The Dreadful Hunt Read online

  “Hmm? You mean the wall?” Vexx eyed it skeptically. The shifting stems seemed as if they’d overheard the discussion and bristled. “Those vines don’t look too friendly.”

  “How about that cupula?” Shyola suggested, already retracing her steps. “It’s just ancient masonry. If you can get me up there, maybe I can spot any potential problems. I don’t think it’s high enough to find a way out,” she said, placing her hands on her hips, “but we could get started in the right direction.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Vexx said agreeably, examining the surface above. “Let’s see…if you begin with a jump, then I’ll add some wind to it. Are you ready?”

  Shy cracked her knuckles, raising her hands in the air.

  “Ready.”

  She jumped up, and a rush of wind magic propelled her into the air, high enough for the succubus to clamber onto the ancient cupula.

  “Oh, it’s tricky here,” she muttered, trying to keep her footing. After a moment, she raised her eyes, frowning as she took in the area around them.

  “How’s it looking?” Kaylin asked, squeezing her bow. “I can’t wait to get out of here.”

  “Traps over there, a dead end…hmm.” Shyola frowned. “Well, I can tell you this…that wasn’t the only minotaur.”

  “Great,” Vexx muttered.

  “But that’s the least of our problems. There’s something in the maze allowing creatures to pass through certain walls…and they’re all coming this way.”

  Through the Maze

  “There’s another garden like this if you continue that way,” Shy said, looking over her shoulder and pointing down one corridor. “Take that forward, then make a left, immediate right, and another right. It opens up into a large garden.”

  “Those creatures you said were coming,” Kaylin added. “What are they? What direction? I could set up traps…”

  “They’re burrowers,” Shy said, shaking her head in annoyance. “They must have created a hive underground. Soldier burrowers are working their way under the walls, but we should be gone before then. And over here…”

  Shy fell silent as four orbiting lights rose high in the sky. They flashed in different colors and then weaved away. A heavy bellow followed, along with an incredibly deep, grating voice. It spoke words in a language Vexx had never heard before. He looked at Kaylin, who was equally confused. Then, a few words made sense to him: come, welcome, greetings, mixed with some unfamiliar rumbling. And then, unmistakably, “Shyola…”

  “That’s Daimontongue,” Vexx exclaimed, blinking in surprise. He’d dabbled in it a bit as part of his pursuit into the Black Arts, but he’d never actually heard it spoken before. Few of those still living had. Atop the cupula, Shy let out a low gasp of surprise.

  “Parnaverius!”

  “Shy, what’s going on?”

  She looked at him in utter astonishment. “Master…he says he sent these lights to guide my way. Parnaverius…he, he’s a Greater Imp in one of the hells…we go way back. I need to meet him! I’ll catch up with you later!”

  “Shy, no, wait up!”

  The succubus leaped off the cupula and over one of the green walls. The sound of her footfalls soon faded away as she headed off to find the Greater Imp.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Vexx grumbled. “Which way did she say to go?”

  “Over here,” Kaylin said, striding forward confidently. “But I don’t remember the rest. Don’t worry yourself, Vexx, we’re better off without her.”

  “Are we?” Vexx grimaced. “Her whip would be really handy if those burrowers ever catch up with us.”

  The many holes that were spread out through the maze had now gained a new ominous meaning. Vexx kept his distance from them, training a watchful eye on their surroundings as they continued at a brisk pace.

  “Never mind them,” Kaylin said, breaking into a run as she took turn after turn. The dungeoneers burst out of the next corridor and into a large, open garden.

  “No, this isn’t a garden,” Vexx’s eyes widened in astonishment. There was a vast proliferation of plant life, but from the designs of stout Dwarven statues formed up in rank upon rank, this was clearly the cemetery at the very heart of the maze. Vexx pushed forward, pressing one hand against the cold marble of an ornately designed Dwarven berserker with two axes raised toward the heavens.

  “Amazing,” Kaylin said as she joined Vexx. “So, is this where dwarves sleep?”

  Vexx frowned. “Are you serious? No, this is just where they keep their…” Vexx trailed off before coming to a sudden realization. “You’re a genius!”

