by Zac Gorman
Being outside felt incredible. Like the first drink of ice-cold water after you’ve been running around in the heat all day. Only better. She closed her eyes for a moment and drank it in. Inside the mountain, the air was as old as the rocks themselves, but out here, it was new and wonderful and almost thirst quenching.
“Hey!” a voice rasped in that particularly unhelpful-to-anyone type of yelling whisper. “Girl! Girl! It’s me!”
Below her, standing on a narrow cliff, was a sullen-looking old man.
“Girl! It’s me! Shabul! With the herbs!”
Thisby thought it was strange that even after years of their arrangement, Shabul still thought it was necessary to introduce himself this way. Also, that he hadn’t bothered to learn her name. Still, it was business, and Thisby didn’t take it personally.
Shabul was the only person, as far as Thisby knew—and admittedly she knew very little of the world outside the dungeon—who dared come this far up the Black Mountain. He grew herbs near the foothills, down where things would still grow, and every few weeks he’d bring his herbs to Thisby in exchange for ingredients for his potions, which she collected around the dungeon. It was a mutually beneficial relationship. She had use for fresh herbs, and his magic potions appeared much more impressive to the locals when he infused them with exotic ingredients from the most dangerous place in the entire kingdom. He neglected to mention that he actually traded for them with a rather polite twelve-year-old girl.
As little as Thisby knew about the outside world, she knew even less about magic. And what she did know, she didn’t exactly find encouraging. Most wizards, she assumed, were like Shabul, making so-called potions out of detritus. She found it absurd to think anybody could truly believe that bits of basilisk bone could cure jaundice, or behemoth dung could cure leprosy, but still, Shabul was nice enough to bring her herbs, so she didn’t mind him personally.
“It’s nice to see you again, Shabul!” she yelled before wriggling back through the small opening to grab Shabul’s bag from her backpack. When she returned, she dropped it into a bucket on the end of a length of rope and lowered it down to him. “How’re things at the store?” Thisby asked. Shabul wasn’t much of a conversationalist, but Thisby had no other connection with the outside world, so she made do. Shabul was distractedly eyeing the bucket on its way down.
“You know. Same as always.” he said. “I grow herbs. I make potions. Of course, next week will be busy, busy, busy!”
When Thisby stopped lowering the bucket, just out of arm’s reach of Shabul, he looked up at her, a bit irritated.
“I mean, when the royals come up mountain next week. For Inspection.”
Thisby’s heart sank. The Royal Inspection. She’d always known Inspection was a possibility, but somehow it’d never felt real before. According to some of the older staff around the dungeon, the royal family used to come around for Inspection every few years to check out the dungeon and make sure everything was in order, but she’d been here for twelve years and this was the first she’d heard of one actually happening.
“But why now?” Thisby blurted.
“Apparently, the Prince fancies himself a bit of an adventurer. Wants to see the biggest and baddest dungeon in all of Nth!” Shabul laughed, amusing himself. “You know what I think—” he started, but before he could even finish his sentence, the bucket clattered to his feet as Thisby ducked back through the tunnel, snatched her backpack, and was running full steam toward her chambers, her tiny feet slapping hard against the cold stone.
By the time she reached her room, she was sweating. Her mind was dizzy with thoughts of all the work that would be necessary to get ready for an Inspection. She already barely had time to sleep as it was.
When Thisby stepped through her darkened doorway she was so lost in thought that she didn’t even notice the pale, gnarled man standing at the foot of her bed.
Chapter 3
“Keeper,” grunted a gruff voice in the dark.
Thisby’s heart tried to escape through her mouth before she realized who it was. But even that did very little to settle her nerves.
The figure shifted so the light shining through the crack in the door illuminated his pockmarked, stony face. Thisby knew her boss could see in the dark and that he liked to use this to his advantage to keep her on her toes. Anything to keep her scared and in her place. Thisby regained her composure as quickly as possible, but she could tell by his unusually smarmy grin that it was too late.
