by Zac Gorman
“Furthermore,” she continued, “there have been rumors of Umberfallian spies around the Black Mountain, and we don’t believe that you are adequately prepared to deal with the potential threat that could pose to our kingdom.”
Grunda shook with anger.
“So THAT’S it, hmm? Is that what you told the King? And you’re just going to sit here and let this . . . this interloper worm her way in here with the preposterous claim that the Black Mountain is harboring Umberfallian spies?” Grunda addressed the last question to the Master, and for a second it looked as if he might actually speak out in agreement, but instead he averted his eyes and said nothing.
“I see,” said Grunda. Thisby could hear the fight go out of her. The goblin stood up to leave, her chair squeaking against the marble floor as she did. “Well, if that’s the way it’s gonna be, then . . . I quit.”
Thisby’s heart lurched in a valiant attempt to escape her rib cage. Blood began to pound in her ears. There was no way this was real. Grunda couldn’t be serious. It had to be a bluff. Any second now, this interloper or the Master would crack and drop to their knees, begging her to take it back, and Grunda would laugh and accept. But as the moment dragged on, as the uncomfortable silence lingered, Thisby began to accept the impossible reality that was now staring her right in the face and refusing to blink.
She began to reach out a hand for her friend, but something popped up in the back of her mind telling her that it was the wrong thing to do. Before she could even withdraw it fully, Grunda had moved away from the desk and shuffled toward the chamber door, before stopping at the threshold to speak her mind.
“I’ll tell you what. I’ve been in this dungeon a long time. A long time. We’ve never had any use for royals no matter which side of our border they fall on. And more importantly”—Grunda looked directly at Thisby now—“this dungeon doesn’t need adventurers. It doesn’t need humans at all.”
In the morning, Grunda was gone.
Thisby and Mingus had stopped by with a box of her favorite cave mushrooms only to find her room looking as if it’d been ransacked. Dresser drawers lay overturned on the floor, cabinet doors were swung open. It was a worrying sight at first, but upon further inspection it became obvious that Grunda herself had packed up her belongings hurriedly in the night, paying little regard for anything she couldn’t fit into a backpack. She’d been in such a rush that she hadn’t even bothered to leave a note.
Despite the likelihood that Grunda had done this herself, it was hard to imagine that after all this time, she could just pack up and leave the dungeon as if it had been an overnight stay at some inn. Thisby remembered Grunda telling her once that goblins had a nose for danger. That the moment they smelled something foul coming, they had an innate ability to run in the opposite direction. Was that what Grunda had done? It was possible, but the thought didn’t help settle Thisby’s nerves.
After a few minutes spent fruitlessly searching for a note, for anything that might give a better clue as to where she had gone, Thisby gave up hope. It was clear that wherever Grunda was going, she didn’t intend for anybody to follow, and that included Thisby. She respectfully put Grunda’s room back together on the off chance she might come back and then sat down at the goblin’s small kitchen table.
It felt like a moment that would’ve been appropriate for her to cry, but she couldn’t. There were too many feelings all swirled together for her to find one to latch onto. It was like eating a soup where the cook had used every spice in the cabinet. There was no way to pick out what was what. She couldn’t tell the sadness from the pity, the anger from the righteous indignation.
She thought about how much she’d hurt when her carriage had pulled away from Lyra Castelis a few months ago and wondered if it was similar to what Grunda was going through. Grunda hadn’t known that she’d wanted to be the liaison, but once she’d gotten the job, the pain of losing it had been too much. In a way, that was how Thisby had felt. She hadn’t known how badly she’d needed a friend until she’d had one. Now she’d lost somebody again. Only this time she’d lost the closest thing she’d ever had to a mother.
The thought of that cranky old goblin, all warts and pointed ears, being the closest thing she’d ever have to a mother made Thisby laugh, and through the laughter, she managed to fight back the tears that had very nearly escaped her eyes. Finally, when the time was right, Thisby closed the door to Grunda’s room and locked it, thinking it wouldn’t be right to simply leave it open. Goblins liked their privacy.
