The King Below

The rats built everything.

Nobody on the surface says so. Ask in the Lumenhall who laid the foundations and you will hear about badger masonry and fox surveying and the old mouse spellwork in the lanterns, and none of it is a lie, exactly. The badgers did raise the bridges. But under the flagstones, under the cellars and the cisterns, under the deep footings that keep the whole gleaming city from easing itself into the marsh, there are tunnels. The tunnels are how the crystal comes up. The crystal is how everything else works. The tunnels were dug by rats, who have been digging them for two hundred years, and who do not appear in any of the guidebooks.

He was born in Thornburrow Warren, three levels below the Frontier, in a chamber cut from chalite so soft his mother liked to say you could bruise it by frowning at it. She bored tunnels. His father had died the year before he was born, in a cave-in, section nine. Nobody’s fault, the foreman said. There was a fund for bereaved families. It paid for two weeks of grain, and on the fifteenth day his mother went back to the borer.

He could read before he was six. Nobody taught him; he worked it out from the crates that came down the freight shafts, matching the stamped letters against words he already knew by ear. FRAGILE. THIS SIDE UP. PROPERTY OF THE HOUSE OF THE OLD BADGER. Words meant for somebody else’s eyes. He took them anyway.

At fourteen he went to the crystal seams, because at fourteen everyone went to the crystal seams. Crystal was the whole point of the tunnels. It lit the lanterns and fed the enchantments and turned the mills, and it came out of the rock in the deep dark, prised loose by hand. The dust got into your lungs and stayed there. Rats on the seams coughed pink by thirty, and this was so ordinary that the young ones had jokes about it. You would hack up a chalk-coloured mess on your first month and somebody would clap you on the back and say, there it is, you’re a miner now.

He worked the seams and read everything the shafts sent down. Newspapers three weeks old and half dissolved. A badger engineering manual with the covers gone. A water-stained book of mouse poetry he found wedged behind a pipe junction, missing its last forty pages, which he read so many times he could recite the surviving half and privately resented the missing half like a debt someone owed him. Somewhere in all that reading a thought arrived that he never managed to get rid of afterwards.

They don’t know we’re here.

Not hatred. Hatred would have required attention. The surface knew about “the mines” the way it knew about weather, a thing that happened somewhere and reliably produced results. Crystal arrived in crates. Who filled the crates was nobody’s question.

He decided to make it somebody’s question.