Page 32 of The Dungeon Book

She climbed a tree, not like other children might climb, but as a child of the Dungeon climbs, fingers gripping the rough bark like cracks in a rock face, lizard-fashion. The dogs leapt and clawed at her feet, but she snatched herself out of reach. The hunt-monster with its sinuous body of horse riders, its long tail of footmen coiled around the tree, dog claws scraping at the bark, its horn voices blaring in triumph even as other mouths howled frustration. It spat arrows at her, and she closed her eyes, believing she was about to die.

Then part of the hunt-monster broke away – Neb pulled himself from his mother’s grip – and called out: “Don’t hurt her!”

Strong hands grabbed Bait and dragged her down from the tree. They carried her to the head of the monster, who looked at her curiously.

“Who are you, child?” asked Sir Rudyard.

She sought for words, but only found one.

“Human.”

The hunt continued for the rest of the day. The hunters swept through the hills, and found no other horrors out of Sir Rudyard’s bestiary. Scouts climbed up to the Dungeon Door, although of course they did not dare pass that dreadful threshold (only a lunatic or an adventurer goes into a dungeon without good cause). They did report that the Dungeon Door was open. Clearly, the wood-hag had fled back into the darkness of the underworld, driven away by the timely action of Sir Rudyard and his companions. Sir Rudyard took this as an endorsement of his philosophy – chaos could be thwarted not only by valiant heroes with bright swords, but also by sensible organisation and delegation. Behold, he might have muttered over breakfast, the fruits of Law!

All that remained was to deal with the few loose ends. The gold coins, for example – obviously, such a fortune could not be left in the hands of a lowly peasant, and the coins were possibly cursed anyway, given their provenance. They were donated to the church, where any lingering touch of chaos could be washed away. Their temporary owner, Neb’s father, was rewarded for his diligence – Sir Rudyard appointed him village reeve and tax collector. Order had prevailed. Everything was in its appointed place, neat as eggs in egg cups.

The child was more troublesome. Sir Rudyard’s preferred solution would be to return the child to her parents. Enquiries were made in the village – surely someone had mislaid a girl-child of about nine or ten years old? But no one claimed the creature. (Privately, Sir Rudyard suspected the parents were all too happy to offload a troublesome child onto the charity of the king’s representative.) Questioning the child was equally fruitless; she claimed to be a lost princess, so she was clearly delusional, a fabulist, or – and here Sir Rudyard betrayed his soft-hearted nature – so discombobulated by her kidnapping at the hands of some horrific dungeon-hag that she had latched on to the tale as a talisman against evil.

No doubt, once she was restored to an orderly environment, she would remember her proper place. “We shall put her to work in the castle kitchens,” he decided, “until she’s claimed. And we can’t call her Bait. That’s not a fitting name for a child.”

Sir Rudyard dubbed her Ealdufrida, after his late mother, which was almost as burdensome a name as Valourentius.

But in her heart she remained Bait, and Neb remained Neb, through the year that followed.

CHAPTER SIX

That year was the worst of Bait’s life.

One might take exception to this assessment and argue that the year the dragon incinerated her mother and tore the child from the bosom of the royal family, and she survived only because a stone-hearted gargoyle took pity on a mewling lump of meat – that year must surely be worse. But she barely remembered that former life, and had not been Bait then.

Also, all that carnage and fiery uproar was done in a brief time. This year was a mill, grinding without end, and Bait’s spirit was its grist.

This was not deliberate cruelty on the part of Sir Rudyard – far from it. On balance, he is a better man than I, and was as kind and generous as his position permitted. But he loved order, and loved to see things put into their place. The proper place for Bait, in Sir Rudyard’s scheme of all things, was a box marked “Ealdufrida: a scullion in the kitchens of Dunshelm Keep”. He thought it a good box: the orphan girl would have bed and board and be a productive part of the great machine of the kingdom. The peasant labours in the field to bring grain to the miller and pigs to the butcher; the miller, the butcher, the baker all have their appointed tasks, and the scullion runs and fetches so that the knight may have his eggs and bacon. Thus fortified he goes out and patrols the borderlands to keep the monsters from the doors of peasants and assorted village worthies alike.

