Chapter 18 Pooling and Puddling
Pooling and Puddling
After that, there seemed no point in kissing. There seemed no point to anything.
Hades stood. He would not meet my eyes. He helped me stand up. He knelt at my feet and straightened out my skirt.
Then there was nothing left to do but return underground. Besides, we were wasting time.
He took my hand — unable to run the risk that I’d run away, even though I knew I wouldn’t — and we walked into the mouth of the underworld together, side-by-side.
I cast one final look back at the border. At the rocky horizon beyond which my mother lived.
And I noticed one more thing.
The basket of edenica herbs that Hades had put at the border was gone.
When we had reached the reservoir, he said, “You know, no human woman has ever walked into the depths of the underworld of her own free will like that.”
“You call this free will?”
“I’m just saying. I thought I would have to carry you again.”
“Try to carry me anywhere and I’ll rip your teeth out.”
The sunlit grass far above our heads, his breath in my mouth, had been forgotten.
We both stalked toward the flurry of activity at the far end of the reservoir, where the workers were doing their best to lay the pipe.
With a tight ball of dread in my stomach, I climbed into the pipe-shaft to see how it was going.
And the answer was… better than expected.
It was obvious that at first, the chaosgotten had laid the pipe in the wrong direction, starting from the mouth at the reservoir, so that it had gotten in the way as they tried to work backwards.
But blessedly, someone had come to their senses and they’d started over again from the rear end, closest to the waterfall.
The seams in the pipe did not line up properly and some water would be lost between the cracks, but that could be fixed later.
(Someone would have to figure out how to block the water flow while they did the repairs, though.
Maybe they could use a gate system? No, what was I saying!
I shook my head at myself, irritated. It wasn’t my job to worry about such things.
I was going to be dead. Although… I did have some good ideas.
Maybe I could mock up some diagrams before I was sacrificed.
Just for their reference. And to make sure water got to my village.)
I kept climbing up the shaft. The chaosgotten working in the pipe nodded to me as I passed. A few of them even bowed. I emerged out the back, where the shaft opened to the cliffside.
The fierce white waterfall sprayed into my face.
Last time I’d been here, Hades had swung me around and kissed me. Moments before telling the Vizeking that he would drown me with his own hands.
But this time, I was alone, except for the dozens of chaosgotten scuttling up and down the vertical cliff-face as they built the suspended half-pipe out to the waterfall.
Despite myself, I couldn’t help but be impressed.
This was the kind of work that godlings, with their spider-legs, were made for.
It would go a lot faster if they would spin webs. But I remembered what Hades had said about that sort of thing being private.
“You’re doing great!” I called out. I wasn’t sure they could hear me over the pounding waterfall, but one of them beamed at me around his spider-fangs. I sat down in the pipe, my feet dangling over the edge, and watched them work.
Just yesterday, I had looked at Mackr’s arachnid eyes and fangs and felt only horror.
Now, I watched the chaosgotten and thought what a shame it was that chaosgotten and humans had never managed to work together before.
The chaosgotten had powers we didn’t have: long lives, an incredible faculty of movement.
And we had things they lacked, too: robust and expansive bodies of knowledge. A vast territory. Common sense.
I thought now that I had been onto more than I knew when I’d asked Calix to negotiate with the chaosgotten.
If only he had done it. Perhaps we could have built a reservoir system that would have benefitted both peoples, and I wouldn’t have had to get sacrificed.
Perhaps the partnership could have extended decades into the future. Centuries.
Or perhaps I was kidding myself because I didn’t want to die.
Either way, it was over. It was obvious that, against all odds, this pipeline would be hooked together within the day. I had done the impossible.
Time for my just reward.
I creaked to my feet. Balanced a moment at the edge of the cliff.
It occurred to me for the first time that I could jump.
I would still die. But I would die either way. And this way, I would have a clean death. No dark god would eat my soul.
The question was, if I denied him his sacrifice, would Hades still pipe water to Limer?
Until his conversation with the Vizeking, I would have said yes. Now, I was not so sure.
It was while I was teetering there, on the edge, that someone bellowed, “LOOK OUT! MüTTE!”
I didn’t even have time to look up before a rock-solid torrent of water smashed into me.
It knocked me into the pipe. It slammed me against the pipe walls.
It swept up chaosgotten on the way, all of us crashing into each other like marbles, the spiderlike chaosgotten’s strange bristly skin snatching pieces of my flesh and my dress.
