The Dungeon Con: One Foot in the Grave ( Hank Grave Book 1): One Foot in the Grave (Hank Grave series)

by Marty Myers

  As he said this Hank removed the door to the pantry and walked them out into the kitchen. In the couple hours since he had built it the guards had made a real mess of it. Almost every dish was dirty and piled haphazardly around the room on counters, tables and even the floor. There was a slight burnt smell emanating from the cauldron and no guard was in sight. Hank was aggravated. Anatolius looked around and wailed a bit before summoning his skeletons from the pantry and getting them to cleaning. Luckily among the odds and ends that Alastor had taken from his old kitchen were some brooms and dish clothes. As Hank stood there he saw one of the skeletons ordered to place the ghostly chef’s cookbook up onto a high shelf near the sinks. He realized the place was in good hands and went out to find the captain to inform him of the change in kitchen staff.

  It only took Hank a minute or two to look through the rooms and hallways to find Kravous overseeing some of his guards. His senses were becoming even more acute, he could feel all their footsteps in his halls and hear their conversations if he focused on any of them. He found his connection to his dungeon was continuing to deepen as time went on. He suspected that if their auras had been other than dark he would have felt that disturbing the aether as well.

  He could only imagine how closely tied Llywelyn was to her dungeon after all this time. She had warned him that eventually any significant damage that was done to the dungeon he would feel as if it was happening to his own body. It was no wonder dungeons became so proactive in repelling invaders from within themselves. Hank flew to where Kravous was, remembering just in time to assume his alternate costume.

  ” Captain,” he said as he passed through the solid stone wall beside them startling one of the guards. “ I have found a chef for the kitchens and have assigned him a squad of skeletons to do kitchen work and take care of the dining hall. They are even now putting the kitchen back to rights. Alert your men that the kitchen and its staff is to be left alone. I do not want the ghosts or skeletons there disrupted as they are serving your men.”

  “ I also want to know when you have set their watches and how many shifts so we can plan out meal times.” Kravous seemed tense as he answered Hank. “ I am setting three shifts of twelve guards with twelve additional guardsmen in a reserve rotation which can respond immediately if there is an intrusion. They will also be expected to maintain their gear and drill while they are in the reserve. Each of my two lieutenants will be overseeing the other two shifts I am not on duty.” Hank nodded in understanding. “ The first shift which has been standing guard since we arrived is going to be coming off duty here in two bells then Grandies second shift of guards will take their posts for 8 bells. Lastly, Agula will stand guard with the third shift for their 8 bells before being relieved by my first shift again. Any guards like Khourrick who cannot muster at the beginning of their watch will be replaced that shift from the reserves. I will want a meal served at each shift change so that each guard is free to take two meals, one when he gets off duty and then another in 8 bells. That should work out well to keep them fed.” “ Okay,” Hank said, “ that seems reasonable enough. So we’re going to need another meal ready in 2 bells when your shift is relived. I will go notify the kitchen and get them some fresh game to work with.”

  The captain nodded and said I want to have you make a training hall for us guards to use as well as what you have already made for us. “ Hank agreed they would work out the details later. He flew back to the kitchen to let Anatolius know. When he swept into the kitchen it was already in a much better state than when he had left it. “ I have spoken to guard captain Kravous, he has 50 men and has arranged his men into three shifts and a reserve squad set to trade posts every 8 bells and wants a meal ready for the guards coming off shift and for those not going on shift. Each shift is going to have 12 regular guardsmen and an officer. So there could be as many as 38 guardsmen at the tables each meal. The first shift change is in two hours. His two lieutenants are named Grandies and Agula if you have to deal with any guardsmen they are in charge if Kravous is not there. There is also a guard who used to be the captain before today named Khourrick, he isn’t well. I don’t know if he will recover and take up his position again or not.”

  “ Anyway either me or Alastor are going to be teleporting in wild game to be made into meals. I expect you will want something to go along with the meat but that is all the guards seem to care about so far. We already fixed them a rough goat stew before you arrived,” he said to the chef. Anatolius took all this in as Hank explained the situation before answering him. “ Can you bring me a bunch of smaller game animals then. Rabbits would be good or a bunch of game birds for cooking.”

  “ I also really need spices to season with, as they don’t seem to have survived the pillaging that my old kitchen received.” Without much thought about what he was doing Hank reached out his teleportation talent and grabbed the spice wrack he was most familiar with. After having strained to move the oubliette a couple hours ago he felt a strange wobble to his talent and then with a surge of power his spices from his apartment appeared on the kitchen counter. Hank was stunned for a moment as he stared at them. Gingerly he reached again and grabbed a big container of salt from the cupboard back home and brought it over as well. This time he paid careful attention to the process and felt the dimensional teleport more clearly. He knew Alastor had developed this unexpected ability himself not long before meeting him and now it seemed he too had access to it. He suspected it was only through the Darkness meddling with their talents and bond that such a thing had even happened. Hank resolved to keep this a secret from everyone but Alastor for now. He swiftly crafted a stoneware container and dumped the salt into it and teleported the earthly container it had come in into one of his sealed secret hidden rooms and destroyed it with death bolts until nothing but a blackened smear remained.

