Chapter 26 The Baths Chamber
The Baths Chamber
We slunk along to what, I thought, was the lowest point in the underworld I’d ever been. It was even lower than the spot where Hades had shown me fishing. When I said this to Elke, she remarked, “You really do know your way around here, don’t you?”
“It’s not that hard. You just have to notice that the path is sloping downward.” Then I admitted, “But it’s harder in boots. There’s a kind of… I don’t know… sense that you get from the catacombs, right? Like, an instinct about where they want to go? And it’s easier to tell in bare feet?”
Elke looked at me sideways. I thought she was going to tell me I was crazy. But she said, “We call that the will of the Monarch. Undirected, but ever-working.”
A chill went down my spine.
“Some of us,” she continued, “not me, but the King for example is said to be quite good at it, can redirect the tunnels by will. Get them to go where we want them to go. It is a subtle skill. But, yes. We are traveling very far down. The baths are saltwater baths; they draw their water from the sea.”
When we approached the baths chamber, I understood what she was talking about. The air was heavy and hazy with the smell of saltwater.
The baths chamber turned out to be many small chambers off a central hub.
The design reminded me a little bit of the honeycomb graveyard.
In the middle of the central chamber, which was foggy and low-ceilinged, a deep, vast saltwater pool was fed directly by rising ocean groundwater.
The smaller chambers were the rooms with the baths, each with their own heavy, locking door.
Most of the smaller chambers were empty, their doors hanging ajar.
I peeked into one as we passed. It was a plain dark room.
Jewels glittered on the walls, made ghostly by the fog.
In the middle of the room was an enormous footed tub of what looked to be cast metal.
Next to the door were large buckets for gathering water from the pool, and a lit brazier for heating the water, and a bowl of pomegranates to snack on, and a fat bar of something green that smelled deliciously of camphor, which I decided had to be soap.
So this was why the baths chamber was only used by the Royal Family. It was because it was so damned nice.
We reached a metal door like the one to Hades’s bedchamber, but shorter and squatter, built more for spiderlike chaosgotten than for humanoid ones.
The door was much thicker than the bedchamber door, too.
This door had two locks. One appeared to be the original lock.
The other was a hastily welded-on deadbolt.
Elke unlocked the deadbolt. The original lock locked from the inside, and was open.
She creaked the door ajar. “Your Lordship?”
Suddenly I was seized with both a terror and a desperate, hot, vicious longing: that I would enter this misty room and find Hades taking a bath.
“Hello, Elke,” I heard Hades say tiredly.
My heart fluttered.
He sounded like all the fight had gone out of him. Which was to say, he sounded the way I felt.
“There’s someone here to see you,” Elke said tenderly. She pushed the door open wide.
I saw Hades for the first time in two days.
He saw me, too. His eyes widened. Then he winced.
My heart stopped at the sight of his body.
His right eye had been blackened so badly it was swollen shut.
His forehead and the whole right side of his face had been almost entirely skinned.
The remaining flesh was stripped, scarlet, and crusted in black dried blood.
He was sitting shirtless with his back against the tub — a much larger tub, I noticed vaguely, than the one in the other room I’d peeked into — and bruises and claw-marks raked all up and down his torso.
His shoulders were the most bruised and swollen of all.
They looked like someone had tried to rip his arms off…
…the way children tear the legs off spiders.
The King. The King had done this to him
I bolted into the room before I even knew what I was doing. “What the fuck happened!” I touched his right shoulder. He hissed and flinched. “Is it dislocated?”
“Not anymore,” Elke piped up behind me. “His Lordship managed to pop both his shoulders back in. I wanted to get him a doctor,” she added reproachfully.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Hades rasped. He closed his eyes and leaned back against the tub again. “Go away, Persephone. I don’t want to see you.”
“Oh, fuck off!”
“You’re not supposed to be here. You’re supposed to be safe. You’re supposed to be high above, basking in the sun.”
“Have you just been wallowing here since I was taken?”
He laughed hollowly. “Taken? I’m the one who took you, in case you forgot. Your little blond friend is the one who rescued you.”
“You’re a dope. I can’t believe you haven’t even bothered to clean the blood off your face. You’re in a bathhouse, for gods’ sake.”
He cracked an eye open. “You’re one to talk. You smell like a corpse.”
“Yes, but I am going to clean myself off. Unlike some people.”