  “Oh, then—”

  “Help, I’m trapped!”

  Vexx and Kaylin peeked out from behind the Dwarven statue to see the same beautiful woman, panic-stricken and tearful as she dangled upside down from a rope. Her eyes sought out Vexx, and she gave him a beseeching look.

  “Good sir, I seem to have found myself—”

  “Didn’t the goblins get you?” Vexx asked suspiciously.

  “Why, yes. Then they deposited me here to—”

  Before she could finish her sentence, an arrow arced forward and embedded itself into her right thigh. Her beautiful, delicate scream quickly gave way to scratchy, agonized cursing. Her disguise faded away, leaving behind a haggard old woman dressed in rags that seemed to have been dragged through the swamp.

  “The hag!” Kaylin snarled, already nocking another arrow. “I knew there was something off about her.”

  The hag twisted away, pulling a rope that allowed her to fall from the snare trap just as Kaylin’s second arrow whizzed by overhead.

  “I…I knew all along too!” Vexx added, less convincingly, and he sent off two quick fireballs toward her. The hag hobbled away surprisingly quickly, and her hands moved as she conjured up a dense fog, and the mist quickly spread outward as she disappeared.

  A cackle echoed in the distance.

  “Time for you to be eaten by my slithering friends! Kill them, my burrowers, harvest their bodies!”

  Vexx was already moving over to the closest Dwarven statue, scanning the arcane symbols within. He jabbed his staff down into the hard dirt.

  “Kazmerian Thunderbrow,” Kaylin said, squinting at the symbols.

  “You know Dwarven?” Vexx asked, raising his eyebrows. Bits of dirt flew in every direction as the sounds of skittering feet echoed in the distance. “Ugh, no matter,” he muttered, yanking his staff back up. “This will just have to do. Cover me, Kaylin!”

  Vexx’s eyes flashed a spectral green, and beams of almost translucent, flickering light drifted down from him and into the disturbed ground where Kazmerian Thunderbrow had been laid to rest. At once, a skeletal hand shot to the surface, and faded brown linens unraveled from around its desiccated arm. Vexx put his disgust aside, leaning forward to grip the hand tightly, ignoring the slight squish as he pulled the skeleton above ground.

  “That’s it, come on up…”

  The undead dwarf emerged, clods of dirt falling around him. He wore an iron helmet carved with runes and an elaborate winged design, though the rest of his rotted body was fortunately concealed in linen wrappings. Two faint green orbs were barely visible behind the linens shielding his face.

  “Defend your home, Kazmerian Thunderbrow!” Vexx urged, pointing his staff outward. “Defend your people!”

  His experiments in the Black Arts had led him to a few interesting discoveries about his necromantic abilities. One of them was that a sense of who a person was before their death still lingered, even in the afterlife. With Vexx’s encouragements, Kazmerian stood tall…tall for a dwarf, anyway, and formed a one-person battle line beside his grave.

  There was a soft hiss as Kaylin released an arrow, though Vexx couldn’t see the target.

  “Just a scout,” she said hurriedly, already setting her pack on the ground. “If I’m quick about it, I can get a few traps set up. But I can hear that there are a lot of these critters coming! We’ll be swarmed soon!”

&
nbsp; “I’m on it!” Vexx said, already moving over to the next grave. He didn’t even bother attempting to dig with this one, casting his necromantic energies above the second dwarf’s grave. He felt a bit woozy from the power he expelled, but it wasn’t overwhelming.

  This would have been my limit once. My level of stamina for this has definitely increased.

  An iron helmet emerged, jutting out from the ground, followed by a grim face where the linen had partially torn. One glowing green eye glared sightlessly at Vexx.

  “Join your friend Kazmerian,” Vexx shot out, moving over to the next one. He didn’t even bother watching as the dwarf staggered out and hobbled over to join his former comrade. When the sounds of keening burrowers became too loud to ignore, a passable line of undead dwarves had formed a shuffling wall. With no axes or shields, it didn’t seem like much, but they chased away a few burrowers who came close enough to sniff at them.