I was hurled like a dead rat into the reservoir; the water bashed down on me and I crawled to the reservoir edge and gasped for breath.
Hades was already on me, pushing his people away, pressing his hands against my breastbone as if to push water out of my lungs.
I slapped at him feebly. When I had crawled to dry land, soaking and muddy, the neckline of my strapless dress practically falling off me from the weight of the wet fabric, I turned around.
Water gushed into the reservoir.
I would have expected cheering. But to my surprise, except for the sputtering of the chaosgotten who’d been caught, like me, in the flood, everybody was silent. Stunned.
The first reaction came from Hades. “Monarch alive,” he whispered. “They did it. You did it.”
The chaosgotten had accessed the runoff from the Primordial Mountain. They had built something that really worked.
And they had done it ahead of a grueling, impossible three-day schedule.
I was about to die. So I was surprised to discover a new kind of wide warmth kindling in my chest. It was pride.
It was what I’d felt when the pipe-shaft had broken through the cliff earlier, but this time, the feeling wasn’t for me — it was for the chaosgotten.
For these disgusting, evil creatures I’d been taught to hate my entire life, whose very visages made my skin crawl.
But even I, a scrawny little human who’d been kidnapped by their leader, had to admit they’d really pulled something off.
Hades, their Prince, was just gawking at the water. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought there were tears in his eyes.
“Who knew you were such a big softie,” I murmured at him, to stop the tears from pricking at my own eyes. Tears of pride for the work we’d done. Tears of terror for what was going to happen to me next.
Hades dashed a hand across his eyes. “I’m not. I’m extremely tough and frightening.”
“Then stop embarrassing yourself. You should congratulate your people. They just worked their asses off for you.”
That tore Hades’s attention from the water. He stared down at me. My soaking dress, my ruined hair. He wore the expression he had worn when I had stalked through his spider-husk graveyard. When I had turned my back on the sun and walked into his underworld of my own free will.
Then he wrenched his attention back to the crowd of people. He called out, “The goddess says you have done well.”
Everyone cheered.
My skin prickled. “Stop calling me that.”
“I won’t. It’s true. It’s truer now than ever before.”
“I’m not a goddess. I’m a sacrifice.”
“You are a sacrifice, it’s true. But as we know from our Monarch’s beloved wife, it is possible to be a goddess and a sacrifice both.”
The chaosgotten had all clambered out of the reservoir.
The water poured, clear and cold, into the pit.
It would be a long, long time until the pit was full, but already it was pooling and puddling.
My throat ached just looking at it. After so long without enough water, I was afraid that drinking as much as I wanted to would make me sick.
Apparently I wasn’t the only one who thought so. The chaosgotten were clustered around the lip of the reservoir, jostling each other, but none of them were drinking.
Then Hades said, “They’re waiting for you.”
I opened my mouth to tell Hades he was being stupid. He could have the first drink. This whole thing had been his idea. (No, it hadn’t. It had been my idea.) But he was right. The chaosgotten were all watching me.
Elke emerged from the crowd. She came toward me with a gentle, blissful look on her face. She took my hand in her spider-leg. Silently, she drew me to the water.
Could I really drink it? Or would it only bind me to this place?
Then I thought, fuck it.
I cupped my hands under the vicious stream.
And felt as everyone around me froze.
The strangeness of it made me freeze, too. Why was everyone acting so weird? Was I not supposed to drink after all? Had I been tricked?
But before I could turn around, Hades’s hands fastened around my dress and jerked me back.
I startled and tried to fight him off, but he had already thrust me behind him.
Elke crowded in on one side of me. A mostly humanoid chaosgotter I’d never seen pressed in on the other. Like they were trapping me.
Or.
Or protecting me.
I realized what was happening.
I had already known that I was to be sacrificed in the Lake, but still, my breath caught with fear.
Because through the sliver between Hades’s arm and his torso, I saw the Vizeking approaching. His ruby eyes, his scarlet robes.
And beside him was someone new.
Someone twice Hades’s height and four times as broad. Someone with black skin that seethed and coiled on his body like smoke. Someone with fangs. Someone with blue human eyes — but eight of them. Someone with human arms and legs — but eight of them, too, sprung forth out of an armored thorax.
Someone with a human head of thick, sleek black hair, pulled into a bun at the nape of his neck. Someone who, atop that head, wore an onyx crown.
This was the King of the Primordium. High Lord of the Underworld. He of the bloodline of the Monarch of the Void.
This was Hades’s father.