Chapter Eight
Nothing is so troublesome as a minor irritant that cannot be caught.
Once, a fly flew into the hollow of my cranium, and no matter how I snapped my jawbone and shouted and bent my will upon him, he would not leave.
The buzzing nearly drove me mad. If I numbered my foes – and I must confess, I have done so in exhaustive detail – Orphir would still be at the head of the list, but that nameless fly would have its place.
Similarly, there was a particular fox for whom Bait conceived a fierce hatred.
The animal had stolen rabbits from her traps four times now; after the second, she had laid snares within snares, layered traps so one would catch a hare, and the next would catch the fox as it sought to steal the carcass of the hare.
But this fox slipped through them all, mocking her goblin ingenuity.
She swore in all the tongues I’d taught her that she would catch this fox.
So, early that dreadful morning, she went out hunting.
Inside the Dungeon Door, Third-Sister was on guard, if that description encompasses “curled up in a ball sleeping, bat-wings shading her eyes from the sun, disturbed only when her beard or mane got tangled in the spikes of her tail”.
Somewhere in the recesses of the Entrance Hall, Gloop did whatever ooze does before breakfast.
“I brought back a deer yesterday,” said Bait. “Third-Sister ate well.”
“Manticores,” I reminded her, “are creatures of excess. It’s not wise to overfeed the guards.”
“I’m awake,” protested Third-Sister. “And we’re not creatures of excess.
That better describes a dragon. We are creatures of—” and here she belched a stink of venison “—elegant sufficiency. A limb for every occasion. Everyone else has their singular virtue, but manticores are polymaths. There’s only one other Denizen that’s our equal when it comes to adaptability.
” She smiled. “The clue is in our name.” Then, sphinx-like, she folded her wings back over her face and began to snore once more.
“Hmph,” said Bait, who had no interest in riddles.
It was a beautiful autumn morning, the sun so bright and the air so clear everything seemed graven on precious crystal. She left me sitting in the lap of my now-skeletal friend.
Bait made her way down the path, down the old road and across the scree-littered slopes to the forest. The sunlight cresting the eastern mountains streamed over her shoulder, casting her shadow before her like a loping giant. The first trap was not far from the tree line.
The fox had got there first. The head of a rabbit was all that remained, tangled in the remains of the snare, which she had hung amid the roots of a mountain ash. Blood stained the undergrowth. She extricated the rabbit skull from the snare; Gloop could have it, at least.
The ring of other traps was unsprung – the clever fox had defeated her once more.
She frowned, and so did the world. The sun darkened for a long moment as a terrible shape took flight. Bait pressed herself into the hollow of the roots, burrowing, hiding, fear squeezing the breath from her.
I watched, immobile – helpless! – from my vantage point up the slope by the Dungeon Door.
Nithscalpa circled once, glorying in his first flight after a long slumber. He’d just shed his skin – I could tell from the way the wing membranes glistened with moisture. He circled, then descended with awful grace, landing only a few feet from Bait’s hiding place.
He sniffed the air.
“Blood,” he said, “and meat. Show yourself, meat.”
Bait did not move.
“Show yourself,” rumbled the dragon, “or I shall burn this forest to cinders.” He raised his head and exhaled a gout of flame.
He was amused, I think, by his own new-found strength, for he had grown hugely in his slumber.
When he’d last emerged from his lair, he’d been fierce but scrawny, a long thin wyrm, all wings and tail and venom.
In the dragon-sleep, he’d waxed mighty. His breast was a furnace now, bigger than the hearth fire in the kitchens of the keep.
His limbs thrilled with muscle beneath steel-plate scales; where before he’d scuttled like a lizard, now he prowled like a tiger.
His head, too, was crowned with new growths of horn and bone, all crests and ridges to guard his vulnerable nostrils and eye.
The damaged socket was now sealed with a shield of bone. His good eye blazed with pride and hunger.
“I smell you there by the rowan tree.” He spoke in the human tongue.
Bait stood, the rabbit head dangling from her right hand. A little blood dripped from it.
Nithscalpa licked his lips. His mottled tongue was ash-black and red, like flowing lava. “Feed it to me.”
A whole rabbit would not have satisfied his hunger, or a whole warren of rabbits. He intended, I think, to fly down and prey on the fat cattle of the village. But he was playful, and drunk on power, and always wanted that thing which he did not have.
She walked towards the dragon. The courage it must have taken, to fight against her instinct to flee!