  The creatures themselves had gaping mouths with teeth as sharp as diamonds, capable of burrowing their way through rock and hard-packed dirt. They resembled enlarged worms with twitching eye stalks and enormous mouths, and they seemed as deadly as they were hideous.

  “Jh-lakmo,” the most recently resurrected dwarf rasped, rising to his feet. He tugged at Vexx’s sleeve, disrupting his concentration. The necromancer looked down in surprise, feeling weighed down by the psychic drain from keeping the undead dwarves in motion.

  “What?”

  “That’s Dwarven for ‘armory,’” Kaylin said, looking over as she nocked another arrow. Her quiver was quickly depleting, and with every arrow she shot, she seemed more and more anxious. “Over…there, I think?”

  The dwarf nodded affirmatively, already lurching forward and shambling over to an intricately carved obelisk. Vexx trailed behind, surprised at the dwarf’s show of initiative as it began batting its aged hand against the surface. It muttered something that Vexx took for a curse.

  His attention was wrested away when a pair of burrowers slithered along the flagstones from out of the mist, the teeth in their open mouths whirring in deadly circles. Vexx reacted in an instant, throwing a fireball that flew straight down the maw of the first one. The next one was surprisingly agile, quickly closing the distance and striking at the necromancer.

  “Stay away!” Vexx yelped, jerking aside as it almost managed to catch his robes. He slammed the bottom of his staff against the creature’s head, but it seemed to do no apparent damage, so he fired a spurt of flames that licked across its gnarled flesh. The eyestalks burned away at once, but the creature’s tough hide kept it alive, leaving it writhing in agony on the ground. Vexx took a step aside, aimed carefully into its gullet, and he blasted it to bloody chunks of flesh with another fireball.

  The dwarf grunted something enthusiastic, which was followed by a mechanical click. Vexx looked over to see a hidden stone door swing open. The dwarf quickly snatched up a bevy of weapons; axes, hammers, longswords. It turned to join the others, dropping a mace on the ground as it trundled away. Stacked tightly together beside the weapons was a pile of old metal shields. Vexx reached for them, wincing as he hefted them onto his shoulder. Wooden shields would have rotted over the ages, and Vexx supposed dwarves had a particular love of metal, but the heaviness of the rusted metal taxed his already exhausted body.

  Still, the necromancer weaved his way over to the line of dwarves, watching as they selected their preferred weapons. He staggered forward, sending the pile of shields scattering on the ground. Even undead, Vexx could sense their disapproval. He collapsed to one knee and felt around in his robes for a blue potion.

  “Just arm yourselves,” he managed, choking down the mana potion as the dwarves carefully chose their weapons and shields. “They’re coming!”

  The magical fog was already disappearing, and at the far end of the green wall, ranks of burrowers were forming, their misshapen mouths open and displaying their wickedly sharp teeth. Nearby, Vexx could make out the dull glimmer of a few spike traps set out in the open. It wasn’t the most subtle placement, but he supposed it would do.

  “What now?” Kaylin asked quietly, joining him as they formed up behind the Dwarven shield wall. They seemed to fall into a decent formation now, and with a pair of damage dealers behind the front line, Vexx fancied their chances. Still, there was no telling just how many burrowers were on the way. “Should I keep firing arrows?” she asked worriedly. “Because I don’t have all that many lef—”

  “Waiting for me, my sweets?”

  “Shy!”

  Vexx and Kaylin looked to the side as Shyola emerged from the mists. She grinned over at them and jogged over.

  “Had to make it past those minotaurs! That was no easy feat. Ah, it’s so wonderful to see you both!”

  Vexx’s smile slipped a fraction.

  “Uh, yeah, you too!” Kaylin added. “I thought we were goners for a moment there.”

  “You know that I could never let them harm a hair on your pretty head,” Shyola crooned. “That’s why I hurried back to help you in your time of nee—”

  Vexx fired a powerful fireball directly into Shyola’s chest. She shrieked and clawed at her chest, turning into the hag in an instant, batting frantically at the scorching flames that burned through her filthy rags. At once, water gushed forth from her hands, extinguishing the fire.

  “I knew it was you!”

  “You’re only delaying the inevitable,” the hag choked out, summoning another thick blanket of fog around her and narrowly dodging another fireball before disappearing into the mists.

