The Wrinkled Crown

by Anne Nesbet

  21

  DOORS AND KEYS

  The only way Linny managed to push her way into that dank tunnel was by stopping thinking altogether, just at least until she was well into it and moving along, propelled by muddy elbows and toes. The Half-Cat purred at her side, and its radiant search-beam eye made the way ahead brighter than the darkness behind, and that was another thing that kept Linny moving. That, and the air, which there seemed to be more of, the farther Linny crawled. That was really the secret to being able to crawl ahead in the dark at all. She kept gulping in great dollops of that air, testing it. If the air began to feel scarce, she just knew the panic would burst out of the tight corner in her chest where she was keeping it all locked up. That would be it for her. She wouldn’t be able to go forward or crawl backward or do anything but hide in the dark mud and—

  The Half-Cat squeezed itself between Linny and the tunnel wall, nipped her ear, and hissed.

  Oh, right! Linny realized she had stopped moving for a moment. That was no good. When there is darkness all around, you have to keep moving. That is key.

  A couple of minutes later, the light from the Half-Cat’s eye hit something ahead and scattered. For one dreadful instant Linny thought she had come to the end of the tunnel, and the end was a stone wall. But then she raised her head a little, and saw what might be a broad step carved into the stone. And when the Half-Cat jumped over her arm and walked ahead a few paces, illuminating the place as it turned its half-golden, half-silver head from side to side, Linny realized that the dreadful wormhole she had been slithering through was spilling her now into an open space, very large in comparison with the wretched burrows she was coming from—more like a room than a tunnel.

  She crawled out from the narrow hole in the ground and took a few very deep breaths in relief. For a moment she had her face buried in her grimy hands, and her breath was coming and going in sobs. Then she was able to open her eyes.

  Right before her was a wide but quite low-ceilinged stairway, made of stone. In fact, the whole tunnel ahead stopped looking like something only earthworms and moles could appreciate and became a thing built by actual people. Built with care, even.

  She was already standing up on what turned out to be a pair of very shaky legs. She put a hand on the stone wall beside the staircase, just to convince herself it was really there and to steady herself, and all the while her mind was taking a kind of inventory of the spaces surrounding her: registering the dampness of the air, the smell of old rivers, all the twists and turns and plunging drops she had just made her way through.

  “Where are we, kitty?” she turned to ask the Half-Cat—and then she started shaking again, because what she saw clearly when she turned around was the awful little hole she had just crawled out of. No human being should ever be in a hole like that. Linny couldn’t imagine—she could not understand—how she had ever, ever, ever managed to enter something as dark and narrow as that hole. She must have been crazy there, for a moment, she thought. But one thing was clear: she could never go back that way.

  She started climbing the stairs.

  The stone roof above kept threatening to graze the top of her head, and Linny was not particularly tall. It all felt very old and massive and silent, and as she climbed, the weight of the air in that place changed. Linny paused to make sense of the difference—she no longer felt so buried underground. Was it just the relief of being on an actual staircase again?

  The people who had built this place long ago also liked to carve things into their walls. Linny hadn’t noticed right away, because her attention had been on the stairs she was climbing. But along the stone wall on her left side ran a set of straight carved lines; on the right, a complicated stone tangle, which must have been quite difficult to carve.

  Linny climbed up the stairs, letting her fingers run along the carvings on the walls, first the tangled lines, and then the straight ones. It was so lovely to have something more solid under her hands than earth. And lovely to be climbing up again. And lovely beyond description not to be in that horrible tiny wormhole of a tunnel anymore.

  The stairs started steep and then flattened out. Then the Half-Cat blinked, and out of that quick dip into blackness something—someone—seemed to jump into focus on the stairs ahead. Linny heard herself squeak and felt herself wobble, but when she had steadied herself and looked up again, she felt glad Elias wasn’t there to call her a fool.

  It wasn’t a person. How could it have been a person, as silent and white as that?

