Confirming the existence of secret, fabled tunnels turned out to be a lot more difficult than they’d expected.
They spent nearly a week hopping between libraries, archives, and hubs for local gossip. They even attended a meeting of the City Planning Commission and sat through two hours of nimby complaints—of which Urk had a disproportionate amount—and reports read as slowly as possible.
For most of that time, they uncovered very little about any tunnels. But they learned plenty that they deemed worth writing down anyhow, and slowly built profiles on the church’s leadership.
David Mammona—the Grand Priest, head of the church and all its branches. Seventy-two, no living family. Rose to the position from a previous role in financial administration for the church. Resided in the Eternal Palace. The only member of the church with the clearance to handle or wear the Crown of Samesh, which was considered the divine right of the Grand Priests and the symbol of their holiness and leadership.
Elijah Amin—head of security for the Eternal Palace. A pyvrin. Twenty-seven, born in Urk and raised as a member of the church. Other members of the congregation said he was “a gift from Eu” and “their chosen protector” and “a very nice and very handsome boy.” Ugh.
Leslie Sheridan. This name had taken some time to uncover, and Azriah had only learned it from a drunk man at a skeevy bar. Records they found listed him as a member of the church and resident of the Eternal Palace—clearly one of importance, but with no role listed anywhere. The drunkard called him the President of the Order of Seekers. It seemed the church’s periapt-hunting arm was even more secretive than they’d thought.
The man hadn’t said much about Leslie, only that he’d once been the captain of a ship called the Viperine and that he collected exotic snakes. Apparently he had also been a close friend of David’s for many, many years.
But they couldn’t dig up any information about tunnels in the palace—at least until Vit returned from an outing the others had placed little faith in: approaching the construction guild posing as an auditor with the hope of taking a look through records of jobs from long ago.
“No one falls for the fake auditor act anymore,” Root had said. “Everyone knows that one by now. I grew up in the jungle and even I’ve heard that one.”
Vit folded their arms. “Not everyone knows about it,” they said, casually placing another book over a dictionary open to the “Au-” entries.
And sure enough, Root ate her words when they returned.
“Here,” said Vit, placing a notecard on a stack of books at the foot of Root’s bed.
Azriah leaned forward. “What is it?”
“A name.”
“Of?”
“A contractor. I found a couple. Some humans—long dead. Some spirits who haven’t appeared in the city census for a couple hundred years or more. This was the only one left over. Contracted to do some work in the palace—and only vague descriptions of what. And still living in the city.”
“That sounds promising.” Azriah took the card. “Hiffender. Weird name. And this bit down here?”
Vit smiled. “That’s where he’s working today.”
They found the site without issue. They had to cross through several gates to get there, which slowed their progress when they hadn’t yet earned the correct hand stamp for expedited access or when they had gotten the stamp but it had since been made indiscernible by several other stamps piled on top. By this point, their hands looked like the training canvases for a child given makeup “just to play around with.”
At the address, Hiffender was easy to spot. The street-facing windows of a building had been stripped of their panes as a fresh layer of bricks went up in their place—less airy and a little more solid, which were not the traits Root usually looked for in a window, but who was she to question the local culture? It looked like slow going, however, on account of the metal bars still in place over the window holes. Perhaps the owners feared their contractor might turn on them and leap in through the openings to attack, rob, or otherwise statisticize them. Hiffender maneuvered his arms awkwardly around the bars as he rebuilt the new wall.
Root hoped the inhabitants never had a house fire; the renovations didn’t seem conducive to easy egress in the event of an emergency.
“Hi there—are you Hiffender?” asked Vit as they approached.
“Eh? Oh, yeah, tha’s me.” Hiffender was a silvery spirit who looked to have doubled up on joints of all varieties: knees that bent in two spots, arms like mangled scrap metal, and fingers that would win thumb wars with a perfect record—not to mention the two hanging from the corner of his mouth. He tried to remove his arm from between the bars for a handshake, but by the time he managed to pivot his joints in just the right way to get it free, he seemed to judge that too much time had passed and instead went for another brick. “Something I can help you kids with?” he asked with a doubled puff of smoke.
“We’re doing a report,” said Azriah. “We heard you did some work on the Eternal Palace; is that true?”
Hiffender looked Azriah up and down. “You students or something?”
“Yes.”
“With a sword?”
“He’s also a student,” said Root quickly, jabbing a thumb to indicate Orne Tyn’s face.
“Griiiiririri.”
“Foreign language major. Exchange student.”
