by Zac Gorman
Thisby got dressed and made her way to the spot near the southeast entrance to the dungeon where she was told to wait for the royals to arrive. Unlike Roquat, Thisby was dressed in her usual old clothes—a worn black canvas tunic and leggings that she’d patched so many times it was hard to make out what material they’d been made from to begin with. It was fine, however, because if all went according to plan, Thisby would never be seen by the royals at all. She crouched there and waited. She waited until her thighs got sore, and she had to shift her weight back and forth to keep her feet from falling asleep.
Finally, she heard some mumbling getting louder. Roquat approached the entrance from the dungeon side with a band of armored ghouls marching in orderly formation behind him. He’d added a cape to his ensemble; it seemed to have been designed for a much taller dwarf, as it dragged on the ground behind him. He barked some orders at the ghouls and then cast an angry grimace toward Thisby, who was hiding in a rocky outcrop some twenty feet above them.
She fantasized about throwing a rock at his big dumb head.
The entrance to the dungeon opened, and Thisby caught her first glimpse of the royal family of Nth. The Larkspur twins stood side by side, flanked by a few royal guards who’d accompanied their carriage. The Master was nowhere to be seen.
The twins strolled elegantly into the dungeon and were immediately at odds with their surroundings. Their pristine clothing, their pretty faces, their natural grace, all clashed horribly with the filthy dungeon that up until a moment ago had seemed to Thisby to be pretty neat and tidy.
As they walked down the rough stone steps to greet Roquat and his men, for the first time in her life, Thisby suddenly wished she were better dressed. Or that maybe she’d washed her mousy brown hair so it didn’t stick out all stringy and gross. Or that she’d patched the holes in her tunic. She even wished momentarily that her nose wasn’t so long and pointy—she’d been told once by a particularly mean goblin that it resembled a draftsman’s angle, and the image had stuck with her ever since. Somehow this all seemed to matter like it hadn’t two minutes ago.
The silver lining was that she was completely hidden from their sight—and it was her job to remain that way. Thisby, like most of the staff of the dungeon and castle, was never intended to be seen by outsiders, as seeing what goes on behind the curtain might break the mystique of the experience. If adventurers had to stop and think about how the monsters that lived in the dungeon stayed fed, or why the more valuable treasure chests always seemed to be guarded by the more dangerous monsters, then they might realize this wasn’t actually an “evil dungeon being kept alive with powerful, ancient magic,” but more of a tourist attraction, a sort of day care for bored kids with swords—albeit one with a terribly high mortality rate.
Thisby stretched her legs a bit and then proceeded to walk along the ledge in a sort of crouched, stooping posture, following as close to the group as possible without arousing their notice. She peeked over the edge to watch.
“Your Highness Prince Ingo! My Lady Iphigenia!” Roquat blurted nervously.
“Actually, as the Crown Princess, I’m ‘Your Highness,’” said Iphigenia.
Thisby watched Roquat come undone as he groveled for forgiveness, which Iphigenia seemed uninterested in providing. The twins walked farther into the dungeon.
“Let’s get this over with,” said Iphigenia coldly.
Thisby followed along with their tour, moving through secret passages, climbing along ledges, at times even walking directly behind the group very, very quietly so as to avoid detection. As they went, Thisby ensured that the Larkspur twins got the best show possible while staying as safe as she could manage.
She stoked the fire elementals to rouse their anger but only did so once the twins were safely behind the ice runes Grunda had cooked up and Thisby had carefully placed earlier that day. She set their course through the werewolf dens but only after she was certain the werewolves were too fat and bloated with horse meat to bother chasing after some scrawny humans. She even let herself act as bait to distract the creeping tendrils of the man-snare plants so the royals wouldn’t fall victim to their poisonous vines of death. And she did it all without being seen.
