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I’m used to being flummoxed in the Merge, but this is a new experience for Inez and Hugo. They walk along in silence, clearly mulling over all that they’ve learned, as Kojo continues his search. When they woke this morning, they had no idea that they’d be uncovering secrets of the Merge’s origins not long after breakfast. It’s a lot for them to take in.
For me, however, it’s business as normal, so I take it in my stride, and that’s why I’m the first to ask a follow-up question. “What do you do here? Are you Family?”
Kojo almost chokes with laughter. “Me! Family! Do I have an aura?”
“I don’t know,” I reply. Although every Family member has an aura, you can only see them if you’re Merged, or a royal like Hugo.
Kojo’s laughter dies away and he stares at me. “You’re Born?” he croaks.
I check with Inez, who nods.
Kojo shakes his head. “A Born locksmith who can open a Crypt borehole? How is that possible?”
“I’ve no idea,” I grin. “So what’s the deal with you?”
Kojo studies me a while longer, walking backwards as he does, then shrugs. “The Departed only sent occasional messages once the Crypt was completed, if they had something extremely important to communicate. Royals took it in turns to camp here, in case a message came – it’s weird when that happens, all the mouths on the statues moving at the same time – but there could be hundreds of years between communiqués, and they grew tired of all the hanging around. At the same time, they were afraid they’d miss a vital message if they left the Crypt unattended.”
“I don’t get it,” I frown. “If a message was that important, couldn’t the Departed make contact with the royals directly, the way they used to?”
“They wouldn’t,” Kojo says. “They were adamant about that. Once the Crypt was up and running, this was the only place where they’d talk to the Merged.”
“Seems like a strange set-up,” I note.
“We thought so too,” Kojo says, “but there was no arguing with them.”
“I see where this is heading,” Hugo says. “The royals hired someone to listen for them.”
“Correct,” Kojo says. “Each Family submitted candidates, and the final choice had to win the approval of every single royal. It took a long time, and hundreds were rejected, but eventually they settled on me, and I’ve been here ever since.”
“How did it work?” I ask. “Did you carry messages to the royals whenever you heard from the Departed?”
“No,” Kojo says. “If it was calamitous – for instance, if they told me the Merge would collapse within a week unless we acted to avert it – I had clearance to leave and warn the Families, but that never happened. Instead, royals used to visit me to find out if I had any news. At first they came often, so I had a steady stream of visitors, but the visits decreased over time. They started coming every few months, then years, then decades. The Departed passed on so few messages that it stopped being a priority for them.
“I’ll admit it got lonely,” Kojo says hollowly. “I’m happy to endure the long, isolated stretches, but it’s hard. I asked a few times if they could appoint a second Cryptkeeper, so that we could divide the watch up between us, but the Families could never agree on another candidate. I guess they didn’t work too hard on it. They had a lot of other things to focus on.”
“You should have gone on strike,” I tell him, feeling bad for the boy, left alone all this time to carry the can.
He smiles sadly. “I didn’t mind that much, until the dark. I haven’t liked being without light. That was no fun at all.”
Kojo looks around and shivers. I share a puzzled look with Inez and Hugo.
“What do you mean?” I ask. “It isn’t dark.”
“It was until you opened the borehole,” Kojo says. “The walls and ceiling only light up when at least one of the boreholes is active. In the old days that wasn’t a problem – even when the royals hadn’t visited for ages, there were always a few Crypt boreholes open in the various realms – but then the old fella hit the scene, and he wasn’t long plunging this place into what he hoped would prove to be an eternity of darkness.”
Kojo looks at us guiltily and lowers his voice. “I never liked the old fella. I shouldn’t say that – I promised to be neutral and respect all the royals when I took this job – but he knows how I feel. He said it to me once, sneered, ‘You don’t like me, do you, boy?’ I looked him straight in the eye and said, ‘No, I don’t.’ He huffed and said, ‘At least you’re honest. I rarely flay a person for being honest with me.’”
“He sounds like a charming sort,” Hugo says witheringly.
“The old fella never approved of the Crypt,” Kojo says. “He didn’t agree with the Departed meddling in our affairs. He wanted to sever all connections with them, and brought a few devisers here to see if they could destroy the Crypt, but that proved beyond them. Nothing they did to the walls or ceiling made any difference. In fact a few of them got jerked through into the Lost Zone.” Kojo snickers, then looks guilty. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t laugh at such a terrible thing.”
“Don’t worry,” Inez says. “Some people belong in the Lost Zone. The Merge is better off without them.”
Kojo gulps. “Anyway, when the old fella couldn’t destroy the Crypt, he decided to make sure that nobody could ever come here again, by breaking the locks on all the connecting boreholes. This was long before he went to war with the Merged. I’ve thought about it a lot since then, and now I’m pretty sure he wanted to stop the other royals coming here in case the Departed tipped them off to his plans, although they never did.”
“It would have spared us a lot of trouble if they had,” Inez mutters.
“The old fella was wrong to think they’d have taken sides against him,” Kojo says, “but he didn’t want to take any chances, so he set out to destroy all the locks, and I guess by the lack of visitors over the last several hundred years that he must have succeeded. I think he targeted royals as well, the older members who knew how to open the locks.”
“You mean he murdered them?” Hugo growls.
Kojo nods glumly. “The locks were made for Family members, but they didn’t simply open to their touch — if one was closed, a royal had to unlock it, and it was a complicated procedure. That’s why they tended to position the boreholes in their palaces or isolated places where people wouldn’t be likely to find them, and leave them open. I imagine, as time passed, most didn’t bother to show new royals how to open the locks, as they weren’t using them even on their occasional visits here, so he wouldn’t have had to kill that many people.”
Hugo looks like he wants to throttle Old Man Reap. I think he’d happily drag the scourge of the Merge back from the Lost Zone if he could, just to be able to wring his neck.
“He came to see me before he destroyed the final few locks,” Kojo says, his voice dropping. “He said he was close to doing what he’d vowed, and had started a war with the other realms. He told me to tell the Departed what was happening if they ever got in touch, and to warn them not to mess with him, or he’d wage war on their spheres too.”
“Wage war on the Departed?” Inez snorts. “He sounds like a madman.”
“As mad as they come,” Kojo agrees, “but a powerful, cunning madman. I didn’t laugh at his threat. I don’t think the Departed would have laughed either. Then he left, and a short time later the lights went out, and they’ve been...”
Kojo spots something and cries out with joy. He races to one of the heads and retrieves something that was stuck in a crack high up. He sits down and raises a foot, and I realise it’s the missing sandal.
“I’ve been looking for that for ages,” Kojo beams, standing to admire the sandal on his foot. “I used to play games with it, hide it and then try to forget where I’d put it, so that I could kill some time searching for it. But one day I hid it too artfully and it’s been lost to me ever since. I feel so happy now, and it’s all because of your visit. Thank you. Thank you so much.”
Kojo’s eyes fill with delighted tears and he darts from one of us to the other, making the greet. As I consider how happy this small find has made him, and think about what it must have been like, stuck here in the darkness for hundreds of years, all by himself, loyal to his duty even though nobody else in the Merge knew or cared, my eyes fill with tears too.