Chapter Five
Bait set off down the hill. Whenever she looked over her shoulder, she saw the minotaur standing athwart the doorway, and she knew she could not turn back.
Not that she intended to turn back. She was a brave child, and she held the silver coin that bore the image of her father as a down payment on her future.
She was the human child – so every Denizen told her – but she did not know what that really meant.
In accordance with the minotaur-prescribed curriculum, I had taught her the line of kings, her ancestry back a dozen generations.
More importantly, it was the last days of summer, and the forested slopes held the promise of berries and apples and other sweet delights.
They held terrors, too. We had visited the surface before on occasion, creeping under cover of night, so Bait was disturbed but not surprised by the mutability of the forest, the way the turning of the seasons ran through it like floodwater drenching everything first in green, then red-and-gold.
She could sneak through the shadows of the trees and navigate in the gloom above almost as well as below.
But as she descended the slopes, she found the forest brimming with eager and alarming life.
Little animals that fled, startled, at the heavy tread of a minotaur were less alarmed by the tremulous steps of a young girl.
Birds and insects flitted about her face, things rustled in the dark, leaves squished underfoot – and Bait had grown up in a realm where the things flitting in your face were usually blood-drinking stirges, their long beaks perfectly shaped to skewer the tear duct at the side of your eye.
Rustling in the dark suggested corpse-worms breaching desiccated flesh, and anything that squished underfoot was likely related to Gloop.
Fear is born of the unknown; the perils you grow up with are unremarkable, while those you encounter later are hideous violations of the natural order.
Such as, for example, Bait’s experience of a bright blue sky.
In the Dungeon, the longest room on our level was the Hall of Pillars – nearly two hundred feet from end to end!
Bait had stood on the threshold of that chamber and squinted at the expanse before her.
And she’d walked the edge of the Chasm many times, even after the minotaur told her not to, and looked down at the fifty-foot drop below.
So, fifty feet down was worth a word of caution, and two hundred feet across merited comment.
The blue void above encompassed unthinkable space.
Pile tree on tree, mountain on mountain, and it wouldn’t fill a fraction of it.
How did surface people walk about heedless of the yawning chasm overhead?
How could you live on the precipice of infinity like that, without the solid comfort of stone above your head?
The forest canopy with its criss-cross of leafy twigs seemed a fragile shield to Bait.
She found a little overhang and huddled there.
She wanted to go home; she knew she should keep going. She told herself that she was a Denizen no longer, and that her future lay with those sky-defying surface people and with her father-the-king, whatever that meant. She felt torn in two, transfixed between above and below.
Low clouds rolled in from the east, blotting out the frightful beauty of the sky, and she could almost convince herself that the grey vault above was a hitherto unexplored section of the Dungeon, some distant level far from the Arcade, and that she could keep going because eventually she’d find a corridor leading back to the levels she knew.
She walked until she found the river’s edge, and that helped, too – this was the same Buried River that gushed through the nixie-caves.
Like her, it had left the Dungeon and braved the surface – and now seemed eager to dance down the waterfalls and gullies to reach the lands below.
She could do no less.
The first living human that Bait had seen in seven years smiled at her.
She ran away.
This misunderstanding was forgivable. Consider Bait’s experiences of smiling.
The minotaur never smiled. Goblins don’t smile – they grimace, or leer, or twist their misshapen madcap faces with glee, but it’s never a pleasant sight.
My own skeletal grin is constant and uninformative.
And if a manticore smiles, it’s just to show so very many teeth as a precursor to something barbed: a comment if you’re lucky.
The human in question was a peasant boy foraging for wild apples in the woods.
His name, regrettably, was Valourentius, a name made famous by a dragon-slaying hero of ancient days, and inflicted on the infant by an over-optimistic father when the mother was insensate from the pangs of childbirth and therefore unable to argue.
But no one called him Valourentius – in the village he’d become known as the New Boy, and over time the rubbing of tongues wore that down to just Neb, and Neb he was even to his parents.
