by Hugo Huesca
“Next time, just say what you want, alright?” Ed suggested. “It did help us both, although something tells me Hoia Forest is about to become less crowded with horned spiders.”
“For a while,” said Laurel. “Then my cluster will grow. We won’t be as numerous as the other six clusters, of course. There is a limit to the population a single Queen can control without the princesses getting any ideas.”
Laurel’s wording gave Ed an idea of his own.
“Don’t kill the other Queens,” Ed urged her.
If Laurel had been a human Queen, and a beggar had just propositioned her for a romp in a nearby pig-pen, she would’ve made about the same horrified expression as came across her spidery face, only with fewer eyes.
“And let them live to replenish their forces? That would be a waste!”
“If a Queen can only control so many spiders, then five more could really help her out.”
“They’ll never listen to me,” said Laurel. “Which won’t dissuade you, will it? You wish to control six clusters instead of a single, more powerful one.” Now she had the dangerous tone of a wife whose husband had suggested they should add more people into their relationship. Ed decided he should clarify as fast as possible.
“Actually, I’m thinking of one huge spider empire. Give them the option of pacting with me, or dying,” Ed told her. It wasn’t really an order; more like a suggestion he strongly encouraged. “The same conditions I gave you, but add another: they are under your direct command. You understand? The same way your princesses help you control your warriors.”
“There’s… no ancestral memory that shows what you’re suggesting, Lord Wraith. Spider Queens simply don’t work with each other… and other Dungeon Lords who claimed more than one cluster simply kept them separate. Why make one of your minions more powerful when you can have that power yourself? You’ll only be encouraging a rebellion. Many of my early grandmothers died this way, before the ancient memories were ancient at all.”
Because the alliance only works with my pact magic to enforce it, Ed thought. Now Laurel had a great incentive to dedicate herself to her partnership with Ed, and more importantly his ideals. She’d need Ed’s magic to keep her Queens in line, and said Queens would make her own cluster powerful beyond belief. Instead of only reluctantly avoiding eating people, she would actively pursue man-eating clusters, capture them, and add them to her own empire. See, Laurel? You are not the only one that can scheme.
“Something tells me that we’re about to get along even better,” Laurel said.
With enough time, even ancient memories could be replaced by new ones.
9
CHAPTER NINE
ST. CLAIRE AND TILLMAN
When Ed finally arrived at the Haunt’s outskirts, the sun was already high up in the sky, and it wouldn’t be long before the afternoon became evening. Undercity was an eight-hour walk away, and the detour with Kaga and Laurel had taken Ed about half that much. Now Laurel was gone, off to manage her war, and he’d made the rest of the trip with Princess Tulip.
He made his way through a dense wall of bushes and vegetation, which gave way to a steep incline that he cleared with ease. The incline led him to a depression in the terrain where the trees became sparse and the amount of tree stumps grew exponentially. The scent of human population breached through the humidity and the cold: mostly smoke and the faint suggestion of food. Ed’s stomach grumbled.
He saw the rocky hill formations rising like fists defying the skies above. Somewhere in there was his Haunt. Before long, the smell of food became almost unbearable—he was getting closer. He saw spiderling patrols more and more often; some of them saw him and hurried past him to report his arrival.
The encampment was settled at the dungeon’s entrance, in case the villagers had to retreat inside for safety. There was a huge campfire in the middle of it, close to a stone well that Ed had dug using drones. Andreena was next to the campfire, overseeing a cauldron whose smell taunted Ed with the promises of a feast.
Most of the humans of the Haunt were huddled close to the fire, probably because of the cold, since by this hour they had already eaten.
They feel safer with others around, Ed corrected himself. It wasn’t just the cold. These people were scared.
As Ed approached, he realized he was the source of the villagers’ fear. Many took a look at him and Tulip and hurried into their tents. After all, they were technically—perhaps more than technically—his prisoners, their stay enforced by a perimeter of spiders that surrounded the place, as much for their own protection as to keep them from escaping.
