Chapter 30 The Lake
The Lake
I’m in love with you. I’m in love with you.
No time for that now.
I ran, Hades and Elke both hot on my heels. My heart was racing. The Lake. My mother…
What if the Monarch had accepted my sacrifice after all?
What if earlier, when my mother had failed to wake up, the Monarch had just been…
I didn’t know, toying with me? He was, after all, Chaos Himself.
Probably He liked to play games. But now the game was over.
Now, when I reached the Lake, my mother would be waiting for me.
Smiling at me with eyes full of pride. She would recognize me.
She’d be wringing the water from her hair.
The first thing I saw when I skidded into the cavern was her body floating face-down.
My heart turned to stone.
She was far out in the middle of the Lake, her hair spread and floating like insect legs. Her dead flesh was becoming waterlogged. The eerie candlelight flickered over her.
It was only when Hades and Elke came up behind me a few seconds later that I realized we were not alone in the cavern.
The King was here, too.
He was in the corner, monstrous, nearly outside of my peripheral vision. I hadn’t even noticed him, too devastated by my mother. But of course Hades locked in on him instantly. I sensed as Hades’s breath caught and his muscles stiffened.
The King was enormous. Almost bubbling with impatience. And… surely not, but did he have more legs than before?
The Vizeking was here, too, looking like a shining red pebble next to the boulder of the King. He was waving his arms at the King, trying desperately to hold him at bay. From what? The King kept feinting, trying to get around the Vizeking and into the Lake. His myriad eyes were fixed on my mother.
Oh, gods. He wanted to eat her.
I searched around for Calix. He’d been with the Vizeking before — where was he now? But he was nowhere to be found. No, wait. There, a flash of yellow in the Lake. “Calix!” I shouted.
“What’s the human boy doing?” Elke asked, frightened and suspicious.
I knew what he was doing. Despite everything, I felt a pang of affection for Calix. He had always liked my mother. “He’s getting my mom,” I said.
Hades rolled his eyes. “Well, tell him to hurry up,” he said through his teeth.
But he was bouncing on the balls of his feet, agitated, all of his attention focused on his father.
He kept touching his bruised shoulders. I didn’t think he realized he was doing it.
The three of us hovered at the entrance to the Lake cavern, far from the King and the Vizeking and Calix and my mom, pulled like violin strings, unsure which way to go or what to do. Hades said, “My father —”
Then the King boomed, “ENOUGH!”
The King broke away from the Vizeking and plunged toward the Lake. Hades lunged for him, but the King was moving far too fast for Hades to catch up, speeding toward Calix and my mom. His jaws were slavering.
Even the Vizeking cried, “No!”
“CALIX!” I screamed. I began to run after Hades. But Elke hooked her spider-legs into my dress, holding me back. “No!” she said urgently. “The soldiers —”
“What soldiers?!”
A rumbling from the throne room behind us.
Elke and I whipped around. Sure enough, green-suited Iernian War Police were trickling in from the catacombs.
They moved slowly, uncertainly. Something about them was almost drugged-looking.
Perhaps they simply didn’t know where they were going, down here in the dark moving tunnels without Calix?
And they were distracted by the jewels in the walls.
But some part of their minds had to be aware of the freezing pull of the Lake, because they were stumbling this way…
“What do they want?” I gasped.
“Not those soldiers!” Elke nearly sobbed. “Ours!”
Ours?
Earlier, I’d wondered if the chaosgotten had a standing army, But even through my fear and confusion, I thought, There’s no way they’re organized enough for that.
The Vizeking had his lackeys, though.
And indeed, a few lackeys were sprinkled among Calix’s soldiers, their scarlet livery flashing among the sea of green uniforms like rubies in a pile of emeralds.
I hadn’t seen them at first because they were moving low to the ground like spiders.
Even the ones with human limbs scuttled like bugs. My skin crawled.
Why weren’t the lackeys and the War Police fighting with each other?
As I watched, I realized that the lackeys weren’t really among the soldiers. They were arranged in a loose arc behind them.
Herding them towards the Lake.
The King’s roar boomed behind me. I whirled around just in time to get splashed by an enormous wave of frigid Lake water.
The King had cannonballed into the Lake.
I searched frantically; where was Hades?
There — a tiny flash of black and white.
Hades had climbed onto his father’s back and was clinging to the spiky black crown atop his father’s head, yelling into his father’s ear.
I was briefly distracted by a flash of yellow. It was Calix’s bobbing blond head — and as I watched, agonized, ripped between him and Hades and the War Police, a wave of water engulfed him.
Calix’s head did not resurface.
My heart surged. He was a dick, but he was my dearest childhood friend — “HADES!” I screamed. “GET CALIX!”
Hades’s father reached one arm up and tried to rip Hades away as carelessly as if he were a mite. Hades grabbed his father’s hair to hang on. The King roared with pain.
I didn’t know what to do. Why hadn’t I ever learned to fucking swim? Elke had bolted to the shore, as close to Hades as she could get. She was crying out and scuttling agitatedly.
