I coughed, and when he asked if I was okay, I nodded quickly and cleared my throat. “I’m so sorry, I’ve been going on and on. How did your meeting with Sylvi go?”
“Good. Good.” His thick eyebrows pinched together, and he frowned. “But … she didn’t really tell me much.”
“What do you mean?”
He leaned back and rubbed his hands on his jeans. “When Sylvi called, she made it sound like she had finally gotten the Kanin to agree to start looking into my parentage. But that’s not what’s happening. A Mästare sent an official letter that basically says that they’ll keep asking the Kanin kingdom to open a paternity case regarding me, and the Kanin acknowledged that they’d received that letter and said we can keep on writing letters, if that’s our wish.”
“And?” I pressed.
“And that’s it.” He laughed bitterly. “Sylvi assured me they were going to keep looking into it.”
“What did she say when she called?”
“The Kanin were reopening my claim, and I should talk to her before they changed their minds.”
I shook my head. “So … did they change their minds, then?”
“As far as I can tell, the Kanin have the same position they’ve always had—ignore and deny,” Pan said with a shrug. “Sylvi showed me the letter they sent, so it’s not like they told her anything different than what I saw.”
I took a bite of my food, chewing as I considered what Pan had said. “But I don’t understand. Why would she call you back here?”
“That’s what I’m saying.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I don’t know. I’m not complaining, exactly. Maybe when they talked to her it sounded more substantial. Or maybe she thought that I’d want to know any little thing, and I would’ve thought that I would too. So here we are.”
“I’m sorry it wasn’t something more helpful for you,” I said.
“Thanks.” He stared down at his lap and inhaled through his nose. “I keep reminding myself that I still know who I am. This doesn’t change anything.”
I put my hand on his knee. “Exactly.”
23
Catacombs
For maybe the second time since I’d been working there, Calder left work on time. I’d returned from putting away books, and he was straightening up his desk.
“Heading out already?” I asked, teasing him for all the times he’d said that to me for staying only an hour or two late.
He lifted his head quickly, his gray eyes surprised. “I have an important dinner engagement, so I can’t maintain my usual schedule. Are you comfortable locking up, or would you like to leave with me so I can lock up?”
“I have a little bit left to do. I can finish it and lock up, no problem.”
“If you’re certain,” he replied, and he was already taking long strides toward the door.
I waved after him, but he never looked back. “Have a fun night!”
As soon as he was gone, I did exactly what I said I would—I rushed around finishing up the work I had left. The very second I was done with that, I ran back to the supply room and grabbed the heavy brass keys hidden behind the emergency candles. I’d been left alone with the keys to the castle, and like Sylvi said—I had to make my time here count.
It was actually Hanna’s words I was reminded of as I unlocked the cellar-style doors. She’d been so focused on the fairy tales and Adlrivellir. I had to find out why.
I had never been in the catacombs before. Calder said the access was limited to those who required it. Since I felt like I might require it, that meant it wasn’t exactly off limits.
The Catacombs of Fables were located directly underneath the archives. From what I gathered from Calder’s grumbled answers, they had been created as a dungeon of sorts, to house prisoners back when the Mimirin had been solely under Vittra rule and still held prisoners (mostly those who had committed treason, traitors, and enemies of the kingdom).
The catacombs were intended for a specific type of criminal, one that the Vittra architects found particularly odious, so they were designed with the explicit purpose of being an unusually cruel punishment.
“The catacombs,” Calder had told me once in his uniquely raspy voice, “were meant to drive us mad.”
They were several stone boxes, underground and windowless, connected by winding tunnels. The walls were made of thick stone to hold the dead. When they executed prisoners, they encased them in the walls.
The interior was a claustrophobic maze, with the paths narrowing as the walls expanded with the dead. Living prisoners were thrown down here, and the only contact they’d ever have with the outside world was when random pieces of food were dropped through holes in the ceiling (now long since closed up).
