Page 97 of The Dungeon Book

So, pray believe me when I say that beneath the skirts of Mistress Clove was a chasm of stinking horror, a dark cave haunted by horrors worse than any dungeon. No flood of eldritch chaos loosed from the ghast’s forbidden doorway could compare to the stench of Clove’s undergarments. But Bait – a creature of singular courage – crawled down and hid between Clove’s bony shins.

Moving like some stately dowager, Clove proceeded across the cell and knocked on the door to be let out. Bait crawled along between Clove’s legs, keeping pace with her to stay hidden.

Maybe the guards subconsciously suspected something was amiss. Maybe they noticed an odd furtive billowing of Clove’s skirts. But I assure you, there was no hiding place in the whole castle less likely to be searched than down there.

Bait slipped away from Clove in the dark. From her own time in the castle, she knew its byways and secret paths almost as well as she knew the Underhalls. She could tell from the particular texture of one stone step or another that she was close to the storeroom under the buttery or some such, and from there she could find her way.

The storeroom was crammed with all manner of supplies. Bait’s eager fingers rifled through them in the dark. She could see nothing, but felt the rough weave of hemp rope, the sloshing weight of a flask of oil, the cold links of iron chain. Needful things went into a sack. The Trapsmiths’ Arcade was long ago and far away, but she remembered her first lessons under Clickglee.

You can take the child from the goblins, but not the goblin mischief from the child.

Then, sack over her shoulder, she ran through dark passages, up narrow stairs, squeezing through a window, then into the sunlight.

She ran along a narrow roof-ridge I can only describe as architecturally symbolic. On the one side, it sloped down towards the exterior wall of the castle, and beyond the wall the endless, trackless green of the forest and escape. On the other, the menagerie of the courtyard, all her friends in chains. At the far end, the wall of the keep itself, sheer as a cliff face. On the levels above, it was pockmarked with windows, but it was a long climb to reach any of them, and sentries watched every approach.

Bait passed by unseen.

How? Because Only-Sister was a huntress, and she had the keenest eyes of any of the Denizens in the courtyard. (Well, excepting Balor the Squinter, who was all eyes, but his vision was impaired by his all-over blindfold.) She was the first to spot Bait, lurking on the windowsill. When the manticore saw Bait, she began to roar, and all the other Denizens took up the call. The uproar drew the attention of the guards towards the courtyard, and away from Bait.

To the guards, it sounded like roaring, and yowling, and grunting, and screeching, a cacophony of troll-howls and stirge-calls and goblin meeping and the cries of a hundred other unlikely creatures. But to those who spoke the Dungeon Tongue, all those roars and yowls resolved into a single cheer.

BAIT! BAIT! BAIT! BAIT!

Bait darted along the roof-ridge to the wall of the keep beyond.

Again, she climbed.

Higher and higher, and still higher.

There are grander keeps with taller towers than Dunshelm, but when one is clinging by one’s fingertips to a crumbling stone wall with nothing below you but a ninety-foot drop, the last thing one needs is the narrator pointing out that it would be a two-hundred-foot drop if you were climbing the Black Tower in Crowhaven. I shall not diminish Bait’s accomplishment with niggling footnotes.

Higher she climbed, and all the castle and all the world beneath her if she cared to look down. There the South Tower, there the kitchen door. There the road to Lastease winding through the forest like a buried river, and beyond that all the lands of the surface kingdom.

There, no larger than a cobblestone from this perspective, was the crowded courtyard. Indeed, it was as if she’d turned over a cobblestone, but all the strange things that crept and crawled beneath it were cheering her name. There Only-Sister, proud despite all her wounds. There the absurd bobbing shape of Balor, there the bloodbeast, there the trolls hollering from beneath their shared umbrella, there the voices of her goblin kinfolk. Only the minotaur was silent.

Had she looked in another direction she’d have seen the mountains, the sun struggling to clear their grim peaks. The Dungeon, ever in shadow. She’d have seen the road home.

But Bait was never one for looking around. All her attention was focused on the climb, on the wall in front of her. In the way that one stone block was alike to another, but also different, and in those subtle differences was the way through the maze. This way was a dead end, that way a crumbling handhold and a deadly fall, that way – another window.

She intended, I believe, to climb up to your room, or to Orphir’s lair, but the wall brought her inexorably to another room on the topmost level of the keep.

There was a heavy curtain just inside this window, so Bait was able to squeeze through unseen. The curtain made the room inside blessedly dark, and her eyes were dazzled by the horribly bright sunshine, so she crouched for a moment in the velvet folds of the drapes and just listened.

Outside, the yowling and roaring slowly faded.

Inside the room, Bait could hear two people breathing.

One faint, regular, slow. Sleeping.

The other a horrible wet rattle, every breath a gasp, every breath a battle.

Dying.

Bait peered through the curtain.

The room was so similar to the princess’s room that for a moment Bait thought she’d miscounted the windows. This had been Sir Rudyard’s bedroom, before the royal court descended on the little keep; the adjoining room that belonged to the princess was for guests.

But Aldebara was not in her own room. She was here, sleeping in a chair, so swaddled in blankets and furs she looked almost entombed. One of her hands had slipped free to rest on the bed bedside the chair. Bait had never seen her own sleeping face before, and was struck by how unburdened Aldebara seemed, as if in dreams her mask slipped away and she could be herself, some third thing that was neither the princess nor a changeling copy of Bait.