Chapter 11 The Catacombs
The Catacombs
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll do it. I’ll fill your reservoir.”
Hades’s face lit up. Suddenly he was almost young-looking. He shook his hair out of his face. “Really?”
“Calm down. Don’t embarrass yourself. Yeah.
” I craned my neck up at the moon-pierced ceiling.
Now that I was committed, I could feel the clock ticking.
“Is that the direction of the waterfall from the mountain? It can’t be, or you’d just dig straight up.
Even you people could figure out how to do that. ”
“Ha, ha. No, it’s not. Come on, I’ll show you.”
And Hades took me through the underworld.
First we went through the fabled mushroom fields. There was no light here, not even bioluminescence, and Hades had to scrounge up a lantern to show them to me. The glittering ceiling and walls and floor rippled with latticework, some of it natural, some of it hand-carved, but…
“There are no mushrooms,” I said, disappointed.
“They can’t grow without water,” Hades replied. He sounded sad.
But also resolved. He would do anything to save his people.
Just like I would do anything to save my mother.
I didn’t like recognizing myself in him. I said we should keep moving.
Next, he brought me to the library: a square chamber filled with piles of books and scrolls and literal scraps of paper. I picked up one of the scrolls; the ink was so faded, it was unreadable. Nothing was alphabetized. Nothing was even shelved. “How do you find anything?”
“We don’t, mostly,” Hades admitted.
He showed me a bank, which was stocked with similar piles of coinage and jewels. I picked up a couple of the coins. They had been beaten out of metal by hand, their denominations scratched on them. “The currencies aren’t consistent.”
“That’s because new kings and treasurers often decide we should use a new monetary system.”
“Without turning over the old currency?”
“I suppose so. But you’ll be pleased to hear that the Vizeking has kept the same system for almost two hundred years now. I think. It doesn’t really matter anyway. The jewels are always good, and there are plenty of them.”
“But how does anyone know how much money they have? How do you keep financial records? Do you have a… budget?”
Hades literally laughed.
“How can you be laughing? This place is a mess!”
“At least it’s about to be a mess with a water source.”
I kept goggling as we left the bank, but there was nothing for it. Finally, he led me to the very deepest reaches of his world, through tunnels as tight and winding and crazy as anthills, and then he pulled me out to —
The surface?
No. It couldn’t be. We had traveled too far down. But the sun, the air —
We were standing at the mouth of a tunnel that opened at the bottom of the cliff, the tunnel running sideways, perpendicular to the sheer vertical cliff-face.
If I took another step, I’d plunge into the sea, which crashed into the base of the cliff in monstrous waves, spraying salt twenty feet up into my face and eyes.
I blinked. I sucked down breath after breath of the fresh open air.
The sea-foam was silver under the sun.
But I couldn’t see the sun itself. It was blocked by the triangle of the Primordial Mountain — huger here, more all-encompassing, than I had ever seen it from a distance. It was like a wall. Like the sky itself.
No wonder the godlings worshiped whatever they thought was up there. The mountain itself looked like it could eat you.
I looked away from the mountain and craned my neck behind me and upward, squinting up the cliff face. There was no way I could climb it. It was as flat and ungrippable as sandpaper.
Sitting in the mouths of other tunnels that dotted the cliff-face were more godlings.
They were casting fishing lines into the sea.
As I watched, one of the godlings’ lines went taut.
He, or she, began to reel, and a great blue fish the size of my body jerked up into the air.
I thought of Calix, of his stories of the marketplace in Corcagia, the giant fish for sale hanging by their mouths.
I breathed the open air. Gods, how I missed him. How I missed home.
“Look at the runoff,” Hades whispered.
I shifted my attention to the silver-white ribbon undulating down the Primordial Mountain. It widened and unfurled before crashing into the blood-colored sea.
There was a shelf of rock a little ways up the mountain, just to the side of the long, jutting overhang that would let you walk directly up to the mountain if you wanted to.
(Looking at that overhang now felt different than it had when I was blithely gathering edenica herbs.
Now I looked at it and thought, A god lives there.)
I said to Hades, “Are you sure it’s a good idea to take that water? If it really comes from Chaos?”
“You were going to take it.”
“Yeah, but that was before I knew about the literal god who’s supposedly up there who eats human flesh.”
“Not all humans,” Hades said. “Only girls.” I shot him a warning look.
