Chapter 35 Mütte
Mütte
The King’s carapace bubbled like batter on my mother’s cast-iron pan back home, that time when I was ten years old and my mother had scrounged and saved for three months to buy enough sugar to make griddle-cakes for my birthday.
More legs punched out of the King’s carapace. Spider-legs. Goats’ hooves. Eagle talons. Bat wings.
It was Calix who shocked me back to myself. He broke away from us and ran at his soldiers. He waved his arms at them and bellowed, “Retreat! Get out of here! Go, go, go!”
But the War Police were too numbed by whatever the Vizeking’s lackeys had done to them.
Lightning-fast, the Monarch pulled the King’s discarded body upright. He sprouted a thousand eyes where the King’s human eyes had been. Mirrored fly-eyes. Snails’ eyes on stalks.
Then He took an enormous, bloody bite out of His own arm.
Elke and I gasped. We pushed back. But the Monarch had more arms where that came from. Even as the King’s spider-fangs dripped muscle and blood, three more arms shoved out of his body to take the chewed-up arm’s place.
Hades was so close to shore. I dove forward to grab him and fell on my face. My broken hips. They wouldn’t carry me.
Hades gasped my name. The moment he was on dry land, he scooped me up. The jostling was excruciating, but I had never been so glad to be in his arms.
“Your Godship!” cried the Vizeking at the Monarch. He raised his arms joyfully. “Welcome! May I present an additional sacrifice for your delectation.” He swept his arm around at the shore full of soldiers. Calix cried out in grief and horror. The Vizeking added, “As a symbol of our devotion.”
The Monarch’s eyes pointed in all different directions. It took Him a moment to fixate on what the Vizeking was pointing to.
And when he did, His attention slid off the soldiers immediately.
And landed on me.
A voice like a thousand avalanches boomed, “Mütte.”
Calix and I clapped our hands over our ears. Hades flinched wildly, but he was forced to listen to that horrible voice or else drop me, and he wouldn’t drop me. Elke recoiled.
My mother whispered, “I told you.”
Hades broke into a run. I reached for my mother. Elke seized her and ran after us, hot on our heels. But Calix hung back. He wouldn’t leave his men behind. Just like — I had to admit it — he hadn’t left me behind when I’d been kidnapped.
I screamed at him. He threw me one anguished, determined glance.
And then he turned his back on me.
Hades slowed. He glanced back and rolled his eyes. “That guy?” he demanded, sounding like no one so much as Calix himself.
“He’s my best friend!” I shrieked. “Or he was before he became a warmongering dick! No, don’t you go get him!” I screamed as Hades started to hand me off to Elke. “You think I want you eaten either?”
Hades hesitated.
Then my mother stepped out of Elke’s grasp and walked back toward the cavern.
That was the last straw. “NO!”
“It is okay. I always liked that boy,” my mother said over her shoulder, gently. “And it’s not too late for him.”
“It’s not too late for you, either, Mommy! No! I saved you! STOP!”
But she was gone.
And Hades was running again. I howled, pounded at his back, but there was nothing I could do.
The Monarch, seeing us disappear into the catacombs, moved faster than any of us.
The last thing I saw in the Lake cavern was the Monarch exploding out of the King’s carapace. His oily, gelatinous, thousand-limbed form crashed into the shore.
Into the soldiers.
Into the Vizeking.
And absorbed them.
The Vizeking screamed as the Monarch’s flesh struck his body. His thin scream was cut off as abruptly as if someone had sliced off his head.
I screamed, too. Calix. My mother. And then —
Calix burst into the throne room a millisecond before the Monarch’s flesh spilled into it.
We all raced through the catacombs. Ducking, weaving. The Monarch surged behind us, His new body filling the space like water. The heads and hands of soldiers, lackeys, and other unfortunate chaosgotten stuck out of his flesh. He was absorbing — eating? — every creature he touched.
And the catacombs’ slow, almost imperceptible movement was gone. Now, the roads thrashed like tentacles. Hades was thrown off balance again and again. Soon he would trip, and the Monarch would eat us —
Hades gasped out, “This way!” and dodged down a narrow side-path.
The path ended dead ahead in matted grass-roots.
We burst out into the sun.
And fell.
The catacomb we were in had pushed upward. It was no longer underground. It arced above the ground like a bridge. We had fallen out of it.
We landed on the soft grass. Hades curled around me to brace my broken bones from the impact. “Persephone? Persephone!”
“You don’t have to yell,” I croaked. I felt hollow. My mother. Gone again. “I’m injured, not unconscious. Where’s Calix? Where’s the Monarch?”
We all looked up.
Overhead, the catacombs seethed. They formed great tubes patterned on the outside with emerald grass and smooth onyx rock and glittering gemstones. The bioluminescent fungi on the walls were withering and dying. My heart broke for them.
And all around us were chaosgotten.
They were tumbling out of the crazy tunnels.
They fell as thick as the raindrops. They were crying out in fear of the open air, or rubbing their concussed heads, or clutching each other, or — a few of them, like Elke — gazing in awe at the mountain and the expansive horizon and the sky, stretching out their hands and spider-legs to catch the raindrops.
A few of the nearest chaosgotten spotted me and Hades and crawled over, begging for help, demanding answers.
Hades could only shake his head helplessly. I sat up.
Together, Hades and I looked toward the east. There was the Mountain, covered more thickly than it had ever been with storm-clouds and tornadoes. Now, you could not even see the runoff. You could not even see the strip of land that led up to the Mountain.
We looked west, toward Limer. That way, the grass and the crazy network of tunnels stretched as far as the eye could see.
There was no evidence of the border.
“How far does the underworld go, now?” Calix breathed. “To Limer? Or —”
“Can’t bring yourself to say To Corcagia, can you?” I snapped. “Can’t bring yourself to admit how badly you’ve fucked up?”
Calix flinched.
The ground beneath us rumbled. We all froze. We had to get away from here.
But neither Hades nor I could bear to leave his people in distress like this.
I turned to the chaosgotten who’d come to beg us for help.
“Listen,” I said. “You’ve got to get everyone away from the Mountain.
Do you understand? It’s not safe here anymore.
” I hesitated. “Bring them… bring them to my village. To Limer. It’s a human village.
I’ll tell my people to take care of you. ”
“Persephone,” Calix hissed.
“Shut up, Calix!” I could not forget how the chaosgotten had tried to save me from being sacrificed after they’d constructed my reservoir pipe. The godlings might be freaks, but they were my freaks.
I watched as the chaosgotten scrambled back to the panicked, crying masses. They began to move in disorganized circles and not tell anyone anything, as per usual. I sighed.
“Well,” Hades said grimly, “you did your best.”
The pain in his voice was unbearable.
I was painfully aware of Calix’s eyes on me.
But I cupped Hades’s face in my hands. I pulled him so close that no one could hear me but him.
I blocked out my broken hips, the war zone, the thundering rain on my skin and hair.
“Don’t worry,” I whispered. “We’ll come back for them.
Look: You saved them once, from the drought.
You built your reservoir; you brought back the rain. And you’ll save them from this, too.”
“If you say so,” Hades said. Still, I felt something in his neck relax.
“It doesn’t matter if you don’t believe it,” I said. “It’s still true. I’ll make sure of it.”
After a moment, he nodded.
He stood up. He gathered me in his arms.
And the Prince of Darkness carried me away from the underworld, just as he had once carried me into it.