The Last King of Erebos

[Ascendancy]

Hades returned to Erebos through the Sovereign's Pyle, its conjunction opening into a guarded receiving court adjoining his palace. Access was reserved for the three brothers alone, though Poseidon had never made use of the privilege.

Before passing through, he examined the gateway's attunement with more care than usual. Everything appeared in order. The conjunction opened cleanly, its boundaries settling into their familiar configuration as he crossed the threshold into the underworld.

The warmth of Greece gave way to the dry chill of Erebos. He welcomed it after the brilliance of Olympus and the ceaseless activity of Hephaestus' workshops.

At the palace, he changed out of the lighter clothing he had worn on Olympus, glad to be rid of it. He had been away for much of the day, yet felt none of the fatigue that might ordinarily have accompanied so much travel. The nectar remained pleasantly at work within him, lending an effortless vitality he had almost forgotten how to appreciate. It was unfortunate that something so agreeable should have come from Zeus. Hades supposed his brother would be delighted to know the gift remained appreciated long after their conversation had ended.

There were matters awaiting his attention, but the conversation with Hephaestus had given him reason to seek Hecate before returning to his customary responsibilities.

He found her within the Mnemeion, where the histories and judgments of Erebos were preserved in countless folios whose inscriptions would never fade. The collection filled a succession of chambers containing treaties, inventories, judicial proceedings, and accounts of events both within and related to the kingdom. Since the beginning, Hades had insisted that original entries remain inviolate. New evidence might amend a conclusion, but it could never erase the record of how that conclusion had been reached.

Hecate was consulting an open folio when Hades approached. She finished the passage she was reading before looking up.

"My lord. I trust your visit went well."

"Well enough."

She set aside her stylus, regarding him with some curiosity.

"You seem remarkably refreshed, considering the journey."

"I assure you, it was not for lack of occupation."

Her gaze lingered upon him a moment longer. Hades suspected she recognized the effects of Zeus’ gift, though she was discreet enough not to inquire after its source.

"I spoke with Hephaestus afterward. There is something you should know."

He drew a chair beside her table.

"An Atharim mortal was apprehended at the Nekromanteion of Acheron. He had been examining the Pyle there, taking measurements with an unfamiliar instrument."

"Examining it for what purpose?" She asked, brows drawn.

"That remains uncertain. The man died before he could be properly questioned, but I recovered the instrument and brought it to Hephaestus. It contained part of an attunement ward of his manufacture, but it had been altered to observe disturbances in mageia rather than interrupt them."

"That is an unusual application."

"He believes it might reveal how a technema responds to interference, though its usefulness would depend upon the knowledge of whoever interpreted the measurements."

"Then the mortal may have been gathering information for someone else."

"That is my suspicion as well. Hephaestus identified a mortal craftsman whose work appears in the instrument's original design, and his current whereabouts are uncertain. I've set Morpheus to find him.”

Hecate considered the information, then drew one of her folios closer.

"That makes what I've found rather more interesting."

Hades recognized the script upon the folio, and gestured that she continue.

"I've been tracing the weapons employed against gods during the wars. Particularly those capable of interfering with our command of Dynamis. Several accounts describe effects similar to the one present at Enodia’s death.”

She indicated a passage near the middle of the folio.

"Do you remember this battle?”

Hades examined the inscription. He remembered the engagement well enough, though his recollection concerned defeating the opposition rather than the particular testimony before him. A number of gods had fallen during the campaign, among them a goddess whose death had been attributed to an unfamiliar weapon.

"Yes, great losses. We believed the Titans leveraged several of those suppressive weapons."

”A witness’s testimony said the goddess remained conscious and capable of reaching Dynamis, but could not sustain any workings of mageia. Her assailants then killed her with ordinary weapons."

He read the passage.

The account was consistent with what he remembered. Such weapons had been rare, but their appearance on a battlefield could alter the course of an engagement. Hades had seen gods of considerable strength rendered helpless before enemies they might otherwise have destroyed. Precautions had been taken whenever their presence was suspected, although such precautions were not always successful. Even now, the recollection stirred an old defiance in him. He had despised the notion that something so small could render all his immense strength and skill utterly useless.

"Have you found anything regarding their construction?"

"Very little. The descriptions concern their effects, not their mechanisms. One witness reported that the weapon had to remain near its victim. Another described a god recovering control of Dynamis once his attackers withdrew."

The effects were familiar, and not solely because of his experiences during the wars.

