Page 28 of The Catacomb King
He shrugged. “It’s the Gestörbunlund.”
The Gestörbunlund. Elke had used that word. She had translated:The land of catacombs. I had responded,We say the chaosgötten are descended from Chaos himself.
That was it. Not only were the people here descended from Chaos, this wholeplacewas.
That was why the tunnels were moving. The very terrain rejected the physical notions of ownership, of space. It refused to be controlled.
Well, two could play at that game.
I wasn’t going to be controlled, either.
I swallowed. I straightened my shoulders. I grounded my aching feet into the earth and looked at Hades expectantly.
Hades raised his eyebrows but took the hint. He pulled on my wrist — he had never let it go, not even when he’d been staring at me; his skin had pressed into my skin this whole time — and he drew me into a tight, flat space honeycombed like a beehive. Each honeycomb pocket had an enormous spiderweb stretched over it, like a curtain or a pane of glass. No spiderweb had the same pattern as any other; they were like snowflakes seen under a magnifying glass.
They were beautiful. But I didn’t have wherewithal to admire them too much, because the floor was littered with human-sized spider husks.
I screeched and leapt back, shuddering all over. “What the fuck!”
“You said you wanted to keep going,” Hades said, smugly, but there was a black flatness to him. “And have some respect for the dead.”
“The…”
I looked up at the honeycombs. Thecatacombs. Oh, no. The spider husks rustled against my bare calves. I suppressed the urge to shiver again. “Why doesn’t someone move the husks?”
“They’re part of the corpses,” Hades said. “When someone dies, the bulk of their corpse — what you would call the body — is moved into a recess, which is your equivalent of a mausoleum, I suppose. One recess per family. But their shed husks stay down here, on the floor of the graveyard. Eventually, the husks disintegrate and are absorbed back into the earth. In this way, after death, we become one with our Monarch.”
Dear gods. I imagined my own self dying. Lying on the ground like those godlings in the tunnels, my flesh sloughing off in layers.
Then again…
In a way, this wasn’t so different from what my mom was doing, was it? Shriveling inside her own skin, losing bits of herself every time she coughed. Maybe the godlings were onto something. Maybe it was better for the pieces you lost to come from the outside rather than the inside. Someday, I would bury my mother next to my father, and their bodies would join again in the soil, becoming one with each other and the earth. This was like that, but bigger.
I swallowed and nodded. “Okay.”
“Okay? That’s all you have to say?”
“It’s none of my business what you do with your dead. It’s… kind of nice, actually.”
“Nice,” he repeated. He was staring at me again. His lips were parted like they’d been in the bedroom. “You like this.”
I felt a twinge of satisfaction. “I suppose you thought I’d be scandalized. Did you want to make me scream?”
“Trust me. If I wanted to make you scream, I would do something else.” He pointed straight ahead, into the darkness on the other side of the graveyard. “No. I only brought you here because we’re going that way.”
Thatway. Through the husks.
I imagined their paperyness scraping my legs. Rasping. “You want me to… walk through corpses?”
“Yousaidyou weren’t scandalized,” Hades replied, a little smugly. He released my wrist, pushed past me and walked through. Unbothered. Apparently this was a normal-ass thing to do in the underworld. When he reached the other side, he turned and leaned against the wall. He tipped his head back and crossed his arms, fixing his blue gaze on my face.
It occurred to me that I could run. He had finally let me go.
But I knew he’d catch me. He was faster, and he had shoes on. And then I’d be in for it.
Besides, I wasn’t about to let him win.
I clenched my fists and proceeded, as upright and slow and dignified as I could, through the thigh-high sea of spider-husks. They brushed the soles of my feet, the insides of my thighs. They felt like paper, like discarded cat-claws, like nails on a chalkboard. My teeth were on edge, but I would not give Hades the satisfaction of watching me shudder, nor would I disrespect the corpses that way. It was not their fault.