The Royal Inspection had been created as a show of good faith between the Black Mountain and the people of Nth—more specifically, the royal family, who, at the time of the Inspection’s creation, had become very concerned about the growing, potentially militaristic power of the dungeon. Over time, as the likelihood of a war between the Black Mountain and the kingdom of Nth decreased, the Inspection became more about spectacle than anything, with each Master trying desperately to outdo the last. So far, thanks to Thisby’s hard work, it seemed to be going well enough.
The whole way through the dungeon, Ingo clapped with delight and asked Roquat questions that he was obviously unprepared to answer. Thisby knew the answers of course, or if she didn’t, she at least knew where to find them in one of her many notebooks. Roquat, however, was the type of guy who preferred to solve his problems with brute force. By Thisby’s estimation, he knew as much about the dungeon as the troll did, maybe less.
“Look out for the venom vine, Princess!” said Roquat, pointing at an old piece of rope covered in moss.
“Are we about done here?” asked Iphigenia.
Thisby was hoping that was the case as well. They’d been at it for hours, and all this sneaking around was beginning to get exhausting. Roquat, however, was starting to look nervous.
“B-b-but you haven’t even seen the best part yet!” he blurted.
Iphigenia decided—for the first time all day—that she’d play along.
“Okay,” she said, grinning. “So, what is it?”
Roquat glanced, panic stricken, at Ingo, as if he could somehow save him from the path he’d started down. But it was too late. Roquat was going to have to find a way to make good on what he’d promised . . . he was going to have to find the “best part.”
Thisby didn’t like the wild look in her boss’s eyes. She began flipping through her notes. The whole tour was carefully planned in order to show the royals an exciting, yet safe, trip through the dungeon. Every step of their tour had been diligently organized to maximize excitement while minimizing danger, and going off script could have dire consequences. She tried to catch Roquat’s eyes without alerting the royals. It was no use.
“Tell me, Princess, have you ever seen . . . a tarasque?” asked Roquat.
Thisby wasn’t afraid of any creature in the dungeon this side of the Darkwell, save Catface, and even then it was more of a healthy caution rather than outright fear. After Catface, the tarasque was next on the list of creatures to be healthily cautious around. Roquat deciding to veer from the itinerary had put the royals’ lives in immediate danger.
She zoomed through the tight-fitting tunnels on her way to the lower dungeon. Her backpack collided with the walls as she ran, knocking her around like a human pinball. She even banged her head once, opening a small cut on her forehead. The tunnels here weren’t designed for running, but beating the royals to their destination was her only chance to prevent an outright disaster.
She cursed Roquat with every breath. He was going to get the Prince and Princess killed, and then what? The dungeon would surely be sieged by the King of Nth. He’d have no choice. Would they be able to survive a war? The dungeon wasn’t much of a home, but it was all Thisby had, all she’d ever known. The monsters she cared for were the closest things she had to friends. Now she’d have nothing. All thanks to Roquat.
Thisby arrived at her destination, sweat soaked and red faced. She unhooked Mingus from her backpack and held him out in front of her. He gazed nervously back in her direction. Thisby could tell he wanted to say something, but thought better of it. She followed the wall down, running her free hand along the smooth bricks, until she passed through a final doorway that emptied into an ancient, underground city—the City of Night.
Chapter 7
It was called
the City of Night because—as the story went—if you stood anywhere within the city’s ruins, the cavern that contained it was so large and so dark that it was impossible to see the walls of the cave, giving the illusion that the city was outside on a still, black night. Thisby thought you’d have to be pretty stupid to fall for this, and that the lack of the wind was a dead giveaway, but poetics were often lost on her. The impact, however, was not.
By the time Thisby came to know it, the City of Night was a city in name only. The ruined structures that lined its long, winding streets had long since abandoned their primary purpose and submitted to a life of form without function, more like growths than buildings. They were scar tissue built up from some horrible tragedy, existing only as a stubborn refusal to be forgotten.
