It took Tohlog some time to get all the necessary information sorted and printed onto the blank papers. Despite his urging, they’d decided to keep their real names for the papers rather than adopting fake identities. Mostly, this was because of his ideas for new names.
“You could be Javier Appleany,” he’d said, pointing a stamp at Azriah. “And you… you could be…” he studied Vit’s face as if looking deep within to find the name etched at the core of Vit’s being. “Slithersby Curtain. And you… Miss Vixie Luscious.” Root folded her arms over her exposed midriff.
“What would I be?” asked Beel with dread.
“We could call you Pongo.”
“Oh.”
“Just our regular names are fine,” Azriah had insisted.
Tohlog had relented, eventually. A few other details had to be crafted to give the fake documents the illusion of authenticity, and by that time the hour had grown hungry. They found a half-decent hole-in-the-wall restaurant, and after extracting their food from within the crumbling opening, they’d decided to spend the night out there and get back in line first thing the following morning.
Tohlog had insisted they use a different gate to avoid any suspicion, so they made their way along the perimeter until reaching another checkpoint. There, they found a long line already camped out for entry the next day.
“Guess we’re sleeping on the street if we want to save our spots,” said Vit.
And it was wise that they did. The line had tripled in length by the time Root opened her eyes the following dawn.
It didn’t move faster than the previous line, but they knew what they were in for this time. They just hoped Tohlog’s forgery would get them through the gate or, at minimum, not arrested.
They waited in line for three hours. At the front, they found no more hospitality than the first time.
“Papers?” asked the guard. They handed them over and held their breath.
“Four pilgrims from Unn. Mm. Mmm. And these were issued by… Pastor Fleecenem?”
“Yes,” said Azriah.
“Great guy,” added Vit.
“Mm. Which one of you is Peel?”
“It’s B—”
Root kicked him—and a little harder than she’d meant to. “This one here. This is Peel.”
“Interesting name. Almost as bad as ‘Root.’ Ha ha. Anyway, here you go. Go on.” He handed back their papers and waved them through the gate.
“Hands,” said a second guard just past the entrance. Root held hers out uncertainly, palms up. The guard grabbed the right one, flipped it around, and stamped the back. “For reentry,” he said. Gold ink soaked into her skin—the eight-pronged symbol of the church and the words “Welcome to Urk!” He stamped the others’ hands as well.
“I do not want to be Peel,” said Peel once they were down the street.
“Looks like Tohlog wrote it wrong,” said Root, checking the paper and handing it down to him. “We couldn’t risk him saying it’s invalid. I am not waiting in that line again.”
“Looks like we won’t have to,” said Vit, holding up their stamp. It hadn’t all applied on their hand, so two of the prongs were missing and it read: “W :ome to Urk!”
“Hold that thought,” said Azriah. They’d been inside the walls all of three minutes and already another gate waited just ahead with a (smaller, but not small) line forming in front of it.
The wall was shorter, but it was still impressive and imposing. At the line, Azriah tapped the person ahead of them.
“Excuse me,” he said. “What is this line for?”
“It’s to enter the Nestfield neighborhood through that gate.”
“Ah, thank you.” Azriah turned back to the others. “I don’t think we’re going that way. We don’t need to enter a neighborhood.”
“The Nestfield neighborhood is the only way onto Chamber Street,” said the woman. “If you’re heading towards the city center, it’s the only way from this sector.”
“Oh. Okay, thanks.”
They waited in line, and again had to present their papers to the guards, but this line moved much faster and the security was not so heavy. They got another round of stamps, these ones depicting a woven circle in green ink.
In Nestfield, they started noticing the city’s quirks.
“Weird sense of fashion,” said Vit. A man walked by them on the street going in the opposite direction. He wore a bulbous green cap with a bit of blue stitching on the side. It didn’t look so notable on its own, but it was the fourth of exactly the same design that they’d passed in half as many minutes. And it was hardly the only odd garment they saw; others had patterned silk scarves around their necks or flopping out of a pocket, patches and pins adorned nearly every breast in small clusters, and stranger accessories—feathers, rope necklaces, novelty glasses—were out in full force. It looked as though every passerby had been dunked in glue and thrust through a costume closet.
