Chapter Eleven
Mistress Clove came to dwell in the Dungeon.
For a time, she and I were roommates and tombmates, which was such an exceedingly frosty arrangement that even Gloop felt awkward around us, and it is no small thing for a boneless, shapeless slime to feel awkward.
Mistress Clove and I knew each other of old, and had not liked each other then.
Age had not improved either of us; death had not improved me, but I suggested it was worth trying on her.
Bait did not take my suggestion. Instead, Mistress Clove moved in with Only-Sister.
The manticore’s wounds were slow to heal.
She needed someone to care for her, and her lair was not far from the wraith-temple.
I do not know if Clove ever found what she sought in the whispering shadows, but she and the manticore became unlikely friends.
The cackling of old women echoed up from the Fourth, an unfamiliar sound in the Dungeon.
And Bait? Bait disappeared for weeks at a time, exploring regions of the Dungeon even I did not know, I who had once been Master here.
She showed me pages from her notebook. Sketch maps of places she called the Vale of Teeth, the Worm-Gnawed Caves, the Room of Faces.
She gave up hunting on the surface, and turned her back on the light.
She grew cave-pale from lack of sunlight and refused to speak anything other than the Dungeon Tongue.
Deeper she went, then deeper still, filling the blank pages in her notebook. There was, after all, one way for a human to unambiguously claim a rightful place in the Dungeon, one lair reserved for humans. Yrn Kyos had been human. Orphir had been human. All the other masters had been human.
I’d been human.
Bait feared she was human.
But if she had the Master’s Tower, that wouldn’t matter.
She talked about the tower, sometimes.
There’d been times when Bait was young when she hung on every word I spoke.
I’d been the font of all knowledge and enchanted her with magical tales of the world above.
(Of course, there had also been times in those early days when she’d ignored me and wandered off to play, and I could do nothing but grumble from my ledge.) I’d enjoyed having such an avid audience.
In life, I’d never been more alive than when I was in front of a crowd, selling them on a magic trick.
Orphir was a better wizard than I, but he’d never enchanted anyone.
After Bait returned from the world above, we’d never quite recaptured that knack of conversation.
She did not need my second-hand stories of either the world above or the Dungeon below.
She’d grown enough to explore on her own, to write her own book.
My only contribution a few sardonic comments in the margins.
But the tower – only I knew the tower.
She questioned me about it, and I’d warned her away.
I’d told her how absurdly lucky I was to survive.
Orphir and I sought the tower while drunk on our own genius, crowing to one another that we’d found the omphalos, the wellspring, the keystone, the root of all magic in the Dungeon.
If it was good enough for Yrn Kyos in the Dust Years, then it would suit two Crowhaven rogues.
We thought the tower was unguarded, you see.
We didn’t know about the traps left behind by Yrn Kyos.
We didn’t know about Throte.
Eight of us went in. Only two survived, and we were the two who’d stayed at the back, behind the sellswords and the brigands and the heroes. You’re all on your own, Bait, I told her. The risk is too great.
I don’t have the guts to go back there.
We come now to a part of the tale that is not pleasant to tell.
For you, I would square my shoulders (if I had them), clench my fists (if I had them) and march on with grim determination (grim determination I can furnish, marching’s harder when you’re a skull). For you, I’ll tell this part.
It began with rumours.
Young Neb was gone from us, but we got news through Mistress Clove.
She sometimes walked down the hill to the village to beg for necessities the Dungeon could not provide.
There’s coin aplenty in the Dungeon; chests of gold and silver, more statues with jewelled eyes than you can shake a ten-foot pole at.
Bait had brought Neb a king’s ransom in gold and treasure over the years.
But it’s hard to buy, say, a chicken or a new shoe with a gold coin that’s worth more than a village might see in a lifetime, and even if the poor village accepts the coin in trade, such wealth attracts adventurers who quite correctly ascertain that it’s easier to loot treasure from dead peasants than living monsters.
Most of Neb’s gifts ended up buried in a treasure trove in Gyul’s garden, where they remain to this day.
She returned with snippets of rumour. Clove had little interest in the wider world.