He remembered with some satisfaction the first time he had watched a Titan struggle against the restraints of Tartarus. Their divine power had been there, immense enough to shatter mountains, yet the prisoner could accomplish nothing with it. The bindings did not sever the Titan's connection to Dynamis; that would have defeated the purpose of preserving the prisoner alive. Instead, every attempt to direct that power against the confinement met resistance that intensified with the effort. Hades had watched the response carefully, testing its limits before he was satisfied that the restraint could endure.

It had required years of work to adapt the old mechanisms to prisoners whose strength and abilities varied enormously. Every confinement possessed protections suited to its occupant, independent of the others. Nyx had been indispensable to their design, particularly where the restraints concerned matters beyond even Hades' considerable expertise.

The precise operation of those cells remained among the most closely guarded secrets of his kingdom. He had never disclosed the full particulars to Zeus or Poseidon, much less to anyone within his own household. Even Persephone knew little of their construction. There was no reason for anyone beyond himself and Nyx to possess such knowledge.

Yet the accounts before him described something disturbingly familiar. Whatever principles governed these weapons, their effects resembled those of the restraints within Tartarus, albeit on a much smaller scale.

"Does something trouble you, my lord?"

Hades looked up from the folio.

"I was remembering how difficult those weapons were to counter. We never established how they accomplished what they did. It was safer for all of us that they were destroyed after the war. The ones we possessed, anyway."

The three brothers had agreed to their destruction as part of the Covenant that divided the world. It was a concession Zeus and Poseidon had been willing to make once Hades was bound to its terms. None of them would thereafter possess a weapon capable of rendering the others defenseless. It had been a sensible precaution. Hades would have found it considerably more agreeable had the brothers shown the same concern for fairness during their earlier negotiations.

"I've identified references to eight weapons, although several accounts may describe the same object. Some were recovered after the war, but their subsequent histories are difficult to establish."

Hades examined the entries. Whatever had become of the weapons surrendered after the Titanomachy, there was no guarantee that every example had been recovered. Nor could he completely dismiss the possibility that others had been fashioned since.

"Until we can establish otherwise, we should assume at least one remains."

"And that it may have found its way into mortal hands."

"Perhaps. But I am more concerned with what those mortals might have done with it."

Hecate considered him for a moment.

"The instrument Hephaestus examined."

"Precisely. Someone can alter divine technemata for purposes their makers never intended. We do not know whether the weapon used against Enodia was an original, something fashioned from one, or something else drawing inspiration from these stories. Nor do we know what other modifications may have been attempted."

Hecate responded thoughtfully. "The originals were dangerous enough."

He returned his attention to the folios.

"Continue tracing the weapons. Particularly their known limitations. Whatever survived may tell us something of what we now face."

"I shall."

Hecate had begun gathering the folios when a figure appeared in the entrance to the chamber.

It was one of the Keres.

The creature stood motionless beneath her dark robes, a porcelain mask concealing the shadowed absence of a face. Three crescents adorned its brow, worked in the intricate patterns by which the daughters of Nyx distinguished themselves. Hades recognized the design. This one was seldom seen within the palace, and never without good cause.

She inclined her head.

"My king. There has been a disturbance."

Hades regarded her. "What manner of disturbance?"

"An alignment where none was permitted. It was corrected. Others followed."

"How many?"

"Four conjunctions failed. A fifth remains open."

Hades rose. The old labyrinth possessed passages whose positions shifted according to arrangements established long before he discovered the prison in the first place. Such movements were expected. Sustained conjunctions were not, particularly along routes he had personally rendered impassable centuries before.

He knew those passages as thoroughly as any man could know the workings of his own creation. For generations, their arrangements had answered to his designs, each alteration carefully calculated and secured against interference. That a conjunction should remain open without his authorization was sufficiently troubling. That it should have been preceded by four unsuccessful attempts suggested something considerably worse.

Someone was learning.

"Has anything passed through?"

"That is not known."

Hades considered the answer. The Ker's presence was itself sufficient evidence of the disturbance's significance. Her sisters rarely troubled him with irregularities that the safeguards could resolve unaided.

"Inform your mistress I am coming."

The Ker bowed and withdrew into the shadows, vanishing from sight.

Across the table, Hecate had risen to her feet. Her attention remained upon the place where the messenger had stood, and the concern in her expression had displaced the scholarly interest of moments before.

Hades departed without further explanation. Behind him came the hurried sounds of folios being closed and gathered. Hecate's footsteps followed his into the corridor before turning toward another part of the palace.

