Chapter Ten #4
“The dragon is dead. His death throes echoed through the whole Dungeon. Everyone heard him perish, child, and every Denizen knows you did it.” I gave her my best grin, which was identical to every other expression I could make, but in this case it was as heartfelt as I could muster.
“I’m proud of you. Slightly terrified, too, but mostly proud.
I’d never thought to know a dragon-slayer. ”
“Will they let me stay?” She opened her eyes and sat up the fraction of an inch the tunnel allowed. “The dragon said—”
“The dragon,” I said, “was never the Master. His word is not the Rule. There’ll be another Levelling, I expect, and some will speak for you.”
“Others won’t.”
“You brought humans into the Dungeon, Bait.”
“There were already humans before.”
“Ah, you’ve decided you’re human again, have you? Not a fearsome changeling?”
“I don’t know what I am.”
“Humanity is overrated, in my experience.”
Her eyes were bright in the dark. “But you were human when you were Master. Orphir’s human.”
“Yrn Kyos was human. The Master’s position is unique in the Dungeon hierarchy. Nevertheless, as one approximation of human to another, well done. You deserve a rest, so sleep. I’ll watch over you.”
I watched her try to sleep again. She was clearly exhausted.
As a child, she could sleep anywhere; in my tomb, in the crook of a corner, in a treasure chest, suspended in a goblin hammock over a chasm.
But she was losing the knack of innocence.
Her body craved sleep, but her mind roamed down unfamiliar labyrinths of thought.
“What’s wrong?”
“Sir Peledon.”
“What of him?”
“He didn’t fight for me.”
“I wouldn’t read too much into that. There can’t be anything much left of that man after all this time. The spell’s devoured him.”
“You don’t know that.”
I knew that very well. When I was Master I’d used similar spells – only when I cast a shapechanging curse, I did it properly and turned the wretches into snails or rats or in one case a potted cactus.
I didn’t accidentally turn a mighty-thewed knight into a far mightier and much angrier minotaur – but I digress.
The point was that I was absolutely certain that nothing remained of Sir Peledon except a few fading echoes or flashes of memory, which were no more the man than a lingering smell.
But I could not bring myself to be so blunt with her.
“Maybe he will surprise us again,” I said, “but he is gone below again, or so the goblins say.”
“One day,” she said, “he’ll come back.”
“I hope he will,” I said. “Now sleep.”
“I’ll make him come back.”
The Levelling went in Bait’s favour.
Nithscalpa had been the loudest voice challenging Bait’s right to remain, and he was dead now.
Balor the Squinter was still alive, but was licking his wounded eyeball, which is such a horrible mental image we shall pass over it in haste.
And while bringing humans into the Dungeon was a terrible breach of the Rules, they’d left empty-handed, and the door had closed behind them.
Bait swore she would never do such a thing again, and that was that.
Also, the second item on the agenda of the Levelling was the division of the hoard, now that the mess of hot gold and hotter dragonblood had cooled enough to actually be divided, and they were more eager to get to that than to chew over Bait’s transgressions.
They agreed that she could remain as a provisional Denizen, her standing to be reviewed later if she happened to get disembowelled, whereupon her innards would be examined by a panel of experts chaired by a mimic.
The ghast did not attend the Levelling, although one of his fungal giants watched proceedings in silence, and seemed satisfied.
Life in the Dungeon returned to what it had been before the dragon’s rise.
No longer was the blanket of darkness rent by garish gouts of flame.
It was quiet enough to hear the distant drip of water trickling over carvings whose meaning was lost long ago, quiet enough to hear the spikers scuttle across the ceiling.
Time became slug-slow again, undifferentiated hours oozing through the endless corridors.
Time to brood, to fall into strange feral reverie, discovering unsuspected meanings in the cracks in plaster or the feel of stone under bare feet.
Once more, monsters lurked in their lairs, ears pricked, nostrils sniffing the chill air for signs of intruders – and there were a few such intruders, mostly treasure hunters drawn by rumours of the dragon’s hoard.
The old door was destroyed and the Wychwood Way shut, but adventurers are like mice – leave treasure unguarded, and they wriggle their way in to nibble at it.
