Dungeon Bringer 2

by Nick Harrow

  “How the fuck are we going to find the stele before I die of old age?” I wondered.

  “That’s a very good question,” Nephket said. “Do you have any spells that might be able to detect magic? It should be the strongest power here.”

  That was an excellent idea, but the only spells available to me were a pair that could cure wounds and one that would light up an enemy like a fireworks display. All useful, but not in this circumstance.

  Rathokhetra stirred a memory up for me, and I summoned the Tablet of Incarnation.

  “The Dungeon Reveals, The Dungeon’s Voice, The Dungeon’s Visage,” I read off the list of low-level powers. “Here it is. The Dungeon Detects.”

  <<<>>>

  THE DUNGEON DETECTS

  Duration: Permanent

  Cost: 5 motes of ka

  This ability allows the dungeon lord to detect any magical items within 100 yards of his dungeon. The dungeon lord is aware of the general location (within 50 feet) and approximate power of the magical item. The dungeon lord does not know any other details about this magical item.

  <<<>>>

  I gladly dropped the five motes and cracked my knuckles. It was time to get to work.

  I closed my eyes and let my attention drift out to Nephket’s mind. The Familiar Bond I’d purchased earlier allowed me to use my abilities from her point of view, rather than only my own. I activated The Dungeon Detects and felt a sudden rush as my awareness flowed out in all directions from Nephket.

  “What was that?” Nephket asked, her eyes wide. A shiver ran down her spine, and goose pimples rose across her skin.

  “Magic radar,” I said. “Not a big deal. Just one of those things a dungeon lord can do.”

  “Most impressive,” she said. “Whoa.”

  She turned her head from side to side, looked up, looked down, and turned in a slow circle. Points of light appeared around her at various distances. I instinctively knew they were all minor magical items, but that was all the information my new ability afforded me.

  “A lot of magic in here,” she said. “We should gather all of this up. It could be incredibly useful.”

  “We’ll have time to explore later,” I said. “Maybe. But if we don’t find this dungeon lord and his stele first, we’re fucked.”

  Nephket nodded, and together we analyzed what we could now see.

  The Dungeon Detects covered a hundred yards, which extended beyond the perimeter of this fortress. Oddly, at about fifty yards the ability picked up a solid wall of magic that extended to the limits of my ability. What the hell was that?

  I shook my head and focused on the items closer to Nephket. There were a trio of small and less powerful sources thirty feet below my familiar’s location. They seemed like insignificant powers, so they couldn’t possibly be the core. Maybe they were lightly enchanted weapons or armor of some type. I noted them for later and moved on.

  There were a dozen or more magical items flanking the hall where Nephket stood, but I dismissed them almost immediately. They were far too weak to be a stele or a dungeon lord’s core.

  Ten feet overhead, on the floor above, there was a neat row of glowing red dots that seemed relatively powerful. I’m not sure what they were, but their triangular arrangement led me to believe they were ritual items of some sort. Maybe another gate key?

  But thirty feet over her head lay a real prize. A half-dozen magical items, all more powerful than any of the items on the lower floors, surrounded an even more powerful item that glowed like a dying star.

  “There,” I said and made sure Nephket had a clear image of what I meant. “That’s the one. Find some stairs and get up there.”

  “How are the wahket?” Nephket asked.

  “Bored,” I said. “I’ve got all but a handful of the drow captured, so there’s not much for them to do.”

  “Good,” Nephket said. Then, to the other guardians, “All right, ladies, we need to find a stairway up to the next floor.”

  My guardians continued down the hall, instinctively splitting their attention to the left and right. Pinchy and the other scorpions scuttled in and out of the archways in search of a staircase.

  After a solid quarter hour of searching, the guardians finally found a stairway and made their way up to the next floor. But they stopped dead at the top of the staircase and stared at the mess before them.

  “I do not like this,” Nephket said.