After their use as a prison, the catacombs were transformed into a book dungeon. All the books that the Styrelse found dangerous or confusing, because the stories blurred our reality with human fiction and even our own fairy tales.
Presumably that’s why all the books about Adlrivellir were kept here. The powers that be didn’t want anyone mistaking the fiction for fact. But I thought I could handle it.
I went through the cellar door and down, down, down the many narrow steps into the catacombs. The steps had been worn from centuries of use, leaving smooth divots and sloping the stone downward. Other stairs in the Mimirin had been updated and replaced, but these had been left dangerously slippery.
The thing that hit me most was the smell—a damp earthiness that instantly brought me back to the crypts. That’s where we’d gone after Finn’s father died last fall; he’d been buried in the crypts high in the bluffs of Förening. It was a wet, rainy autumn day, so the younger kids stayed at home, out of the rain and mud. But I had been there, with Hanna and Liam, as Finn led us through the family tombs. Finn came from a long line of elite trackers, and that earned them plots in the Trylle royal crypts.
“Why are you showing us all of this?” Liam had been doing his best not to sound as uninterested as he obviously was, but it was hard for him, at only six years old, to hide it well. He’d dug his toes into the mud and pulled at a loose thread on his shirt.
“Liam, stop!” Hanna had hissed and elbowed him in the ribs. “You shouldn’t disrespect the dead.” She’d been standing beside him, hanging on Finn’s every word.
“It’s not disrespectful to ask questions,” Finn had admonished gently. “I’m showing you this because these are your ancestors, this is your history. It’s important to know where you come from to help find where you should go.”
The memory was instantly shattered when a big, fat spider dropped down in front of me, dangling from a gossamer tendril of web. I jumped, slamming hard into a bookcase, and my back collided painfully with the splintering wood.
It was another unfortunate case of my strength getting the best of me when I was startled. In my fear, I’d jumped forcefully enough into ancient bookshelves that they snapped. An avalanche of books rained down on me, and I fell to my knees and covered my head with my arms until it finally stopped.
I pushed the books off me and slowly sat up. My body already ached from my earlier work, but now I could add stinging cuts and splinters poking into my skin, and a book had struck me right in the temple, causing a big gash along my eyebrow.
“Ah, crap,” I muttered, surveying the dusty carnage around me.
And then I spotted a familiar cover. My cell phone—which I’d dropped during the commotion—lay at an angle, and the light from it hit a shimmering emblem on the front of the book. The triskelion symbol with the vines.
As I reached for the book, the spider dropped down on the pile. I watched it from the corner of my eye.
I realized this wasn’t just another book with the Älvolk symbol. This book—bound in soft fabric with lightweight vellum pages—was the same book I’d seen in Hanna’s grandfather Johan’s study. Not the exact same copy, of course, but it was the same edition as Jem-Kruk and the Adlrivellir, although the title page was missing.
; I flipped through the book to read more, but I noticed movement. The spider was scurrying around, and now I realized it wasn’t the same spider. This one was larger—a lot larger, actually. Long, spindly legs stretched out from a bulbous body marked with a jagged strip of dark emerald green down its back.
There were multiple huge spiders crawling around, my head was bleeding, and I felt dazed and sore all over. I knew I had to clean up the mess, but just then I needed to get out of there.
Clutching the book under one arm, I wielded my phone like it was a holy cross warding off a vampire. Unfortunately, the spiders did not react like vampires.
In fact, an even larger one crawled out of a gaping crack in the wall. A massive spider with an abdomen as large as an apple, and a dozen opalescent eyes reflecting the cell phone’s flashlight.
Before I could scream, I was running, racing frantically away from the spider. The faster I ran, the more horrifyingly apparent it became that it was futile—the halls were endlessly winding, I couldn’t remember the way I had come, and more spiders were lurking around every corner—some of them as large as house cats.
