Chapter Six #4
They searched the castle, the village and the surrounding countryside.
Once they had decided what they were looking for, they found plenty of signs.
Those tracks in the mud? Goblins have feet very like foxes.
That fallen fence? Goblin sabotage, the little bastards creeping in at night with shovels, gnawing at the foundations.
A horse throws a shoe? Goblin work, pulling nails out of the animal’s hoof with their sharp teeth.
Poorly maintained weapons in the armoury?
Certainly some goblin had climbed in through a window and smeared rust on the blades.
One of the chickens stops laying after years of yeoman service? Goblins.
They found plenty of clear and undeniable evidence of goblin mischief, but no actual goblins.
At mealtimes, the people of the castle traded old stories of subterranean perils. The servants and a few of the guards gathered in the kitchen to eat. Bait lurked in the corner, still nervous of crowds, but she could not resist eavesdropping, hungry for news of the Dungeon.
“That dragon hasn’t flown forth in years,” said old Helric. “But I remember it well. Whole sky over the mountain lit up like blood and fire, and the earth shook. Be a bad day when it flies forth again.”
Bait muttered that the sky over the mountain lit up like blood and fire every morning, for the mountain lay due east of the border castle, and that everyone knew that Nithscalpa was asleep.
“The dragon’s dead,” said another. Bait couldn’t recall his name, so when she related these events to me, she referred to him as Hairy-Nose, so Hairy-Nose he shall be until the world’s end.
“But there’s a worse peril now. My cousin saw it – a sphere o’ eyes, floating o’er the forest!
That beastie’s the Master of the Dungeon now, and I fear its dread gaze has fallen upon us! ”
Bait snorted at the suggestion that Balor the Squinter could be Master of the Dungeon.
“There are caves out by Woolpit that run deep,” observed Suhana, one of the serving girls. “My father always said those caves were part of the Dungeon. He said if you went deep enough, the wraiths would eat you.”
Bait could not resist correcting Suhana. “Wraiths don’t eat. They’re dead.”
If only she had stopped there.
“They drain life force. You get colder and colder when they touch you, only you don’t notice because it’s like falling asleep. You’ve got to watch the moss. When it withers, you know they’re hungry.”
A silent chill fell over the kitchen, like a wraith at the feast.
The assembled servants stared at Bait.
“Who’s this?” asked Hairy-Nose.
“Ealdufrida,” said Suhana. “The orphan they rescued.”
“Been reading the lord’s bestiary, have we?” remarked Helric. He was unconvinced by Sir Rudyard’s reliance on scholarship, being of the opinion that knowledge was a dangerous thing.
“Eel can’t read,” mumbled Offa through broken teeth.
They’d set up the boy’s sickbed in a corner near the kitchen hearth, so he could stay warm while he healed and his great-aunt could watch over him.
Various limbs were bound up with bandages and splints, and his face was purple-black with bruises.
Mistress Clove had a rota of serving girls ladling broth into Offa’s gullet.
Bait, by the way, was exempted from this duty after she ignored the ladle in favour of picking up the whole cauldron and nearly drowning Offa in chicken soup. She’d claimed misunderstanding.
“She can,” said Suhana. “I saw her in the chapel.”
“Where,” hissed Mistress Clove, “would a peasant girl learn to read?” The kitchen possessed a big leather-bound book of recipes and herb lore.
Clove could not read a word of it, but liked to win arguments with the equally illiterate steward by dragging it down from its sacred shelf, pointing to some random recipe and claiming that the wisdom of ages and pages was on her side.
“Maybe the wood-hag taught her.” Helric laughed as he said this, but without any discernible humour.
Bait had the belated sense not to offer any further corrections along the lines of “actually, I was taught to read by a talking skull of remarkable wit and erudition; by the by, Mistress Clove, he knew you when you were both considerable younger, and even though he’s a dead and fleshless skull, he aged more gracefully than thou.
” Instead, she slunk away to her corner.
The conversation moved on to other matters.
Mistress Clove perched on her customary stool by Offa’s sickbed.
Spying from the pantry doorway Bait thought that she resembled nothing so much as a gargoyle carved from dried meat.
Then the old woman caught sight of Bait, and her lips twisted in what might have been a knowing smile.
“Changeling,” muttered Mistress Clove to herself.
I had not taught Bait about changelings.
