Page 31 of The Dungeon Book

One of the sentries – Nebbish in appearance, but his face twisted with un-Neb fear and fury – snarled at her and shoved his torch towards her face, the sudden light blinding her. All her carefully arranged words fell apart, and the best she could do was show him the coin in her hand. Tell them who you are.

He grabbed her wrist. Bait panicked and twisted free, then she was running into the dark and they were on her heels, streamers of flame from a dozen torches following her as they ran through the fields. In the Dungeon, she knew exactly where she was, but here they had the advantage. She sprinted across the fields, shoved through hedges, dodged and ducked, always only a heartbeat away from being caught, but she couldn’t escape. Shouts in the human tongue boomed like incomprehensible thunder. Lights, all around, closing on her.

Then – at last – the edge of the woods. Trees like dark pillars, the deeper darkness of the forest. It wasn’t enough to dissuade her pursuers. She flung herself into the mouth of an abandoned badger sett, wriggling through the narrow gap like a fish. The lead pursuer plunged his arm in after her – then snatched back his bleeding hand when Bait bit him.

But they had the creature trapped now, or so they thought. They fetched shovels and dug down until the entrance was wide enough for the bravest of the villagers to crawl in after her. But Bait was the adopted daughter of goblins, and though she could no longer hide in the Trapsmiths’ Arcade, she could still construct a rudimentary snare from old tree roots and badger bones. The bravest villager’s face joined his wounded comrade’s hand as further evidence that a monster was abroad, and this testimony was presented to Sir Rudyard in due course.

Bait lay there for a long time, not daring to breathe. The utter darkness was soothing after the harsh firelight, the tomblike gloom a balm. She pressed her fingers into the dirt, probed the walls and roof, mapping her new lair. If she could have crawled down through the badger tunnels, down and down through the earth of the hillside to the roots of the mountains, and thence found her way back into the Dungeon, she would have. She had tried the surface world, and it had not welcomed her. But the only way back to the Dungeon was through the Dungeon Door, and between here and there were many miles of forest and many hunters.

Exhausted, she curled up and slept.

The villagers provided the eggs and the black bread. Sir Rudyard had brought the tea himself.

“You tell me the monster’s in a den near the forest eaves. Very good. We shall smoke it out.”

“One of the monsters, my lord,” said a villager. “Some sort of goblin.”

“I have brought with me,” said Rudyard, “an illustrated bestiary.” The study of monsters was part of the education of a knight, along with hawking, heraldry, horsemanship and hewing things with a big sword. Sir Rudyard had never excelled at the monster-slaying part. He had preferred the hawking and really enjoyed the heraldry, but had never felt confident in the fighting of fearsome foes. Not due to any lack of conviction – if anything, he thought that the monster-slaying was the most important part of a knight’s duties, even if it very rarely arose. It was a knight’s task to wield strength in the service of Law, to be violent within very specific constraints. He insisted on eggs, etc., because it forced the world into some semblance of order. His breakfast struck a blow for Law.

But sometimes, breakfast was not enough. This day, he would strike with sword, not sausage. Monsters were embodiments of chaos. Irruptions of unnatural energies, according to the prologue of the bestiary.

He wiped egg grease from his hands, then turned the bestiary towards the peasants. “Perhaps you can identify some of the other monsters. Do these woodcuts look familiar to you?”

The assembled worthies of the village examined the book, turning the pages gingerly, as if too hasty a flip could free a monster from its woodcut prison. Sir Rudyard steepled his fingers and tried to exude an aura of calm as the villagers argued about what they had or hadn’t seen in the night.

“It was one of those,” said one villager, pointing with complete confidence at an illustration of a salamander.

Sir Rudyard solemnly perused the text associated with the entry. “Those are forty feet long,” he said at last, “and live in volcanoes. And, according to learned sages, blaze with the heat of a raging inferno at all times. Are you certain?”

The villager muttered that it had been drizzling that night, so the raging inferno might have been dampened. Or, possibly, he was mistaken – but there was something in the woods. On that point, everyone in the village agreed.

So, for that matter, did Sir Rudyard. In the heartlands, sensible men might dismiss talk of magic and monsters as old superstitions, but these were the border marches. He had seen enough to know that the forces of chaos were very real. Rudyard would certainly have preferred that someone more actively courageous and heroic was leading the forces of Law in this particular cosmic skirmish – why, only a few years previously he’d had the honour of hosting the renowned Sir Peledon, who had passed this way on some urgent quest. The knight had stayed at Sir Rudyard’s castle overnight, but had left at daybreak, and privately Rudyard suspected that a lack of a proper breakfast contributed to the knight’s subsequent disappearance. Sir Peledon had been a man to singlehandedly battle the horrors of the Dungeon, but the lesser Sir Rudyard had instead brought along a host of huntsmen, dog-handlers, spear-carriers and other hirelings, as well as several other knights and men-at-arms. Now he waited with all the patience he could muster for the eyewitnesses to identify the quarry.

“No, it’s not one of those either,” said Sir Rudyard. “The clue is in the name ‘oceanic behemoth’.”

After some time, consensus developed that they were under siege by some variety of wood-hag or wood-wose. The bestiary spoke of dark enchantments, of how such creatures twisted the forest around them into a living nightmare of cruel thorns and fetid fungal blooms, and how they poisoned the roots of the trees from below. The malign rot of the Dungeon was everywhere. Anything and everything could be undermined by chaos.

Law needed its champions. Even absurd ones like Sir Rudyard.

He rose and sounded his silver horn. “The hunt begins!”

The horn call stirred Bait from sleep.

The baying of dogs brought her instantly to terrified wakefulness – and confusion. The sound of barking called up old memories of her life before the Dungeon. There had been dogs in the castle; barking was a spell that conjured the smell of wet fur, the feel of burying your face in the neck folds of a hound. She lay there in the dark, caught between her buried past and her subterranean present, and it nearly cost her any future, above or below. Had she fled immediately, then maybe she could have escaped.

But she waited too long, and the pleasant memories of the castle dogs melted into the present danger of the hounds slavering and clawing at the entrance to the badger sett. Above, she heard shouts, the voices of men – then smoke filled her nose, her lungs, burning her eyes.

Panic. Clawing at the earth. Tugging on dead roots. Hands scrabbling on stone. But whatever else she was, Bait was a Denizen of the Dungeon, and there are very few dead ends in the labyrinth. There’s always another way in or out, a narrow shaft or a secret door – or a back exit, narrow even for a boneless goblin, but driven by desperation and smoke inhalation, Bait wriggled out into merciless winter sunlight.

“There! It’s there!” cried one of the hunters.

She ran, for all the good it did her.

She dodged through the trees, scrambled up the slopes, running for the Dungeon Door and the sanctuary of the Dungeon. Certainly, I’d have welcomed her back, but the gargoyle guardians who watch over the Entrance Hall would have given more practical assistance. She was a Denizen of the Dungeon, so they would have let her in, even with a host of hunters on her heels.

But the Dungeon was many miles away, and the hunt was very close.

Hounds snarling and howling just behind her. Riders crashing through the woods at either side, encircling her, cutting her off. She saw it, I think, as one great monster like the adventuring parties the goblins told stories about. A single creature with a hundred dog-shaped claws, with teeth of spears, arrow-spitting, its voice the discordant blare of hunting horns. No shadows to hide in, no traps to spring, no tunnels to crawl in, no minotaur to come to her rescue with a roar. Nothing except the chase, nothing except hot breath on the back of her legs, the pain in her lungs, the terror of the bright surface, the horn calls ever louder.