“Why isn’t anybody talking about all the damn spiders?” I asked—shrieked, really—into the claustrophobic tunnels as I slowed, catching my breath and pressing my hand against the stitch in my side.
Maybe it wasn’t something they put in brochures, but it really seemed like the kinda thing that leads to gossip and rumors.
But that wasn’t really my most pressing concern. I was trapped, stumbling through the catacombs with no cell reception and giant spiders crawling everywhere. They weren’t chasing me, but it still felt like they were closing in.
“How am I going to get out of here?” I whispered into the darkness.
I heard footsteps slapping gently on the stone floor, and in the dim light I saw a shadow dancing along the wall.
“Hello?” I asked, and the shakiness of my voice surprised me, but it probably shouldn’t have. My skin crawled, like a thousand tiny legs were dancing all over it, and I didn’t know how to get away. It took all my restraint not to devolve into hysterical screaming.
And then the shadow was taking form—a sliver of a troll, tall enough that the figure had to stoop beneath the ceiling. It barely even looked trollian—it was more like someone had been stretched out until they became a semi-opaque waif. But their dark eyes looked like they belonged to the baby Holmes twins Lissa and Luna. A look far too innocent, wide, and … trollian to belong to something so unearthly.
They were an Ögonen, and they were extending their long slender fingers toward me.
24
Unsettled
I started to scream, but the attempt stopped in my throat. Or really, it had been stopped. I could almost feel the scream—ice-cold and frozen in place, a hard rock in my trachea, even though air passed through it as I breathed.
The Ögonen stood before me, holding their hand out with their fingers curled, making a clutching gesture in the air before my face.
I put my hand to my throat and let out a shaky breath, but I still couldn’t make a sound. The Ögonen stared impassively at me, blinking once slowly.
They were entirely androgynous, with no mouth and two slits in the center of their oblong face for a nose. The light from my phone hit their chest, shining through their semitransparent ocher skin so I could see the subtle beating of their heart.
Let me go! I screamed, but the words never made it out.
My main focus was on the Ögonen stealing my voice, but in my peripheral vision I saw the spiders, crawling over the walls and ceiling, covering the books and floor as they swarmed around us.
The Ögonen moved their hand, pointing down the hall behind me.
And then I was running. I don’t know if I had a choice or if my body was just moving, racing under the command of something else. When I came to a T intersection, I turned left without thinking or knowing why. My feet were following a path I couldn’t see, and as long as they took me away from the spiders and the voice-stealing Ögonen, I was happy to let them.
One more sharp left, and there it was—a set of rickety wooden stairs. They were steep—almost like a ladder—and I ran up them without hesitation.
At the top was another set of cellar doors, and I charged into them, but they didn’t give. I slammed my palm against the door and shouted for help—and finally, mercifully, my voice was free.
The door finally opened, and I ran out, practically tripping over the top steps, and I collapsed onto the stone floor.
“Ulla Tulin?” Elof Dómari asked. He stood over me, squinting at me as I brushed my hands all over my body, making sure that no spiders had hitched a ride. “Are you okay?
“Yeah, yeah.” I stood up and ran my hands through my hair one more time. “I’m fine.”
“You’re bleeding, and you were screaming for help down in the catacombs. Forgive me if I don’t entirely believe that you’re fine.”
“Sorry. I went down to get a book.” I held it up to show him. “And there were all these spiders. Why didn’t anyone tell me about the giant spider infestation in the catacombs?”
Elof pressed his lips into a thin smile, and he went over and locked the cellar doors. “That’s because there weren’t any spiders.”
“No, there were, I swear.” I pointed at the door. “I just saw them everywhere.”
“No, you saw what the Ögonen wanted you to see.” He started to walk away. “Come back to my office with me. I’ll get you cleaned up and explain it all to you there.”
He led me back to the old brass elevator at the end of the hall, and as Elof controlled the lever and sent us up to the third floor, I briefly explained to him my experience in the catacombs, and he didn’t seem surprised by any of it.
