Doctor Fate: In the Dungeon of the Damned

Chapter 4 - The Dungeon of the Damned

Doctor Fate steeled himself for Nergal's imminent attack.

Nergal had dispatched his statue-minions in what Fate assumed was a puppet-pageant staged by the death god for his own amusement, or at most an exercise to get the measure of his opponent, and Fate had disposed of these pawns as the game demanded.

And now, the scrimmage played out, the prologue completed, the opening feints dodged and countered, Fate had no doubt that Nergal would at any moment come bursting through a door, or ceiling, or dimensional portal, and then the real contest would begin, and Earth's greatest sorcerer would be in for the fight of his life.

But the seconds ticked by into minutes, and the minutes had become almost an hour before Fate had to admit to himself that he was going to have to be the one seek out Nergal. He found this a bit perplexing; Nergal had already gone to the effort of seeking him out, had launched the first attack, and had then laid an elaborate trap to further toy with him. It seemed the next step; outright, full-force attack was a foregone conclusion.

But what if, thought Fate, reassessing the situation, the trap was not for spectacle or reconnaissance after all, but had been a serious effort on Nergal's part to destroy him? What if Nergal was lying low now because the magic required to raise powerful gods from the dead in the form of their animated stone idols, complete with all their own life-force and eldritch power, while still maintaining complete control of them, had exhausted his powers? This thought had actually not occurred to Fate because his battle with the Annunaki idols had not taxed his own power that greatly, his battle with Enlil and his tapping into the amulet to dispose of Zuen notwithstanding. So many combatants in such a confined space had actually made it easy for Fate to use them against one another, and to use their own powers against themselves. Nergal had had to expend enormous amounts of mystic energy to pull off his trap, whereas Fate had simply to, more than anything, use his wits to triumph. The thought that Nergal was depleted whereas he himself was not gave Fate hope: there might be limits to Nergal's dark magic after all, and those limits might be within the outer bounds of Fate's own power.

But that hope was tempered by the most obvious implication of his enemy's failure to appear: Fate would have to seek Nergal out – and to do so he would have to confront him in the death-god's own realm, where Nergal controlled the battlefield. For Fate knew exactly how to find him, how to enter the death-god's dark realm – and what it would cost him to do so. Nevertheless, if, as he suspected, the battle in the Temple of the Annunaki had wearied Nergal more than it had Fate, then there was no time to waste in confronting the god of death while he was at less than full strength.

Fate dropped to his knees in contemplation and prayer. He called out to Anu to steel him for what lay ahead and, as if in response, his mind was filled with the image of his beloved Inza, the mere thought of whom had always given him all the strength he needed. He rose, and prepared to exit, when he turned instead and went over to the remains of Ishtar's statue. There in the heap of rubble on the ground, lay her meh, the adornments, her weapons – the means by which she directed her power and the source of much of it. Fate picked the lapis necklace out of the rubble and undid the clasp holding the slender gold chain – as slight as spider silk – together to form the necklace's three loops. He pulled off seven beads, and, with a pinpoint beam of golden light from his finger, etched a pictograph on each one, and dropped these beads into a pouch in his belt. Then, without further delay, he bounded up into the air, passing like a ghost through the temple roof, flying north and east with the speed of a fighter jet.

Nergal would be in his palace in the underworld dimension of Kur, a realm for lost souls established by none other than Nabu as one of his first tasks on Earth. Humankind had in those early days of civilization learned the ways of necromancy long before it was ready to deal with the consequences of what it unleashed, and thus early civilization was haunted by lost souls inappropriately summoned from the the Pit or even the Blessed Realm back to Earth, with no way back to where they belonged. Ghosts were a huge problem, and Nabu needed to give humans back control of their world from the spirits that were threatening to overrun it.