Dungeon Lord: Abominable Creatures (The Wraith's Haunt Book 3)

by Hugo Huesca

  Gallio found the knowledge fitting. Like a moral added at the end of a children’s tale.

  Yet he could feel his throat clenching while he climbed the steps of the Seat Room toward the fallen figure.

  It can’t be, Gallio thought, when he was in front of the fallen Dungeon Lord. It can’t be him.

  He almost turned back. But he was an Inquisitor, and Inquisitors stared at the light of truth, even if it blinded them. So he reached for the hood and pulled it back just as the light abandoned the Dungeon Lord’s eyes.

  Gallio stared at the face of the dead man. And kept staring, his face a mask that could’ve been set in stone.

  His companion reached his side atop the raised dais. She scowled at the corpse. “So, it isn’t him.”

  “No,” agreed Gallio. “Not this time, at least.” This Dungeon Lord was someone he had never seen before—a Lotian called Jiraz. The man had smuggled himself into Starevos to face the Heroes, hoping to find his destiny. He had found it. Just not the one he’d expected.

  A part of Gallio was relieved. What would he have done if the dead had been Edward Wright instead of the stranger? True, at least it meant that the otherworldly Dungeon Lord was still alive—which meant that so were Gallio’s people. It also meant that Gallio and Wright could still stumble into each other. If that happened, the Inquisitor would be forced to break an oath to fulfill his duty to the Light. But in doing so, he’d condemn himself.

  Whatever he did, he could not win.

  “Good,” said Alvedhra, still glaring hatefully at the dead Dungeon Lord. She knelt next to the corpse while drawing an enchanted silver dagger, which she used to sever the corpse’s head from its body. It was standard Inquisitorial procedure—one could never be too careful with Murmur’s favorites—and Gallio nodded. She had learned well, and not a single movement of hers was wasted. Some expert hacks, and the deed was done. She kept the head, grabbing it by the ash-covered hair.

  “Any news about our mutual friend?” he asked her in a whisper, making sure the other members of the Militant Church inspecting the Seat Room weren’t listening.

  The Heroes were getting close to Undercity, some groups already prowling the countryside. If Edward Wright hadn’t yet escaped from Starevos, it was but a question of time before the Heroes reached him and he shared the fate of all other Dungeon Lords before him.

  Alvedhra shook her head while wiping the blood from the dagger with the corpse’s cloak. “No. I’ve put out as many feelers as I dare to without alerting him, but other than the surge of necromantic energy in Hoia Forest last winter, there’s been no clue. Not that the locals care.” Her upper lip stiffened. “Most of my contacts write about Undercity’s officers trying to put down a new smuggling group. Seems like the nobility is more concerned with their purses than the sanctity of their souls. I bet they’ll change their tune when retribution comes, but by then it will be too late.” Alvedhra spoke with the zealous intensity of the recently converted. Usually, they mellowed out with time. But she’d need her passion to steel herself for the trials that awaited the expedition.

  Maybe it’s a good sign, Gallio thought. If Wright is keeping his head down—or better yet, he’s gone altogether—there’s a chance the Heroes may pass him by.

  And yet…

  Gallio and Alvedhra walked down the steps of the dais, their red capes fluttering with the small breeze that came from the cracks in the dungeon. A small entourage of servants, men-at-arms, and clerks waited for them at the bottom.

  “The Dungeon Lord is dead,” Alvedhra announced, releasing the severed head from her grip and letting it roll away. “You may approach.”

  “My gratitude, Eminence,” said Master Enrich. The grizzled Militant Church veteran went past the Inquisitors and climbed the steps using a silver-tipped cane to keep his balance, his famous metal wand hanging from the strap of his belt and swaying with each step. A pair of servants followed him, carrying the surgeon’s tools that Enrich would use to extract the Dungeon Lord’s heart. The so-called Mantle.

  While Enrich set to his grim task, Gallio met with the other Inquisitors. Even with the Dungeon Lord dead, there was still work to be done: Survivors that had slipped the Heroes, supply caches yet hidden in the wilderness that an enterprising minion might use to re-start the holds of its former master, and treasure chambers waiting past the Seat Room, well-guarded and loaded with lethal traps.