On her way back to her bedroom, Thisby passed by the pockmarked rock wall where the mindworm liked to hang out, and as if on cue, the moment she thought about it, the bright red worm wriggled out of its hole, all thick and fat and glistening with worm-jelly. It watched her with some measure of curiosity, studying her with its twelve glittering, jewel-like eyes until she felt compelled to stop and wave hello.
Hello, thought Thisby politely, knowing it was unnecessary to speak aloud to a creature that could read minds.
As if it were being yanked by an invisible string, the worm bolted upright, straight as an arrow, and Thisby heard Grunda’s warm, familiar voice echoing in her head.
“Had to go. Will return. Stay safe. Stay strong. Love, Grunda.”
Thisby watched the mindworm go wiggly and slink back into its hole exactly like it’d arrived only a moment ago, and before she knew it, one of the tears that she’d tried so hard to deny managed to escape down her cheek.
Outside the Black Mountain, the warm spring rain had washed away the last traces of winter, but from where Thisby stood inside the mountain, it was impossible to tell. She cupped her hands in front of her face and blew hot breath into them. Curling wisps of steam slipped through the gaps in her fingers, like ghosts fleeing a poorly designed prison.
Thisby paused only briefly to admire her hard morning’s work spent chipping open an entry into the ice wraiths’ den before shouldering her backpack and hustling on toward warmer climes. There were plenty of miserable jobs around the Black Mountain, but having to pickax through several feet of ice in subzero temperatures while ice wraiths moaned on and on about their former lives as kings and queens of long-forgotten nations had to be near the top of her list. It wasn’t quite as bad as shoveling up the nightmares’ droppings, but it was probably a little worse than cleaning up the trails of bubbling slime that the acidic oozes left behind.
Thisby walked briskly, and even a few feet out from the ice wraiths’ den, the temperature had already climbed enough that she could remove her gloves. She did so carefully. It’d been a long week, and her hands were showing the blisters to prove it. Not even Mingus’s slime healing magic had been able to relieve them as quickly as new ones could spring up.
The first few weeks of life under Marl—now primarily referred to as “Overseer”—hadn’t been nearly as terrible as Thisby had feared. Monsters were still permitted to come and go freely between the castle and the dungeon, with one small caveat: visitors now needed to provide the guards at the gates of the castle with an Overseer-approved passage token—a little gold disk that was stamped with the scowling face of the Master on one side and the silhouette of the Black Mountain on the other. The idea for the passage tokens belonged to Overseer Marl, who thought that the tokens would help “regulate and control the flow of visitors into and out of the castle,” despite the fact that an excess of visitors had never actually been a problem to begin with.
By the end of the first week, the passage token system hit some snags. The first was that due to an unforeseen gold shortage, the production of passage tokens had ground to a halt. This resulted in the value of passage tokens among the monsters skyrocketing, which led to their popularity as bartering chips in the dungeon’s black markets, which of course led to hoarding and thus, within a short span of time, had conspired to make passage tokens in circulation extremely rare. Somewhat ironically, when Thisby tried to present this issue to the Master in person, she was unable to procure a passage t
oken and couldn’t enter the castle. This wouldn’t have been an issue if the Master had answered the repeated signals she sent from her scrobble, but getting an answer from him since Marl had taken over as Overseer had been next to impossible. Only once had he deigned to pick up, and Thisby suspected that he’d been inebriated at the time. Needless to say, he wasn’t very helpful.
All in all, though, it was a small problem.
On the way back to her bedroom, Thisby took the scenic route. Mingus would’ve protested if he’d stayed awake long enough to do so, but it wouldn’t have mattered. When you’re along for the ride, you only have so much authority. Thisby was tired herself, but there was still more work waiting for her when she got back, so she didn’t see the point in hurrying. Besides, this was her favorite part of the day, and she was determined to savor it.