  It was not a person but a statue, its pale stone head almost grazing the stone ceiling, and the straight lines on the left and the tangled lines on the right ran from the walls across the tunnel ceiling, only to dip down into the statue’s shoulders, becoming something like a pair of endlessly long and mismatched wings, tangled and angular, wrinkled and Plain.

  The statue had a stone lourka slung across one shoulder and a sheet of stone paper marked with lines and numbers draped across her other arm. She had Linny’s hair and Linny’s nose. And she held out her stone hands almost beseechingly, one cupped in the other, and from the hands dangled something that wasn’t made of stone at all.

  It was a medium-large ring of some kind of silvery metal that apparently did not tarnish, even when left in tunnels for hundreds of years. From it dangled an old-fashioned key, not very large and (unlike the ring it hung from) dark with age, and another little strip of nubby metal as shiny as if it had been born yesterday, covered with odd lines and raised dots.

  She ran her fingertip over those bumps and then lifted the key ring right off those stone hands as easily as she might have grabbed a coat from a coat hook.

  “This means there’s going to be a door!” she said cheerfully to the Half-Cat. She ducked around the statue and looked up the stairs. A surge of encouragement had lifted her hopes.

  Then she stopped.

  In front of her was not one door, but two. Nearly identical and side by side, and above them were two words chiseled into the stone. They weren’t too hard to read. They said, WHICH WAY?

  Linny snorted. Which way? She didn’t care which way, as long as it led out. And she had the key in her hand, didn’t she? One of those doors would have to answer to that key. That’s how stories work. If there’s a key, and a door, then the key opens the door. Anything else would be ridiculous.

  The doors were almost exactly the same: stone doors with a keyhole where a more ordinary door might have a knob. The blackened key slipped easily enough into the keyhole on the right, but it refused to turn. But the other door’s keyhole, just a smidge closer to the edge of the slab, was formed very differently and wouldn’t take the key at all.

  Linny was not an idiot when it came to locks and doors. Keys don’t necessarily have to look like keys. So she tried the bumpy, shiny piece of metal in the left-hand door, and there was a glorious moment when it slipped home, smooth as silk. That was where it belonged.

  But it wouldn’t turn either!

  She spent a long time moving from door to door and jiggling keys in locks, trying to catch whatever balky part of the mechanism was refusing to recognize its own key, but nothing came of that. Then she brought out the few small tools she had nabbed from the cartographer’s kit and tried to pick those locks, first the one on the right, then the left, but these doors would have none of that. A long time later, she had tried all the tricks she knew, and by the end she was exhausted, and the doors were as closed as ever.

  She went back down the steps a little ways and rested for a while with her back against the back of that statue. What the heck was going on with those stupid doors? How could you hand someone a key—no, two keys—and then not make sure the keys even worked?

  Maybe the old mechanisms in those locks had rusted to pieces. Then she was doomed. Because she would not, she could not, go back into the earthworm tunnel. She could not go back.

  The Half-Cat rested with her awhile, wandered up to sniff the doors, returned to Linny’s side, roamed off again.
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  Linny watched it come and go, and she was so tired her eyes sometimes saw one cat and sometimes saw two cats in front of those doubled doors.

  The doors were so like each other. They were really as like as could be. When Linny tried the eye-crossing trick with them as she slumped back against the statue, they shivered toward each other, ran into each other, clicked into focus as one door, denser and more mysterious looking than either had been on its own.

  She let her eyes relax back into the usual way of seeing: two doors. The Half-Cat rubbed its head against her elbow and started up the shallow stairs again.

  Her heart was pounding as if it thought she had figured something out.

  She sat up taller, clenching the key ring in her hand, and tried it again. The world blurred; the doors slipped toward each other, closer, closer—and snapped into focus. One door. One extremely doorlike door, deeper and denser than any ordinary door, and with, she saw now, two keyholes, flickering a little, side by side.

