Chapter Thirteen
There are parts of this tale that I am ashamed to tell.
My betrayal of Bait, for example. Orphir beguiled me with the same arguments he used on others – like Nala, who I shall come to in a moment – but, no, I cannot justify my treachery by saying I was deceived.
I knew. After all, I knew Orphir. We were brothers in arms, fellow conspirators bound by circumstance and ambition.
Like me, he was a better liar than he ever was a wizard.
What ruined me then was what ruined me in the first place – jealousy, greed, lust, all things base and shallow.
What can I say? We are who we were made to be, even in death.
Master Pentsable tried, bless him. He tried to give me a moral education along with an arcano-historical one.
He cannot be blamed. I was a wretch, a rogue, and a liar in life, and in death I was not much better.
On this I shall have more to say – I shall argue before you like a prisoner in the dock, a penitent in a confessional – but this has always been Bait’s story, not mine. I am but a messenger. So to her tale I return.
The guards bound Bait and put a sack on her head. The daylight was hot through the coarse weave of the cloth.
She struggled. Like a wild cat, she hissed and kicked and bit, but she was small for all her ferocity, and they dragged her down the hill until she went limp.
I knew she was listening for the Buried River, and the voices of the nixies calling from the waters.
The river followed her down the hillside, and kept her company after they threw her on a horse – a new experience for Bait and not one she liked in the slightest – and brought her down the long road to the keep.
I cannot guess what she was thinking. No doubt she was afraid, but Bait was always like a coiled spring: push her, compress her, and she would retaliate given the slightest opening.
Whatever fear weighed on her would transmute into violence.
Was she haunted by the secrets of the Dungeon that had been snatched away from her?
The Master’s throne, the forbidden door – there’s always another mystery, another unmapped chamber.
One can explore for ever and never know all the paths of the labyrinth. Did the thought gnaw at her?
Or did she think of me? Did she know I had betrayed her? Did she recognise the skull beneath the skin, or was I a stranger to her in life as I had been a friend in death?
Still blindfolded, they whisked her through yards that stank of manticore dung and troll bile.
She cried out in the Dungeon Tongue, and a chorus roared in answer.
They got you too, yowled a pack of young goblins.
You are not alone, growled Only-Sister. Help us, free us, fear us, roared trolls, and we shall feast on human flesh.
Did she listen for the clattering speech of a talking skull, and hear nothing?
Stone steps of the South Tower under her feet.
Then light.
Then, at last, a half-familiar face.
“What have you done to her? Are those chains? Take them off! Take them off, she’s just a child!” Nala pushed at Bait’s guards, poking them into action.
“It tried to bite me,” grumbled one.
“I’ll do worse than bite if you don’t free her,” snapped Nala. “I told them not to hurt her.”
“We have orders,” said another RAS adventurer, as he removed the manacles from Bait’s wrists, “to keep her legs bound. Orders from on high.”
“There won’t be any need for that.” But they left the manacles on Bait’s legs, and bound the other end to a stout metal ring.
“Cold iron, that,” snarled the adventurer in Bait’s face. “Understand?”
She licked it, much to the man’s consternation.
“I’ll be just outside,” he said to Nala. “If it gives you any trouble, call and we’ll deal with it.”
“Out!”
The door closed behind the adventurers. Bait watched Nala closely, like a mongoose watches a serpent, searching for signs of trickery.
The tower room was once again much as it had been three years earlier, when Nala and the first RAS expedition had come to the border keep.
Again, there were maps of the Dungeon tacked up on the wall, books like the aftermath of a paper hurricane, strange potions and philtres in padded cases, relics in a golden muddle of reliquaries.
Only the butcher’s slab was different – now, it was scrubbed clean, the surface pristine white.
It reminded Bait of the counters in the kitchen below when she was done with Mistress Clove’s punishments.
“Are you hurt?” asked Nala. “Hungry? Thirsty?” She picked up a pitcher of a water.
The mongoose stare didn’t waver.
Bait’s belongings were in another sack. Nala plucked the Dungeon Book from a pile. “I thought I’d lost this? Did you take it?” She leafed through it, glimpsing at one remove secret chambers beyond imagining. A genuine smile blossomed. “Oh! Bait, these are marvellous.”
“It’s my book,” said Bait.
