Chapter Nine #3
“Not you, then. Tell someone else. Nala and the RAS.”
“They haven’t come back. There’s war over yonder.
” Neb waved the cudgel behind him, in the vague direction of, in order, the river, the village, Dunshelm, Lastease, the lands of Eskerlund, Vellisport, all the other provinces of the kingdom, the northern gap, and all the other lands of men.
As gestures went, it was less than specific, but it got his point across.
“Someone else, then! Adventurers!” Bait bit her lip in frustration. “Sir Breakfast!”
“Rudyard,” said Neb.
“Him.”
“I don’t think he’d listen to either of us.”
Bait sat down beside him on the tree stump. She poked at a patch of ash with her foot. “He wants to eat me.”
“Sir Rudyard?”
“Nithscalpa. The dragon.”
Neb was unsurprised that his friend was on first-name terms with dragons.
“You could leave. You’re out of the Dungeon. I’ll be taking the cart to the castle in a few days – stay with us until then, and I’ll bring you as far as Lastease. And then . . . then go where you want.”
Bait shook her head. “It’s not just me. It’s—”
From Neb’s perspective, she followed this statement with a litany of croaks, shrieks, hisses and other strange sounds. The Dungeon Tongue is strange in the ears of outsiders. But Neb acknowledged that this was somehow a winning argument.
Summoned by names it recognised, Gloop oozed into view. The corridor slime picked its way carefully, its pseudopods gingerly avoiding direct sunlight.
Neb stared at the shambling slime, which by then was the size of a calf. “What’s that?”
“That’s Gloop. He’s a friend.” Bait drew her knife. “Do you want some?”
Neb let that pass without comment. “I can talk to Offa,” he suggested after a moment’s thought. “He knows all the castle folk.”
“Him?”
“We’re friends, sort of.” He saw the anger in Bait’s eyes, which only a few months before had been more readily in her teeth. “You went away! And he does know everyone in the keep.”
“All right. Offa, then. But you can’t tell him about me.”
Neb pondered a moment.
“We’d need to convince him.”
Bait opened her hands. Gold shone in the dappled light.
Bait hid in the woods for weeks, waiting for her plan to play out.
Neb departed for the castle, taking with him a few bits of Dungeon loot that Bait had brought down with her.
She’d intended for Neb to have it all, and the thought of Offa getting his horrible floury hands on it rankled – even if Bait was still rather vague on what people actually did with treasure, other than pile it up in corners of their lairs, or sleep on it.
She dared not go back up the mountain. Nithscalpa had not crawled out of his lair since he’d captured Sir Peledon, but Bait could tell the dragon was still alive.
That awful, unnatural heat still hung over the valley.
Sometimes, when a cloud passed in front of the sun or the wind sighed in the branches, fear seized her heart.
She longed for the sheltering roof of the Dungeon.
The sky was a horrible expanse, a wide open plain where the dragon could roam at will.
She was not alone in this fear. Nithscalpa had brought ruin to the lands around the Dungeon, burning and devouring at will.
The survivors faced a horrible choice – to rebuild with what little they had left, knowing that the dragon might return at any moment, or to abandon everything and take to roads already crowded with the hungry and the desperate.
Bait watched them from the eaves of the wood.
She watched families load their belongings onto carts and drag them down the dusty road, no oxen to draw them because the oxen were all burned.
She watched people in the village pool what little they had to eat, watched them gather around a bonfire and tell stories of better days and worse perils.
She eavesdropped on their talk and their songs, but felt no urge to join them.
Other than Neb, and Nala, she’d found few people in the surface world worth talking to.
Everyone else sensed her Dungeon nature.
She thought back to what she now considered to be a silly youthful obsession with King Arus, who wasn’t even her father anyway.
She didn’t have a father. She was a changeling, Dungeon-born.
Why, she had more in common with the dragon than these surface folk.
But even as she thought it, she knew it was unworthy of her. She could almost hear the minotaur’s snort of disappointment.
She dropped a piece of bark into Gloop. The slime had nearly doubled in size since she’d left the Dungeon, feasting on the undergrowth and sucking nutrients out of the soil. It left obvious trails through the forest, bright-edged in their zealous cleanliness.
