Chapter Three
Below, Nithscalpa slept on his bed of stolen gold, growing larger and stronger in the way of dragons. He had been mighty before; now, he was unassailable.
Above, the tower lay empty, the door barred.
There was no Master in the Dungeon. There was no rule but the Rules, no one in charge but custom.
In whispered conversations in the Trapsmiths’ Arcade, or on the banks of the Buried River, Denizens talked of what would happen when the dragon woke.
Nithscalpa’s hunger would surely be prodigious; when a dragon wakes from a long sleep, then follows a breakfast of calamity.
Would Nithscalpa feast on the Denizens close at claw, or would he attack the surface lands once more?
What trouble would that bring? Adventurers had come seeking vengeance after the dragon’s last flight, but they had not delved deep. Would the next intrusion be worse?
Few of the Denizens considered the human child in their deliberations.
To most, Bait was now no different from any of the goblins.
Indeed, she thought of herself the same way.
She scurried and scampered and squeezed through narrow cracks with the rest of them.
She had the run of the level now, and the Dungeon was her playground.
When she grew thirsty she would go down to the Buried River with the other Denizens, and drink alongside trolls and rat kings.
Sometimes, she would find one of the mirror-still pools by the river and look at her own reflection by the light of glowworms, and wonder why she was different from her goblin kin – but she did not linger there, for she knew the danger of the nixies who dwell in those pools, and who can ensorcel anyone who stares too long into the waters.
Bait knew the perils of the Dungeon like another child understands not to touch a hot stove, or to avoid a field of thistles.
When she hungered, and the thin stews of mushrooms and cryptic meat of the goblins were not enough for her, she’d climb to the secret cave near the Arcade where the Dungeon slime quivered, and cut a sugary slice for herself.
Sometimes, when she made her way through the corridors and caves, feeling her way in the dark through touch and smell, she sensed the presence of enemies.
Kobolds from the lower levels were easy for her to spot, with their tapping and their chirping and their coppery stink.
Balor the Squinter was harder to detect, for he levitated silently and lurked near the ceiling of chambers.
But if he opened one of his other eyes, the faint glow would give him away and Bait would slip into a side passage with goblin quickness.
These near misses happened more and more often as the years went by, and Bait’s knees and shoulders were always scraped and scabby. The narrow goblin cracks grew narrower.
There was another lurker, too, that was neither kobold nor squinter.
The bellows-breath of the minotaur was like thunder in the dark, and it amused Bait when she heard the big monster trying to be stealthy, tiptoeing along behind her on his massive hooves.
Clickglee had warned her to stay away from the minotaur.
Since he’d claimed the Chasm Hall, the minotaur had proved to be a singularly unneighbourly Denizen.
He had kept to the Rules and not trespassed in other monsters’ lairs, but the corridors near the Chasm Hall were slick with blood and ichor and unmentionable slimes, for the minotaur was quick to wield his axe.
More than once, Bait had found chopped-up kobold bits in her path.
Being a sensible child, she swept them up and fed them to the slime.
It glooped happily as it digested the giblets.
The jelly slices tasted coppery after that. Bait ate them anyway.
Day by day, without noticing it, she grew a little older and a little taller.
But not as old or as large as the dragon.
Time is hard to reckon down in the Dungeon.
I said Bait grew taller day by day, but there’s no day down there, nor night.
The darkness of the tunnels is dark of a different quality.
Above, night must always give way to the dawn; the watchman on the wall or even the gargoyle on the tower knows that day will come again through the natural cycle of the cosmos, just as the tides ebb and flow.
Below, darkness is for ever. It’s tunnel-aged, thick and slow.
Intruders measure time in the guttering of their torches, in the time it takes candles to burn down, before the light fails.
The Dungeon dark is not a tide or celestial cycle; it is eternal, even if it briefly consents to retreat.
The Dungeon preserves, too. Without wind and rain, without the feverish scrabbling of humans, the past endures down here.
When Orphir and I first came to the Dungeon, I remember our eager ambitions, and how we thought we would achieve them swiftly.
