The first sign that Brindle had been chosen by destiny was a beetle in a waistcoat blocking the morning tunnel.
“You are late,” said the beetle.
“For my shift?” Brindle asked. “I have seven minutes.”
“For the prophecy.”
The beetle held up a strip of bark. It said, in old root-script, When the rain reaches the red stone, the one who knows every way beneath us will lead us home. Underneath, in much newer ink, someone had written BRINDLE, MAPS.
Brindle read the old part twice. Then he read the new part. “That says Brindle, Maps because that’s the name on my desk.”
“A remarkable coincidence,” said the beetle.
At the desk, Brindle kept records of tunnels: which ones sloped, which ones leaked, which ones had become somebody’s pantry without anyone telling the records office. He did not know every way beneath them. Yesterday he had got lost between the turnip vault and his own aunt’s front door. He told the beetle this.
“The chosen are often humble.”
“The chosen are sometimes misfiled.”
The beetle, whose name was Pell, escorted him to the council chamber anyway. The red stone stood outside the chamber, a smooth marker at the bottom of the northern shaft. Rainwater had covered its first carved line overnight. By noon, if the ditch above kept filling, water would reach the second line and enter the nursery passage. The old spillway was blocked. Everybody knew that. Nobody knew what by.
Inside, six council members had drawn up chairs around Brindle’s map. His aunt Moss was there, dripping from a trip to the surface. So was Tiller the shrew, who maintained the old doors, and Fen, a young vole with a whisker bent permanently to one side.
“Good,” said Councilor Rusk. “Our guide has arrived.”
“Your clerk,” said Brindle.
“We need you to find the western escape route.”
“You need Fen. She ran the western route last month.”
Fen shook her head. “I ran as far as the cracked tile. After that it was blocked with roots.”
“Then you need Tiller, because the old doors—”
“I’ve got one paw,” Tiller said. He raised the other, wrapped in a leaf sling. “And before anyone asks, I did it by falling over a bucket.”
“A guide,” Rusk repeated, “would know what to do.”
Brindle looked at the map. Whoever had last redrawn the nursery passage had made it a pleasing straight line. In life, it bent twice, passed beneath Moss’s mushroom shed, and came out at the public water bowl. He had marked that correction in red, but Rusk’s paw was covering it.
“Move your paw,” Brindle said.
Rusk moved it. Brindle pointed to the bend. “If the nursery floods, it will flood the bowl next. We can’t send everyone west through a blocked passage and hope. We need to open the spillway before noon.”
Pell smiled as though destiny had begun speaking.
“I need to see it,” Brindle said, “and I need someone who knows how it works.”
Tiller came with them. So did Fen, Moss, and, after a short argument about how useful a ceremonial sash was in a wet shaft, Pell. Rusk stayed to organize the move from the nursery to higher rooms. That was work he knew how to do.
They reached the spillway through a tunnel so narrow that Pell had to walk sideways. At its end stood a wooden gate, black with age. Water seeped under it. Behind them, a runner from the nursery called that the red stone’s second line was nearly gone. Tiller explained that a stone weight on the far side should pull the gate open when someone freed the catch.
“And the catch is where?” Brindle asked.
Tiller pointed to a hole already full of water.
“Of course it is.”
Fen went in first. She came back shivering and carrying a broken peg. The catch had been tied shut with a cord that ran up through the wall.
“Someone did that deliberately?” Pell asked.
“Someone wanted the gate to stay open only when they wanted it,” Tiller said. “Follow the cord.”
The cord disappeared into a side run that did not appear on Brindle’s map. Brindle felt a hot flush beneath his fur. He was responsible for the maps, and he had missed a whole tunnel.
“I told you I didn’t know every way,” he said.
Moss pushed past him. “Nobody knows this one. I dug it last spring.”
“You dug a tunnel behind a floodgate?”
“I dug a mushroom cellar. I tied the gate because it kept swinging and shaking dirt into my beds. I meant to tell Tiller.”
Tiller looked at her. Moss looked at the floor.
“I also meant to untie it before the rains,” she said.
For a moment, all Brindle could hear was water picking its way beneath the wood. Then Fen said, “Can we have the quarrel when the nursery is dry?”
Moss’s cellar was stacked with pale caps in neat rows. At the back, the cord was looped around a root thick as a leg. Moss undid the knot, but the gate did not move. Tiller tried the catch again. Nothing.
“Weight’s jammed,” he said. “We’ll have to get to its chamber.”
That chamber had two entrances: the wet hole by the gate and an abandoned coal run on the other side of the nursery. On the map, the coal run ended in a cross. In Brindle’s notes, the cross meant uninspected. Rusk had always read it as closed.
“I can get there,” Fen said. “I know the cracked tile.”
“I can tell you what to look for,” Tiller said.
“I can bring the small carts,” Moss said. “If we need to haul anything.”
Pell took off his waistcoat. “I can carry a message. It has pockets.”
They ran. At the nursery, water was creeping over the lowest floor tile. Rusk had already moved the smallest children into the high assembly room. He had stationed two older moles at the bend with dry blankets and counted every family as they passed. Brindle nearly told him about Moss’s cellar, but there was no time to explain the whole stupid knot. He said, “We have a route to the weight chamber. Keep the bend clear.”
Rusk looked at the map, then at Brindle. “The cross?”
“Uninspected,” Brindle said.
“That is a terrible symbol.”
“I agree.”
Fen found the cracked tile. Beneath it, the coal run smelled of wet stone and old smoke. The tunnel opened into a low chamber where the spillway weight hung crooked against a bank of silt. It was a lump of rock too large for one animal to shift. Tiller showed them the notch where it should sit. Moss fetched the carts, and they scooped the silt into them with flat pieces of bark. Pell carried loads twice his size and complained that the waistcoat had never held so much as a seed cake.
When the last wedge of silt came free, the weight dropped. Somewhere behind them, the gate groaned open. Water rushed away through a channel no one had used in years.
Brindle stood with both paws in the mud, waiting for the sound to change. It did not. The water kept moving away from the nursery.
They went back by the public bowl. Its rim was wet, but the nursery passage was dry. The children in the assembly room cheered when Fen came through, then asked whether anyone had brought lunch. One small mole asked why Pell had no waistcoat. Pell said he had lent it to the flood.
At dusk, Rusk assembled the council again. He thanked Brindle as the one the prophecy had named.
“It named no one,” Brindle said. “Pell wrote my name under it because it was on my desk.”
Pell studied the bark. “I may have been hasty.”
“Fen knew the passage. Tiller knew the gate. Moss knew why it was tied shut. You moved the nursery. We all worked out the rest.”
Rusk set the bark down. “Then what should we do with the prophecy?”
“Put it in the records,” Brindle said. “With the other things we aren’t sure about.”
The next morning, he drew a proper map of the mushroom cellar. Moss signed it and promised to tell the records office before digging anything else. Beside the coal run, he replaced the cross with the words needs inspection. It used more ink. It was much harder to misunderstand.
On his way home, he passed the red stone. The water had fallen below the first line. Pell was there in a clean waistcoat, trying to scrape Brindle’s name off the bark without scraping away the prophecy.
“Leave it,” Brindle said. “It will remind us to read both parts.”
Pell considered this. “Would you at least let me call you the Almost Expected?”
“Only if you put it on my desk. I keep the records.”