Chapter Three #3
He towered over both of us. He filled the doorway with hide and muscle, and had to hunch over to bring his massive head down to stare at us with those mad, twitching eyes. He seemed confused, as if just roused from sleep.
“Go away,” he growled.
“No,” said Bait.
Anger rumbled in his throat. “Unwise, goblin. Go away before I become angry.”
“Not a goblin,” said Bait. “I’m Bait.”
“Begging your pardon, sir,” I said, “we’re being pursued by kobolds and Balor the Squinter,” I said. “We ask for sanctuary.”
I have heard that elephants are terrified of mice, and panic at the sight of them. Apparently, minotaurs have a similar reaction to talking skulls, for he flinched.
“Please,” added Bait. It wasn’t a word used by goblins. She must have dredged that from some deep recess of memory.
A light of awareness came back to the minotaur’s eyes. He looked at Bait again – and then he fell to one mighty knee before her. He bowed his horned head and tried to speak in the human tongue. The words were ill-fitting in his maw, and came out utterly unintelligible. He roared in frustration.
Now it was Bait’s turn to flinch, but before she could turn and run the minotaur swept her through the door with his shovel-like hands and slammed it behind her.
He picked up a heavy bar and slammed it home, bolting the portal shut.
Then he stomped away, the whole hall shaking with his fury.
He flung a chunk of fallen masonry into the pit in the middle of the hall, slammed his fist into a wall (smashing perfectly good plastering), threw back his head and roared, and brandished one of his many battle axes, all of which had been polished and honed to a worrying sharpness.
Again, he tried and failed to force human words through his monstrous throat.
This was a topic on which I had some professional expertise.
“Cursed, are you?”
He ignored me.
“You have the balanced, stable demeanour of one who has been transformed by magic.”
He snorted at me.
“You’re speaking the Dungeon Tongue now. A legacy of Yrn Kyos, if you’re wondering. All Denizens can speak it to some degree. Even those without lips or lungs. But human tongues are for . . . well, human tongues. Few down here can manage them.”
He glared at me.
“How do you know such things?”
“I was the wizard Corn—”
He charged at me.
Bait snatched me up. The minotaur swerved to avoid trampling her, tripped and went down in a cataclysm of muscle and horn. He lay twitching for a moment, then with wounded dignity unfolded himself and brushed the Dungeon dust from his hair.
“I—” I began again, but he raised one finger to silence me. He stomped across the hall until the wide pit in the floor lay between him and the two of us. He lowered himself to sit on the edge of the abyss, and faced us across the chasm.
“Now we may speak.” There was a quaver in his voice, and I realised the pit was to guard us against him.
“I was the wizard Cornelius,” I continued cautiously, “but I surmise you had an encounter with the wizard Orphir.”
“You and he,” growled the minotaur, “are in league. Cornelius and Orphir – those names are known to me.”
“You are misinformed, but I’m gratified to hear I am still remembered.”
“As scoundrels. As deserters.”
“The calumnies of jealous rivals.”
“There was a bounty on both your heads.” He grunted, clearing his throat. He’d not spoken so much to another living soul in years.
“And that’s the one thing I still have, alas. You were a bounty hunter, then? Before your . . . present state?”
The minotaur shifted around, trying to find a comfortable position for its ill-made body. “A knight. I am a knight. Sir Peledon.”
“Was that what brought you to Orphir? Were you hunting him?”
“I had another quest.”
I had my suspicions about what that quest might have been. It was hardly coincidence that brought a knight to the Dungeon so soon after Bait’s precipitous arrival. But given our host was already prone to fits of rage, I did not press the matter.
“And in the course of that quest, you ran afoul of that scoundrel Orphir?”
“He did this to me!”
“Ah,” I said, “I suspect he meant to kill you, not transform you.” Orphir was never good under pressure.
“I will find him,” rumbled the minotaur, “and end this curse.”
“Finding him may be difficult,” I counselled. “Ending the curse, though, borders on the impossible.”
“Magic did it. Magic can undo it.”
I would have winced. “Spells of transformation cannot be undone. The minotaur shape is not some mask that’s hiding your true form.
It’s you, now. At best, another wizard could cast a second spell to give you a human shape once more, but that’s not the same as undoing the change.
It’d be making a different man out of the remnants.