  Gallio was the senior Inquisitor present, so he was in charge. Which meant that if anything went wrong past this point, the fault would fall on him. Besides, there were still a few higher-ups who hadn’t liked his return, and they were even now keeping an eye on him, eager to pounce at the slightest mistake.

  It didn’t worry him. Let the old whiners play their games of favorites and politics. He was here because his pledge to Alita demanded it. Nothing more, nothing less.

  “There aren’t as many batblin corpses as we expected from the scout reports,” he told one sturdy Inquisitor named Oak. Oak was prideful and tall, and lacked an ounce of common sense in that thick head of his. In short, he was young. Just like Alvedhra. Just like Gallio had once been. “Send Rangers along with the Militants to reinforce the perimeter. If the batblins ran away before the battle, there’ll be tracks all over the place. The critters aren’t known for their discipline—specially when scared to death.”

  Inquisitor Oak nodded. “Yes, Eminence,” he said.

  Gallio nodded and turned to leave. As he did so, Gallio shifted his gaze up toward the shadowy arcs of the ceiling, which were covered in webs and dust. For the briefest instant, he could swear he saw something small and hairy shift near a corner. A rat, maybe? He was about to say something about it when a servant entered the chamber in a rush, his white tunic scraping at its hem against the dirty cobblestone floor.

  “Eminence Gallio!” the servant called. “Cleric Zeki sent for you. He’s searching for survivors under the dungeon, and our group located a hidden catacomb. Cleric Zeki says you should come at once! The Dungeon Lord’s vampire survived the fight. The creature is locked in its own coffin, Eminence. Its fate is in your hands.”

  3

  Chapter Three

  Back to the Haunt

  The forest gave way to the Haunt’s holdings long before they reached the dungeon itself. The first sign of civilization hidden among the forest was a pair of Scrambler Towers framing the entrance to Haunt-controlled territory. The Towers were octagonal stone pylons with a series of rune engravings covering every side and a spherical railway of brass magical systems crowning its top. Illusion enchantments disguised the Scramblers as a pair of decrepit trees with skeleton-thin branches, and a complex mesh of magical traps loaded with Mind compulsions were always on standby. If triggered, they launched an area-of-effect series of minor orders meant to cause any uninvited guests to go about their business elsewhere, and make them believe it had been their idea.

  The brass sphere at the top was the most important part of the Tower, and a perceptive eye could see a faint shimmer on the surrounding air—the telltale clue of heavy magical activity. The sphere was a complex counter-spell system, focused on neutralizing Divination attempts. It hid the Haunt from most kinds of scrying, masking the magical emanations of the dungeon’s ley lines.

  When Ed had bought the Dungeon Upgrade: Scrambler Tower, the fully functional load-out had manifested itself in his mind, ready for use whenever he had the resources to build them. He could’ve left it at that, but curiosity had gotten the better of him, and with Lavy’s help, he had studied the inner workings of the Scramblers.

  The anti-Divination sphere was so complex that Lavy hadn’t been able to even fathom how it worked—apparently there was Unholy magic involved—but the other parts turned out to be simple. The Haunt's ley lines powered the whole contraption. They only worked if set directly over one. The traps reloaded their spells this way, and the trigger mechanism was an alarm spell enchanted with permanency. A secondary permanent alarm would trigger a message spell
to warn Ed if someone managed disbelieved the Scrambler’s disguise, or pierced its anti-Divination field.

  Ed would’ve loved to have a chat with the person or entity who had designed the Scramblers and trade ideas. If he focused on their schematics, he could “edit” them with his own alterations, but for the time being, he lacked the expertise to try.

  Someday, I’ll know your secrets, he thought, throwing the Scramblers one last lustful glance as his group left them behind. Switch the anti-divination field for one that locates stuff… figure out a way to translate that data as coordinates and feed them to a fireball trap with an aiming mechanism, and we’ll have automatic fireball turrets everywhere we want. He needed to learn magical theory. So far, he had seen and used exclusively pre-made spells, but as soon as he figured out the source code needed to create those spells in the first place… well, he was a software designer.

