Page 6 of The Catacomb King
My heart flared. My whole body locked into protecting my mom. In that moment, Calix could have been a stuffed animal for all I cared. He had frozen in place. I raced past him, almostknocking him over. I was already babbling to my mother in the low voice I used when she got like this: “Mom, Mommy, Mom, it’s okay. It’s okay.”
Her shrieking was growing louder. My panic was like fingernails on a chalkboard. I had to get her calm and comfortable,now. I had no time to cook the herbs I’d gathered this morning. I grabbed them from my basket and fed them to her raw, apologizing again and again for their bitterness. She didn’t seem to notice my apology; she recoiled from the herbs. When she tried to scratch me, I pinned her wrists as gently as I could with one hand and fed her with the other. Finally I coaxed the half-vial of water down her throat.
After a few minutes, she quieted.
Calix let out a breath. As if it was over. Ha! As if it would ever be over.
My mother’s eyelids flickered. She settled back onto the cot, coughing lightly. But she didn’t scream anymore, and she was no longer worried about Calix. She stared at me with glazed, incurious, childlike eyes.
I licked my lips. Hopelessly, I dampened a rag with saliva and wipe the blood and spittle from her lips. I tucked her into her place on the cot. I built up the fire. As if by doing all these little chores, I could undo her distress.
Finally, once my mother was pacified and snoozing, I rounded on Calix.
Calix already had his hands up. His face was white. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know — but Persephone — what did you give her?”
I didn’t answer. I was fuming. The herbs were nowhere near as powerful if you didn’t heat them first. That meant a whole basket, wasted. A whole six-hour midnight walk down the drain. I grabbed my now-empty basket and my notebook and made to push past him out the door.
But Calix grabbed my arm. “Persephone!”
“Fuck off. You know what I gave her.”
His grip tightened. “Tell me you haven’t been going to the underworld.”
“I haven’t,” I said stoutly. “I’ve been going into the fields ontopof the underworld.”
Calix’s eyes widened. He squeezed me so tight I thought he’d leave marks. Some dangerous part of me wanted him to. “At the quarter-century mark? Are you nuts?”
“Nuts? I amtrapped!” I screamed at him. “Look at her! I have no choice!”
But Calix was relentless. “You’re crazy. You shouldn’t even still be living in Limer. Haven’t you noticed? The population is half what it was a year ago. Anyone with any sense has left, at least temporarily, to stay in a neighboring village, or in Corcagia —”
“I wouldloveto go to Corcagia,” I hissed.
I waited, my heart in my throat, for him to say,Then come. Come with me.
But he didn’t. He just glowered. Eventually his hand slipped from my skin. I felt my arm gingerly. No bruises. No nothing. I slumped.
“I don’t like it,” Calix said. It was all he had to offer. “I’m worried the godlings will… take you.”
And crack my bones open. Suck my marrow out. “They’re not going to take me. I’ve been going there for three months.”
I thought he would have a heart attack. “Youwhat!”
“Shut up. If you don’t like it, then help me with my idea.”
He gestured at my empty basket. “If your idea is anything like this… gods, Persephone, you’re telling me you’ve been going to the underworld to gather edenica herbs… forthree months…”
He almost couldn’t get the words out, he was so sick at the thought. I felt a small stab of satisfaction. grinned at himmercilessly. “Oh, no. My idea is nothing like this. Trust me,” I said. “It’swayworse.”
The Border
We walked together to the underworld border.
Our village was the westernmost human settlement on the island of Iernia. If you walked west from Limer — as I did, regularly, against the advice of everybody alive — then you would reach the underworld border, followed by the lush land that carpeted the underworld. But fromthere, if you kept going — if you walked all the way across the underworld’s territory, that twisted, unknowable underground land, through which dark creatures skittered, emerging only every quarter-century to steal a woman to eat alive — then you would reach the very edge of the island.
The land ended at a vertical cliff. The cliff plunged a thousand feet ninety degrees down, straight into the Tourmaline Sea — except for one impossibly narrow overhang, which stretched over the water like a mile-long finger. The tip of the overhang touched an enormous mountain that erupted from the middle of the ocean.
We called that mountain the Primordial Mountain. When the sun set, it cast a shadow that extended over the entireunderworld. The top of the mountain was always wreathed in tornadoes and black clouds. Nobody knew what was up there.
