Their arms of multicolored stamps got them back through the many walls of Urk without any trouble. The days had faded the ink, but even the walk through the last sweltering parcel of desert that the portaller couldn’t hasten them through (and resulting perspiration) hadn’t been enough to melt the images beyond faded recognition. The city’s ink budget must’ve been considerable, and their formula near-miraculous.
(Near. Nothing more—not truly. This is critical, as the alternative would demand that the city’s population do some immediate and dedicated training in the dexterity of their feet.)
They earned fresh stamps as they made their way through the checkpoints towards the heart of the city.
“Should we see if the Eight Trees Inn has a room open again?” asked Vit as they neared the inn they’d stayed at before.
“Hm, might be better to keep a low profile,” said Azriah. “Somewhere with less stringent bookkeeping.”
They found just the place: the basement level of a brunch restaurant called Herb and Apple. The owners were a couple slipping out of middle age and into something a little more elderly: a spritz of a woman—there one moment and gone the next, leaving only the aroma of fruit tarts in her wake—named Orphalia Hunch and a man who introduced himself only as “Orphalia’s second husband.”
The Hunchs were trying to break into the hostel business, they said, and had (lightly) renovated their basement accordingly. They had not, they admitted, had any luck with this, as they had yet to book a guest. Beel applauded the good sense of those who had come before and pushed to find lodging elsewhere, wary of anyone with interests in “the hostile business.”
It was a basement. No line of quilt-clad cots, secondhand couches with mismatched end tables, or army of overwatered potted plants could change that. And the boxes of produce and other ingredients made sure the atmosphere waffled between “storage” and “grocery store.”
It was, however, exceptionally affordable. And breakfast was included.
As they walked the streets—both on their way back into the city and after dropping their travel things at their new base of operations—they heard extensively from the king.
“That building—ugh! Just look at it. Too big, too gaudy. That wasn’t there back in my time. I never would’ve let them put up something so tasteless.”
“Oh, and what’s that? What is that? Is that supposed to be a fountain?”
“Just look at all these people! What are all these people doing here? It’s so crowded! Never used to be this crowded—used to be a nice spot for an afternoon walk. Noisy, noisy, people everywhere…”
“No—oh, just look at this! There was never a wall there. This used to be—yes, right there, and stretching out that way, all that used to be a park. Magnificent park! One of the city’s best! To think they’d level all of that for this tasteless, boxy thing.”
“You can tell which walls are original and which have gone up in recent years, you know. Yes, just look at them. The old ones have so much more class—simple, elegant. These new ones are just overdoing it, and they skimp out on materials. See? See? Just look at that one there! What did I tell you?”
“Oh, I knew this was what I’d come back to. I knew what would happen if those extremists got a comfortable foothold. Taking over the whole city! Bloated, creeping into every corner. Just look—why do they own this building now, too? This used to be a perfectly good local spot, and now it’s just another one of their gift shops!”
Vit interrupted the barrage of comments. “And what about here?” They’d arrived back at the Eternal Palace.
“Eugh—just look at what they’ve done with the place! They need a new landscaper, I can tell you that much.”
“Might be hard to find one tall enough,” said Root.
“Or sticky enough,” countered Beel.
But there was a second question nestled within the first—one they’d worried about, which had the potential to dump all the plans they’d amassed so far into the trash and force them to figure out a new angle: was the palace too changed, making the king’s knowledge centuries too late?
“How different?” asked Vit.
“Well, I had a good many more spiky bits up there. What will they do—yes, yes, what will they do if some terrible flying beast comes along to perch on the roof and… and… and stick its claws or snout or beak in the windows, topple things, get its… you know… droppings all down the walls?”
“And any additions, or…?”
“That part there is new. Yes, below the—yep. And those banners… I would never hang banners like that! Fire hazards, every one of them!”
Root looked up at them. At least on that matter, he had a good point…
“And ugly besides! And the symbols. As if someone might be uncertain who’s taken up residence these days. Ha!”
“But you still know the way in?” said Root.
“The way in? I know a hundred ways in!”
“And they’re still accessible? Secret?”
“Well, the U tunnel door is gone by the looks of it—or covered up. Eh… and secret? A bunch of primitive human minds couldn’t find all of my tunnels in five thousand years! Ten thousand!”
“Thanks,” said Root.
