Chapter 5 The Stalagmite Throne
The Stalagmite Throne
Idrew my knees into my chest and found my body shivering of its own accord. My bravado was leaving me. I tried to ignore it and looked around the rest of the bedroom. Surely there was something in here that I could use as a weapon.
The Prince had thrown me onto an enormous bed.
The mattress was large enough to fit three people comfortably.
I peeled back the blanket to inspect the mattress; it was made of what seemed like woven silk.
The shimmering black blanket on the bed was silk, too, as were the pillow-cases.
The mattress’s stuffing poked out the seams. I yanked out a strand of the stuffing and identified it as a strange, soft, flaxen straw.
They had plants in the underworld, then.
I crawled off the bed. Experimentally, I tried the metal door. It didn’t budge. I might as well have been in a vault.
The floor was carved out of the same onyx as the walls, though it didn’t glitter chunkily like the walls did.
Rather, the floor had been sanded down and made as smooth as poured stone.
An enormous rug was spread in front of the fireplace.
The rug, too, was made of woven silk. The rug’s design of dark, badly dyed colors was so chaotic it was hard to look at.
And the furniture. It was clear and translucent, like nothing I’d ever seen.
There was a chair in the corner, a large box with cubbies that I took for a dresser, and, unbelievably, a bookshelf full of books.
I longed to look at the books but there was no time; instead I went over to the chair, tried to pick it up, and overbalanced so hard I nearly fell over.
It was as light as a feather. I’d thought it would be heavy, like wood or metal or stone, but it was more like resin or poured glass.
I peered closer. There were bubbles trapped in the material. The chair’s poured edges were bumpy, like no one had bothered to sand them down. And when I put the chair back on the floor, it wobbled.
I frowned. The chair was as badly made as the rug. And the same appeared to be true for all the other furniture. It all had a rich quality to it, but there was no technique to the craftsmanship. Why was all this shit so badly made?
Because this was nothing but a fancy holding cell, was why.
They didn’t need this room to be nice. After all, I wasn’t expected to be here for long.
I began to shiver even harder.
I shuffled closer to the fire, trying to calm myself.
There had to be a way out of here. Someone had done it before.
(Yeah, two hundred years ago, for barely twelve hours, and not before they fucked her up so bad she ate her way through leather.) All I had to do was escape this room and flee back up the tunnels.
Surely I could retrace the Prince’s steps.
(No, I couldn’t.) I would go up, up, up.
I’d climb the walls if I had to. (I had never climbed anything in my life.)
I hurled myself against the door. Nothing. I beat my fists on it. Nothing.
But surely someone would come for me eventually. Surely the point was not to let me starve in here.
(What if it was?)
My mind returned to my original thought: I needed a weapon. When someone opened the door, I would attack them. Kill them if I had to. Then fucking run.
I searched around. The glass chair. The stone floor.
I rolled back the chaotic rug, revealing a great expanse of stone floor. I smashed the chair on the stone. Again. Again.
The muscles in my back and arms burned. But finally, one of the chair legs split.
I snapped the chair leg off. I hurled the rest of the chair into the corner.
I threw myself to the ground and scraped the edge of the chair leg across the stone ground, over and over again, faster and faster, filing it one way, then turning it, filing it another way, then turning it, filing it again, like sharpening a pencil —
The metal door creaked open.
I lunged.
The horrifying monster who’d opened the door screamed and shut the door again.
I stood there, panting with my makeshift spear, my heart hammering.
That had not been the Prince.
What had it been? A… godling, surely? It had had… I thought it had had a human face, and human hair, but the body, the arms, if they were even arms…
I swallowed. It had looked like a spider. A giant, five-foot-tall spider with a human face.
I pressed myself back toward the fire, trembling. The spear shook in my hands.
Something small glistened on the floor in front of the door. The hideous spider-godling had dropped it.
I whimpered. I really didn’t want to find out what it was.
I couldn’t get the sight of those eight horrible legs out of my head, and I couldn’t stop shaking.
“I want to go home,” I whispered. For the first time since my kidnapping, I found myself fighting back tears.
“Please, gods, take me home. Let me go home.”
None of the gods answered.
I bit my tongue until the tears behind my eyeballs dried up.