  A narrow passage led away from the top of the staircase, and deep purple stones embedded in the ceiling illuminated the scene. The walls were constructed of slabs of striated muscle that looked like they’d been carved off a creature the size of a house. Heavy black stitches tied the meaty slabs together and fastened it to rings in the ceiling and to hooks on the floor.

  The ceiling was made entirely of scalps. Dozens of bloody, hairy swatches of skin were bound together by thick copper spikes. Some scalps were old and nearly mummified, while others were still moist and dripped splatters of blood onto the floor.

  As repulsive as the ceilings and walls were, it was the floor that had stopped the guardians.

  It was alive.

  Male and female torsos of countless different races had been stitched together by a madman. They were attached to one another by coarse threads stitched through the stumps of their arms and legs. The hideous quilt of meat and bone wriggled. Countless eyes opened and closed in stupefied horror at their situation. Tongues licked at the air as if in search of something to explain their terrifying situation.

  “Who would do this?” Zillah asked. “This is madness.”

  “This isn’t drow work,” Kezakazek said. “There is something darker at work here. Something older than my people.”

  “We can debate its origins later,” Delsinia said with a deep sigh. “Let’s finish this.”

  The rest of the guardians followed her advice, and the quartet moved as quickly as they could across the twisted floor. It took them what felt like an eternity to reach the next chamber, and I felt the seeds of nightmares forming in Nephket’s head.

  “Shit,” Zillah said after she saw what lay in the next chamber. “This is even worse than the hall.”

  The rest of the guardians joined her at the door, and Nephket blew out an exhausted sigh.

  Her eyes roamed over the scene and showed me everything in the chamber.

  Zillah was right.

  This was worse than the mess in the hallway.

  A lot worse.

  Chapter 15: The Spider

  THE STAIRCASE MY GUARDIANS had followed to the source of the magic ended in a narrow hallway and a door.

  Long bones, far too large to have come from any humanoid creature, had been bound together with intricate knots of copper wire to give the door its shape. Smooth ribs nestled in-between the long bones, their curves fitted together so carefully only the smallest of spaces remained between them. Those gaps had been plugged with teeth of all shapes and sizes, pristine and white as if they’d been plucked from jaws that very day.

  But even that bizarre portal hadn’t disturbed Zillah. It was the room that lay beyond.

  That chamber was a half-sphere thirty feet in diameter. An enormous spinal column supported the ceiling from just above the doorway to the floor on the opposite side of the room. The immense vertebrae, each at least five feet long, had been wired together with copper cords as big around as my wrist.

  Gargantuan ribs descended from that central spine and split the ceiling into six equal sections. Each of the roof’s section was composed of a different kind of bone. The first section was fashioned from skulls wedged together and held in place with copper wire knotted through their black, staring sockets.

  The second area was nothing but rib bones; the third, arms; the fifth, pelvises; and the sixth, legs. The floor was constructed from tiny bones, mostly teeth and fingers, with progressively smaller and more intricate copper wires to hold them all in place.

  The bones were a testament to an impressive feat of engineeri
ng, but it was the runes that covered those bones that demonstrated their creator’s madness. Someone, or something, had taken the time to inscribe runes onto every single bone in that room, including the thousands of bones that made up its floor. The inscriptions were so clean and uniform they could have been punched out of a machine.

  “This would have taken decades,” Nephket said, her voice trembling with awe.

  “Centuries,” Kezakazek corrected. “This is the work of an insane immortal. Or a dynasty of mortals. It’s—”

  The floor groaned and split along seams that had been invisible only moments ago. The sections slid back into the wall to reveal a star-shaped hole that exhaled a foul, too-sweet stench.

  “I do not like this, not at all,” Zillah said. Her tail quivered above her head, poised to strike at whatever emerged from the impenetrable blackness at the chamber’s center.

  “This is impossible,” Kezakazek whispered as a star of pure darkness rose from the center of the room. The inky blackness filled the gaps left by the retracted sections of the floor, then continued to rise until it reached the arched ceiling.