  It was an illusion, but it was all she had.

  She stood up carefully, not letting her eyes lose their new focus. One door. Two keyholes.

  She walked up the steps, taking it slow. And at the edges of her vision, the Half-Cat walked beside her.

  Here’s the strange thing: there was only one door now, not two, but the Half-Cat had doubled. Linny was quite sure she saw the shadowy gray echo of a cat on her left, and another, brighter shadow trotting along on her right. She had to will herself not to look away at the Half-Cat, to see what the trick was, because if she looked away, she would lose the door. And she was feeling, more and more, that this was the door she needed. This impossible door.

  Even quite close to it, the illusion persisted. She held the keys on their ring out in front of her, and without looking directly at either keyhole, she used both of her hands to slip both of those keys into the keyholes right next to each other, in this impossible door.

  And the keys turned.

  And the door swung open.

  Here everything became strange for a few moments. She stumbled through the door, not letting the keys out of her hands, and on both sides of her, the Half-Cat strode through, too, as cool as can be: a cat gleaming golden on one side of her, and a cat as silver as a mirror on the other. She felt right, and she felt peculiar, and then the cats flowed into each other and became one cat, and behind her the door closed with a bang, and when she jumped around to look, she found herself facing a blank wall, with no doors visible in it at all.

  But that didn’t matter, because all around her now was everything a person could ever have wanted from the world: sweet, unburied air.

  22

  THE GIRL FROM UNDERGROUND

  She breathed in great, greedy gulps. So much air! And noise! And, most amazing of all, light!

  There was another little set of stairs not far in front of her, very steep, leading up out of the sunken holding area she was now in. They jutted out from the side of the wall like a series of embedded bricks.

  Someone was giving a speech. She thought she recognized the voice, but she wasn’t sure. Some Plainish trick—some dreadful tinkering—was magnifying that voice and making it so enormous that Linny’s bones shook with it. And not just her bones, but the bones of whatever building she had just dug her way into.

  That voice was saying, “Greetings, citizens wrinkled and Plain!”

  Linny was still a little dizzy, finding herself so suddenly out from underground. What was all the noise she was hearing? She was clearly—the air told her that—very near the river. She had kept enough sense of direction, through all those winding worm tunnels under the earth, to know that the river must be quite close by.

  “In other years,” said the great huge magnified voice speaking to the world from somewhere at the top of those stairs, “we would have had claimants willing to play the labyrinth game for our amusement and to fulfill long tradition. But time moves on, and worlds, like children, must finally grow up—”

  She almost almost almost had that voice placed.

  “I assure you, if a claimant had managed to pass our preliminary tests, she would be here—but as you can see, there is no one. That shows it is time to face the truth and let go of this legend. There never will be another Girl with a Lourka. No one will ever find that lost crown or claim the powers it used to symbolize. That was a fantasy, and fantasy is beneath us. We must be governed by logic, and yes, I mean by that that even the wrinkled places of the world must submit to reason, and to the wise rule of the Plain—”

  The Half-Cat hissed. And the crowd’s shouting became uglier and angrier, though some voices were cheering.

  She recognized the voice now, in all its angular hatefulness: it belonged, of course, to the regent.

  No Girl with a Lourka? What part of Angleside’s plotting did that lie feed, anyway? It was time to go up that last little flight of steps and see what was going on out there at the top of them. But first she stripped off the ripped and tattered lab coat, since it was much the worse for all those tunnels. There!

  Her lourka, protected in its sack, had come through all the underground slithering amazingly well. Sure, there were a few new dings along its edges, but really, considering what it had just been through, that wasn’t too bad. There were probably more than a few dings along her own edges, too, she figured.

  The Half-Cat meowed. It seemed impatient.

  “All right, all right!” said Linny.

  The key ring was too big for her pocket, but she wasn’t about to leave it behind. Keys are to be collected, not abandoned.