  Ivalis would soon learn the sheer destructive power of databases and SELECT * FROM spell functions.

  “You’re chuckling to yourself again,” Alder warned him as they rode.

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “You should be,” Lavy said. “Your evil laughter needs a lot of practice before it befits a Dungeon Lord of my status.”

  “Don’t you mean his status?” Kes asked, lifting an eyebrow.

  Lavy threw her hair back. “I’m the Haunt’s Head Researcher. That’s a status symbol in itself. For the Haunt, mind you.”

  They found the next sign of civilization about an hour after passing through the Scramblers. A group of four kids of varying ages lay under a tree, enjoying its shade while they ate raisin-like berries gathered from nearby bushes. The kids called to Ed and the others as they passed. Alder waved back at them.

  “Their parents will be pissed when they catch them slacking off,” Kes said with a grin after the kids were out of sight.

  “It’s a nice day,” Ed said. “It’d be a waste if nobody got to enjoy it.”

  In any other circumstance, a group of kids playing deep in Starevosi woods would’ve been suicidal, but the Haunt’s holdings were patrolled by horned spiders and batblins—and few critters dared venture into a Dungeon Lord lands, unless they intended to join him.

  Ed threw a glance at a lone boulder near the grass road they were following. To a stranger, it was solid rock, but to Ed, it was hollow and had a wooden door. Several feet away, a small trail of violet vapor rose from a fist-sized hole in the ground and dispersed itself in the air.

  The rock was the entrance to a small underground farm carved by Ed’s drones. The kids’ parents were probably inside—Ed activated his Evil Eye and confirmed that no alarms had been triggered within—working the fields. They were growing gray puffball, which was a mushroom-shaped tuber about the size of a batblin and native to the Netherworld, so they could grow underground. It tasted like a watery potato, but it was nutritious, and you could grind it into coarse flour to make a calorie-rich bread that lasted a while in storage.

  Crops native of the Netherworld had quickly become staples of the Haunt’s diet. Most of them fed on Dark emanations the way a normal plant fed on sunlight. The problem was that Netherworld plants poisoned the soil and made it unsuitable for growing a normal plant for centuries, unless a powerful Cleric intervened and cleansed it. Growing the crops underground solved that problem, but there was still the issue of the gas.

  Ed studied the vent that allowed the violet vapor to exit the underground farm. All the Netherworld plants exuded that vapor. It wasn’t explosive, nor was it poisonous, and it had no visible side-effects. It smelled like taro tea. Andreena, the Haunt’s Herbalist, thought it was the stuff the Netherworld’s atmosphere was made of, and Ed was willing to bet his non-skeletal hand that ignoring that detail would bite him in the ass eventually. So all farmers, much to their annoyance, had to subject themselves to monthly health checks, just in case anything went sideways.

  Not that anything had in the few months since Ed had built the farms.

  At first, Ed had intended to have drones tend to the crops, but drones were dangerously incompetent with most tasks not related to a dungeon’s creation and maintenance… although Ed sometimes wondered how much of that incompetence was feigned out of laziness. They were very skilled at sculpting rock, for example. That very week, a drone had carved a statue showing the process of horned spider reproduction in extravagant detail. Horned spider reproduction was best described not at all. Unwilling to let the statue terrify everyone in the Seat Room, he had sent it to terrify everyone in the Prison instead.

  Since he couldn’t use drones, he had gone to the villagers for help. Beforehand, he’d wracked his brain for incentives to get them on his side. Extra coin? Better housing? Free booze?

  The reaction of the first former farmers he’d approached had been among his biggest culture shocks since his arrival at Ivalis.

  “You mean we get to have our own land?” the couple had asked. “And you’re only asking for a tenth of the crop in return?”

  “Huh?” Ed had suddenly realized that his whole perspective on feudal-like social contracts was probably wrong.

