Chapter Nine #5
Even I heard it, several levels up. Where was your humble narrator during all this?
Why have I related the intrigues of greasy scullions, of justly exiled hags, of a knight who by his own admission is at least half toast even before he meets the dragon, instead of telling of my own great adventures?
The truth is that manticores, for all their boastful tales of being creatures of infinite resource, with claws and teeth and spikes and wings and livers and so forth, are sorely lacking in hands.
I suppose Only-Sister could have carried me in her jaws, but she argued that she would have need of her teeth.
So, I’d been given to the goblins like an unwanted vase, to be propped up on some shelf and forgotten about.
Oh, I had a role in the plan. I was to remind Clickglee and his tribe of what needed to be done in advance of the dragon-slaying.
Once, I was Master of the Dungeon, and then I was a memorandum.
So I sat on my shelf in the Trapsmiths’ Arcade, and listened.
Off beyond the Hall of Pillars, Only-Sister yowled, hunting and being hunted by the dragon’s partisans.
Down in his lair, Nithscalpa snored, while the manticore bellowed and rattled her chains.
Ard ard ard echoed Sir Rudyard’s platitudes, like the barking of a scrappy little dog, and I could tell from the echoes that the intruders were close at hand.
“It’s time, Clickglee.”
The trap was simple by goblin standards. I’d had many arguments with the trapsmiths over it, fending off proposals to add rotating blades or hidden trapdoors or poison gas vents. “All it needs,” I insisted, “is a portcullis. A big heavy one.”
A big heavy one was duly procured. They salvaged it from the wreckage of the Entrance Hall, so it was a little melted, but still fit for purpose.
The other part of the trap, of course, was the bait.
Not our own dear Bait, but a pile of weapons.
Salted with gold and gems, too – there’s a knack to making a treasure hoard look perfectly enticing.
I watched a master artisan at work, Clickglee placing a gold coin just so, or polishing up a ruby and setting it at an angle to catch the light.
*
“My word!” said Sir Rudyard. Beside him, Offa said something quite unprintable; had I hands, I would have clapped them over Bait’s impressionable ears.
“Should we . . . ?” said Offa, in a tone that suggested that they absolutely would regardless of what Sir Rudyard decided.
“It is a dead end.” Rudyard peered into the side chamber, completely overlooking the concealed portcullis. “But those blades might be, uh, enchanted weapons of dragon-slaying or—”
Offa charged past him, greedy hands reaching for that perfectly placed ruby. That broke whatever thin crust of discipline restrained the others. Half a dozen rushed in before the trap triggered.
Down came the portcullis with a crash.
Up went the uproar, the shouts of alarm. Those left outside rushed to the aid of those trapped within. It was a very heavy portcullis; the porters and bearers recruited in the village threw down their burdens and joined in trying to bend bars or lift gates.
Inch by groaning inch, everyone united in one single heroic effort, the portcullis rose. Slowly, slowly, they escaped that part of the trap.
But while they laboured, no one noticed goblin hands reaching from the shadows. Ropes and poles, hammers and chisels, leather and wood and steel – trapsmiths make much better use of these things than humans.
After, there was much alarum and confusion.
It’s one thing to put, say, a quill pen or a half-eaten apple down and then forget where you left it, but it’s something else entirely to mislay the baggage for an entire dungeoneering expedition.
The humans huddled together, fearful of the dark, unsure of the path forward.
Had they keener sight, they’d have seen the goblins just beyond the torchlight.
“We should turn back,” argued one guard. “Take the gold and go, before our luck runs out.” (Actually, he was considerably more vocal and earthy than that.)
Sir Rudyard smoothed down his moustaches. Then he picked up an ancient spear from the pile of loot and handed it to a nearby villager. One by one, he armed them all, and there were exactly enough weapons to outfit all the bearers. “I would call that,” he said, “a sign of good luck.”
It wasn’t. It was a sign that Pinshriek had fingers enough to count all fourteen villagers.
Now all the humans were armed, and the goblins had work to do.
“We press on.”
On through the Trapsmiths’ Arcade. I watched them parade past from my little nook, one by one.
Sir Rudyard in the front, hoping for a convenient signpost marked “this way to the dragon”.
Two boys I guessed to be Offa and Neb from Bait’s descriptions, in that one was greasy and the other in dire need of a comb.
Then a bristle of spear-carrying guards and villagers, and it was a miracle they had not yet impaled each other.
Our would-be dragon-slayers did not fill me with confidence.
I’d known genuine adventurers, the sort recruited by the RAS, the sort who might actually have had a chance of killing Nithscalpa.
They’d had a chance of killing me, back when I was Master, back before I died.
Mad bastards, all of them, troubled childhoods, unspeakably violent.
As dangerous as any Denizen. I was very glad of Old Throte’s stony hide between me and their swords.
None of those who followed Sir Rudyard had that sort of killing edge.
I worried Bait did not, and I worried she did.
The kobolds came out of the dark in the Chasm Hall.
A swarm of lizard-children, the tallest of them barely three feet tall, bird-boned and delicate in their movements, comical until they sprang at you.
It was like fighting a swarm of plucked chickens, if chickens carried knives.
One man went down, a monster clawing at his face, and Offa came in with his big clomping foot and kicked the kobold clean into the pit.
He goggled at his own bravery, and only then remembered the spear in his hand.
After that, it was butchery – but they’d all been blooded then, they’d seen that the horrors of the Dungeon could bleed if you poked them hard enough. Fired up with battle fury, Sir Rudyard led them down the smoky chasm before anyone could consider the wisdom of descending into a dragon’s lair.
The caves below were awash with fumes. A hellish miasma set them all coughing and choking. “It can’t be far,” said Sir Rudyard. “Other scholars report similar foul, ah, exhalations”. He waved his bestiary, although the smoke was so thick that the gesture was lost on everyone.
Offa, being used to the smoke of the kitchen, had the sense to tie a kerchief around his face.
“The air’s clearer this way,” said Neb. He led the company forward.
Then the worst part of the journey. Billowing fumes turned the caverns into a phantasmagoria.
Faces in the smoke – were those lurking monsters, or carven relics, or your companions made monstrous, red-eyed and scaled with grime?
The walls crawled with curlicues of smoke, skin crawled with sweat, many-legged things crawled beneath clothing and armour.
Black centipedes as long as your arm. Hagworms with the faces of old women, the teeth of serpents.
The heat sapping their strength, breathing an ordeal, panic rising, no way out, no way forward, heartbeats hammering in their ears like drums in the deep, the certain terrible knowledge, no way out, no way out, no way out, daylight a fleeting memory, an impossibility.
Only the Dungeon. Only the dark.
I wasn’t there, of course, but I remember it from my own experiences in the Dungeon. If I may leave Sir Rudyard and his company in a living hell for a moment, I shall describe a portion of the Dungeon’s layout that will soon become important. Lacking hands to hold a pen, let me draw with words.
On the western side are the halls you have already been introduced to – the Trapsmiths’ Arcade, the Hall of Pillars, the old Entrance, and the like.
Descend the western stairs, and you get to the old temple quarter, the former lair of the manticores, lots of wraiths – and the secret door by which Bait admitted Rudyard and company.