“Sure. And you’re gonna tell me this one’s studying entomology?” he asked, pointing loosely at Vit despite the constraints of the window bars.
“We’re all in historical architecture, actually,” said Azriah, “and we were wondering if we could get some information from you. If, that is, you did work in the palace.”
“Yeah, I did.”
“And what sort of work was it that you did?”
Hiffender laughed. “You just fishin’ for a good grade if you write about the tunnels or something? Lots try it, you know—I hear they usually get a C.”
“Get to see what?” asked Vit.
“Why’s that?” asked Azriah.
“Not enough info to hit the word count.”
“We’re good with synonyms and rephrasings and redundancy and such,” said Root.
“And saying the same thing again in a different way,” said Root.
“And rambling,” said Root.
“Believe me, I’ve bullshitted my way through plenty of papers,” said Root.
“Heh. Well, you can only stretch a little so far,” said Hiffender. He extracted his arm from the half-covered window and wiped his hands. “Yeah, I did a few jobs over there, but I can’t tell you much—no, like I can’t, not that I won’t. No secret, really—doesn’t need to be. You kids know much about Ago Sog?”
The four of them exchanged confused glances.
“Ago Sog—the Unsightly King,” said Hiffender.
“Oh, well why didn’t you just say so?” asked Vit. “Yes, we’ve heard of him.”
“In our classes,” added Root.
“Right, well, he was a paranoid guy—real, real paranoid. Most paranoid anyone’s ever been, I’d bet. The whole tunnel thing was so he’d always have a way to escape the palace if someone came to kill or depose him, or just to move around without being seen by the palace staff, since he didn’t trust them either. Only problem was, see—what if the builder he hired to make the tunnels came to kill him? That’s what he was asking. So he had to have another builder come and build more tunnels. ‘Cept then he couldn’t trust that guy neither. So he hired a lot of us—a lot of us—and had us working on little bits here and there and blind to the others. Lemme tell you: one of the projects I worked on, you know what it was? A staircase. No way in, no way out. Had another guy block it off just as soon as I finished—almost before, and I had to skip my lunch break that day to make sure I made it out in time. Yeah, you think that’ll make for a good paper? It didn’t for the last kid, and don’t come back to me complaining like it’s my problem the way he did. I’m warnin’ you.”
“A staircase…” said Vit. “And you worked on other bits too?”
“One other. A little elbow-shaped bit.” Root wondered if he meant it in the standard layout or something more like his elbow, which nearly constituted a maze on its own. “Had a fake floor at one end that dropped down to some spikes. He loved spikes. Yeah, that whole place was booby trapped to hell and back—seeing as that’s where the victims were meant to go, of course. And that’s not even including the labyrinth of dead ends, fake-outs, redundancy. I hear sometimes the Children uncover a bit when they’re doing renos, but it’s never more than an empty hallway or single room. There are secret tunnels in the secret tunnels. You think you’re in a dead end? Wrong! You think you narrowly avoided the spike pit? Wrong again—the spikes are fake and that’s the way forward. None of us builders knew more than what was around the next bend, if even that. There’s only one person in all the worlds who could navigate that mess of tunnels, and that was exactly the point.”
“Well, cool to work on that bit of history, at least,” offered Vit.
Hiffender shrugged. It looked more like he was snapping every bone in his arms. “Didn’t even pay that well, the cheapskate. Better what happened—and that tunnel system didn’t even save him in the end.”
“Thank you for your time,” said Azriah. “I think we have enough for our report.”
“Hey, it’s your grade,” said Hiffender with another sickening shrug. They left him to return to his work removing the city’s windows one by one.
“Only one person in the worlds who could navigate them,” repeated Root.
“We could find more of the builders,” suggested Vit. “If we combine all of their knowledge, we might come up with an approximate map. The humans are gone, but the list looked like mostly spirits, which means they’re around somewhere, just not in Urk.”
“That would take a very, very long time, I’m sure,” said Azriah. “The tunnel idea might be a dead end.”
“A whole lot of them, by the sound of it,” said Beel.
“We know the tunnels exist now—we can’t pass that up,” said Vit. “Maybe we could try exploring them on our own. We’ve made it through dungeons before.”
“And how do we get inside?”
“Hm. Good point.”
“We might be able to get a map,” said Root.
Beel scoffed. “Yeah, I’m sure the king spent all that time making an unknowable maze of tunnels just to leave a map lying around for anyone to find.”
“Okay, let me rephrase: we might be able to get a guide.”
