Page 9 of The Dungeon Book

Bait giggled.

The Levelling agreed that Bait would be recognised as a Denizen of the Dungeon, with her lair in the Trapsmiths’ Arcade. A few were minded to disagree, but the minotaur snorted at them, and minds changed. The minotaur was also recognised as a Denizen; none disagreed with that. The more dangerous monsters in the Dungeon, the better, so long as they obeyed the Rules.

One by one, the Denizens departed. The nixies melted into the trickling waters of the Buried River. The wraiths faded like the memory of a nightmare after waking, leaving only unease behind. Trolls stomped, kobolds scurried, ghouls skittered, until at the last there was only Clickglee and the minotaur.

“I don’t know you,” said Clickglee, “but that was a right nice thing you did, and a favour’s a favour. If ever you need a pit trap dug or something spiky or—”

The minotaur took an earthshaking step towards the little goblin. He lowered his titanic head. His hot breath steamed about his nostrils.

“Keep the child away from me,” snarled the minotaur. “That’s all.”

Bait giggled again.

That was how the child came to the Dungeon.

CHAPTER TWO

Bait dwelt with the goblins for her first three years in the Dungeon. On the whole, those were happy years. She had her adoptive pack of goblin kin to run and wrestle. Sometimes, she went hungry, but only when everyone else did, too. She was apprenticed to Clickglee as a trapsmith, and took great pleasure in laying out all the bits of some snare or deathtrap in neat rows, rusty blades and poison needles all arranged by size. She had her toys, too – her favourite a flail the goblins dug up in some buried armoury. Bait, grown bigger than most of the goblin pack, would swing the weighted chain around at speed, and another goblin would cling to the end until it could cling no longer.

The silence of my tomb was often disturbed by the sound of inelegant goblin flinging.

At Clickglee’s insistence, Bait never strayed far from the Arcade.

Except once.

*

The goblin pack were playing on the Great Stair, when up came a troll. Trolls, you should know, are like goblins if you took all the cleverness and replaced it with muscle, and took all the sharpness and replaced it with muscle, and then added on more teeth and claws and about six feet of height. And then piled on the muscle.

They are exceedingly hard to kill, with one exception – sunlight turns them to stone. But sunlight was not an issue in the Dungeon.

They also have prodigious appetites. The goblins wisely hid in a narrow side passage as the mighty troll approached. He knelt down and peered in, eye big as a saucer – not that anyone present knew what a saucer was, except Bait in some dim recess of memory.

“Tha’s Bait, innit?” said the troll, blinking.

“You can’t eat her,” chorused the goblins.

“We can’t either,” added the goblin Grimegable mournfully, and Bait poked him in an eye. She’d have poked the troll, too, if she could have reached him.

The troll feigned great offence.

“Wasn’t asking to eat her, was I? Didn’t say a word about eating.” His stomachs rumbled in counterpoint. “No, I’m wond’ring if I can borrows her. In a professional capacity.”

He opened his hand, the size of a dinner plate, and in it was a handful of shiny things: fragments of polished metal, river pebbles, gemstones that would have fetched a king’s ransom on the surface. The goblins shrieked like crows.

Bait’s attention was drawn to a blue necklace. One of the links was cracked and broken, but it was still pretty. Human hands wrought it, long ago; had I been there, I might have discoursed on the history and symbology of the Elder Empire, and how lapis lazuli was sacred to the goddess of spring. But I was not there, so everyone was spared.

Bait did not care about the necklace’s provenance or meaning. She only thought that she wanted it, and reached for it.

The troll grinned.

An arrangement was quickly reached. The troll – given name Crunchbone, if I recall – would borrow Bait for a little while. In exchange, Bait got first choice of the shiny things. Crunchbone picked Bait up and set her on his shoulders, and off they went.

Riding trollback was exhilarating at first – the speed! The height! The smell! The alarming proximity of Bait’s pate to the lintel! Up the stairs leapt Crunchbone, six steps at a time, level after level, until he came to the Entrance Hall. Clickglee had forbidden Bait to enter that Hall, although she’d dared to creep to the very edge of the threshold, the topmost step of the Great Stair. Four gargoyles, kin to Old Throte but smaller, guarded the Hall.

Bait knew the Rules: keep watch on the Entrance Hall, for the keeping of the Dungeon is the common task of all.

But there was no lingering on the threshold this time. Crunchbone threw open the Dungeon Door, and they were out.