Page 86 of The Catacomb King
I couldn’t very well tell her about my mother. I was surprised she hadn’t noticed the scent of formaldehyde and rot. Perhaps spiders didn’t have a very good sense of smell.
“I just want to see him,” I said at last. “Not to rescue him. Just to confront him.” It was the best excuse I could think of.
Elke eyed me. “Are you going to kill him?”
I laughed. “You think very highly of me, don’t you?”
“We all do,” Elke said.
There was a silence.
I admitted, “I haven’t decided yet whether I’m going to kill him.”
Elke thought about that. “All right,” she allowed. “I will take you to him.” Then the look on her face shifted. It became something I’d never seen on her before, the sort of look I would have expected, a week ago, to see on every chaosgötter all the time: faintly amused, almost sly. “May I ask whether, while we are there, you would like to take a bath?”
“I beg your pardon,” I said with dignity. “No, I would not. I am going to yell at His Lordship, thank you very much, not to enjoy the spa.”
“I know, but you might as well, my lady. We have plenty of water now, thanks to you.”
I didn’t have time for a bath. There was going to be an invasion. I had to resurrect my mother.
“I’ll draw it for you,” she offered. “It will only take a few minutes.”
At that, I wavered. I was covered in the filth of my mother’s grave. Surely I could spare five minutes to wash it off.
“Fine,” I grumbled. Elke beamed. “But I want one more thing. A key to this room. I need somewhere I can feel safe.”
Without hesitation, Elke withdrew the key from her pocket and offered it to me. It was a black metal key with enormous teeth. It looked like it might eat me.
I tucked it into my corset. Elke, ever the devoted maidservant, gathered up the negligée so I’d have something to wear after I bathed. I thought about asking her to bringsomething else, but it was really the only option besides the threadbare dress.
Feeling a little uneasy and a little ridiculous — and a little excited, guiltily, at the thought of a real hot bath — and a little breathless, a little angry, at the thought of seeing Hades again — I locked my mother behind that metal door.
I went with Elke to the baths.
The Baths Chamber
We slunk along to what, I thought, was the lowest point in the underworld I’d ever been. It was even lower than the spot where Hades had shown me fishing. When I said this to Elke, she remarked, “You really do know your way around here, don’t you?”
“It’s not that hard. You just have to notice that the path is sloping downward.” Then I admitted, “But it’s harder in boots. There’s a kind of… I don’t know…sensethat you get from the catacombs, right? Like, an instinct about where they want to go? And it’s easier to tell in bare feet?”
Elke looked at me sideways. I thought she was going to tell me I was crazy. But she said, “We call that the will of the Monarch. Undirected, but ever-working.”
A chill went down my spine.
“Some of us,” she continued, “not me, but the King for example is said to be quite good at it, can redirect the tunnels by will. Get them to go where we want them to go. It is a subtle skill. But, yes. We are traveling very far down. The baths are saltwater baths; they draw their water from the sea.”
When we approached the baths chamber, I understood what she was talking about. The air was heavy and hazy with the smell of saltwater.
The baths chamber turned out to be many small chambers off a central hub. The design reminded me a little bit of the honeycomb graveyard. In the middle of the central chamber, which was foggy and low-ceilinged, a deep, vast saltwater pool was fed directly by rising ocean groundwater. The smaller chambers were the rooms with the baths, each with their own heavy, locking door.
Most of the smaller chambers were empty, their doors hanging ajar. I peeked into one as we passed. It was a plain dark room. Jewels glittered on the walls, made ghostly by the fog. In the middle of the room was an enormous footed tub of what looked to be cast metal. Next to the door were large buckets for gathering water from the pool, and a lit brazier for heating the water, and a bowl of pomegranates to snack on, and a fat bar of something green that smelled deliciously of camphor, which I decided had to be soap.
Sothiswas why the baths chamber was only used by the Royal Family. It was because it was so damnednice.
We reached a metal door like the one to Hades’s bedchamber, but shorter and squatter, built more for spiderlike chaosgötten than for humanoid ones. The door was much thicker than the bedchamber door, too. This door had two locks. One appeared to be the original lock. The other was a hastily welded-on deadbolt.
Elke unlocked the deadbolt. The original lock locked from the inside, and was open.
