Chapter 11 The Catacombs #2
I gasped. “I’ve seen this book! I have this book!”
“What?”
“At home! From one of the farmhands. But my copy is different.” I seized the book from him and flipped through it.
As I turned the pages, though, I deflated a little.
My book at home was almost the same, but not quite.
Mine was printed on normal paper, for one thing, and it was written in Iernian — the language that Hades and Elke and everyone else here seemed to speak, but that clearly wasn’t their only tongue and certainly wasn’t the language of this book.
The book’s letters were blockier than I was used to and full of diacritics.
Also, whoever had written them had awful handwriting.
Most importantly, though, the illustrations in this book were slightly different than the illustrations in mine.
I landed on a watercolor painting of a razed forest surrounding a mountain. I frowned.
“What’s wrong?” Hades asked.
I wished I had my copy to compare. “This looks almost exactly like a drawing in my version. Except these” — I pointed to the thousand razed trees — “are living trees in mine. And the mountain is different in this one. Bigger. And shaped differently — more lumpy.” This mountain looked almost humanoid, in fact.
“And the mountain is moved over a little. In my version, the mountain is further over here, closer to the sun.” I pointed to the orange egg-yolk painting of the sun.
“I always liked that painting,” Hades remarked. “I like that it shows night and day at the same time.”
I scowled. I, too, had spent a long time staring at this painting in my book, and I did not like having this in common with the Prince of Darkness.
The egg-yolk sun was on the right-hand side of the mountain and the stars were on the left, and as a child, I had liked to map the constellations in the book to the real constellations my father had showed me before he died.
I frowned harder. “These constellations are wrong.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The stars in the painting are wrong,” I repeated, louder.
Hades sneered. “Maybe it’s just because we have a different sky than you have. In case you forgot.”
“No, that’s not it. These stars are real, but they’re wrong. This picture takes place at a different time than mine. These constellations are…” I thought. “I think this picture is exactly one year after mine. See?”
“No, I don’t see, because I haven’t seen your stupid book. This is my book. Give it back.”
“Okay, okay, don’t be such a baby. I don’t want to touch your gross spider-skin book anyway.
” I handed it over. Hades snatched at it petulantly, but when he had the painting in front of him, he frowned at it the way I had.
Eventually, begrudgingly, he suggested, “Maybe a copy of this book made its way out into the light-world a long time ago, and maybe you humans distorted it into something else.”
“‘A copy of this book’?” I repeated. “How many copies are there, exactly, that they can get so lost they end up in Limer?”
Hades was grumpily silent.
“Do you people have mass production?” I went on.
“You know we don’t.”
“Do you know what a ‘printing press’ is?”
“Shut up.”
“Maybe we wrote the story first and you people distorted it.”
Hades shook his head, hard and angry. “No. This is our oldest story. Our heritage. Our blood. You fucked it up somehow.”
“I didn’t do shit. I’m a cleaning lady from a minor village.”
“Don’t talk about yourself that way,” Hades said, suddenly fierce. “You’re a goddess.”
He’d been calling me goddess sarcastically since I got here. This was the first time he sounded like he meant it.
My throat closed up. No one had ever spoken to me like that. Ever. Not Calix, my dearest friend. Not even my mother. Not even my dead father.
And suddenly I was angry. Where did he get off throwing around words like goddess? He had no right to make me feel this way, itchy and short of breath, like I’d been caught in poison ivy. He had no right to make me long to watch him open his mouth and say those words again.
Hades bit his tongue. “Metaphorically,” he added. “Literally, of course, you’re just a weak, soft-bellied human.”
“Oh, fuck you!”
“Not even descended from the Monarch. Not even a half-god like the weakest of us.”
I could have killed him. And to think I’d just allowed him, a moment ago, to make me feel good.
“We call you worse than weak where I come from, you know. To us, you’re demons.
Monsters. You tear innocent people from their loved ones, from their entire worlds.
You imprison them. You kill them. You —”
“Yeah, yeah, we drink their blood and eat their organs,” Hades said sarcastically. “We crack their bodies open and hang up the bones to use as wind chimes. Trust me, soft-skinned Persephone. We do worse than that. But we’re still as worthy of survival as you are.”
“Agree to disagree,” I spat.
He ignored me. “So I’m going to make sure you have everything you need to fill that reservoir up. And that means that as far as my people are concerned, you are a goddess, when you’re with me.”
“Yeah? Well, first of all, in that case, I’m going to need you to stop calling me goddess. Second, stop being a dick. And third, I need a damn map.”
Hades huffed. He rubbed his forehead and put the strange book away. I tracked it with my eyes. I couldn’t get over it. Something about that duplicate illustration… it was just so strange.
Hades said once again, “We don’t have a map.”
I shook off the strange book. The tingling feeling in my esophagus when he called me goddess. I thought about this. Then I had an idea. I said, “You’re really going to do whatever I want?”
Hades said warily, “I’m not sure I like the sound of that.”
“Because if you don’t have a map, then you’re going to help me make one.”