The tents swayed in the wind. They were another drone creation. Purple and pink satin stripes added a touch of color to the plain fabrics. Purple and pink were quickly becoming the Haunt’s colors, which wouldn’t have bothered Ed had he not seen the Lasershark glyph sewn into the fabric with silver thread.
Ed could build simple structures by transmuting materials using drone magic, as long as those materials were related to dungeon building. Using the correct materials was much more efficient, however, so the tents were built out of canvas cotton and linen, which were easy enough to obtain from the neighboring farms. Each of the tents housed about five villagers, and there were ten tents strewn in a circle around the campfire. Half of those tents were already empty, though, which gave the camp a downtrodden appearance, the pale phantom of a better time—about a week ago.
Among the tents stood the evidence of human inhabitation that slowly had gone from “temporary,” into “until we come up with an idea that doesn’t end in an Inquisitorial purge.”
Clotheslines went from the top of the tents and extended downwind toward the trees. There was a stream nearby where people could wash their clothes, but the same impulse that huddled them together made them avoid straying far from the encampment.
A few farm animals kept to themselves in a shoddy pen opposite the rocky formation of the Haunt’s entrance; a few hens, a pair of old goats that bleated angrily in the cold, and a single milk cow so thin that the only thing coming out of its shriveled udders was most likely dust.
Children played near the pen, about half a dozen of them. They were screaming at the top of their lungs. One of them chased the others, grunting and hissing with his hands raised above his head. Ed realized they were playing “hunt the mindbrood.”
They are young enough to not understand the danger they are in, Ed mused. When the children caught sight of his and Tulip’s approach, though, they quickly disappeared in the general direction of their mothers.
“Last night the villagers tried to lynch one of the warriors,” Tulip told Ed.
“Did they hurt her?”
“Her leg will grow back. It was good that your batblins took their weapons from them.”
Even farmers without a single combat talent could take out a group of spider warriors if they set their mind to it. Better to keep them busy, Ed thought. Otherwise it wouldn’t be long before someone tried to lead a violent escape attempt.
Andreena watched him approach while she patiently stirred the cauldron. The movements sent a whiff of smoke in Ed’s direction that made his mouth water.
“This is where I take my leave,” said Tulip. “These villagers of yours are awfully quick to reach for their hoes when I’m around.”
“Thanks for the company,” Ed told her as she left.
“Prone to nightly walks, are you, Lord Edward?” Andreena said once he was in front of her. “A risky habit to have. We live in dangerous times, haven’t you heard?”
She handed him a clay bowl of soup. Ed studied the brew like a new father holding his child for the first time.
It was potato soup, meaning at some point the water had contained potatoes. Funny how hunger worked; Ed was sure that back on Earth he wouldn’t have looked at the soup twice.
After he downed it in seconds and had already started in his second bowl, he realized that Andreena could have poisoned him without much effort.
<
br /> He stopped mid-slurp and eyed the Herbalist with suspicion.
“Had I wanted to, I would’ve done it days ago,” Andreena said happily.
“True,” said Ed, then finished his bowl. He observed with pleasure that he wasn’t dying.
“A few more days on this diet and you’ll have an angry mob knocking at the Haunt’s doors,” Andreena warned him. “We need bread, grains, cheese… at the very least. People get violent on empty stomachs. But if you really care about keeping everyone at ease, you’ll give them some booze. All you can get.”
“I’ll send another scavenging party to the farms,” Ed said, eyeing the improvised pen with the farm animals. “Many are empty by now; hopefully there won’t be another incident.”
Andreena sighed. Days ago, Ed had sent a scavenging party formed mostly of batblins to check on the farms. They had found an improvised La Resistance group of farmers holed up in a silo. The farmers had chased the batblins almost all the way back to the Haunt, only stopping when Laurel’s spiders came to the rescue. Lavy had complained that she wanted to laugh at the batblins’ luck, but couldn’t do it on an empty stomach.