Reluctantly, Nala closed the Dungeon Book and handed it back to the child. “Of course. It’s yours. I’d love to study it someday, if you’d let me.”
Bait hugged the book tight.
“I did not want it to happen this way. I wanted to come back here on my own and find you, but . . . events overtook me.” Nala took a breath.
Her fingers knitted and unknitted, as if she did not know what to do with them.
Bait did not understand surface folk, but Nala reminded her of a rabbit caught in a snare, twisting this way and that, dragging the wire tighter. “What should I call you?”
“Still Bait.”
“Not Ealdufrida, ever – I remember that. But you had another name, when you were young. I don’t know if—”
“Aldebara,” interrupted Bait. “I know. I was the Princess Aldebara. Orphir made a changeling of her.”
“No. Well, yes, There was a changeling, but Orphir didn’t make it. Another wizard did.”
“That’s not what happened.”
“That is what happened. That’s what the Chancellor told me.
” A flicker of emotion – fear? Doubt? Anger?
“The changeling was rescued by mistake. She was brought back to the king, presented to him as his trueborn daughter. Even the Chancellor didn’t suspect Cornelius’ deception for many years – and now it’s done, isn’t it?
There’s no fixing the mistake. She is the Princess Aldebara now, and you’re Bait. ”
“She doesn’t know what she is?”
Nala nodded. “She grew up as the princess. It was only when she fell ill that we realised an error had been made. If I’d seen the truth when I first came here – oh, so much of this is my fault. All I can do is help repair the damage.” She took a deep breath. “You want to be Bait, don’t you?”
Bait shrugged.
“Princess Aldebara . . . the other . . . was raised to rule. Without her, there’ll be chaos. More chaos. The kingdom will fall.”
Bait shrugged.
“I know you don’t understand, but for the good of the realm you have to—”
“I understand.”
“Then—”
“I don’t care. You attacked the Dungeon. You hurt my friends. You broke the Rules.”
“The princess is sick, Bait. She’s dying. Changelings aren’t meant to last this long. But we can save her. You can save her. We just need a little of you to fortify her. A few drops of blood, that’s all. Blood and magic, and the Chancellor can restore her.”
“I don’t care.”
“Bait, listen to me.” She lowered her voice. “This is important. More important than you can understand, perhaps—”
“I understand. I just don’t care.”
“They will make you care, and you won’t like that. The needs of the kingdom outweigh all of us – but I swear on my life, once this is done, you’ll be free to go. Please – at least talk to her. She needs you.”
First, Bait insisted on seeing the Denizens who’d been captured.
The castle was more crowded than ever before.
Bait did not know that the entire royal court had decamped here, fleeing the baronial rebellion, and Dunshelm could not contain them all.
Like an overstuffed treasure chest, it had burst, spilling brightly coloured tents and pavilions like jewels across the green.
Every room was occupied. Great lords and ladies stacked in bunks in the barracks, courtiers slept in the kennels.
Even Bait’s old nook in the kitchen was now home to a minister of state.
Added to this hosted host were the captured Denizens.
The inner courtyard had become the strangest zoo that has ever existed.
Only-Sister in a cage, a dovecote full of stirges, baskets writhing with hagworms, pots and pans as prisons for nixies, trolls chained to a pole, mimics so sun-baked that whatever disguise they adopted was marred by cracks, a duckpond’s worth of Gloop (the indigestible bones of errant ducks floating upon it), and for those brave enough to descend into the castle’s modest dungeon, cells crammed with an assortment of goblins and kobolds.
Gaolers watched over this assembly of monsters, so fearful of their charges that they kept a spears-length between them and the prisoners at all times – but they need not have been so fearful.
A horrible lethargy hung over the courtyard.
Exposed to the cruel sun, pinned in place, the Denizens seemed a sorry lot: starved, bedraggled, mangy, more pathetic than fearsome.
The surface world leached them of enchantment.
Before Bait was allowed down to visit the inmates, she was obliged to wear a disguise.
She was the very image of the princess – or, rather, the princess was the very image of her.
The Princess Aldebara was known to be very ill, and could not be seen walking around the keep.
Nala dressed Bait in the robes of an initiate, and drew a hood over her face.
Thus concealed, she was allowed make a brief tour of the courtyard.
Nala followed close behind, as did armed guards like shadows.