Monsters slain in battle were replaced.
Chopped-up troll bits – those unseared by fire or acid, anyway – sprouted new limbs and scuttled away into the shadows to regrow.
Sacs of fungus and dust grew in the corners of the Arcade, and over the course of the year swelled and burst, spilling out a greenish fluid and a fresh wet goblin.
Once the dragon’s corpse had cooled, hagworms ate it, their old-women faces smeared with sticky gore, their old-women voices nattering away about what a lovely piece of dragon it was, can’t usually get such nice dragon these days, oh no.
There are always things in the dark.
Bait tried very hard to find it all unremarkable.
She tried not to think about how strange the castle folk or even Neb would find the ways of the underworld.
She sought to forget what Nala had told her about magic deep-rooted, about the secret veins beneath the world.
She did not want to think thoughts from the surface.
She tried to go back to sleep, to find her way back to how things used to be – not just before the dragon, but before she’d ever left the Dungeon.
For a while, she ran with the new goblins, shrieking and skulking through the corridors, competing in childish games to see who could lay the most elaborate trap (she usually lost) or who could fit the most spiker-eggs up their nose (she won, being considerably bigger than the goblins, until one day a contender burst from a sac; the other goblins named him Bignose, and Bait retired from the sport), or hide-and-seek in the dark, where the aim was not to find the best hiding place amid the nooks and crevasses, but to be stock-still and silent, not even breathing (she won, and it worried me).
Victory can be a bitter cup. You set out to reclaim the lost magic of Yrn Kyos, and you end up the keeper of a madhouse of eccentric monsters.
You set out to defend your place in the Dungeon from a vengeful dragon, and find you’ve grown too big to fit back in.
Bait fought against growing up with all her might, but she was undeniably human, and you can never go back. We grow, or we die.
I’d done one; I really hoped she’d pick the other.
All the games felt hollow to her, even though she played them over and over.
Her laughter became forced, her footsteps leaden.
She gave up hunting in the woods. She hid from the sun with all the wariness of a troll, and grew cavefish-pale.
I worried about her, of course, but what could I do?
I was an ornament on a shelf. I tried to draw her back into her studies, baiting her with the gorier bits of history, but she scorned my lessons.
“Let us return to our study of history. I believe, before we were rudely interrupted by the late and unlamented Nithscalpa, that we were discussing the Twilight of the—”
“I don’t need to know any of this,” she said.
“What you need now may not be what you need in future. Sitting there, you don’t technically need your limbs, but you still wouldn’t want anyone to chop them off.”
“What, you’re going to teach me to grow new limbs, are you?”
“Would that I could! You’re wilfully misconstruing the metaphor.”
“I don’t need to know what that means, either,” she said in a huff.
“Sir Peledon employed me to give you an education befitting a young lady. Even though he’s gone, we should finish out your curriculum, or at least those portions I am equipped—”
“Can you teach me magic?” she demanded.
“I, um, ah – well, firstly, it’s not on the curriculum that I agreed with the minotaur.”
“He won’t know.” She sniffed. “He doesn’t know anything any more.”
“Second, it’s not a trivial request. I studied under Master Pentsable for years, learning mathematics, astrology, correspondences, alchemy, natural and unnatural philosophy, thaumaturgy—”
“And none of that helped, you said! You couldn’t do any real spells until you came to the Dungeon. That’s what you told me! There’s only magic down here, not up there!” I had rarely seen her so visibly angry.
“Bait, what’s wrong? What brought this on so suddenly?”
“Can you teach me magic or not?”
I ground my teeth. “Can I? Yes. Maybe. Somewhat. Bait, you’ve seen how easy it is for spells to go awry.
I think the only reason I had any success at all is because I sowed my spellcasting, so to speak, on barren soil.
I learned to make do with the faintest traces of magic.
The Dungeon is, as you say, considerably richer in sorcery – which makes it all the more perilous. ”
“Don’t care.”
“I do.”
“So you won’t teach me?”
“I didn’t say that. But patience is a vital—”
She snarled like a troll and stomped off.
I learned, much later, what had precipitated her foul mood.