Page 104 of The Catacomb King
And suddenly a theory snapped together in my head.
It sounded insane, but what if the pictures weren’t just paintings in a kids’ book? What if they were anillustration?
That was why the two pictures were different from each other. They showed the Before and the After. They demonstrated some kind of ritual, akin to the tribute sacrifice. A ritual older than either of our peoples, so old it had turned into myth, then fairytale. A ritual as old, maybe, as the gods themselves.
The trees in the illustration were the soldiers. They were my mother. They were Hades, and Calix, and Elke, and me.
They, we, werefood.
And the mountain in the picture — moving, growing, shifting shape after the razing — or devouring — of the trees — was the Monarch.
If I was right, then the Monarch Himself was taking over the body of the King.
What if the Monarch had been seeping into the King for some time now? Maybe six years ago, when Hades had last seen his father, the King had only been reclusive and strange. But I would bet that for the past year, he had been turning into something else. The Monarch had been moving into him, just as the mountain in the picture had moved and changed shape.
That was why the King was so hungry.
And, I realized, this was what the Vizeking had been working toward all along. Why be advisor to a king when you could be advisor to a god? These were the pieces I hadn’t seen, that Hades hadn’t seen, that poor Calix planning his little war in cahoots with the Vizeking had certainly not seen.
The Vizeking had skipped the Monarch’s quarter-century sacrifice. And then he had waited a year. That was how long the ritual took in the illustration. One year.
That was why the Vizeking had been so furious when Hades kidnapped me. Why he hadn’t really been that angry when we stole the runoff water from the Primordial Mountain. Sure, he’d acted like he was angry to save face, but later Elke had said he really didn’t seem to mind. That was because it had nothing to do with his plan. It had probably been a relief to him that Hades had wanted to use me for a while instead of feeding me directly to the Monarch. It had bought the Vizeking time to work behind the scenes with Calix to make sure I’d be rescued before I could be sacrificed, which would have undone all the Vizeking’s work. And that was also why the Vizeking had tried to stop me resurrecting my mother. By then, he had only had to wait a few more hours. If I had only managed to make atruesacrifice to the Monarch, I could have ruined his entire plan.
And as the Vizeking had worked his scheme over this long year, the Monarch’s influence had grown. Expanded. That was why the drought, the Monarch’s revenge for His missing meal, expanded past the boundaries of the underworld and into my world.
I recalled my shoes, placed on one side of the border between my world and the underworld but ending up on the other side. The underworld’s territory, theMonarch’sterritory, had been expanding. Inch by inch.
And now, the year of the ritual was almost up.
I would bet, in fact, that we were only six minutes short.
This moment was the culmination of the Vizeking’s plan. He would bring his god to earth. He would make Him manifest. He would feed Him my mother first, and then he would feed Him the hundreds of men behind me.
And after that, the Monarch would probably eat me, too. And Elke. And Calix. And Hades. Maybe everyone in the underworld. Everyone in my village.
I could think of only one way to stop it.
“HADES!” I screamed. “YOU HAVE TO KILL THE KING!”
Hades couldn’t hear me. Elke, though, looked appalled. Was I really telling Hades to kill his father?
“IT’S NOT HIM,” I shrieked. “IT’S —”
I broke off, yelping, as one of the Vizeking’s lackeys swarmed me. He knocked me down and ground my face into the dirt. I choked and spit. Fiercely, I wriggled within the cage of the lackey’s half-human legs and managed to roll onto my back. The lackey clicked his spider-fangs at me, blinked one spider eye and one human eye. I slammed my knees into the lackey’s abdomen. It was hard but crunchy, like a bug. It cracked.
The lackey made a wild hissing noise. He recoiled.
I scrambled up just in time to watch the King rip Hades from his headalong with his own hairand hurl Hades thirty feet against the wall.
I screamed.
The King’s crown had come off. It flew up into the air along with Hades. Hades smashed into the wall and fell like a stone into the water. The crown splashed into the water beside Hades’s…
No. I would not think the wordbody. I would not even consider it. No.
Now the King was storming toward my mother. The soldiers were stumbling into the cavern behind me.
“One more minute!” the Vizeking called to the King. He was laughing.