After a moment, when my body had stopped shaking so hard, and the spider-godling hadn’t burst back into the room to eat my face off, I dared to inch closer to the shining object on the floor.
Maybe it was something I could use. Or a clue as to what they were going to do to me.
I reached out with my spear to drag it over to the fire, so I wouldn’t have to touch it.
It was a small glass container of berries.
Even through my fear, my stomach grumbled.
I winced against the twanging hunger-pain in my stomach.
But they’d have to try a little harder than that.
As if I could forget the woman who’d escaped the underworld and been dragged back by the magnet in her belly.
There was one rule, along with Don’t get kidnapped, and that was Don’t eat the underworld’s food. I’d never get out if I did.
I unrolled the rug and ground the fruit into it with my bare foot.
The door opened again. I raised my spear. But it wasn’t the spider-godling.
It was the Prince.
My breath went from my lungs. I hated myself for it, but I had never been so relieved to see someone in my life. I was just glad it wasn’t the spider-creature. The Prince was far from safe — he’d kidnapped me, for gods’s sake — but at least he looked human. Or mostly human.
On some level, you could tell that he wasn’t really a human being. He was just half an inch too tall, a hair too broad-shouldered. But apart from that…
His thick black hair fell to his chin in blunt sheets.
Someone had chopped it off with the same carelessness they’d used to fabricate the rug and furniture, but the rough edges only made him look wilder and set off the line of his jaw.
His neck was as corded as it had been under my tongue (and marked with red bite-marks where I’d drawn blood, ha).
And the muscles of his arms and chest showed far too clearly through the thin, clinging fabric of his black silk shirt.
Muscles that could throw me around like I weighed no more than a feather.
Not that it mattered, but he was extremely handsome.
I scowled. I didn’t have time for thoughts like this. This godling wanted to eat me.
I’d let him, some traitorous part of me whispered slyly. Depending on what part he wanted to eat.
Enough of that, I snarled at myself. I resettled my grip on the spear.
The Prince scowled, too. Then his eyes fell on the berry mush in the carpet. “What is that?”
“I’m not eating your evil food,” I spat.
“Hmph. I could force it down your throat.”
“I’d like to see you try!”
“Your Lordship,” whispered the bug-lady.
I jumped. She was sneaking in, hiding behind the Prince, her human face looking for all the world like she was scared shitless.
The spear started to rattle in my hands again.
I gulped and fixed my attention on her human face, as if that would help me block out the rest of her. “Look out. She has a weapon.”
“Yes, yes, she’s very resourceful,” the Prince said sarcastically. He clearly wasn’t fazed by my makeshift spear at all. “I’m sorry about all this, Elke. You may go.”
The bug-lady hesitated. “Your Lordship…”
“I’ll be fine,” The Prince said. He glanced away from me and toward the bug-lady. Elke. I was surprised to see real tenderness in his face. Dear gods. Was that his girlfriend? His bug girlfriend?
And if so, why was she acting so afraid of him? He was being nice to her.
Or… wait.
Was she scared of me?
Elke backed up, glancing anxiously between me and the Prince. She kept watching us even as she started to close the door.
And kept closing the door.
Excruciatingly slowly.
The Prince rolled his eyes. “It’s fine, Elke.”
Elke sighed and shut the door the rest of the way, but I would have bet anything that she was waiting outside, prepared to barge back in at the first sign of trouble for her precious Prince.
But in the meantime, it was just me and him.
I swung my spear at his chest.
“Ooh, I’m terrified,” scoffed the Prince. “Why’d you ruin the rug? And — Monarch alive, woman, did you smash up my chair? Do you break everything you touch?”
“How about you let me out before I break something else?”
“I’ll break you if you’re not careful. Put that down before someone gets hurt. You scared the shit out of my maidservant.”
The bug-lady. “She’s not your girlfriend?”
He choked. “Elke? Monarch’s balls, no.”
It was so odd to hear my own language issuing from this person’s mouth.
(Godling. I had to remind myself that he wasn’t a person, he was a godling.) It had been even odder to hear it coming from Elke.
Both of them had a strange, guttural accent, but they unmistakably spoke my tongue.
I found myself running my tongue over my teeth, trying to shape the sounds the way he did. Ell-kuh.
“Elke had it coming,” I retorted. “She scared me.” I kept my grip on the spear.