Rogue Dungeon

by James A. Hunter

  The flash of green from the brambles lit up the intersection ahead. He was only yards from the maze. Roark glanced over his shoulder.

  With a flash of gold, Lowen dispelled the ice. The red-hooded mage scribbled furiously at a parchment as he approached the tangle of thorny brambles. The Ustars—bearded berserker included—had grouped behind the mage, waiting for the passageway to clear so they could charge.

  Lowen ripped the spell off and tossed it at the brambles.

  Instead of dispelling the thicket, the branches slithered down the passage toward Roark, gaining speed as they went.

  Roark sprinted into the maze, cursing the red-hooded bastard’s cleverness. Now he either had to dispel his own entanglement or abandon his plan to lose these goons in the maze while he tried to outrun the thorny whips. Damn. With a begrudging grunt, Roark threw a dispel writ at the racing brambles. They disappeared in a flash of gold.

  The clamor of running feet reverberated off the walls of the maze as they followed him in.

  Roark hooked left, then right, dropping an explosive spell that would lie dormant until someone bearing the winged serpent crossed paths with it. The detonation would collapse the maze on their heads, hopefully taking Lowen by surprise and buying himself enough time to get back to the Tyrant King.

  Roark raced through the last intersection, grabbing the wall to redirect his momentum around the corner. A weak glimmer of silver moonlight filtered through the hidden window above as he dashed up the steps toward the blue sitting room.

  As he reached for the catch, the false wall swung open. The Tyrant King stepped into the gap.

  Roark stopped so quickly that he nearly fell on his face. He threw out his hands instinctively, slapping palms to the walls and jamming several fingers in the process.

  Behind him, the explosive spell detonated. The stone steps shook beneath his feet as the tunnels fell in, blocking off any means of retreat.

  At the top of the stairs, Marek chuckled. “No way out now but through me.”

  Roark righted himself and straightened up, glaring back at the tyrant.

  “Just as well,” he said, affecting a confidence he didn’t feel. “I came here to end your worthless life, not run away.”

  “Big words to hide bigger fears.” Marek descended a step, and Roark backed away as if magnetically repelled. The man he’d been so unimpressed with before now looked every inch the deadly monster he remembered from childhood. “You know what they called me before I took the throne, boy?”

  Roark swallowed hard, unable to stop himself. He knew. He was the sole survivor of the massacre that had earned Marek the nickname.

  “The Butcher of Korvo,” he replied in a hoarse whisper.

  “Just so.” Marek dipped his head in acknowledgement. “And now I’ll finish the job properly.”

  The Tyrant King surged forward, a flash of amber light filling the stairwell. Electricity seared through Roark’s nerves, passing through his barrier spell as if it didn’t exist. Just beyond the pain and disbelief, he felt himself tumbling down the stairs.

  What felt like lifetimes of agony later, the electricity abated. Roark opened his eyes, blinking away the purple-green afterimages left on his retinas and struggling to get his bearings. He was lying on debris from the collapsed tunnels.

  “I’ll give you one chance, boy,” Marek said. “Tell me where the Rebel Council’s hiding out and I’ll make your death quick. Refuse and I’ll draw your life out until you’re begging to die.”

  Roark’s muscles shuddered and twitched with aftershocks as he pulled himself to his feet. He bowed his head, not trusting his voice, and raised one trembling palm as if to surrender. With his other hand, he dipped into his pocket and whipped out a spell.

  Another flash of amber light. The scrap of parchment was incinerated. As the ashes crumbled in his grasp, Roark followed the light to the Tyrant King’s chest—a glowing topaz stone set in an intricately worked silver pendant.

  “I tried to be merciful,” Marek said with a half-hearted shrug, his indifferent tone more suited to discussing a boring day in court than doling out excruciating torture. “You brought this on yourself. Remember that.”

