Chapter Eleven #3
No doubt he spoke to Orphir, too, when I was busy decomposing. But the power behind that door was not the power he wanted. He wanted to rule the surface world, not destroy it.
Bait probably said, “What’s behind the door?”
And the ghast replied with a word that exists only in the Dungeon Tongue, for the surface world has no conception of it. Let me translate it, inaccurately and inadequately, as them.
Imagine wild magic given form and flesh and hunger.
Imagine things that cannot be imagined, or described, except with babbling about eyes and tentacles and using the word “eldritch” a lot.
If magic is the loose change lost under the cushions of a couch, then the things down there are the treasure hoard buried beneath the floorboards of reality.
Tarnished and befouled, sunk in such a shit-pit that even the vilest, most degenerate wretch would hesitate.
Imagine them set free. Imagine them pouring down the hillside in a cataclysmic flood.
Oh, they’d rescue the imprisoned Denizens – their cousins many levels removed, both born of the same strange magic – but the flood would not stop there.
On and on they’d rampage. Dunshelm, Lastease, Eskerlund – and farther still.
Who can plumb that pent-up reservoir? Who knows how deep the Dungeon goes?
The surface, when you think about it, is thinner and frailer than onion skin, a mere wisp of green-and-sunlight clinging to the rocky shell of the world below.
There are more horrors beneath your feet than can be imagined.
I think, if you glimpsed even a fraction of what lay beyond that door, you would flee back to the sunlit lands and never contemplate opening it.
But Bait was different.
Desperate.
And in that moment she was willing to burn everything above to preserve everything below.
“How do I open that door?”
The ghast smiled. “No Denizen can open it. Only the Master.”
So she climbed.
Retracing her steps, back through the caves, through the labyrinth, up the long stairs, back to the levels of her childhood.
Back to corridors where she knew every inch of the ground, every crack and imperfection in the stone – now rendered unfamiliar by spilled blood.
She walked through chambers where the silence was different now, with an absence of lurking monsters.
She passed through the lair of Only-Sister, stepping gingerly through the aftermath of battle.
The manticore had lost her freedom; a dozen humans had lost blood, organs, limbs and lives.
She passed through the Trapsmiths’ Arcade.
All the traps had been tripped. Every pit yawned, every tilting block was tipped at an angle.
Underfoot a litter of needles and darts and snapped tripwires.
The warren of side passages appeared empty, and she was too big now to squeeze back into her old haunts.
“Clickglee?” she called. “Anyone?”
Only silence.
She moved on.
By my tomb she halted for a long moment.
Did she sense, maybe, a strange yet familiar presence?
Some echo or scent of the one who’d taken me?
It had taken Fuglog several days to find Bait in the depths, and more time had passed in her search for the ghast. Surely no discernible trace could have survived, but Bait was a strange child.
The stones spoke to her. Soot stains on the ceiling spoke of many torches.
Scrapes and scratches on the walls meant armoured intruders.
The last of hesitation or backtracking suggested they had known where they were going. The RATS had returned.
“Cornelius?” she said softly.
“Gloop.” The slime oozed out of a crack in the plaster.
Bait knelt and cradled it – and, because she was also a practical child, sheared off a portion of the jelly with a flensing knife.
She had not eaten in days. The ghast, being a gracious host, had given her a portion of mushrooms from the deeps.
Bait, not being a foolish guest, had thanked the monster and said she’d eat them later.
She threw them into a bottomless pit and washed her hands thoroughly in the Buried River.
She interrogated Gloop around mouthfuls of Gloop.
“Were you hurt?”
“Gloop.” A defiant, proud gloop.
“Do you know where Clickglee went?”
“Gloop.” A note of sorrow.
“Or where they took Cornelius?”
“Gloop.” Uncertainty. A quiver ran through the slime. Bait frowned.
“What is it?”
“Gloop.”
She stood. “I can’t stay. I’m going to the tower.”
Gloop flung itself at her feet, clinging and sticking to her, pleading with her to change course. But the slime was small, those days. She could just step out of it.
“I have to go.”
And so Bait set off for the Tower of Yrn Kyos. She passed through the Chasm Hall, and on down through the caves, through the dragon’s lair. The carcass had been picked clean by hagworms, but Nithscalpa’s skull leered at her out of the moonlight that filtered down the chasm above.
