The Dungeoneers

by Jeffery Russell

  Durham stood for a time, looking at the night sky. The cliff loomed over the tops of the trees. He could see the stone face at the top of the falls, the water streaming from its mouth and eyes a silver cascade in the moonlight. Tanahael and the Crypt of Alaham awaited.

  -7-

  Durham awakened to Thud’s bristly face looming over him.

  “Make with the vertical, lad! Ye just have time for breakfast afore we head up the trail.”

  “I’m on the scouting team?” Durham asked. His mouth tasted like stale feathers.

  “Yer me shadow, remember? You coming goes without saying.” He paused. “Until jest now when I said it, at least.” Ruby stood just behind him, a heavy walking stick in hand. Durham had been under the notion that Thud’s shadow proclamation had been for Durham’s safety. This was being challenged by the fact that he now found himself with the morning agenda of walking toward the haunted ruins of a city rather than toward a creek with a bucket.

  Gammi was making his way around the camp with a steaming pot, ladling its contents out as he went. He reached Durham and stopped, arching an eyebrow.

  “How many legs did it have?” Durham asked.

  “More’n four.”

  “Think I’ll have to pass,” Durham said. His stomach gave an unhappy growl.

  “Got them pancakes too, what the elves gave us.”

  “Any butter or jam to go with them?”

  “Got some grub paste…”

  Durham frowned.

  Gammi rubbed his bare head thoughtfully. “Well, the elves usually put tree sap on ‘em but they didn’t give us none. Lotsa trees around though.” He paused only briefly before catching the gist of Durham’s expression and continuing. “Or I got a bit of honey if that’ll work for you.”

  Durham brightened up.

  “Honey and pancakes? I can work with that.”

  Gammi winked. “I’ll be back ‘round directly.

  He returned a few minutes later carrying a honey bucket, the sack of pancakes slung over his shoulder. He also, curiously, had donned a long coat of chainmail that hung down to his knees.

  “Still might be some bees, bark and bears in the honey. Ain’t been filtered. Probably fits right in with Elvish cooking though.” He set the bucket down and dropped the sack with a fluffy thump. “Got a surprise for you, too.”

  Durham’s arm hairs twitched.

  “Oh?”

  Gammi reached into the sack and pulled out a limp stack of pancakes. He plopped them down onto Durham’s plate, gave Durham a grin then turned and sat down on them.

  Durham’s mouth was hanging open as if it had intended to say something to prevent his pancakes from being sat upon but had been too stupefied by the notion that a dwarf was sitting on his pancakes to actually express anything. Gammi stood back up and gestured grandly at the somewhat flatter stack. The pancakes had lines criss-crossing them from the chainmail and were concave with the curve of dwarven buttocks.

  “We calls ‘em waffles. Holds the grub paste better. Honey too, most likely. A great advancement in pancake technology.”

  “Why do you call them that?”

  “It’s what Thud yelled the first time Gong accidentally sat on his pancakes.”

  ᴥᴥᴥ

  The trail had once been a road. Ancient wagon ruts were still visible along much of it, eroded from their new life as run-off ditches for rain. Foliage encroached from the sides, narrowing the route to the width of the local wildlife. They saw tracks in the numerous patches of mud as they ascended—deer and goats, primarily, occasionally a bear track. The waterfall was only occasionally visible but its roar was constant, limiting any conversation to yelling in ears and hand gestures. Thud was in the lead, a walking stick in each hand making it seem he was skiing up the hill. Durham followed with Ruby just behind him. She had a broad cone-shaped straw hat and two walking sticks as well which made Durham suspect that he was missing out on something with his single walking stick. He’d rescued it from the firewood as they’d left camp. Giblets followed Ruby, with Nibbly taking up the rear.

  Mungo had hiked up with the vanguard team—they’d left about twenty minutes before Durham’s group. Durham had spotted a few of the trail marks that they’d left but didn’t know what they meant. He didn’t envy them. The trail was irritatingly steep and they, apart from Mungo, had all been in full armor. The morning air was cool but the sun was out, its heat adding up with each step until he had sweat stinging his eyes. An occasional mist-laden breeze provided a few seconds of relief but those were much less common than the clouds of insects arriving for breakfast.

