Dungeon Lord: Otherworldly Powers (The Wraith's Haunt Book 2) Read online

  DUNGEON LORD

  OTHERWORLDLY POWERS

  HUGO HUESCA

  Hugo Huesca © 2017

  Cover design by James T. Egan of Bookfly Design.

  Www.bookflydesign.com

  CONTENTS

  1. Chapter One

  2. Chapter Two

  3. Chapter Three

  4. Chapter Four

  5. Chapter Five

  6. Chapter Six

  7. Chapter Seven

  8. Chapter Eight

  9. Chapter Nine

  10. Chapter Ten

  11. Chapter Eleven

  12. Chapter Twelve

  13. Chapter Thirteen

  14. Chapter Fourteen

  15. Chapter Fifteen

  16. Chapter Sixteen

  17. Chapter Seventeen

  18. Chapter Eighteen

  19. Chapter Nineteen

  20. Chapter Twenty

  21. Chapter Twenty-One

  22. Chapter Twenty-Two

  23. Chapter Twenty-Three

  24. Chapter Twenty-Four

  25. Chapter Twenty-Five

  26. Chapter Twenty-Six

  27. Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Epilogue

  Edward Wright

  Afterword

  Keep in Touch!

  Also by Hugo Huesca

  1

  CHAPTER ONE

  KATALYN

  After the Thieves Guild had betrayed her and sold her off to catacomb-dwelling cultists, Katalyn Locksmith had started to suspect she was going to have a bad day. Her suspicion became a certainty when the residual necromantic magic from whatever ritual was taking place in the quarries below started to reanimate the corpses in her cell.

  Katalyn always made a habit of looking at the bright side of life. For example, she may have been seconds away from a painful and excruciating death via zombie teeth, but at least she now knew why Undercity was suffering from a particularly nasty undead plague. An out-of-season one, at that.

  “Someone ought to do something about it,” she reckoned. As long as that someone wasn’t her. She had enough on her plate already. She had to free herself, escape a heavily trapped, undead-and-cultist-infested catacomb, and finally, had to get revenge on the man that had betrayed her.

  Many experience points awaited her if she survived. Maybe she would disrupt the cultists’ ritual—if she had the time—as an encore.

  The mummified corpse shook weakly in its embedded stone coffin in the wall next to her. Katalyn wasn’t an expert in magic of any kind and couldn’t tell how long it would take for it to rise and look for its breakfast inside her innards.

  She had to hurry. Sadly, the cultists had frisked her before chaining her to the skull-covered wall of the ossuary, and they had removed all her tools, including her lockpicks. At least it meant the cultists took her seriously and gave her the respect she deserved by her skill as a Thief.

  In any case, they had forgotten to silence her to prevent her from using magical talents or items. It was an understandable omission, since she was a full-on Thief and not one of those fancy multi-classed, third-rate amateurs that liked to substitute skill with magic.

  The chains locking her arms above her head rattled loudly as she pushed against the skulls on the wall and fought for a better position. She didn’t worry about the noise: the ossuary was inundated by the cruel incantations of the cultists down below, a constant song with ineffable lyrics from one of those dead languages with more consonants than vowels.

  Her movement accelerated the creation of the zombies, but so far she could afford to ignore them. With three hundred fifty experience points to her name, Katalyn could deal with a couple newly born undead. If she freed herself.

  Using her right hand, she pulled at the fingernail of the little finger of her left hand as if she were trying to tear it off. The fake nail came off painlessly, and she held it tightly—if it slipped, she’d be screwed.

  “Peaches and cream,” Katalyn whispered. The words were the last required trigger for activating the magic of the nail, which promptly heated up to an almost unmanageable level. The nail changed shape and size until it became a Guild-certified lockpick.

  While she worked on the padlock, the mummified corpse managed to push its coffin out of its hole in the wall. The rotten wood smashed against the ossuary’s floor. Splinters flew in every direction, and the noise briefly overpowered the cultists’ song, which was gaining in intensity by the second. The zombie spilled out of its destroyed coffin and tried to figure out how to stand up.

  Zombies had a Mind score of three or four, if Katalyn recalled right. It meant the zombie would need a second or two to figure out how to stand up. She used this knowledge to push down the pang of fear that threatened to blossom inside her chest. Trembling hands could be the doom of any Thief, regardless of skill.

  The padlock clicked open just as the zombie regained verticality for the first time in decades. It raised dusty brown arms in Katalyn’s direction and fixed a hungry stare on her. Its ocular cavities were two empty wells.

  “Sorry,” Katalyn told the zombie, “don’t get too fond of walking just yet.”

  She swept the corpse’s feet off the floor. Zombies were as agile as they were smart, so the corpse smacked head-first against the hard stone surface of the floor with a dusty thud. Before it could rise again, Katalyn stomped on its skull, which crumpled under her boots as if it were made of clay.

