Chapter One
To begin at your beginning:
In the nightless dark, at a time beyond knowing, in the place called the Underhalls of Yrn Kyos by scholars, the City of Wonders by the dead and the Dungeon by everyone else—
—it was then and there I noticed a crack in the plastered wall of my tomb.
A hairline fracture, one might say, though it was a long time since I had the hair to make that comparison. The crack snaked between ancient hieroglyphs and runes of power. It was no wider than the breadth of a fingernail – but again, that was a measure I was ill-equipped to judge.
I watched the crack grow. Not by much, but the plaster flaked as the Dungeon shook. Something was afoot.
“Afoot”: a third thing I lacked.
From my perspective, that was how you came to the Dungeon.
*
Nithscalpa’s assault was swift and one-sided. Castle walls built to keep out armies are useless against a flying foe. Arrows cannot pierce dragon scales. The keenest sword cannot avert the hurricane.
Thrice Nithscalpa circled round Castle Uthgard.
He scoured the battlements with flame. Men could choose: burn at their posts, or fling themselves over the parapet to break on the rocks.
On another occasion, Nithscalpa might have enjoyed that.
Dragons are not merely cruel; they delight in demonstrating their superiority, like a cat saying to a mouse, I won’t eat you if you can jump from this chair to that one. Look how easy it is!
The cat leaps with lazy grace. The mouse falls short and perishes.
The one difference is that dragons set the mice on fire first.
But Nithscalpa was not there for sport. Far he’d flown from his lair, and he’d flown with purpose. He landed and clung to the wall of the keep, claws digging into the masonry as he crawled about, peering in the windows.
A storeroom. No.
A stairwell. No.
A room full of archers. No. Absently, he spat flame through the arrow-slit.
A study, the walls lined with scrolls and books. No. He burned that, too.
The books weren’t about him.
A nursery.
Yes.
Nithscalpa tore at the wall. In a few heartbeats, the gap was wide enough to admit his head. He smiled a smile five feet wide, mirthless and razor-sharp.
In a corner was a child’s bed.
In the bed was a child.
Flame rose in the dragon’s throat. He swallowed it back down. This meat was not for roasting – not yet. Instead, his jaws gently closed around the fragile cot with its fragile contents.
He was exceedingly pleased with himself in that moment.
Then – out of the corner of his right eye, he saw a woman rushing towards him. She had a long dagger in her hand, desperate courage in her face, and then Nithscalpa would never see anything ever again from that eye.
Deep went the dagger – but not deep enough.
The dragon ripped his head from the tower, the bed still clutched in his jaws.
He spread his wings and dropped, swooping low over the courtyard, catching the thermals from the burning outbuildings.
Awkwardly – even for a dragon, it’s hard to be graceful when you’ve just lost an eye – he juggled the bed from mouth to forelimbs.
Every instinct in him, from his soot-stained snout all down his serpent-neck, all down his bristling back through the furnace of his belly to the tip of his lashing tail – all demanded that he gobble up the little scrap of sweet-meat.
But Nithscalpa resisted the urge – for now.
Instead, once the cradle was cradled in his claws, he circled around one last time and screamed out all his pain and frustration and anger.
The castle burned.
The people burned.
The mother burned.
The dragon flew away.
East he flew, outracing the wind. East, and terror followed like thunder after a lightning blast. The lands of men were orderly and calm, all neat hedgerows and patchwork fields, ruled by thick ledgers and books of law.
Monsters had no place in this land. Scrawl “here there be dragons” at the edge of a map, and the implication is that all the rest – the bits with the neat roads and fields and pretty little castles – have an unwritten “here there be absolutely no dragons, thank you very much” banner.
Bright swords drove monsters to the margin and the Dungeon.
But the rulers of the lands of men mistook the Dungeon for a prison. It’s not – it’s the underworld. It’s the veins beneath the skin of existence, the place where secrets and treasures wait for the worthy, guarded by darkness and terror and things with teeth.
A prison gate is locked. The keys are in the hands of the gaoler. But the Dungeon Door opens to anyone with the courage to cross the threshold, from either side.
East the dragon flew. Pine trees on the heights bent under the wind of his passage.
The mountains before him, then the mountains beneath him.
Swift are the wings of dragons, mighty their claws, fierce their wrath, but greater than all these is their pride.