“Roquat,” Thisby said coldly.
Roquat was a miserable old Dünkeldwarf whose family had lived in the mountain for generations. Like most Dünkeldwarves, he was as pale as moonlight and as thick as a tree trunk turned sideways. He had milky white eyes and a beard into which he’d woven little bits of every rock that he’d ever tasted, a teeth-shattering tradition among Dünkeldwarves that Thisby found particularly stupid. (Although, admittedly, she found certain aspects of their culture quite fascinating—like how they had no word for love but more than one hundred words for granite, or how their people had lived in the Black Mountain longer than anyone else, predating even the goblins. As far as Thisby knew, Roquat was the lone survivor.)
“Come now, Keeper. You’ll call me Boss unless you desire a week of digging trenches in the Deep Down,” he wolfishly mumbled through a mouthful of sharp, blackened teeth. Normally, her deliberate impudence would’ve resulted in an immediate punishment, but Roquat’s pride in catching Thisby off guard had tempered his anger. For Roquat, this was as close to pleasant as he could manage.
“You know why I’m here, Keeper.”
Thisby’s mind raced while she tried her best to look collected.
It was possible that he knew about the Royal Inspection, but it was just as likely that he knew nothing. Roquat was Thisby’s boss, and he served as liaison between the dungeon and the Master. But he was a long way down the ladder in the grand scheme of things. The Master entrusted only a small group of people with privileged information, and Roquat—likely for good reason—wasn’t one of them. Besides, the sooner Roquat found out about the Inspection, the sooner she’d be spending her nights cleaning the scum off the walls of the gnoll pits. Thisby wasn’t new to this game, and she knew better than to volunteer information freely in the dungeon.
“Roquat,” Thisby said coldly.
“I’m afraid I don’t have your connections, Boss,” she said with as much forced reverence as she could stomach.
Roquat moved into the light and stroked his beard thoughtfully.
“Hm. That you don’t, whelp. That you don’t.” Roquat chuckled as he sat down in the chair at her desk. The legs creaked and splayed beneath his weight. “You didn’t forget what tomorrow is, did you?”
Thisby’s momentary relief vanished. Roquat recognized her look of revelation. He let out a throaty laugh that sounded like he was choking on a bagful of marbles.
“The Darkwell!” blurted Thisby.
“Your mind’s been slippin’ lately, Keeper! Maybe it’s time you started writin’ some of this stuff down!” Roquat was positively delighted.
“And what does an illiterate like you know about writing?” squeaked a voice from the doorway.
Thisby and Roquat looked over at the little old goblin standing in the doorway. Roquat bolted up to his feet, tipping over the chair. Even though he was easily ten times their size, something about goblins had always made Roquat uncomfortable. Thisby suspected it was their magic.
With a curt nod, Roquat excused himself from the room but couldn’t resist one last parting shot.
“Better get to bed, Keeper. You’ve got a busy day tomorrow and you don’t want to keep him waiting. It’s a long walk to the Darkwell.” Roquat let his ominous words hang in the air as he went. As he shoved past Thisby, his body odor stung her nostrils. It was terribly unpleasant, even worse than usual, and it caused her to gag. She almost said something mocking but decided to bite her tongue. As sweet as it may have been to get in the last word, the l
ikelihood that it would’ve resulted in a beating was fairly high, and besides, even if it hadn’t, there was nothing in the world worth having to deal with him for a second longer, anyway.
Thisby relaxed her shoulders. It wasn’t until Roquat left her room that she realized they’d been pulled up around her ears the whole time.
“Never mind him! What was he doing in here anyway, don’t you lock your door?” said the old goblin in a tone that Thisby could only describe as motherly—somehow both soothing and stern simultaneously.
“I thought I did,” said Thisby.
“Well, never mind, never mind!”
She patted Thisby genially on the hip—which was about as high as she could reach—and crossed over to the desk. She gently picked up the chair that Roquat had tipped over and returned it to its proper spot, nodding contentedly as if erasing the memory of his presence.