  Killing the zombie earned her zero experience points, since a singular low-leveled undead posed no risk to her even if she was unarmed. But opening the padlock under duress and with a time constraint did earn her a marginal amount of points, as well as a rank increase in her lockpicking skill.

  “That’s the thing with you,” Katalyn told the remaining two zombies and the singular reanimated skeleton shuffling toward her from the other side of the ossuary. “I keep getting stronger, but you stay the same. Farming you is a waste of time.”

  Then again, she was unarmed, and skeletons were trickier to dispose of than zombies.

  Before the undead could corner her, she rushed the closest one—the skeleton—and tackled it into a wall. Skulls broke under the impact of the undead’s ribs and the Thief’s shoulders, and fragments of bone showered her face.

  Behind Katalyn, the two zombies extended their arms toward her neck, so she grabbed hold of the skeleton’s arm and launched it against the zombies. As she did so, the skeleton’s elbow broke, leaving the arm in Katalyn’s possession, which solved her unarmed status.

  Katalyn used the extra reach of her improvised weapon to push the bigger of the two zombies away from the others, then kicked at the skeleton’s knees. As it fell, the skeleton clung to the nearest zombie and brought it down too.

  Normal, intelligent creatures would’ve learned by now to protect their legs against Katalyn’s attacks, but without the presence of a Necromancer or a higher form of undead, these monsters were too stupid to figure it out in such a short amount of time.

  The third zombie fell the same way the others had, and the Thief calmly eliminated them one-by-one by stomping on their heads. She made sure to spread the bones of the skeleton far from each other, to stop them from recombining.

  Katalyn was alone in the ossuary. Her and the truly dead. For her troubles, she was five experience points richer. It wasn’t a lot, but they added up.

  She discarded the bone arm and waited for her breathing to calm down.

  It took longer than she’d expected.

  It was the song. Too frantic—now drums had joined the fray, and the noise was pounding the side of her head in th
e beginnings of a migraine.

  She was acutely aware of the smell of embalming potions that permeated the ossuary.

  Strange. As far as she was aware, the catacombs had smelled, to her, only of dust and mold. The reason why would have to remain a mystery. She needed to leave the catacombs before the cultists decided they had arrived at the part of their ritual that required a sacrifice.

  The door to the ossuary was locked, too, but that obviously wasn’t a problem for her. After dealing with the lock, she pushed open the heavy wooden slab. Then she froze, and a scream died in her throat as bright sunlight stung her eyes.

  WHERE KATALYN’S brain had expected to see a bone-decorated and badly lit passageway, it had instead found a park in the middle of the day, filled with people dressed in strange clothes of happy colors.

  After the initial shock had passed and Katalyn’s eyes adjusted to the light, she had to deal with many smaller shocks as her mind sifted through the raw amount of data thrown at her in short order.

  First of all, she had stepped into another world. No doubt about it. The people here were as different from their Ivalian counterparts as a batblin was from an elf. These men and women were slower, better fed, and even taller on average. Judging from the insanely high quality of their strange clothing, every single one of them had to be of noble station.

  Away from the paved road that crossed the park, hundreds of magically powered metal chariots roared one after the other down a street so densely populated that it put even Galtia, capital of Starevos, to shame. And the buildings that grew above those… some of them rose higher than her eyes could see without craning her neck, colossal structures of glass and metal that defied everything that Katalyn knew about modern Ivalian construction techniques.

  “Bullshit,” she muttered, feeling silly for falling, albeit briefly, for such an obvious trick. “That’s some creative use of illusion spells. But whatever Wizard did it, they went too far and made it unbelievable. So it’s easy for me to pass the Mind contest.”

  She looked back over her shoulder. The entrance to the ossuary was still there, the remains of the undead still sprawled across the stone floor. No one beside her seemed to notice the magical doorway, however.

  Since this world offered better prospects than the situation she had come from, Katalyn abandoned the door and explored her surroundings.

  It was easy to get lost in the movement of the crowd. Her clothes and demeanor should have clashed with the natives’, but no one gave signs of realizing she was there. When she understood this, the idea of going around cutting purses and emptying pockets was almost overwhelming.

  But first she had to find the Wizard who was powering the illusion enchantment, since that was the most probable source of the spell that had brought her here in the first place.

  Above the chatter of the families walking next to her came the ring of bells. It was a happy tune, catchy, probably the work of a skilled Bard. Something in the music gently urged her to find its source—an embedded Bardic utterance, no doubt.

  The music came from one of the metal chariots. This one was big and bulky, rectangular, white, and with an unrealistic depiction of a cow painted right at its middle. The cow held a light-brown pyramidal shape with a ball of yellow lard over it.

  A group of little kids surrounded the back of the armored chariot, many of them already holding a cone-with-lard-on-top in their little hands. Katalyn liked children: they were excellent distractions in the middle of a heist. She walked closer to the chariot, gently urged by the ringing of its hidden bells.