Ed showed the Herbalist his bitten hand. “Mind taking a look at this? It was from a zombie. Is there anything I should worry about?” Like developing a taste for human brains.
“Oh, only the infection,” said Andreena.
Ed almost had a heart attack. “The infection?”
Her eyebrow hovered between a frown and a concerned expression, like she wasn’t sure where she should start explaining. “Infections happen when open wounds get dirt in them—”
“Will the bite turn me into a zombie?” Ed had avoided asking directly for fear of looking like a fool, but since that ship had sailed…
The eyebrow finished its arc and became a frown. “You may be mistaking zombies for werewolves,” Andreena said. She placed a hand on Ed’s forehead to check for fever. “Back in your world, people fight the undead during their nightly walks?”
“We did our undead fighting indoors, actually,” said Ed. Using plastic controllers, over a monitor screen. It’s all in good fun until you meet a real zombie.
Andreena scanned the wound. “Come with me to my tent; I’ll rummage through my stash and see if I’ve any Vruhi petals left. No promises, though; I’m already running low on everything.”
The Herbalist’s tent had served as a makeshift field hospital for the wounded villagers after the mindbrood’s attack. Hemp ropes hung from every wall, with plants, roots, and vegetables tied like a curtain of a thousand different shades of green. Rough wooden shelves were stacked at the back, stashed with jars of brown liquids and cooking utensils. The floor was littered with empty beds made of straw—some of them were stained with blood. Andreena’s own bed was hidden in a corner by a curtain.
A barrel-sized cauldron slowly boiled water under a fireplace. Andreena filled a jar, grabbed a handful of plants from her walls, and set to work over a mortar and pestle with her back turned to Ed, who stared at her with curiosity.
First, she washed his wound—which was unpleasant. She made sure to get into it, hunting almost invisible specks of dirt with the zeal of an Inquisitor. When the wound was clean to her satisfaction, the Herbalist washed it in a brown concoction that made Ed smell like old-lady’s medicine. She covered the wrist with a plant paste—that was the Vruhi petal, Ed guessed—and bandaged it.
“There you go; your resist disease talent should handle the rest. In any case, if you see pink lines growing from your wrist and going up your arm, talk to me at once. I mean at once, Edward. Don’t wait to see if they go away, don’t try to get drunk and hope for the best. Those lines have killed men with twice your Endurance ranks.”
At that point, the tent’s entrance flapped open and Lavy and Alder barged in. Lavy led the charge while Alder followed close behind. Both of them moved with a stiffness that brought back bad memories of catacomb zombies to Ed.
“Where have you been?” Lavy demanded. “We’ve been worried sick! How dare you do this to us?”
“She’s angry that you skipped the first day of training,” Alder clarified. “And didn’t suffer like she did.”
“Oh, shut it,” Lavy said. “You cried the last ten minutes, and Klek had to console you.”
Alder’s eye twitched at the memory.
“Look,” said Ed, “it’s Kharon’s fault, not mine.” He showed them his bandaged hand. “You won’t believe the night I’ve had.”
He told them about Kharon, about the zombies—he omitted the part where he almost had a mental breakdown—about Katalyn, Nicolai, and the assassin Torst, who started a war by pacting carelessly with the Dark.
His friends listened with rapt attention, Alder wincing at any mention of wraiths or undead. Lavy’s eyes shone with interest at those exact mentions, and Ed hoped to all the Dark and Light gods it was a purely academic kind of interest, and not the carnal kind.
“You were right, I don’t believe it,” Alder said when Ed finished. “You had an adventure without me! What in the Wetlands were you thinking? Leaving the Haunt without your Bard!” He smashed his hands on a stand, which earned him an irate glance from Andreena. Alder slowly put his hands back in his pockets, smiling awkwardly at the Herbalist.
“That’s the part of the story you have trouble with?” Lavy said. “Not the one where a heartbroken mass murderer with a heroic-grade regeneration talent is coming to kill every single one of us?”