  They reached the top of the falls about an hour after they’d left camp. The great stone face looked down on them, adorning the front of an old cyclopean dam across the top of the falls. Durham wondered if the face was a likeness of Alaham or if it predated him. Behind the dam was a long narrow lake in a steep forested valley. The sound of the falls faded and the air filled with the scent of pine as the road they followed continued up the side of the mountain. It wasn’t long before they came to the vanguard team resting at a vantage point that offered a broad view of the valley below.

  Tanahael lay below them.

  It was far larger than Durham had expected. He knew that it was the ruin of a city but had expected a few scattered broken buildings and wells, not a ruin that was still as extensive as an actual city. It filled the valley, a tumbled ocean of stone. Nature had reclaimed much of it. The trees were thick enough to be a forest in parts and the streets were choked with bushes. Vines climbed dark gray walls and ferns adorned the rooftops. A dozen or so towers still stood tall enough to rise above the trees, their tops broken and jagged against the sky.

  Thud made a loud ‘gurmph’ noise in his throat. “Well ain’t that a sight.” He unshouldered his pack and fished around in it, finally producing a pair of Mungo’s duoculars.

  “One o’ Mungo’s thingjiggys,” he said to Durham. “First one he made was just two spyglasses stuck into some goggles. Looked like a right tit wearing it and they liked looking off every which way.” He raised the duoculars to his eyes and fiddled for a minute with the knobs and gears.

  “Ah, there we go,” he said. “Hmmm.” He lowered the duoculars. “Not sure what I was expecting ta see. Everything just looks the same but closer.” He pointed down the hill. “We’ll scout about today then hole up ‘til nightfall. Gonna stay the night to see if things take a turn after dark. Signal the base camp, eh?”

  Mungo produced a tube from his pack and set it up on a small tripod. He pulled out a paper-wrapped ball the size of a plum and Thud handed him his cigar. Mungo touched it to a cord on the side of the ball which ignited in a shower of sparks then dropped it in the tube. There was a deep thump noise and a trail of smoke into the sky, now a brilliant flare of white, a falling star in day.

  ᴥᴥᴥ

  They spent the better part of the day exploring the city. Weed infested broken plazas of upturned stones overlooked by the hollow windows of the shells of buildings. Birds flickered between trees that grew up amid toppled walls. The air was thick and lazy with sun, cicadas buzzing from the bushes. They entertained themselves by speculating on what different parts of the ruin had been. Mansions and houses, markets, wineries and mills, guard houses that looked much the same as what Durham was used to, complete with comparable levels of hygiene. What they didn’t see was any sign of a threat. Periodically Thud would point out old fire pits.

  “Adventurers been here,” he said. “Them fires are far newer than the ruin and we ain’t seen anything that could be carted off for a profit. Figger we should keep an eye out for anything that looks like it might have been a temple. If we’re trying to find a crypt then seems it’d be close by.”

  “Can’t imagine that it hasn’t been found and looted also,” Gong said. “Place this big ain’t exactly a secret. I’d warrant every adventurer within a thousand leagues has been through here.”

  “Yeh, well the mace ain’t been found, though
,” Thud said. “And the king thinks it’s still here somewhere so we’ll find the tomb and clear it out. If it ain’t there then we’ll scour this city ‘til we’re sure that it ain’t here anywhere.”

  “Couldn’t one of the adventurer groups have found it and taken it?” Durham asked.

  “Unlikely,” Ruby said. “The mace is not a subtle artifact. Unless they stuck it in a box and forgot about it then it would have been noticed. Believe me when I tell you that you don’t want it to be anywhere other than locked in a box deep underground.”

  “Isn’t that precisely where we think it is?”

  “Yes,” Ruby said. “The difference being that the king feels that it should be his box deep under his ground.”