“Thank you, Grunda. You’re too kind,” said Thisby.
Grunda pretended like she hadn’t heard Thisby and continued to dutifully straighten up her room. Thisby knew goblins were notoriously bad at taking compliments but figured it was worth a shot anyway.
Thisby watched Grunda organizing her notebooks and tried to fight the uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach. She trusted Grunda more than anybody else in the dungeon, but lately, she’d been feeling particularly careful about her belongings, her notebooks especially.
A week ago, Thisby had returned to her room to find several of her notebooks missing. The strangest part was that her room had been locked, and when she returned, it still was. Of course, she’d suspected Roquat, but he didn’t have a key and he couldn’t simply walk through walls. It was possible she’d left the door open, but had she really been getting that careless? She’d seemingly just done it again, so it was possible. Or maybe he did have a key. She’d have to look into it.
She hadn’t suspected Grunda—after all, they were friends—but Thisby knew goblin magic was particularly adept at sneaking goblins into places where goblins didn’t normally belong, and Grunda was far from the only goblin in the dungeon. She hated herself for even thinking such ugly little thoughts, but just like goblins couldn’t help but get into mischief, humans couldn’t help but mistrust. A nasty little disease of the human spirit to which even those as good-natured as Thisby weren’t completely immune.
Thisby shook the thought from her head and smiled at her friend.
“He’s right about one thing, though. You’d better get to bed,” Grunda said as she blew some dust off a filthy old notebook in which Thisby had jotted her notes on the biology of carnivorous dungeon plants. “It’s at least a day’s trip to the Darkwell, and you know how cranky he gets when he’s kept waiting.”
Chapter 4
The scariest room in any house is almost always the basement. Sure, occasionally you might come across an especially spooky attic, or a creepy nursery, or a haunted broom closet, but nine times out of ten, the last place you want to be in a house on a stormy night is the basement. The Black Mountain was no exception. The lower you went, the scarier it got.
Near the top of the mountain, you had your basic goblins and imps. Small monsters who could be fairly vicious when riled but weren’t enough to thwart most hardy adventurers who wandered into the dungeon in search of treasure. Below that were your zombies, ghouls and vampires. Undead creatures, that sort of thing. Below that you started getting into your bigger nasties: trolls, orcs, were-things, wyverns, dire this-and-thats. Of course, the lower you went, the better the treasure. That was sort of the whole appeal of the dungeon. Test yourself against the deadliest monsters on the planet and leave with a fistful of coins to show for it—if you leave at all. Most adventurers who tried their luck in the dungeon never made it any lower than the midway point, let alone to the bottom. They were lucky. Below the midway point was when you started to get into the really nasty stuff.
Thisby had seen it.
Thisby had been as low in the dungeon as any human had ever been, possibly lower, and she moved about it all with ease. She could traipse among vile, ooze-spitting giants and look into the eyes of a spectral ghoul without blinking. She could do this because she paid attention. She studied the behavior of the monsters. She knew their strengths and their weaknesses. Their patterns and their habits. She knew the tricks and the secrets of every inch of that dungeon, and somewhere, buried inside her notebooks, there was an answer to every problem the dungeon could throw at her. It’s unbelievable what can be accomplished when a person pays attention and takes diligent notes, and nobody paid better attention or took better notes than Thisby Thestoop.
But even Thisby had her limits. There was somewhere in the dungeon that nobody had ever been. Not even the Master.
The basement.
Thisby stood on the rocky precipice that overlooked the Darkwell—the basement door. The only thing standing between her and the darkness at the bottom of the world. The Darkwell was the spot where the dungeon ended and the Deep Down began. A single, solitary gate protected the dungeon from whatever it was that lay beyond. She held a candle out at arm’s length and strained her eyes to see if she could detect any movement. That she couldn’t see a thing made her heart climb even farther up into her throat.