  This time when the pendant flashed that blinding amber light, Roark tried to dodge. It was a futile effort. There was nothing to dodge. No arc of electricity, no projectile or blast or bolt, just pure unadulterated agony destroying him from the inside out. It was like magma running through veins. Like a skinner’s knife slicing off flesh an inch at a time. Like acid melting his guts and dissolving his bones. All of it at once. As if from far away, he heard himself screaming. He willed himself to lose consciousness or die—one or the other, anything but awareness—but the same amber magick torturing him was blocking those too-easy escape routes. He couldn’t take it. He would lose his mind if it didn’t end soon.

  He had to end it however he could. Death or betrayal, whichever one would stop the pain faster.

  Without warning, the agony dropped down to a nearly bearable level. Roark realized he was on his knees at the foot of the stairs, his upper body held up by some force other than himself, sweat rolling down his face and back. The pendant glowed a furious amber on the Tyrant King’s chest.

  “You were saying about the T’verzet?” Marek prompted.

  “Th-the T’ver-zet,” Roark stuttered, struggling to form words through the constant stream of pain. “Th-th-they’re—”

  Marek nodded like a patient tutor with a particularly slow student. The only hint that he was interested was the slight bend of his neck, leaning in closer as if he could will the information out faster.

  “They’re—” Roark’s shaking hand plunged into his last-ditch pocket and scooped out sand mixed with pepper powder. He flung the mixture into the Tyrant King’s face.

  Marek howled, pawing desperately at his eyes. Arrogant bastard was used to facing down academy-trained mages who relied entirely on magical attacks, not hedge mages who’d had to finish teaching themselves. And certainly not hedge mages who had grown up around the dirtiest thieves in Traisbin. The tyrant’s concentration broken, the amber light faded and the pain running through every muscle fiber of Roark’s body dissipated.

  He nearly collapsed, overwhelmed by the relief, but forced himself back to his feet. He couldn’t waste this momentary advantage.

  While Marek reeled from the attack, Roark stumbled up the stairs, using his hands as well as his feet like a dog. He shouldered clumsily past Marek, knocking the sorcerer into the stone wall. With a last surge of adrenaline, he reached up and snatched the pendant, ripping it from the Tyrant King’s neck.

  “I’ll destroy you!” Marek screamed, any semblance of control gone. He groped blindly after Roark as the younger man staggered away. “You’ll know nothing but agony from now until eternity! Only in your wildest pain-induced hallucinations will you be able to dream of the sweet release of death!”

  Roark’s strength gave out at the top of the stairs, and he fell into the blue sitting room. He could hear Marek stumbling up the stairs after him. From the sound of it, the Tyrant King was recovering quickly.

  There was only one recourse left. It was beyond dangerous, but he didn’t have any other options.

  With shaking hands, Roark pulled the penknife from its hidden pocket inside his leather jerkin. He slashed the sleeve of his woolen jacket open from wrist to elbow and started carving the spell into his forearm, trying to picture the pub that doubled as a resistance safehouse with as much clarity as his exhausted mind could manage. Performing blood magick, such as this, was incredibly dangerous—and deadly unstable to boot—but it was also far more powerful than regular written cantrips, and right now he needed all the power he could muster.

  A portal opens in front of me, leading to the topmost floor of the Hearth of the World.

  As he finished punctuating the sentence, the air before him shimmered and a violet portal split the air with the ripping sound of torn cloth.

  It was a dangerous play.
Reckless.

  Portals were the least understood of all the branches of magick. Even with perfect spelling and grammar and the most clear and accurate wording in the world, mages often stepped through to find themselves trapped inside trees or half out of walls or creatures or other people or crushed at the bottom of the Great Sea. Or a few miles away from the destination they had in mind, mildly inconvenienced but otherwise fine. Two hundred years had passed since the founding of the academy, and still no one had discovered any difference between the portals that worked and the ones that killed the traveler in a variety of gruesome ways.

  Roark pushed himself to his feet, ribbons of hot blood running down his arm and off his fingers. The dripping red shined black in the violet light from the portal.

  “You fool,” came Marek’s harsh whisper from behind him. “You’ll kill yourself.”