  He checked over each of the spices on the spice rack with Anatolius and was surprised at how many of them the ghost recognized. They were so far from earth how could all of the same plants be here too? Why hadn’t Hank thought about this before he wondered? He would have to ask Alastor if he had any idea why that would be. Hank took back any unfamiliar spices and checked to make sure he removed any earth labels from the glass spice containers on the wrack. Then he made slots carved into the wall to hold the spices.

  Then he took the wrack back thinking to dispose of it as he had the empty container of salt earlier. But then he got another idea and as a test, he tried teleporting it back to his apartment. It was harder to put it back, much harder. Hank wondered if that was because his world had so little magic essence left in it. Once it was done he stood there a minute before he felt recovered.

  Then he mentally kicked himself. Taking the spices would weird Francis out and if she had actually been there while he plucked them away and then returned the empty rack it could have done more damage to her perception of reality. Hank chanted and tried to scry his apartment. It took some time and much effort before the place came into focus in his mind. The first thing he saw was that no one was home. He had half wished that he would see Francis when he looked but she was nowhere to be seen. It was daytime there but he had lost all track of time and had no idea what day it was. She was probably at work now.

  Hank felt sad looking in on his old life. He also felt quite the strain as the scrying between worlds was taking quite a toll on him. Hank let the chant die off in his mind and focused again upon the kitchen. Anatolius had been waiting patiently thinking he was scrying for game for the next meal. Hank focused and began the scrying chant once again focusing upon the high mountains in the mountain range. He swept over the high peaks and down the rocky trails until he saw mountain goats, on down a bit to the tree line where he searched before finding bunny tracks. His immaterial senses swept through thickets of thorns following them to their burrows and on into the ground. He found groups of them deep in dark burrows.

  Hank teleported them to the kitchen and struck them down with his death bolts. He could feel each
of the animals lives extinguished within his dungeon as a small burst of essence filtering through the stone and into his core. He became more familiar with their auras signatures and found hunting the rabbits to be easier each time he focused again upon scrying out their burrows. In a short time, he had harvested enough rabbits to feed the guards. Hank thought he had done well. He was definitely improving.

  He then decided to try something different. He had seen while he was hunting rabbits that he could actually pass his scrying right through the snow and earth and see almost everything perfectly well. He had seen that what some of the rabbits were eating an assortment of onions, carrots and other wild herbs and tubers. He was able to teleport many of them back to the kitchen where he showed them to Anatolius. The ghostly chef was delighted to have greens and tubers to serve with the rabbits and got a skeleton onto cleaning them up and preparing them immediately. More than half of the rabbits had been butchered and skewered by his staff when Hank left the kitchen. He thought they had a little more than an hour left before the shift change. Hank teleported some more coal into the bin before he left the kitchen. He went to check in on Alastor, he had a lot to talk to him about.

  Chapter 21

  Alastor meanwhile had gone and opened up one of the treasure chests brought back from the Dark Citadel. He suspected something serious had happened between Hank and the other dungeon based on the momentary flashes he had gotten through their bond but had not had a chance to talk to him privately about it due to the fight and all of the other events that had followed right on the heels of the portal transfer.

  So instead while Hank was dealing with setting the kitchen staff up he had sent Birch out to collect some more of the items upon their list to get the dungeon completed. After seeing the Dark’s mood today he was in no hurry to anger it himself. He had cast the same spell that Hank had earlier on the farmers trip to disguise their wight with a semblance of life before sending him off with some gold to buy the pitch they needed to trap the first floor.

  After the stunt Hank had pulled teleporting the oubliette back he wasn’t the only one feeling strained and a bit weird. Alastor too felt a difference in his talent. He thought to test out his teleportation and its range and low and behold it had increased again with all the stretch and strain his partner and he were putting it through. Alastor didn’t think Hank understood yet just how closely bound they were together. Literally, they would be sharing one fate soon as their magics’ and life forces became ever more tightly bound together as the ritual continued to work its way ever deeper into their beings. It was much different than the master servant bond he had with Provoas which enslaved him but kept them at arms reach mystically speaking.

  Instead, it just kept drawing them closer and closer together trying to sync them into one well-oiled machine. For them, it was either grow stronger together and adapt or splinter and break apart and likely wither and die. Alastor had never felt closer to anyone or anything then he did with Hank. He was catching more and more of Hank’s thoughts and feelings through the bond as well. It was changing him even as his own personality and thoughts were flowing back into his partner doing the same for the man. Neither of them was who they had been before the ritual tied them together and they were still in the process of changing even now.

  Alastor had never known another demon bound dungeon to compare them to, although he had heard the stories of the Dark Citadel and her demon lover Dulleth the Cunning. When he had lived it had been said the Dark Lady and he could not be breached nor bested by anything less than a Lord of Light warring within their own dark halls. He thought they just might be able to one day amass that kind of power and prowess if he could get Hank to be more cautious so that they might live through their current infancy and on into dungeon adulthood.