  If the chamber itself was the product of an insane mind, what the parting shadows revealed beggared the imagination of even the maddest.

  Six small rings of amber light appeared at the points of the floor sections around the abyss. The runes that made up those rings twisted and writhed like breeding serpents and stung my guardians’ eyes if they stared at them for more than a handful of seconds. Beams of sulfurous light burst from each of the runic circles and converged on the twisted creation that had risen from the floor’s center.

  “Oh, fuck,” Nephket said.

  An enormous creature stood at the center of the chamber, its skin an oily, rubbery black substance that reflected nauseating rainbows from any light that touched it. The beast’s form shifted and blurred when Nephket tried to examine it for my benefit, and only by turning her eyes slightly away from the thing was she able to get a glimpse of its truly horrific form.

  And that glimpse was more than enough. One brief image of the horror burned the tortured creature’s image in both of our minds and left us too stunned to speak for a moment.

  The creature was so tall its sloped skull almost touched the spine embedded in the room’s ceiling. At one point the creature had possessed six eyes, but someone had plucked them from their sockets and then stuffed the puckered holes with gray ashes. The creature’s mouth had likewise been defiled and was surrounded by chipped yellowed fragments of what might once have been an octopus-like beak. All the thing’s teeth had been shattered, snapped off at the gum line to leave nothing but cracked roots and exposed nerves in tortured sockets.

  Countless tentacles, long and muscular, had once emerged from the creature’s torso. Someone, or something, had ripped those appendages away from the beast’s body and left behind ragged stumps.

  And that was where the true horror began.

  Some cruel fiend had embedded barbed copper rods into the stumps that dotted the mutilated beast’s body. They’d threaded the severed tentacles onto those rods like strips of teriyaki chicken ready for the grill. Whoever was responsible for this monstrosity had bent the rods into writhing, serpentine forms that made the tentacles look like they were prepared to strike with their phallic tips.

  The creature’s long, gorilla-like arms had suffered the same fate. They had been torn loose from their sockets at the shoulders and elbows and then reconnected by copper splints screwed through the meat into the bone. The beast’s gangly legs hadn’t been spared, and the screws and wires that had replaced its hip joints and knees were bent from the weight they’d been forced to support.

  Despite the tortures that had been visited upon the creature, it was still alive. It drew one shuddering breath after another, and the sound of its heartbeats echoed through the chamber like the sluggish pounding of a dilapidated machine. Its breaths filled the chamber with a sickly aroma tinged with the stench of decay.

  “This has to die,” Zillah rasped. “Now.”

  “Stop her!” I shouted in Nephket’s thoughts.

  The wahket grabbed the scorpion queen by the shoulder and shook her head.

  “Whatever this thing is,” Zillah said, “we can’t just leave it here.”

  “We won’t,” I said to Nephket, and she relayed my words so the other guardians could hear her. “This thing is tied to the Solamantic Web. If you kill it, you could be trapped in Kozerek’s fortress. Give me a few minutes. I think I can untangle the threads of the web from this thing without bringing the whole thing down.”

  I studied the creature through Nephket’s eyes and tried to make sense of it. This was definitely a dungeon lord of some sort, and it was definitely something that Kozerek had enslaved somehow. When I focused on it, I could see the lines of power that ran from its body into the luminous runic circles that bound it, and from those rings into the very substance of the Solamantic Web.

  I knew that one of those threads led to my dungeon, but I had no idea which one. If I removed the wrong binding, I’d bring the whole thing crashing down around my guardians’ ears.

  That was something I wasn’t willing to risk.

  I approached the Solamantic Web and studied the threads that tied the many worlds together. It was a complicated pattern, with many redundancies and threads that spiraled off into nothingness. I tried to follow the thread that led from Soketra to Kozerek’s lair, but I was frustrated to discover that it frayed and unraveled in a dozen different directions when I tried to follow it.