He was already pulling Dynamis into himself when he reached the Mnemeion's exit. Tartarus was the greatest charge of his existence. Whoever had dared interfere with its defenses was about to learn why the Titans remained his prisoners.

[Ascendancy]

The passage Hades opened from the palace delivered him into a chamber of black stone, where the air was cold enough to sting the lungs. He stepped between the columns and the conjunction closed behind him, leaving only the empty space between its pillars.

A Ker waited. Her porcelain mask bore the three crescents of Nyx, their arrangement matching that of the one who had come to the Mnemeion. She inclined her head silently as he approached, then turned to lead him onward.

Hades followed without speaking. The labyrinth surrounding Tartarus extended far beyond the portions he had adapted for the confinement of the Titans. Its original builders, whomever they were, had left behind an extraordinary arrangement of tunnels, chambers, moving fortifications, and mechanisms whose purposes were not always apparent. The Pylai Hades had subsequently installed made the approach more difficult still. A traveler might find a perfectly functioning pair, pass safely through its conjunction, and emerge somewhere from which no passage led onward. Others could not be activated at all. Some required sequences known only to those entrusted with their operation.

He had taken particular satisfaction in making the route toward Tartarus all but impossible to navigate without his permission. Now someone was trying.

The Ker led him to a gallery overlooking the labyrinth. Its passages stretched away beneath them in immense terraces of rough stone, interrupted by gulfs and towering walls whose upper reaches disappeared into darkness. Here and there, a distant light illuminated the face of a column or the edge of a platform, revealing fragments of architecture otherwise concealed by shadow. Some belonged to the systems Hades had installed; others were remnants of the original prison, still functioning after eons of neglect. Farther still, the labyrinth continued into depths that no eye could follow.

A wind moved through the depths below, rising and falling in long, uneven breaths. An occasional gust reached their gallery, cool against his face and strong enough to stir the folds of his coat. Somewhere in the ancient passages, wind storms would be making their eternal circuits. Their courses varied with the shifting architecture, sometimes little more than a restless stirring of air and at others gathering into a violence capable of scouring the passages clean. Hades had never found reason to interfere with it.


Nyx waited near the gallery's edge.

She wore darkness as naturally as another goddess might wear silk, her figure discernible against the stone less by the light surrounding her than by the absence of it. Hades had known her for centuries without ever becoming entirely accustomed to her presence. There was something about a goddess that predated the Titans that made ordinary measures of age and authority seem inadequate. Zeus had once shown a healthy reluctance to provoke her. Hades had found cooperation considerably more rewarding.

Nyx regarded him with mild curiosity, the uncertain light tracing her high cheekbones and the fine angles of her face. Her dark hair was drawn away from her face, emphasizing the severe beauty of features that centuries of familiarity had rendered no less striking.

"Your daughter said there have been four unauthorized alignments."

"Four were attempted. The fifth remains open."

"Where?"

Nyx gestured toward a distant region of the labyrinth, where the immense walls descended through successive levels before disappearing into darkness. Hades knew the Pyle she meant, though it lay far beyond their sight.

"The first attempts failed almost immediately. Each endured a little longer than the last."

There was a note of genuine interest in her voice. Hades did not share it.

"I shall close it."

"I expect you shall."

Nyx's attention returned to the labyrinth. He inclined his head and departed, and she made no move to accompany him.

The route beyond the gallery descended through a series of passages built into the walls of the gulf. Hades knew them well enough to proceed without consulting their markers, though he paid close attention to the movements of the surrounding stone. Sections of the labyrinth shifted often. A passage that stood open at one hour might be concealed at the next, and a stairway might withdraw into the wall while a traveler was still upon it.

He passed through an arch as the corridor behind him began to turn. Heavy masonry moved with the rough grind of stone over stone, closing the opening through which he had come. Hades continued, untroubled by the movement. Another route would become available farther ahead.

Something disturbed the upper edge of the wall. He instantly stopped.

A dark shape stirred within the fissure, then a long, sharply tapered limb eased into view, nearly the length of a man's forearm. It swept slowly from side to side, probing the darkness beyond the opening. Behind it, something armored began to emerge, its flattened body sliding over the masonry as overlapping plates separated and settled into place. A Skelith. Hundreds of narrow legs found purchase against the wall as the creature drew its immense length from a crevice scarcely wide enough to admit a man's hand. Its armor was mottled in irregular shades of black and gray, so nearly matched to the surrounding rock that its outline vanished whenever it became still.