There were none left in the Dungeon. I thought there were none left in all the world.
They were a creation of the wizard Yrn Kyos – in his latter years, the inhaling-mercury-fumes era.
Late in his unnaturally prolonged life, Yrn – I shall call him by the familiar Yrn, as if I knew the man; I did spend several decades sitting in his chair, after all.
Colleagues in Dungeon mastery across the divide of centuries.
Late in life, Yrn justifiably feared that some rival wizard or avenging adventurer might slay him, so he fortified the Dungeon with ever more traps and monsters.
The changelings – vat-grown duplicates of humans – were not the most fearsome of these monsters.
No razor-sharp claws, no chitinous hides, a reasonable number of eyes.
Considering a wizard did it, they were restrained compared to abominations like Balor the Squinter.
But being apparently human made the changelings all the more horrific.
The Dungeon is a place of horror, but it’s down there, under the earth, beyond the dark threshold.
Heroes go down into the dark and return with treasure or scars; monsters creep out of the Dungeon and raid the surface, but there’s always that dividing line, that clear threshold between above and below.
Changelings, with human faces and Dungeon hearts, violated this division.
The Dungeon denizens feared adventurers more than any other danger, because adventurers worked together, spear and sword, shield and spell as one, all united against the dark.
Whatever differences they had were erased by the common struggle against the perils of the underworld.
But if you could not trust your fellow adventurers, if the Dungeon might be among you wearing a human face, then that unity of purpose was broken and all was lost.
Yrn Kyos was long gone, his changeling vats derelict.
But the fear of changelings lived on, remembered in stories and superstitions.
Changelings, the tales said, could not abide the touch of cold iron or holy water, or the sound of church bells.
Otherwise, they felt no pain, nor discomfort from extreme heat or cold.
They drank blood, the tales warned, they stole the breath of newborn infants, and they could take the faces of those they murdered.
Most of all, the tales warned, the changelings knew strange and secret things no human should know.
“These yolks are broken,” complained Sir Rudyard.
Bait, already irritated at having to carry the heavy breakfast tray all the way up to the solarium, said nothing.
“The bread is too hard. The tea is lukewarm.” He might have added this is a fallen, godless world and we are all sinners.
“I’ll tell cook,” said Bait, who wouldn’t.
“Also inform her that we have guests arriving.” Sir Rudyard gestured at a letter on his desk, with no less than three impressive wax seals, one of which reminded Bait of her precious silver coin.
Bait picked it up and read a few words – “ROYAL” and “ANTIQUARIAN” leapt out at her – before Sir Rudyard firmly retrieved it.
Serving girls reading his correspondence without a by-your-leave was a manifestation of disorder.
“Tell cook to begin planning a banquet in their honour. Seven guests from the capital, as well as all the senior members of my household, and various dignitaries from the neighbourhood . . .” Sir Rudyard appeared to divine the correct number in the entrails of his eggs. “Tell her to plan for some two dozen.”
Bait nodded.
“Tell me, Ealdufrida, how are you getting on in the kitchens?”
Bait shrugged.
“Is that poor boy recovering from his fall?”
Bait shrugged, which Sir Rudyard took to mean as well as can be expected, but which Bait meant as I didn’t have a chance to put sharpened spikes at the bottom of the stairs.
She wished the lord would dismiss her, or better yet get distracted by his breakfast so she could steal the letter and read it.
Instead, Sir Rudyard turned the awfulness of his full attention on her.
“I must tell you, I fear, that no relative has come forward to claim you. I’ve sent messengers to all the nearby villages, to no avail.”
On the wall of the solarium was a map of the known world.
Dunshelm was near the bottom right corner, with nothing between it and the edge of the utter unknown except some jagged tooth-like mountains and a scrawled image of a dragon.
But up and left, north and west went roads, through the settled lands of Eskerlund and Crowhaven all the way to the crowned city.
Her father King Arus dwelt there.
“Did you send messengers there?” she pointed at the capital.
“I did, as a matter of fact. Not about you, of course! No, I sent a report about this recent spate of, ah, rumblings underground. Our guests include heroes and exorcists who will drive away any lingering traces of, ah, malicious influence.” Rudyard sipped his tea cautiously, perhaps blaming goblin sabotage for its insufficient temperature.
“It’s good that they responded so promptly to my letter. Proper order, eh?”