And . . . alas, the longer you remain in this form, the more your mind changes to match it. “
Angrily, he shoved another boulder into the chasm. Bait padded over to the edge and imitated him with much smaller rocks.
“How long do I have? How long will I still . . .” He shook his head again, as if rational thought could be wrung from of his brain with sufficiently violent motion. “How long will I still think like a man?”
“It depends on a multitude of factors. The strength of your will, your emotional discipline, how close to a beast you were as a man. Recalling the memories of your former life might help, although I’m told doing so can be painful.
You should be able to hold on another two or three years or so, I’d guess.
But I have retired from wizardry, so this diagnosis comes without warranty. ”
He considered my words while Bait dropped pebbles into the abyss.
“Long enough,” he said at last, “long enough.”
The minotaur – or Sir Peledon, or He Who Was Sir Peledon – picked up his favourite axe and left the Chasm Hall.
He barred the door behind him. Kobolds had gathered in the corridors nearby.
Had I the skin, I would have shivered at the sounds of axe work that echoed through the Dungeon, the suddenly silenced tapping.
On and on it went, a cacophony of furious roaring and hewing.
Bait was unmoved, and occupied herself with the contents of the larder.
Later, I would learn that the minotaur slew more than three dozen kobolds, and drove the survivors back to their lair in the southern part of the Dungeon.
Balor the Squinter, however, escaped the minotaur’s wrath.
One good axe blow would have cleaved that sinister potato in twain, and few of the Denizens would have mourned the Squinter’s passing.
But Balor took refuge in the high-ceilinged Hall of Pillars, where no axe could reach him.
His eye-beams blazed, and while the pillars took the brunt of his glare, Sir Peledon was forced to retreat in the end.
He came back with his hide scorched and smoking.
When he returned, he brought Clickglee and a pack of goblins with him.
The goblin chieftain had to stand on tiptoe to embrace his adopted child.
The others crowded around Bait, happy that she was still alive.
They were even happier that she’d lived up to her name and lured so many kobolds within reach of the minotaur’s axe.
They brought her back to the safety of the Trapsmiths’ Arcade.
And me? I was left with the minotaur.
He sat down next to me at the edge of the pit, and for a long while there was a silence broken only by his heavy breathing. He picked at the burned parts of his hide, and spent some time cleaning kobold bits off his axe blade. At last, he said: “She doesn’t belong here.”
“Humans generally don’t.”
“She must be returned home.”
“So I suggested. But it’s a long way even to the nearest village.”
“I would carry her,” he said, “but they would not know who she was.”
“Is she someone, then? I suspected as much.”
“It is no concern of yours, wizard!” he snarled. I rather wished I had the pit between me and his wrath once again. Or, failing that, legs. One blow from that massive fist could smash my skull into splinters and snuff me out.
“It was a concern of Orphir’s,” I ventured.
He picked me up and held me above the pit.
“Tell me of him,” growled the minotaur, “so that I am prepared to slay him when next we meet.”
*
The cleverest thing that Orphir ever said was this:
“Magic is loose change.”
I did not take his meaning at the time, as I was gnawing through a rope tied around my wrist. He returned to the topic when I took a breather.
“It’s like dropped coins. Sometimes, you find a gold coin lying on the road, and it’s a singular wonder. A miracle, bright as a fallen sun. But you snatch it up and spend it, and it’s gone.”
“It has been a while,” I said, plucking strands of hemp from between my teeth, “since either of us happened upon a gold coin by chance.”
“But when we do, we squander it, yes?” said Orphir.
“ ‘Squander’ strikes me as overly judgemental. We put both specie and sorcery to the best possible of uses; to whit, filling our bellies.”
“Most of our magic is passing copper off as gold,” grumbled Orphir. “We take the pettiest of spells and convince people that these are wondrous enchantments.”
“Keep your voice down, in case someone takes that as a confession.”
Let me reveal the context of this conversation: chronologically, it was forty or fifty years ago.
Geographically, it was in the heart of the settled lands, on the road between Vellisgard and Crowhaven, and, if even more precision is desired, it was in the back of a wagon transporting prisoners to judgement at the travelling Court of Assizes.
Orphir and I were among that rabble of pickpockets, sheep thieves, footpads and poachers, although we stood accused of a much more erudite crime: sorcery.