  The words were almost funny coming from the sorcerer who’d threatened him with an eternal life filled with pain only moments before. In the face of that, a grisly death in a tangle of limbs and organs or under hundreds of millions of tons of water didn’t seem like much of a risk.

  “You’re as much a coward as the council,” Roark called over his shoulder. “If I survive this, I’ll find a way to make you pay for every drop of innocent blood you’ve spilled.”

  Bracing himself for the worst, Roark jumped into the portal.

  FOUR:

  The Citadel

  The blue sitting room of Graf Manor disappeared in the bright violet of the portal. Wind screamed past Roark’s ears as if he were falling from a great cliff. Then the violet light blurred and stretched, splitting into rays of lilac, amethyst, burgundy, and indigo. Waves of pain tore through his body. It felt as if he were being ripped apart one muscle fiber and bone splinter at a time, then pieced back together over and over again. On the faraway fringes of the torment, some detached part of his mind wondered whether that was how this portal killed its travelers—by shredding them endlessly until their consciousness fell apart and nothing was left.

  What felt like centuries of agony later, awareness slapped Roark in the face like a wet washcloth. He wasn’t falling anymore, he was walking. Odd. Very much so. He looked around, searching for clues as to where he had come out. The crumbling remains of what looked to have once been a great citadel lay before him like the bones of some ancient beast. A cold black fog rolled along trampled muddy earth, broken up here and there by weathered cairns of vitrified stone.

  It sure as all the hells wasn’t the safe house. This dead citadel was like nothing he’d ever seen in Korvo. It didn’t look as if it belonged on his home planet, let alone in his home city.

  Furthermore, his body felt strange. Awkward. Clumsy. Slow. Perhaps he was still recovering from the whirlwind of torture, first at the Tyrant King’s hands, then inside the portal. If he took a moment to regroup, maybe he could make sense of this.

  Roark lifted a hand to his head and froze, staring at the leathery blue flesh of a scrawny, disproportionately long arm. Where was the familiar olive skin laced with fading spell scars? He looked down, heart hammering away inside his chest. Instead of his own lean body, he found a bird-chested torso that flared into a potbelly and ended in a pair of bowlegs. A dirty loincloth strung around his waist was all that preserved his modesty, and judging by the strange, misshapen parts that had replaced the rest of his body, he didn’t want to see what was under there.

  His mind spun. This was all wrong. What had that portal done to him? Had he even made it into the portal at all? Maybe the Tyrant King had killed him and now he was being resurrected as some sort of dark creature built to serve the Ustari Empire. There’d been rumors of experiments in the north, chimeras pieced together from animal and human remains.

  If that was the case, then what had he been made from? Roark studied the arms again, this time with emotionless detachment. Some sort of thick, leathery blue hide, almost like that of a Great Sea whale. The stubby, dirt-caked fingers ended in black claws like a bird of prey. He ran his tongue over a set of wickedly serrated teeth. A shark, perhaps?

  No, if he’d been killed and rebuilt to serve in the Tyrant King’s armies he would have weapons or armor. None of this added up.

  Roark looked down again at his narrow, birdlike chest and realized with a start that the topaz pendant he’d snatched from Marek was hanging around his neck. Somehow that bit of jewelry had made it through the portal unaffected.

  Before he could study himself more closely, movement in his peripheral vision caught his attention. He snapped his head around and spotted another small, malformed creature with blue skin hiding in the shadows of a crumbling staircase corkscrewing into the earth. Thin white letters floated over the creature’s head.

  [Changeling]

  Had the Tyrant King’s mages found a new way to write spells in the air? Was that what they’d been experimenting with? Was it how they had turned him into this thing … this Changeling?

  Roark headed toward the staircase. At first, he tried to move carefully, not wanting to provoke an attack or frighten the other creature away. But the awkward slowness of his new body wore out his patience within seconds, and he broke into a clumsy trot.