  Still Brooding upon these thoughts Alastor felt the call of Birch echoing down the bond he shared through Hank. He had tried not being a part of that when it was cast and at first, he thought he had succeeded but as time passed and they continued to blend together he had felt the mystical bond bleed over into him far enough that he was connected to Birch anyway. Truly one fate and one fortune awaited he and Hank if it had not already overtaken them.

  When Alastor scryed Birch he found that he sat with a wagon full of barrows of pitch in the secluded site they had chosen for their comings and goings from a coastal town called Norath Town. It was easiest to get the pitch from a large harbor where there was a shipbuilder in operation there that regularly built and maintained ships sealing their wooden hulls in pitch to keep them watertight.

  Once Birch felt his eyes upon him he gave the sign that all was well and Alastor teleported him up into the cellar of the castle figuring that was close to their eventual use and big enough for a wagon load. He would have just put it into the second floor where it was going to be used but he wasn’t sure that the half height of the ceilings would have fit the barrows and allowed them to be opened properly. He hoped that Hank could use some of his amazingly precise teleporting to cheat in placing the pitch onto the ceiling there. Otherwise setting this trap for adventurers was going to take quite a while to apply.

  Alastor had been observing Hanks trick of claiming part of something with his aura before moving just that much of a larger whole elsewhere. He wanted to learn to do it too, but he could see that he would not be able to do it on the scale or with the precision Hank did. Because the rituals making Hank into a dungeon and separating and diffusing out his aura like that was a large part of how he accomplished it. Still, he thought he might be able to eventully master it on a smaller scale like Hank did with crafting stone implements out of the blocks of waste stone they created.

  He would work on that as well as teaching Hank his teleport trick in stuttering the teleport and stretching it out until it could be used to kill. It was clever and he was proud of figuring it out. Most animals and ungifted mortals could be slain with it fairly certainly. But he didn’t think it would kill someone with a stronger aura or proper mystical training. Now that he thought about it his dimensional teleport from being summoned back to this world had been a much harder trip on him and his aura, perhaps it would kill even a mage if he forced the trip into stuttering and targeted a fell enough destination to finish them off with if they managed to survive the trip. Maybe into a lava pit in hell for example. Only someone else very capable of teleporting themselves would be able to wrest control of such a bad trip from him and redirect themselves to safety. If they were caught unawares initially it would be even harder for them to resist or redirect their trip. He shuddered to think about himself being forced into such a situation. Luckily He and Hanks bonds made both of them even harder to cast upon to any but their master who could still bypass their resistances through the bond.

  Shaking off these musings he decided it was time to see what Hank was up to just as he felt Hank simultaneously seeking him out. Such serendipity would likely only grow Alastor thought as his friend appeared to flow out from the stone wall next to him. Aloud he said, “ Hank I have had Birch retrieve a measure of pitch, but I need your help with applying it to the ceiling of the second floor. I am hoping you can use your ability to place it all up on the ceiling instead of us getting skeletons up here with swab brushes.

  In his mind, he telepathically sent Hank another message through their bond. “ We have much to discuss, First I have found my teleporting talent stretched out during that big heave we used to get the oubliette here. I warn you again Hank, what can be stretched can also be ripped and broken. No talent is without limits even if ours is being reinforced by each of us there is still a limit. It is like a muscle, too much too soon or too often may tear it instead of building it up.” Hanks acknowledgment echoed back to him at these words. “ I hear you. I will try to be more careful, but as you have noticed this I too have found my talent stretching.

  I have big news Alastor and some questions for you. I was finishing getting the kitchen ready for dinner as you know and Anatolius was telling me what
he still lacked. One thing he bemoaned was spices to season the food. Almost unthinkingly I reached out to where I knew spices would be. My own spice wrack from home appeared.” Alastor looked at Hank intently, before replying. “ That should be way too far for anyone to reach Hank. It is only because that is where my first dimensional teleport ended up that that makes a weird kind of sense for you to be able to duplicate it.”

  Alastor continued their mental conversation. “ Also each creature has an innate tie to their home realm which makes those transfers easier. Demons for instance, even those who do not normally have the ability to dimensionally teleport elsewhere can often travel directly to their home dimension. Half of banishing a demon is just convincing them to use this innate ability. In fact, a few demons who are conventionally known to be unbanishable actually are just deficient in this ability. Most half breed hellspawn, for instance, cannot be banished because they are already upon their home realm.”

  Hank said aloud, “ very well, let’s go to the second floor and see If I can attach the pitch directly to the ceilings.” They teleported up and Alastor said, “ the barrels are actually up in the cellar I wasn’t sure they would fit down here with the low height.” Hank looked up into the cellar and teleported one barrel down to test it out. It cleared the ceiling but would be almost impossible to open and dip out of. Hank looked inside the barrel and infused it with his aura. He then studied the rooms and halls on this floor and moved them down to the furthest one where he intended to coat the ceiling. He looked upon the ceiling and chose an amount of both the surface of the ceiling and a volume of pitch and aimed the teleport to exactly where the two should meet. It worked well and once he had a few transfers made he was able to judge the amounts well enough to pick up the pace with very little dripping.