  The harder I stared at the web, the more difficult it was to make any sense of it. I paced before the web, clenched my fists, took a deep breath, and focused on my meditation.

  In.

  Out.

  I concentrated on each breath and let it carry me away from my current predicament. It was a trick I’d used often as a hacker, and it worked wonders to focus my mind without distraction. It also unfettered my creativity from the chains of frustration and anxiety I’d experienced all too often in my life.

  In.

  Out.

  “Nephket, tell the others to watch the rings. I’m going to try something,” I said. “I want to know if any of the rings react to it.”

  I reached out and laid my finger on the orb that represented Soketra. I concentrated on the connection between here and there and imagined a ripple passing from one end of the thread to the other.

  “Yes!” Nephket shouted in my thoughts. “One of the rings just flashed.”

  “Perfect,” I said. “That’s exactly what I needed to know. Keep an eye on that ring. I’m coming through.”

  “No!” Nephket shouted. “We can handle it on this side.”

  But I knew they couldn’t. They were guardians, powerful in their own right, but they didn’t have the abilities of a dungeon lord. They couldn’t manipulate the Solamantic Web, and I was sure that would be a necessary part of this procedure.

  I also didn’t want them alone with the flailing dick monster if it suddenly woke up and decided to kill everyone it could get its penile tentacles around. I didn’t believe for a second that the creature was helpless or defenseless. Someone might have played mad scientist with its parts, but, somehow, it was still alive.

  And I’d bet even money it was pissed about the situation it found itself in. If it woke up, I wanted to be there to subdue it again.

  I checked to be sure my core still floated above my shoulder, then plunged into the Solamantic Web. There was still another core back at the cobra throne where I’d left it, but that one was empty. Kozerek might be able to do something vile with any core, but at least he wouldn’t have my ka.

  Passing through the web was like riding the Tilt-A-Whirl after downing a fifth of Gentleman Jack with an LSD chaser. My head and stomach went in two different directions, and my eyes tried their best to convince my brain that they could see for miles, and miles, and miles in every direction at the same time. Glimpses of strange worlds flitted ac
ross my vision: giraffe-like creatures with pendulous breasts that dangled from the sides of their throats, bird-men with spikes like hypodermics where their genitalia belonged screeched at a marching column of fungus creatures, and a whole world of jackal-headed women lounged on piles of offal surrounded by clouds of vermillion smoke.

  Those were just the things my mind could grasp. There were dozens of other more surreal scenes that flitted in and out of my perception before I could make sense of them and stow the madness in my memories.

  The multiverse is a weird fucking place, boy and girls.

  And if I’d thought the view from Nephket’s eyes had prepared me for the insanity that was Kozerek’s Krazy Klub for Wayward Drow, I was sadly mistaken.

  My senses swam the instant my feet touched down on the glossy black floor. The engraved vision of the dick-monster orgy bubbled up from the floor in all its disgusting, three-dimensional glory. With every step I took, my vision seemed less trustworthy, and an insistent throbbing took up residence between my ears.

  “You okay, boss?” Zillah asked.

  While I was relieved to have my guardians back in my thoughts, I wasn’t pleased that they sensed my discomfort.

  “I’m all right,” I confirmed. “Just a little woozy from my trip through the web. You guys could have warned me what a mindfuck that is.”

  “Would have if I’d known,” Zillah said, “but it was a walk in the park for me. A heartbeat of complete blackness, and then I was through.”

  “Same,” Delsinia added.

  “Here, too,” Nephket tossed in her two coppers.

  “Barely longer than a blink,” Kezakazek confirmed.

  “Must be my awesome dungeon lord senses messing with my head, then,” I explained. “Because I got weird postcards from a bunch of freaky worlds.”

  “I have no idea what that means,” Delsinia said. “But it sounds strange.”

  “That’s putting it mildly.” I traced my guardians’ footsteps. “What’s the cockerwocky doing in there?”