  She could see now the man who had been hidden by the back of the chariot so far. He stood in the middle of the crowd of kids, and he was in the process of handing them more treats in exchange for some coins.

  The first thing Katalyn noticed about the man was his legs, then his uniform. It resembled that of a baker. White crisp trousers, a black leather belt, polished black leather shoes, a white shirt that would’ve earned the derision of Undercity fashionistas, and a white overall to finish the ensemble. He also wore a little cloth hat on his head.

  What was a man like that doing selling goods to children in the street? If he could afford those shoes, he had no need of acting as a common merchant.

  Katalyn had a keen eye for wealth indicators—a natural development of her profession. It was the reason she’d scanned the man’s outfit first and paid attention to the rest of him second. But when she did, she paled so fast that her golden-brown skin must’ve resembled the porcelain white of the monster dressed as a merchant.

  His face had no features. No nose, no ears, no lines of expression, only a pair of tiny black eyes and a gigantic smile that extended far wider than what it should have—and with more teeth. His legs and arms were too long for his body, and thin enough that supporting the weight of his torso should have been impossible. Yet something told Katalyn that the man was hiding his full height, as if he were somehow slumping.

  Like the pieces of a riddle in the treasure chamber of a Dungeon Lord, facts inched together inside her mind.

  She had been taken to another place by a mage extremely skilled in portal magic, and she was hidden from the natives’ sight by a power that went beyond mere illusion.

  Katalyn had grown up with tales and grim songs of such a being, same as most of the children in Starevos and Lotia. A monster with a hungry smile, capable of bending space and time without effort.

  Kharon. The Boatman. The black emissary of Murmur. Death and tragedy followed where Kharon was sighted. To gaze upon his stats sheet caused Warlocks to lose their minds. People believed he stole children from their cribs and grown men from the arms of their loved ones, and brought them to terrible worlds to fulfill the cruel will of Murmur.

  He’ll come in the nighttime, bearing gifts, the old crib song went, but his smile is hungry / and he cleans his teeth / with the bones from my baby’s hand…

  The Boatman turned to look straight at her with those tiny black eyes of his. The space between his teeth was cavernous.

  Katalyn ran. She ran for a long time, but when she dared to look back over her shoulder, she was only a couple steps away from Kharon’s white chariot, and the monster himself regarded her with a warm, inviting smile.

  “Now, now, Katalyn Locksmith,” Kharon told her as he handed a new cone to a delighted little pony-tailed girl. “That is no way of greeting an old family friend. Especially one who just saved your life.” His fingers, she noticed, were like long white worms.

  KATALYN RECITED ALITA’S NAME, the name of her seven holy avatars, and the name of the three divine consorts just to be sure. According to legend, that ought to be enough to call golden fire from the sky unto the Boatman and throw him back into the pit whence he had come.

  Kharon stood there, smug in his unburnt state. Katalyn reflected on her situation. Well… fuck, she thought.

  “But the legend…” she said. “No Dark avatar shall wander mortal realms—”

  “—as long as the Light shines over them,” Kharon finished for her, nodding along like he was quoting his favorite part of a bardic song. “Yes, quite. The thing is, the Light can’t shine everywhere, and even in Ivalis there are blind spots. This particular realm, though, has been missing its divinities—on both sides of the spectrum—for a couple hundred years now. Free for the taking, right? I’ve grown quite fond of the place. I like to stop here for breakfast before work.”

  Since the Boatman had his attention focused elsewhere, the group of children slowly drifted away, their multi-colored lard cones melting over their hands.

  On the bright side, Katalyn thought, at least those kids won’t be anywhere near him for now.

  She then realized, with dawning horror, that a boy and a girl remained behind. They eyed the open back doors of Kharon’s wagon with mischievous grins.

  Despite Katalyn’s screams trying to warn them, the kids inched forward past Kharon’s back, their gazes never leaving the promised treasures of the wagon’s interior—which
appeared entirely black to Katalyn. Her hands passed through the kids’ shoulders like a ghost. The happy tune of the bells drowned all other sounds.

  After the last kid—the boy—had climbed inside the wagon, the doors closed on their own. No one noticed, except for Katalyn.

  “Let them go,” she pleaded.

  “Oh, don’t you worry. The girl, Sarah, is about to go on an amazing adventure. Sarah will find herself in a world she’ll grow to love, and she’ll likely become a legendary hero. A good old time, all around.”

  “And the boy?”

  “Diego? His adventure will be… a bit shorter, I’m afraid.”

  Katalyn lunged to attack the Boatman, but she was a ghost to him, too, and she couldn’t harm him.

  “Anyway,” Kharon went on once Katalyn had worn herself out, “as I was saying, I brought you here to save your life.”

  “I don’t want your help, aberration! Whatever pact you have to offer, I reject it.”

  “Smart decision, but irrelevant. The pact is already made,” Kharon explained happily. “Your father made it, you see, right before he went and plunged Starevos into war.”