Alder shook his head sadly. “You don’t understand, Lavy, you are not a Bard. When I tell this tale at a tavern why should people believe me? I wasn’t there. Ed could’ve made up this stuff.”
Ed shook his bitten hand at him, which prompted Alder to add a quick, “No offense.”
“You make stuff up all the time,” Lavy muttered.
“I’m a trained professional,” said Alder.
Before the discussion could derail any further, Ed intervened. “Next time I get kidnapped by a psychopathic demigod, I’ll try to call you, Alder. But in the meantime, Lavy is right. There is a mass murderer coming here at some point in the future, and we best be ready for him. This isn’t some newborn monster, but a smart human with men and resources at his disposal. He’ll hit hard and fast, and if we aren’t harder and faster, we’ll be in trouble.”
Something in his expression made his friends realize the danger of the situation.
“What’s the plan?” Lavy said.
“Katalyn will find the wraith; we fortify ourselves in the meantime. Train, double the watch, arm ourselves,” Ed said. “Recruit more forces. We need gear that can handle undead—and that can handle Nicolai’s regeneration. We need money to pay for all that.”
“Hard to make money in the middle of nowhere,” Alder pointed out.
“We’ll figure it out,” Ed hoped. “First, I’ll sort out the necessities of the dungeon. There are a couple room designs I’ve been toying with the last few days. It’s time to test them out.”
A bunch of batblins played in the Haunt’s entrance. This was the place where Ed had made his first Seat, and it was now a greeting hall of sorts, the spot that had housed the villagers before he had the tents built. When the batblins saw him, they instantly pretended to be in the middle of something grim and important. Ed had seen that same attitude in his coworkers, back on Earth, when the boss entered the room.
Chuckling under his breath, he reached the new Seat chamber, which was guarded only by two drones. The room itself was naked rock without any decoration, lighted only by magical torches that were part of the updated room design of his dungeon engineering skill’s improvements. So far, Ed’s experiments to make those torches by himself had failed utterly.
The seat was made of rock, lovingly sculpted by drone’s spit, and was about as comfortable to sit on as a cactus. When Ed was far from the dungeon, any creature could make a pact with him using a pre-made offer and swearing loyalty to the Seat.
Since Ed wasn’t willing to let anyone ruin the
ir lives on his behalf unless he really had to, one of the clauses of his pre-made offer was, “I swear I don’t have a better option than to pact with Dungeon Lord Edward Wright, and I understand the consequences of doing so. I’ll now name the consequences aloud…”
Ed activated his Evil Eye and focused on the Seat. A character sheet for his dungeon manifested in his line of sight. He noted that, as his understanding of Ivalis and its magic improved, the terms of the character sheet changed slightly.
The Wraith’s Haunt
Dungeon Lord Edward Wright.
Drones 25
Dominant Material Cave Rock
THREAT 55 - LOCAL - How aware the outside world is of the dungeon and how willing / able / ready they are to do something about it. A 100 indicates imminent destruction.
OFFENSE 1550 - A representation of the strength a dungeon’s forces can muster during an attack (raid or invasion) outside the dungeon itself. It shows the experience they would award, as a group, if they were defeated (but not absorbed).
DEFENSE 1700 - SERVES as an indicator of the defensive strength of a dungeon, but also the experience the inhabitants would award if they were to be defeated (but not absorbed) during the defense of said dungeon. It is multiplied by a percentage given by the dungeon’s upgrades and defenses.
MAGIC GENERATED 1 - Measures the magic created by the Sacred Grounds that can be put to use in different endeavors or to power dungeon upgrades.
MAGIC CONSUMED 0 - Measures how much magic is currently being consumed.
POPULATION
57 HUMANS (3 combatants)
1 avian combatant
124 batblins (26 batblin combatants)
Spider Cluster: 1 Queen, 3 Princesses, 17 warriors, ? spiderlings.
AREAS
LIVING ZONES:
1 Living Quarters
1 Storage
1 Camp
MILITARY FACILITIES:
