by Nick Harrow
“Surprise, surprise, surprise, lover,” she snarled. “Miss me?”
She slammed her forehead into my nose, and the impact filled my head with blazing comets.
With a roar, I grabbed my attacker by her mane of long, green hair and hurled her away from me.
She screamed as she sailed across the room and grunted when her back slammed into the wall. She glared at me with emerald eyes surrounded by flickering shadows, and I glared right back at her.
<<<>>>
Delsinia, The Nightmare’s Bride, 6th-level Dungeon Lord
<<<>>>
My special dungeon lord sight didn’t give me any more information than that, but at least it was something.
“Careful,” Nephket cautioned me. “She’s more powerful than she appears.”
Not that Delsinia appeared weak, mind you. Her naked arms and legs were corded with wiry muscle, and patches of glistening green scales covered her shoulders, abdomen, and thighs. Her chest and hips were wrapped in white chains with links as thick as my thumb, and she moved with a sinuous grace that was mesmerizing.
“Silence, silence, silence, slave,” Delsinia hissed.
My rival dungeon lord twisted her hands counterclockwise and bone daggers appeared in each of them. The daggers were connected by what looked like an extra-long spinal cord that rattled and chattered as Delsinia moved the daggers in strange patterns.
“No need to get snippy,” I said. “Put the blades down and surrender to me. Hand over your core and walk away. We don’t have to—”
The dungeon lord exploded into motion. She raced toward me, body low to the ground, muscled legs pumping. The bone daggers in her hands flashed with a supernatural light as she thrust her hands toward my gut.
She was fast, I’d give her that, but I was no slouch in the fighting department. I pivoted on my back leg and twisted to the side. My khopesh swept up, and its hook caught her weapons and slid them away from my gut with millimeters to spare.
Delsinia was so committed to the attack that she couldn’t correct course to protect herself. Her blades shot past me, and her knee slammed into my thigh so hard we both grunted in pain.
Before Delsinia could get away, I braced my right leg and brought my left knee up into her stomach with all the force I could muster. The short, sharp strike slammed into her solar plexus so hard it lifted her into the air and her breath hissed out of her lungs.
My khopesh was out of position, which is the only thing that kept me from lopping her head right off. Instead, I had to satisfy myself with a hard strike to her temple with the hooked sword’s pommel.
The blow should have knocked the fight out of Delsinia, but she acted like I’d stroked her cheek with a feather. She twisted her body away from me, landed on her feet, then launched herself into a graceful front flip that bounced her up and over my head.
The spine that connected Delsinia’s dagger looped under my chin and arrested her jump. She twisted in midair and swung down with acrobatic ease. Her knees slammed into my back and she pulled back hard on her daggers like a rider trying to bring an unruly mount to heel.
“No!” Nephket howled.
Before I could warn her to stay back, my familiar had thrown herself through the air. Her mouth was opened in a feral scream and her claws were bared. She had every intention of tearing Delsinia’s throat out and feasting on her gizzard.
But neither Delsinia nor I were incarnated, and Nephket sailed through us both like we were no more than a mirage.
“Yes, yes, yes,” Delsinia hissed in my ear. “Die. Pain. Cease!”
I reached over one shoulder to grab the dungeon lord’s emerald hair, but she jerked her head back and slid lower on my back to stay out of my reach. She locked her bony ankles in front of me and leaned back until my back bent like a drawn bow.
Fortunately, choking a dungeon lord isn’t a very effective way to kill us. The bony vertebrae hurt, sure, but I was in no danger of suffocating. Unless she sawed off my head, which I supposed she could have if she really tried, Delsinia wasn’t going to end this fight on my back.
I backpedaled across the room as fast as my sandaled feet would carry me.
At the last possible second, I felt Delsinia try to slither off me, but I was having none of that. I grabbed her ankles with both hands and held on tight. A moment later the dungeon lord was sandwiched between my back and the hard and unyielding surface of her dungeon.
She shrieked in surprise and pain, and her grip on the daggers slipped just enough to let the bones around my throat go slack.