“You heard the builder man—there’s only one…” Beel stopped walking and put his hands on his temples. “Ohhh…” he whined, a sound of dread.
“Exactly,” said Root. “If there’s only one person who knows the tunnels, we need that person on our side.”
“The Unsightly King?” asked Vit. “But he was killed.”
“And he’s a spirit. He’s alive, somewhere.”
“Sure, but where?”
Root shrugged. “Well, I have a guess. Think about it: how do you imprison a spirit?”
“Hey, hey, come and look at this…”
Reeb Marks wasn’t having a great time on this job site. He’d taken the apprenticeship to make some decent money, maybe start a family and buy one of those nice little homes in the good part of the city with a couple dozen locks on the door and no windows on the ground floor—the good ones. The first job site hadn’t been too bad, but this one was just a nuisance. So many palace guards breathing down his neck—literally. He hardly had the range of motion to swing a sledgehammer, let alone slack off and have a lunch beer with his buddies.
The day’s task was to bring down this stretch of wall to make room for a jacuzzi tub. Watching where he swung made it slow going, so when the hammer broke through into open space, it was after a long afternoon of half-swings.
The guy next to Reeb—what was his name again?—came over at Reeb’s call, happy enough to get a moment’s break. But the palace guards behind them swooped in faster, blocking their view.
“Whadcha hit?” asked the other guy.
“Some weird room or something,” said Reeb. “Can’t… see, though.” The guards swarmed like ants to a crumb of cracker on the sidewalk.
When Reeb finally got a peek, the hole surprised him. It was a dark shaft like a covered well, a straight drop down twenty feet. When he’d broken through, some other bricks crumbled away, leaving a gap just wide enough for Reeb to lean through. He did so, peering into the abyss.
There were spikes at the bottom, looking dusty but no less lethal.
“What do you see down there?” asked the other guy.
“Take a look,” said Reeb, pulling himself back out of the opening. The other guy leaned through.
“Spikes. Maybe old storage—extras to slap on the facade?”
“Who stores spikes point-up? What if you fall on them?”
“How would you store ‘em?”
“Lying down sideways.”
“What if you run into ‘em?”
Reeb thought about it. “Good point.”
“Sure are, by the looks of it.”
“Maybe point-down, then?”
“Hmm. Sounds wise, unless you’re a mole or something like that.”
Beside Reeb, the palace guards conferred in low tones. They seemed to come to some agreement. One of them stuck out a boot and nudged the builder leaning through the hole.
“Ay—! AAAAaaaeee—” The builder lost his footing and disappeared into the dark hole beyond.
“Hey, you, what was that—!” started Reeb.
A sound like tearing paper echoed up, and then a muffled ffFwuff. Far below, a voice called up.
“Hey, you’ve gotta see this!”
Reeb wasn’t going to be the one to lean through the hole—not after what had happened. A few guards took turns, ducking back through and conversing.
“Paper…”
“Fake…”
“Lower hallway…”
Curiosity got the better of Reeb, and he took a quick glance. Where the spikes and floor had been, now only shreds of paper and foil hung in torn strips from a ring around the hole. The drop continued below into a huge mound of feathers. The other builder sat amidst them looking entirely unharmed.
“There’s more down here,” he called up. “A low passage going this way. Looks like it only goes a few feet…”
“Coming down,” called a guard and dropped through the opening. He landed in the feathers. Another two joined him.
“Reeb, come on down!”
Steeling himself, Reeb made the jump. His stomach flipped, but before he knew it he was safe in the pile of feathers.
There wasn’t enough room at the bottom of the hole for five. Reeb had never been at the bottom of a well with four other guys, but he figured it would feel exactly like this. One of the guards stood at the start of the new hall, barring the others from exploring.
“I will go,” he said. “This is official palace business. You builders stay here.”
“Oh, it wasn’t official palace business when you pushed… him down here first?”
The guard ignored Reeb. He took a step down the new hall—short, clearly a dead end as far as Reeb could see.
Underfoot, the floor gave way—more paper. The guard plummeted.
The four of them peeked over the edge. At the bottom was another set of spikes, these ones also stored point-up. The bloodied body of a guard stuck in them like the last stubborn bits of dinner between molars.
“Those real down there?” called one of the other guards, leaning out over the hole. He got no answer.
“Who would build a place like this?” asked the other builder. “A fake spike pit that leads to a real spike pit? And nothing else…”
Reeb watched the other guards’ backs with careful hesitation. How invitingly they looked at his boot…