Chapter One #4
Bait learned, in those grisly games, to distinguish one monster from another in the dark.
The tapping of kobold claws, the rustle of stirge-birds, the muttering of the hagworm’s human faces and the slithering of their slimy bodies, the jabbering of imps.
She learned when to signal to Clickglee to snatch her away, when the waiting goblins should pop out with their knives and traps.
Stirges called for weighted nets, kobolds for weight of numbers.
Worms should be fought with spears and thrown stones, imps up close.
Practical experience taught her more about the Dungeon Denizens than any bestiary.
But there was one monster that the goblins talked about that Bait had yet to meet. A many-headed horror – five or six or more heads, twice as many arms wielding torches and spears and bright swords, all armoured in a shell of steel. Savage, cruel, wholly ignorant of the Rules.
Adventurers, the goblins called this horror and feared it above all else.
*
Not all the goblins agreed with Clickglee’s decision to keep Bait.
Some grumbled that Bait had no place in the Dungeon – or, rather, that she had a place in the Dungeon, and that place was in the stewpot.
“Toothsome and tender it is,” they muttered, “better to eat it now, while it’s in our warren, rather than let some other Denizen have such a prize. ”
They gathered around Clickglee’s side tunnel, hissing and jabbering and demanding the goblin chief hand over the child.
Bait saw the eyes of the goblins in the dark, glimmering like red sparks, and she pressed her face to the stone of the Dungeon wall.
Clickglee put himself between the pack and the child.
Goblin chieftains are chosen for cunning, not courage.
I have no doubt that he weighed his decision as he’d calibrate the trigger on a pit trap.
In time, he would come to love the child as much as a goblin can love anything that isn’t shiny or sharp, but in those first weeks that love bore little weight. Other concerns were stronger.
“Throte told me to keep her.” The gargoyle’s words had weight.
“Throte’s not here.” Their eyes shone with a hungry light.
“Then call a Levelling.”
Word of the Levelling echoed through the Dungeon.
It travelled in claws tapping on stone and the whispers of ghosts.
It even reached me, in my pool of mud at the bottom of a forgotten stairwell; I overheard some trolls grumbling about it as they tramped past. A Levelling is a gathering of the Denizens ? not all of them, not the whole Dungeon, for the Dungeon is unfathomably vast and no creature living or dead knows all its secrets, but all those nearby.
They gathered in the Chasm Hall, an ancient high-ceilinged chamber riven by a huge pit in the floor.
The foundations had cracked in a long-ago cataclysm and now a canyon gaped in the midst of the wide hall like the yawning maw of a dragon – all too appropriate, for that pit led down through many secret ways to Nithscalpa’s lair.
Sulphurous fumes curled up from below.
Trolls and kobolds, rotting ghouls and shadowy wraiths, nixies from the Buried River, rat kings and fang snails, a cavalcade of horrors all gathered in the recesses of Chasm Hall.
Clickglee balanced little Bait on a spur of rock right above the precipice. An inch or two in any direction, and she’d fall. Some of the onlookers held their breath. More licked their lips.
“What say you, Denizens of the Dungeon?” called Clickglee. “Can I keep it, and we all agree not to eat it?”
“It’s human,” rumbled a troll.
“You sure?” hissed a mimic, presently in the shape of an ornate treasure chest. It scuttled closer on little brass legs and sprouted an incongruous nose. “Doesn’t smell human. And it’s tiny.”
“Larval stage human,” pronounced the old bloodbeast with great authority. “Seen it before. Once it gets a little bigger, it’ll pupate and hatch all covered in iron.”
The mimic conveyed an uncertain shrug with a rattle of its chest lid. “Maybe it’s human, and maybe it’s not.” The nose melted away, replaced by a long wet tongue to lick the toothy rim of the chest. “Eat it and find out?”
Clickglee pressed his argument. “It’d be all right if I added another goblin to my tribe, yeah? Or ’nother dozen for that matter. What difference does one human make?”
“Humans,” said the troll flatly, “bring trouble.”
“Some of you were human once.” Clickglee jabbed a finger at the crowd of undead wraiths. “And you live down here.”
Long dead, whispered the wraiths. Their voices were dust and hate. Long cold. Long forgotten. We do not live down here. We do not live.
Clickglee shivered, and grasped for another argument. “Those outlaws that lived over Wychwood Way was human.”
“Yeah, but we ate ’em,” said a troll, “so they don’t count.”
Clickglee glanced nervously up, as if he could see through stone to the tower above, and dropped his voice to a whisper. “Master’s human.”
“He’s the Master. Doesn’t count either.”
“How about this?” suggested Clickglee. “We’ll raise it goblin-fashion. It’ll barely be human at all.”
“Fair enough,” said the troll, “but if humans from the surface come looking for her, they’ll bring trouble.”
“None of ’em know she is here,” said Clickglee, “and I shall make sure they don’t find out. She’ll never leave the Dungeon, not so long as she lives.”
Not after, either, whispered the dead.
“All right then,” muttered the troll. “Long as it keeps the Rules, it can stay.”
“Eye have another matter,” came a voice from the ceiling.
Everyone looked up – and shuffled back in alarm at the frightful sight of Balor the Squinter floating there.
He was a ball of eyes, his only orifice a fanged mouth.
Each of his eyes had a different magical property, but he kept them all shut, all but the one that permitted him to levitate.
I do not know what wizard’s laboratory or arcane accident spawned Balor, but everyone in the Dungeon loathed him, and he returned their hate a hundredfold.
He had no lair or chamber, but wandered the deeper levels.
It was a long time since he’d come up. No one was pleased to see him.
But there could be no fighting at a Levelling.