Rogue Dungeon Read online

  What these intruders didn’t know about Graf Manor was that generations ago, the lady of the house had become somewhat … eccentric … and was convinced that one of the roaming bands of Lyuko travelers had cursed her. As a result, she’d had several secret entrances and exits built into the estate in case of attack. Of course, she’d also slept in a coffin and worn a necklace made from her late husband’s teeth, but thankfully those precautions hadn’t outlasted her ladyship. The whole family had had a good laugh at the irony when, nearly a hundred years later, Roark’s father took a Lyuko tsarina for his wife—though his mother liked to joke that the marriage was all part of the curse.

  It took some kicking around in the snow and rockfall, but Roark located the heavy iron ring lying tangled in the dead grass like an ancient bit of trash. He grabbed the ring with both hands and pulled, straining until the hidden trapdoor opened with a rusty creak.

  He winced. Could use a bit of grease, those hinges.

  Roark took a moment to toss down a scrap of paper containing an illusion to camouflage his passing—An area fifteen foot square from the edges of this paper appears as if it has not been disturbed by humans in the past hour.—in case anyone came looking for the source of the noise. When the paper hit the snow, the magick went into effect, and he could see nothing but an undisturbed blanket of white from his boots to the tree line. The illusion would last only ten minutes or so, but that would be plenty of time for the blizzard to remedy the situation.

  Satisfied with the working, Roark climbed into the blackness of the mountainside tunnel and eased the trapdoor shut behind him. The darkness felt as though it was pressing in from all directions, thick and claustrophobic. This might have almost been frightening if he hadn’t grown up playing hide and seek in these passages. He pulled another scrap of paper from his pocket and rolled it into a tube. The end smoldered for a moment, then caught, lighting the passage with a tiny green flame.

  The tunnels running under the estate grounds weren’t so different from the secret corridor under Cambry’s fabric store. Mortared stone lined the walls from top to bottom, and thick wooden beams protected them against cave-ins. Roark followed the mountainside tunnel to its first fork—the right leading to the stables and the left to the eastern wing of the manor house—and took a left. From there, he hooked right, right, and then left again, easily snaking through the maze meant to confuse pursuers. He’d lost his little sister Talise in there once purposely and been spanked soundly for it.

  The smirk died on Roark’s lips at the bottom of the stairs. He extinguished the burung fire and followed them up. At the top, he found the hidden window that looked out into the courtyard, its pane dusty from going so long unused. From the outside, the hidden window looked like just one more in the line of glassed-in small archer slits along the manor’s eastern wing. But from the inside, the window and the stairs were concealed behind a false wall in the corner of what his family had called the blue sitting room.

  Roark’s hand came to rest on the catch that swung open the false wall, but he didn’t spring it yet. Instead, he looked out into the courtyard, the last place he’d seen his family alive. Most of them, anyway. His father had been cut down in the sleeping quarters trying to defend his mother and Talise, who still hadn’t outgrown her habit of sneaking into their bed at night. After his father, four of his uncles, an aunt, and three cousins were killed, the Ustars had dragged the remaining von Graf men, women, and children outside and executed them in the courtyard. All except for Roark.

  He flinched at the memory of his mother throwing herself over the tiny shadow of his little sister as the Ustari blade fell. The two of them had died beside the well house, just over there.

  That night had been chaos and screaming and the clash of steel on steel. The servants who hadn’t run were slain where they stood. Roark had done the only thing he could think to do as the Ustars closed in on him—grabbed the hunting knife from his fallen cousin and carved I am invisible. into his left forearm. It was the first time he’d improvised magick, the letters sloppy and haphazard with the overlarge blade, but mercifully, the spell hadn’t killed him.

  Out of the twenty-seven members of the von Graf family, only the eleven-year-old Roark had escaped the slaughter. Fitting, then, that twenty years later, he would be the one to end the Tyrant King’s reign in the very same house. And thanks to the Rebel Council’s cowardice, he would do it alone, just like he’d done everything else since Bloederige Noct.

  Roark triggered the catch and the false wall swung open, silent as a ghost. He crept out into the sitting room, his boots whispering across the faded blue rug. The musty scent of emptiness and neglect hung in the air like fog.