Before she could recover, I hooked the fingers of my left hand under the garotte and threw myself into a forward somersault.
My weight crashed down on top of the much smaller dungeon lord on my back, and her breath exploded from her lungs in a hot rush alongside my left ear. Something cracked and splintered beneath me, and I hoped it was her ribs. I pulled the length of bone up and over my head and rolled to my feet without releasing it.
Delsinia lay flat on her back, her arms and legs spread-eagled and her hair splayed out around her head like the guts of a bug that had splatted against a windshield. A low moan escaped her lips and her eyes flashed like warning lights.
With a roar, I yanked hard on the spine and ripped the daggers out of her hands. I flung the weapons behind me and they rattled against the bars of the gate.
“Big mistake, lady,” I said. Rathokhetra’s rage had stoked my own anger to a seething boil. It was time for this one to die.
I took a two-handed grip on my khopesh and raised it high overhead. At the height of its arc, I swung it down like the blurred blade of a guillotine. In my mind’s eye, I already saw her body shattered and split cleanly in half. Rathokhetra howled, sure that Delsinia was dead.
Unfortunately, this dungeon lord was far tougher than I’d expected.
My khopesh’s leading edge slammed into Delsinia’s chest just between her breasts and skipped off the bone chains that protected her. Instead of carving a bloody swath of destruction down her body, my weapon only managed to draw a thin line of blood down to her navel.
Of course. Of course she had magical fucking armor.
The crazed dungeon lord sprang to her feet with lightning speed and swiped at my midsection with nails I realized were very, very sharp. Her left hand met the inside curve of my khopesh’s hooked blade as I parried, but her right hand swooped below my guard and into my gut.
The blow forced me back a step, and if I hadn’t been wearing my own magical armor, it probably would have ripped my guts out. As it was, I escaped her attack without a scratch, but I didn’t want to give her another chance to eviscerate me.
My blade was too heavy for a quick reversal, so I settled for a front snap kick into Delsinia’s left knee. The attack should have shattered the joint and left her crippled on the floor, but, again, dungeon lords are resilient motherfuckers.
When my toe made contact with her body, Delsinia flipped backward and most of my attack’s force was wasted. She landed on her hands and did a front handspring back at me with her mouth open wide in a hellish scream.
“You, you, you!” she screamed. “Die!”
Her voice sounded rough and tortured as if it’d been years since she’d used it to do anything but scream. There was a ragged, emotional undercurrent beneath the words she shouted, a hint of loss and betrayal that I couldn’t understand.
“Not today,” I snarked back and twisted away from her attack.
Delsinia sailed past me with her claws extended and landed on the ground right next to her fucking daggers. She swept one of the daggers off the floor and spun in a graceful pirouette that sent the spine and other blade whipping through the air above her head. With a feral screech she swept the blade at my exposed back.
The whistling blade came so close to severing my spine I felt a cool breeze as it shot past my back. With a surprised shout, I jumped forward and spun around, my khopesh held before me in a defensive position. I wasn’t sure I’d be fas
t enough to parry the dagger if she swung it at me again, but I was damned sure going to try.
“How long?” Delsinia asked. Her voice was still ragged, but the rage had lessened. There was a curious, questioning tone to her words. “Down, down, down. How long?”
“Lady, I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” I snapped.
Delsinia lost her shit at my response. She threw her body into a series of twisting cartwheels and launched her dagger at me in a cyclone of whip-crack slashes that forced me to retreat until my back hit a wall.
She was so fucking fast. I’d been much quicker than the raiders who tried to take down my temple, but compared to Delsinia I was a damned snail.
I deflected another of her whirling slashes and the dagger rebounded off my khopesh with a high-pitched tone like the ringing of a crystal gong. I thought that would be enough to rip the blade from her hand, but Delsinia was faster and smarter than that.
When her blade rebounded from mine, she released her grip on one dagger and thrust her arm forward. The spine that connected the blades looped around her forearm, and she ducked low to let both blades spin over her head. With a triumphant shout, Delsinia caught the spine in her fist and pivoted at the hips to arrest the blades’ rotation and bring them down in an overhead slash.