The king said nothing; he didn’t seem to have caught Root’s meaning. It must’ve been a few hundred years at least since he’d last seen an eye-roll performed with real eyes.
“Can you show us?” asked Azriah.
“Mm? Oh, a way in? Of course, of course. Let’s see, which one to use… How about… that way—around the back there, yes.”
They followed his instructions as he led them around to the far side of the palace, then past it, down the street that bordered the elbow-shaped adjacent building with the promenade on the roof, the Villa Apostolic.
“This all used to be barracks,” said the king, indicating the villa with a jab of his stony mouth. “My own soldiers, guards. What have they done with it now? What is this?”
“Religious housing,” said Vit. “At least, that’s what the girl said when we toured. Residential and studying space for the church’s leaders.”
“Pah!”
“But the way in?” asked Root.
“Those alcoves with the statues; fifth one down. Climb up and around when no one is looking.”
“I’ll go,” said Vit. “I’ll wave you guys in when it’s open.”
Vit shifted into spider form. Azriah moved to hand the king’s brick to them.
“No, no, nooo!” The king’s protests went ignored as Vit climbed up and into the alcove. Twenty seconds passed, and then they heard Vit’s voice.
“Come on up. Narrow door back here, but we can all fit.”
They slipped inside one at a time while the street’s scattered tourists focused on the holy tchotchke hawks and caricaturists.
The inside of the tunnel was nothing more than a crawlspace. It reminded Root of crawling under the family’s barn to retrieve a litter of stray kittens or whatever toy or ball had picked the perfect trajectory into the most cumbersome spot to retrieve it, as such items were so apt to do.
Half a dozen feet down the tunnel to the right, the space widened slightly—but only slightly. Dust and spiderwebs already covered Root’s clothes, and she didn’t think she could blame Vit.
“Watch out there,” said the king from somewhere ahead of Root.
“For wha—?” cl-ONK!
Vit yelped in surprise. Root hoped that the walls were thick. She also hoped Vit was okay. Obviously.
“A little more warning, next time,” said Azriah. Root crawled forward to look.
A section of the tunnel had rotated, one corner now pitched downwards as a V in the floor. At the bottom, what had been the floor and wall had parted like a toothy mouth, sharp and grinning. A line of coppery shards poked up through the opening, barely peeking out now from a glob of messy spider webs. Root crawled carefully over the trap.
The king had to instruct them in opening a second hidden door—a hidden tunnel within the hidden tunnels. Past it, they found themselves in a much cleaner passage, tiled underfoot and with careful scrawl long-faded on the walls in the runic spirit alphabet. The king brought them to a hinged section of wall.
“Listen here. Tell me if you hear anything on the other side,” he said. Vit and Azriah put their ears to the wall.
“Nothing,” said Vit.
“Then—carefully—use that handle there. It swings down. Oh, the latches. Pull that. Yes.”
Vit did as the king instructed. The hinges groaned through gags of centuries of rust and decay. With the panel held open hardly an inch, Vit peeked through.
“It’s clear.” They lowered the wall and climbed up.
They were in an office, emerging from beneath a desk. No light lit the room, but slatted beams filtered in through the mostly-open shades of a window by the door. It looked out into a larger room beyond.
It was a library—or something like it. Huge shelves and columns of books rose and descended outside the office, which seemed to be on an upper balcony, narrow and built from metal lattice. At the floor level, people sat at desks and long tables, reading and taking notes by lamplight—some in clergy robes, others in travel attire or dressed more casually.
“Oh, sure,” said the king. “Rip out a perfectly good sparring arena and fill it with books. That will certainly keep you safe when assassins storm your palace.”
“Maybe they’re all reading about, uh, defense tactics,” suggested Vit.
“Look down there,” said Azriah, pointing in the direction of the room’s lower floor.
Off to the side stood two figures. One, they recognized easily: Syrus. But the second man was a stranger.
He was climbing in age, though hadn’t scaled as high as David, and his hair had less grey. That was the nicest thing that could be said of his hair, however, as it appeared his response to a receding hairline had been a panicked plea to the youthful look of unruly length. The result was a helmet of hair that looked like it had slipped from the crown of his scalp to hide shyly along the back of his head. The unflattering middle part looked to have been styled by an executioner’s axe that had found the center of his head but hadn’t finished the job. He looked like the sort of hooligan Root used to share detentions with back in her school days who had abruptly gained forty years of age.
