Chapter Seven #3
If she didn’t like the courtiers, she could lay traps for them. All the history books spoke about grand staircases and towers and mighty castles. Even if she was a princess, she could still lay a tripwire. A fourth finger let go.
Still she dangled on the precipice of destiny.
Sir Peledon had sacrificed so much for her. He’d given up everything for his quest, and she had to finish it for him.
She let herself fall.
“I’m going home,” she said to Neb, “at midsummer.”
Six RATS entered the Dungeon Door.
Limping, bleeding, dragging their battered carcasses across the threshold, two RATS came back.
A strict accounting would put it at less than two.
Even if you credited them with the sacks of loot and overstuffed backpack slung over one shoulder, you would also have to take into account the blood loss, the broken limbs, the missing fingers, the dented helms, the acid-scorched armour, the cracked shields, the notched swords, the shattered sanity.
A lot of red ink in the debit column, right there.
Not even the sloppiest clerk could overlook the fact that, as soon as the two survivors staggered into the sunlight, one of the pair glanced at his companion, considered their prospects for an instant, compared the burden of his limping companion to the weight of the looted treasure – then shoved his fellow adventurer aside.
The lone survivor staggered off down the slope.
The other swayed.
“Perik,” he called after his companion. “Come back! Perik, damn you!”
Perik hunched his shoulders and kept going.
The other adventurer cursed, then collapsed.
By chance, he fell into my gorse bush, landing face to skull with me.
The whites of his eyes were mottled yellow; his skin deathly pale beneath all the gore and dirt and cobwebs and incongruous garlands of golden gorse petals. He was quite blind.
Hagworm venom does that to you.
“That didn’t go well, I take it,” I said. “What got you?”
“Who’s there?” he gasped.
“Oh, just someone who’s got relevant experience to your situation,” I said. I felt obliged to keep him company. “What got you?”
He mumbled about horrors of the underworld.
“You’ll have to be more specific.”
“Eyes . . . eyes in the dark . . . couldn’t move . . .”
“The Squinter got you!” I could not contain my amusement. There’s no other word for it – I cackled. “The Squinter! Oh dear, that’s . . . well, that’s unlucky. And you had those maps! I’d have expected you to do a lot better, considering.”
Memory of some old terror twisted his face. “All wrong!” he gasped. “In the Chasm Hall . . . it found us as we camped . . . a great beast . . .”
“Oh, that would be the minotaur. He’s new. Nice chap, on a good day.”
“Tore us asunder . . .”
“Well, he doesn’t have many good days.” I was fired with curiosity; where had these maps come from? Who had sent these adventurers? I had my suspicions, and wished I had a way of satisfying them. It’s hard to be inquisitive and immobile.
“Scattered,” he whispered, “lost. Lost. Wandering in the long dark hell. How long?”
I totted up the sunrises since they’d gone below. “Eleven days.”
“Eleven days.” He let out a wheezing groan. Blood trickled from his mouth and nose. “Felt like . . . lifetime.”
It was.
“Well then,” I said with as much cheer as I could muster. “Time to sit up, there’s a good fellow. Push yourself up with your right arm.”
His limbs twitched. He tried to speak, but there was little breath remaining in him.
“Come on! One last effort! Right arm!”
To his credit, he shoved himself upright, twisting in the middle of the gorse until he ended up with his back against the doorpost, his legs tangled in the bush.
“Now pick me up. I’m just to the left of your hand.”
He was too far gone to even question it. He fumbled about blindly until he found me, and dropped me in his lap.
“Good man. Lift your head now. Feel that warmth? It’s the sun on your face.”
“I can’t see it.”
“It’s there. You made it back to the surface. Few manage that. You made it out.”
He died with a smile on his face, this nameless adventurer. He was a creature of the sunlit lands.
He should never have gone below.
Perik survived. Three days later, he stumbled into Neb’s village, shivering and feverish.
They wrapped him up in a blanket, relieved him of any loose change and other minor treasures he had in his backpack, bemoaned that the RATS had inexplicably filled their bags with bits of carved stone and chunks of masonry instead of gold, and decided that it was up to the reeve to bring the stranger back to Dunshelm Keep.
He was loaded, not gently, into the reeve’s cart.
“Fire!” moaned the adventurer. “Eyes in the dark! Things crawling on the ceiling. Heret’s skull . . . burst asunder. Pierced by a thunderbolt!”
“Spikers,” muttered Neb. “Bait says you need an iron pot. Or a good helmet.”
“That girl’s mad,” said his father Gyul.
“That’s what they all say up at the castle.
