Chapter 25 Rescue
Rescue
My hot blood turned to sludge.
I stopped cold. I wanted to back out of the room, but the Vizeking had already seen me. He was on the far side of the bed, the side with the bookshelf, flipping through one of Hades’s books. His wide, buglike body could hardly fit between the bed and the wall.
“Human girl?” he said, disbelievingly. “Who brought you back here? Not your little yellow friend.” I thought yellow friend meant Calix, although I couldn’t tell whether the Vizeking was referring to Calix’s hair or his constitution.
The Vizeking’s gaze flicked to my mother’s corpse, which I’d draped around my shoulders like a shawl. “Dear Monarch on high, what is that?”
“None of your business,” I said with as much hauteur as I could muster. Something was wrong. Hades had kept this room as neat as he could, considering what he had to work with. But now the bed was unmade, the carpet was askew, and Hades’s clothes and books were strewn about. “Where’s Elke?”
“Who?”
“The servant! Hades’s maidservant.”
The Vizeking obviously had no idea who I was talking about.
My blood simmered. These fucking aristocrats, never taking note of the slaving folks who made their cushy lives possible.
It was how I had always felt about the Stammerer parents — although, in fairness, not about Josie.
“I’m sure I don’t know,” said the Vizeking.
He closed the book he was holding. From here, I could see that it was the book Hades had showed me, the one I had a copy of back home, with the mountain and the trees. “You are… here to see a maidservant?”
“Yes,” I said stoutly.
The Vizeking considered. “And the human corpse? What’s that for?”
“It’s a present.”
“You have come… all the way back from the Lümerlund… after being rescued by your beloved” — who’d told him Calix was my beloved?
— “from the very jaws of the worst fate known to godlingkind, after successfully fleeing from Hell, a fate that none in centuries have managed to achieve… in order to… gift a human corpse… to a maidservant?”
“Yes,” I repeated.
The Vizeking thought about this for a while.
When he didn’t answer me, I added angrily, “Where’s Hades? This is his bedchamber. What are you doing with his book?”
Slowly, the Vizeking remarked, “I will give His Lordship credit for one thing: You are certainly more interesting than most of your predecessors. I am not quite sure what to do with you right now. I will leave you here while I figure it out. Excuse me.” He swept past me.
I realized too late what he was doing. My heart dropped the instant before the metal door slammed shut. I let my mother fall on the carpet and hurled myself at the door, pounding my fists against it. “Vizeking! No, wait! You’ve got to let me out! There’s going to be an invasion!”
Through the metal, I could just barely hear him laugh.
I wrestled with the door, but it was no use.
I turned slowly, my breath panicking in my lungs. Days after my kidnapping, I was trapped in here again. This time with my mother’s dead body, and Hades and Elke missing, and a brutal invasion on the way.
And I didn’t know what, but I had the sense that since I had left, something in the underworld had gone horribly wrong.
I banged on the door a while longer, but it was only so I could feel like I’d made an effort. I could feel the fight leaving me, like air. The last few days had been too much. The pipeline, the drowning, the betrayal, the rescue, the funeral. I had almost nothing left in me.
I had not even cried.
Well, I wasn’t going to cry now. (I avoided looking at my mother’s corpse, though I couldn’t evade the thick, choking scent of formaldehyde and rot.) I tried to console myself with the Vizeking’s last words: I am not quite sure what to do with you right now.
I will leave you here while I figure it out.
That implied that he would come back. And when he did…
Unfortunately, someone had removed the shards of Hades’s glass chair. There was nothing left to make a weapon with, unless I sharpened my own fingernails.
I considered it, frankly.
But I just didn’t have the energy.
I made the bed instead. Re-shelved the books. Rolled my mother’s body in the carpet and propped it up next to the fireplace, so that if I caught sight of her out of the corner of my eye, it looked like she was just sleeping, bundled up against the chill.
The clothes that Elke had brought me were rolled in a ball in the corner. I shook them out. My palms glided over the sleek white negligée. I looked down at my violet dress. It was hanging off me from the long, sweaty walk with my burden. Filthier than ever after rooting around in my mother’s grave.
I thought with longing of Hades’s long-ago offer of a bath.
At that moment, as if on cue, the door creaked open. I dropped the clothes and whirled, prepared to argue with the Vizeking. But this time — my heart soared! — it was Elke!
