Page 60 of The Dungeon Book

The strange gifts ceased on the day Sir Rudyard and his retinue arrived.

Bait watched the adventurers from the eaves of the forest. Sir Rudyard rode right past her without noticing her hiding place in the old badger sett. And if he didn’t notice that, she thought sourly to herself, he’ll never survive below.

Not without help.

“Stay,” she told Gloop, then she set off up the slope.

It was the worst of treacheries for a Denizen to ally with the surface folk, or to guide outsiders through the Dungeon’s labyrinths and snares. But the dragon had proclaimed she was not a Denizen. He’d driven her from her home, turned the Dungeon against her! Her heart was aflame with an unfamiliar righteous fury – how dare the dragon break the Rules! How dare he call himself Master without earning the title! As far as she was concerned, bringing in adventurers was wholly justified.

Neb had once told her that two wrongs did not make a right, but if you turned left and left again down certain twisted corridors on the Fourth Level, you’d end up going right. The Dungeon, for all its intricacies and secret ways, was far more comprehensible than the morals of the surface world.

When she reached the edge of the wood, she stopped for a moment. She waited and watched, always conscious of the possibility that Nithscalpa was out hunting. He might spot movement out of a corner of his good eye, and swoop down upon her. She’d escaped being caught in the open once; the dragon would not spare her again.

Nothing wheeled in the moonlit sky. Bait gathered her courage and darted up the old road towards the Dungeon Door. Every time a cloud passed in front of the moon she held her breath, counted her heartbeats, fearful that each one might be her last.

The Dungeon Door was gone. The crevasse that Nithscalpa used to leave his lair was high up on the mountain slopes and guarded by sheer cliffs. But there were other ways in, other doors. I had shown some of them to her, on our explorations of the Dungeon. As a child, Bait had pushed against them, making sure they were solidly closed. The Rules say it’s the responsibility of every Denizen to watch against intruders, and she’d been so diligent then. All the easily accessible doors were closed, and could only be opened from the inside.

Instead, she waded into the icy waters of the Buried River, gasping as the cold water slapped against her skin. The river emerged from a crack in the rock, and it was possible – just possible – to squeeze through and climb up the narrow channel. At least, the nixies did it. It was only when Bait was up to her neck in rushing water, pushing her right shoulder painfully under the lip of stone, that she recalled that nixies were water-spirits who could become liquid at will, which made it easier.

For the first time, pinned as she was in the crack, the river shoving her painfully against every rock, she felt fear. It was not only that she was taking a perilous route in – it was the Dungeon itself that terrified her. She was entering it like a human, like one of the surface folk, an unwelcome intruder. She had no lair to retreat to – not the cosy niches of the goblin tunnels with their stink of copper and sweat, not Cornelius’ schoolroom where the narrator of this tale had instructed her with such wit and verve that she might have momentarily forgotten her mortal terror in favour of sudden belated appreciation for his diligent instruction, not the Entrance Hall she’d once claimed as her own. She was a trespasser here.

Icy water splashed in her face, and she couldn’t catch her breath. The dark beneath the mountain wasn’t soothing any more, it wasn’t welcoming, gently yielding its mysteries through touch and subtle sound – it was the dark of the abyss, the pit opening up before her. She felt as though a wraith was nearby, that her strength was ebbing away even as she needed every ounce of it just to hold her place against the current.

I don’t want to die, she thought, whatever and whoever I really am, I want to live.

Be like a nixie, Bait thought, and that somehow helped. She squeezed and shoved and dragged and suddenly she was through, at the foot of the Falls of Night, the waters crashing down on her from far above. She inched over to the edge of the shaft, where the flow was a little less furious, and began to climb. The freezing water numbed her fingers so much that she could not grip the stone. She climbed by bracing herself against the far wall of the shaft, inching up with stiff limbs like a spider. Sharp rocks dug into her bloodied back. Her knees were a butcher’s block of scrapes and cuts.

It was so very hard. It was so dark she could not tell if she was in the Dungeon or the grave.

Run and hide, said the goblin in her. Goblins avoided effort and strife. Build the trap and wait for your enemy to fall into it. But she could not make a snare big enough to catch a dragon. She had to keep climbing.

Fight, roared the minotaur. But Bait was no warrior. She didn’t even have the strength for this first step, this first obstacle. And the minotaur was gone, anyway. She was alone. No one could protect her.

Gloop, said Gloop, and that helped, too. The corridor slime didn’t think, and thinking wasn’t needed here. She just needed to move, inch by inch, nothing except the next foothold, the next bit of rock. To cling to the face of the waterfall even as the river ripped away everything else . . .

Then, at the top, unseen hands grabbed her and pulled her over the lip. They carried her to the bank of the Buried River, pushing her onto the bank, working the water from her lungs, making her gasp, making her breathe, making her live. Bait, what are you doing here?

“I came back,” said Bait.

“Alone?” asked one of the nixies, wistfully. “We’ve seen you with mortals. Did you bring nothing for us to eat?”

But the leader of the nixies shushed her companion. “Give her a chance to rest. Can you imagine how much work it must be, dragging all those bones around?”

“Unthinkable!”

“So unnecessary!”

“We could always get rid of them,” suggested a third, trying to be helpful. “Drown and join us, Bait. We’ve always liked your name.”

“I need—” Bait rolled over and vomited –

At least, I assume she did. I heard all this later, from Bait and from the nixies, and neither of them added details like that. To hear them talk, this whole episode could be summarised in a few words. Bait climbed up the Falls of Night, rested with the nixies a while, then continued on her way. It was the nixies who mentioned the part about bones being heavy and unnecessary, which I took as a personal attack, while it was Bait who asked me, curiously, if she really would become a nixie if she drowned in the river. Neither of them put as much emphasis on the physical act of survival.

That is, I suppose, my contribution. I was, then, more and more conscious of my limitations. Being a talking skull is better than being a silent and unthinking skull, especially if you’re like me and delight in verbiage. But all my words and wisdom had been utterly useless when it came to the dragon. I’d become, quite literally, a burden. Mere baggage, to be left behind when Bait set off on this quest of vengeance. She could have stuffed me into a bag or some such, instead of leaving me with a mopey manticore. But why bring along a talking skull?

*

“I need,” continued Bait, wiping her mouth, “to get down to the Sixth.”