Hades carefully stepped into the shelter of a recessed doorway.

He had encountered Skelith before. No one knew how long they had inhabited the labyrinth, or whether their ancestors had been present when its original builders first occupied the place. They possessed no Dynamis, but their strength, armor, and remarkable ability to exploit the shifting architecture made them formidable predators. They remembered the movements of the passages, anticipated where prey might be trapped, and could remain motionless for hours against the stone.

This one was large enough that killing it would require some effort. More importantly, the disturbance would likely attract others. Skelith were sensitive to the smell of blood and an injured specimen could bring several of its kind out of hiding.

Hades waited for it to pass.

It paused near the opposite wall, flattened itself until it seemed impossibly thin, then vanished over the upper edge.

Only when the faint rasp of its movement had ceased did Hades continue.

He advanced through a succession of narrow passages until he reached an opening whose ceiling disappeared into darkness. Several scattered Pylai occupied the floor at irregular intervals, their columns rising from separate platforms connected by short stairways. Some had been abandoned when Hades constructed the final defenses. Others remained functional but offered destinations of little use to anyone attempting to escape.

Two mortals stood near one of the dormant pairs. They wore dark, close-fitting garments of durable woven fabric, reinforced at the seams and joints, with short, fitted jackets secured at the waist. Narrow pockets and straps kept their equipment close to their bodies, while soft-soled boots suggested an effort to move quietly. One studied a slender technema while the other examined the Pyle columns.

So mortals had succeeded in opening a conjunction after all.

Between the columns, the conjunction stood open. Hades studied it for a moment, searching for some sign of how the mortals had accomplished the impossible. Everything appeared as it should, save that the passage existed at all. He had taken considerable care to ensure that it could not.

The men spoke quietly. Their movements were efficient and practiced. They appeared accustomed to working together, and neither showed any particular concern at the movements of the surrounding walls. Evidently they had encountered enough of the labyrinth to regard its changes as ordinary hazards. That suited him.

He could have killed them where they stood. A sufficient exertion of Dynamis would have crushed the technemata, collapsed the conjunction, and left little of either mortal worth examining. But he needed one of these men alive. Preferably both.

He studied their positions and the passages surrounding them. The man with the smaller technema stood nearest the active conjunction. His companion had moved several paces away to examine an adjoining platform. Beyond that platform lay a dormant Pyle whose paired destination Hades knew intimately.

It would serve.

Hades drew upon Dynamis, directing it into the sleeping columns. The response was immediate, and a stable opening appeared. Its destination remained precisely where it had always been, but nothing in the chamber indicated who had initiated the connection. Both mortals turned toward it.

One of the men approached the newly opened conjunction, studying the Pyle with the technema. He called something to his companion, who remained beside their original, then gestured for him to join him.

Hades allowed them a moment before drawing upon Dynamis and setting a nearby wall in motion.

A great section of stone began sliding out from the side of the chamber, advancing slowly across the open space between the two platforms. The mortals glanced toward it without alarm. The labyrinth had rearranged itself around them before, and neither appeared particularly troubled by another movement of its walls.

The man beside the newly opened Pyle stepped away from the advancing stone, leaving his companion on the opposite side. Only when the partition passed the midpoint of the chamber did he seem to realize that it would cut them off entirely. He called out, gesturing for the other man to come around.

His companion hurried toward him, but the space between the moving wall and the opposite masonry was narrowing rapidly. He approached the gap, hesitated at the tremendous weight of stone sliding toward him, then retreated.

The two men shouted to one another across the remaining opening. Before either could find another way through, the partition met the opposite wall with a deep, reverberating impact.

Hades watched from concealment as the nearer mortal approached the new obstruction, calling to his companion through the stone. This one presented little immediate difficulty. He remained beside the Pyle through which they had entered, and Hades knew every passage leading away from it.

The other was a different matter. The newly opened conjunction lay on his side of the partition, offering him a route into a completely different region of the labyrinth. If the man ventured through it, he might be lost before Hades could reach him.

Hades withdrew from his vantage point and entered a narrow corridor behind him. The passage descended through several turns before reaching a stairway that appeared to end against solid stone. He continued without hesitation, slipping through an opening in the masonry that revealed itself only briefly as the surrounding walls changed position.

