Page 85 of The Dungeon Book

Further indignities befell me. I can mention them only briefly.

Once again, I was stuffed in a sack. I was a small and portable skull no longer, but a half-formed torso can be crammed into a large bag. I shall not dwell on the interaction between the jolting of the cart, the coarse weave of the sack and the fact that I was still lacking skin over most of my new body.

Nor shall I mention that although Orphir’s spells had provided me with mouth and throat, gullet and belly (I supplied my own teeth), he had not yet equipped me with the other end of the digestive system. The jolting of the cart had further ill effects there. RAS soldiers carried me from the village at the foot of the mountain up to the reopened Dungeon Door.

Mercifully, he finished the spell soon after we arrived at my old tomb. He waited so he could draw on the ambient magic of the Dungeon instead of tapping his own stock of sorcery, which rather undermined his talk of brotherhood and partnership.

“You could have done that sooner,” I grumbled, although I cannot deny I was pleased to have knees, not to mention other accoutrements.

“Forging the spell was not easy. The works of the ancients were of little use, so much of you is improvised. Do let me know if anything leaks.”

“A delightful prospect.” I tested my legs, and found that I still remembered how to walk. “To the tower?”

“Not for you, Cornelius. You’ll wait here with these loyal fellows – poor conversationalists, you’ll find, but I don’t pay them for their wit. If your information proves accurate and I secure the child, then we shall all return to the castle. If not, well, you won’t have far to go.”

“Charming. By the by, saying ‘the child’ like that makes you sound unreasonably sinister.”

“The changeling, then,” he said, loud enough for the RATS to hear.

“Her name is Bait,” I insisted, “and she’s not to be harmed. Even if she bites.”

He stopped and picked a silver coin off a shelf. He turned it over in his hand, amused at the profile of a much younger King Arus stamped on one face. He handed it to me.

“Never let it be said, my friend, that you got no loot from the Dungeon.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

There are parts of this tale that I am ashamed to tell. My betrayal of Bait, for example. Orphir beguiled me with the same arguments he used on others – like Nala, who I shall come to in a moment – but, no, I cannot justify my treachery by saying I was deceived. I knew. After all, I knew Orphir. We were brothers in arms, fellow conspirators bound by circumstance and ambition. Like me, he was a better liar than he ever was a wizard.

What ruined me then was what ruined me in the first place – jealousy, greed, lust, all things base and shallow. What can I say? We are who we were made to be, even in death. Master Pentsable tried, bless him. He tried to give me a moral education along with an arcano-historical one. He cannot be blamed. I was a wretch, a rogue, and a liar in life, and in death I was not much better.

On this I shall have more to say – I shall argue before you like a prisoner in the dock, a penitent in a confessional – but this has always been Bait’s story, not mine. I am but a messenger. So to her tale I return.

The guards bound Bait and put a sack on her head. The daylight was hot through the coarse weave of the cloth.

She struggled. Like a wild cat, she hissed and kicked and bit, but she was small for all her ferocity, and they dragged her down the hill until she went limp. I knew she was listening for the Buried River, and the voices of the nixies calling from the waters. The river followed her down the hillside, and kept her company after they threw her on a horse – a new experience for Bait and not one she liked in the slightest – and brought her down the long road to the keep.

I cannot guess what she was thinking. No doubt she was afraid, but Bait was always like a coiled spring: push her, compress her, and she would retaliate given the slightest opening. Whatever fear weighed on her would transmute into violence. Was she haunted by the secrets of the Dungeon that had been snatched away from her? The Master’s throne, the forbidden door – there’s always another mystery, another unmapped chamber. One can explore for ever and never know all the paths of the labyrinth. Did the thought gnaw at her?

Or did she think of me? Did she know I had betrayed her? Did she recognise the skull beneath the skin, or was I a stranger to her in life as I had been a friend in death?

Still blindfolded, they whisked her through yards that stank of manticore dung and troll bile. She cried out in the Dungeon Tongue, and a chorus roared in answer. They got you too, yowled a pack of young goblins. You are not alone, growled Only-Sister. Help us, free us, fear us, roared trolls, and we shall feast on human flesh.

Did she listen for the clattering speech of a talking skull, and hear nothing?

Stone steps of the South Tower under her feet.

Then light.

Then, at last, a half-familiar face.

“What have you done to her? Are those chains? Take them off! Take them off, she’s just a child!” Nala pushed at Bait’s guards, poking them into action.

“It tried to bite me,” grumbled one.

“I’ll do worse than bite if you don’t free her,” snapped Nala. “I told them not to hurt her.”

“We have orders,” said another RAS adventurer, as he removed the manacles from Bait’s wrists, “to keep her legs bound. Orders from on high.”