Page 22 of The Dungeon Book

The next day, she slipped out again. I was attentive that morning and did everything I could to stop her.

“Stop!” I said.

She did not listen.

Again, the minotaur paused outside my tomb. When he heard no lesson in progress, he pushed open the door. His frown was the moment before an avalanche, and you know someone’s going to get crushed.

“Where is she?” It would be redundant to point out that he growled or rumbled these words. Everything about Sir Peledon was larded with dreadful weight and barely suppressed fury. Especially that giant axe.

His gaze fell upon Bait’s newly acquired treasures, the works of human hands. He snatched the blanket up and hurled it aside. “Where is she?”

“Gone to get a drink at the river!” I chattered. If only I’d stopped there. “Visiting the goblins. Playing at the Falls of Night. Fetching stones for our mathematics lesson! Cleaning the chalk duster! Um—”

He snatched me up, and I braced for the hurling aside part. “WHERE IS SHE?”

“I don’t know.”

The search began. Sir Peledon and I swept through Bait’s usual haunts. The Buried River, the Trapsmiths’ Arcade, the old pit where we used to keep the slime. Clickglee roused the goblins to join in the search, although the goblin chieftain was getting old now, and his voice counted for less among his kinfolk. Goblins don’t so much age as flake, slowly disintegrating until there’s nothing left but fungus and dirt that accretes in the upper corners of the Dungeon. New goblins grow in sacs that form amid this build-up of rot; a broom is the bane of goblin-kind. Still, Clickglee’s command was enough to roust a dozen doughty goblin boys, and they raced off ahead of us, whooping and laughing.

They returned crestfallen and empty-handed.

“Down,” I suggested. “The west stair.”

“You sore, sore, swore!” He struggled over the words. “To watch over her, wizard!”

“I watched! Watching is all I can do!”

Bait usually tied me to her back or carried me in her hands, so I could see. On this trip, I saw only the inside of a minotaur’s hairy armpit, and I shall carry no word of that place back to trouble the world. But mercifully it was a short journey; Sir Peledon charged down the west stairs like the aforementioned avalanche.

“Everything on the lower levels knows we’re coming,” I remarked. The armpit was unmoved.

The body was gone from the corridor. My first assumption was that it had been eaten, most likely by the manticore who’d delivered that mortal blow, or perhaps some mindless scavenger – a cousin of Gloop’s perhaps. None of the wiser Denizens would have taken another’s kill. Human meat is prized in the Dungeon. Old Yrn Kyos cultivated a taste for it among his guardians. To steal the manticore’s kill would be an insult to the manticore, and they take all things to excess – especially vengeance.

Not even scraps of flesh remained, and while there were still reddish stains on the floor, they’d leaked from the adventurer as he’d bled to death, not after. It was very clearly the minotaur, and not in that moment Sir Peledon, who knelt and sniffed the ground, and found tracks leading away into the dark. Scrapes, too. The body had been dragged.

I still suspected that some Denizen had taken the corpse to the sanctuary of its own lair, to feast undisturbed – and while one Rule states that a corridor kill belongs to the killer, another Rule declares that each Denizen’s lair is private and must not be entered without permission. But all rules can be bent or broken by force, and neither explained where Bait had gone.

The minotaur had her scent, and unerringly he tracked her through the maze of the Fifth to a closed door.

“Bait,” I whispered. “Are you in there?”

“No,” came the reply from inside.

The minotaur quivered with fury. He made a grunting noise that was intelligible in neither the human nor the Dungeon Tongue. He placed me on a convenient ornamental ledge opposite the door so I could speak.

“Come out now!” I ordered.

“No.”

The door exploded inwards under the hammer blow of Peledon’s fist.

This was the tableau: within was a little antechamber, where long-dead priests once prepared for rituals in the temple nearby. Bait had dragged the adventurer’s corpse and propped it up on a stone bench, the dead man’s head lolling against the wall. She was curled up in the corpse’s lap, and had draped one of his arms over her back in a sort of limp hug. It was less grotesque than pathetic. Lacking skin, one forgets to how people crave the touch of another. Bait had her guardians and champions in the Dungeon, but a talking skull could not offer comfort.

Even lacking a heart, I was moved.

Sir Peledon was not. He rushed in and wrenched Bait from the morbid embrace. She shrieked and tried to bite him, but got only a mouthful of hair and hide. A silver coin fell from her hand and rolled across the floor to rest just below my ledge. Struck in recent times, from the look of it, for it bore the image of some young king I did not know.

“Idiot child!” roared the minotaur. He shook Bait with such fury I feared for her life. “What . . . stupidity is this?”