Page 47 of The Catacomb King
“Drown her! Drown her!”
“No!” I shouted. “No drowning. Listen to me for one second.” They had started to clamor. I set my teeth. Surely I could make them understand me. We all spoke the same language, after all, and I had already explained the water-pipe concept to Calix once, and then a second time to Hades. I tried to think more about Hades’s reaction than Calix’s. “We’re going to fill this reservoir with water. And what you’re going to do is first dig a really big shaft, and then build a really big slide. We’re goingthisway.” I pointed behind me. “We’re going to start here and dig out and up, toward the Primordial Mountain. Then we’re going to line the shaft with… something… non-porous. Metal or resin or glass.” I was weakening. “Do you guys have… anything like that?”
Silence from the horde of godlings. They weren’t even rustling now.
Someone said, “I still think we should drown her.”
“Shut up, Mackr,” Hades ordered abruptly. He held up my spear, which he’d taken from Elke. The one I’d made from the broken glass chair. Only it wasn’t really glass, was it? “Persephone. Will this material do?”
My stomach flip-flopped. The Prince, asking me a question in front of all his people. Asking my permission. “That would do nicely,” I said. My voice was throaty. I cleared my throat again,tried to project my voice the way he was doing. “Do we have more of it? Does it melt down?”
“I don’t think so.” Hades looked at the crowd. I realized he was at a loss. Of course. He was a prince. He didn’t know shit about construction materials.
Then the worker who’d said I ought to be drowned — Mackr — admitted, “We can work it.”
I found this Mackr fellow in the crowd. He was toward the back, nearer to Hades than to me. His body appeared to be entirely human. His physique was broad and bulky. But his head was a flat spider-head. He had eight pupilless black eyes. Two enormous, furry fangs.
The inside of my mouth dried up.
For a moment I couldn’t talk. The godling tipped his head back. Challenging me, the way Hades had with his crossed arms? I could not read his face. There was nothing human in it, nothing that signified any thought or feeling, and yet the mind behind those black eyes was an intelligent mind. But the spider-face was so alien that I found myself unable to treat this godling like a person. The crowd was full of monsters, of course, but somehow they had all blended together until now; but at this moment, staring at into Mackr’s face, I felt acutely like I was about to be eaten.
No. I struggled to pull myself together. If I didn’t, Iwouldbe eaten. And by something far crueler than this Mackr asshole.
“Thank you,” I managed. I tried closing my eyes, but that only made me feel more frightened. Like they could be creeping up on me. I imagined I heard their rustling limbs, growing closer and closer. I opened my eyes again, forced myself to stare Mackr in the face. “Can you work it into big pipes?” I held my arms out in a circle. “Or sheets that can be bent?”
“I guess so,” said Mackr.
“Mackr,” said Hades, reproachfully. Like he was this guy’s fucking dad.
But Mackr shifted a little and said, “Yes.” Nothing else, though.
I caught Hades’s eye by accident. Despite myself, I almost snickered. My own irritation was mirrored on his face. “Okay, great,” I said. “What do you need to do that?”
“Acid vats.”
“And how long will it take to make the pipes?”
“Half a day, maybe.” Gods, this was like pulling teeth. No wonder the King had retreated into a cave rather than try to rule these people. “You’ve got to have time to let the material dry after you do the working.”
“Is that time included in your half-day estimate?” I sounded like a textbook.
“Yes.” Mackr was getting more and more recalcitrant.
I turned my attention to the rest of the workers. “And how many of you know how to do this? The working of this material into sheets?”
A pause. Then a bunch of hands and spider-limbs raised into the air. I couldn’t count them, but I had the impression that it was a lot. It had better be enough. I only had two days for this.
I beckoned Hades up to help me. He came straight to me at once, parting the crowd between us.
When he had reached me, I whispered to him what I wanted him to do. I was painfully aware of all the eyes on us, some of them belonging to creatures that made my skin crawl. I wanted to hide. I wanted to go home. I wanted to return to Hades’s bedchamber with the metal door and lock myself in.
But in fairness to Hades, after I was done talking, he did exactly as he had said. Which is to say, he did exactly whatIsaid.
He went down to the sea of workers and separated them into diggers and pipe-builders, based on their self-reported level ofexpertise. (This itself took over an hour. I dug my nails into my palms so hard I left crescent moons. I didn’t have time for this!) A number of godlings kept drifting between the two camps, but eventually Hades decided that good enough was good enough. He looked to me for the next step.
Even with the furrow between his brows deepening with anger and frustration, having him — no, havinganyone— but still, him! The Prince of Darkness! He who lorded over these wild half-gods! — look tomefor instruction made my chest lift like there was an air balloon in it. For a moment I forgot to be afraid.
“You supervise the pipe-builders,” I said to Hades. “Go with them to… wherever they do the fabrication. Figure out how the process works and have them make as many pipes as possible. Maybe… two feet in diameter.” I held my arms out to demonstrate. “From outside edge to outside edge,notinside edge to inside edge, so that they fit in the shaft we dig. Okay?”
