Chapter One #3
She vanished into the darkness of the warren, where goblins waited with sharp teeth. Had I still breath, I would have held it, expecting the child to be devoured within seconds. Nothing would be wasted, not shard of bone or scrap of rag. Goblins are nothing if not efficient.
Instead, there came a squeak of pain from the trapdoor.
Throte lunged forward and stuck his long stony arm into the aperture. He pulled out the goblin chieftain, and firmly attached to the goblin’s ear was the human child.
Goblins weren’t the only things with sharp teeth.
The goblin chieftain towered over his kin, being nearly three and a half feet tall. His fingers were astoundingly long and excessively jointed. All manner of tools – again sharp and clever – hung from his jerkin. He was the master trap-maker of the warren. Clickglee by name.
Throte disentangled Clickglee’s ear from the human’s teeth. The chieftain ran an eight-fingered hand over the ragged wound.
Then he laughed. “It’s very fierce,” he said. “It might be useful. It can stay a while.”
“What do we call it?” asked the other goblins. Goblins, being creatures of chaos, place grave importance on names.
Clickglee considered the question.
“Bait.”
We left Bait with the goblins. Throte carried me back to my tomb in stony silence, broken infrequently by stony speech.
“I do not like that name,” he said.
“It’s not especially auspicious, no. But it won’t be hers for long. Either she’ll go back to the human lands, or something will eat her.” Nithscalpa might be sleeping, but there were many mouths in the Dungeon.
“I do not like that thought, either.”
“Why do you care what happens to the child?” It intrigued me that the gargoyle would take such an interest in a human. From his perch atop the tower, he’d seen centuries and the passing of many mortal lives.
“Do you not?”
“I was never full of love for my fellow human even when I was alive.”
Throte returned to Orphir’s tower. I would not see him again for several years.
More weeks passed. I spent them in long contemplation of the crack by my door.
You make your own fun when you’re a skull.
My reverie was interrupted when Orphir opened my door without so much as a by-your-leave.
For anyone else it would have been a flagrant breach of the Rules, but my old colleague was a special case.
I suppose I should give him his proper title: Master of the Dungeon. He leaned heavily on a staff as if weary from some great effort.
It would be petty to point out that it had once been my staff.
And my title.
“I am leaving, my dear colleague,” he said.
It irritated me that he still called me that.
“I am done with this accursed Dungeon. I am done with foul air and dismal depths. I am done with damp and gloom and cold. I am done with the things that infest this place. I am done with having gold and nothing to spend it on, with having power and no way to profit from it. Yrn Kyos was mad. I shall leave this pit before I join him.”
“Don’t let me keep you.”
“I came to say farewell out of respect for our partnership.”
“It would have been more respectful not to have murdered me in the first place.”
“I do regret that, you know.” From a belt pouch he produced a dagger I knew uncomfortably well.
It was still stained with rusty flakes of me.
He contemplated it with what might have appeared to an outside observer to be genuine remorse, but I knew the man uncomfortably well, too.
“The Rules of this place bind us all. Only one may command the tower.”
“And what have you done with it, eh? What great works have you accomplished?” Orphir was always a poor wizard, in my estimation.
“More than you!”
“I was cut down in my prime! What’s your excuse!”
His face flushed with anger. “I am going to do, Cornelius, what we set out to achieve when we were young. What we vowed to do before we came to this fetid prison. I’m going somewhere bright and warm, with women and wine and good food.
I shall be a king instead of a master. A long-deserved promotion. ”
He picked me up and contemplated me. “I was going to bring you along. You could have been, perhaps, an eye-catching desk ornament. But you never could shut up, could you? Always thinking you know best. Always thinking only of yourself. To hell with you, Cornelius Aurilex. Here you shall stay.”
With that, he hurled me into the darkness with all his strength. I bounced off a stone wall, ricocheted off a pillar and bounced again down a long, long stair with many steps. At last I came to rest in a puddle of mud in a forgotten corner in the uttermost depths of the Dungeon.
Might I add, face down.
There I lay for a long time.
But this isn’t my story.
*
The human girl – Bait, as the goblins named her – grew in the warren of tunnels and wormbores around the Trapsmiths’ Arcade.
