Page 1 of The Catacomb King
Journey to the Underworld
Three o’clock in the morning. The air frigid as teeth, the sky stained jet-black. You’d think anyone with any damn sense would be asleep.
But no one ever said I had any sense.
I couldn’t sleep. I never could. Not with my mother coughing up blood in our only cot while I lay on the hard wood floor next to the fire. I’d long since given up trying to soothe her; it was no use, and I’d only wake her up.
Besides, her poor dried-out throat could only be soothed with water. And eleven months into the drought, we didn’t have any.
We didn’t have any of anything.
At the beginning of her illness, I used to just lie there and listen, my terror and anxiety ratcheting higher and higher, my own chest hurting in solidarity, like someone was scratching my lungs with a fingernail. Like I was climbing a flight of steps cut into a cliff, each jagged stair one step closer to my mother’s death.
Then, just three months ago, I hadn’t been able to take it anymore. I had known the risk, but I told myself,Surely I canget away with just once. In the middle of the night, I’d braced myself, pulled on my boots, and snuck out to the fields over the underworld. There, I’d gathered the little red buds that grew only in those lands. They were analgesic flowers called edenica herbs, which could be heated over the fire until they leaked a pain-dulling elixir.
I had almost been too afraid to give my mother the elixir — everyone knew that eating food from the underworld was like eating a magnet that dragged you underground, trapping you there — but I theorized that the herbs didn’t really count as food, and the fields over the underworld didn’t really count as the underworld itself.
More to the point, I was so desperate.
I would only do it the once, I told myself.
That was what I told myself the next time, too. And the next time. And the next.
But this week, I’d promised myself I would stop. Really. The risk of getting kidnapped was too great. I’d been raised on stories of the dark, evil godlings who lived in the underworld, sharp-toothed and many-legged, who dragged women underground and cracked them open and ate their bone marrow. If that happened to me… well, for one thing, I’d be dead. And for another, it would ruin my mother, who would have no one left to take care of her.
But lying here, listening toherdie, was ruining me.
Does it count as lying to yourself if you know you’re lying?
I rekindled the fire, tucked our single meager blanket more tightly around my mother, and snuck out.
The walk from my village to the border of the underworld stretched ten interminable miles. Three hours in the bitter dark. I had tried to hate the walk — its length, the frigid air, the soreness in my legs, the fear as I approached the border. But if I was being honest with myself, I couldn’t hate it. The terror felt too much like anticipation. The pain in my legs felt too much like I had an ounce of control.
Even ten miles from the border, Limer was too close to the underworld for most people’s comfort. Traveling merchants came through occasionally, as did tourists who wanted a cheap thrill. But everyone agreed that no one shouldliveso close to the underworld — that strange, haunted land where black shadows slithered in and out of pockmarks in the cliffs. The underworld itself was deep under the earth, but the grass and herbs overtop of it grew as thick as fur year-round, and dew glittered on that grass even in the afternoon, unscorched by our insipid northern sun. Even the sun was brighter on the underworld side of the border. And it set a few minutes later.
When I’d started making this journey, I’d told myself it would be a one-time thing. Hell, it might have turned out to be azero-time thing. I’d stood so long at the border that I had lost feeling in my feet. The monstrous godlings kidnapped a nubile young woman every quarter-century. Every twenty-five years like clockwork. It was the only time they crossed the border, but cross it they did. It did not matter if everyone ran; they would travel hundreds of miles to get their woman, if they had to. They had done this in my mother’s time, and in my grandmother’s, and in my great-grandmother’s. They had done it for at least a thousand years.
Except this year.
This year, it had not been twenty-five years since their last kidnapping.
It had been twenty-six.
At first, I’d worried that by journeying to the underworld, I was placing myself in the line of fire. That when the underground monstersdiddecide to kidnap their woman, I’d be the first one they saw. And no one would be around to hear me scream.
But over the course of these past few months, it had become clear that no one was going to bother to kidnap me. Which meant it was getting harder and harder to talk myself out of gathering the herbs. There were never any scaly hands wrapping around my waist, no broad-shouldered, shadow-faced figures rising from the depths to snatch me underground. Just me going home to my mother, simmering the red herbs, coaxing the syrup down her throat, then running off to spend ten hours cooking and cleaning at the Stammerers’ house in exchange for a pathetically small salary, which I needed to keep my mother in threadbare clothes and dried beans.
I had originally taken the job with the Stammerers because they were rich enough that they had water for me to steal. But by the time I resorted to going to the mouth of the underworld, the drought had lasted so long that the Stammerers had started ordering me to scrub the floors with sand instead of soap.
And still the fields withered and crackled.
And so did my mother’s lungs.
And so did the earth under my feet on my illicit trips to the underworld.
And the drought and my mother’s illness both stretched on and on.
And on.