It was hard to see without the help of Mingus’s brilliant light. This far down into the mountain, the darkness proved challenging even for someone as well adapted to it as Thisby. The dark down here wasn’t like other darkness. Here it took on its own physical properties. It had weight. It moved. It pulled you in like quicksand and made it hard to run. She’d tucked Mingus safely away inside her backpack as per his request. If there was one thing in the Black Mountain Mingus hated more than anything else—and the list of things he hated was very, very long—it was a visit to the Darkwell. Periodically, she would hear him softly muttering comforting words to himself through the thick canvas walls of her bag, but she tried her best to tune him out.
She bounded from rock to rock down the steep ravine toward the Darkwell. The Darkwell was more than fifty feet in diameter with a short rim made of rough stone that seemed to jut up from the dusty earth like the pursed lips of a pouty child. Inside, covering the round opening, was a wrought-iron gate forged in an ancient method known as blackweave, the bars knitted together like cloth to form a nearly impenetrable tapestry of twisted metal. The bars were so tightly knit that not even the smallest creature in the Black Mountain could squeeze through. This was intentional. There was nothing from beyond the Darkwell that anybody in the rest of the Black Mountain wanted anything to do with.
What exactly was beyond there was impossible to know. The gate had stood for hundreds of years, and nobody who was around before that time cared to talk about it much. Perhaps the strangest feature for something commonly referred to as a gate was that the Darkwell didn’t appear to have any latches or hinges. This was also intentional. There was no way in, and there was no way out of the Darkwell.
This should have made Thisby feel safe, but it didn’t. It wasn’t just the unknown horrors that lived beyond the gate of the Darkwell that made her uncomfortable, but the thing that stood watch at the gate as well.
Her candle created a thin bubble of light that seemed to be growing weaker under the oppressive weight of the encroaching darkness. She thought about Mingus hiding in her backpack. It would’ve been nice to have him out, if he weren’t so scared. He could glow far brighter than any candle—and having some company, no matter how frightened that company may have been, wouldn’t have hurt, either. She allowed herself a few seconds to imagine she was back in her tiny bedroom, pouring over the day’s notes and lying snugly in bed, before a deep voice from across the well snapped her back to reality.
“Hello, Little Mouse.”
She felt his breath like a warm breeze, reaching her on a delay as it traveled from half a room away.
“Tut, tut, tut!” he clucked derisively. “You came all this way and didn’t bring me a treat?”
She watched the shadows move
just beyond the lip of the well, shapes swimming in darkness like oil dropped into a bottle of ink. The creature was coming her way.
As he moved closer, she could make out some of his features in the dim candle glow. First his large, shining, saucerlike eyes. Then his sharp teeth, pearly white against the black velvet shadows. Finally, his gigantic body slunk out in front of her in its entirety. He revealed himself in exactly the order he intended, maximizing his dramatic impact.
The Sentinel of the Darkwell climbed up onto the grate and began to pace slowly. His toes were the size of wooden barrels, yet his footfalls were completely silent. The only sound he made was the occasional scraping of his claws against the blackweave gate, a noise like a kitchen knife being sharpened against a whetstone. It was unsettling, to say the least. Thisby knew it was intentional. If he’d wanted to, she knew that he could tap dance on sheet metal without waking a sleeping baby in the next room. The noise was a threat.
As he moved closer, she could make out some of his features in the dim candle glow.
As someone who’d spent her entire life in the company of monsters, Thisby had never seen a normal cat. She’d seen pictures of them, of course, but after meeting the Sentinel, she could never quite understand why any rational human would want a miniature version of such a horrible monster as a pet. What could be the purpose of such an obviously deceitful creature, so predisposed to violence and mayhem, and why would anybody want to keep one around?
“Next time, Catface,” said Thisby.
The Sentinel bristled.
“Did you come here to mock me, Little Mouse? Or do you have other business? Bringing me dinner, perhaps?”
