Page 27 of The Catacomb King
You Have a Deal
We ran through the narrow winding tunnels. I was still barefoot from walking on the grass high above. (Oh, how I missed the sun!) Hades’s boots, plus his sheer height, meant that he moved at twice my usual speed. The uneven rock floor pounded like a fist at my feet. But I was determined to keep up.
As we moved farther and farther away from the bedchamber, the population of unmoving godlings in the middle of the road increased. Soon, it was hard to walk. Crowded together like this in the darkness, they looked like a jumble of human and spider parts, like someone had taken a bunch of life-sized dolls and a bunch of giant spiders and chopped them up and thrown them together at random. At first I flinched every time I saw a godling, but although the black eyes of the conscious ones tracked me, they all caught sight of Hades and left me alone. I found myself pressing closer to him.
And after a while, I realized that the godlings weren’t just respecting Hades; they lit up at the sight of him. They crawled forward to bow at his feet. When that happened, I noticed that Hades always greeted them by name, even as we rushed by: “Hello, Rolfrik,” or “Back soon, Idah.”
There had to be hundreds of them. How could he keep track?
Maybe it was made easier by the fact that most of them didn’t move at all. They lay in the middle of the road like stuffed pillowcases. The spider-legged ones lay on their backs, their legs curled in the air. The sight made goosebumps break out on my flesh.
But they were also… kind of pathetic.
They made me feel the way that talking to Hades sometimes made me feel: a weird combination of scared and sympathetic. I didn’t like it. Eventually I mustered up the courage to ask him, “Are they dead?”
“Not yet,” he said grimly. “But they are dying.”
“Of what?”
“Thirst.”
Thirst. “You don’t mean like my mother?”
“Exactly like your mother,” he admitted. Then he jerked me around a corner, shocking me. I hadn’t exactly been paying the most attention to the road, distracted as I was by all the godlings and this revelation, but I was pretty sure that corner hadn’t been there a second ago.
Wait. I thought hard for a second. We’d turned left when we’d exited the bedroom that Hades had imprisoned me in. That meant we were traveling the same tunnels we’d traveled when we’d gone to the throne room.
Except… the twists and turns were in different places.
The tunnels had moved. They were like snakes: enormous, slow-moving snakes. “What is this place?” I gasped out. “What’s going on?”
Hades slowed, then stopped entirely. I tripped over myself, resentfully grateful at the opportunity to rest my aching feet.
Then I felt the hum ofsomethingthrough the soles of my feet.
I stood silent and still.
What was that sensation? It was, I thought, the vibrations of the shifting tunnels. They weremoving, like an animal’s throat. And the black, shadowy skittering of dark godlings far away. The slow, slow growth of the shining fungus. The rich glittering of the jewels on the walls.
My skin crawled.
And yet… a part of me was awed, too.
There was nothing like this in Limer. Nothing, I was sure, in all the Lümerlund.
It was a mercy and a gift, yes, that my world did not suffer from this black, swallowing darkness. It was a mercy that we had the sun. But in exchange, we lacked this subtle, sharp, glittering beauty.
I looked up into Hades’s face and found him staring at me.
My face went hot. “What?”
His face reddened, too. He cleared his throat and averted his gaze quickly. “I just… didn’t think you would notice.”
“You didn’t think I would notice that theroads move?”
“Elke says the human women usually don’t.”
For some reason, this embarrassed me, too. He was acting like I was special. “Well, they’re probably distracted by all the kidnapping! No, really. The roads move? Please, this is insane.”
