“Finish it,” Zillah said. “Let’s not get bogged down with a few fucking zombies, ladies.”
“Yes, ma’am!” Anunaset shouted. “Wahket, strike!”
The front row slammed their spears into the zombie’s torso, but didn’t push it back. They held it close to their shields even as its jaws chomped at the air in front of their faces and rancid fluids sprayed across them.
The second rank’s spears thrust into the zombie, too, nearly cutting it in half. With a shout, the club-wielding cat women on the outside of the back row lunged forward and hammered the decayed monstrosity’s skull into goo.
“Nice!” Zillah whooped. “Boss, Pinchy says we’ve got company headed our way from the east and more far to the south.”
The wahket looked a little shaken by their first battle of the day, but despite their gore-spattered faces they didn’t seem any the worse for wear. Best to keep them moving and finish this nasty job before they had too much time to think about how close they’d come to disaster.
“Let’s not keep the welcome party waiting,” I said.
I pushed the dungeon past the first crumbled tombs ahead of us, then turned hard to the east when I heard the shuffle-clatter of approaching zombies and skeletons.
The dungeon corridor plowed through the ruins of a tomb like a bulldozer through a snowman, and pieces of shattered masonry and cracked stone rained down around the gang of skeletons and zombies ahead of us. This was a larger group than the first we’d encountered, and I sensed the tension in the air as the cat women braced for battle.
The wahket remained in formation as we advanced and were ready for the five skeletons that charged into the dungeon. The bony bastards slammed into the shield wall with rib-shattering force, but they didn’t even seem to notice the damage they’d caused to themselves. Their jaws clacked together in a desperate attempt to reach the wahket, but the skeletons couldn’t get past the shields.
The s
econd rank moved at the same instant that Zillah called for them to strike. Their clubs shattered the skulls of three of the skeletons in the blink of an eye, and the dungeon hallway filled with a cloud of bone powder that reminded me of moldering books in a forgotten corner of a secondhand bookstore.
For a moment, the wahket were blinded. They held fast, but I saw a danger they couldn’t detect.
“They’re coming over the top!” I shouted. “Clubs, swing!”
The remaining skeletons had taken advantage of the distraction to haul themselves up and over the shields of the wahket in the front row. The bony monsters were light and surprisingly nimble, and before the front rank could respond, the bad guys were behind them.
The club-wielding cat women in the second rank swung blindly. They weren’t in a panic, not quite, but it was a near thing.
The first club whistled through the smoke and managed to miss both the skeleton and, thankfully, the other wahket. I cringed at how near a miss it was and offered up a silent dungeon lord prayer that the next one wouldn’t take off the head of one of the cat women in the front rank.
Fortunately, the second club hit a skeleton and ripped its jaw clean off. It wasn’t a fatal blow, but it staggered the creature, who lost its footing when it stepped back into the first rank of cat women.
“What is that sound?” Nephket asked.
A strange piping warbled through the air. It reminded me of a badly out-of-tune bagpipe played by someone with no skill whatsoever. The distorted music, if you could call it that, unnerved me, and it was getting closer.
“Front rank, hold!” Zillah shouted.
The cloud of dust had settled, and the clear air revealed a very bad scene.
The wahket’s training hadn’t included any tips on what to do when your enemies monkey over your shield wall. Anunaset still faced forward, ready to deal with any threats that popped up, but Aliyah, who anchored the right-hand side of the formation, had turned to face the skeleton who’d bumped into her back.
Which left her open to attack by the trio of zombies who’d finally made it into the dungeon.
“Zillah!” Nephket shouted when she saw the danger. “Do something!”
“Ah, fuck,” Kezakazek groaned. She’d positioned herself far to the left of the dungeon corridor and peered out past the wahket. “There are a lot more creepy-crawlies headed this way. Like, a lot more.”
“Screw this noise,” I shouted. “I’m incarnating.”
“Boss!” Zillah shouted. She jumped forward and dug her chitinous legs into the dungeon’s wall. With a war cry, she vaulted to the ceiling, then twisted and dropped down behind the zombies. The scorpion queen used her spear to hook the rotter that had moved toward Aliyah’s back and flung it back out of the dungeon. “Save your ka. We’ve got this.”
Nephket raised her voice, and a warm chant surrounded my whole team with strands of golden energy that both lifted our spirits and restored our stamina. I glanced at her, and she nodded back at me.
If Zillah said we had it, I trusted her to make sure that was true.
Rathokhetra muttered his agreement at the back of my thoughts, which was almost enough to make me get physical just to spite him. That asshole had a very different idea of sound tactics than me. He’d let all the wahket die if it furthered his goals.
I was not going to be that kind of dungeon lord.
The wahket in the back rank cried out and smashed the skeletons to tiny bits. They wisely avoided any further head shots, which prevented more explosions of blinding dust from screwing things up for them. Instead, they hammered the creatures’ arms off, then smashed their legs to pieces and kicked their skulls back down the dungeon.
“What a mess,” Kezakazek grumbled. She poked one of the skulls with her toes, and when it didn’t try to bite her, picked it up. “This would look good in your throne room, though.”
Zillah and the rest of the wahket dealt with the three zombies in short order, but there wasn’t much of a breather. We’d taken down five zombies and six skeletons so far, but there was nearly twice that number of undead headed our way.