  At the center of the room, the long blue chaise lounge had been overturned and never righted. Here and there, wingback chairs lay on their sides, their legs chopped off for firewood. The remains of an end table and an oil painting lay in the fireplace together half-burned. Though Roark remembered seeing it hanging on the sitting room wall in his youth, he couldn’t recall which of his ancestors the portrait had depicted. It was too late now to ask since anyone who might know was long dead.

  Taking care to avoid the blackened floorboards in the doorway of the sitting room—old blood, marking where his Uncle Jorik had perished—Roark stole silently into the hall and toward the main sleeping quarters. The closer Roark drew, the more blood spots he encountered, the only physical memorials of his family. There was the place where Uncle Gareth fell. And there, Cousin Dirk. Cousin Res. Aunt Caena …

  And in the corridor just outside his parents’ chambers, the dried pool of black where his father had made his last stand.

  The heavy oak door was shut, but no Ustar stood guard outside. The short-cropped hairs down the nape of Roark’s neck prickled. No guards patrolling the halls and only a token show of force outside the manor? He’d been so caught up in memories, he hadn’t given the lack of ready adversaries a thought, but this wasn’t at all like the Tyrant King. That bastard never went anywhere without his personal entourage of the most brutal fighters in all of Traisbin.

  Roark pressed his ear to the intricately carved panel of the door, holding his breath and straining to hear any hint of movement. Long seconds passed with nothing but the sound of his own pulse.

  Then, finally, the muffled creak of leather.

  It was like that old joke about the saucy milkmaid—How many heavily armed Ustars could fit in one antechamber?

  Well, that was a problem easily solved. Roark snuck back down the corridor into the nursery his sister hadn’t lived long enough to outgrow and sprung the catch on the false panel in the wall. It swung open silently. Little Talise had used the passage as a shortcut between her bed and their parents’, though its original purpose was a quick escape. Not that the passageways had done much good on Bloederige Noct. Between the two bedchambers lay a cramped staircase leading down into a tunnel, which exited a few feet outside the carriage gate. Roark crossed the landing and pressed his ear to the panel on the opposite side.

  Snoring. Deep and steady.

  Roark slipped the wickedly curved Lyuko dagger from his belt. A fitting present from the son of a murdered tsarina.

  Careful not to make a sound, he tripped the catch and eased the panel open a crack. The snoring continued undisturbed.

  A fire crackled merrily in the fireplace, its yellow-orange light dancing along the walls. The huge canopied bed that had once belonged to his parents stood just outside the false panel, the source of the snores. The bed’s heavy green curtains had been drawn to protect against stray drafts, hiding the sleeping Tyrant King inside.

  Unfortunately, it also hid the door to the antechamber, which lay on the opposite side. He couldn’t see whether it was open or shut. If Marek cried out or put up a struggle, the guards would come running, and the few seconds a closed door could afford him would be invaluable.

  There was nothing to be done for it, however. Roark had come too far and would not be denied his chanc
e at vengeance. Creeping around the bed just to check on a door only increased his chances of making a sound that would wake his quarry and end this assassination before it began. Better to get the job done and deal with the consequences as they came.

  Like a Mist Wraith, Roark crept to the bed. Taking a fold of the heavy bedcurtain in hand, he raised the dagger, preparing to drive its curved blade into the Tyrant King’s black heart. Silently, he pulled the curtain back.

  The bed was empty. The curtains on the opposite side hung open.

  A dozen battle-scarred, bloodthirsty warriors and one red-robed mage stood at the ready. A bearded Ustar with a wide-bladed battle-ax grinned as he made exaggerated snoring sounds.

  And at the center of the bodyguards stood the Tyrant King, Marek Konig Ustar.

  THREE:

  Fallback Plan

  “So predictable,” the Tyrant King said, shaking his graying head. “Spend a night in some backwoods manor and every rat with a minor claim to the old nobility comes crawling out of his hole.”