Around his shoulders, he wore a snake, brown and black. He seemed utterly unconcerned with its slow path around his neck, despite the wary glances of Syrus and others nearby.
“That must be Leslie,” said Vit. “Right? The name Azriah learned from that drunk guy.”
“Leslie Sheridan,” said Azriah with a nod. “Exotic snake collector. President of the Order of Seekers.”
They’d seen enough of the arena-turned-library, and not wanting to get caught by a cluster of bored academics filing into the office for a meeting, they slipped back through the hidden door and into the tunnels again. While it was reassuring to have confirmation that the tunnels—or sections of them, at least—existed and had evaded discovery by the church since their colonization of the old palace, what they really needed was a way to reach the halo. The king obliged and led them back out to the street and in through another hidden entrance at a different corner of the palace.
These tunnels led them up and up—stairs, ladders, holes in the ceiling they had to jump and hoist themselves through. Root’s arms were getting tired by the time they reached anything worth stopping to look at for any reason except to eye a sharp protrusion while shimmying by it.
The tunnel had dumped them into an air shaft a hundred feet back, and they’d crawled on their elbows from there. The king brought them to a grate that looked out into the open air beyond.
It was the courtyard below them. From one side, the Hall of Relics butted in. Guards flanked the doors.
“This could do,” said Root, whispering to the others.
Azriah nodded. “Vit—do you think you could get down there as a spider? Into the hall, nab the halo, back up here without anyone noticing?”
Vit scratched their head. “Maybe. I might need a distraction for the guards in the hall, but I should be able to get down and back up without issue.” They looked up through the levels rimming the courtyard above. “Doesn’t look like there would be too many eyes on this side. But we will want to keep tabs on the windows and those balconies there and there—”
“It’ll never work,” said the king. They all turned to where Azriah had set his brick near the grate.
“Is there a tunnel that will get us closer? Into the hall, maybe?” asked Azriah.
“Sure. You’re more likely to be spotted emerging from those points. Still, doesn’t matter—it’ll take more than stealth to steal the halo.”
“Well, as you’ve seen, Vit can—”
“I know,” said the king quickly.
“We’ve done it before,” agreed Vit. “Stole the— er, stole from a local politician in another city. I snuck in as a spider and made it out undetected.”
“That was different.”
“How do you know?” asked Root.
“It wasn’t in my palace.”
“How do we get down there, then?”
“It’ll be a heist. A proper heist. With a team—more than just the five of us.”
They all shared a look. “You have a plan?” asked Azriah.
“I’m working on it.”
“Hm. Well, we’ll hear it, but at the end of the day, this is our job and we’ll take whichever avenue seems best.”
“You say you’re working on it,” started Vit. “What have you got so far?”
The king clicked his tongue. Did he have a tongue? He had to have something. He clicked his something, and it sounded like rocks. “There’s more I’ll need to see. We’ll need to do some recruiting, gather information. But, well, therein lies your next problem.”
“Which is?” asked Root.
“No one’s going to do it for free. Of course. You all might be willing to do the job for the halo, but unless you intend to share it… yes, unless you intend to, oh, take turns—shared custody—you’re not just going to convince anyone else to come along. There will have to be something in it for them. You’ll need money.”
“We have a bit,” said Vit. “Maybe not enough to hire a team…”
“He means we have to steal money too,” said Beel.
“A lot of money,” said the king.
Root looked down at the courtyard—at the columns etched with gold embellishments, the balcony railings crusted with lapis lazuli and quartz and polished copper. She looked at the courtyard floor emblazoned with an enormous gold pronged symbol. She took it all in as her mind replayed the sound of the service collection bowl making its third round beneath banners plastered with ads for the church’s specialty goods.
“I think we can manage that,” said Root.
“They’ve got quite a bit,” agreed Vit. “Plenty to spare. And what was that fundraising event coming up…?”
“Fundraising event?” asked the king.
“Right,” said Azriah. “The Evening of Generosity. Said they hold them quarterly. Donors paying to rub elbows with the church elite in the palace.”
“Excellent,” said the king.
Vit turned to the brick. “Excellent?”
“Excellent. We have a date, then. But there’s much to do to get ready—much.”
Root groaned. “We have to go to some snobby donor event?”
“And pay to get in?” asked Beel.
Azriah chuckled and shook his head. “If it helps, think of the ticket as an investment.”