Beyond it, a gallery overlooked an immense gulf. Far below, a pair of columns stood upon a narrow platform, their pale surfaces barely distinguishable in the gloom. Hades descended to them and drew upon Dynamis, opening the conjunction. He passed between the columns and emerged elsewhere in the labyrinth, behind the great partition that had separated the intruders.

He closed the conjunction and continued through a passage concealed among the surrounding walls. The route was one of countless shortcuts he had preserved when adapting the labyrinth to his purposes, inaccessible to anyone who did not know precisely where to look.

Ahead, a voice echoed faintly through the stone. The mortal was calling for his companion again, and Hades quickened his pace. He reached a narrow recess overlooking the isolated platform and found the man standing beside the open Pyle, his apparatus hanging at his side.

The mortal called once more, listened, then turned toward the conjunction. A faint scraping sound came from the chamber beyond the columns. He raised his apparatus and approached the opening, peering into the darkness on the other side.

Hades knew that sound.

He had intended to take both men alive. Their accounts could be compared, and each might possess knowledge the other lacked. The mortal was within easy reach, and there were ample ways to subdue him before he could resist.

Another faint scrape reached him from beyond the Pyle.

The man leaned closer, apparently trying to determine what had moved within the chamber. Hades watched him for a moment, struck by the peculiar confidence of someone who had penetrated the defenses of Tartarus and still believed its mysteries could be uncovered through patient examination. He had entered a place forbidden to him, tampered with protections laid down over centuries, and now stood on the threshold of a danger he could scarcely imagine.

Hades considered the man a moment longer. He could take him alive, certainly. But the mortal had come to Tartarus seeking its secrets, and Hades found himself disinclined to deny him this particular discovery. He stepped out of concealment and crossed the distance without a sound.


The man became aware of him only when Hades seized a fistful of his jacket between the shoulders. He cried out and twisted, attempting to see his attacker, but Hades drove him toward the columns before he could turn. His free hand caught the man's wrist, wrenching his arm aside as he struggled to regain his footing.

A narrow edge of mageia opened the skin along the man's forearm. Blood began to run down his fingers. He cried out as Hades shoved him through the conjunction.

The mortal stumbled into the darkness and fell heavily to one hip. His apparatus struck the stone beside him, scattering several small components. He scrambled upright, clutching his bleeding arm, looked around the unfamiliar chamber, and turned back toward the gateway.

Hades stood on the other side. Recognition spread across the man's face.

"You came to learn about the Underworld. Then learn."

The mortal stared at him, bewildered. Then something struck him from behind.

An enormous shape lifted from the darkness against the wall, its armored body unfolding in a violent rush of articulated legs. It came over him before he could turn, driving him face-first into the stone. A scream tore from his throat as the creature's limbs closed around his body, their hooked ends finding purchase in his clothing and flesh.

The Skelith dragged him backward with astonishing speed. He clawed at the floor, his arms and legs scraping uselessly against the stone as the creature hauled him toward a narrow fissure. His cries grew frantic when its flattened body began forcing itself into the opening, taking him with it.

Hades watched the struggle, then let his gaze travel beyond it. The surrounding darkness was moving as the walls came alive.

Overlapping ridges along the walls began separating from the masonry. Armored segments lifted, revealing hundreds of narrow legs beneath them. Skelith uncoiled along the ceiling, their immense bodies emerging into the light. Farther back, still more shapes stirred among the stone.

The mortal's screams continued from somewhere within the fissure, growing muffled as the creature dragged him deeper into the bedrock. The others were already converging upon the disturbance, following their meal.

Hades closed the conjunction. The cries ended abruptly, leaving the empty space between the columns. He regarded the silent Pyle for a moment, then wiped the blood from his fingers.

He turned toward the adjoining passage.

He still required a living prisoner.

He hurried back the way he had come. The route soon delivered him to his original vantage point overlooking the chamber where he had first discovered the intruders, and the surviving mortal was still there.

He had abandoned his measurements and was examining the partition that had separated him from his companion. He pressed his hands against the stone, searching for some indication of movement, then leaned close enough to place his ear against it. Twice he called out. When no answer came, he struck the wall with the heel of his hand and shouted again.

At last he stepped away and surveyed the remaining exits as if weighing his options. His attention settled upon a narrow passage. He hesitated as though choosing at random, looked back once more, and entered it.

Hades followed.

The corridor descended through a succession of turns, its walls broken by recesses deep enough to conceal a person. The mortal stopped frequently, listening at intersections and examining passages before committing himself to them. At one he called his companion's name. The echoes returned it several times, each repetition fainter and less distinct than the last.