Before she’d had mountains of paperwork waiting for her in her bedroom, Thisby had loved the long walk back to her room at the end of the day; her muscles aching, her eyes already growing heavy, knowing that the day was finally behind her. There was something about the feeling that was hard to describe. It felt almost like she was swimming back to her bedroom, carried along by a warm current. Whether it was the beginning of sleep taking hold or the satisfaction of a good day’s work or something else entirely, there was an undeniable magic to being in the dungeon while it transformed from a place of work to a place she could simply enjoy. It was like seeing it with new eyes. She noticed things she never would’ve noticed otherwise: the way that torchlight danced over the mossy bricks, a pair of initials carved into a block of stone by two long-forgotten adventurers, or how, from the right distance, the banshee’s wails could sound almost like a song. These were the moments that she lived for, when she could disappear into the dungeon and simply exist as an observer, free of the weight of responsibility. For the duration of that walk, it was just her and the dungeon.
The sight of her door—or more accurately, the mountain of paperwork still waiting for her on the other side of it—sent her crashing back to reality.
Thisby unshouldered her backpack with an aching groan that would’ve made old Grunda proud and dropped it to the floor. Mingus in his lantern felt like he weighed a hundred pounds as she lifted him off the hook on her backpack and locked the lantern into the fitted brass ring that sat atop the little glass box on her desk. There was a sharp, familiar klatch! noise followed by a pneumatic hssss! that indicated the slime was hermetically sealed inside the enclosure. Sleepily, Mingus yawned and slid out of the lantern, down through one glass tube and back up through another into his private little bedroom, which hung above Thisby’s desk.
His “bedroom” was really no more than an aquarium in size or function. There were some drawings of Thisby’s he’d hung on his walls, a little chest for storage of his personal items, and a round bed that’d been stitched together from a multitude of wildly patterned fabrics Grunda found lying around. It wasn’t much, but Mingus didn’t require much. His bedroom was connected to a series of tubes that led all around Thisby’s room, starting from the point where his jar locked into the enclosure on Thisby’s desk, then traveling around her bedroom in a circuit. With them he could go wherever he wanted while never being exposed to the outside air he so reviled.
Thisby watched him retreat up to his room, pluck out his “awake eyes,” and put in his “sleeping eyes,” upon which she’d painted little crescents to indicate a closed eyelid, and slide into bed.
“G’night,” he muttered, half-asleep already.
His glow quickly faded. Mingus never glowed while he slept.
Thisby lit a candle and shuffled through the parchment stacked on her desk. When she reached for her pen, she was so exhausted that she knocked over her inkwell with her elbow, but fortunately the lip of the bottle landed on the edge of a notebook and didn’t spill. It was a small victory. She righted the bottle with a sigh and rested her chin in her hand.
“Where do I even start?” she muttered to herself.
Overseer Marl had wasted no time implementing policies designed to make the dungeon more efficient, the most surprising of which was a sudden influx of ghouls, twenty-four in all, who were placed under Thisby’s command. Consequently, Thisby was awarded the position of Senior Head Gamekeeper—finally getting the promotion Mingus had so often teased her about—although she found the title itself, as well as the responsibilities that came with it, fairly confusing. Still, she’d tried to focus on the positives. At least, initially. With twenty-four extra workers in the dungeon, she’d thought that she might finally be able to tackle some of the bigger projects that she’d been putting off. She’d even thought, during the brief time when she’d allowed herself to indulge in such fantasies, that with all the new help she might have enough free time to take another vacation.
Her optimism hadn’t lasted long.
The first week with her new team had been an unmitigated disaster. By the end of it, she was already down from twenty-four staff to a nice even twenty, after four of them perished in the line of duty. One ghoul had forgotten to wrap a shank of meat and wandered too close to the troll’s lair while stinking of raw lamb. Another had been tricked by a monster disguised as a treasure chest that swallowed him whole. And last but not least, two particularly dimwitted ghouls fell off a bridge while roughhousing. Technically, their remains had yet to be recovered, but they were presumed dead. Well, deader than before, at least. And that was just the beginning.