“Keep up!” called Vit over their shoulder. “Bradan, come on!”
Bradan said those words to Vit sometimes. Not often—just if they were out late foraging or walking or if he was worried about noises somewhere off in the swamp when Vit stopped to watch a bug. Bugs always grabbed their attention. They didn’t really know why—just fun to watch.
So Vit liked to return the favor when Bradan lagged behind. It happened that way more often, especially because Vit was nine now, and fast.
“We’ve got nowhere to be that won’t be there when we get there,” said Bradan.
Vit swung from one marshy island to another using strings of web thrown over a tree bough. They landed lightly. “How do you know? Maybe a… a bear eats the sitting rock!”
“Then we’d better take our time so we aren’t on it when she does.”
“Can’t you go a little faster?”
“See if you move this fast when you’re my age. I’ll bet you don’t even go half as swiftly.”
“Bet I go even faster than I can now.” (This seemed a reasonable bet to someone who had, up to this point, been able to run faster and faster with every passing birthday.)
“Tell you what,” started Bradan. “Come down here. All right. Do you see that big log over there? Leaning up on that island and sticking into the water? Yes, that’s the one. We’ll race to it. Winner gets to set our speed for the rest of the walk.”
Vit looked up at Bradan, then back down at the log. It was a decent ways away, across a lot of murky water and some tiny squishy islands that Vit knew would plunge into nothing underfoot. That didn’t matter—Vit could swing their whole way across easy.
“But,” continued Bradan, “the game has rules, of course. No touching any tree branches or roots.”
“But—!”
“Your webs are allowed,” said Bradan.
“Hm, okay.”
“Just no hands or feet. Next rule: no talking during the game. We must race silently.”
(This was a universal rule established in nearly every game invented by an adult to occupy a child since the dawn of time.)
“Why?”
“Or else the mud monster might get us.”
“Got it.”
“Are you ready?”
Vit fell into a spring-loaded stance. “Yes.”
“All right. First one across the log wins. On your mark… get set… go!”
Vit lunged with all their might, taking two bounds and then leaping out over the water. They threw up their webs and caught a branch overhead, swinging, an arc that had their heels nearly skirting across the water’s still surface like a skimmer bug. They hung left, swinging around a tree—careful not to touch it, not to break the rules—and landed on the next island. They raced across it, their sandals slapping the mud.
There was no way Bradan could beat them—no way! They were almost halfway there already, and Bradan was nowhere in sight.
Vit jumped and began swinging across the next water gap.
Something stirred the water below them, kicking up waves in the stagnant, algae-clouded surface. Vit nearly missed with their next web.
“He-ey!”
The waves zipped toward the log. Then a great shape burst from the water.
The enormous salmon shimmered in the silver light as it leapt through the air amidst a spray of water. Pinkish, grey-green, and black, it rose, clearing the finish line log by several feet before splashing back into the water on the other side with a flick of its tail and—Vit swore—a cheeky grin, laughter alight in the wispy pink glow of the fish’s eyes. It vanished back beneath the water and algae, then jumped again—lower this time, just high enough to reach the log. The salmon grew—stretching from three and a half feet in length to a man’s height—and then Bradan stood there, perched comfortably on the log, hands clasped, back in his human form. He watched Vit approach with a smile as the pink glow in his eyes faded—the left eye dazzlingly blue, and the right an iridescent salmon’s eye set upon the patch of scaly pinkish skin that covered his face from brow to shoulder.
“Keep up!” he called to Vit as they crossed the last of the distance.
“That wasn’t fair!” said Vit. “You can’t use your salmon form!”
“Why not?”
“Because…” they began. “…!” Vit crossed their arms. They unfolded their human arms into two sets of spider limbs—extra arms to cross, just to make a point.
“It doesn’t seem to be against the rules. It wouldn’t have been prohibited if you had turned into a salmon.”
“I can’t turn into a salmon.”
“No? I thought you’d noticed.”
“Noticed what?”
“That you’ve been sprouting a tail.”
Vit’s mouth betrayed the effort to maintain an unamused pout. “Can we have a rematch on the way back?”
“Sure. We’ll see if your gills have come in by then.” Bradan rubbed a hand down the right side of his neck, smoothing the gills on the scaly patch of skin. “Come on, then. A nice, leisurely stroll.” He waved Vit along. “And if the rock is missing when we get there… well, perhaps the culprit will be that bear!”