A dungeon’s where she belongs, all right – a proper one, with chains and locked doors and whatnot.
Sir Rudyard did her a kindness by taking her in, and how did she repay him?
Murdering scullions and eating babies, by all accounts. ”
Neb bowed his head and kept his own counsel.
*
Perik was given the dubious honour of dining with Sir Rudyard; the content of their conversation was never reported to me, so I can only guess that it went something like this:
Sir Rudyard, cheerily: What ho, welcome back, how do you like your eggs?
Perik, feverishly moaning: Dead! All dead! The horror . . . the horror . . .
Sir Rudyard, awkwardly: Of course they’re dead. They’re cooked.
Perik, reliving untold horrors below: HE stirred in his sleep . . . the awful presence of him . . . like standing before a furnace . . . ah, all wrong, all wrong.
Sir Rudyard, demonstrating his utter inadequacy to the moment: I always find a good cup of tea quite revivifying.
Perik, in the throes of delirium: Death! Death comes for us all!
Sir Rudyard, his patience exhausted: Yes, but . . . after breakfast.
The sacks of relics and other treasures were emptied across Nala’s table.
The scrapings of the Dungeon – the heads of statues (and one misidentified gargoyle head), runic tablets, glass jars brimming with slime, fragments of ancient scrolls and broken holy talismans from the haunted temples, assorted teeth, a wet sack of monster bits that dripped ichor across the floor.
Nala shrieked like an enthusiastic crow and swooped upon these shiny prizes.
Bait hung back. The monster remnants troubled her. This was not due to squeamishness – this was a child who categorised insects by chewy, crunchy, or wriggly. She knew, too, the Rules of the Dungeon did not forbid murder – but because she feared she might see a familiar face among the giblets.
Neb peered about the interior of the South Tower.
The castle kitchens – always warm, always crowded, always a brimming cornucopia of things to eat – had seemed a wonder beyond comprehension to him.
Indeed, up until the recent feast-day, he’d assumed that the kitchen was the great hall of the keep that others had mentioned, and that Sir Rudyard and the other dignitaries would gather around the same table as Mistress Clove and the serving girls.
His sense of scale was still based on the little village in the hills.
When Bait spoke of living in a palace as a princess, he imagined something like Dunshelm Keep, perhaps a little more colour, a lick of paint or a stained-glass window; when she talked of the Dungeon, I suspect he envisaged something like a badger sett.
In years to come, he would storm both these places with fire and sword.
For now, he regarded a rather tatty curtain with a degree of awe reserved for the shroud of a dead saint.
“That’s that,” he whispered to Bait. “Nearly midsummer.”
“I’m leaving at midsummer.”
“That’s what I meant.”
“Oh.”
“Off to be a princess in a castle,” said Neb.
Nala was distracted by her work, and only half listening to their talk. She misinterpreted Neb’s statement as a question. “The White Palace.”
“What?”
Nala glanced up. “Princess Aldebara lives in the White Palace. Not a castle. It’s next to the Institute.”
Bait froze. “Who . . . who is Princess Aldebara?”
“King Arus’ daughter,” replied Nala absently, her attention returning to her work.
“Wasn’t she . . . wasn’t she lost?” asked Neb.
Nala waved a hand without looking at the two children. “That’s an old tale. She was only lost for a few weeks. The king sent out all his knights to look for her, but none of them could find her. It was the Chancellor himself who saved her and brought her home.”
“The princess was found?” Bait’s voice was very small in that moment.
I remember my own first expedition into the Dungeon, back when it was Orphir and me and a few hirelings.
It was, of course, a disaster. We delved unprepared into the labyrinth, and suffered for it.
But I chiefly recall that moment of revelation and hope when, after a long period of – how did that poor fellow put it?
– of wandering in the long dark hell, we caught an unexpected glimpse of sunlight.
It was like that for Bait, only in reverse.
“The princess was found,” she said again, laying the words like stone blocks. “The princess isn’t lost. She’s with King Arus.”
Tell them who you are.
But she wasn’t that person. She was herself.
Tell them Sir Peledon sent you.
The minotaur was wrong. All the other knights had failed, he said, but he’d been wrong then, too. All the knights had failed.
“This princess – what’s she like?”
“I’ve never met her. She’s said to be very clever, and gentle, and soft-spoken.
Quite unlike her mother, from all accounts – Queen Aldebeth was, ah, tempestuous.
But . . .” Nala lowered her voice. “I’ve also heard that she’s frail.
She hardly ever leaves the White Palace.
The king’s not well, either. Thank heaven for the Chancellor’s steady hand on the tiller of state. ”