Chapter 13 The Second Day
The Second Day
Back in the bedchamber, Hades left me with my rough hand-drawn map and an uneven, poorly notched strip of glass, which was what served for a ruler in this godsforsaken place. He went to marshal his team of workers. The next day, we would begin construction.
I had now been in the underworld for, I thought, perhaps just under half a day.
That left two and a half days remaining.
Sixty more hours without food.
When Hades left, I doubled over against the stomach cramps.
Mom has been dying for months, I chided myself. You can manage two and a half more days.
I gridded some parchment as best I could and tried, around the hunger, to calculate how to proceed with constructing a system that would flow between the mountain runoff and the reservoir.
I decided we would start at the reservoir and dig a shaft straight toward the mountain, as the crow flew.
Hopefully the shaft would stay static, since it was being constructed by the godlings and not by the Monarch.
The shaft would open out the cliffside at the closest point to the runoff-waterfall.
From there, we’d build a half-pipe and stabilize it with suspension ropes that we would hook to a higher point up the cliff.
We’d build the half-pipe out far enough that it intersected with the waterfall.
It would carry water all the way down to the reservoir.
Easy. Simple. Way more straightforward than what I had designed for Calix.
Calix.
My flask of water and my edenica herbs were still sitting in my basket in the corner, surrounded by the remains of the broken chair. Hades had dropped them there this morning after confiscating them from Elke.
I’d have to come and get you.
I wondered if Calix had meant it. If he’d figured out what had happened to me. If he would make it here before I starved. Or before I got fed to a jealous god for failing to build this fucking pipeline.
I was so hungry. Forget it. I knocked back the flask of water. It wet the inside of my mouth and did nothing else. It was so tantalizing. I thought about eating the edenica herbs, but I knew they wouldn’t fill my belly and their painkilling property would just fuck me up.
It had to be nighttime again, I thought. How many meals had I missed?
Did godlings sleep at nighttime?
Well, I did. And if I wasn’t going to get to eat, then I needed to build up my energy for tomorrow.
I lay down on the bed and squeezed my eyes shut.
Obviously, I did not fall asleep. My mind whirred crazily with plans for the pipeline. Thoughts of Calix. Thoughts of Hades. Terror of the god on the mountain. The glassy Lake, the softly rotating cocoons. Hunger: mine, the god’s.
The door creaked open.
I sat up, expecting Elke. But it was Hades.
“What do you want?” I demanded. “Are we getting started with the building already? Humans need to sleep, you know.”
He didn’t answer. He entered without even looking at me. He lay down on the rug, facing away from me, toward the low-burning fireplace.
I curled my knees into my chest uncertainly. He’d already made it clear he wasn’t going to touch me, so I didn’t feel endangered, but what fresh weirdness was he up to now? “Uh, can I help you?”
“No,” he said, muffled. “Go to sleep. You’ve got to boss around a thousand construction workers tomorrow.”
“A thousand!”
“Something like that.”
I hoped he was exaggerating. Or maybe not. We’d need all the help we could get. “Okay. But in the meantime, what are you doing?”
“I’m going to sleep.”
“On the floor?”
He rolled over. “You’re in the bed. Unless you want to share.”
Heat flared on my cheeks. “Don’t you have your own room?”
“This is my room.” He rolled toward the fireplace again.
This was his bedroom? Why was I here, then? Didn’t they have a holding cell for tributes, or something? “Why did you put the kidnapped tribute in your bedroom?” Unless the Vizeking was right after all about what Hades wanted from me. My mouth dried up.
Hades must have sensed my discomfort. He said, muffled and tired, “Not this again. Do I look like I’m trying to fuck you? I’m all the way over here. Go to sleep, Persephone.”
Despite myself, I believed him. I was even a little embarrassed for having doubted him for a moment. But something still didn’t make sense. This couldn’t be the Prince’s bedroom. It was so small, and it was in the middle of nowhere.
I sat up and found my makeshift map. If the library was here, and the graveyard was here, then…
“We’re so far from the throne room. Why is your bedchamber so far away from the rest of the palace?
Or are palaces in the underworld just laid out differently?
” I wasn’t even sure the word palace was the right word to describe what I was talking about.
Everything in the underworld blurred together, interconnected by the latticework of catacombs.
But there was clearly a demarcation between the area I thought of as the palace, which contained the throne room and the library, and the other main area, with the graveyard and the reservoir and the bank.