“They think everything in the Dungeon is monstrous,” she whispered to Gloop. And the dragon was monstrous. It was a monster, after all. But monstrous wasn’t the same as evil. Gloop was a monster, but it wasn’t evil. Just being a monster wasn’t Nithscalpa’s sin.
Nor was the problem with the dragon’s nature.
All things had a nature – goblins tinkered, slimes digested, minotaurs fought, dragons were cruel.
But nature wasn’t everything. You could resist it, wrestle with it, shape it.
Old Clickglee had worked Bait into his traps, and made a place for her in the Dungeon.
The manticores had become Bait’s friends, even though they were creatures of claw and tooth and sting.
You couldn’t change your nature, but nature was only a starting point.
Nithscalpa’s dam, the dragon Nithaca, had been a fierce guardian of the Dungeon in Yrn Kyos’ day, but she discriminated in her cruelty, and only punished those who broke the Rules or trespassed in the Dungeon.
Nithscalpa chose to be evil, and used its nature as an excuse.
Bait’s nature was to keep silent, to hide, to avoid the entanglements of the surface.
Sometimes, that was harmless. Sometimes, that might even be good.
But, right now, it wasn’t.
Terror of the dragon had driven all the animals from the forest, but Gloop still slithered loyally by her side, and he’d grown a lot lately.
The next morning, the people of the village breakfasted on thin slices of lightly fried corridor slime. They did not know what it was, they did not know it came from the Dungeon. They only knew it tasted good and that it sustained them.
The next day there was more.
Every day after that, the strange food appearing as if by magic.
Even though Bait was quick as a shrike, cunning as a hagworm, she did not go unnoticed. She soon realised that the village sentries were deliberately leaving gaps for her to sneak through, that their guard dogs were tied up at night.
That they left an empty stool at the very edge of the firelit circle. She never sat there, but the offer cheered her.
The strange gifts ceased on the day Sir Rudyard and his retinue arrived.
Bait watched the adventurers from the eaves of the forest. Sir Rudyard rode right past her without noticing her hiding place in the old badger sett. And if he didn’t notice that, she thought sourly to herself, he’ll never survive below.
Not without help.
“Stay,” she told Gloop, then she set off up the slope.
It was the worst of treacheries for a Denizen to ally with the surface folk, or to guide outsiders through the Dungeon’s labyrinths and snares.
But the dragon had proclaimed she was not a Denizen.
He’d driven her from her home, turned the Dungeon against her!
Her heart was aflame with an unfamiliar righteous fury – how dare the dragon break the Rules!
How dare he call himself Master without earning the title!
As far as she was concerned, bringing in adventurers was wholly justified.
Neb had once told her that two wrongs did not make a right, but if you turned left and left again down certain twisted corridors on the Fourth Level, you’d end up going right. The Dungeon, for all its intricacies and secret ways, was far more comprehensible than the morals of the surface world.
When she reached the edge of the wood, she stopped for a moment.
She waited and watched, always conscious of the possibility that Nithscalpa was out hunting.
He might spot movement out of a corner of his good eye, and swoop down upon her.
She’d escaped being caught in the open once; the dragon would not spare her again.
Nothing wheeled in the moonlit sky. Bait gathered her courage and darted up the old road towards the Dungeon Door. Every time a cloud passed in front of the moon she held her breath, counted her heartbeats, fearful that each one might be her last.
The Dungeon Door was gone. The crevasse that Nithscalpa used to leave his lair was high up on the mountain slopes and guarded by sheer cliffs.
But there were other ways in, other doors.
I had shown some of them to her, on our explorations of the Dungeon.
As a child, Bait had pushed against them, making sure they were solidly closed.
The Rules say it’s the responsibility of every Denizen to watch against intruders, and she’d been so diligent then.
All the easily accessible doors were closed, and could only be opened from the inside.
Instead, she waded into the icy waters of the Buried River, gasping as the cold water slapped against her skin.
The river emerged from a crack in the rock, and it was possible – just possible – to squeeze through and climb up the narrow channel.
At least, the nixies did it. It was only when Bait was up to her neck in rushing water, pushing her right shoulder painfully under the lip of stone, that she recalled that nixies were water-spirits who could become liquid at will, which made it easier.