And though outside the wall they’d seen humans mostly just clustered around the checkpoint lines, inside they were the majority by a sizable margin.
They’d done hardly five minutes of walking before reaching another gate and another line.
“I like your hat,” said Vit to the woman who got in line behind them.
The woman stared like this was an odd compliment to pay.
“Sorry, does it mean something?”
“Oh,” said the woman after looking down and seeing the papers ready in their hands. “Pilgrims.”
“Yes. Sorry, just curious about the city.”
“The hat tells the other residents of Nestfield that I’m one of them.”
“Oh, okay, cool. And that pin with the maple leaf? I think I saw another of those.”
“I live on Syrup Lane. It shows my neighbors that I’m one of them.”
“Ah. And the yellow on the toes of your shoes?”
“Nestfield is in the South Zigwater Sector. So it—”
“Got it,” said Vit. They pointed to the gate ahead. “And where does this gate go?”
“Into the Crestslew neighborhood,” said the woman, her expression souring. “But it’s the only way onto Chamber Street, and I’m headed to the Fashion District for some shopping. I need a new dove charm for my braided right-hand bracelet so that my family knows I live in our house too.”
“I see.”
From a tall brick building just beside the road, a man emerged. Looking frightfully over one shoulder and then the other, he took out a key ring and began locking the vertical line of locks along the door, which included two heavy padlocks. He scampered off like prey.
The four of them passed through the gate and earned another stamp. In Crestslew, the houses were nicer—taller, more ostentatious, and on larger and better manicured lawns. They practically oozed gold. Or, at least Root imagined they might. She couldn’t see much past the high walls and heavy iron gates that surrounded each one.
Medium-sized walls rimmed blocks and smaller walls or imposing, pointed wrought iron fences wrapped around clusters of homes, three or four or five huddled together like a frightened family cowering from a burglar. Even within those, every home had its own wall or fence.
Bars bolted down windows already shuttered and locked. More than a few homes had armed guards at the doors, some even with a second guard who, as far as Root could tell, seemed to be keeping an eye on the first guard. The people who roved the streets did so with hasty strides and hands pressed tight over their pockets and bags, only removing them for the briefest of seconds when they tapped a patch or charm to indicate it to another passerby.
And it didn’t end in Crestslew. As they walked the city, they passed through more and more checkpoints as they delved deeper and deeper into the maze of the partitioned city with stamps spilling up their forearms.
Near the city center, they found another surprising sight—familiar, but it felt as though they hadn’t seen something like it in a lifetime.
In a wide plaza of sandstone bricks and glazed tiles in every color, rimmed by yet another wall, stood two towering obsidian standing stones. They curved towards each other at the tops but ended in razor points before they could touch. Shimmering like a web between the two, thin as a film of oil, wisps of glitter danced and curled. All four of them paused by one of the plaza’s entrances where guards checked and stamped those on their way out and into the rest of the city beyond. Root couldn’t help but notice the security here looked laxer than at the spot where they’d entered.
As they watched, two humans popped into existence at the base of the obsidian stones, materializing from the glitter like stretched out spaghetti snapping back into shape.
“Where does it go?” Root asked.
“Setoterra,” said Vit.
“Yeah, I fucking know that. I mean where?”
They shrugged and looked at Beel.
Beel shrugged too. “I don’t know the associated locations of every pair of gates.”
Still… regardless of where, that gate went straight back to Setoterra. Was it bright, sunny daytime on the other side? Or night? Was there a monsoon raging? Or a peaceful, lazy day? All she had to do to find out was walk up and jump through…
And then wait in line again when she came back the other way.
No—they had business here, in Urk. They had a mote periapt to find. Root pulled her attention away.
Azriah’s eyes lingered on the gate between worlds just a second longer, but then he, too, landed back on the streets of Urk.
“Where to?” asked Vit.
Directory signs pointed various ways from the plaza for newcomers dropping in from Setoterra. They paused to scan the closest one.