He put his hands up. “Okay, okay, okay. The runoff… I don’t think it’s from Him, exactly.
It isn’t like the waterfall in the Lake, you know?
That’s a gift, a transaction, that tethers us to the Monarch. This is different. It’s just there.”
“Which is it?”
“Hm?”
“The waterfall in the Lake. Is it a gift or a transaction?”
“They’re the same thing,” Hades said. I raised my eyebrows.
But he wasn’t looking at me, or even at the Primordial Mountain.
He was gazing upward and behind us, at the fisher-godling.
The fisher had lost the blue fish. His line had snapped.
And he was coughing, now, into his human hand.
The same rough, bloody cough that lived in my mother.
Hades’s face, watching his subject suffer, was etched with lines of pain.
He said decisively, “The runoff from the Mountain is just water. It’s just melted ice. It’s not connected to the Monarch. We can take it.”
Not for the first time, I believed Hades was lying. Not to me, though. To himself.
I knew self-deception when I saw it. As if I hadn’t been doing the same thing while gathering edenica herbs for my mother, day after day after day, as she crept closer and closer to death.
I hoped to all the gods, Chaos included, that I wasn’t doing the same thing now.
I needed to draft a plan for the access system that would link the waterfall to the reservoir.
We went back to the library for charcoal and blank parchment.
The parchment was made of some kind of flaxlike lichen, silkier than the wood-pulp paper I was used to.
It had been unevenly pressed, so that it was too thick in some places and too thin in others.
Just like everything else in this godsforsaken place.
Then I asked for a map of the underworld.
Hades laughed.
“What’s so funny? How do you expect me to plan schematics for a pipeline if I don’t know where the pipes can go?”
“Just put them anywhere. No one will notice or care.”
“Do I detect a touch of bitterness in your tone, my Lord?”
“My Lord? Are we standing on ceremony now?”
“I’ll consider it if I get my map.”
“The bitterness, as you so politely call it, is because I would love to have a map for you, but I’m the only one here who feels that way. Just as, apparently, I’m the only one who wants to source water for the thirsting masses.”
“What’s the deal with that, anyway? Can’t the King do something?”
“No one has seen the King in six years,” Hades said shortly.
“What, like he doesn’t do public events? What if someone needs to petition him for something?”
“I do not mean he does not do public events. I mean no one has seen him in six years. Now. Let us consider. What will be the first step for the pipeline if you do not have a map?”
But I was still trying to wrap my head around the King thing. “Have you seen him?”
Hades closed his eyes. He took a deep breath through his nose. After a beat, he repeated, “No — one — has — seen — the — King — for — six — years.”
“But isn’t he your father?”
“For Monarch’s sake. Do you ever quit?”
“Trust me.” I tapped the shitty blank parchment. “You don’t want someone who quits working on this job.”
“No, I haven’t seen him. I don’t know what to tell you. Now please, please, focus on the Monarch-damned pipeline.”
“I can’t,” I insisted. “I need a map.”
“You can’t have one. The tunnels move.”
The tunnels. Of course. Damn this crazy place. I wracked my brain. The tunnels moved… but did that mean everything else moved, too? “Are the tunnels manmade? I mean, godling-made? Or are they natural formations?”
Hades seemed surprised by the question. “Neither, I don’t think.
Hold on.” He got up and started rummaging around in the piles of scrolls and books.
I leaned back with satisfaction and watched his blood pressure skyrocket as he hunted fruitlessly for whatever he was looking for.
“I know I have a copy of this back in my room… Aha!”
He came up with a book bound in what appeared to be a discarded spider-husk.
“Um,” I said. “Is that bound in spider-skin? Isn’t that the same as someone from my world binding a book in human flesh?”
“Probably. What’s the problem?” He was flipping through the book.
He lit up as he found the page he was looking for.
“Here we go. The tunnels aren’t natural or godling-made.
They, like the Lake, are a gift from the Monarch.
Or not a gift exactly, but.” He wrestled with his own tongue.
“I don’t know how to translate this word for you.
A boon? A bonus? An add-on, something extra.
“The gift is the Lake. That’s the thing that ties us to Him.
But the land around the Lake — the whole Gestorbunlund, the tunnels — was thrown in, I guess you would say, to make it possible for us to…
take advantage, of His bounty. He made the Lake, and then He made this home for us.
” Hades flipped the book so I could see it.