How the ruins of a city came to exist within the Black Mountain was uncertain, although everyone had their theories. The mountain itself was easily large enough to hold several cities stacked atop one another, but why this one had been built, as well as why it had been abandoned, remained a mystery. It was a puzzle that fascinated Thisby, as did most things, but in her twelve-year tenure in the Black Mountain, she’d never had the opportunity to spend much time studying the City of Night or the monsters that dwelt within it. Actually, her trips to that particular area of the dungeon had been so infrequent that she could count them all on one hand and still have a few fingers left over. It wasn’t due to lack of interest. Instead, it was because the City of Night more or less regulated itself, and to put it simply, her time was better spent elsewhere. The City of Night was an ecosystem unto itself inside the dungeon, large enough to support an entire food chain of monsters large and small, which didn’t depend on Thisby’s interference to keep itself in balance. And at the very top of that food chain was the tarasque.
Thisby walked through the city with Mingus in hand. He’d reduced his glow to a faint blue light at Thisby’s request. If she could’ve moved without any light, she’d have done so, but the noise of her tripping over loose stones and crumbled columns would’ve drawn more attention than it was worth. She shook her head when she thought of Roquat, bumbling along carelessly with the royal twins in tow, an entire entourage of outsiders, in fact, and how much noise they were inevitably going to make.
She’d already come across a pack of wolf moths, a slime mephit, and some kobold raiders out hunting for loot, but for the most part the city was quiet. It was early still, and the City of Night lived up to its namesake. Before long, though, Thisby knew the dangerous beasts would begin to appear, ready for another night’s hunt.
The forum at the center of the city was a large stone building shaped like a bowl and had begun to crumble beneath its own weight many years ago. Its original purpose had been buried under centuries of neglect, but it was called the forum by the inhabitants of the city, so that was how Thisby had always known it. She’d been there only once in person, on her first time in the City of Night. She’d gotten lost on her way back up from the Darkwell—one of the only things of significance lower in the Black Mountain than the city—and was naturally drawn to the structure.
Even in ruin, the forum was a thing to behold. It was easy for her to imagine what it must’ve been like in its prime, bustling with people and activity. Of particular interest to her were the gates to the forum. Aside from the Darkwell, they were the only other instance of blackweave Thisby had ever come across in the mountain. In the shadow of the building, dwarfed by its size, she paused at the threshold, silently acknowledging the power of this place before steeling her reserve and heading in.
Inside the building it was pitch black, save for Mingus’s soft blue light, which illuminated the hallways with its swaying glow, giving the distinct sensation of being deep underwater. It reminded Thisby of the mermaid coves she swam through once a year to check for red algae buildup, only here there were far fewer irate mermaids biting at her ankles. Right now, though, she thought angry mermaids would be preferable to whatever was waiting for her in the darkness.
Something rattled nearby. The noise echoed off the walls, which made its origin impossible to pinpoint, but it seemed close. For a moment Thisby stood still, wondering if she should draw a weapon, but decided against it. This was fortunate, as she didn’t carry any. The Master never would’ve wanted her to use one. As far as he was concerned, a good monster was worth twenty gamekeepers. There was a small utility knife in her backpack, but it was barely sharp enough to cut hair—which she knew full well, as evidenced by the ragged ends left over from last week’s hack job.
“Probably just rats,” said Thisby.
“That’s not much comfort, you know,” said Mingus. “Down here, dire rats can grow to the size of a carriage.”
“I know! I know! I meant it’s probably a beetle or a salamander!”
“The beetles are even bigger than the rats! The salamanders breathe fire!”
“Would you just stop it already! Just calm down and be quiet!” shushed Thisby.
The last thing she needed was Mingus freaking out. When Mingus freaked out, his light was unreliable, and when his light was unreliable, well, she was likely to trip over any number of the loose fixtures and crumbled stones that blanketed the floors of the ruined forum. She often toyed with the idea carrying a regular old nonsentient lantern with her—just for backup—but she’d never followed through with it. She was too worried about hurting Mingus’s feelings. Their friendship was more important than being able to see in the dark, anyhow.