  All their lives, the farmers of Burrova had owed allegiance to Galtia, the capital of Starevos and where the headquarters of the local branch of the Militant Church was located. The tax collector would come right after harvest season was over and take half the crops. No farmers ever owned the land they worked, and after their death, their sons could consider themselves lucky if the farm wasn’t reassigned to somebody the local authorities liked better. After paying the tax, the leftover crops were used to feed the farmers and their families until the next harvest. Whatever remained of that, which wasn’t much, was sold to buy whatever they couldn’t make themselves, such as shoes, a donkey, or buttons to repair a tattered vest.

  “I mean, it’s underground,” Ed had warned them.

  “Have you ever had to chase down a pack of scared goats after the fence breaks in the middle of a Starevosi storm?” they had retorted—perhaps with more curtsies and some “my Lord” sprinkled here and there, but that had been the gist of it.

  Not only had most of the Haunt’s villagers volunteered to tend the underground farms—they had considered it an incredible gift. In this world, everyone, from a lowly peasant to the mightiest king and all his armies, depended on a bountiful harvest to survive. Ed still wasn’t sure what to make of the realization, but he had redoubled his efforts to make sure the Haunt was self-sufficient. The only things stopping him from covering the entire forest with underground farms were that the sheer space each farm required a lot of drones and a lot of time to dig—and he couldn’t spare either—and that not all ground was suitable for digging, even with his Mantle’s magic strengthening the caves against quakes.

  “The plants exhale this mysterious gas,” he had told the farmers. “Seems to be safe, but you know how those things go.”

  “A pack of werewolves ate my cousin and his entire family. The gas smells better than I do. We’ll take our chances.”

  In the end, they had come to an agreement. One adult member of the family would become a minion of Ed. It was a necessity, to ensure that they wouldn’t run away, and it also allowed Ed to make sure they were safe.

  If the Haunt ever fell, and the Inquisition purged its minions, the non-pacted adult was to run away with the kids and hide in the nearest village. It wasn’t a pretty prospect, but it was life, and it was better than the alternative.

  Those words were quickly becoming a staple in Ed’s inner monologue.

  After leaving the farms behind, the group stopped in a grove to rest and let the hell chickens cool down. Ed summoned a group of drones to gather branches, and Kes started a quick fire using flint—she always traveled with it, along with a battered iron skillet she refused to give up.

  They ate hell chicken sandwiches made with puffball bread and thick slices of cheese, and drank warm mead.

  “You know? Last summer, we almost got killed by a mob of batblins,” Lavy said, pat
ting her belly after she finished. “Now, those critters do the fighting for us. If you ignore the Militant Church and their Heroes, I’d say we’re doing great.”

  “Me too,” said Alder. “I wish life could always be this easy.” He sighed. “Beer and food, friends, an army of horned spiders. All the simple pleasures. Then again, a few months of that and I’d run out of things to chronicle.”

  Kes straightened and threw fistfuls of dirt at the fire. “I aspire to live a life that would give a Bard nothing to talk about.” She winked at Alder, then tossed a chunk of hell chicken breast to her mount, Neckbreaker, who caught it in the air and devoured it whole.

  The group crested a rocky cliff that was too steep for a normal horse, but that the hell chickens climbed with ease, their razor-sharp talons digging into the ground like it was Rolim’s flesh. The Haunt’s mainland was located inside a depression deep with vegetation at the outskirts of a mountain range that extended all the way up the Starevos coast and flanked Undercity on its other end.

  When Ed had first arrived in Ivalis, this section of Hoia had been growing untamed and was rich with predators. Nowadays, the predators were of a different nature. Vast, growing circles of tree stumps broke the green evenness of the forest, with crude lumberyards slowly growing next to them like ticks getting fat off their prey. Gravel roads snaked through the terrain in all directions, getting swallowed in the distance. Faint smoke trails rose up to the sky.

  The way to the dungeon led Ed and the others past the three growing batblin encampments, each built next to the other like orphans huddling together for warmth. They were protected by rough and shoddy palisades with only a few dozen sheds surrounding a bonfire, and dozens of batblins racing around, hauling materials, food, and weapons. From a distance, it was impossible to tell if they were playing, or working, or fighting each other. Ed suspected that they were putting on an air of business because their scouts had seen him approach.