Following is Chapter 12 of the long-awaited sequel to the Skirmisher Publishing LLC fantasy novel Swords of Kos: Necropolis! Herein an ambush is laid, it is sprung, and battle, savage and deadly, is joined with a dangerous and troublesome foe ... Join alchemical rogue Paros, Elven barbarian Parthenia, transmuting wizard Pumayo, and moon priestess Selene in their Return to the Necropolis! 

Read "Return to the Necropolis: Chapter 11"

It was more than six hours before Kidna, who had taken to frisking in the stream of the Styx, saw the Dwarves coming back down the passageway, and she quickly slithered over to hide in the shadows near the secret door. The party had almost given up hope of seeing them again at all that day and had wondered if something might have befallen them or if they had decided to camp somewhere in the catacombs. Presumably, if the Dwarves were just going to wherever they had cached the stolen loot and loading up their backpacks with as much of it as they could carry, they would have returned in an hour or two at most, so this delay was mystifying.

"Finally!" Parthenia said to Paros from where the two of them lurked hidden behind the half-open secret door. "Dwarves move pretty damned slowly." Having received the signal from the preternatural serpent that the marauders were on the way back, she pushed the door shut and, along with the rogue, readied herself for the battle to come.

With some reservations, the party had determined that the most effective way of striking the miscreants would be by surprise and from two directions and they had laid the groundwork for this accordingly. While the two who could cause the most damage from a sneak attack to the rear of the Dwarven party waited below, the two spellcasters, Pumayo and Selene, sat in the hall of statues above. They had barred the doors leading out of the temple to prevent anything from happening upon them while they waited there alone. Normal conversation had not gone very well, as neither of them really seemed to understand anything the other was talking about, but Pumayo prided himself on his cosmopolitan nature and would not accept defeat quite so easily. He had finally engaged her in a word association "game" that seemed to amuse her adequately and, while he could not be sure whether or not she had learned anything about him, gained some additional insights into the way her mind worked. She did, indeed, as Paros had said, have "other ways of knowing."

Pumayo sensed when Kidna spotted the Dwarves and immediately ceased his wordplay with Selene and signaled to her that the time had come. The four companions were concerned about just how formidable the Dwarves might be and had, with the time and resources at their disposal, formulated the best plan of attack they could and would be sparing no effort to hit the enemy party hard and take it out fast. The priestess stepped over to one side of the opening that led down into the catacombs, beside the statue of the goddess Persephone, and Pumayo stepped to the other. He then removed from his breast the rectangular brooch, knelt down, and gently tossed it onto the floor in front of him, whereupon it immediately transformed into a massive, full-sized tower shield some four-and-a-half feet in height and half as much in width.

"What are you going to do with that?" asked Selene, not responding to the way the shield had appeared. She had seen such implements used by young Elven warriors to shield more experienced archers, but if the wizard attempted to wield this thing he would not be able to do much else.

"You will see when the time comes," Pumayo said enigmatically with his characteristically flabby smile. It was laying on the floor a few feet back from where the stairway began and would not be visible to anyone from below.

As usual, the Dwarves took longer than the party expected to make it through the chamber of the Styx and reach the stairway; with his ear pressed to the inside of the secret door, Paros could hear first splashing, then sounds of consternation followed by some prolonged conversation, then a deliberate chanting in a foreign tongue. He relayed all this to the impatient Parthenia and postulated that one or more members of the other group had been unable to cross the stream but that a spellcaster amongst them had performed an invocation that had helped accomplish this. He reflected once again, ruefully, that when he and the two women had become trapped they had not had an arcane spellcaster with them and that relatively novice Selene only had a handful of divine spells at her disposal.

There was some tension after that, while Paros listened intently to see if there were any other sounds to indicate whether the Dwarves had noticed that something in particular had changed in the room and thereby be harder catch off guard. Presently, however, they moved on without any further discussion, and Paros could hear their heavy boots clomping on the stone floor as they tromped past the secret door some fifteen feet away and then begin to ascend the stairs, toward the place where the other two party members were hidden. It was almost time ... as soon as he was certain the last of the stout folk had begun to climb the stairs, Paros cautiously pushed open the stone slab and peeked into the chamber. It was almost completely dark, the subterranean Dwarves not needing any sort of light source to see clearly, and only the faintest light from the statuary chamber above gave them a sense for the layout of the area. Snuffing out the candle they had used for light, Paros and Parthenia slunk through the secret door and toward the stairway leading upward, their missile weapons in hand.

Using a small hand mirror to watch the stairway from above, Pumayo waited until the Dwarves had begun to ascend the stairs and then uttered the words of an arcane spell, animating the rope that lay coiled on the landing thirty feet below. As the first two members of the group tramped up onto the landing, which widened out into a twenty-by-twenty chamber with a bas relief of Thanatos, god of death, on its southern wall, they shouted out in alarm. When they did, Pumayo uttered a command in the Draconic tongue, which he used for casting spells, and the far end of the rope, tied around the hilt of a dagger, responded by tugging it out of the thing it had been inserted into.