Our early triumphs deceived us; we conquered the tower and thought that made us masters of the Dungeon, when in truth we knew nothing of what lay below our feet.
We grew old and grey without noticing, for we were always intent on finding the next secret, the next arcane treasure that would be the final piece of the puzzle.
Deeper we delved, on long expeditions into lightless realms below.
Without day and night, without seasons to mark the turning of the years, we – or rather I – did not notice the passage of time.
I did not notice Orphir’s growing frustration.
Nor, rather more relevantly, the knife in his hand.
All this is but to say: I cannot be sure how many years passed between the Levelling, and when things changed. I had no candle to hold back the dark or mark the flowing hours. I was just an undead skull, face down in the mud – until Bait landed on me.
It cannot be denied that she had been careless.
Clickglee would have clipped her about the ear (if he could reach it) and called her heedless.
She’d heard the kobold war party chittering in a nearby room, and should have turned back.
But she was hungry, and the slime pit was nearby, so she kept going.
Balor’s eye-beam flashed. A paralytic ray, blazing brilliant white.
Bait twisted, dodged, and ran even before she knew she was running.
Clickglee and the goblins had taught her well: if you’re small, and you’re caught outside your lair, run!
She sprinted headlong through the Dungeon, blind but sure exactly where she was, every pebble and flagstone familiar to her bare feet as she pelted down the corridors.
Then – another twist, a squeeze, and into the narrow little goblin crawl-tunnel where foes could not follow.
If she reached the far end, she’d be safe.
But she’d grown a little too tall, a little too broad, and her shoulder caught on the narrow mouth of the crack.
It slowed her down by a few seconds, and even though she quickly scraped through the gap and squeezed halfway down the tunnel, it wasn’t enough.
The Squinter’s telekinetic eye seized her like an unseen hand – the horrible sensation of it on her skin, like a million invisible hooks – and dragged her back.
She scrabbled for a handhold, dug her dirty nails into the wall, but to no avail.
Balor tore her from her refuge, and the kobolds were waiting to grab her.
“Let go!” she squealed.
“To the dragon!” chanted the kobolds. “Dragon! Dragon! Dragon!” They meant to offer her to Nithscalpa, to align themselves with the coming Master of the Dungeon.
“Move, over-limbed idiots!” snarled the Squinter. Each use of his eye-beams drained him, and he wanted to keep some of his power in reserve to deal with other foes. It was a long way down to the dragon’s lair. That’s why he needed the kobolds.
Two kobolds grabbed Bait’s legs, two more held on to her arms, and hung on no matter how much she wriggled and thrashed – and she wriggled and thrashed a great deal, and bit and cried and screamed.
But kobold scales are tough, and so are kobold hearts.
Maybe goblins and gargoyles can take pity, but not kobolds who think they’re about to win the favour of a dragon.
And, anyway, they feared Balor’s evil eyes more than anything else.
“Not that way, fools! Can’t you see? Not through the Chasm Hall!” shouted Balor.
So the kobolds took a different route. But this route led them past the jelly pit.
The slime had grown over the years, despite the best efforts of Bait’s appetite. She’d fed it on kobold bits and other offal, and it had grown bigger and bigger, and learned to throw pseudopods up to the very rim of the pit.
Now, I cannot claim to be an authority on the thoughts of corridor slimes.
Others have told me their portions of this story over the years, and I have arranged them for you in the order that seems most appropriate.
In some cases, I have had to exercise editorial discretion.
Clickglee’s account, for example, involved excessive detail about the mechanics of pit traps.
The humans (we’ll get to the humans later) screamed a lot.
But I have not had a conversation with the slime.
So, I can’t guess if it had, over the years, developed some emotional attachment to our Bait, a puppy-like devotion to the girl who had fed it and trimmed it, or if it merely sensed the presence of tasty and unusually fresh kobolds close at hand.
Or, rather, close at pseudopod.
Squrk went the slime. Neep, said one kobold as it let go of Bait’s leg in surprise. Gnurk was the sound a second kobold made, as Bait’s liberated leg kicked it in the back of the head. (I am relying on Bait’s account for the sounds.) The child wriggled free of her captors and fled into the dark.