Chapter 36 Nemesis
Nemesis
We walked for an hour with Calix and Elke before we finally reached the border to the Lümerlund. All that way, the ground beneath us kept shifting. Tunnels kept bursting forth, dumping crying chaosgotten into the rain.
When we crossed the border, leaving emerald grass behind and placing our feet on rocky earth, even Hades and Elke breathed a sigh of relief.
But the rain overhead didn’t stop.
I shivered. In Limer, everyone was probably laughing, dancing in the square, opening their mouths to the sky. My mother’s empty grave was filling up with mud.
Calix said at last, “The underworld is going to keep spreading, isn’t it?”
“I think so,” I admitted. I explained what I had figured out in the Lake chamber: the Vizeking’s yearlong ritual, the King’s increasing strangeness as his body was filled with the Monarch, the Monarch’s own expanding influence.
And now that the Monarch was truly on earth, His influence was stronger and vaster than ever.
Then something awful occurred to me. I said, “If the edge of the underworld reaches Limer or Corcagia… and the people there eat the food that’s been touched by Him… they won’t be able to escape His influence. They’ll be pulled to the underworld even if the underworld shrinks again.”
And then I thought of something else.
Hades and I looked at each other in horror.
I had eaten the food.
“But I feel fine,” I said uncertainly. “I mean… look. I’m on this side of the border.”
“Do you feel fine?” Hades demanded.
Did I?
If I was being honest… there was a pull. Deep in the pit of my stomach. Like the pull I had felt toward the glassy freezing waters of the Lake, the first time I had laid my eyes upon it.
I swallowed. I closed my eyes. I said throatily, “No. I’m going to have to go back.”
Calix asked, “For your mother?”
I opened my eyes again. “What?”
He had no idea what we were talking about. But of course, why would he? He didn’t know I’d eaten the underworld fruit.
Calix repeated, “For your mother. She grabbed me down there — she’s fucking strong, Persephone, I don’t know what you did to her — and she shoved me out of the cavern like I was a tiny dog or something.
I tried to go back for her, but everything was moving so fast. But I didn’t…
” He hesitated. “I didn’t see her get… eaten.
That big monster, the Monarch, it was…” He swallowed.
“It was eating my men. But she was off to the side. She seemed… okay. So maybe she’s still down there. ”
Please, no. I could not bear to hope this hard. Not again. All this hope was going to kill me. “She doesn’t even know me,” I protested pathetically. “She called me mütte.”
Hades said, “She called you what?”
“Yeah. The Monarch called me that, too. And so did you, Elke!”
Hades glared at her. Elke shrugged feebly.
“And so did some other people,” I went on, “like Mackr. What does the word mean?”
“Don’t tell her,” Hades said at once to Elke.
“Your Lordship, I think she should know…”
“Tell me.”
Hades looked shifty. Elke sighed. She explained weakly, “Mütte was the name of the Monarch’s human wife.
But we use it now as a kind of honorific.
It’s kind of like how ‘His Lordship’ is an honorific for the Prince.
Oh! I mean, the way ‘His Majesty’ is an honorific for the King.
My apologies, Your Majesty, for my error. ” Elke swept a light curtsy at Hades.
Hades, who still wore the crown.
“Oh,” said Hades uncomfortably, “you don’t have to do that.”
“Yeah,” said Calix, “you really don’t.”
“You shut up.”
I asked, “What does the honorific mean?”
“It means goddess,” said Hades tightly. “And it also means wife.”
My stomach grew hot. “So everyone who’s been calling me mütte has been secretly referring to me as your wife? And, wait. When you called me goddess, were you also calling me your wife?!”
“That’s not important right now,” Elke interrupted hastily. “The important thing is, if your mother — who has a small piece of the Monarch in her, given her resurrection —”
“What? No one ever told me that was how it worked!”
“No, we just told you not to do it,” Hades bit out. “But you just decided you were smarter than everyone else, didn’t you?”
“I am smarter than everyone else,” I said haughtily. “That’s why you kidnapped me in the first place.”
“You never talked like that back home,” Calix mumbled.
“Stop!” Elke screeched. “Everyone listen to me for once!”
Everyone shut up and stared.
Elke blushed. “Sorry,” she muttered. But she plowed ahead. “But what I’m saying is, if your mother called you Mütte, and the Monarch called you Mütte, then it seems the Monarch thinks you are some version of His human wife.”
“But I thought His wife still lived on the Mountain,” I said, confused. “I mean, you told me she was still up there.”
Hades and Elke looked at each other. “She is supposed to be up there,” Hades admitted. “But He seems confused enough to think you’re his wife. And if He thinks you look like His wife, and if your mother looks enough like you…”
“Then He might think my mother is his mütte, too,” I whispered. Dear gods, I couldn’t live like this. My hope was a physical thing in my body, heavy and painful like a coal. “And so He might not have eaten her. Is that what you’re saying, Elke?”
Elke was quiet. She did not seem to want to go that far.
It was Hades who said, “At the very least, He might not have eaten your mother the same way He eats everything else.”
My heart soared. “Then we have to get back in there.”
“It’s not a guarantee,” Hades warned. “And you’re not going anywhere. You can’t even walk. Elke, bandage her up, would you?”
“With silk again?” Elke squeaked.
“That was amazing,” I told her. I wasn’t really paying attention.
My eyes were fixed on the wild maze of seething tunnels in the distance.
Like tentacles, I thought. Or a forest of thorns.
