Page 36 of The Dungeon Book

Atten smiled. “What a fairer world it would be if that were true. You tell a better story than any of mine, I think.”

He leaned forward and handed her back her coin. “Have you a place to sleep, child?”

“I don’t know.” Say Sir Peledon sent you. Tell them to bring you home. But Atten was in no condition to bring her to the king whose face was on that coin. “I’m a servant in the kitchen at Dunshelm Keep.”

“That’s a long walk at this hour. Stay here tonight, and leave when it’s light.”

But she chose to walk in the dark.

*

Bait’s thoughts were a tangle. Once, she might have used me to help unravel them, our conversation wrapping the thread of discourse around the smooth spool of my skull, but I was far away, and so she had to tug and tear at them herself.

It had been hard enough for her to think of the minotaur as a human, when he clearly wasn’t. From her perspective, the minotaur clearly belonged in the Dungeon; more, he belonged close at hand. He was her shadow, her protector. She’d walked without fear in the dark places underground, knowing that a great beast trod close behind. Even his stink was like a shield, that blood-and-barnyard stench a sign that all was right. Here on the surface, she’d wondered if he was watching over her still. The minotaur’s presence was as constant and reassuring as the Dungeon ceiling.

She tried to imagine Sir Peledon as he had been, to reconcile the images of knights she’d seen with Atten’s tales, and tried to tie all that to the minotaur she’d known. Lacking a face, she used the features from her silver coin. With an effort of will, she could imagine Sir Peledon riding down this very road towards the keep seven years ago. She could almost hear the hoofbeats of his horse, the jingling of his armour – but when the imagined phantasm rode past her, she could not imagine what he might smell like, and his face was distant and immobile.

What did it mean that Sir Peledon had a family? What was a family, for that matter? She’d seen Neb’s family, with Big Neb and She-Neb and all the other Nebs, but only from the outside, and the threads of kinship confused her. Bait had her goblin-kin, true, but that was different. The goblin pack was a big ball of teeth and sharp bits and jokes, and everyone was treated the same. Except maybe Clickglee, and that was only because he was bigger and older than the rest. Family meant something different to humans. It was more important to them.

But if that was so, why had Sir Peledon left his family behind? Atten had spoken about it as if Peledon abandoning his daughter was heroic and praiseworthy, a sign of knightly devotion, but why was that the right thing to do? It was as though the surface folk had Rules of their own: be brave, be honourable, be kind. They weren’t written down anywhere – you had to disentangle them from stories and from preaching in the chapel and from what people assumed you already knew. Everyone else seemed to know these surface Rules already, but then ignored them. Except heroes, who were praised for doing what everyone agreed should be done.

The Rules of the Surface, Bait decided, were badly designed, but Sir Peledon had followed them nonetheless, at great cost to himself. Bait had never asked him to do that, it had happened before she was Bait, but somehow it was on her to justify that sacrifice. And now the minotaur might not even remember that sacrifice, might not even know he’d been Sir Peledon or that he’d given up his family for her, and somehow that made it harder.

The night suddenly felt heavy, as if she was pushing through spider webs. Unwanted and unfamiliar responsibility settled on her, heavy as the minotaur’s hide.

If this burden was what it meant to be Princess Aldebara, she did not like it.

The second stage of Bait’s relationship with the serving girls – and, for that matter, with Mistress Clove, with Offa, and with half the castle – was fear.

It began with Offa’s accident. The boy tumbled like a sack of sticks from the topmost step, and the sack was full of splinters fit only for kindling by the time he hit the bottom. He survived, but not without broken bones and innumerable painful bruises. Bait could have had nothing to do with it. She was nowhere near Offa when he fell. Everyone saw her scrubbing pots in a corner of the kitchen when he took his tumble, and no one missed her that night when she slipped away to visit Squire Atten.

