Page 50 of The Dungeon Book

The eye withdrew – replaced by a clawed foot. He scrabbled about, talons scraping through the scorched rubble, scattering the ashes of the manticore, smearing the jellied remains of Gloop. “Where are you?”

The claws found the corner of our alcove. We were just inside the door, at a mercifully awkward angle – but for all his size, his armoured scales, Nithscalpa was a serpent. He twisted about, and the claws came ever closer. Bait scurried deeper, pressing herself into the far end of the alcove. The talons left inch-deep scratches in the stone where she’d lain.

“You are mine to eat, human. My kill. The Master of the Dungeon gave you to me.”

“Orphir’s been gone for years!” I shouted. “You’ve no right—”

He snatched his claw away, and again, lit the Entrance Hall ruddy gold with the glare of his glare. “Right? Right? I am the dragon. I am might. I know you too, dead master. You are nothing to me. If Orphir is gone, if the Master’s Tower is empty, then I am Master here – and, as Master I say, come out. Come out and be eaten.”

“No,” said Bait.

“There was a Levelling, Nithscalpa!” I shouted. “The Rules protect her.”

“You talk to me of rules, thief?”

In his fury, he tore at the mountainside. The ancient lintel of the Dungeon Door splintered and collapsed. The ceiling of the chamber quaked. Bait picked me up and ran to the stairwell, reaching it mere instants before the Entrance Hall collapsed entirely. Even through hundreds of tons of earth and stone, we could hear the dragon’s wrath as he laid waste to the mountainside.

Presently, his belly got the better of him. His prodigious growth had filled him with an even more prodigious hunger, and Bait was only ever supposed to be an amuse-bouche to the great feast of cow flesh that waited in the valley.

“My kill!” he snarled. “My right!”

In a display of the sort of majestic pettiness only dragons and kings achieve, he snuffled about the ruin of the slopes until he found the head of the rabbit that Bait had caught. He gobbled it up, in the way that Bait might eat a single hazelnut.

Then he took flight.

That night, had we had sat at the Dungeon Door, had there still been a Dungeon Door to sit beside, we would have seen the smoke from the burning valley rising to devour the stars.

A Levelling, then.

A Levelling was called.

Bait’s lair in the Entrance Hall was destroyed. My own tomb was known to the Squinter and other enemies, so we dared not rest there, nor could we take refuge in the narrow recesses of the Trapsmiths’ Arcade. We took the west stair and rested in the haunted halls. I kept watch for hungry wraiths while Bait slept. She woke, remembered what had happened, wept and slept again. The wraiths – the shades of long-dead priests and necromancers – seemed to fall back onto old habits, and keened with her.

We brought news of Third-Sister’s death to First and Second.

“Our Sister was outside her lair,” said First. “By the Rules, she was wandering. There were no unaligned witnesses to her death; who is to say Third-Sister did not strike first, or otherwise offend Nithscalpa? We must not be hasty.” As head of the family, she was obliged to exercise restraint, weigh arguments and not be swayed by emotion.

Second-Sister was under no such obligation. “It was foul treachery! You heard what Bait said! Bait was in her lair, and no kill is lawful inside a Denizen’s own lair! Our Sister was there as her guest, ate her meat! And she was guarding the Door, and the keeping of the Door’s a common task for all! This was no lawful kill!” She tore clumps from her mane in sorrow. “Vengeance! Vengeance for our Sister!”

“You are the only Sister left to me now, and I will not be hasty,” said First. She turned to us. “We shall be at the Levelling – but we have much to discuss in private, first. I thank you for these tidings.”

But Second-Sister lifted her paw, showing Bait the scar she bore. Years ago, she’d pulled a shard of metal from that pad, and the manticore had not forgotten. “Vengeance,” she said.

Bait clasped the paw and nodded.

Later, though, I counselled Bait on what I thought was the best course of action. What else could I do? Words were all I had, but she’d rarely listened to my lessons.

“I think you should leave the Dungeon. Go quietly, before the Levelling. And go quickly – be down in the human lands long before Nithscalpa learns you’ve gone. He might not pursue you – his enmity is chiefly born of the fact that you’re something denied him, and I think that once you’re out of sight, he’ll forget about you. And even if he doesn’t, well, better to be behind castle walls and armed guards than alone in a dungeon.”

“Castle walls and armed guards didn’t stop him before, and he was smaller then. And I’m not alone here, am I?” She paused to drop a bit of rabbit into a battered old pot that contained the scraped together remnants of Gloop. I doubted that the scrap of corridor slime would survive. I doubted most of the Denizens would stand with her.

“Not wholly alone, no. But the odds are against us.”

“I’m not leaving.”

This was a bigger Levelling than the one that had confirmed Bait as a Denizen. Not since I’d claimed the tower and become Master had so many Denizens from the lower reaches of the Dungeon gathered in one place. The Chasm Hall was too small to house all these lords of the underworld, so we gathered in a cave in the eastern dungeon, not far from Nithscalpa’s lair. The air was thick with smoke and dragon-stink, and the bellows-breath of Nithscalpa echoed through the passages.

Bait was not without supporters. The manticores, obviously, were stalwart opponents of the dragon. First-Sister remained in their lair, mourning the loss of Third, but Second-Sister went wandering through the lower levels, bringing words of Nithscalpa’s misdeeds to the Denizens of the Deep. Such wanderings were not without peril, and Second limped into the Levelling bleeding from many wounds – and picking bits of kobold from between her many teeth.