Chapter Four #4
“I already gave you one,” said the monster, “and am not inclined to revise it.”
“Beware!’ said the servant, and he shone the light of the lantern on a dark shape that slithered across the floor of the bathhouse.
At first, the captain did not understand what he was looking at, but then he realised it was the scorpion tail of the monster.
He threw himself out of the door and slammed it behind him, just as the poisonous stinger struck.
The old servant’s screams were regrettably prolonged.
“The beast,” said the captain to no one in particular, “has a venomous sting.”
He returned to his villa to consider the problem.
He even asked his lieutenant for counsel, but received only a scrawled note that he did not bother reading.
(It said “FEAR WE ARE SURROUNDED SEND RELIEF”.) Finally, he invited the merchants and other worthies to dine with him in the villa.
Only a few attended, and they were all ones who had profited from the war and the occupation and the sufferings of their fellows.
In the absence of the head servant, the captain himself waited on them, bringing them silver plates laden with dates and sweetmeats and cyanide. And after the convulsions were done, he had his soldiers pick up the bodies and carry them down the garden.
The servants, and indeed many of his soldiers, were appalled by this. The captain assured them it was a necessary evil, but some of the servants fled.
“The monster will eat the poisoned flesh,” said the captain to himself, “and be sickened by it. Then we will have it! It can’t fly because of my nets the labourers strung up, and my soldiers’ spears will keep its claws at bay, and its teeth will splinter and break on my well-forged steel shield.
And I will put the tip of my sword to its throat and demand it foretell the future. ”
The thought came to the captain that even though the monster was stronger than any human, they had defeated it through ingenuity, through discipline and through cooperation.
Behind the tip of his sword was not just a length of metal and a strong arm, but the efforts of a whole kingdom.
A vast and glorious pyramid, all the strengths of so many people united behind a single will.
Then he looked up, and saw that the villa was overrun, that his garrison of soldiers was scattered and overwhelmed.
News of the poisonings had been the spark that lit the tinder, and the town burned with revolution.
He saw that the spearmen had cast down both their weapons and the poisoned corpses they bore, and fled.
The captain saw that he was alone.
Almost alone.
“I was right,” said the voice in the shadows.
I told Bait that I did not care for her story. It had too much bone-crunching for my comfort, and I felt it was an unsuitable tale to be told to a young girl.
“I liked it,” she said. “The monster won. That doesn’t happen in the stories in your books.”
The tellers were also unsuitable.
“They were nice to me.”
I suspected that the whole affair was a distraction from some other concern. “Why did you move the adventurer, Bait? What did you think you were doing?”
“He was human,” she muttered. “Like me. Sort of.”
She looked up brightly. “Look, they let me keep one of the coins.”
In her palm was the bright silver she had so cherished.
The episode of the dead adventurer put an end to our excursions into the lower levels.
Sir Peledon decided that it would be better to educate Bait about the surface, and Bait was nervously fascinated by the prospect.
The tree she’d found growing in the Dungeon, for example, was one of her favourite spots – although the first time she’d gone there in daytime, the sunlight shining down through the hole in the ceiling was like a spear skewering her between the eyes, and she fled in terror.
It took weeks for her to acclimatise to the brightness of daylight.
We visited the Dungeon Door, too.
“It’s been some time since I came this way,” I said to the guardian gargoyles, but they responded with stony silence. As we passed the threshold, I saw dozens of eyes gleaming in the dark, watching us with suspicion. Few ever left the Dungeon.
A quick history lesson, which Bait ignored completely: the Door was once the gate of a great city.
Travellers would climb the road that zigzagged up the mountain – little trace of it remains now – and pass through the double doors of the city gate, awed by their solemn grandeur and the statues of strange gods.
Then – a wide lamplit tunnel, and hence to the city proper in an otherwise inaccessible fold of the mountain beyond.
Imagine those travellers – pilgrims and traders, seekers and scholars – labouring up that steep road, the mountains looming before them, no sign of the city except that lonely road – and then, at last, they see the golden light streaming from the open door, a treasure trove of delights safe under stone.
The lamps are broken now, the tunnel dark and twisted.
When Orphir and I first went in search of lost magic, we endured months of miserable wandering.
The old texts spoke of a road through the forest – the road was long lost under centuries of leaf mould and mudslides.
Blundering around the forest while our beefy companions jeered, half starved and more than half mad, digging with our fingernails in search of some trace of that lost road.
I think I was digging a grave for Orphir when we finally spotted the Dungeon Door as an oddly regular opening in the cliffside.
We’d known we were in the right place because there was an icon of Yrn Kyos nailed to the Door. When I became Master, I’d replaced the icon with an image of my own face. I thought Orphir had done the same – he was not lacking in pride – but there was no symbol on the Door now, only an empty circle.
Out of the Door, onto a dark hillside under the stars.
The Door was set into a cliff face. Bait clung to the rock wall, shivering as the cold wind brushed her face.
Behind us, north and south and east, mountain peaks rose like fangs beyond the cliff.
Away to the west, the slope tumbled down through a chaos of boulders and scree to the forest that cloaked the shoulders of the mountain.
Somewhere in the dark, the Buried River burst from its tomb and crashed over a waterfall as it rushed away through the woods, its course hidden by the dark trees for many miles, but far away I could see the white ribbon of the river in the moonlit valley below.
Bait only had eyes for the stars. She looked up, and up, and up without end, seeing a world without a ceiling.
Then she said, in a small voice, “I want to go back down.”
*
But that was only our first excursion to the surface. We made a dozen more in the year that followed. Some even in daylight (“too bright”, but she was entranced by the colours sunlight revealed), and some as far as the forest eaves (“is it worms?” she asked when she first touched grass).
Some days, Sir Peledon followed us. Never openly, never admitting it, but we would hear him grunting and wheezing as he hauled his mighty frame up the narrow stairs, and then the clatter of his hooves as he followed us down the tunnel.
When Bait and I went out, the minotaur would linger just on the inside of the Dungeon Door.
He stood in shadow and watched Bait run in the sunlight.
Always he would vanish when we started to hike back up the slope, ducking his horned head under the Dungeon Door so he was gone when we returned.
He would never admit he had been watching.
Until Bait’s last day with us.
The minotaur stood in the doorway, blocking the Dungeon Door.
“The time has come for you to leave.”