The King Who Went Missing Inside His Own Statue

How it begins

The king asked Rhea Nasser to stop chiseling his nose.

Fine white dust covered her sleeves. She had spent the morning removing imperfections from a man whose official biography admitted none.

Rhea lowered the hammer.

The enormous stone face above her remained fixed in the expression of benevolent certainty selected by the royal portrait committee. Beneath it, the scaffolding creaked in the morning wind.

"What?" she said.

"The nose. It hurts."

Rhea looked down. Forty feet below, workers were sweeping the square around the monument. A guard leaned against the fountain, eating something wrapped in paper. Nobody appeared to have noticed the constitutional complication occurring overhead.

"Your Majesty?"

"Who else would be inside my statue?"

It was a fair question, but she disliked its tone.

The king had been missing for nine days. The official account involved a private retreat. The less official accounts involved an assassin, a foreign princess, or a disagreement with a horse.

Rhea had been hired to finish the monument before his expected return.

"How did you get in there?"

"I was inspecting the workmanship."

"From inside?"

The stone face said nothing.

Below, the guard looked up. Gus Moss had been assigned to watch the scaffolding after someone painted a moustache on the royal knee. He narrowed his eyes.

"Who are you talking to?"

Rhea considered several career-preserving answers.

Before she chose one, a second voice sounded from the statue's chest. Older. Female. Unimpressed.

"Tell him we've been asking that for sixty years."

Rhea set the hammer down with great care.

The king made a small, unhappy noise.

Under her boots, the monument vibrated. Not a crack. A crowd shifting in a room that had been too small for too long.

She looked over the edge of the scaffold.

"Gus," she called, "I think we're going to need more than a ladder."