  Roark’s grip on the Lyuko dagger tightened until the leather straps around its handle creaked. His mouth was dry. His heart thundered in his ears. Crossbow bolts and spell scrolls were trained on him, but he couldn’t look away from the aging man with the salt-and-pepper hair. The first time he’d seen Marek Konig Ustar, he’d been a child and the despot had been a monster, pulling spells from thin air without paper or writing, completely disregarding the basic laws of magick.

  Now, standing this close to the man in his fur-line robes, Roark realized the Tyrant King looked like nothing more than a bored aristocrat. If not for the deadly glint in his eye, it would be almost hard to believe that this was the same sorcerer who had conquered the entire continent of Terho in less than five years and kept it clutched in his bloody fist for the next fifteen.

  Marek turned to the red-hooded mage standing at his right hand. “Looks as if I owe you that purse, Lowen. The T’verzet was in Korvo all along.”

  Roark scowled. Lowen von Reich—heir to the first of the noble houses to flip allegiances when the Ustari Empire invaded and even more of a horse’s ass than Albrecht when they’d been at academy together. Though, unfortunately, Lowen was a far better scholar. Arrogant, cruel, and just competent enough to avoid blowing himself up by accident, which would have been a true favor to the world.

  “Take him alive,” the Tyrant King said lazily, waving a dismissive hand at Roark. “We’ll need the usual who, where, and what out of him in case his accomplices try to flee the city.”

  The armed Ustars started around the bed, heavy armor clanking. The mage and crossbowman held their positions, covering Roark to make sure he didn’t try to run for it.

  With a great effort of will, Roark forced his fingers to fall open. The Lyuko dagger dropped harmlessly onto the empty bed.

  “I surrender,” he said, scrubbing his palms up and down his woolen jacket as if to wipe frantic sweat from them. On an upward swipe, he snagged a scrap of paper from his pocket and palmed it. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

  Inside the hood, Lowen’s face twisted into a condescending smirk. “Funny, that doesn’t sound like the mouthy little von Graf brat I remember.”

  “Probably because I beat your ass badly enough that last day at the academy that it knocked you stupid,” Roark said, tossing down his spell.

  At the sudden movement, the crossbowman let loose, but Roark was already throwing himself out of the ten-foot blast radius. The bolt tore through the shoulder of his jacket, barely scratching his flesh.

  A concussion wave shook the bedroom. Armor and weapons clattered like a tinker’s cart caught in a tornado as the approaching guards were hurled into the wall. One hit the fireplace and screamed as embers found their way through the chinks in his armor.

  Roark rolled to his feet in front of the false panel, a spell in each hand and a new plan forming in his mind. He would lead them into the tunnels, lose them in the maze, then double back for the Tyrant.

  Lowen was already in motion, having protected himself from the burst of compressed air with a prepared shield spell. The red-hooded mage threw a ball of paper at Roark’s feet.

  Roark darted into the passageway a moment before a trio of iron bolas screamed through the air at knee-height and splintered the panel behind him.

  Roark grinned as he leapt to the bottom of the stairs. “I think you over-wrote it, mate!”

  “You don’t need legs to tell us everything we want to know,” Lowen replied.

  Three of the heavily armored Ustars pushed down into the passageway after Roark, their shoulders so wide that they had to come one at a time. The blades of their halberds glinted in the glow from the firelight above.

  “Send the muscle in first to soak up the deadly spells, is that it?” Roark taunted them. “Not a bad plan unless you’re the muscle.”

  With a practiced flick of his wrist, he threw the spell in his right fist at the stairs. Green light flashed when it hit. Thorny brambles erupted from the stone steps, entangling the brutes’ legs. The shocked Ustars struggled and chopped at the brambles, trying to free themselves, but for every branch they cut off, five more sprang up. In seconds, their halberds were tangled in the fast-growing thicket.

  Effective, but not enough to take them out of the fight. Any mage with even basic training could write a dispel.

  Roark tossed the spell in his left fist toward the stairs. This flashed an inflamed red when it landed.

  “Nothing personal, gents,” he said as the sickly scarlet smoke drifted up to meet them. Then he laughed. “Well, actually, it’s incredibly personal. Enjoy your larva pox.”

