“You didn’t hear nothing!” Benny snapped, pointing himself at the woman.

A rumble of eminent displeasure echoed from the heights of Mount Brunt.

“I’m pretty sure I did hear something,” the woman retorted, squaring her shoulders and giving Flinn a steely glare. “How do you know this man, Brunt?”

“What’s going on?” More heroes, presumably the remainder of Brunt’s party, approached from somewhere behind the Ogre.

“This guy’s giving Brunt trouble,” the woman replied.

Benny tried to seize control again, and Flinn jolted with the effort of keeping the hook’s mind at bay. “Will you let me speak!” The Tinderkin’s patience leaked from him in a high-pitched hiss like steam from a tin kettle. “I know how to handle this idiot!”

“Idiot?” The hero at Brunt’s side looked up at the Ogre and then back to the Gnome. “I don’t know who you’re talking about, but⁠—”

“Keep your mouth shut or I’ll open your throat!” Flinn snarled with a flourish of his hook. “I don’t need you⁠—”

But he never finished the sentence, because at that moment Brunt finally reached a conclusion. The Ogre wrapped a hand like a leathery vice around the assassin’s torso and head. “Flinn… bad!” he growled.

Flinn tried to argue as he was lifted, but his mouth was covered by the massive hero’s grip. His arms were pinned to his sides, and his legs kicked uselessly at the air around him. His muffled protests died away when he was level with the Ogre’s face. There was a finality in the Ogre’s tiny, angry eyes.

“Justice… Brunt style!” growled Brunt, and squeezed.

Chapter 30

A damp crunch filled the air, and then again as Gorm Ingerson swung his axe once more. The giant spider’s face flew off in a spray of green and black ooze. “Works well if ye cut their heads off!” he shouted to his companions.

“How?” Just down the hall, Heraldin held a spider the size of a large dog at bay with his rapier.

“Just chop it off!” Gorm hollered, turning to square off against another specimen.

“Chop what off?” the bard screamed. “There isn’t a head to chop! There’s no neck! It’s just eyes and fangs and then legs!”

“No, ye—hmm…” Gorm paused, considering the spider warily advancing on him. There was no neck or head discernible on what a more educated hero would have called the spider’s cephalothorax. “Well, ye can… chop the body at the right angle to slice off the face.”

“How is this helpful?” Heraldin shrieked, just before the spider in front of him exploded in a font of black ichor. Its relatively decapitated corpse spasmed and rolled up like some sort of spring-loaded golem. Behind it, Gaist cleaned his sword and nodded to the eyes and mandibles twitching on the ground.

“See? Gaist gets it.” Gorm pulled his axe from the face of the final arachnid. “That the last of ’em?”

“The last of the big ones, anyway.” Heraldin stepped on a hand-sized spider as he considered the piled corpses of its larger kin. He nodded to the long hallway at the rear corner of the vault, still flickering with orange light. “Could any be left alive in there?”

Gorm shook his head. The hallway ahead was narrow, unlabeled, and, until very recently, choked with spiderwebs. It was the sort of passage that seasoned heroes avoided and younger heroes never came out of, and Gorm would have happily skipped it had Johan’s trail not clearly led straight into its darkened maw. After a brief consultation with the bard and the weaponsmaster, the party decided to use the last of Heraldin’s flaming oils to clear out the passage. One thrown vial later, the doorway began belching thick black smoke and huge, hairy spiders. Gorm considered the de-faced corpses of the arachnids, and then the smoldering pathway ahead. “Not much can survive a conflagration like that. Bigger question is if the smoke’s clear enough to pass.”

Gaist checked the hallway and gave a quick nod of affirmation. Almost everything in the passage had burned away, including whatever carpets and tapestries had adorned the walls. Now the tunnel was nothing but blackened stone, empty save for a couple of charred spider corpses and trails of black smoke drifting toward the thin grates of the vault’s ventilation shafts.

Gorm’s heartbeat thundered in his ears as they made their way down the hall, but the red mist had retreated entirely from his vision. Sweat beaded on his brow, and his axe twitched with a tremor in his hand. He started when Heraldin whispered to him.

