Chapter 9 You Have a Deal
You Have a Deal
We ran through the narrow winding tunnels. I was still barefoot from walking on the grass high above. (Oh, how I missed the sun!) Hades’s boots, plus his sheer height, meant that he moved at twice my usual speed. The uneven rock floor pounded like a fist at my feet. But I was determined to keep up.
As we moved farther and farther away from the bedchamber, the population of unmoving godlings in the middle of the road increased.
Soon, it was hard to walk. Crowded together like this in the darkness, they looked like a jumble of human and spider parts, like someone had taken a bunch of life-sized dolls and a bunch of giant spiders and chopped them up and thrown them together at random.
At first I flinched every time I saw a godling, but although the black eyes of the conscious ones tracked me, they all caught sight of Hades and left me alone. I found myself pressing closer to him.
And after a while, I realized that the godlings weren’t just respecting Hades; they lit up at the sight of him. They crawled forward to bow at his feet. When that happened, I noticed that Hades always greeted them by name, even as we rushed by: “Hello, Rolfrik,” or “Back soon, Idah.”
There had to be hundreds of them. How could he keep track?
Maybe it was made easier by the fact that most of them didn’t move at all. They lay in the middle of the road like stuffed pillowcases. The spider-legged ones lay on their backs, their legs curled in the air. The sight made goosebumps break out on my flesh.
But they were also… kind of pathetic.
They made me feel the way that talking to Hades sometimes made me feel: a weird combination of scared and sympathetic. I didn’t like it. Eventually I mustered up the courage to ask him, “Are they dead?”
“Not yet,” he said grimly. “But they are dying.”
“Of what?”
“Thirst.”
Thirst. “You don’t mean like my mother?”
“Exactly like your mother,” he admitted. Then he jerked me around a corner, shocking me. I hadn’t exactly been paying the most attention to the road, distracted as I was by all the godlings and this revelation, but I was pretty sure that corner hadn’t been there a second ago.
Wait. I thought hard for a second. We’d turned left when we’d exited the bedroom that Hades had imprisoned me in. That meant we were traveling the same tunnels we’d traveled when we’d gone to the throne room.
Except… the twists and turns were in different places.
The tunnels had moved. They were like snakes: enormous, slow-moving snakes. “What is this place?” I gasped out. “What’s going on?”
Hades slowed, then stopped entirely. I tripped over myself, resentfully grateful at the opportunity to rest my aching feet.
Then I felt the hum of something through the soles of my feet.
I stood silent and still.
What was that sensation? It was, I thought, the vibrations of the shifting tunnels. They were moving, like an animal’s throat. And the black, shadowy skittering of dark godlings far away. The slow, slow growth of the shining fungus. The rich glittering of the jewels on the walls.
My skin crawled.
And yet… a part of me was awed, too.
There was nothing like this in Limer. Nothing, I was sure, in all the Lümerlund.
It was a mercy and a gift, yes, that my world did not suffer from this black, swallowing darkness. It was a mercy that we had the sun. But in exchange, we lacked this subtle, sharp, glittering beauty.
I looked up into Hades’s face and found him staring at me.
My face went hot. “What?”
His face reddened, too. He cleared his throat and averted his gaze quickly. “I just… didn’t think you would notice.”
“You didn’t think I would notice that the roads move?”
“Elke says the human women usually don’t.”
For some reason, this embarrassed me, too. He was acting like I was special. “Well, they’re probably distracted by all the kidnapping! No, really. The roads move? Please, this is insane.”
He shrugged. “It’s the Gestorbunlund.”
The Gestorbunlund. Elke had used that word. She had translated: The land of catacombs. I had responded, We say the chaosgotten are descended from Chaos himself.
That was it. Not only were the people here descended from Chaos, this whole place was.
That was why the tunnels were moving. The very terrain rejected the physical notions of ownership, of space. It refused to be controlled.
Well, two could play at that game.
I wasn’t going to be controlled, either.
I swallowed. I straightened my shoulders. I grounded my aching feet into the earth and looked at Hades expectantly.
Hades raised his eyebrows but took the hint.
He pulled on my wrist — he had never let it go, not even when he’d been staring at me; his skin had pressed into my skin this whole time — and he drew me into a tight, flat space honeycombed like a beehive.
Each honeycomb pocket had an enormous spiderweb stretched over it, like a curtain or a pane of glass.