Before the Dwarves, the bronze statue of great Achilles lurched to life and, with a creaking, metallic tread, stepped toward them, its tarnished sword and shield upraised. Its body was still split from shoulder to waist from the powerful blow Parthenia had dealt it with her two-handed sword so many months before, causing the right side of its body to unnaturally flop a bit, but it would take considerably more damage to put it down for good. Or, of course, something being jammed into the slot in its heel, like the dagger Paros had loosened up with a small hammer and then oiled so that it would come out easily after the companions had painstakingly dragged the statue out of the water, hauled it up the stairs, and stood it up opposite the sculpture of Thanatos. The Dwarves could, of course, try to jam something back in the heel of the construct, but the mass of animated metal would not make it easy for them, and presently they would have other things to worry about as well ...

Like most adventurers, the Dwarves were confident that they could defeat almost anything they encountered, and did not balk at being confronted by the animated statue. They were also seasoned combatants and, as the construct lurched forward, they moved to surround and flank it so as to more efficiently destroy it; within seconds, the companions to either side of the Dwarves could hear the clank of steel weapons upon the artificial creature and the words of barked orders and uttered spells. None of them doubted that, left to their own devices, the stout quintet of adventurers would make short work of the statue and so, once battle against it had been fully joined, Paros and his companions struck.

Selene led the attack by invoking the power of her moon goddess, causing a glowing longbow to appear at the top of the stairway, draw back the spectral arrowed nocked in it, and fire it at one of the Dwarves on the landing. The missile shot past the Dwarf the priestess had directed the attack at, striking a wall and vanishing in a flash of light, but the spiritual weapon would now continue to fire on its own while Selene did other things. Pumayo cast his own spell and, as he did, the large shield rose up off the floor and also began to bob in the stairway, moving as needed to maximize the protection it could provide to him.

Simultaneously from below, Paros and Parthenia stepped from behind their cover and, looking up the stairway, fired their own missile weapons at the unexpecting Dwarves. Both of them struck true, eliciting screams of pain and surprise from their victims, and the rogue could see that the one he had sneak attacked had sunk to his knees.

Some of the Dwarves now shifted their efforts over to counterattacking against the party. One of them, a robed graybeard, uttered his own arcane spell and launched from his outstretched hand a pair of glowing bolts of force. These shot unerringly up the stairs at Pumayo — who the spellcaster recognized as his counterpart in the attacking party — and, being magic missiles, bypassed the animated but mundane shield the wizard had employed for his protection. But, almost as if they had been deliberately fired at it, the missiles flew straight into the bullseye on the round, shield-shaped brooch that Pumayo used as a cloak clasp.

Pumayo chuckled audibly as his magical countermeasure did its job and then, a target selected, uttered one of five spells written down on a scroll he had produced from a case on his belt. As he completed it, a scorching ray of fire erupted from his own upraised hand and tore down the stairway, striking the outmaneuvered Dwarven wizard and causing his robes to burst into flames; he screamed briefly and then crumpled to the floor in a twitching, smoking, burning heap. Pumayo dropped the scroll and picked up the loaded crossbow he had set close to hand.

One of the other Dwarves had gone over the companion that Paros had shot with his crossbow and laid hands upon him, even as both the rogue and barbarian continued to direct all their fire at the injured one (following a convention in vogue among adventurers of completely and unequivocally finishing off one foe before shifting fire to another).

A withering volley of missile fire continued to rain from above and below into the Dwarven party on the landing, about half the arrows and bolts striking true against their targets; the surrounded marauders counterattacked and defended themselves as well as they were able to while also contending with the statue, which continued to slash at them with its sword. Presently, the largest and most heavily armed and armored of the Dwarves sent the golem crashing to the ground with a powerful and telling blow from his greataxe. He then faced up the stairway, called to his remaining companions to follow him, and charged Selene and Pumayo; the trio of furious Dwarves stormed toward the two spellcasters, weapons upraised.

As the lead Dwarf trampled across the glyph of warding that Selene had inscribed about halfway up the steps, a powerful blast of lightning exploded from the stairs, enveloping him and the two following him. The stout warrior fell to his hands and knees and the other two tumbled back down the stairs toward the landing, injured and disoriented. It had been an expensive spell, and had required the moon priestess to crush into dust two valuable diamonds and use them to create the outlines of the glyph, but it had clearly been worth it and functioned fully as well as any of them could have hoped.

Parthenia charged now, howling in rage, and Paros followed her up the stairs; above them, Selene picked up her morningstar and shield and moved down the steps toward the Dwarves. Only unarmored Pumayo remained behind, glancing appreciatively at the crossbow bolts embedded in his animated shield, and just as glad that it had not been put to the test in melee. The wizard uttered a word of command and, as one of the wounded opponents attempted to stand up and face the attack of the oncoming barbarian, his still-animated rope began to wrap around the Dwarf and entangle his limbs. Little things like that rarely made much of a difference on their own, Pumayo thought, but many of them, all together or one after another, could tip the balance of a battle.

The melee that followed was swift and brutal and, when it was done, the mangled bodies of the five Dwarves lay sprawled across the stairs and landing. Paros, Parthenia, and Selene had all sustained relatively minor injuries in the battle, Pumayo alone avoiding any wounds, and the priestess handily healed them all with the remaining spells at her disposal. The companions then moved on to searching the remains of the Dwarves. 

Read "Return to the Necropolis: Chapter 13"