I checked my ka vessels and cursed when I saw that I’d only added four motes of ka after all that fuss. The wahket were valiant fighters, but they were still zero-level commoners and even the pathetic challenge rating of the skeletons and zombies gave them a run for their money. I needed to figure out a way to raise the level of the cat women, and fast. There was no sense in endangering their lives for so little return.
“Hold your ground,” Zillah barked at the wahket. “I have to go out there and see what the fuck is going on.”
“You sure that’s a good idea?” I asked Zillah. “You’re too important to die on a scouting mission.”
“As if. I need to deal with that noise,” Zillah said. “Something is calling the undead to us. For all I know, it’s raising them.”
That didn’t sit well with me at all. I wasn’t a necromancy expert, but I’d been under the impression this necropolis was a static sort of thing. If there was some creeper out there making more zombies and skeletons, maybe it was time to go back for reinforcements. Four times as many wahket would certainly help out.
I said as much, but Zillah shook her head and waved off my concerns.
“It’s probably nothing,” she said. “But I’ve got to go before the whole horde gets here.”
With that, she blew me a kiss and then boogied on out of the dungeon. When she was in a hurry, the scorpion queen used her human legs and all six of her scorpion legs to haul ass. She built up a full head of steam before she reached the oncoming parade of the living-impaired, then bounded off to the right, scrambled across the roof of a fallen tomb, and vanished from sight.
“She’s something,” Kezakazek sighed, almost wistfully. “Where’d you find her?”
“Long story,” I said, but then the zombies arrived, and story time was over.
Upright corpses ripe with rot and festooned with hanging patches of moss and mold stumbled down the main thoroughfare of the necropolis. Their skeletal friends wormed their way toward the front of the procession, and the jaws of all those skulls clattered together with a sound like a castanet troop in hell.
The wahket held their shields and weapons at the ready, but I felt the fear that wormed its way through them. They hadn’t broken, but this field trip had turned a lot darker than they’d imagined possible.
“You’ve got this,” I said. I used my dungeon lord powers to appear before the wahket in my Super Sentai getup. I wore head-to-toe gold armor studded with blue gems that blazed with electric power. My khopesh was an extra-fancy version of itself, as well, and looked like it would cut down a tree as easily as lop off a head. “You are the warriors of Lord Rathokhetra, and these creatures are nothing before your might!”
“For Lord Rathokhetra!” the wahket cried.
Kezakazek twisted her hands through painful contortions and barked a series of twisted syllables. One of the drow’s trusty acid spheres exploded out of her hands and plowed through the horde of undead a few yards outside our dungeon. The deadly ball sizzled and popped as it blew through a skeleton’s sternum and shattered its spine. The creature’s head popped off like a snipped daisy, and its bones collapsed to the ground with a dusty rattle.
The rest of the undead tromped forward and ground their fallen compatriot into splinters of dust. The stench that rose from their decayed flesh was enough to make even a dungeon lord gag, and the wahket swallowed hard and brushed at their sensitive noses as if they could wipe the stench away.
“Hold your ground,” I barked in my best Zillah imitation. “Focus on your shields. Let the horde smashed up against them, and the second rank can finish them off. Nephket, keep their strength up. I’m here to help, too.”
Nephket’s voice became louder and more strident in response, and the golden glow around the wahket intensified. The cat women stiffened as new energy buoyed their spirits and energized their muscles.
The leading ed
ge of the horde slammed into their shields. It was composed mostly of skeletons, who clung to the iron rims of the round barriers in a vain attempt to wrench the protection from the wahket’s hands.
“For Rathokhetra!” the cat women shouted again. They thrust their shields forward, and the impact slammed the skeletons back into the next wave of attackers. Bones cracked and popped, and a trio of skulls let out one last chatter before they crumbled to dust.
But the horde was far from stopped. They surged forward in a concerted wave that rocked the first row of wahket back on their heels. Zombies and skeletons thrust their heads forward, and their jaws clacked together inches from the noses of the embattled cat women.
“For Rathokhetra!” the second rank of wahket shouted. They threw their weight into the backs of their allies and swung their clubs in an even, precise rhythm. The spiked weapons shattered naked skulls and crushed jellied brains into sticky goo that clung to their weapons and dripped down their arms like slime.
But not all of the zombies that took a hit went down. For every three that fell, another wobbled on its feet and surged back to the attack. Their undead fortitude let them shrug off some of the fatal blows, which turned the tide of the battle in their favor.
The warriors in the front rank choked and gagged at the horrible smells that rose from their enemies’ ruptured skulls and shredded bodies, but they kept their shields held high to defend the fighters in the second rank. The club-wielding wahket in the second rank took advantage of their defenses to put every ounce of strength they could muster into their attacks. The squad of wahket had become a war machine. They operated as a single, flesh-and-blood unit with one purpose: to destroy the undead.
As the grinding battle carried on, I was still with the wahket but my attention shifted to focus on the battle as a whole. From my new vantage, it was obvious the battle line had mired the undead in a relentless slaughter. As long as the shields held up, the second row could safely batter the undead into lifeless heaps of putrefied flesh and splintered bone.
Despite the horrifying resilience of the zombies, the wahket’s methodical strategy evened the fight. The second row had adapted their tactics to quickly swing a second time if any of their foes didn’t fall. The extra effort cost them energy, but the wahket were sturdy and their endurance was impressive.
