Page 21 of The Dungeon Book

On our peregrinations, we took the western way. Even though the kobolds and the Squinter had fled, the dragon was still down there, slumbering fitfully in dreams of gold and charred meat and burning cities. A good teacher protects his student from being eaten.

On this particular day, we had come down to the Fifth Level, which has once been the halls of the priests who tended the dead of the city. The wall bore ancient hieroglyphs, and I had hoped to teach Bait some of her letters. The wraiths acknowledged Bait’s right to dwell in the Dungeon, but there was a chance of encountering other, less friendly Denizens on the west Fifth, too.

Bait peered around a corner – and ducked back, pressing herself to the wall. “Something there!” she whispered.

Not wraith, or troll, or kobold, or any other Denizen.

A human.

The adventurer lay against a stone door. His left leg was drenched red: a manticore had bitten deep. He’d tied his belt above the wound as a tourniquet to slow his blood loss, to no avail. I remembered the cold sickness in my stomach as I pressed my hand against my back, after Orphir stabbed me, as if I could hold on to life by muscle power and will. I’d failed, and so had this poor adventurer. In his last moments, he’d tried to force the portal behind him open. Half of his splintered sword was jammed in the crack between door and frame.

Bait stared at it, wide-eyed.

It was, after all, the first human she’d seen in years.

At least, the first one with skin.

“Be careful,” I said, but Bait’s curiosity was always stronger than her fear. She knelt by the corpse. Even when there was enough light for her to see, she trusted what her fingers told her. She was not gentle with the dead man, her fingers probing his face, his gear, even his wound.

“Dead?”

“I believe he is.”

“Talk.” She pushed the dead man’s jaw open. His swollen black tongue flopped out.

“He’s dead, Bait.”

“You’re dead. You talk.”

“I am exceptional.” I listened for footsteps on stone, or the scraping of claws. “We can’t linger, Bait. Blood will draw Denizens from below.” I could not tell if those distant sounds were my imagination, or lurking horrors, or the shadow of Sir Peledon. The minotaur might have followed us, as was his habit.

“There’s stuff.” She picked up fragments of the adventurer’s broken sword, then found a long knife at his belt. She took the knife. The belt, too, then boots and backpack. Looting the body was a tradition of the Dungeon. By the end, I was buried under the treasures piled on Bait’s back, and she staggered under the load.

“Our lesson for today, Bait, is knowing when to stop.”

We returned to my tomb and sealed the heavy door. Bait emptied the backpack onto the lid of my sarcophagus, and cleaned blood and dirt off her new-found treasures by dipping them in Gloop. A handful of coins, a length of rope, flint and tinder. A leather flask of water. Boots, which we stuffed with shed minotaur hair, and some old papers looted from the Fifth, and lo! for the first time in her life, Bait’s toes were warm. A blanket! That she spread eagerly on her bed. Wrapped in cloth – human food! It was poor fare to my eyes – stringy dried meat, dry bread, a scrap of cheese, a hard biscuit of some sort – but to Bait it was a feast. Over and over, she asked me what each thing was called.

“It’s still cheese, Bait.”

“Cheese.”

Exhausted by our field trip, she fell asleep wrapped in a dead man’s blanket, her treasures arranged around the bed. She was especially fascinated by one of the coins, her fingers tracing the outline stamped on it over and over.

The dead do not sleep, but in the long dark of the Dungeon the mind slips away to inward labyrinths of memory in waking dreams. Sleepless, we recall the events of our lives over and over. Pleasures become golden treasure hoards locked away in the maze of days; follies and errors become pit traps. The wandering monsters of the psyche haunt the dead, too. That night, I relived over and over the weeks where Orphir and I wandered the mountains, searching for the Dungeon entrance and the lost tower of Yrn Kyos. I felt again the fear of being lost in the wild, of knowing we could never go home.

My point is this: yes, I failed to notice Bait slipping out of the door, but it would be wrong to accuse me of neglect. It could happen to anyone, even the most diligent guardian.

However, I worried that the minotaur would not agree on this point.

After a few hours, I heard him shuffling and snorting in the corridor outside my tomb. There was no mistaking the sound of his massive hooves clattering on the stone, the horns scraping on the ceiling – or the occasional slap of his palm as he stumbled on all fours. Orphir’s spell kept eating away at Peledon’s humanity, and his form was in flux. His fits of blind rage grew frequent.

He paused outside my door. I panicked and launched into my planned lesson, even though my only student was Gloop. “So, if I have six stones, and I add two more, how many do I have? Eight, of course! Very good, Bait. Now, stay quiet and pay attention. If I have six stones, and I add three . . .”

I got to eighteen stones before the minotaur moved on.

Bait returned a few hours later, filthy and exhausted. She let Gloop eat dirt and dried blood from her fingers, but she would not tell me where she had been.

“I’m tired,” she said, and pulled the blanket over her head, ignoring first my questions, then my commands, then my exhortations, and finally even my snide and subtle sarcasms.