Hades remained beyond his sight.

He needed the man alive, and that required some care. The Atharim at the Nekromanteion had managed to poison himself before they could stop it. This one likely carried the same precaution, and a sudden confrontation would give him precisely the opportunity Hades wished to deny.

Beyond the next bend, the corridor ended at a massive stone doorway. The mortal stood before it, examining the seam between its panels. He braced one shoulder against the door and pushed, but it refused to move. He tried again, then stepped back and searched the surrounding masonry for some means of opening it.

Hades watched from a recess twenty-five paces behind him. Folds of mageia deepened the shadows around his position, obscuring the outline of his figure without disturbing the light elsewhere in the passage. From here he could see the mortal clearly enough, and the narrow corridor offered few places for the man to conceal his movements.

A low roar traveled through the corridor behind him.

Hades turned his head. The sound was distant but unmistakable, a continuous thunder that seemed to come from somewhere deep within the labyrinth. He felt its approach through the floor before the first movement of air touched his neck.

The Black Breath of Tartarus.

Ahead, the mortal paused beside the sealed doorway. He had heard it too, though he appeared uncertain of its source.

Hades knew better. The corridor was narrow, the door impassable, and the roar was growing louder. Of all the passages the fool might have chosen, he had managed to find one with no escape from the approaching Breath. Hades felt a sharp irritation at the prospect of losing another prisoner before a single useful answer could be obtained. He abandoned his concealment and ran.

The first gust struck his back before he had covered half the distance, driving his coat against his legs and lifting dust from the floor. Ahead, the mortal turned toward the sound. He had scarcely raised an arm before the wind slammed him against the doorway.

The roar gathered strength with astonishing speed. Hades drew mageia around himself as he ran, forcing the worst of the current aside. Grit streamed past him in furious sheets, and fragments of loose masonry rattled along the stone. A jagged piece struck his protection near the shoulder and shattered in a spray. He could divert the Black Breath into the deeper passages, but not before it overtook the mortal. For now, he needed only to reach him.

The mortal crouched against the door, his arms locked over his head. His clothing snapped violently around his body, and blood ran from a cut above his brow.

Hades was nearly upon him when a spray of gravel burst down from above. He swept it aside with Dynamis, scattering the fragments against the opposite wall, and reached the doorway as the wind rose to a deafening pitch.

He spread his protection around them both.

The man sagged against the stone. His face remained buried beneath his arms, and he seemed unaware that anyone had reached him. Hades stood between him and the corridor, holding the rushing debris at bay while the Black Breath gathered around them. Then the roar diminished.

The change came so suddenly that Hades heard the faint patter of dust settling upon his coat. The wind slackened, the loose fabric at his knees fell still, and the corridor emerged from the darkness in fragments as the airborne grit began to clear. The eye of the breath had reached them. Hades knew its passage would be brief; a few seconds at most. The Black Breath gathered into vast churning currents, and this pocket of calm would last only until its opposite side swept overhead.

Behind him, the mortal lowered his arms. He was gasping, his face streaked with dust and blood, his eyes streaming from the grit that filled his eyes. He tried to draw a deeper breath, coughed, and wiped his mouth with a trembling hand. Only then did he seem to notice someone was standing between him and the corridor.

Hades paid him little immediate attention. The brief calm was already passing, and he felt the Black Breath gathering beyond it, the great turning wind swept back toward the doorway with a violence far greater than before. The first grains of dust began to rise from the floor. He spread his arms and drew upon Dynamis, preparing to meet its return.

Wind struck the corridor with such force that the stone trembled beneath his feet. Hades divided the oncoming current, sending half tearing along the wall to his left and the other half to his right. Between them he preserved a narrow refuge extending back to the doorway, where the mortal remained crouched against the stone. Dust and gravel streamed past on either side, and fragments of masonry shattered against the walls as the Black Breath hurled them through the passage.

He held his ground. The currents pressed against his control, their combined force sufficient to scour flesh from bone. He widened their separation, forcing the violent streams farther apart even as the pressure built around him. A jagged fragment of stone came hurtling through the darkness. Without disturbing his hold upon the wind, Hades caught it with splintered focus mageia and sent it spinning harmlessly into the passing current.

Then his ears began to ache. The pain settled behind his eyes and deep within his skull. He attempted to inhale and found the air strangely inadequate. His lungs expanded, but there was scarcely enough pressure to draw breath. Moisture gathered at the corners of his eyes, and a sharp sting beneath his nose made him wonder whether it had begun to bleed. He resisted the impulse to touch his face.

