Page 35 of The Catacomb King
No. It couldn’t be. We had traveled too far down. But the sun, the air —
We were standing at the mouth of a tunnel that opened at the bottom of the cliff, the tunnel running sideways, perpendicular to the sheer vertical cliff-face. If I took another step, I’d plunge into the sea, which crashed into the base of the cliff in monstrous waves, spraying salt twenty feet up into my face and eyes. I blinked. I sucked down breath after breath of the fresh open air.
The sea-foam was silver under the sun.
But I couldn’t see the sun itself. It was blocked by the triangle of the Primordial Mountain — huger here, more all-encompassing, than I had ever seen it from a distance. It was like a wall. Like the sky itself.
No wonder the godlings worshiped whatever they thought was up there. The mountain itself looked like it could eat you.
I looked away from the mountain and craned my neck behind me and upward, squinting up the cliff face. There was no way I could climb it. It was as flat and ungrippable as sandpaper.
Sitting in the mouths of other tunnels that dotted the cliff-face were more godlings. They were casting fishing lines into the sea. As I watched, one of the godlings’ lines went taut. He, or she, began to reel, and a great blue fish the size of my body jerked up into the air. I thought of Calix, of his stories of the marketplace in Corcagia, the giant fish for sale hanging by their mouths. I breathed the open air. Gods, how I missed him. How I missed home.
“Look at the runoff,” Hades whispered.
I shifted my attention to the silver-white ribbon undulating down the Primordial Mountain. It widened and unfurled before crashing into the blood-colored sea.
There was a shelf of rock a little ways up the mountain, just to the side of the long, jutting overhang that would let you walk directly up to the mountain if you wanted to. (Looking atthat overhang now felt different than it had when I was blithely gathering edenica herbs. Now I looked at it and thought,A god lives there.)
I said to Hades, “Are you sure it’s a good idea to take that water? If it really comes from Chaos?”
“Youwere going to take it.”
“Yeah, but that was before I knew about the literal god who’s supposedly up there who eats human flesh.”
“Not all humans,” Hades said. “Only girls.” I shot him a warning look. He put his hands up. “Okay, okay, okay. The runoff… I don’t think it’sfromHim, exactly. It isn’t like the waterfall in the Lake, you know? That’s a gift, a transaction, that tethers us to the Monarch. This is different. It’s just there.”
“Which is it?”
“Hm?”
“The waterfall in the Lake. Is it a gift or a transaction?”
“They’re the same thing,” Hades said. I raised my eyebrows. But he wasn’t looking at me, or even at the Primordial Mountain. He was gazing upward and behind us, at the fisher-godling. The fisher had lost the blue fish. His line had snapped. And he was coughing, now, into his human hand. The same rough, bloody cough that lived in my mother.
Hades’s face, watching his subject suffer, was etched with lines of pain.
He said decisively, “The runoff from the Mountain is just water. It’s just melted ice. It’s not connected to the Monarch. We can take it.”
Not for the first time, I believed Hades was lying. Not to me, though. To himself.
I knew self-deception when I saw it. As if I hadn’t been doing the same thing while gathering edenica herbs for my mother, day after day after day, as she crept closer and closer to death.
I hoped to all the gods, Chaos included, that I wasn’t doing the same thing now.
I needed to draft a plan for the access system that would link the waterfall to the reservoir. We went back to the library for charcoal and blank parchment. The parchment was made of some kind of flaxlike lichen, silkier than the wood-pulp paper I was used to. It had been unevenly pressed, so that it was too thick in some places and too thin in others. Just like everything else in this godsforsaken place.
Then I asked for a map of the underworld.
Hades laughed.
“What’s so funny? How do you expect me to plan schematics for a pipeline if I don’t know where the pipes can go?”
“Just put them anywhere. No one will notice or care.”
“Do I detect a touch of bitterness in your tone, my Lord?”
“My Lord? Are we standing on ceremony now?”