Even knowing that Nithscalpa was swifter than her, and fire was quicker still, few humans could have taken those slow, dreadful steps into the full presence of the dragon, to come within reach of those flesh-rending claws, that thundercrack tail, those endless rows of teeth.
To come so close as to see the little wisps of steam rising from the gaps between armoured scales.
“This?” she said, holding up the rabbit’s head. Her hand shook.
“That,” smirked Nithscalpa. Her terror was a feast for him.
“It’s my kill,” said Bait – in the Dungeon Tongue.
The dragon’s eye blazed. “What are you?” Suddenly, his head was right next to Bait. His tongue slithered and scraped over her skin, tasting her. “Human. Who are you?”
She kept walking up the slope. “I live in the Dungeon. Rules say I can. Rules say this kill’s mine.”
“How,” asked Nithscalpa, “did a human come to dwell in my Dungeon?” There was still amusement in his voice, but the joke was wearing thin.
“I don’t know,” said Bait. “I grew up below.” She was past the dragon now, clambering over the rocks. The Dungeon Door in sight.
“A human child.” Behind her, Nithscalpa licked his lips again.
“That’s my lair,” she said, without looking back. “The Entrance Hall.” By the Rules of the Dungeon, she would be safe there.
But she’d have to cross the threshold first. Corridors – and Outside – don’t count.
“Your lair, is it? You’re the guardian of my Dungeon?
” Nithscalpa chuckled. “Oh, there will be changes, now I am awake.” He licked his lips a third time, and a shudder ran through him.
“You! I know you. I remember that taste. Old Throte lied. Him I will deal with later. But you, mortal – you have been my kill to devour all these years, and I—”
Bait spun around and flung the rabbit’s head at Nithscalpa’s good eye. He flinched, just for an instant, and she ran.
She dodged to the side, into his blind spot.
His claws scored the mountainside inches away from her.
She sprinted for the threshold and the safety of the Dungeon. Only a few feet away from me, now, and the dragon rearing behind her, all flame and fury.
Had I a heart, it would have been in my throat, had I a throat.
I remember her grabbing me as she ran, catching me by the eye socket, gathering me to her as she flung herself to the right, into one of the niches in the wall of the Entrance Hall that had until recently been occupied by a gargoyle.
I remember seeing Third-Sister rousing from her slumber, lifting her head in bleary confusion, her face so very human even as she untangled her lion limbs from her bat wings and scorpion tail.
I remember hearing Gloop bubble with anticipation of some treat, for Bait always brought scraps when she came back from hunting.
Then—
Fire.
I survived.
You might say, “of course you survived, Cornelius, you’re telling this tale”. But I was already dead then, so it’s worth clarifying. Battered, chipped, cracked, scorched, but intact. Bait shielded me with her body. She saved me. Others she could not save.
Third-Sister was directly in front of the Door, and took the blast right in her human face. Human face, lion’s body, bat wings, scorpion tail, all reduced in a heartbeat to fine white ash.
Bait threw herself – and myself – into a side alcove, in the hopes of sheltering from the blast. No doubt the shelter helped a little, but the flames came roaring around the corner in a torrent of fire.
What protected us was Gloop. I do not know if the slime was instinctively seeking out its usual scraps and treats, or if it genuinely rushed to defend its mistress against a far greater threat.
But the cool gelatinous bulk of the corridor slime slithered between Bait and the fires at just the right moment.
Gloop did not burn. It sublimed, turning from semi-solid to hissing steam in a flash. The poor thing bubbled and thrashed as most of it evaporated in the impossible flame. Bait’s back and legs were scalded, but those were minor injuries compared to what might have been.
Dragonfire blasted the Dungeon Door to cinders.
It scorched the hall, shattered the pillars, licked the stairs to the second level.
A peal of thunder rolled through the dungeon, echoing through the labyrinth, on and on through endless corridors, through unplumbed depths, until it was swallowed at last by the immemorial silence of the roots of the world.
Stones split, the earth quivered, the mountain stumbled.
Bait, stunned and terrified, cradled me as rocks and a few equally stunned spikers fell from the ceiling. The air was too hot to breathe; Bait whimpered with each inhalation.
A terrible silence.
Then –
“I can hear your breathing, human.”
“Don’t move,” I whispered.
“I smell your burnt skin. I taste fear in your sweat.” The Entrance Hall flooded with golden light as Nithscalpa pressed his good eye to the doorway. “Where are you?”