  The voice was still booming, not that far away.

  The Half-Cat squeezed itself to one side to let her pass, and the two of them, girl and cat, climbed up the little jutting-out steps. Linny kept one hand on the stone wall on the right, because that steadied her.

  “Time for us all to open our eyes and go about our business!” said the booming voice. “Why did we think we needed Girls with Lourkas, all those years? It was always just a fairy tale and a dream. Wake up! Wake up! We have tolerated nonsense for far too long!”

  That was when Linny and the Half-Cat reached the top of the stairs. A breeze blew into Linny’s face, and she could almost have cried from the wonderfulness of that breeze, and also from the world, the structure of the world, flooding and feeding her starving eyes.

  Had those tunnels brought her close to the edge of the river? Well, yes, you might say that. In fact, as she stepped up onto the rim from the stepping-stone stairs, she saw immediately where she was: she was standing not just near the river, but at the very center, the apex, of that great stone bridge that crossed the river, that joined the two fairgrounds, the wrinkled and the Plain. The tunnels had brought her to the very foot, the root, of the Angleside end of the bridge, and then the staircase had led her up inside the heavy-bellied bridge itself. It was remarkable! What a clever way to build a bridge, not to mention a tunnel!

  She smiled at the thought of it—and also because it was the late afternoon out here, and the light was golden and liquid and beautiful.

  And there were people everywhere. Some of those people were on the bridge itself, on either side of her, but held back by temporary fences.

  And they were all, the ones on the banks of the river and the ones on the bridge, looking up at her. Well, sort of at her. At a man standing in front of her now. She could not see his face, since he was in front of her, but she could see how he leaned forward to speak into a round metal can on a tall stick.

  “So there is no Girl with the Lourka this year, and will never be in any year to come. That is the way of progress,” the regent was saying into that metal can, and every word he spoke became, by some Plainish trick, immediately huge, gigantic, enormous, overwhelming:

  P R O G R E S S

  Linny shook herself and stepped forward to get a better view of the crowds everywhere, of the fairgrounds to the right (where the crowds were mostly in grays, dotted with colors) and the fairgrounds to the left
(where the crowd was dressed in every imaginable color, and then dotted with the occasional Angleside gray), of the river rolling ahead and then to the left, of everything so beautiful because it wasn’t under the ground, because it was bathed in late-afternoon sun. She had never seen anything so lovely as this world unfolding in front of her eyes, which had been starved for a view like this for what felt like a very long time.

  She took another step forward, out from the shadows, right into the light.

  That was when the noise changed.

  It had been an angry and complicated roar: angry on the left, where the wrinkled side of the fair was, and complicated on the right, where the Plain’s half of the fair was laid out. Nobody on either side seemed particularly happy. But when Linny stepped into the light, the sound of both of those crowds swelled for a minute and then fell away.

  The regent turned around from his tin can, saw Linny standing there, and spluttered.

  In fact, as soon as he saw her, all of his angles seemed to sharpen, and his skin grew paler, and his eyes narrowed in displeasure.

  “You!” he said. (He was facing away from the crowds and the tin can, but the word still echoed in the air a little, like the faint ghost of something large.) “What are—how did you even get here?”

  “From underground,” said Linny. Her words became very large, too. What’s more, now she saw that on the Angleside bank of the river, there was a very large flat surface set up, like a giant picture, and in that picture was a moving image of Linny herself, at this very moment, only many times larger than she actually was, with the simply enormous key ring swaying back and forth in her hand. Enough to make you seasick. And the regent was up there, too. Oh, horrors. Linny tried to keep her eyes away from the thing. She still wasn’t comfortable with pictures of herself.

  “What did you say?” said the regent, blinking his narrow eyes. Behind him the river rolled around its corner—and then ran into the blank wall of the waterworks. And between here and there, so very many people, crowds on both sides of the river, balloons, flags, everything holding its breath.