Page 70 of The Catacomb King
And the answer was… better than expected.
It was obvious that at first, the chaosgötten had laid the pipe in the wrong direction, starting from the mouth at the reservoir, so that it had gotten in the way as they tried to work backwards. But blessedly, someone had come to their senses and they’d started over again from the rear end, closest to the waterfall. The seams in the pipe did not line up properly and some water would be lost between the cracks, but that could be fixed later. (Someone would have to figure out how to block the water flow while they did the repairs, though. Maybe they could use a gate system? No, what was I saying! I shook my head at myself, irritated. It wasn’t my job to worry about such things. I was going to be dead. Although… I did have some good ideas. Maybe I could mock up some diagrams before I was sacrificed. Just for their reference. And to make sure water got to my village.)
I kept climbing up the shaft. The chaosgötten working in the pipe nodded to me as I passed. A few of them even bowed. I emerged out the back, where the shaft opened to the cliffside.
The fierce white waterfall sprayed into my face.
Last time I’d been here, Hades had swung me around and kissed me. Moments before telling the Vizeking that he would drown me with his own hands.
But this time, I was alone, except for the dozens of chaosgötten scuttling up and down the vertical cliff-face as they built the suspended half-pipe out to the waterfall. Despite myself, I couldn’t help but be impressed.Thiswas the kind of work that godlings, with their spider-legs, were made for.
It would go a lot faster if they would spin webs. But I remembered what Hades had said about that sort of thing being private.
“You’re doing great!” I called out. I wasn’t sure they could hear me over the pounding waterfall, but one of them beamed at me around his spider-fangs. I sat down in the pipe, my feet dangling over the edge, and watched them work.
Just yesterday, I had looked at Mackr’s arachnid eyes and fangs and felt only horror. Now, I watched the chaosgötten and thought what a shame it was that chaosgötten and humans had never managed to work together before. The chaosgötten had powers we didn’t have: long lives, an incredible faculty of movement. And we had things they lacked, too: robust and expansive bodies of knowledge. A vast territory. Common sense.
I thought now that I had been onto more than I knew when I’d asked Calix to negotiate with the chaosgötten. If only he had done it. Perhaps we could have built a reservoir system that would have benefitted both peoples, and I wouldn’t have had to get sacrificed. Perhaps the partnership could have extended decades into the future. Centuries.
Or perhaps I was kidding myself because I didn’t want to die.
Either way, it was over. It was obvious that, against all odds, this pipeline would be hooked together within the day. I had done the impossible.
Time for my just reward.
I creaked to my feet. Balanced a moment at the edge of the cliff.
It occurred to me for the first time that I could jump.
I would still die. But I would die either way. And this way, I would have a clean death. No dark god would eat my soul.
The question was, if I denied him his sacrifice, would Hades still pipe water to Limer?
Until his conversation with the Vizeking, I would have said yes. Now, I was not so sure.
It was while I was teetering there, on the edge, that someone bellowed, “LOOK OUT! MÜTTE!”
I didn’t even have time to look up before a rock-solid torrent of water smashed into me.
It knocked me into the pipe. It slammed me against the pipe walls. It swept up chaosgötten on the way, all of us crashing into each other like marbles, the spiderlike chaosgötten’s strange bristly skin snatching pieces of my flesh and my dress. I was hurled like a dead rat into the reservoir; the water bashed down on me and I crawled to the reservoir edge and gasped for breath. Hades was already on me, pushing his people away, pressing his hands against my breastbone as if to push water out of my lungs. I slapped at him feebly. When I had crawled to dry land, soaking and muddy, the neckline of my strapless dress practically falling off me from the weight of the wet fabric, I turned around.
Water gushed into the reservoir.
I would have expected cheering. But to my surprise, except for the sputtering of the chaosgötten who’d been caught, like me, in the flood, everybody was silent. Stunned.
The first reaction came from Hades. “Monarch alive,” he whispered. “They did it.Youdid it.”
The chaosgötten had accessed the runoff from the Primordial Mountain. They had built something that really worked.
And they had done it ahead of a grueling, impossible three-day schedule.
I was about to die. So I was surprised to discover a new kind of wide warmth kindling in my chest. It was pride. It waswhat I’d felt when the pipe-shaft had broken through the cliff earlier, but this time, the feeling wasn’t for me — it was for the chaosgötten. For these disgusting, evil creatures I’d been taught to hate my entire life, whose very visages made my skin crawl. But even I, a scrawny little human who’d been kidnapped by their leader, had to admit they’d really pulled something off.
Hades, their Prince, was just gawking at the water. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought there were tears in his eyes.
“Who knew you were such a big softie,” I murmured at him, to stop the tears from pricking at my own eyes. Tears of pride for the work we’d done. Tears of terror for what was going to happen to me next.
Hades dashed a hand across his eyes. “I’m not. I’m extremely tough and frightening.”