  The Changeling, loitering in the shadows of the crumbling citadel walls, didn’t attack or run. Its eyes didn’t even focus as he approached; it just stood there staring and swaying on its scraggy legs. This Changeling wore a grimy loincloth identical to Roark’s, but it also had a strip of leather around its bald head. Moth-eaten black feathers were stuck into the band and swayed in time with the creature’s body.

  Roark opened his mouth to demand some answers from the Changeling, but all that came out was a croaky grunt. Anger and frustration flared, but he pushed them down. Filling his narrow chest with air, he began again.

  “Where?” Speaking was like overseeing a three-way duel between his mind, his vocal cords, and his too-wide mouth while pulling every sound up from the pit of his potbelly. “What are this? Where are this?”

  The Changeling grunted and pointed stupidly out at the eddying fog.

  Perhaps the magick which created Changelings also damaged the brain. Working carefully through each question, Roark formed the words in his mind first, then forced them out through his serrated teeth. He felt his potbelly jump with each croaked syllable.

  “Where. Are. We?” he asked. “What is this. Place?”

  The Changeling continued to sway on the spot. After several moments, it cocked its head and grunted.

  With a wry smile, Roark told the Changeling to slow down a bit, but in his rush the quip came out as just another meaningless croak.

  Roark rubbed his pounding temples with dirty, claw-tipped fingers. This was going to be unbearable without sarcasm. A world without biting wit simply wasn’t one worth living in.

  The swaying Changeling grunted as though it agreed and pointed out at the fog once more.

  Roark sighed and searched the citadel for anyone or anything slightly more sentient. No other creatures wandered the muddy ground inside the ruins, but there was a gap in the top of the wall opposite the crumbling staircase where some long-ago attack had smashed the stones inward in a heap of broken rubble.

  He left the Changeling swaying in the shadows and headed for the gap in the wall, hoping to get a better view of his surroundings, if nothing else. Climbing the stone pile should have been easy having grown up climbing the cliffs and mountains around Korvo, but with the unfamiliar limbs it was a slow, clumsy process. Especially since each one of his limbs seemed to be a different length. Finally, though, Roark made it to the top. He grabbed a handful of stone wall on each side of the gap and pulled himself up.

  Down below lay a graveyard peppered with broken, weather-worn tombstones that shined white as bone in the moonlight. Crypts in various states of disrepair had been torn open, and crumbling mausoleums stood with doors ripped off their hinges.

  Lumbering between these stone monuments on stiff legs were walking corpses. Desiccated fles
h and scraps of cloth hung from their bones, and many of them had ancient-looking brass swords hanging at their sides or cracked dark-wood bows slung over their shoulders. Like the Changeling, thin white lettering glimmered over their heads.

  [Shambling Revenant]

  Roark settled his misshapen backside onto the wall and crossed his scrawny legs, resting an elbow on them while he thought this over.

  In Traisbin, it was common practice for the handiest priest or mage-noble to make out writs for those who died to ensure that their souls would pass on undisturbed to the afterlife and remain out of reach of necromancy. It had been one of the many duties the men and women of his house had carried out for the people of Korvo. There were always stories of mages who’d gone mad and tried to build corpse armies by murdering men and leaving their bodies unwritten. For a while, rumors had even circulated that this was how the Tyrant King was sweeping the continent so quickly. Baseless rumors, Roark knew. The Tyrant King had come to power through bloody swords in the hands of regular, order-following humans while other regular humans turned a blind eye.

  The writing in this place did seem to hold some sort of magic—the letters could exist with nothing more than the air as a medium—but Roark didn’t think this world was the same one he’d been born on. When looked at objectively, the evidence all seemed to be pointing toward the portal having dumped him out in some other dimension.

  Just as he came to this conclusion, an arrow thudded into his leathery blue knee. He croaked in shock as white jags of pain lanced in all directions from the wound, and his leg kicked involuntarily. A strange vial decorated with intricate gold filigree appeared to his right, half full of some glowing red liquid. Before his eyes, the mysterious white lettering appeared.

  [x2 Stealth Multiplier]

  “Aw, hells yeah!” a voice shouted. “Get wrecked, son!”