Page 47 of The Dungeon Book

“I take it,” I said carefully, “that you did not, ah, do as Sir Peledon wished?”

“I’m not her. The real princess was rescued years ago. Maybe I’m a changeling. Maybe I’m something else. But I’m not her. She’s out there.” She glanced down at the mountains and the forest and the village and Eskerlund and Crowhaven and all the other villages and cities and everything, all spread out under the bright sun that day.

She turned her back on it. “And I’m here.”

“So you are,” I said. “Shall we go back below?” We made a good partnership, she and I. She brought quick hands and nimble legs, I provided historical context and sardonic commentary. A worthy match.

She picked me up, but paused on the threshold of the Dungeon.

“Sir Peledon . . . will he be angry with me?”

“Perhaps – but I have not seen him in months. I hear he’s gone wandering deep.” Privately, I doubted he would even remember her. There was nothing left but beast in him.

She stepped over the threshold and closed the Door behind her. She exhaled.

“I missed the dark.”

In the end, we did not return to our old haunts. The gargoyle guardians of the entrance chamber had been destroyed, and without a master in the tower, there was no one to carve new ones. The only remaining gargoyle was Old Throte, still perched sentinel on the Master’s Tower above the Dungeon, and if he was troubled by the sledgehammer disposal of his stony siblings, he showed no sign.

Bait claimed the entrance as her new lair. It was the first page of her Dungeon Book.

At first, the Denizens disapproved. The Rule of the Dungeon states that guarding the Dungeon is the common task of us all, and the Denizens misliked having a lone human child – well, a human child, a talking skull and an affectionate slime – be the first line of defence against any further raiders. But Bait won them over. First, she promised that she would raise the alarm before intruders even reached the Door; second, she went out into the sunlight and snared birds and small animals, and the Denizens fed better than they had in a long time. Indeed, it soon became common for monsters from the deep levels – a manticore, for instance – to take shifts watching over the entrance and get a fresh snack of mountain raven or a haunch of deer. Bloody were Bait’s hands that autumn.

Second, she’d grown in her time away from the Dungeon. Not only in height – although she did tower over her goblin kin when they came to visit, even old Clickglee – but in courage and tenacity. She had seen how humans behaved, and knew more of her own strengths. Just as goblins are skilled in trap-making, and slithering hagworms in the art of poison, and trolls excel in brute force, she understood now that humans are strongest in self-delusion. A human can believe that they can bring order to the world through insisting on breakfast, or rally a mob against an innocent through sheer bitterness, or understand the truth through reading books alone – and they believe these things so strongly that the world bends a little to their desires. Bait wanted, more than anything in that time, to belong in the Dungeon, and so she carved out a place for herself – not as an honorary goblin or as the minotaur’s ward, but in her own right.

Goblins shun sunlight and never hunt on the surface, but that autumn goblin snares in the woods caught rabbits and deer – and even one forester, who stumbled back home with tales of how a wood-hag rescued him from a trap, but told him she was keeping his hatchet as payment, and also to deliver this pouch of ancient gold coins to the reeve’s son.

Some evenings, watching the sunset from the Dungeon Door, Bait and I would talk about her experiences in the castle. I was especially interested in this scholar Nala, and the mysterious Royal Antiquarian Survey she represented. Digging up fragments of discarded history and squeezing the dregs of magic out of them . . . it was not the first time I had heard such talk, and I had my suspicions about who this Chancellor might be. But Bait was often unwilling to discuss her time away, and I did not press. The one thing she’d carried back from the surface, the thing she treasured like a precious gem, was the thought that she might be a changeling. She took pride in this new word, this new monstrosity. Old tales said changelings felt no discomfort from heat or cold, so sometimes she would swim in the freezing waters of the Buried River. She’d emerge shivering, teeth chattering, and say she felt nothing. Old tales said changelings could fool humans, and she practised human speech like an actress learning lines.

I had my suspicions about who the changeling was, but I did not share them. I should have. I told myself that it was a harmless fancy on Bait’s part, and that it would be cruel to disabuse her of the notion, but that was not the true reason. I was a con artist long before I was a genuine wizard or the Master of the Dungeon, or a talking skull for that matter. Old habits do not merely die hard, they can survive death. I hoarded suspicions and secrets like treasure in the recesses of my brain; while I knew more than young Bait, I had power over her.

As she grew, she needed me less and less, and I disliked that.

Sometimes, she would leave me sitting in the dead man’s lap by the door for days on end, while she went off hunting in the woods.

Later, as winter winds bit and hunting became scarce, she would go below. She risked exploring the lower levels of the Dungeon, in regions that were little known even to me, levels no adventurer had trespassed since the days of Yrn Kyos. I feared for her safety, but she would not relent.

She was looking for the minotaur.

He’d left his former lair in the Chasm Hall and gone wandering. He held on to the dregs of his sanity and honour so he could finish his last quest and see the princess safely home. When he believed his task was accomplished, he gave up the struggle, and gave in to the transforming curse. He became the beast he’d wrestled with for years – and now Bait sought the beast in the darkest depths of the Dungeon.

She found signs of his passage. Hoofprints in blood. Rival monsters chopped and gored. Once, in the distance, the frustrated snort of a bull, and the sound of mighty horns scraping against a low ceiling. But she never caught up with him, no matter how deep she delved.

Bait left him a message. She found a room where he’d recently slept, a chamber thick with the animal stench of him, the fragments of a broken axe scattered across the floor, the handle splintered. She placed her silver coin in the middle of the room, and in the dust she wrote two words.

FORGIVE ME.

She came back to the entrance and did not go below for a long time.

Outside the Dungeon Door, winter howled, but the strongest winds did not trouble us in our underground home. Spring cloaked the mountain in green. Goblins built new traps in the Entrance Hall, fortifying our defences, for I suspected the RATS would return in the new year.

The summer was unusually warm. Bait swam with the nixies in the Buried River. Gloop sizzled when it crawled over the hot rocks near the door, and took to lurking in the back of the chamber where the sun could not reach. An air of indolence reached even the lower levels. Manticores stretched like house cats; goblins snoozed in their nooks in the Arcade, their traps unfinished, neglected. It was the sort of summer that put me in mind of selling cure-alls at village fairs, the sort of summer that stretched on for ever.

Hotter it grew, and hotter, even after midsummer rolled by, even after the harvest. The nights sweltered. The days scorched.

An unnatural heat.

The dragon had awoken.