No spiderweb had the same pattern as any other; they were like snowflakes seen under a magnifying glass.
They were beautiful. But I didn’t have wherewithal to admire them too much, because the floor was littered with human-sized spider husks.
I screeched and leapt back, shuddering all over. “What the fuck!”
“You said you wanted to keep going,” Hades said, smugly, but there was a black flatness to him. “And have some respect for the dead.”
“The…”
I looked up at the honeycombs. The catacombs. Oh, no. The spider husks rustled against my bare calves. I suppressed the urge to shiver again. “Why doesn’t someone move the husks?”
“They’re part of the corpses,” Hades said.
“When someone dies, the bulk of their corpse — what you would call the body — is moved into a recess, which is your equivalent of a mausoleum, I suppose. One recess per family. But their shed husks stay down here, on the floor of the graveyard. Eventually, the husks disintegrate and are absorbed back into the earth. In this way, after death, we become one with our Monarch.”
Dear gods. I imagined my own self dying. Lying on the ground like those godlings in the tunnels, my flesh sloughing off in layers.
Then again…
In a way, this wasn’t so different from what my mom was doing, was it?
Shriveling inside her own skin, losing bits of herself every time she coughed.
Maybe the godlings were onto something. Maybe it was better for the pieces you lost to come from the outside rather than the inside.
Someday, I would bury my mother next to my father, and their bodies would join again in the soil, becoming one with each other and the earth. This was like that, but bigger.
I swallowed and nodded. “Okay.”
“Okay? That’s all you have to say?”
“It’s none of my business what you do with your dead. It’s… kind of nice, actually.”
“Nice,” he repeated. He was staring at me again. His lips were parted like they’d been in the bedroom. “You like this.”
I felt a twinge of satisfaction. “I suppose you thought I’d be scandalized. Did you want to make me scream?”
“Trust me. If I wanted to make you scream, I would do something else.” He pointed straight ahead, into the darkness on the other side of the graveyard. “No. I only brought you here because we’re going that way.”
That way. Through the husks.
I imagined their paperyness scraping my legs. Rasping. “You want me to… walk through corpses?”
“You said you weren’t scandalized,” Hades replied, a little smugly.
He released my wrist, pushed past me and walked through.
Unbothered. Apparently this was a normal-ass thing to do in the underworld.
When he reached the other side, he turned and leaned against the wall.
He tipped his head back and crossed his arms, fixing his blue gaze on my face.
It occurred to me that I could run. He had finally let me go.
But I knew he’d catch me. He was faster, and he had shoes on. And then I’d be in for it.
Besides, I wasn’t about to let him win.
I clenched my fists and proceeded, as upright and slow and dignified as I could, through the thigh-high sea of spider-husks.
They brushed the soles of my feet, the insides of my thighs.
They felt like paper, like discarded cat-claws, like nails on a chalkboard.
My teeth were on edge, but I would not give Hades the satisfaction of watching me shudder, nor would I disrespect the corpses that way. It was not their fault.
When I reached the far end and found the entrance to yet another tunnel, I turned and faced Hades.
He was, of course, still staring at me. This time, he wasn’t even embarrassed at being caught.
“You don’t need to keep looking at me like I have two heads,” I said. “All I did was walk. Where next? I suppose we’re walking over lava this time? Or thorns?”
He worked his jaw a moment. He closed his eyes. When he opened them, he pointed. “That way.”
“You’re not going to grab my arm and drag me along like a piece of rope?”
“Not unless you want me to,” he said hotly.
Then he sighed. “No, I’m sorry. You’re right, I’ve been dragging you around like a dog on a leash.
It didn’t occur to me that you’d be able to navigate around here.
I can lead you if you’d like, but if you prefer to walk yourself, you can. Just tell me what you want.”
“I don’t know where we’re going.”
“I’ll tell you.”
Why did I feel like we were having a conversation about something else?
The tunnels were cold. To my annoyance, I missed the warmth of his hand on my arm. But I wasn’t about to get jerked around when I could be in charge. “Okay.”
I walked into the tunnel. He walked behind me.
I was vividly aware of his heat at my back, his blue gaze prickling on the nape of my neck.
But his voice was normal when he told me, “Left here,” and, “Keep going straight.” Only once did he touch me, when I tripped and he caught me, almost chivalrously, by the elbow. I shook him off.
Even though I didn’t know where we were going, I knew immediately when we’d gotten there.