Chapter Five #3
Not once in the last ten years had he allowed the vicissitudes of the world to disrupt his expectations.
Not even the infamous night seven years prior when the sentries had seen dragonfire on the mountain, and word had come of the attack on Castle Uthgard, and terror had struck the hearts of everyone in the keep.
It was not that Sir Rudyard was unafraid of the prospect of a dragon crawling from its lair in the underworld to lay waste to the lands of men; it was just that, given the choice, he would prefer to face such a horror well fortified with ?
Eggs. Bacon. Black bread. Tea.
Even on that precipice of that calamity, he had held true to his breakfast course, and, again, order had been restored.
The dragon had not attacked. This was, of course, due to the eye-gouging inflicted on Nithscalpa by Queen Aldebeth, not any virtue of boiled eggs, but Rudyard went with the information available to him.
Eggs. Bacon. Black bread. Tea. Ramparts of order.
Thus, when the messenger arrived, he was obliged to wait. Eggs were cracked with two neat taps like an opening volley, the bacon dissected into six pieces with military precision, the bread employed to soak up the survivors, stodgy calvary routing the remnants of a defeated host.
No martial metaphor was available for the tea, but Harald still had to wait until Sir Rudyard had slurped it all down and wiped his moustache with a napkin like a shroud being draped over the body of a fallen hero.
Then Sir Rudyard pushed the gory battlefield – the first skirmish of the day’s war on chaos victoriously concluded – aside and turned to the messenger.
Sir Rudyard listened intently to what had become a rather confused story.
There was a monster in the woods – who might be a demon or a changeling – and had given a gold coin – or many gold coins, or a whole treasure hoard, or a blood-red ruby the size of a wild apple – to one of the village children, who was now bewitched, or cursed, or eaten.
There might also be more monsters, trolls or goblins or hagworms, as big as trees (but definitely not trees).
Having heard the tale, Sir Rudyard took immediate, decisive action.
“Tell the riders to prepare for a hunt. Ready the dogs, prepare the horses. And get this man some breakfast.”
Events continued to accelerate.
Tongues of flame burned around the village.
Some bobbed through the dark in the hands of unseen sentries.
Others had been tied to the wooden palisade that surrounded the village.
Bait stared at the dancing flames with interest and alarm.
Fire was a rarity in the dungeon; Denizens could see in the dark, and there was nowhere for the acrid smoke to go.
A burning torch below was like hammering on a huge gong.
Torches were for special occasions, for Levellings and feasts – or for times of war.
Torches had burned in the corridors of the Arcade when they’d fought the kobolds.
But she didn’t know the surface customs, and could not tell if this commotion was celebration or conflict.
She had not seen Neb in three days, not since she’d given him the coins. Worry wormed up from her belly to catch in her throat.
She crept closer, leaving the shelter of the forest, nothing between her and the night sky. The village was surrounded by fields; she hid in the hedgerows and undergrowth, fearful of being seen. In her hand she clutched her precious silver coin.
Tell them who you are, the minotaur had said. Tell them Sir Peledon sent you. Tell them to bring you home.
She should just walk in, she told herself. Do as the minotaur had said. She practised the words over and over, trying to make the human words fit in her mouth as easily as the Dungeon Tongue. I’m the daughter of King Arus. I was lost, but now here I am.
But I haven’t been lost, she’d objected.
I knew where I was the whole time. And Sir Peledon had groaned and shaken his head, and the thought that she’d caused the minotaur distress was like a knife in her stomach.
Bait did not know King Arus, but it was important to Sir Peledon, and he’d saved her time and time again. For his sake, she would go home.
On she went, scurrying, crawling on hands and knees, darting from one deeper patch of shadow to the next until she reached the wooden palisade.
She peered through gaps between the stakes, examining the strange houses of the villagers.
Sir Peledon had told her that she’d live in a palace when she went home, which to Bait sounded like a dungeon with more windows, a great pile of stone with an appropriate number of labyrinthine corridors and vasty halls.
More torches bobbed to and fro in the dark, but other than those patrolling sentries she could see no one in the village.