It was only later, when a close examination of the stairs discovered a broken strand of catgut, drawn so thin it was nearly invisible in the dim light, that suspicion fell on Bait – but not only on her. For a young man, Offa had accrued an impressive number of people who hid their grins when he hit the floor. He’d tormented the miller’s children, the fisherman’s apprentice, the grooms and the dog boy, not to mention half the children in the surrounding town. A reign of terror breeds its own resistance.

Nor was it certain that Offa had been the intended victim. Others passed up and down that stair every day. Think of poor Ysilde, nearly due now, and clumsy with the weight of her belly – what if she’d fallen? Had the trap been meant for her? For Clove? For someone else? Paranoia spread through the castle. The old chaplain watched his young aide through narrowed eyes, wondering if the lad’s stupid round face concealed murderous ambition. The seneschal feared that some enemy had noted his habit of going down to the kitchen for a mid-morning biscuit, and ordered that the guard on the walls be redoubled – what if this enemy was plotting to attack the keep, waiting only for a murderous elevenses to trigger their assault? The captain of the guard rushed off to pay his gambling debts in Lastease before there were any more “accidents”.

Sir Rudyard appeared immune. His philosophy demanded imperturbability. In the face of chaos, law must be absolutely rigid and unbending; in the face of a servant smashed like crockery, another servant must step immediately into the breach. So Bait was dispatched to deliver Sir Rudyard’s customary breakfast, and to her credit she took the conventional route up the stairs and along the castle corridors, instead of her preferred peregrination through roof and window.

Still, in the solitude of his solarium, Sir Rudyard checked under the toast for concealed assassins. He was only a man, after all, and not a brave one.

Inchoate fear swirled around the castle, until Mistress Clove put a name to it.

“Goblin work,” she said.

She was the oldest resident of the keep, and her people had lived in the shadow of the Dungeon for generations. They’d seen parties of adventurers go up the mountain, equipped with vigour and ambition and ten-foot poles, and seen lone survivors stagger back down, scarred and scared and whispering of horrors in the dark. Goblins, according to the tales, laid cruel traps and took glee in suffering. They mostly kept to the darkness of the Dungeon, but it had been some time since any brave adventurers had ventured up the mountain (most prospective adventurers, we learned later, were off fighting in the wars in the north). If a dragon could come crawling out of the Dungeon, or a wood-hag, then might not goblins have crept into the castle under cover of night to work mischief?

Goblin work.

Just as whispers of the wood-hag had terrified the peasants of Neb’s village, so did the rumour of goblins galvanise the soldiers of Dunshelm Keep. But these were not fearful peasants. They were soldiers. True, for the most part they were the dregs of the kingdom’s soldiery – criminals, conscripts, troublemakers, mixed with a little local muscle, all commanded by a knight who would be the first to admit that courage was not among his chief virtues – but they had been sent to this borderland to guard against monsters, and now the enemy was at their door!

They searched the castle, the village and the surrounding countryside. Once they had decided what they were looking for, they found plenty of signs. Those tracks in the mud? Goblins have feet very like foxes. That fallen fence? Goblin sabotage, the little bastards creeping in at night with shovels, gnawing at the foundations. A horse throws a shoe? Goblin work, pulling nails out of the animal’s hoof with their sharp teeth. Poorly maintained weapons in the armoury? Certainly some goblin had climbed in through a window and smeared rust on the blades. One of the chickens stops laying after years of yeoman service? Goblins.

They found plenty of clear and undeniable evidence of goblin mischief, but no actual goblins.

At mealtimes, the people of the castle traded old stories of subterranean perils. The servants and a few of the guards gathered in the kitchen to eat. Bait lurked in the corner, still nervous of crowds, but she could not resist eavesdropping, hungry for news of the Dungeon.

“That dragon hasn’t flown forth in years,” said old Helric. “But I remember it well. Whole sky over the mountain lit up like blood and fire, and the earth shook. Be a bad day when it flies forth again.”

Bait muttered that the sky over the mountain lit up like blood and fire every morning, for the mountain lay due east of the border castle, and that everyone knew that Nithscalpa was asleep.