“The Eternal Palace,” said Vit, reading from a sign. “Tohlog mentioned that. Sounds like a headquarters if you ask me.”
“Villa Apostolic,” read Azriah. “Numinous Cathedral. Any one of these could house… yeah. Looks like they’re all pointing that way, at least. We can start in that direction and find an inn to set ourselves up for our time here.”
“Sounds good to me,” said Root, whose feet weren’t sore from walking so much as they were sore from standing around and moving one step forward at a time. Somehow it wore them out more than trekking through the forest and desert.
They found an inn not far away that called itself The Whispering Feather. Unfortunately, everyone else—including the staff and sign on the front—called it the Eight Trees Inn, and so, lacking in communicative abilities, it was overruled and doomed to suffer a lifelong identity crisis.
They purchased a room for four and dumped their travel things in a heap in the center.
“Finally,” said Beel as he flopped down on a bed.
“Five minutes,” said Root, though she wanted to do the same. “And then we should be off again. We have work to do here.”
“Ohhh,” moaned Beel. “Where do we have to go now?”
“Sounds to me like we should scope out this Eternal Palace.”
Bradan stood in the cramped kitchen of his small cabin and diced onions. As he sliced, the pieces joined the other veggies in a wooden bowl beside him—onions, carrots, mushrooms, taro. A lush green bundle of watercress sat patiently waiting its turn.
It wasn’t much, that cabin in the swamp—just one room. The kitchen occupied one end—a wash basin, a few cabinets, and a small stretch of countertop. A low table lived in the far corner with a seating cushion on the floor at either side, and two wood-framed reed cots took up the other corner—one well-worn, one newer. There were a few chests of wool blankets and clothes, numerous half-melted candles, and racks of drying herbs and cured meats. A small stone hearth and chimney made the floor sag on the back wall, and at the front was a door propped open against a rock that had become a permanent feature, as occasion to close the door was rare. A few wide windows held similar status; one had lost a shutter nearly a year ago, but Bradan just hadn’t gotten around to—or found reason for—hanging it back up. He didn’t mind the bugs or snails or various crustaceans that climbed up and in through the open windows and made their homes in the corners or under the furniture.
In fact, numerous spiderwebs hung from the rafters, but those had become something of a constant of late and were hardly related to the things that went in and out the windows besides.
Bradan set a pot of rice and vegetables above the fire. He sliced two mangoes, tidied up, and when the evening meal was nearly ready, he walked to the door.
Outside the cabin’s front door was a deck nearly as large as the rest of the cabin. Two chairs were the main features, alongside barrels placed below funnels to collect the occasional rainwater from the roof, a rack of firewood, and a few storage crates filled with various gardening tools and supplies to repair the cabin as needed. Among the collection was not, as he’d expected, a small child.
“Hello?” he called. He scanned the marshy landscape. The whole cabin perched atop a collection of stilts that kept it out of the water below. Muddy islands and wide, gangly trees dotted the land all around. Enyn’s light bathed it all in a calm, silver hue.
Giggling echoed up from somewhere beneath the deck’s floorboards. Bradan went to the edge and looked down. Only the water looked back.
“Hello?” More giggling.
Slowly, paced by his joints, Bradan got down on his knees and then onto his stomach. He hung his head off the edge of the deck and peeked beneath the house.
The child—three years old and always full of wonder—hung from the bottom of the deck. Big wads of spider silk crisscrossed over their bare feet, binding them upside-down to the boards. Wispy tufts of dark hair just barely brushed the water’s surface.
With eyes wide—one human eye, four spider eyes—they stared in awe at the sight of the water’s surface an inch from their face. Skimmer bugs zipped across the ripples, and just below swam half a dozen purple and red fish with fins that pulsed in luminous bursts while they swam. Transfixed, it took a moment before they noticed Bradan.
They looked up at the bearded face of the older man hanging off the deck in front of them. They started, then cracked a grin and giggled some more.
Bradan laughed. “Come on then, Vit. It’s supper time!”