Bait would not stay in her box.

At first, she found the castle more to her liking than the forest. Corridors and chambers, crumbling stone walls, innumerable nooks and crannies to hide in – not so different from the Dungeon. She found a corner of the pantry where she was out of the way of the trampling feet and blaring voices of the other servants. The pantry was windowless and blissfully dark, and from this lair she could sneak out and explore the rest of this level. The Dungeon was a ruined city, twisted by cataclysm and the passage of ages; Bait had learned to navigate its unlikely byways, and did not think it strange to get from, say, the Trapsmiths’ Arcade to the Hall of Pillars by crawling through a crack in one wall, climbing down a dry well shaft to the level below, cutting through the sanctum of a ruined temple and then up a spiral stairs and through a secret door. Crawling, squeezing, climbing, doubling back along twisted routes were all natural to her. Similarly, in this new dungeon, she quickly discovered that the best route from the kitchen to the solarium where Sir Rudyard liked to break his fast was to scale the cupboard, squeeze out of the narrow window, run along the roof of the adjoining chapel, climb in through another window, out of the door, up a spiral stair and hence to the solarium.

The best route for Bait; for Ealdufrida, this was plainly disobedience and mischief-making.

The orderly design of Sir Rudyard had a solution for this. Ealdufrida the Scullion was a servant of Clove the Cook, so instructions were passed down to Mistress Clove that her new serving girl should be disciplined – for her own good, of course.

Clove had ruled the kitchen of the keep for many years; she’d claimed her lair long before Sir Rudyard’s tenure, and defended it fiercely. Indeed, I remembered Clove from my own unpleasant sojourn in the keep. Then, she’d been a merely unpleasant serving girl with her constant scowl and sharp tongue – which, along with a much blunter kitchen knife, was her only defence against the miscreants and criminals of the garrison. Orphir and I, being con men instead of robbers, rapists or murderers, were gentler than our peers; young Clove rewarded that by tormenting us, as an example to the rest. Fifty years had changed her in two ways only – first, the baking heat of the kitchen had turned her into a pinched scrap of leathery malice so shrivelled that she might be mistaken for some sort of undead horror if encountered in the Dungeon. Second, she had tripled her culinary range, adding “boiled eggs” and “bacon” to her signature grey slop.

I can still taste it now, despite being a skull without lips or tongue or any organs of sense. I said back then that it tasted like death, and I was right.

But this is not the tale of my sufferings. For now, it’s Bait’s.

“Wicked thing,” said Mistress Clove, “no wonder your kin cast you out. Offa! Show the wicked thing the proper way up to the dining hall!”

Offa was a kitchen boy, born of a serving girl who had died of the flux a few years prior. To say Clove cared for him is to overstate the matter, but she found him useful. Offa was big and broad-shouldered, and caked in flour from his official role as the baker’s boy, and a big broad-mouthed grin caked in blood from his unofficial role as Clove’s special little enforcer to terrorise the other kitchen servants. In this case, he grabbed Bait by the ankle and dragged her up the stair, along the narrow stone passage, up another stair, and hence came to Sir Rudyard’s solarium. The proper route was thus graven onto both Bait’s memory and her face, every step a scrape.

If Offa thought to terrorise Bait by this method, he was mistaken. She had encountered trolls twice Offa’s size and with ten times more teeth. He did not scare her.

After three weeks, she resolved to murder him.

Sir Rudyard confiscated almost all of Bait’s possessions when he took her in. It was not fitting for a kitchen scullion to wander around in ill-fitting boots, or the meanest goblin rags, and certainly not with a jewelled dagger. The boots he gave to big-footed Offa, the rags burned for fear of disease, and the dagger taken into safekeeping by Sir Rudyard as a relic of the elder days. Bait was permitted to keep her silver coin, and was issued with a tunic, a thin rope belt and other clothing, including a pair of sandals.

She contemplated beating Offa to death with a sandal, or strangling him with the belt. Neither seemed promising. She was also distracted in her murderous mission by the other servants, and – on happy occasions – by Neb.