The catacombs around the throne room were wider, smoother, less populated, and more heavily jeweled than the ones in the rest of the underworld.
If my map was correct, then technically I supposed this bedchamber was in the palace area, but it was certainly on the outskirts.
Hades said, “It’s not laid out differently.”
“You kidnap a woman every quarter-century and you don’t even have a proper place to put her?”
“I put you right here. You’re fine. Stop complaining.”
I thought of him saying, earlier, that everyone hated him. Thought of his hard, handsome human body, so different from the bodies of the rest of the spider-people. I thought of him saying, No one has seen the King for six years.
His father had relegated his son to the far corner of the palace because he didn’t love him. And no one had ever done anything about it.
That made me so sad.
But I knew Hades wouldn’t want to talk about it. I lay down, staring at his fire-limned hair. When he didn’t move, I rolled onto my back to face the ceiling. I closed my eyes.
The fire died down.
I thought of Hades. His father. My mother. How lucky I was to have her. How terrible a person I was, to have ever wanted to get away from her and out of Limer.
I could have laughed at myself. Just look at me now.
I woke up sick with dread.
Today was the second day of my kidnapping.
The day I marshaled a society born of literal chaos to build a system that I wasn’t even sure could work.
Hades was still lying on the ground, curled in the fetal position.
I could just make out his outline in the light of the half-dead coals.
He was facing me; he must have rolled over in his sleep.
His long black hair was all stuck up on one side, like a chicken’s feathers.
I suppressed a snicker. His face was uncreased and relaxed in a way that it never was awake; it made him look handsomer than ever.
His pulse beat in his neck. It was kind of a marvel, really, that he even had a pulse.
I wondered if the other godlings, the more spiderlike ones, had pulses, too. If they had human blood. If human veins ran through the bodies of creatures like Elke and the Vizeking.
I wondered what the King looked like. If there was even one way in which Hades took after his father.
Someone knocked timidly on the bedroom door.
Hades bolted awake. “Come in,” he said crisply, sounding for all the world like he’d been up for hours.
Elke came creeping in with a cooked whole fish on a tray, along with a little bowl of some rice-like, spherical grain.
My stomach rumbled.
But Elke set the tray in front of Hades, not me. She glanced at me guiltily.
“Ignore her,” Hades said to Elke. He was already chewing on the rice. “She doesn’t have to eat if she doesn’t want to.”
“I don’t want to.”
“There you go. Everyone’s in agreement. Elke, are the workers gathered?”
“Some of them,” Elke said unconvincingly.
Hades scowled.
Panic spiked my heart. “Don’t tell me they’re not ready,” I said, a little wildly. “We don’t have time to waste. I’m getting drowned in two days!”
“They will be there. I’ll make sure of it. Get dressed.”
“I am dressed.”
Hades put down his bowl of rice and regarded me, tangled in the black silk sheets in my shitty rag-dress. His expression was distinctly unimpressed. “Those are the same clothes you wore yesterday.”
“It’s not as if anyone gave me pajamas.”
His scowl deepened. There was a slight upward tilt, though, at the outer corners of his eyebrows. Was I making it up, or did he look… embarrassed?
“Get the lady some clothes,” he ordered Elke. “And give her a bath.”
Both Elke and I gasped. “Your Lordship,” Elke protested, “the water —”
“Give the woman a bath,” Hades repeated. “She needs it.” And then, before I could even find anything to throw at him, he said, “These fucking people!” and swept off, presumably to treat someone else like shit for a change.
“Don’t worry,” I said to Elke, who was somehow managing to wring her nonexistent hands. “I’m not taking a bath in a drought. These tone-deaf royals, am I right?”
“No, His Lordship is not usually like that. He’s typically very careful about that sort of thing. Mütte Persephone —”
“What’d you call me?”
“…Persephone?” Elke squeaked.
“No, no, that other word. Mootah?”
“Mütte,” Elke said. “Oh, do not tell His Lordship I called you that. It was an accident.”
“What’s it mean?” I demanded.
“It’s not an insult,” Elke squeaked. “Please. I’ll draw you a bath.”
“Elke!”
“No, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”
She was about to leave. To waste tons of water on a bath for me. “No, wait, wait, wait. Fine. I won’t tell. But, Elke, don’t draw me a bath. I’ll feel bad.”
“His Lordship…”
“Fuck His Lordship,” I said. Elke gasped. “Just bring me, I don’t know, a rag or something so I can wipe my face. Please,” I added.