  “You hex-slinging cur!” the Ustar nearest the smoke shouted, the fury in his voice nearly concealing the panic. “I’ll rip your limbs off one at a time!”

  “I doubt that,” Roark said with a malicious grin, retreating down the passageway and melting into the shadows. Within moments, their shouts morphed into cries of pain and choked guttural noises as the vomiting took hold.

  A great boom rattled the manor on its foundations. Dirt and debris rained down from above. Firelight filled the staircase and spilled into the passageway as the bedchamber’s wall splintered.

  Roark dug through his pockets searching out a shield spell in case the whole tunnel collapsed on top of him, but miraculously the braces held.

  “Stop tearing up my manor, you over-writing dimwit!” he hollered back up the passageway.

  “This estate and everything on it belongs to the Ustari Empire,” Lowen called down. “But if you surrender now like a good mutt, we’ll even bury what’s left of your body on the grounds when we’re done with you. Let you join your family in the afterlife.”

  Roark knew that wouldn’t happen. The mage was just playing for time while he wrote another spell.

  “Come down here and get me,” Roark replied.

  A moment later, a flash of gold light on the stairs dispelled the brambles around the pox-ridden Ustars. The crossbowman appeared at the top of the stairs, letting a bolt fly into the shadows.

  Roark pressed himself to the stone wall as the bolt whistled past and clattered down the passage.

  “A little to your left, mate,” he said, stepping into the light.

  The crossbowman slapped another bolt into his bow and stomped on the stirrup, cranking the screw like mad in his rush to get the contraption cocked.

  Roark pressed the shield writ to his chest, then flung another spell at the stairs. Brilliant white fingers of lightning sizzled from the paper, searching out the closest sources of metal. The crossbowman and the vomiting Ustars seized and shook as the electricity danced through their bodies.

  The lightning had barely dissipated when the thick-bearded brute with the battle-ax leapt through the gaping hole Lowen had blown in the wall. He landed with a weighty clang in the passageway, mere feet from Roark. With a ululating screech, the brute swung his battle-ax at Roark’s chest.

  The wind from the swing ruf
fled Roark’s hair as he backpedaled. He pulled out another concussion spell and tossed it at the bearded berserker. The spell rebounded off an invisible barrier, and the blast threw Roark backward down the corridor.

  All the air left his lungs in a whoof when he hit, and his head bounced off the stone floor. Bright lights that had nothing to do with magick flashed in his vision. Rebound spell. Lowen must’ve written it for the berserker before sending him down. No more spell attacks that could backfire, then.

  Roark rolled onto his side, trying to coax his lungs to breathe again while he pushed himself up onto arms and legs still prickling from the impact.

  “What’s the matter, von Graf?” Lowen’s voice rang down the stairs. “Did you outsmart yourself?”

  With that idiot’s taunting, Roark almost didn’t hear the whistle of the blade at his back. He threw himself into a clumsy roll. The bearded berserker’s ax buried itself in the stone floor, slinging up sparks.

  Finally, Roark’s throbbing lungs reopened, and he gulped down sweet oxygen like water. He fumbled in his pockets, searching out a defensive writ that wouldn’t ricochet.

  He dropped the paper and stumbled farther down the passage as it floated to the floor. Blue light flashed onto the stone walls when it hit. The air crackled and the temperature in the tunnel plummeted. A thick layer of black ice covered the ground fifteen feet from the edges of the paper in all directions.

  The berserker cursed as he tried to wrench his ax from the stone only to find it frozen in place.

  Roark smiled. An unintended consequence, but a lucky one.

  From the stairs came the clomp of boots running with entirely too much confidence.

  “Rebound spells for everyone, then,” Roark hissed bitterly, digging into his pocket for his own version of the barrier. He stuck the spell to his chest, sending up a flash of purple light.

  A moment later, the singing whine of a projectile cut through the air. His barrier tolled like a bell as a spear bounced harmlessly off.

  Shouts echoed behind him as running boots found the black ice and armored bodies crashed to the floor. He chuckled and dropped another entanglement spell for any of the brutes not tripped up by the ice.