We made it to his lab, and he unlocked the door—using a key from a ring of large brass keys. He instructed me to sit down on the squat stool next to one of the dwarf-height islands nearby. He flicked on the lights—not all of them, but enough so the classroom wasn’t completely submerged in darkness anymore.
Elof gathered up a first-aid kit, then he sat on the stool across from me. “You know the Ögonen are the guardians of Merellä, using their intense psychokinesis to mask its appearance?”
“Yeah, I think I understand, basically.” I understood the concept, but most sources were vague about anything pertaining specifically to the Ögonen.
Elof motioned for me to lower my head, so he could more easily reach my wound and clean it. I leaned forward, and he gently dabbed the cut above my eyebrow and a scratch on my cheek with an alcohol swab.
“Sorry, this stings a bit,” he said when I winced.
“It’s okay.”
“To do what the Ögonen do—essentially hiding an entire city with a bustling population in plain sight from humans—that takes a great deal of power. A cloaking spell of that size has them working at max capacity—so to speak—which is one of the reasons the citadel must be strict about admittance to the Mimirin and Merellä as a whole. Population control is a must.
“As powerful as the Ögonen are, they have their limits,” he went on as he gently applied a butterfly bandage to my eyebrow gash. “Which is why you’re able to see the city. Even half-TOMBs like Pan are able to see through the cloaking spell to the stone and flesh underneath.
“So.” Elof had taken care of my largest scrapes, and he sat back on his stool. “To guard the areas from the likes of you, they have to use different tactics. And it so happens that it’s far easier for the Ögonen to create visions than it is to hide something that is really there.”
“You’re saying that the Ögonen made me hallucinate spiders?” I asked. “To scare me away, like guard dogs?”
“Yes, exactly.” He tilted his head. “Which means that you didn’t have permission to be down in the catacombs.”
I sighed. “No, I didn’t. And I broke a bookcase, accidentally.” I groaned. “I should go back down there to clean it.”
“I’ll send
someone down,” Elof said. “Unless you’re granted permission from the Styrelse, it’s best if you do not go back down again.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make such a mess.” I set the book down on the island and tapped the cover. “I thought this would help me figure some things out.”
“The archives are not under my domain, so I will leave it to you to discuss with Calder how to proceed with that book,” Elof said, and his gaze turned more severe. “And I do trust that you will tell him about what transpired today.”
I nodded. “Yeah. Of course.”
“Good.” He relaxed again. “But there is something I discovered recently that I thought you might find interesting. It’s about the Ögonen, actually.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“How much do you know about chromosomes?”
I shook my head. “Not much.”
“Humans have forty-six chromosomes, and like many other animals, ours come in pairs,” he began. “In fact, most species work in similar ways with chromosomes in pairs or sets of three, from seedless watermelons all the way up to decaploids like certain types of strawberries, which have sets of ten.
“But they’re usually consistent, with minor variations. Down syndrome in humans has a single triple bond, resulting in forty-seven chromosomes. And then there’s the Ögonen. Every one I’ve tested has thirty-five chromosomes, compromised of seven pairs and seven trios.”
“Why? What does that mean?” I asked.
“There is still much that we don’t understand,” Elof admitted. “But we’ve recently been able to ascertain Eliana shares several sets of chromosomes with the Ögonen, and like them, she has a mixture of pairs and trios.
“But unlike them, she also has a few that match ours,” he finished. “She seems to be connected to us both.”
“What are the Ögonen? No one’s ever given me a straight answer,” I said.
“They’re a type of troll, but beyond that, it’s hard to categorize them,” Elof explained as best as he could. “I suspect that we must have common ancestors from long ago, but the Ögonen lived in complete isolation. For eons, perhaps. At some point, around a thousand years ago, the Ögonen were no longer able to survive on their own. The Vittra eventually came to their aid, housing the Ögonen in exchange for their protection.”
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