  ᴥᴥᴥ

  They found a wide street lined with temples late in the afternoon. A row of pillars ran the length of the street, marble entryways to what had once been grand buildings to each side. Statues of the Gods stood before each temple, some broken, some fallen, all of them green with moss. The largest temple lorded over the others at the end of the street. Gravestones were visible behind it. The interior was built in the shape of a pointed arch, the peak of the ceiling high overhead. Many of the stones had fallen in and thick curtains of ivy hung down, glowing green in the dusty shafts of sunlight. The floor was a mix of broken and tumbled stones amid thick patches of mud and rotted plants. Like the rest of the city, the temple had been stripped of anything that might have been of value save for the huge rune on the wall behind the altar. There were some things, apparently, that even adventurers were wise enough not to try and steal and it seemed that the Rune of Grimm was on the list. Durham and Ruby lowered their gaze and shielded their eyes with their hands, the traditionally appropriate response to Grimm’s rune. Gazing upon the rune was said to draw the god’s attention and Grimm was the sort that folks liked to escape the notice of.

  “God o’ the dead, ain’t he?” Thud asked, eying the rune appraisingly.

  “God of death, god of bone, god of justice, god of balance,” Ruby recited. “Among other things, of course. He’s one of the three gray gods and graveyards often have his altar. Usually it’s just a shrine in the corner of the graveyard. I wonder if Alaham had this built? I can see how a necromancer might find appeal in Grimm.”

  “Well, can’t see that there’d be a huge market for a twelve foot tall granite rune and it’d be tough getting that onto one of the wagons,” Thud said. “We’ll doc it and leave it be.”

  “What do you mean by ‘doc it’?” Durham asked.

  “We write down a description and location. Sends that off to be cataloged at Kheldurn. When dwarves is hired to build something that needs some kinda monuments they can look at the list to see if it’s been tagged somewheres. If so then they can send out a team to recover it rather than makin’ a new one. Big market in old statuary. Rich folk types likes ‘em in their gardens. Gonna take us a week to tag all the statues in this graveyard. They kept the stonecarvers busy in this city.”

  The graveyard beyond the temple was far larger than Durham had realized. Large enough to qualify as a necropolis. The monuments clustered thickly together—stones and statues, crypts and mausoleums, spreading left and right along the wall of the valley as far as the eye could see. A cliff rose at the back of the cemetery, several hundred yards away. The overgrowth here was thick, the trees taller and greener, a fact which Durham’s brain shied away from thinking too much about.

  “Empty,” Giblets said, or at least something that approximated the word ‘empty’.

  “Sorry?” asked Ruby.

  “All dem graves sunk, see? Nuttin’ in em.” He pointed at a row of depressions in the ground.

  “Are you suggesting that someone dug all of the bodies up?”

  “Naw. Neckermancer, eh? ‘Speck dem bodies dug demselves up. Less shovelin’ that way.”

  Gong trotted down the steps into the graveyard and poked his head in the nearest crypt. He looked back at them and shook his head.

  “Empty.”

  Thud whistled. “There must be, wot? Thousand or so graves here?”

  “More than that,” Ruby said. “This is the only graveyard we’ve seen and likely served the entire city. Tanahael was a city of ten thousand people. That works out to around forty thousand dead per century. The city stood for at least six centuries.” She fell silent, letting them do the math in their heads.

  “Ain’t that many graves here, though,” Gong said.

  “Once the yard is full, you bury the new ones on top,” Ruby said. “Notice how the ground here is higher than all of the area surrounding it? The graves were probably stacked many layers deep. It wouldn’t surprise me if they also had catacombs somewhere.”

  Durham was suddenly glad to still be on the temple steps.

  “Can’t say all dem graves empty,” Giblets said. “Can’t see ‘em all.”

  “Unlikely,” Ruby said. “I don’t know how many undead Alaham can maintain but it’s going to be a number in the dozens rather than the hundreds or thousands. He’s probably been raiding this graveyard for bodies for centuries. Even with that there’s going to be a lot of undisturbed graves out here.”

  “Tanahael fell before the Gods of the humans went to their sleep” one of the vanguard said. He pulled his helmet off. It was Rasp. He was close enough now that Durham could see that the lines of script tattooed across his face looked like some sort of religious text. “Time was the temples here would have kept this ground hallowed. Kept the dead at their rest. The power of the Hermits is not great enough to keep light in all of the shadowed places.”

  “The dwarves have different Gods, don’t they?” Durham asked. “Are they asleep too?”

  “Aye, we do, and no, they ain’t” Rasp said. “But they’re like dwarves in their ways, preferring to sit in chambers of stone, feasting and drinking, digging deep within the earth and crafting wondrous things from the metals they find.”