Everyone must be hiding indoors, huddled together, fearful of foes.
Bait glanced around, looking for the great danger that threatened the village, not realising that she was the cause of their terror.
All the sentries looked alike to Bait, to whom the range of human faces seemed terribly limited, endless Neb-like variations.
In the Dungeon, anything could be someone’s face.
She wondered which of the houses sheltered Neb and his family.
He had a father and a mother – not abstractions, but actual people, warm skin and strong sheltering arms. That thought sat awkwardly in Bait’s head.
All her life, she’d been the human girl, always different, always entirely herself.
She’d lived with the goblins, with Gloop, with a talking skull, but she wasn’t a goblin or a slime or a wizard’s skull.
Then again, in times of peril or sorrow, she’d huddled in the goblin tunnels, or dipped her toes into Gloop’s cooling acidic gel, or stayed up in whispered conversation with the skull while outside Sir Peledon drove the danger away. What was kinship or family?
In the dark, she ran her fingers over the fading features of her father on the coin, then closed her fist around it. Gathering her courage, she approached the sentries at the gate.
“I—”
That was as far as she got.
One of the sentries – Nebbish in appearance, but his face twisted with un-Neb fear and fury – snarled at her and shoved his torch towards her face, the sudden light blinding her.
All her carefully arranged words fell apart, and the best she could do was show him the coin in her hand. Tell them who you are.
He grabbed her wrist. Bait panicked and twisted free, then she was running into the dark and they were on her heels, streamers of flame from a dozen torches following her as they ran through the fields.
In the Dungeon, she knew exactly where she was, but here they had the advantage.
She sprinted across the fields, shoved through hedges, dodged and ducked, always only a heartbeat away from being caught, but she couldn’t escape.
Shouts in the human tongue boomed like incomprehensible thunder. Lights, all around, closing on her.
Then – at last – the edge of the woods. Trees like dark pillars, the deeper darkness of the forest. It wasn’t enough to dissuade her pursuers.
She flung herself into the mouth of an abandoned badger sett, wriggling through the narrow gap like a fish.
The lead pursuer plunged his arm in after her – then snatched back his bleeding hand when Bait bit him.
But they had the creature trapped now, or so they thought.
They fetched shovels and dug down until the entrance was wide enough for the bravest of the villagers to crawl in after her.
But Bait was the adopted daughter of goblins, and though she could no longer hide in the Trapsmiths’ Arcade, she could still construct a rudimentary snare from old tree roots and badger bones.
The bravest villager’s face joined his wounded comrade’s hand as further evidence that a monster was abroad, and this testimony was presented to Sir Rudyard in due course.
Bait lay there for a long time, not daring to breathe.
The utter darkness was soothing after the harsh firelight, the tomblike gloom a balm.
She pressed her fingers into the dirt, probed the walls and roof, mapping her new lair.
If she could have crawled down through the badger tunnels, down and down through the earth of the hillside to the roots of the mountains, and thence found her way back into the Dungeon, she would have.
She had tried the surface world, and it had not welcomed her.
But the only way back to the Dungeon was through the Dungeon Door, and between here and there were many miles of forest and many hunters.
Exhausted, she curled up and slept.
The villagers provided the eggs and the black bread. Sir Rudyard had brought the tea himself.
“You tell me the monster’s in a den near the forest eaves. Very good. We shall smoke it out.”
“One of the monsters, my lord,” said a villager. “Some sort of goblin.”
“I have brought with me,” said Rudyard, “an illustrated bestiary.” The study of monsters was part of the education of a knight, along with hawking, heraldry, horsemanship and hewing things with a big sword.
Sir Rudyard had never excelled at the monster-slaying part.
He had preferred the hawking and really enjoyed the heraldry, but had never felt confident in the fighting of fearsome foes.
Not due to any lack of conviction – if anything, he thought that the monster-slaying was the most important part of a knight’s duties, even if it very rarely arose.
It was a knight’s task to wield strength in the service of Law, to be violent within very specific constraints.
He insisted on eggs, etc., because it forced the world into some semblance of order. His breakfast struck a blow for Law.