“I’ll draw your bath, but I can’t stay,” Elke said apologetically. She placed the little white dress carefully next to the brazier. Oh, gods, why had I let her bring that of all things for me to wear? “Someone will notice I’m gone and become suspicious. I’m not supposed to visit him.”
“Elke, don’t be ridiculous, of course I can draw my own bath.”
“I’ll draw it,” Hades said suddenly.
“You sit down and shut up. You shouldn’t even be moving. Elke, are there bandages?”
Elke pointed silently to a roll of bandages beside the door. They were next to the brazier and the buckets and the pomegranates and the bar of green soap. I also spotted a clay pot of what was presumably ointment. Elke mouthed at me, They’ve been there this whole time.
I said to Hades, “It’s pretty disrespectful of Elke that you haven’t even bothered to dress your wounds. She’s going pretty far out of her way to help you.”
That made Hades’s face flicker with shame.
Good. Maybe now he’d take better care of himself. But I was relentless. “You should feel bad. And no, you are not allowed to draw my fucking bath. What are you going to do after that, hold me underwater?”
There was a dead silence.
“Well, I’d better get started,” Elke said hastily. She scuttled off.
Hades, with great effort, hauled himself to his feet. He slouched over to the bucket and began to head to the saltwater pool.
“Hades!”
“Let me draw your bath,” he said heavily. “Let me feel like I’m doing somebody some good.”
“Forget the fucking bath! You fucking drowned me!”
“I was never going to drown you.” He closed his eyes. “Look. If you let me make you a bath, I’ll clean and bandage up. Okay?”
“You’ll clean and bandage up, and you’ll give me some gods-damned answers.”
“You drive a hard bargain, goddess.” But he was smiling a little. Or he would have been, I thought, if it didn’t clearly hurt his face so bad.
There was nothing I could do to stop him and Elke drawing and heating water for my bath. I did, though, fetch a bucket from another chamber to help them. “What?” I demanded when Hades looked at me, exasperated. “What am I supposed to do, just stand around while you wait on me?”
“That’s the idea.”
“Fuck off,” I told him again.
Within fifteen minutes we had the bathtub full to the brim, hot and steaming.
This was insane. I kept feeling like I was going to wake up.
I hadn’t taken a bath in over a year, and I had never taken one like this: a full, rich, hot bath in a tub long enough to stretch out in, redolent with steam and the smell of camphor soap. This was a bath for kings and queens.
I was still staring at the water when Elke said, “Okay, bye!”
I whipped around. “Wait, don’t leave me here with —”
Her spider-rear was already vanishing, closing the door behind her. She deadbolted it from the other side. K-chunk.
“— him,” I finished lamely.
I was alone with Hades and his bruised, shirtless body.
He glared at me.
My traitorous breath caught in my throat. I tried to cover it up. Haughtily I said, “Well, I certainly don’t see how I can be expected to take a bath with you here.”
“I can’t leave,” he said flatly. “I’m a prisoner.”
“Elke was literally just here with the door open.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
I flexed my hands at my sides. My skin tingled under his gaze. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t bathe with him here, but we’d filled the whole stupid tub.
And now I was locked in.
The truth of it hit me. I was a prisoner now, too. And my mother was still rotting in Hades’s bedchambers! And Calix was still coming with his cannons! Why was I taking a fucking bath?! “Elke’s coming back, right?”
“Yes. She just has to make sure no one notices she’s been visiting me.
She’ll be back in a couple of hours, probably with something to eat.
” Seeing me dart a glance at the pomegranates, he added dryly, “Something with substance. But don’t worry.
I won’t make you eat it. I’ll never try to make you do anything again. I learned my lesson, goddess.”
He turned around. His broad back was covered in bruises. I pressed my knuckles to my mouth to stop from crying out. In obvious pain, he lowered himself to the ground beside the brazier, in front of the locked door, as far away from me as he could get.
I whispered involuntarily, “Hades?” Immediately I wished I hadn’t. My voice was humiliating.
But he didn’t mock me for it. “I won’t look,” he said softly. He reached for the bandages. “Go on.”
I licked my lips. I would have loved to be able to say I didn’t believe him.
My fingers trembling, I unlaced my corset.
I watched Hades’s muscles twitch at the sound of the cords whispering through the eyelets.
I let the dress slide off and pool on the ground. I stepped into the tub, hissing as the hot water slid up my calves. I moaned involuntarily. It felt so good. Hades’s back muscles spasmed.
Then I realized I didn’t have any soap. “Oh, shit.”