To her, the kitchen of Dunshelm Keep had been kingdom enough.
But, with Bait away on her subterranean expeditions, my own appetite for news grew.
Clove and Only-Sister would natter away, chewing over trivial bits of gossip from Dungeon or village, and I was left to piece together fragments into a patchwork.
I could hardly make my own way down the hill – one can only roll so far – so this is what I assembled from her snippets.
Of course, you know what happened better than I.
In tea leaves of limbless veterans and a fresh crop of deserters-turned-brigands, I deduced that the Chancellor’s Great Northern War had gone sour.
He overextended his reach, and the rebel barons took advantage of this weakness by rising up again, this time with more success.
In the prayers offered in the churches, in the critiques about the sermons of the village priest, I deduced that King Arus’ illness had worsened.
As the Princess Aldebara had not yet come of age, the Chancellor now had to divide his time between his duties as royal physician to the crumbling ruler and de facto ruler of the crumbling realm.
Then – in the sudden doubling of tithes and taxes, in the abrupt demands for food and drink and all manner of comestibles, I guessed that Sir Rudyard had guests.
The word went forth that the king was departing for the border marches – not, of course, because of the rebel threat, but because his physician declared that fresh country air would do the king good.
Little Dunshelm, the threadbare sock on the toehold of civilisation at the edge of the wild, was now host to the royal court of King Arus.
Black bread and bacon and tea was not the sort of fare to delight cultured courtiers – though, with revolt spreading, that was all they could expect and more than they deserved.
I ground my teeth, thinking of what this might mean. I hoped Bait would return soon.
The RATS got to me first.
Royal Antiquarian Tunnel Surveyors.
Such a bland title. It conjures images of scholars discussing abstruse points of history over tea and crumpets, does it not?
Sages with ink-stained fingers poring over great leather-bound ledgers of learning, Bait’s little Dungeon Book all grown up.
All the secret places of the kingdom, all the marvellous strange nooks and ruins catalogued so that they might be preserved and studied.
Let history be exalted and exhumed, let the wisdom of elder days be brought to light.
I can imagine the Chancellor proposing it in the same way we used to hawk cure-alls from the back of a cart.
There was some truth to it, of course, a few genuine scholars like Nala, a few impressive ledgers to be presented to the king, so he could turn the pages with his feeble fingers and squint at the sketches.
Look here, your majesty, and admire this illustration of a dragon’s skull, very like the one that incinerated your late wife.
Is it not much better to have such things flayed on parchment, to have their bones cast into bronze trophies?
The RATS who stormed the upper levels were of a different sort from the poor doomed adventurers of previous years.
They came prepared: unsporting maps of the Dungeon; weapons of cold iron that could wound the liquid form of nixies; silver-edged swords to cut wraiths; spears and nets to fight manticores; hammers to smash our few remaining gargoyles; iron helms to guard against spikers.
Now, I have never known an adventurer who was wholly sane.
In this I make no judgement; I’ve never known an interesting person who was wholly sane, either.
But to be an adventurer takes just the right mixture of desperation, curiosity and courage.
Ordinary people fear the unknown, but adventurers are drawn to the dark like moths to flame.
Yes, there’s treasure in dungeons, but there are safer ways to make one’s fortune.
It is something else – a desire for glory or knowledge, the lure of the subterranean abyss.
To know what’s around the next dark corner.
These new intruders had none of that. They were veterans of the Great Northern War, and they entered the Dungeon like soldiers.
No wary exploration, no cautious tap-tap-tap of the ten-foot pole, no sense of wonder.
Hatred of Dungeon-kind consumed them. Some Denizens they killed, others they captured.
The rattle of chains echoed through the halls.
They entered through the ruins of the old Entrance Hall, squeezing through the rubble to reach the old stair. Then, they descended level by level, room by room.
Click went goblin traps. Bones broke, flesh bled, RATS fell – and more came.
The halls echoed with the roaring of angry trolls. The intruders did not quail. Spears they set, fire and acid they brought, and the trolls fled.
Room by room, closer and closer.