Page 116 of The Catacomb King
Elke blushed. “Sorry,” she muttered. But she plowed ahead. “But what I’m saying is, if your mother called you Mütte,andthe 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 thinksyoulook 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’shumiliating. 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 aman,” 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 Gestörbunlund,” Hades said to me quietly. “We worship the Monarch only. To suggest there are others would be blasphemy.”