Behind him, the mortal's weight shifted against the protection Hades had extended around them. He glanced over his shoulder and found the man on his knees, one hand clutching his throat while the other tore at his collar. His mouth opened in desperate attempts to breathe, but no air seemed to enter his lungs.

Hades understood his error at once. In diverting the wind, he had deprived their refuge of the pressure needed to sustain a breath. An oversight, and one that would shortly cost him the only living witness to the intrusion. His irritation sharpened into alarm. He turned back toward the storm and reached for the air gathering in the adjoining passages.

He extended another exertion of Dynamis into a neighboring passage, gathering a volume of air and enclosing it around them. With it, the pressure rose. His ears cleared with a painful release, and he drew a deep, satisfying breath. A glance confirmed the man behind him could breathe.

Hades felt a measure of satisfaction. He had been obliged to save an intruder from the very defenses intended to destroy him. The irony might have amused him more had the circumstances been less inconvenient. At least the man was breathing.

On either side of their refuge, the Black Breath still raged, its immense currents pressing against the narrow space he had preserved. Hades reached into the labyrinth's depths, finding the familiar passages through which he had so often directed their violence. He had no intention of extinguishing the Breath. It had served him faithfully for centuries, and would again.

He began turning its course, guiding the separate currents away from the corridor. The task should have demanded considerable concentration, particularly while maintaining the air around his prisoner. Yet Dynamis answered with an abundance that made each adjustment almost effortless. He found he could manage the immense forces with a delicacy ordinarily reserved for far lesser endeavors, separating one current from another without diminishing his hold upon either.

The discovery pleased him. A smile touched his face as he drew more deeply into his divine power, savoring the precision with which the Black Breath yielded to his command.

He spread his arms farther, and the divided torrents swept away through the adjoining passages. The roar receded into the depths, leaving only scattered grit drifting through the corridor. Small stones rattled against the floor and settled.

Hades maintained their refuge until the air had recovered, then released his hold upon it.

Silence settled.

He lowered his arms. His coat was disheveled and coated with pale dust, the wind having torn his hair from its customary order. His eyes still watered, and the sharp sting in his sinuses lingered. He wiped his face with the back of one hand, satisfied to find no trace of blood. Then he turned.

The mortal remained on his knees against the doorway. He slowly looked up at Hades with an expression of stunned gratitude, apparently unable to comprehend how he had survived. The expression lasted only a moment. Recognition came slowly, then all at once. His eyes widened. He recoiled against the stone, the relief draining from his face as he understood who stood before him.

Hades regarded him with mild amusement. A moment ago the mortal had looked upon him as a deliverer. Now he recoiled as though the Black Breath itself had returned. Hades supposed the change was understandable, though it seemed a poor acknowledgment of the trouble he had taken to preserve his life.

"Killing your companion may have been rash," Hades said, voice cold. "I shall exercise better judgment with you." 

Hades closed the distance in an instant, seizing the mortal by the jaw and forcing his head back against the doorway. The man struggled, throwing his weight against Hades and reaching for his arm, but the god scarcely yielded. Lashes of mageia sprang from around him, catching the mortal's wrists and drawing them against the stone. Another secured his shoulders, leaving him straining uselessly against the restraints.

Hades caught the movement of something small pressing against the inside of the man's cheek. He tightened his grip upon the mortal's jaw, forcing his mouth open before his teeth could meet.

"I have seen that trick before." 

The man struggled to close his mouth, but Hades held him fast. With considerable distaste, he inserted two fingers between the mortal's teeth and hooked the small pellet from his cheek. The unpleasant warmth of the man's saliva against his skin only deepened his disgust. He withdrew his hand, holding the pellet between his fingertips as though it were something particularly foul.

Hades examined the pellet. The man's resistance faltered at the sight of it, his breathing still ragged from the ordeal. Only then did Hades loosen his grip and withdraw his hand. The lashes of mageia remained, holding the prisoner securely against the doorway.

”You and I will speak again,” Hades said. A faint movement sounded behind him. He did not turn. The soft approach was familiar, and he had sensed her presence before she emerged from the darkness.

The Ker came forward without announcement, her porcelain mask pale against the black of her robes. Hades extended the pellet toward her, and she accepted it between two gloved fingers, examining it briefly before concealing it within her garments.

