Page 63 of The Dungeon Book

Our would-be dragon-slayers did not fill me with confidence. I’d known genuine adventurers, the sort recruited by the RAS, the sort who might actually have had a chance of killing Nithscalpa. They’d had a chance of killing me, back when I was Master, back before I died. Mad bastards, all of them, troubled childhoods, unspeakably violent. As dangerous as any Denizen. I was very glad of Old Throte’s stony hide between me and their swords.

None of those who followed Sir Rudyard had that sort of killing edge.

I worried Bait did not, and I worried she did.

The kobolds came out of the dark in the Chasm Hall. A swarm of lizard-children, the tallest of them barely three feet tall, bird-boned and delicate in their movements, comical until they sprang at you. It was like fighting a swarm of plucked chickens, if chickens carried knives. One man went down, a monster clawing at his face, and Offa came in with his big clomping foot and kicked the kobold clean into the pit. He goggled at his own bravery, and only then remembered the spear in his hand.

After that, it was butchery – but they’d all been blooded then, they’d seen that the horrors of the Dungeon could bleed if you poked them hard enough. Fired up with battle fury, Sir Rudyard led them down the smoky chasm before anyone could consider the wisdom of descending into a dragon’s lair.

The caves below were awash with fumes. A hellish miasma set them all coughing and choking. “It can’t be far,” said Sir Rudyard. “Other scholars report similar foul, ah, exhalations”. He waved his bestiary, although the smoke was so thick that the gesture was lost on everyone.

Offa, being used to the smoke of the kitchen, had the sense to tie a kerchief around his face.

“The air’s clearer this way,” said Neb. He led the company forward.

Then the worst part of the journey. Billowing fumes turned the caverns into a phantasmagoria. Faces in the smoke – were those lurking monsters, or carven relics, or your companions made monstrous, red-eyed and scaled with grime? The walls crawled with curlicues of smoke, skin crawled with sweat, many-legged things crawled beneath clothing and armour. Black centipedes as long as your arm. Hagworms with the faces of old women, the teeth of serpents. The heat sapping their strength, breathing an ordeal, panic rising, no way out, no way forward, heartbeats hammering in their ears like drums in the deep, the certain terrible knowledge, no way out, no way out, no way out, daylight a fleeting memory, an impossibility.

Only the Dungeon. Only the dark.

I wasn’t there, of course, but I remember it from my own experiences in the Dungeon. If I may leave Sir Rudyard and his company in a living hell for a moment, I shall describe a portion of the Dungeon’s layout that will soon become important. Lacking hands to hold a pen, let me draw with words.

On the western side are the halls you have already been introduced to – the Trapsmiths’ Arcade, the Hall of Pillars, the old Entrance, and the like. Descend the western stairs, and you get to the old temple quarter, the former lair of the manticores, lots of wraiths – and the secret door by which Bait admitted Rudyard and company.

There’s also the eastern dungeon, below the Chasm Hall and beyond the caves. A crevasse splits the Dungeon in twain between west and east. The upper dungeon, that is – the lower levels all connect up, but not even I know all the turnings of that labyrinth. The crevasse leads to the surface, and on the lip of that precipice stands Yrn Kyos’ Tower, the Master’s Tower – and around and behind that, unscalable mountains and cliffs and unpleasantness. The only way to reach the tower, therefore, is to pass through the caves, reach the foot of the crevasse, and then climb up the nearly-but-not-quite unscalable cliffside, or brave the nigh-unsurvivable corridors of the eastern dungeon.

But Nithscalpa had made his lair at the bottom of the crevasse, in the Vale of Mists.

He was not so large when Orphir and I came that way, fifty years ago. He was thin then, no bigger than a house cat, all tail and wings and hate. Recently hatched from some long-dormant egg. The furnace of his belly had not yet kindled, so all he could do was spit acid at us.

I could have wrung his neck then and saved us all the suffering.

But I could have done many things differently.

Now Sir Rudyard and his company followed the same path I’d taken many years before.

They came to the foot of the crevasse. The air was sweeter, a cold mountain breeze from far above – and oh! the glimpse of stars, a tiny patch of sky far, far above. They sank to their knees, gasping and spluttering, giving thanks that they had survived the passage of the caves. They were alive!

Then they heard it. An animal roaring, furious beyond measure, bellowing like a demon. The sound of metal smashing on metal, straining, rattling.

“Is that . . .” Offa mouthed the dragon.

Sir Rudyard tried leafing through his bestiary, but the fumes had turned the pages into an illegible mush. “It does not sound like, ah, our quarry,” he whispered, “but the foe must be near. Look!” He pointed at deep gouges in the cliffs above, left by the dragon’s claws as it crawled out of its lair like a monstrous bat.

“The moment is at hand,” he whispered, frowning as the distant roaring threatened to interrupt his monologue. “I have prepared some words.” He took the inspiring speech he had prepared from inside his armour, but mercifully it, too, had been reduced to illegibility. “But perhaps now is not the time.”

Sir Rudyard too sat down and looked up at the little patch of sky. Far above, over the mountain, dawn was coming, and with it the morning and the promise of breakfast. There, in the dark of the Dungeon, he found he could not remember the taste of eggs or bacon, or the sounds of the castle waking up around him. He struggled to recall the time when the skies had not been blackened by smoke, when his days had not been endless worries, when it had seemed like the walls of order might endure against the tide of chaos.

Sir Rudyard wanted, very much, to live.

While the company rested, Neb slipped away. Bait had shadowed them since the temple-wraiths. She’d whispered directions, and he’d nudged Rudyard accordingly. She had guided them through the Dungeon, an unseen presence in the shadows.

Now he could see her. There was just enough starlight for him to make out her faintest outline. He had never seen her so tense, so twisted up with fear.

“Careful,” she said. “Don’t touch that.” She pointed towards a cloth-wrapped bundle, wet and bloody. “It’s poison.”

In the distance, the beast roared again.

“That’s my minotaur,” said Bait in a small voice. She wiped her face, then turned to Neb and sniffed, “You smell.”