If she remembered the surface world beyond the Dungeon, she showed no sign of it.
She ran with the goblins, crawled with them through the passages, scurried and hid and cackled with them.
She learned to move in the lightless places, to distinguish one darkness from another in the same way a shepherd knows different sorts of rain.
She could tell where she was by the cracks in the stone under her feet.
She would brush her hand against a carven bas-relief and know exactly where she stood.
Bait had a cave in the warren where she slept in a nest of blankets.
Clad in the same filth and rags as her adopted kinfolk, she could be mistaken for an unusually symmetrical goblin.
And if a Denizen from the deeper levels scented that she was human, then she was small enough to wriggle into the labyrinth of side tunnels.
The Trapsmiths’ Arcade was her refuge, and for the first year or so she did not go far beyond it.
Why, you might ask, did Bait not try to escape this terrifying dungeon? Why did she not return to the surface world she came from? Why did she not tell them her true name, or speak of the Castle Uthgard where she had lived before Nithscalpa stole her?
In truth, Bait was a strange child even before the dragon took her, and to her the Dungeon was not more terrifying or more incomprehensible than her former home.
Goblins taught her to wriggle through tunnels or build concealed traps or lap rainwater that puddled in the cupped hands of a statue, and all that seemed just as sensible as the courtiers who had despaired of teaching her to sit quietly or to use a knife and fork, or to drink from golden goblets.
Speech never came easily to her, though song did – she would recite verses she’d overheard in the castle in her piping voice.
Of course, speech does not come naturally to goblins either – their speech is a magpie argot of stolen words and repurposed phrases, which suited Bait very well.
*
Goblins survive on very little, but growing human girls need to eat. Though there was rainwater, and mushrooms aplenty in the dank central well, and the occasional scrap of meat of which it is best to ask no questions – she needed more.
Corridor slimes sweep the Dungeon clean of corpses and other debris.
These blobs of protoplasm mould themselves to the width of the passageways, oozing along at a snail’s pace and absorbing anything they can into their sticky core.
Consult any good bestiary and you shall learn that their jelly-like flesh is mildly acidic, dissolving anything other than stone, metal or hard bone, and mildly paralytic, so that insects unlucky enough to land on their clear surfaces cannot escape.
But what no bestiary records is that the flesh of a corridor slime, sliced thin and lightly fried, is more than mildly delicious.
So, Clickglee lured one of these slimes up the stairs, teasing it with rats on sticks – and Bait beside him, giggling as she imitated him – until it slithered into a pit near the Trapsmiths’ Arcade.
The goblins kept the slime there, feeding it regularly.
The slime thrived in its new home, and would have grown to prodigious size if the goblins had not shaved off slices to feed Bait.
The fried jelly made Bait’s mouth tingle, and tasted sweet and burnt at the same time.
At first, it brought back a memory from her life before the Dungeon, when there would be a silver bowl of candied nuts in the feast hall at Castle Uthgard, and she would climb up on the table to get them, and people would shout at her and tell her to stop, and she would not stop because she was hungry and did not understand what they were shouting about.
Goblins never shouted at her to stop.
In time, she forgot the silver bowl.
Clickglee named her Bait, and he put her to work as such.
The goblins of the Arcade were not without enemies.
Most Denizens left them in peace, either because they wanted the goblins’ expertise in trap-making, or because goblins were not worth eating.
But sometimes creatures wandered up from the lower levels who saw the Trapsmiths’ Arcade as an ideal lair for the taking.
Hagworms slithered into the tunnels; little kobolds and imps besieged them in pint-sized knife fights; blood-drinking stirge-birds nested there.
The Rule of the Dungeon proclaims that each Denizen is keeper of their own lair, but rules bend in the Master’s absence, and there was war in the dark.
Goblins are as tough to uproot as old thorn briars.
They have teeth and knives and spikes and traps, and even if a monster pushes past all that, goblins are as tasty as old thorn briars, too.
But a human child, defenceless and tender – in the Dungeon that’s a treat rarer than any candied nut.
So Clickglee would dangle his Bait in front of the intruders, literally – she would hang from his long arms from a trapdoor in the ceiling of the Arcade, screaming in somewhat feigned fear, until the monsters came snuffling and drooling at the scent of human prey.