Page 92 of The Catacomb King
Heat flared in my groin.
The deadboltk-chunked. I sprang away from Hades, and Elke opened the door and blinked at us both. Hades was curled in on himself like a boulder, his chest heaving with desire. I couldn’t believe Elke couldn’t practicallysmellit.
“Oh, good!” Elke said, surprised. “You got some ointment on him! But, Your Lordship, you need to bandage that.”
“Uh-huh. Well, bye.” I strode out of the room as quickly as I could. I heard Hades gasp just once, brokenly, as I shut the door behind me. The gasp was a stab in my stomach. It might have been a sob.
Pomegranate in hand, I went to Hades’s bedchamber.
I passed a few chaosgötten on the way. None of them spoke, but they bobbed their heads when they saw me. Were they… bowing at me? No. Surely not. Either way, I was glad to see that their bodies seemed healthier now that they had water. They were walking around instead of lying on the ground like shriveled beans.
I tried to tell myself that no matter how things went with my mother, at least I had done that.
But now that I was finally on my way to the Lake, I could no longer bring myself to care about such things. As long as Hades was okay and my mother was alive, nothing else seemed to matter.
In Hades’s room, I found a pouch with a strap and slung it around my waist like a belt. I put the pomegranate in it. I didn’t even stop to change my clothes.
I hoisted my mother over my shoulders, carpet and all, and set off for the throne room and the Lake.
Is She Here for You?
Immediately upon exiting the bedchamber, though, I noticed that the hallway had curled in on itself. It no longer ran the way I wanted it to, south and down. It was heading east and upward instead, toward the surface.
“Hey!” I said aloud, like an idiot. “Turn around!”
Was I making it up, or did the walls and floor judder slightly, as if they’d heard me?
I grumbled. Surely not. Surely the catacomb’s movements, inconvenient though they were, had to be random. This was the land of chaos, after all.
Well, I wasn’t going to be beaten by some stupid tunnels. I considered removing my boots in order to sense the movements of the floor more easily, but I didn’t really want to walk around barefoot with the hundred pounds of my mother on my back. I followed the catacomb’s slope for a little while, waiting for a fork. Nothing.
The catacomb kept leading me upward.
I stopped walking. Aloud again, I asked the catacomb, “Are you trying to get rid of me?”
Nothing. The jewels twinkled in the walls.
“Hey,” I said, “fuck you.”
Then something occurred to me. If I’d always navigated the underworld based on instinct and sense, rather than knowledge…
I closed my eyes.
I inched slowly, carefully, along the path. Feeling the vibrations of the catacomb’s floor through the soles of my boots, the soles of my feet.
I couldn’t be sure, but I thought it was working. I knew, instinctively, when I hit a fork in the road; there was a sort of opening-up sense under my feet. I took the right fork. And again, here, a fork up and down; I couldn’t go up, I didn’t have the spider-legs, but I would have picked the downward route anyway…
I tripped.
I knew before opening my eyes that my experiment hadn’t worked.
Instead of taking me to the Lake, the catacomb had led me to the invasion shaft that Calix’s men had dug.
I kicked the wall ferociously. “Now you listen here,” I started to hiss at the wall, like a crazy person. “I got Hades’s workers to dig a pipe-shaftright through youand I willdo it again. OPEN UP.”
The air eddied slightly.
I froze. Had it worked?