Straight at my face.
In that moment, I knew I had a choice. I could play keep-away with Delsinia and hope she ran out of juice before she cut me to ribbons. Or, I could do something stupid and bring the fight to her.I released my grip on the khopesh with my left hand and raised that arm up toward Delsinia’s daggers. The razor-sharp weapons descended toward me like the raking claws of a plummeting raptor. There was no way for me to avoid that attack. It was too fast, and the weapons were already too close to my body. Their tips punched through the flesh of my arm like a pair of ice picks into a ripe watermelon, and rich, red blood gushed from the twin wounds.
The pain was shocking, but not nearly as bad as I’d feared it would be. After the initial moment of impact, the blades embedded in my forearm produced nothing more than a dull, irritating ache.
With a dark grin, I twisted my wounded arm to wrap the spine between the daggers around my wrist. Before Delsinia realized what had happened, I ripped my arm back and tore the bone chain from her grasp.
Disarmed, Delsinia used her superior agility to increase the distance between us. She tumbled backward with a handspring that would’ve made a gymnast jealous. She landed with perfect form and raised her hands in front of her in a defensive posture. Her emerald eyes darted from my hands to my feet and back again as she searched for an opening in my defenses.
“Enough of this shit,” I said. “I’ve taken out your zombie trumpeter. I slaughtered your drow. I turned you ghouls into compost, and now I’ve disarmed you. You’ve lost this fight, Delsinia. Give up. I promise I’ll make your death as painless as possible.”
I stalked across the room toward her, and Delsinia sidled from side to side in the hopes I’d slip up and let her get past me. She made one desperate lunge to get around me, maybe to go for Nephket, but my khopesh darted out and blocked her path.
“You left me,” she wailed. “Down, down, down. So many years. So dark. Left, left, left.”
“I don’t even know you,” I said. I’d backed her into a corner now, and her eyes were locked on the tip of my blade as if it were a serpent about to strike. “Do me a favor. Shut your mouth and die.”
“You do know me, me, me,” she screamed. “Look, look, look!”
Time froze around me as Delsinia stood tall and her hair flared behind her like a cobra’s hood. Our eyes locked, and I felt a dry desert wind scour us with gritty sand. The dungeon receded around us, and I found myself perched high above a sun-soaked desert with Delsinia curved against my side. Her lips caressed the side of my neck as we watched our troops carve a swath of destruction through our enemies.
Rathokhetra howled through my mind like a screaming storm. Oh, yeah, he knew who the fuck this was.
And, suddenly, so did I.
My khopesh felt very heavy and its tip fell to the stone floor. I’d misinterpreted Rathokhetra’s pain as rage. He wasn’t angry at Delsinia. He fucking missed her.
“You see, see, see,” Delsinia said. Her voice was low and tortured. “Finally. You see me.”
“Delsinia,” I started, but she cut me off.
“I worshipped you,” she howled. “I killed, killed, killed your enemies. My love made me your slave, slave, slave.”
I heard Nephket’s stifled gasp from behind me and was torn by the desire to tend to the two very different kinds of pain in the room for me. Three if I counted Rathokhetra’s agony in my skull.
“I am not the same man you knew,” I said in a vain attempt to make Delsinia understand.
“You lie!” she shrieked. “I see, see, see you, my Lord Rathokhetra.”
I dredged Rathokhetra’s memories for some sign of this woman. I needed to know what she was to him, and what he’d done to her. I needed some way to make her understand that we didn’t have to be enemies. She had nothing I wanted, and if I could convince her to leave me the hell alone, I wouldn’t have to leave here with even more blood on my hands.
Hell, if I played my cards right, there was a chance we could part as allies. It might be very useful to have another dungeon lord to watch my back for any threats that reared their ugly heads in the Great Below.
