Page 92 of Inkpot Gods

“Just do it.”

“I’ll need my hand if I’m going to do that.”

Reluctantly, Kelpie releases her hand, pulling slowly back and stepping clear. Artemis watches her, then unslings her bow and draws an arrow, sliding it into place before turning to take aim at the opposite side of the room. She doesn’t cross the threshold, just pulls back the bowstring and releases her arrow into the air.

It flies straight and true for a full second before the vines whip to life around it, wrapping tight around the wooden shaft and jerking it to a halt. Several leaves fall to the floor, shredded, even as the vines tighten around the captured arrow, constricting it. Artemis lowers her bow.

“Huh,” she says. Then, turning to Kelpie: “How did you know?”

“Because this is the Up-and-Under, and it takes the help-kelp to travel between Earth and Water,” says Kelpie. “The etiäinen downstairs, that was standing in for the Bumble Bear. You could argue your way out of the fight if you just said the right things and didn’t look directly at the monster. Fairy-tale rules. I don’t think it was something innocent before it was forced to become something terrible, but Asphodel was both Queens, and she made her monsters well.” She looks down at her own bright orange hand, then balls it into a fist, nails biting into her palm. “Remarkably well.”

“Well, at least we know no one came this way.”

Kelpie turns to blink at her. Artemis waves her hand, indicating the floor, where only a few broken leaves mark the path of her arrow.

“If the vines had grabbed any of our people, there’d be a lot more mess. If they’d grabbed Roger, a lot more of them would be charred, and there would probably be a peach tree in here somewhere. Even Lily and Smita would have broken some vines before they went down. We know they left this room alone.”

“We keep moving,” says Kelpie.

“Yes,” agrees Artemis.

They don’t run up the next flight of stairs; they climb quickly and with purpose, and this time Artemis is the first to move toward the door, opening it to reveal the green room on the other side. “Now we know where the plants came from,” she says. “That’s a start.”

“I don’t know—oh, gods, Arty, look.” Kelpie gestures, not stepping into the room, but her voice shakes as she indicates the bones tangled among the roots. “It ate them. This room ate them.”

“Not our people,” says Artemis firmly. “Those bones are old. It ate the alchemists who used to work here. Not anyone we care about.”

Too late, she remembers that Kelpie may well have cared about these alchemists, may have called them her friends. But she’s not Dodger; she can’t take back her words once they’ve been spoken. They hang between them, free to do their damage, and she’s relieved when Kelpie only turns her face away, not answering her.

After a few frozen seconds, Kelpie says, “We need to keep going up. We need to find them and get out of here before something terrible happens. To the people we care about.”

“Kelpie, I didn’t—”

But it’s too late. The orange girl has turned and is heading back to the stairs. She’s moving slower now than she was before, but still more briskly than she normally does, climbing to the next level without hesitating or looking back. Artemis follows, resisting the urge to draw her bow again, to ready herself to fight against an enemy she can’t see and doesn’t fully understand. She’s a huntress, and more, she’s an embodiment of a natural force of the universe. She doesn’t have the freedom to act against what she was designed to be, not the way a true human would.

Because that’s the thing that people like Asphodel and Lilianne always miss. She gets to be a goddess, yes, gets to run the forests and travel the sky above the Impossible City. She gets to be a part of something bigger than herself. But she never got to decide that she was going to do any of those things. She didn’t even choose to occupy this body, the shell that once belonged to Annabelle Austin. That whole conversation was conducted between Anna and the moon, which was only the thinnest idea of Artemis while it was happening in the abstract. Once it was done, she manifested here, and now this is where she lives, and where she’ll always live, until the day she’s too slow or too careless and gets cut down, leaving her small fragment of the divine to return to the ruined hollows of Olympus and let Anna go on to whatever afterlife awaits her.

Most Lunars go to the Impossible City when they die, divinity and mortality remaining conjoined as both fragments enjoy their well-earned retirement. Given how much Anna has hated her on the few occasions when they’ve been forced to meet, she doesn’t expect that to happen for her.

All she can do in the here and now is follow Kelpie, follow the woman she’s come to love more than she would have believed possible after the amount of time she’s spent running the moonlit roads alone, and hope that they’re not racing toward their own destruction. The atmosphere in the lab was never comfortable; now, it’s becoming oppressive, pushing down harder and harder against her skin, reminding her with every step that she was never meant to be here.

Asphodel only ever viewed the Lunars as useful tools, when she viewed them at all. There are old rumors about her being responsible for several deaths among their kind, long before her inheritors would figure out how to use the broken bodies of the Moon to build their grand designs in unbreakable concrete. She isn’t a part of this plan, whatever that plan really is. Neither is Kelpie, or Judy, and that makes all three of them expendable—Kelpie maybe less than the other two, since she’s at least a cuckoo, and that means she belongs to Asphodel on some level—and expendable things get discarded when their usefulness is spent.

Kelpie does at least hesitate when she reaches the next landing, looking over her shoulder at Artemis. There’s a wild anxiety in her eyes, one that only intensifies as she turns and wrenches the door open, plunging through.

Artemis follows.

As she reminds the people around her on a painfully regular basis, Artemis is a hunter. She knows how to run and how to stalk, and she knows the smell of death. It permeates the forest, as omnipresent as the smell of life, but while the smell of life is green, bright, and growing, death is bruised purple-rot, thick and sludgy. Fresh blood is bright, torn between the two, but even that fades quickly into the decay of its inevitability.

The moment she steps into the space that was once the menagerie, the smell of death assaults her, so strong and immediate that it nearly eclipses the greater horror beneath it: the smell of life lingers here too. The space is alive. The ground turns soft beneath her feet, and she looks with revulsion down at the layer of skin and tissue covering the floor, tracing it up onto the walls and finally the ceiling.

Horror flooding her senses, she turns to Kelpie and asks, “What is this place?”

“The mosasaur,” says Kelpie quietly. “The belly of the great beast that carries them from water into air, where they can make the passage into fire. We’re moving through the layers of the Up-and-Under, and the story is laid out like a botanical walk. You have to go from one to the next, there’s no reaching the ending if you don’t. We started from the beginning and followed the opening chapters in the right order, and now we’re in the middle of the story.”

“Once you start things with ‘once upon a time,’ the only way out is through,” says Artemis wearily.

“Yes,” says Kelpie, nodding firmly.