“Is everything all right?” the bard asked.

“I… I’m fine.”

“It’s just that you’ve stopped moving.”

Gorm followed Heraldin’s gaze down to his own boots, which were indeed stationary. “I… I have a bad feelin’ about this.”

“Me too,” said the bard.

The Dwarf smirked despite himself. “Ye have a bad feelin’ about everything.”

“And I’m usually right.” Heraldin tipped his hat with a grin. “But that’s never stopped you before. What’s wrong?”

Gorm took a deep breath through clenched teeth. There was an oily feeling in the air, a miasma of dread that he’d felt in his nightmares for over two decades. He’d felt it only once before in waking hours, when that foul viscosity and the accompanying tendrils of thorny midnight had chased him screaming from the dungeons of Az’Anon the Spider King. Sweat poured from the Dwarf’s brow. “Somethin’ ain’t right… all around us,” he said. “There’s something… wrong down here.”

“Something besides the giant spiders trying to eat our faces?” asked the bard.

“Aye,” said Gorm.

Gaist nodded.

“Of course there is,” said the bard with a dour grimace. “Should we wait for the mages then? It might be good to⁠—”

“Ha haaaa!” Somewhere ahead of them, Johan’s laughter rang out. It sounded strange, like an out-of-tune trumpet blown by an asthmatic herald. Yet as warped as the laughter was, it still carried an unmistakable note of triumph.

Gorm swallowed his rising gorge and took a deep breath to steady himself. “There ain’t time to wait any longer. Whatever Johan’s up to, we can’t let him finish it. Let’s go.”

The door at the end of the hallway was still partially open. The heroes heard sounds of frenetic activity as they drew close to it: heavy breathing, labored grunts, clanking metal, and the intermittent grating of stone on stone. There was soft muttering too, punctuated with a muted version of Johan’s signature laugh.

“Just a little farther,” the king gasped. “Just a little more.... to… hrrngh… go! Ha! This can still work. I just need to get low enough, and then I finish off whatever’s down there. Then I kill the witnesses, and I emerge the triumphant king! Ha ha! It still works… No witnesses, no problems. Who could argue? I still have time… I still…”

Gorm pushed open the door a crack and looked into a small, circular chamber around what looked at first glance like an empty cistern. A bent iron railing and a few chunks of rectangular stone protruded from the sides of the dark pit like broken teeth—the remnants of a spiral staircase that led down into the black depths of the mountain. Johan knelt at the edge of the pit, using his sword and mailed fist to chip away the mortar around the cobbles on its border. He’d already moved several, carving a thin first step into the rim of the circle.

“What do you see?” Heraldin whispered in Gorm’s ear.

“Just Johan workin’ by a broken staircase.” The Dwarf scanned the shadows for any sign of a lurking spider demon or dark altar. “No sign of the big bad.”

“What does that mean?”

Gorm considered what could have brought the arachnid plague and the oily miasma in the air both to the dungeon of Az’Anon decades ago and now to the palace. “Could be he was keeping some otherworldly horror down the stairs. Or maybe his patron is off fightin’ the other heroes. But if he’s made a pact with a shadow creature or demon, it could still be in there, invisible.”

“What’s our plan, then?” asked the bard.

“Tactical therapy,” the Dwarf murmured.

“What?”

“Common tactic for dealin’ with villains, especially the ones in charge,” whispered Gorm, readying his axe and shield. “Ye get ’em talkin’ about their plan, and why they’re doin’ it, and soon enough they’re in a monologue about how they had a bad childhood or their mommy didn’t love ’em. And all the while, you’re minin’ ’em for clues about what you’re up against and repositionin’ yourself tactically, or even stallin’ for time. Or all three, in this case.” He signaled Gaist, who acknowledged with a curt nod and slipped into the shadows of the chamber.

“And that works?” asked Heraldin.

“Ye’d be surprised. Let me do the talkin’.” With that directive, Gorm pushed through the door and called to the kneeling king. “That’ll take a while. I’d guess those stairs went down half a league before I blew ’em up.”