Chapter 9 You Have a Deal #2
We were in the biggest chamber I’d seen so far.
It was bigger even than the throne room and the lake chamber, although the ceiling was not so high.
There were no candles, and the bioluminescent fungus was sparse.
But we had to be relatively close to the surface, because the ceiling was thinner here, almost webbed-looking, and faint white sunlight — which meant it was daytime; how long had I been underground?
My stomach grumbled furiously at the sudden thought of how long I’d gone without food, and Hades raised his eyebrows but said nothing — the sunlight shot through the webbed ceiling like needles.
Oh, how I missed the sky.
Under the light, an enormous, almost flat hollow was set into the ground at our feet. The hollow had to be twice as large as my village.
I knew at once what it was. I’d spent too long poring over old engineering textbooks and my own schematics not to know.
It was a reservoir.
And it was empty.
“The drought,” I breathed. “Of course. You said all those godlings, they’re dying of thirst.” Somehow it had never occurred to me that the underworld might be impacted by the drought.
After all, the land across the border appeared to operate according to a completely different ecosystem.
The sun moved differently, the grass grew year-round, the dew always sat on the blades…
But it was true, I realized, that in all the time I had been going to the land above the underworld, it had not rained. Not once.
“Yes,” Hades said. “I have heard that it often rains at different times on our side of the border than on the Lümerlund side” — and I thought of old stories from the farmhands’ books, tales of storm-clouds on the underworld side while the sky over human heads was blue as bluebells, and the rain over the underworld struck the invisible barrier between worlds as though it were striking glass — “but it is supposed to rain here, you know. The rain trickles through the earth above our heads” — he pointed — “and water also seeps up from underneath. Usually, anyway. It collects here, in the reservoir. We use it as drinking water and bathing water, and we irrigate our fields with it.”
“Fields?”
“Mushroom fields.”
Gods, I would love to see that. I caught myself. No, I didn’t want to see any stupid mushroom fields, I wanted to go home.
Still, I was fascinated. “The ceiling,” I said. The spiderweb fissures shot through with sunlight were beautiful, but… “It’s not supposed to be that cracked, is it?”
“Correct.”
“It’s dried out.”
Hades didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to.
“How long has it been since it rained?”
“Eleven months and twenty-six days.”
Five days short of a year. That was how long it had been in Limer, too.
And that was how long it had been since we’d expected an abduction, and it hadn’t come.
I said, “So you think the drought is because you haven’t kidnapped anybody? And that’s why you took me?”
Hades stayed silent.
I felt like I should be afraid, but my brain was working too hard.
This was exactly how I’d felt when I had drafted the plans for the reservoir in Limer: I had been confronted with a problem, and my brain had sunk its teeth into it like a weasel.
It wouldn’t let go until I had solved it.
“That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “That might explain the drought on this side of the border, but not the one on my side.”
“That’s what the Vizeking said,” Hades admitted. But he was unshakeable. “But the timing lines up exactly. Eleven months and twenty-six days. It can’t be a coincidence.”
I still felt like there was a piece missing.
I knew I wouldn’t be able to stop chewing on it until I’d figured it out.
But when it came to the timing… he was right.
“Congratulations, then. You’ve kidnapped me and it’ll rain now.
Woohoo. When it rains, then will you let me go?
” I knew he wouldn’t. There was still more he hadn’t told me.
“Oh, no,” he said, matching my tone. “No, no, no. No, you have to be sacrificed first. You see, the Lake” — and I could tell, somehow, that in his mind he capitalized it — “provides a direct connection to our Monarch. He lives atop the Primordial Mountain with His human wife, our Mother.”
“I’m sorry, what? Elke told me the Monarch was the god Chaos. You’re telling me the god Chaos lives on the mountain in the sea?”
“Don’t say His name!” Hades hissed wildly. Then he paused, realizing what I’d just said. “You didn’t know that?”
“You mean, I didn’t know I’ve been living a couple miles from Chaos, the god of entropy and madness? No, and I don’t believe it now. But carry on.”
Hades was getting irritated. “Why do you think the world is so distorted here? The grass that grows year-ground? The sun in a different place? The moving tunnels? The blood-colored ocean?”
“It’s not distorted to you. This is your home.
” And mine, too, in a way. It had never occurred to me that the sea might be a different color elsewhere until Calix wrote about it from Corcagia.
“I never thought about it. I just thought you were all freaks. How do you know Chaos lives on the mountain? Do you, like… visit?”
“No!” Hades said, scandalized. “No. No. His form is not for us to see. And His name is not for us to say, so stop saying it. May His name be silence on our lips. But He’s up there, all right. He is connected to us through the Lake, as I said; or perhaps it is that we are connected to Him.”
I was skeptical. But I let Hades keep going. He was finally explaining shit to me, after all.
Hades took a deep breath. “At the Lake. Do you recall the cocoons?”
The enormous sacs, rotating slowly and silently over the mirror-surface, limned by the blue light. “Yes.”
“Those are the sacrifices,” Hades said.
“The… what?”
“The tributes.”
My ribcage began to hollow out. “You’re going to put me in a cocoon? Why?”
“A thousand years ago, the Monarch took a human wife. Inexplicable, but there you have it. And ever since then, He’s had a taste for human women.
So every twenty-five years, we feed Him one.
We drown her in the Lake, and her soul is sent up to the Mountain through the waterfall, and the Monarch eats it.
Those women’s bodies are what you saw in the cocoons. ”
A yawning pit of dread in my stomach.
“That’s it. That is why I took you. To drown you in the Lake and bring water to my people. But I need you to do something else first.”
“As if I would do anything for you!”
“Here is the problem,” Hades went on stolidly.
“I do not trust the Monarch. Don’t tell anyone I said that; it’s blasphemy.
But I believe the Monarch has already betrayed us once.
Let us suppose that He did cause the drought as punishment for our missing tribute.
If that’s the case, don’t you think He has treated us very severely for what is really, in the grand scheme of a thousand years, a very slight delay? ”
“If you think I’m going to agree with a single thing you say, you’ve got another think coming.
” My mind was clawing like a rat in a cage.
Drowned in the Lake. My soul fed to Chaos himself.
Would it hurt? Would I feel his tongue on my flesh?
I imagined sharp black teeth, my blood on them, the fibers of my muscle rending.
My body rotating in a silk cocoon in the high darkness. Oh, no, no, no, no.
“My people have been dying. I do not trust the Monarch not to punish us again. I want to find a way to fill our reservoir without relying on rain, and I think you can design a system to access the runoff from the Primordial Mountain. That is why I brought you here.”