My mother, like the princess in a fairy tale, was trapped within the forest in the heart of the underworld.
I had to save her. “The crawling. The silk. I’ve never seen anything like it. ”
“It’s humiliating. You’re not supposed to do it in public!”
“I feel like the rules change when it comes to saving someone’s life,” I said dryly. “Or, you know, setting their broken bones.”
Elke skittered back and forth for a second. Then she snapped at Hades and Calix, “Turn around!”
Hades did, obediently. Calix goggled. “What? Me? I don’t even know what’s going on!”
“Yes, you! You’re a boy.”
“I’m a man,” said Calix. But he turned around, grumbling. Even I closed my eyes while Elke spun her silk and wrapped it tightly around my hips and leg and arm. When she was finished, I had to admit I felt better. My limbs still seared with pain, but at least I was stable.
I hated to admit it, but before we made any moves to fight the Monarch or return to the underworld, I needed a doctor.
That meant we needed to go to Limer. And we also had to warn the villagers of the impending flood of godlings and the expanding underworld border.
To tell them that the god Chaos lived among us again.
And then what?
“We can’t fight the Monarch ourselves,” I said. I hated to admit it, but it was true. “Who can we ask for help? Not the Body,” I snapped at Calix, who had already opened his mouth.
“That’s not what I was going to say,” Calix retorted. “Don’t you ever go to church?”
“Don’t start.”
“Chaos is a god,” said Calix. “But he isn’t the only god.”
“The gods aren’t —” The gods aren’t real, I had been going to say in frustration.
But obviously I stopped.
“You wouldn’t have thought this one was real, either,” Calix said wisely. “I know you love your math books and fairy tales, Persephone, but it wouldn’t hurt you to crack open a holy text once in a while.”
“Oh, shut up. You were never religious before you went to Corcagia. Somebody help me stand.”
Hades gathered me gently and set me on my feet. I ground my teeth against the pain. I leaned against Hades. Together, we stared at the crazed landscape of the underworld. The wild, thrashing black rain. The looming lumped form of the Primordial Mountain.
“We have no other gods in the Gestorbunlund,” Hades said to me quietly. “We worship the Monarch only. To suggest there are others would be blasphemy.”
“There are others,” I admitted. “There are seven gods in total. Supposedly.”
Gaia, goddess of earth, birth, and agriculture.
Her husband, Oceanos, god of wildlife and of the sea.
Eros, god of desire.
Erebos and Aether, the twin gods of light: one of the moon, one of the sun.
Chaos, god of entropy and madness. While the other gods were related to each other by blood — for Gaia and Oceanos had given birth to Erebos and Aether, and Eros was Erebos’s husband — Chaos stood apart. Parentless. Siblingless. Unborn.
And none of the other gods could match Him. I knew this from the myths. The other gods were too… solid. Too concerned, in the stories, with their internecine squabbles. Chaos could not be grasped, and this gave Him an advantage.
But once upon a time, Chaos’s power had grown too great.
It had expanded to encompass not only Iernia and the mainland, but the sky-palace of the gods.
During that time, human beings had caught vicious illnesses, transformed into animals, collapsed randomly in the streets.
Because humans were so ill, worship of the gods had ceased.
The clouds that supported the sky-palace had collapsed into hail.
That was when the seventh god had come into being.
She had walked across the horizon. No one knew from whence. She carried a golden sword as tall as her body. On the blade of the sword were a thousand notches: one notch for every enemy She had vanquished.
She drove Chaos from the sky-palace, from the mainland, from Iernia. She chased Him across the earth’s surface, and in Her wake the people transformed back into human beings. The clouds beneath the sky-palace knit themselves back together.
Chaos fled to the farthest point on the map: the Primordial Mountain.
When Chaos had retreated to the Mountain, it was said that He had cried out to the goddess for mercy. He had not meant to hurt anyone, He said. He couldn’t help it. He was only what He was.
Frankly, having now seen Him, I thought that was probably true. The Monarch did not seem to be able to help warping everything He touched. He couldn’t help being so hungry.
But the golden goddess did not care about intent. She only cared about actions.
So to punish Chaos for His cancerous growth — His wild influence, His size — She turned Him into the smallest and most insignificant of creatures: a bug.
(Although She could not change His nature entirely. After all, even a spider could spin a vast web of influence.)
Thus did Chaos become the spider-god, who spawned the chaos-godlings.
And the goddess who had defeated Him added the thousand-and-first notch to Her sword.
For she was Nemesis. Goddess of retribution and cruelty.
But also of balance. Of taking an eye for an eye.
I said to Calix, “Are you talking about Nemesis?”
Calix shrugged.
“No. We could not possibly try to negotiate with Nemesis. That’s insane. She’s the most dangerous. I don’t even mean the most dangerous god. I mean the most dangerous, period.”
“You sound like you’re trying to convince yourself,” Hades said.
I was.
And it wasn’t working.
I tried again. “It doesn’t matter. Because nobody knows where She is.
I mean, no one knows where any of the gods are.
The sky-palace isn’t real, or…” I sighed.
“I mean, I suppose I wouldn’t have believed that our mountain was the Primordial Mountain, with an actual god on it, so maybe the sky-palace is real.
But.” Gods, it felt stupid to even suggest this.
“But even if it is, even if the rest of them are up in the sky-palace, Nemesis didn’t live there. No one knows where She is.”
“I know where She is,” Calix said.