I suspect Nithscalpa would have objected to any description that implied the mountains, however magnificent or perilous, might in any way compete with his glory.
So, let us agree the mountains were unremarkable piles of dull rock flecked with snow that in no way blazed like fire in the rosy-gold dawn, and that they remained wholly unremarkable even as he wheeled down towards the tower that stood then and stands now on the edge of a crevasse.
“Give it to me,” hissed Nithscalpa. “The kill is mine.”
The tower of the wizard Orphir was narrower than the keep of Castle Uthgard. The dragon coiled around it like a monstrous corkscrew and glared through a window. A mix of blood and aqueous fluid ran from the ruin of his right socket.
“You have been paid already,” replied Orphir.
“It is not about recompense. It is about revenge.”
“You killed Aldebeth, and it was she who took your eye.” The wizard stroked his chin, and no doubt gave every impression that his mind was on some higher plane, cogitating on lofty matters.
Take it from me – wizards are liars.
Worse, we are con artists.
I mean, hark at how I pretend to be some sort of omniscient narrator, telling you what happened first at the castle, and now in the Master’s Tower.
The conversation between Orphir and the dragon was relayed to me by an unimpeachable gargoyle, but I’m only guessing about how the attack on the castle played out.
Maybe Aldebeth stood in front of her child’s bed, guarding it like a she-wolf.
Maybe she flung herself out of the window and grabbed on to the dragon’s tail, stabbing him even as he tried to shake her off.
Indeed, many years would pass before I even learned about the dragon’s attack on the castle, or who Aldebeth was.
All I know is that Nithscalpa flew off with two eyes, and came back with one more infant and one fewer eye.
“I killed the mother,” said the dragon, “but she did not suffer.”
“For my purposes I hope you are wrong,” said Orphir. “But I acknowledge your right to the kill. Go and rest. I will send the dregs down to you when I am done.”
The dragon unwound itself from the tower and slithered into the crevasse, crawling through the caverns of the eastern levels down to his lair.
That I knew for a fact, for the whole Dungeon shook with the force of Nithscalpa’s passage.
The crack in my wall widened a little.
Orphir kept his word. Some days later, when he was done with the stolen child, he sent the dregs down to Nithscalpa.
His courier was Old Throte, the gargoyle guardian of the tower – old even by the standards of the Dungeon, which had its share of ghosts and ghasts and ageless horrors, not to mention a dragon.
Throte had been there since there was ever a Dungeon under the mountain.
So old was he that his stone skin had cracked, his stone fangs chipped, his stone wings grown immobile as, well, stone.
They hadn’t worked as wings in centuries, but for a while he’d used them to keep the rain off his head. Now, they were too stiff even for that.
But he was still Throte, still guardian of the tower. Sworn to serve, sworn to keep the Rules.
“Take this,” said the wizard, “and bring it to Nithscalpa with my compliments.”
Throte did as he was told, as always. He brought the bundle of rags, still wet with blood, down through the endless winding stairs and corridors of the Dungeon.
It was a long walk. Denizens smelled the scent of human blood and crept from their lairs, but when they saw it was Old Throte carrying a squirming bloody bundle, most bowed their heads and slipped away.
Only the very hungry or very foolish sought to block the gargoyle’s path, and they fled when Throte told them that this meat belonged to Nithscalpa.
At last, Throte came to the threshold of the dragon’s lair.
All was dark. Throte did not need light to see, but the Rules say one must not enter a lair unbidden, and Throte was a stickler for the Rules.
He would not trespass on the meanest kobold’s hovel, let alone the lair of a dragon – and not one in a foul mood.
So, he waited.
A golden-red light flared a burning eye in the dark. A second light followed, slow and painful and sticky.
A long, sulphurous yawn.
“You’re far from your perch, old stone. What do you bring me?”
“What remains of the child, as the Master commanded.”
Nithscalpa heaved himself off the gold that was his bed, sending cups and crowns clattering. He slithered to the mouth of the cave, drool smoking on the rocks, and bent his head to gobble the contents of the blanket.
It was empty.
Nithscalpa hissed. He tore the rags from the gargoyle’s hands, tossed them into the air and incinerated them with a flash of flame.
“What remains of the child,” repeated Throte, “when the Master was done with it. He did not specify how much would remain.”
“The kill is mine by right! Recompense for my eye. And you bring me nothing but bloody rags!”