Page 42 of The Dungeon Book

Another clatter of weapons, like a carpenter selecting the next tool. These adventurers were technically Tunnel Surveyors of the Royal Antiquarian Survey; I suspect that nomenclature came after we started calling them RATS.

“Then down again. The Chasm Hall. We’ll make camp there before the climb down into the eastern halls.”

I was taken aback by how bone-deep my anger ran. I’d never really thought of myself as a Denizen. First, I was an intruder in the Dungeon. After I claimed the Tower of Yrn Kyos I was, for a while, the Dungeon’s master. In that time, my relationship with the Dungeon was much like that of old Yrn’s – we were hermits in the wild wood, throwing the occasional scrap to the wolves prowling outside our door. Even after Orphir relieved me of tower, life and limb, I still considered myself a sort of master emeritus, a detached observer of the Dungeon instead of someone who dwelt there. But seeing these adventurers, these RATS, march in forewarned and forearmed infuriated me.

There was nothing I could do, however. I lay there with a face full of gorse and listened to the grinding cry of the gargoyles, the crunch of hammers on stone, until the last crash and the sudden silence, broken only by the sound of fighting men gasping for breath, or coughing in the clouds of stone dust thrown up by the destruction of the guardians. One of the adventurers was injured. I could hear him whimpering, hissing, “Bind it! Bind it!” through clenched teeth.

One never forgets the sound of gushing arterial blood.

And that’s only the first room of the First Level, friends. There’s worse below.

The sound of their footsteps was just the first part of them to die away inside the mountain.

Bait’s time with Nala was brief, but they became friends. The close confinement helped – everyone in the castle now feared Bait, and Nala was a stranger in those lands, so they were forced into each other’s company. But more, Nala did not treat Bait as a child, and Bait, having no idea how a child should be, was more comfortable as an oddity. It helped, too, that their chief topics of conversation included:

“Where might I find runes like these?”

“The Fourth Level, in the lair of the manticores.”

Or

“What lies beyond the Chalcedony Door on the Seventh Level?”

“A room of statues. They’re all hiding their faces, like they’re weeping, all but one.”

Or

“What’s the Dungeon Tongue word for a hagworm?”

Normal topics that Bait could easily comprehend, instead of Mistress Clove’s demands or even Neb’s well-meaning but confusing mumblings. Nala recorded her answers solemnly in a leather-bound ledger, and promised that these notes would one day be enshrined in the great Royal Antiquarian Library. It was curious for Bait to be part of something larger.

“I feel like a stone in a wall,” she observed one day.

“What do stones feel like?”

“Solid. Secure. They know where they belong, and what they have to do.”

“And what’s that?”

“Keep the wall up. Watch. Share secrets.”

Nala laughed. “How does a brick share secrets?”

Bait closed her eyes and ran her fingertips over the rough wall of the tower. “Like this. Twenty-four stones to the door from here. Then it’s thirty-three steps down to the courtyard.”

“Did the stone tell you that?”

Bait nodded.

“The leading theory at the RAS,” said Nala, “is that magic lingers in places where the psychic imprint of the old empire is still intact. Hence, abandoned ruins, lost cities, islands that have gone unvisited for centuries. That’s why you get all sorts of strange creatures in dungeons.”

“Like what?”

“Floating eyeballs and talking skulls. Not unusual to you, maybe, but to the rest of the kingdom they’re very strange.”

Outside the window, a swarm of creatures gobbled green worms that sprouted from the ground. Those were the creatures that grew clothes on their backs, not the ones that squirted cheese. Strange, thought Bait, was a matter of perspective.

“The purpose of this survey is to bring back relics and fragments that might retain a trace of this imprint. A thaumaturgical field, that’s what the Chancellor called it. If such a field could be re-established elsewhere, then who knows what feats of magic might be possible?” Nala rested her chin in her hand. “Recovering the works of the ancients, bringing about a magical renaissance! That’s the dream, Bait, not dragging a few coins out of the mire. Building an empire of wonders, that’s what we’re doing here.” She drummed her fingers on her cheek, which was the only cheek that Bait had ever seen free of pockmarks or scars or grime. “You know,” Nala said thoughtfully, “you might have the makings of a genuine sorcerer. You spent a long time immersed in the thaumaturgic field, after all. You’re certainly worth further study.”