“If the Master’s Tower is empty, then I am Master here,” she whispered to herself, and looked up.
Far, far above, on the lip of the crevasse, was the tower.
The moon was full, and it seemed in that moment that the tower belonged more to the lunar sphere than the Dungeon.
The dark below held few fears for Bait. The tower was something else entirely.
It was on the surface, above the Dungeon, but there was no way to reach it from outside.
Sheer cliffs guarded it on all sides. The only way to reach it was through the Dungeon.
No Denizen could go there. It was for the Master alone, and there was no Master now.
When Orphir and I made our attempt, we wandered in the Dungeon for weeks, searching for the way to the tower.
Half-starved, half-mad, half-dead, half-unable-to-count, we staggered out onto the surface in a daze.
We blinked in the grey autumn morn. We drank in light like men dying of thirst. The tower resembled a lighthouse on a rocky island surrounded by a sea of mist, and we were shipwrecked sailors struggling up the shore.
We could see nothing of the surface lands below.
Only the tower, that gaunt grey sentinel, that lonely spire.
In that moment I remember thinking that Yrn Kyos must have been a very great fool to live all alone, only monsters for company.
It was sweet then to be alive, and it would have been sweeter still if we’d had anything to eat or actually drink.
Metaphorical drinking of light fills no stomach.
We lay there gasping for a long while. One of the sellswords staggered about the little island of rock, peering over the cliffs that guarded it on all sides.
All were plainly unclimbable. He drew his sword in a manner that suggested the sales contract had expired and it was time to renegotiate our arrangement.
“This is a dead end, you—” and then he said a very rude word that I won’t echo here.
In fact, I have spared your delicate ears a great amount of profanity.
Adventurers are not well-spoken in general.
It comes with the occupation, I fear. When one deals with horrors that are often nameless, or unspeakable, or unutterable, or simply indescribable, flexible profanity is the only solution.
“You said we wouldn’t have to go back down into the dark again. How will we get out of here? Sprout wings?”
I dragged up the dregs of my showmanship.
“Friends! Do not be dismayed by this last trial. This is the Tower of the Master! If we hold it, we shall be masters of the Dungeon. We’ll have the magic to kindle torches in the dark, to open all the doors.
We’ll conjure you a royal road to march home on, proof from all harm.
All the loot you can carry and more besides shall be yours! One last effort, I pray you!”
“And maybe we will make them sprout wings,” muttered Orphir. “Who knows what magic we’ll have when the tower is ours?”
Stones fell from the top of the tower. We all looked up, and saw the gargoyle perching there, looking down at us with glittering obsidian eyes.
He spread his wings – which were by that point wholly non-functional, but the act of spreading them dislodged yet more stones and bits of moss and dirt to rain down on us, so it had the desired impact.
We all cowered as the shadow of his wings blocked out the sun, and the Dungeon dark returned.
His voice was a prison door crashing closed.
“There is nothing for you here,” said he. “The way is shut. The Master commanded it. Go away if you value your lives.”
“Your Master’s dead,” shouted back Orphir.
“We think,” I added. “He hasn’t been seen in centuries.”
Orphir glared at me, then continued. “His throne is vacant. But the Rules he laid down demand that the Dungeon have a Master.”
“And we volunteer!” I shouted. “We’ll do it! We’ll take on the burden of ruling this Dungeon.”
Throte cocked his head. “I am bound to the service of the Master, and his last command to me was to guard the tower. No Denizen may enter here, on pain of death. No stranger, either. Only the worthy may enter. Consider that before you cross the threshold.” With that, he withdrew.
“A very rude word,” said the sellsword. “How do we fight a damn talking statue? The bastard won’t bleed if we stab him.”
“Weren’t you listening?” I said. “Clearly, it’s a test of courage. If you don’t think you’re worthy, they eat you – but if you are worthy, you can claim the throne. And I say to you, my good fellow, that we have proved our worth by getting to this threshold. The tower’s but a formality!”
He wavered.
“We have no other choice but to go on,” said Orphir. “Something, the door.”
Something, I should clarify, was not the man’s actual name. It was along the lines of Kurt, or Khul, or Kurk. Something rough and sharp, appropriate for one of our loyal hired brutes.
Something opened the door.
Something else was waiting. A thing of knives and shadow, just inside the threshold.