The chaos caused by monsters receiving the wrong food or getting the wrong treatments had spread through the dungeon in record time, thanks to having such a large staff. Thisby shuddered to even think about the amount of work it would take to put everything back to normal. Before, her job had seemed like an endless list of things to do, but at least they were her things to do. Now she had to do her own work on top of cleaning up after everyone else’s.
Thisby pulled a piece of parchment from the top of the stack, which had grown in height to the point where it was losing structural integrity.
At the top, it said Ghoul #510 in Marl’s big, swoopy handwriting, below which Thisby had added the word Shivers in her own messy chicken scratch. The ghouls who worked for the Master were never given proper names, but referring to them as numbers made Thisby uncomfortable, so she’d taken to giving those under her care informal nicknames instead. “Shivers” was so called because he was always shaking, “Blinky” had only one bulbous eye, and so on.
The rest of the paper was organized into a grid, leaving spaces for her to write in a short evaluation. There were fifty-two spaces in all, one for each week of the year, the vast majority of which sat blank. It was almost cruel. Every week since the Overseer had arrived, she looked at that sheet. Every week she had to see that constant visual reminder of how much work there was still left to do.
Thisby stared at the sheet for so long that it put her into a kind of trance. How had Shivers done this week? Who was Shivers again? What had he been assigned to do?
Her eyelids were heavy.
Maybe, she thought, if she just closed them for a minute . . .
In the morning, Mingus rolled out of bed and peered through the glass wall of his bedroom to find Thisby fast asleep on a stack of parchment, ink dried on her face, still clutching a pen in her right hand.
Chapter 5
Iphigenia was alone beneath a blanket of white stars. The grass, still stiff with the memory of winter, pricked at the soles of her bare feet as she craned her neck up, feeling terrifyingly small.
It’d been two months since she’d begged her father not to send Marl to the Black Mountain, which also marked the last time they’d spoken. She’d protested against the interference of the kingdom in the dungeon. Only a little more than a year ago, she wouldn’t have batted an eye if they’d blown the entire thing to bits, but after spending some time in the dungeon, she’d begun to see its value. The dungeon was more than a place for thrill-seeking adventurers to test their mettle for treasure and personal glory
. It was a home for all the creatures who had no other place to go. And it was a good home, too, because they had Thisby.
She left the lawn and walked down the path, balancing on the balls of her feet so that less of her bare skin had to come into contact with the cold stones. A breeze washed over her face. She drank in the night, inhaling deeply. It reminded her of being a little girl, catching fireflies in the courtyard with her brother. She remembered how they’d raced around the fountain for hours. Not a care in the world. Back then she still loved him. It felt like a lifetime ago.
More recently, she’d been here with Thisby. It was Thisby’s last night at the castle, and they’d wanted to commemorate the occasion. So Thisby had rolled up the cuffs of her pants, splashed through the fountain as if it were a perfectly normal thing to do, and climbed up the pedestal to carve their names in a well-hidden spot at the base of the statue, near the lion’s paw. Later that night, neither of them could sleep. They stayed up talking all night until the sun rose pink and happy, betraying the sadness Iphigenia felt within.
Iphigenia had never shed a tear for her brother, but when that girl’s carriage had pulled away the next morning, she’d had to dig her fingernails into the palm of her hand to fight them back. Eventually her fear of embarrassment bested her sadness, and she shook the feeling away. There was always a sense of pride in not letting her emotions get the best of her. Her father had told her years ago that a good leader never cries. Not in front of his subjects, not even in private. She asked him if he’d cried when her mother died, and he’d told her no. Iphigenia had wished it was a lie but knew that it wasn’t.
She had a new mother now; well, her father had a new wife, at least. But she was barely older than Iphigenia herself, and they had so little in common that aside from being part of the same family, the only thing they shared was a fondness for her father. Now, Iphigenia wasn’t even so sure they shared that anymore.