The Vizeking had moved to the shore, too. He was flapping his hands at the King. “Ignore him!” he screamed at the King. “Just wait six minutes! Then your first meal is right there!”
Meal?
My mother.
But… first meal?
Something was dawning on me, insistently. I tried to ignore it, focused as I was on the chaos and on Hades’s and Calix’s lives, but it rapped on my brain like it was important…
Frustrated and confused, I turned back to the soldiers. The confused, grumbling, pushing soldiers. Who were being herded into the Lake by the Vizeking’s lackeys.
They reminded me of something. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what. And then I realized:
Green and clustered as they were, they looked like the picture of twisted trees growing around the mountain in my childhood book.
Which also reminded me of the duplicate picture in Hades’s book. That picture showed chopped-down stumps, clustered around an even bigger mountain.
And… in Hades’s version, the bigger mountain had moved.
After exactly one year.
And suddenly a theory snapped together in my head.
It sounded insane, but what if the pictures weren’t just paintings in a kids’ book? What if they were an illustration?
That was why the two pictures were different from each other.
They showed the Before and the After. They demonstrated some kind of ritual, akin to the tribute sacrifice.
A ritual older than either of our peoples, so old it had turned into myth, then fairytale.
A ritual as old, maybe, as the gods themselves.
The trees in the illustration were the soldiers. They were my mother. They were Hades, and Calix, and Elke, and me.
They, we, were food.
And the mountain in the picture — moving, growing, shifting shape after the razing — or devouring — of the trees — was the Monarch.
If I was right, then the Monarch Himself was taking over the body of the King.
What if the Monarch had been seeping into the King for some time now?
Maybe six years ago, when Hades had last seen his father, the King had only been reclusive and strange.
But I would bet that for the past year, he had been turning into something else.
The Monarch had been moving into him, just as the mountain in the picture had moved and changed shape.
That was why the King was so hungry.
And, I realized, this was what the Vizeking had been working toward all along. Why be advisor to a king when you could be advisor to a god? These were the pieces I hadn’t seen, that Hades hadn’t seen, that poor Calix planning his little war in cahoots with the Vizeking had certainly not seen.
The Vizeking had skipped the Monarch’s quarter-century sacrifice. And then he had waited a year. That was how long the ritual took in the illustration. One year.
That was why the Vizeking had been so furious when Hades kidnapped me.
Why he hadn’t really been that angry when we stole the runoff water from the Primordial Mountain.
Sure, he’d acted like he was angry to save face, but later Elke had said he really didn’t seem to mind.
That was because it had nothing to do with his plan.
It had probably been a relief to him that Hades had wanted to use me for a while instead of feeding me directly to the Monarch.
It had bought the Vizeking time to work behind the scenes with Calix to make sure I’d be rescued before I could be sacrificed, which would have undone all the Vizeking’s work.
And that was also why the Vizeking had tried to stop me resurrecting my mother.
By then, he had only had to wait a few more hours.
If I had only managed to make a true sacrifice to the Monarch, I could have ruined his entire plan.
And as the Vizeking had worked his scheme over this long year, the Monarch’s influence had grown. Expanded. That was why the drought, the Monarch’s revenge for His missing meal, expanded past the boundaries of the underworld and into my world.
I recalled my shoes, placed on one side of the border between my world and the underworld but ending up on the other side. The underworld’s territory, the Monarch’s territory, had been expanding. Inch by inch.
And now, the year of the ritual was almost up.
I would bet, in fact, that we were only six minutes short.
This moment was the culmination of the Vizeking’s plan. He would bring his god to earth. He would make Him manifest. He would feed Him my mother first, and then he would feed Him the hundreds of men behind me.
And after that, the Monarch would probably eat me, too. And Elke. And Calix. And Hades. Maybe everyone in the underworld. Everyone in my village.
I could think of only one way to stop it.
“HADES!” I screamed. “YOU HAVE TO KILL THE KING!”
Hades couldn’t hear me. Elke, though, looked appalled. Was I really telling Hades to kill his father?
“IT’S NOT HIM,” I shrieked. “IT’S —”
I broke off, yelping, as one of the Vizeking’s lackeys swarmed me.
He knocked me down and ground my face into the dirt.
I choked and spit. Fiercely, I wriggled within the cage of the lackey’s half-human legs and managed to roll onto my back.
The lackey clicked his spider-fangs at me, blinked one spider eye and one human eye.
I slammed my knees into the lackey’s abdomen.
It was hard but crunchy, like a bug. It cracked.
The lackey made a wild hissing noise. He recoiled.
I scrambled up just in time to watch the King rip Hades from his head along with his own hair and hurl Hades thirty feet against the wall.
I screamed.
The King’s crown had come off. It flew up into the air along with Hades. Hades smashed into the wall and fell like a stone into the water. The crown splashed into the water beside Hades’s…
No. I would not think the word body. I would not even consider it. No.
Now the King was storming toward my mother. The soldiers were stumbling into the cavern behind me.
“One more minute!” the Vizeking called to the King. He was laughing.
I searched the water frantically. Hades was nowhere to be seen, and neither was Calix.
There was nothing for it.
I ran forward and dove into the Lake.