  “Wow,” Kaylin commented. “I know that’s the hag, but do you think Shy looks like that underneath everything?”

  “I’m not about to find out,” Vexx said, turning to face the approaching horde of burrowers. He jabbed his staff over the helmets of the undead dwarves and fired off his Ethereal Screech. A volley of shrieking and exploding skulls streamed out from the netherworld to slam into the charging burrowers. A dozen flew through the air, but more made it through, their worm-like bodies snaking around the corpses. A few were caught suddenly, the spike traps jabbing into their hide, and another was pinned to the ground by Kaylin’s precise shot.

  Then the survivors streamed past, storming into the shield wall, and the undead dwarves began to hack away.

  The Shield Wall

  Kazmerian Thunderbrow slammed down with an ancient mace, spraying the blood of a burrower all across the stone floor. Then he jabbed forward with the rim of his shield, knocking another to the side, where it was quickly finished off by two dwarves with ancient swords. Kazmerian let out a ragged cry of exultation, which was echoed with varying success from the other undead dwarves around him.

  Vexx’s vision swam from the exhaustion of animating this number of corpses, and though he had enough power to cast a Scorching Fireball, he had to lean against a grave to keep himself upright. Kaylin, on the other hand, was a blur of motion as she loosed arrow after arrow.

  “Minotaur up ahead!” she shouted, shooting an arrow into the fog and striking the minotaur in its chest as it lumbered out of the fog. The arrow stuck out, wobbling in place as the minotaur stormed forward. The minotaur roared as Vexx staggered to his feet, and the necromancer casted a weak fireball that burst on its chest but did little besides singeing the beast’s hide.

  Then the minotaur slammed into the shield wall, tossing Kazmerian and a few of the other dwarves into the air. The beast reared up just in front of the dungeoneers, pausing to huff and glare at them. Vexx straightened, energized both by the loss of his undead minions and by the presence of danger in front of him. He leveled his staff directly at the minotaur’s chest and let loose another barrage of screaming skulls.

  This time, the howls of the netherworldly skulls soared past and exploded so close that Vexx could feel the intense emotions of the tortured souls streaming by. They slammed the startled minotaur back, and the dull, green explosions ripped away flesh and bone with each detonation. The minotaur staggered back,
leaning against a grave as the Ethereal Screech continued, finally blasting him apart. Vexx looked away, smelling the sickly stench of overcooked beef with the undertones of death and decay, and he focused back on the burrowers that continued to emerge from the mists.

  The shield wall was broken now, the dwarves were hemmed in, and they scattered into small groups of twos and threes as they slashed at the charging burrowers with ancient swords and axes. One of the worms surged toward Vexx before jerking upward in shock, a spike trap jammed through its belly. Kaylin had dropped her bow and now stabbed her knife into the very center of the burrower, twisting as she pulled it free.

  Vexx turned to see two more of the burrowers circling behind him and blasted them with a wave of flames. He paused to take another vial from within his robes and noticed that his potion stash was running alarmingly low. The burrowers writhed back and forth in the flames, filling the air with their inhuman wails of anguish. Part of the blast had caught a dwarf, and he turned to pat it out, but it soon spread along its linen garments.

  “Damn it all,” Vexx muttered, then sent a psychic order out to his undead minion. “Charge!”

  The undead dwarf detached himself from his comrades, rushing into the open, where a few burrowers were feasting on their deceased brethren. The dwarf missed with one slash of his axe, but he stumbled into a burrower and spread the flames before collapsing on the bloody ground. By then, the other burrowers had disappeared, evidently giving up the fight.

  “We won!” Vexx called out.

  A cackle echoed in the distance. “Have you? You have not found your way out of my lair yet, have you, my sweets…”

  “She’s the worst,” Kaylin muttered, making her way forward and pulling an arrow out of one of the burrower corpses. “But she has a point,” Kaylin admitted. “We don’t even know how to get out of here.”

  Now that the mists had drifted away, the dungeoneers could tell that they were in a large grove somewhere near the center of the maze. Only six of the undead dwarves were left, their glowing eyes staring down mournfully at the companions they had lost once again.