“The Rathokhetra you knew is but a memory,” I explained. “He was betrayed by his allies, and they all but destroyed his empire. His priestess summoned me to take up his mantle and defend his people. I’m sorry for your loss, but—”
“My loss, loss, loss?” Her voice cracked as she barked out a crazed, desperate laugh. “I gave you that empire. I chained my people to your dreams. I lost everything!”
I glanced toward Nephket, but she had nothing to offer except for a slow, sad shake of her head. Her eyes were wide with fear and confusion as if all of this was a version of history that she’d never stumbled across in her readings of Rathokhetra’s prophecies and scriptures. Delsinia wasn’t the only one who was in pain.
There was only one person in this room with any answers as to what the fuck was going on here, and it was high time that piece of shit offered me something other than grumbles and groans and mindless outbursts.
“Hey, asshole,” I thought to the splinter of Rathokhetra lodged in my gray matter. “Give me something I can work with here.”
The old fucker shied away from contact and retreated further into the shadows of my memories. He was harder to find, but I still felt him inside me like the annoying sting of a tiny splinter wedged in the calloused skin of my heel.
I didn’t know if I could force Rathokhetra to tell me anything, but I was damned sure going to try.
“No more running,” I said to him. “I don’t care how much you hate talking about Delsinia. It’s your turn at bat and you better hit it out of the fucking park.”
The old dungeon lord resisted me again, but I was done playing nice. I dragged him out of the shadows and into the light. He squirmed and wriggled, but it was a losing battle. He was inside my head, and I was, at least for the moment, still the fucking boss.
He relented at last. A flood of memories gushed out of him and took up residence in my skull. It wasn’t a pretty story, but it seemed to be the truth.
I didn’t have time for the whole history lesson, but what I saw made me wince. Rathokhetra and Delsinia had once worked together, very closely. When shit started to go south for the old bastard, he sent Delsinia away to safeguard his back door from some nasty, nasty creatures in the Great Below. It wasn’t supposed to be forever. A few months, maybe a year. To protect them both, he’d laid a geas on Delsinia that prevented her from telling anyone of his location or from leaving her dungeon until he came to release her.
He hadn’t banished Delsinia to this place to be cruel; he’d done it to save her from his enemies the only way he knew how.
But the war hadn’t gone the way Rathokhetra expected. It had dragged on and on, and his resources had been spread so thin that he didn’t dare bring the only woman he’d ever truly loved, the only creature he’d ever considered his equal, out of the darkness. He was afraid his enemies would find her and use her against him. He was afraid for Delsinia, and for himself.
Well, that was certainly a doozy.
“I...he never meant for this...” I began. Then I stopped, and my shoulders sagged. “You were never meant to stay here for so long. It should have been a short while until it was safe for you to return. But I...he was defeated.”
Delsinia’s eyes leaked fresh tears with every word. Her beautiful features cracked and an ugly sadness forced its way to the surface. She stared at me with ancient eyes and wept bitterly for a past she could never recover.
“End, end, end,” Delsinia sobbed. “Free me. It is the only way. Hurry, hurry, hurry.”
She fell to her knees and bowed her head. The emerald waves of her long hair cascaded to the floor between us like a pool of spilled ink.
I looked away from her for just a moment and locked eyes with Nephket. My familiar’s eyes brimmed with tears, and I wondered what legends she had remembered. She knew I hadn’t been the one who betrayed Delsinia, but Rathokhetra had. And her people had worshiped him just as surely as Delsinia had loved him.
The thing about never meet your heroes? It goes double for your gods.
We’re bastards.
Every fucking one of us.
I glanced toward the gate and saw Zillah and Kezakazek at the bars. They stared at me, eyes open wide in disbelief. I felt their bloodlust, their anger, their confusion, and their desire to end this mess.
“Do it,” Zillah said. “She attacked you. She’ll do it again if you give her a chance. You can’t ever trust another dungeon lord.”
Kezakazek let out a long, ragged sigh and lowered her head for a moment. Her shoulders sagged as she weighed the decision that had fallen into my lap, and then she went very, very still. Finally, she lifted her eyes to mine and offered me a bitter little smile.
