Page 23 of The Catacomb King
The Prince. Hades. His flashing eyes, his floating hair. Not that I had any reason to doubt it, except for the fact that he somehow couldn’t get an audience with the King, but… “He’s really the Prince of this whole place? The underworld is so… vast.”
“The Prince of the Primordium,” Elke said. There was something automatic about her response that made my skin turn cold. “He of the bloodline of the Monarch of the Void. Ruler of the Gestörbunlund. Yes.”
“Gestörbunlund? What does that mean?”
“It is our name for our homeland. The place you call the underworld. It means…” Elke thought hard, rolling the syllables in her mouth. Her human mouth. Gods, it wasso weird. I couldn’t believe I was having a civil conversation with one of these things. “It means ‘catacomb land’.”
A shiver went down my spine.
“I think because of all the tunnels,” Elke added, as an afterthought.
I seriously doubted that was why. “If Hades is your Prince, then how come he doesn’t look like you guys? How come he looks like me?”
Elke looked shocked. “You cannot call him by his name!”
I rolled my eyes and repeated my question. She hesitated. She glanced behind her at the open door, then warily at my spear on the floor. She crept all the way into the room and closed the door behind her. “His Lordship is… very human.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
Elke gestured to the books on the shelf to the side of the room. “Our ancestor… one of our ancestors… is the Monarch. Do you know about the Monarch?”
She said this as though it was impossible for anyone not to know about the Monarch. My pride surged. I couldn’t bear to tell her I had no idea what she was talking about. “In the human world, we say that your people — the godlings —”
“Chaosgötten,” said Elke. “That is what we call ourselves.”
“Okay, the chaosgötten.” I struggled to pronounce the syllables. Elke smiled at me, encouragingly, and all at once her face looked soft and sweet, almost pretty. “We say the chaosgötten are descended from Chaos himself.” I struggled to remember anything else about Chaos, or about the gods in general. There were seven gods in the pantheon: Gaia, Oceanos, Eros, Erebos, Aether, Chaos, and Nemesis. They each had different realms of influence, and not a one of them had ever interested me.
Religion was not prominent in the village of Limer. We had other shit to worry about. Oh, sure, sometimes a traveling preacher came through, and everyone gathered around and listened to his sermons and pledged to Be Better From Now On, but no one ever was. Limer wasn’t Corcagia, where there was an enormous, lacy cathedral that Calix had described in his letters; and it certainly wasn’t the mainland, where every god in the pantheon save for Chaos and Nemesis had a shrine in every home. That sort of thing was for other people, not for me. I preferred math.
But Elke answered, “Yes, that is our Father. The Monarch, whose name we do not speak. May His name be silence on our lips. But we are also descended, you know, from the Monarch’s wife. His human wife. The first human woman to be taken.”
A pit in my stomach. I had never read that in any of the books the farmhands had gifted my mother.
Elke clicked her second set of legs. “Some of us take after our Father. But some of us take after our Mother. His Lordship is one of those, I think. Not only in body but in mind. Our Mother’s blood is strong in him.”
“How old is he?”
“The Prince? He is only twenty-six. He is a baby. He thinks he knows more than he knows.” Then Elke looked stricken. “Forgive me. I am only a servant.”
“You don’t have to apologize to me. I’m a servant, too. I clean houses. Or I used to, I guess.” I laughed bitterly.
Elke didn’t. “Please don’t tell him I said that,” she said. “Please.”
“Why would I tell him? What good would it do me to get you in trouble? You’re the only one here being nice to me.” I supposed Hades was being nice enough, but he had kidnapped me and kept hauling me all over the underworld, so it didn’t count.
Then I had an idea. Maybe I could get Elke to be even nicer… especially if I scared her a little bit. “I’ll tell you what,” I said. “I’ll keep your secret if you do me a favor.”
Elke drew her head between her shoulders. “What?”
I scrambled off the bed. Elke flinched, presumably thinking I was going for my spear, but I was only picking up my basket of edenica herbs and the flask of water, which, like the spear, no one had bothered to remove. “Can you please get this to the border between the, what did you call it, the Gestörbunlund, and the human world?”
“The Lümerlund,” Elke said. “We call your world the Lümerlund. The light-world.”
“Okay. Can you get this to the Lümerlund?”
I was thinking about my last trip to the border with Calix. The way he’d said,I’d have to come and get you.
I was hoping against hope, so hard it made me sick, that he would see the basket and know I’d been kidnapped — especially if Josie also noticed I was gone. That Calix would keep his promise and come and get me. That in the meantime, one of them would look after my mother.
