Page 57 of The Dungeon Book

“That there’s no one around to stop the dragon but us, sir?”

The bacon fell from Rudyard’s fork.

“Arrant nonsense,” he said again, more thoughtfully this time. “That will be all.”

Sir Rudyard speared the bacon once more, but found he had quite lost his appetite. He’d piled order upon order, propriety upon propriety. He’d put everything in its right place, done all that was expected of him.

He was tired of this dish, and ready to try something new.

“On second thoughts,” he said, “fetch my armour.”

When the dragon first attacked, the folk of the keep had gathered on the east wall to watch the distant flames. A line of brooding orange on the horizon by night; a pall of black smoke and an acrid smell by day. The taste of the ash got into everything. Dunshelm had been built to keep the dangers of the borderlands in check, and now those dangers came closer every night, and all the swords and spears in the keep’s armour could not check them.

A sudden cataclysm provokes action. A slow catastrophe is like a hypnotic serpent, bewitching you with its eyes, freezing you in place until you’re trapped in its coils. Had the dragon attacked the keep directly, there’d have been plenty to do – chiefly a lot of running and screaming, maybe some futile waving of spears, but at least the disaster would have been upon them, the matter brought to some sort of resolution, however ghastly. They would have to ask themselves: what next? But the dragon’s wrath fell first on the herds and fields near the mountain, so the folk of the keep had time to watch the slow unfolding, to get used to the glow on the horizon and the falling ash.

Worse, life went on. There were always things that had to get done – more than ever, in fact. While the castle walls stood, they had to be cleaned and whitewashed, especially with all the black ash on the wind. Water to be drawn, wood to be chopped, fires lit, meals prepared – bacon to be fried and eggs to be poached, as Sir Rudyard might have put it. The machinery of order is blind; until a greater force disrupts it, it rolls on and on.

The one person in the castle for whom this was not true was Mistress Clove. Catastrophe had already struck her.

Once, when I was Master of the Dungeon, Orphir and I went exploring the flooded caves above the Buried River. Lurking in a crevice we found this ancient crab, swollen by the magic of the Dungeon. It had squeezed itself into the crack in the rock countless years before, and survived by snatching at whatever little fish or scraps of food that washed by. It had grown huge, but hideous and clumsy, ill-adapted to life outside its little lair. I brought it back to my tower and called it Clove, because it looked rather like her.

Now, she resembled it in another way. She shambled around the castle, already in the throes of what’s next, bitterness curdling into something strange.

Seated on her customary step in the courtyard, Clove watched as Offa came hurrying down from the solar. Excitement struggled in him with bowel-loosening apprehension; he looked, I imagine, like a man who has swallowed a live squirrel.

“He’s off to fight the dragon, then, is he?”

“Aye,” said Offa. “But he’s not going alone. He’s taking me along, too, and any guards who can be spared.” He glanced down at the remaining steps of the stair, perhaps judging if the fall would kill him or just break a few bones like his last tumble. Anything to get out of having to go below.

Clove grabbed his wrist. “Listen! That monstrous child came out of the Dungeon. She survived down there. If she can, so can you. This could be the making of you. Get what you can, then get out. Let his lordship face the fire.”

*

At first, the expedition was greeted with great excitement. The castle folk climbed up the battlements to watch Sir Rudyard and his retinue ride out, armour specially burnished for the occasion. As they’d passed through the woods, peasants gathered by the roadside, smiles shockingly white against their ash-streaked faces, grappling with the first unfamiliar hope since the dragon began.

“Poor things. One has to pity them,” said Rudyard. He raised his hand to wave, but he was not a good rider, and wobbled precariously on his horse. “We go to slay the dragon!” The cheers were half-hearted and disbelieving.

At the village at the foot of the mountain, Sir Rudyard, perhaps unwisely, gave a speech.

“Take heart! Two years ago, it was a wood-wose that troubled you, and we prevailed over that peril. Now, it cannot be denied that the present danger is considerably worse. I have written to the king, and am sure that help will be dispatched as soon as possible, but in the meantime the border watch will conduct, ah, a preliminary scouting mission into the dungeon.”

As speeches went, it was somewhat lacking. I could have given a better one. Its one virtue was that Sir Rudyard spoke his intention aloud for the first time, and now that he had given his word he would not turn back. “We have brought supplies for our scouting mission,” continued Sir Rudyard. “Our horses and wagon cannot proceed further, so we’ll need some stout fellows to carry our baggage up the mountain.”

Stout fellows were duly volunteered.

The next morning, they set off up the mountain. Sir Rudyard in front, clad in armour including a full helm, his moustache bristling through the gaps in the visor. One of the villagers pointed the way to the hidden entrance.

Behind came Offa and a few of the other castle guards. I imagine they looked like the inexperienced adventurers who sometimes invaded the upper levels when I was Master: fresh, tender meat flavoured with bluster and greed, unable to imagine the perils beneath. The Dungeon is not a battlefield; on a battlefield, the enemy is over yonder, and your line of retreat is whatever the opposite of yonder is. Below, the danger lurks in the dark, just beyond the reach of torchlight, and the labyrinth baffles any retreat. Below, all you can rely on are your companions; you must fight back-to-back.

After the men came the bearers, laden with dungeoneering supplies. Enough food to feed an army, complete with iron rations (hard tack, dried meats, Mistress Clove’s leftover puddings), enough rope to rig a galleon, enough ten-foot poles to make a precarious ninety-foot pole, a bristle of climbing spikes, a thunder of hammers, a wedge of chisels, a blaze of torches, a rattle of chains and – most presumptive of all – a hoard’s worth of empty sacks.

They came to a gully. Stunted trees and bushes clung to the walls, reaching for whatever sunlight penetrated the mountain nook. Alien mushrooms grew from the wet earth. Had Nala or some other worthy of the RAS been present, or if Sir Rudyard had thought to bring his herbarium, they might have realised that these mushrooms were a sign that they’d entered the Dungeon’s penumbra, where the dregs of magic seeped out to enchant the world outside. They were on the threshold of the underworld.

They kept going. Darker now, in single file they went, feeling their way in the dim light, wading through mud. Errant shafts of sunlight caught spores dancing in the air and picked out the worn ghosts of carvings in the stone. The wintry blue sky stained with thin trails of smoke became a memory as the branches intertwined above their heads, turning the gulley into a tunnel.

Perhaps I am projecting, but I remember my own first descent into the Dungeon. Dreadful apprehension mixed with excitement, the unknowable underworld yawning below me. The rapture of the labyrinth.

Then, at last, the door.