She looked stricken. “Persephone,” she gasped. “I overheard the Vizeking speaking of you, but I couldn’t believe… what are you doing here?” Hope swelled visibly in her face. “Have you returned to rescue His Lordship?”
Rescue? Where was he? “After what he did to me? No fucking way.”
“You don’t understand. He wouldn’t —”
“Maybe he wouldn’t, but he did.” And yet, the word rescue tugged at my traitorous heart. Begrudgingly, I asked, “What’s happening?”
Elke wrung her little spider-legs. It looked strangely comical. “The Vizeking has imprisoned him.”
“Where?”
“In the baths chamber. It has a more robust lock and door than this room. For privacy,” Elke explained.
“The Vizeking could not very well put the Prince into prison, I suppose… but the baths chamber is typically used by none but the Royal Family, so it’s a safe place for the Vizeking to jail His Lordship and still save face. ”
“Why doesn’t anybody besides the Royal Family use the baths chamber? Because of the drought?” But I had fixed the drought. “What about the reservoir? Oh, no, Elke, don’t tell me the pipe we built isn’t working. I will truly burn this whole place down.”
“It is working! The reservoir is half-full.” Thank the gods. “Everyone is flocking to it. I… I would have expected the Vizeking to be angry about it. But he does not seem to mind.”
That was strange. Monarch knew he’d been angry enough about the pipeline before. “What happened after I left? Hades ran after the Vizeking and the King. Did he catch them?”
“I don’t know,” Elke whispered. “The Lake… it was awful. So much killing. We do not mind death, you know that, but the killing…. After you escaped, the Vizeking’s attendants finally arrived —”
“The red-robed ones? The lackeys?”
“Yes. They drove out the humans. Then the Vizeking jailed His Lordship.”
“Did he think Hades had something to do with the attack?”
“No. He jailed him for helping you. The Vizeking found out about the rabbit. I don’t know how. I didn’t tell, I promise.”
“I know you didn’t tell.” I was pacing. I hated myself for being worried about Hades. He didn’t deserve my mercy. “But I hope you don’t think that the thing with the rabbit excuses what he did to me later. He was going to feed me to the Monarch.”
“I really don’t think he was,” she argued. “I just don’t. In twenty-six years, I have never known him to do anything like that.”
“You might feel differently if you’d been the one he’d carried into the Lake.”
Elke frowned. Then the frown shifted into a confused expression. “If you have not returned for His Lordship, then what are you doing here?”
I couldn’t very well tell her about my mother. I was surprised she hadn’t noticed the scent of formaldehyde and rot. Perhaps spiders didn’t have a very good sense of smell.
“I just want to see him,” I said at last. “Not to rescue him. Just to confront him.” It was the best excuse I could think of.
Elke eyed me. “Are you going to kill him?”
I laughed. “You think very highly of me, don’t you?”
“We all do,” Elke said.
There was a silence.
I admitted, “I haven’t decided yet whether I’m going to kill him.”
Elke thought about that. “All right,” she allowed.
“I will take you to him.” Then the look on her face shifted.
It became something I’d never seen on her before, the sort of look I would have expected, a week ago, to see on every chaosgotter all the time: faintly amused, almost sly.
“May I ask whether, while we are there, you would like to take a bath?”
“I beg your pardon,” I said with dignity. “No, I would not. I am going to yell at His Lordship, thank you very much, not to enjoy the spa.”
“I know, but you might as well, my lady. We have plenty of water now, thanks to you.”
I didn’t have time for a bath. There was going to be an invasion. I had to resurrect my mother.
“I’ll draw it for you,” she offered. “It will only take a few minutes.”
At that, I wavered. I was covered in the filth of my mother’s grave. Surely I could spare five minutes to wash it off.
“Fine,” I grumbled. Elke beamed. “But I want one more thing. A key to this room. I need somewhere I can feel safe.”
Without hesitation, Elke withdrew the key from her pocket and offered it to me. It was a black metal key with enormous teeth. It looked like it might eat me.
I tucked it into my corset. Elke, ever the devoted maidservant, gathered up the negligée so I’d have something to wear after I bathed. I thought about asking her to bring something else, but it was really the only option besides the threadbare dress.
Feeling a little uneasy and a little ridiculous — and a little excited, guiltily, at the thought of a real hot bath — and a little breathless, a little angry, at the thought of seeing Hades again — I locked my mother behind that metal door.
I went with Elke to the baths.