“Valourentius” was, as I said, a name drawn from ancient history.
“New Boy”, though he did not know it, was a product of recent events, stratagems and choices made by distant lords and kings (and by one scheming chancellor in particular).
Well, less a product than a side effect – when five thousand soldiers marched through the Gap and the Great Northern War began, none of them thought “aha, all the slaughter and sorrow we’re about to inflict will surely be worth it if some poor infant three hundred miles away is spared the burden of being called Valourentius”.
Croplands burned, herds slaughtered, cities sacked, the order of things overthrown, and a great many folk forced into the borderlands where few humans dwelt.
Valourentius was too young to remember much of the wearisome march from Crowhaven through Eskerlund and out into the borderlands, but he and his parents were not the first to make that journey in recent years.
When Orphir and I had been sentenced to the border watch, many decades before Valourentius’ unfortunate naming, Dunshelm Keep was a lonely watchtower on the very edge of settled lands, several days’ ride from even the most miserable village.
Now, between the wise stewardship of King Arus and his immediate predecessors (Arik II, called the Pious; Queen Eridala, called the Wise, as Gloop could tell you if it had only a mouth and recalled my lessons), the frontier had expanded, the miserable village had grown into the prosperous town of Lastease, and there was a new miserable village in the shadow of the castle, and in that miserable village dwelt a miserable boy who at least was no longer called Valourentius.
Neb smiled because he thought he glimpsed a young girl about his age, a little younger maybe, and thought he might make a new friend, but she vanished with such suddenness that he could only assume he had imagined her.
Certainly, when he thought back on it, the apparition had been an unlikely one.
Corpse-pallor pale, eyes like emeralds, hunched under the weight of a laden backpack, dressed in patchwork rags and what might have been woven cobwebs, and wearing a pair of boots many sizes too large for her – and had that been a jewelled dagger in her hand?
No one in the miserable village looked like that. He must have imagined her.
Still, Neb left one of his precious apples on a flat stone near the riverbank.
When he came back the next day, the apple was gone.
Their first conversation started poorly. Overwhelmed by the prospect of actually talking to another living human being, Bait forgot all human speech, and fell back onto the Dungeon Tongue.
“Hello,” said Neb, and Bait cackled in the manner of a goblin.
“Who are your people?” he asked uncertainly, and she snorted like a minotaur.
“Do you speak?” he wondered, and she hinged her jaw like a grinning skull until finally she remembered a word. Unfortunately, it was the wrong word.
“No,” she said.
However, it was also the right word. Children are not, morally speaking, much better than adults, but they can be more accepting.
They have yet to cobble together a sufficient understanding of the world, and so have not yet divided it into things which are familiar and proper and correct, and things which are strange and disturbing and wrong.
A child who has never seen a kitten before considers it no more or less marvellous than a dragon.
An adult has seen many kittens come and go, but – impending circumstances excepted – has seen no dragons, and so they are strange and disturbing and wrong.
Dragons are in the category of things that belong in the Dungeon, and sensible adults build border fortresses and watchtowers to guard against such things.
Neb accepted that his new friend could not exactly speak. It seemed odd to him, but he was the New Boy and had spoken to only a few dozen people in his whole life. Maybe not-speaking was common elsewhere. That was as much thought as he gave to it.
“Where do you live?” he asked, and she pointed up the mountain.
Neb knew nothing about the Dungeon save vague legends about the horrors of the underworld, and assumed that she meant the nearest tree.
They climbed the tree and sat amid the branches, and shared some of the food from the bundle of supplies that Sir Peledon had given her.
After, they went looking for nuts and berries, then Neb remembered he’d been sent out to look for fallen branches for firewood, and so Bait joined in that quest.
Presently, it grew dark.
Neb shivered as twilight drew in, gloom twisting the trees into alarming shapes, and he looked longingly towards the lights of the village. “I should go home,” he said. “What about you?”
Blue skies and open air and good food and the company of friends, the minotaur had said, and she’d enjoyed the day.
She found her voice again. “Not yet,” she said.