  “Then they sell those wondrous things to others,” Nibbly said. “Those people then hire dwarves to build dungeons to protect their wondrous things. Then others hire us to go into those dungeons and recover those wondrous things to be locked away, creating a continuing market for new wondrous things. And thus the great wheel of the dwarven economy turns.”

  Rasp frowned at him.

  Ruby pointed straight ahead at a large ivied mausoleum that lay near the center of the necropolis. It was connected to the temple by a narrow strip of grass empty of headstones but with scattered cobblestones evident as if it had once been a paved path. “The catacombs are likely in there, based on ease of access.”

  They made their way to the building Ruby had indicated, Durham taking great care to stay on the path. He’d always avoided the graveyards in the city, easy to do as there was an aura of stench around them strong enough to be noticeable even over the city’s pervasive odors. He’d once seen gravediggers scurrying out after a heavy rainstorm to rebury the bits that had surfaced through the mud and that had been enough to put him off of chancing a repeat visit.

  The tombs they passed gaped dark and empty, capstones pried loose or broken.

  A wrought-iron gate lay on the ground near the mausoleum entrance, half dissolved into rust. The thin shaft of light from the open doorway showed a floor strewn with shards of pottery, walls lined with broken urns and, at the chamber’s center, a narrow flight of steps leading down into darkness.

  “Ain’t sure catacombs is where Alaham would put his tomb.” Thud said. “Most likely place for adventurers to have been through also. Dark hole in a graveyard, they’d be like fairies to cake.”

  Giblets made a milky gargling noise in his throat, spat, then gave a jerk of his head. Not at the graveyard, but at the cliff face of the valley wall, rising ahead of them. ”Speck dasit,” he said.

  The trees had obscured their view. The valley wall lay at the back of the graveyard, a ragged cliff rising high overhead. There were tombs there, carved into the face of the cliff, curtained with fern
s and ivy. Dozens of large rectangular openings in the stone offering glimpses of pillars in their shadowy recesses. A larger circular opening lay at the center of them all, just above the valley floor, its edges carved in a frieze of runes. Within, a great doorway stood beneath an ornate pediment.

  Ruby borrowed Thud’s duoculars and gave the tomb a closer look. She lowered them and nodded. “The runes are the egotistical chest pounding you’d expect but they do confirm that it’s Alaham that’s in there.”

  “Or,” Thud said, “it’s where he wanted folks to think he is. In either case, that’s where we’re going to start tomorrow morning. Mungo, go signal the others to start prepping the wagons to come up. Rest of us will set up camp in one of the temples out by the entrance.”

  “Avare,” Ruby said. “Travelers fall into his domain.”

  “Avare it is,” Thud said. “Hope he don’t mind dwarves.”

  ᴥᴥᴥ

  They were not the first to camp there. The fragmented scraps of what remained of the temple’s original furnishings had been shoved to the sides of the room and the floor was stained with soot beneath a gaping hole in one corner of the roof. The fallen stones had even been arranged in a semi-circle around the campfire’s remnants. The Rune of the Wanderer was carved into the wall above a stone slab altar, cracked and mossy from past rains. One wall was tumbled outward, a few ambitious stones remaining as a suggestion but enough of the temple’s structure remained to give the illusion that it was shelter. They soon had a fire flickering in the corner, shadows dancing on the weathered walls. Durham leaned against one of the stones and munched on one of his remaining pancakes. He had no honey for it but, on the other hand, the pancake had the bonus of not having been through Gammi’s waffle upgrade. Ruby had already curled up on her blanket and was snoring with a sound like a giggling duck. Thud and Nibbly had their cards out with Mungo advising both players to the point where he was playing the game against himself with the dwarves serving merely as a means of moving the cards around. Giblets watched, rocking back and forth occasionally and laughing at inappropriate times. He had a piece of stone in his hand that he would suck on from time to time then study speculatively, as if gleaning information from it. Gong and the five dwarves of the Vanguard had spread around the perimeter of the room and were settling in to sleep, save Rasp, the one posted to first watch. He sat in the temple doorway, out of the firelight, mace on his shoulder.