Page 59 of The Catacomb King
Trying for hauteur and failing, I said shakily, “Should I also tell them I saved your sorry life?”
But Hades didn’t sneer at my quivering voice. “You won’t have to.” I couldn’t read his voice. “Walk.”
My ankle seared. But I braced myself against the shaft’s walls and slid down, onto the edge of the reservoir.
All eyes turned to me.
I was suddenly painfully aware of how sticky I was. Covered in Mackr’s green blood. My hair and eyelashes and eyebrow hairs stuck together in hideous, putrid clumps. I listed sideways on my bad ankle. My clothes were disgusting, clinging to my body, ripped to shreds, somehow damp and crusty at the same time.
I scrubbed dried blood out of my face, suddenly sure that I would cry. No. I set my jaw and instead gestured to Hades with a sarcastic flourish as he emerged from the pipe-shaft behind me. “Voilà,” I said. “Now. Where’s Mackr?”
No one said anything.
“Where is the son of a bitch?” I repeated.
Still nothing. Then, slowly, a few of the worker-godlings in front of the pack — spiderlike, all of them — shifted to the side. Out of my view of Mackr.
Who was lying on the ground, unmoving.
His head had split open the rest of the way. His human body, too, had cracked, almost down the middle. His limbs were situated at strange angles, like spider-legs; and where I could see his bones, they did not look like human bones. The bones looked like Elke’s carapace, black and shiny and hard.
“No,” I heard myself say. I found myself stumbling forward on my bad ankle, reaching for the body. I fell to a kneeling position beside Mackr. I shook him. “Mackr. Mackr, wake up.”
“He’s dead,” said one of the godlings who had moved out of the way.
“No, he’s not,” I said. “He’s just giving me a hard time.”
“Mütte,” the godling said to me, “he’s dead.”
Behind me, Hades bit out, “What did you just call her?”
A paralyzed silence.Mütte. That was what Elke had called me by accident.
The godling said, “That’s what Mackr called her.”
“Hewhat?”
“He said,Mütte tried to save me.Those were his last words.” And then he said, “I, I apologize for my presumption, Your Lordship. When he said it, we all thought, in the pipe-shaft —”
“You thought wrong. Don’t any of you forget she’s getting drowned in the Lake if she doesn’t get her fucking shit together.”
A silence. My spine was turning to ice.
Then one of them said, in a tone that I supposed only a people born of chaos would dare to use on their beloved Prince, “Doesn’t that make hermoreof a mütte?”
A flurry of gasps.
“Watch your mouth,” Hades snapped. “Anger not the Monarch.”
“He’s already pretty angry,” the godling said insolently, and he gestured at the pipeline and the rockslide.
I choked out, high-pitched, “What’s wrong with you people? Why are you fighting? Someone isdead!”
Everyone was quiet again.
I touched Mackr’s hideous broken face. I wished he had eyelids I could close. Anything I could do, as a sign of respect. I managed to ask, “Are you going to take him to the catacombs?”
“Um. Not yet. The body must be prepared first,” said the godling who’d called me by that strange name. He sounded surprised by the question, but he didn’t show his surprise on his face. He was so spiderlike, I wasn’t sure hecouldshow it.
