Page 80 of The Dungeon Book

I didn’t follow after.

He chanted words of power. He conjured brilliant blue chains around Old Throte. It was terribly impressive – by the admittedly low standards of the modern age. It might have even held the gargoyle. But I was not inclined to trust in anything or anyone.

I ran right for the throne and settled my arse in it.

That’s how I became Master – through sacrificing others, through betraying friends, through technicalities and loopholes. It was far from worthy.

Bait stood before the tower all alone.

*

Between Bait and the empty throne were all the levels of the tower. When I was Master, after the few years of practice in channeling power (which actually turned out to be a few decades), I’d replaced the tower’s guardians. Orphir had done the same. A host of things of shadow and knives awaited poor Bait on every floor.

So she avoided the floors. There were windows six storeys above her. She climbed the outside of the tower, nimble fingers digging into cracks in the ancient mortar.

One level, two, and the wind caught her, rushing past her with the fury of a dragon – but she was a girl who had slain dragons, or at least arranged their deaths, so she hung on, and climbed.

Two levels, three, and the chasm yawned beneath her, a three-storey fall only the of foretaste what awaited her if she slipped. If she slipped from any of three sides of the tower, she’d break on the rocks and then tumble down the cliffs; the other fall on offer was shorter but no less lethal, a plummet into the crevasse above Nithscalpa’s lair. Her bones and the dragon’s bones would lie entangled in the Dungeon for ever, and she did not want that.

Three levels, four. Spirits pressed themselves against the glass, demon faces leering, demon voices calling. Any normal intruder might have been so terrified as to willingly cast themselves into the void. Bait was steeped in the horrors of the Dungeon, and so they did not frighten her unduly. She climbed past them.

Four levels, five, and Old Throte came crawling down the tower wall towards her like a stone lizard. As a courtesy he enfolded her in his broken wings to ward off the wind, so they could converse in as civilised a manner as is possible for an ancient gargoyle and a strange child who both clung to the exterior of a wizard’s tower in the midst of howling winds.

“What are you doing here, Bait?”

She pointed away down the mountain, to where human lands nestled in green. “You see it from up here, don’t you? You can see the RAS coming. They took Cornelius and Only-Sister and lots of the other Denizens.” She shrugged as best she could while clinging to the tower. “Something has to be done about that.”

“I am bound to defend the Master’s Tower against all intruders,” intoned Throte. “Leave this place, child, and we shall have no quarrel.”

“I’m not in the Master’s Tower, am I?” argued Bait. “I’m outside it.”

She squeezed past him and kept climbing. Throte scuttled after her.

“True enough,” said the gargoyle. “But the instant you cross the threshold, I am bound to stop you.”

“If you wanted to kill me, you could have given me to Nithscalpa years ago.”

“I spared you, child,” said the gargoyle, “for I did not think it right that a creature without wit or wile or claw should be treated as a foe. But know this: you have proven yourself worthy of my respect, and therefore I shall do my utmost to eviscerate you should I catch you.”

“I think,” said Bait, “that you want a good Master for the Dungeon. Someone who cares for this place like Yrn Kyos did. I think that’s why you didn’t kill me when you could have.”

“My own desires cannot sway me. I am bound to obey the Master’s commands. Thus when you cross the threshold of the tower, I am bound to stop you.” The gargoyle’s eyes glittered. “It does concern me that if you should enter by the southern window on the fifth floor, it will be more difficult to catch you.”

“That one over there?” Bait stopped climbing upwards and began to inch around the tower.

“That is the very one,” said Throte, “which would be most inconvenience.”

The southern window was very narrow. There was no way for the gargoyle to get through it. Even for Bait, it would be a tight squeeze. The stonework on the southern side was treacherous. She dug her toes into the gaps, sending pebbles cascading down the mountainside far below. For an instant, she hung there, sky all around her, more exposed than she’d ever felt in her young life. Nothing at all between here and the terrible vastness of the world.

And then her questing fingers found the edge of the window, her toes caught the sill, and she squeezed through the gap. The Dungeon enfolded her again, and she was in.

This is what Bait saw, in the last moments of her time in the Dungeon. A glimpse of the room she’d landed in – the Master’s bedroom, unused since Orphir’s day (in all my nights in that room, I never slept well. The room’s too cold, the bed’s too hard, and the things of knife and shadow snore). Behind her, the gargoyle’s grey arm is lunging through the window, snatching and clawing, stone splintering on stone, but she’s already running forward, out of reach (did she remember, in that moment, a dragon clawing at another tower, far away?).

She throws open the door, finds the spiral stair beyond. She has never been here before, but she’s heard me reminiscing about my old living days, she’s seen the tower laid out in blue ink in the RAS charts, it’s in her stolen Dungeon Book. She sprints up the steps, sure-footed, even as things howl and gibber on the levels below. Outside, the scrape-scuttle of the gargoyle as it races up the outside of the tower, trying to reach the wide windows of the topmost level before she bounds up the last stair –

And now she’s in the throne room, the Master’s room, the wizard’s sanctum. No time to look at the wonders assembled here, the cabinets behind the glass, the reliquaries, the ancient tomes and grimoires. No time for anything except the Master’s throne, the heart of the Dungeon.

When you are a child, your home is shelter and security. It keeps you safe.