Following years of neglect, the once simple layout of the forum had become a maze of blocked passages and accidental shortcuts through crumbling stone walls. She’d found a map of it several years ago, which she’d copied into her notebooks, but that book was sitting on a shelf in her bedroom back at the top of the mountain. Besides, she knew it wouldn’t have done much good since new paths opened and old ones closed daily as the building shifted and settled.
Thisby resented the hurry she was in, thanks to Roquat. She’d never had a chance to properly take notes on the forum and was overwhelmed with fascinating new discoveries wherever she turned. She saw carvings of strange creatures doing battle in what looked like the center of the forum, detailed diagrams of the city center, even something that looked like a statue of Roquat—as confusing as that was. She easily could’ve spent hours filling her notebooks with scribbles and drawings, but there was no time now; she’d have to come back when there wasn’t so much impending doom.
Thisby stepped out through an archway at the top of a staircase that had about half its stairs intact. She looked around, straining her eyes against the darkness. There was still no sign of Roquat and the others.
She peered over the edge, leaning through a gap in the broken brass railing, and assessed her situation. She was some three dozen rows up from the ground level, just high enough to see over the back of the tarasque asleep in the center of the forum. As Thisby stared at the monster, which undoubtedly had bits of food larger than herself stuck between its teeth, an unpleasant thought creeped into her mind and didn’t let go.
“Now what?” she mumbled.
At a loss for what to do next, Thisby did the one thing that came most naturally to her: she took some notes. She pulled out the first notebook she could find in her backpack and began to scribble down as much information as possible before the others arrived. She began with the most obvious thing in the room—the seventy-ton monster—and figured she’d work backward from there.
As far as Thisby knew, the tarasque was the largest creature in the dungeon. Her best guess put it at two hundred to two hundred fifty feet long from tail to nose. It had a heavily armored spiny shell on his back, like that of a snapping turtle, and six legs that looked as if they were designed for short bursts of tremendous speed, but probably not maneuverability. Its head was a massive jumble of horns and teeth, partially hidden beneath a mane of thick hair that wreathed its face and made it hard to distinguish individual features. It was impossible to get an accurate idea of its toot
h length and jaw structure from the angle she was sitting, but Thisby figured that since it could probably open its mouth about as wide as a drawbridge, if it ever came to a direct confrontation, it was best to avoid its bite regardless.
The one thing Thisby found most interesting about the tarasque, however, wasn’t its size or its jaw, but its tail. On the end of its long, plated tail was a jagged barb resembling a scorpion’s stinger. It was shaped in such a way as to imply that it was indeed designed to deliver poison, but try as she might, Thisby couldn’t figure out why something as massive as the tarasque would need poison. Poison was typically a weapon for small creatures. An evolutionary defense mechanism to ward off larger, more dominant predators. A chill went up her spine when her brain forced her to imagine the obvious answer she’d been avoiding.
There was something bigger than the tarasque.
Moments later, Roquat arrived looking the worse for wear. His fancy suit was unbuttoned and untucked, and his eyes darted back and forth between the buildings ahead. Behind him, the royal twins walked in the middle of a circle of guards who had their weapons drawn. It looked as if they’d encountered trouble along the way.
They made their way into the forum, entering low at ground level. Thisby winced when she saw them.
“You’d have to try to be that stupid!” chided Thisby in a hoarse, angry whisper.
“What do you mean?” asked Mingus.
“They came in low! The tarasque will feel their vibrations! It’s like they’re trying to get caught!”
She could hear hushed voices down below as the group moved in for a better look at the hulking behemoth. Thisby darted back into the building and headed down to get closer. Perhaps if she could get Roquat’s attention, she could talk him out of whatever it was he was planning to do without alerting the royals. When she emerged from the floor just above them, she could hear Roquat anxiously explaining the tarasque to the still unimpressed Princess.