The prisoner watched the exchange. His eyes followed the Ker as she approached, and what little composure he had recovered began to desert him.

"Keep him alive enough to talk."

The Ker inclined her head. At a gesture from Hades, the lashes of mageia released the mortal into her custody.

Hades watched them disappear into the darkness. He brushed the last of the dust from his sleeve and turned toward the deeper labyrinth. There was still a conjunction to close, and the approaches to Tartarus required further examination.

[Ascendancy]

Chapter 5
Even Here

The Pyle opened onto what had once been the lowest chamber of a temple. Its walls were pale limestone, softened by centuries of damp, and the air that met Hades carried what Erebos never did: wet earth, green rot, and the faint warmth of a sun somewhere overhead. A narrow staircase climbed toward the mortal world and vanished around a bend where roots had forced their way between the stones. Somewhere above, water dripped with the irregular persistence of a spring finding its way underground.

Acharaca. He knew it before he had drawn a full breath. The Carians had once carried their sick down these steps to sleep near his threshold and dream their cures. They had stopped coming generations ago.

He had expected to find evidence of the Atharim’s preparations. The chamber held almost nothing. Dust lay thick in the corners, but across the floor it had been scuffed and swept and trampled. Someone had occupied this place recently, and had taken pains to leave nothing behind.

Hades studied the marks without touching them. Footprints crossed and recrossed the dust, far more than two men could have made. Others, then, though how many the floor would not say. Faint rectangles showed where crates had rested. A dark stain marked where a lamp had burned for days. Whoever had organized this had held a position here, watched the Pyle, sent their two men down into the labyrinth, and withdrawn before anyone might return. Their discipline irritated him almost more than their trespass.

He climbed the staircase. Near the top, roots had pried the steps apart, and the light warmed from grey to gold. The upper entrance lay hidden beneath the fallen stones of a shrine, its columns toppled, its altar split by a sapling that had rooted in the crack.

He knew this shrine as well. Mortals had raised it the year he wed Persephone. He remembered the garlands, and the smoke of the offerings rising through the earth, and how she had laughed to find that the Carians had carved her face kinder than his.

Now goats grazed among its stones, and the trespassers had walked over its ruin to reach his door. He stood there longer than he intended. Then he descended.

The Pyle waited at the foot of the stair, darkness folded between its pylons. Only when he faced it to return home did he see what they had left for him.

Cut into the inner face of the lintel, where nothing emerging from Erebos would ever look, a serpent devoured its own tail. It was not a Hellene sign. The cuts were deep and clean, their edges not yet softened by the damp. Beneath the serpent, in the same unhurried hand:

EVEN HERE

Hades regarded the inscription for a long time.

Two mortals had crept into the approaches of Tartarus. One now belonged to its inhabitants and the other to him. That was not victory. It was trespass, and it had been paid for. Yet someone had carved this before the two men descended, before anyone could know whether they would return, on the chance that a god would follow them up the passage and turn to go home.

The presumption was almost laughable.

Almost. The serpent had no beginning and no end. Whoever had chosen it had not chosen it for him to understand, and that, more than the words, stayed with him.

He did not touch it.

He crossed back into his kingdom, and the air of the labyrinth closed over him like deep water. Then he turned to face the gate. It had stood since before the first priest of Acharaca was born. He did not close it.

Dynamis rose through him and into the stone. The lintel cracked first, splitting the serpent through its coils. The pylons followed, breaking along their length and coming down in a roar of dust that rolled up the staircase and out into the mortal air. When the echoes settled beneath the earth, there was no longer a door at Acharaca. There was only rubble at the foot of the stair, and above it a shrine to his marriage, open to the sky, for whoever came back expecting an answer.

***

Two days after the intrusion, the prisoner had told the Keres everything, and everything amounted to almost nothing.

Hades turned a piece of bread between his fingers. Names. Artifacts. Instructions to enter the Pyle, study their destination, and continue until further movement became impossible. There had been no provision for his return. He did not know how many others were involved, nor what the artifacts were meant to do. The Keres had found no deception in him, and that troubled Hades more than any lie would have. The Atharim had sent men down knowing they would not come back. Those willing to spend lives so cheaply would spend more.

He had set aside the regalia of the throne hours ago and wore only a tunic of black wool. The small key he habitually wore lay on the table beside his cup. It was osmium, blue-grey and heavier than any metal its size had a right to be. He had drawn the ore from the roots of a mountain himself, before there were mortals to name it.

He had managed perhaps three mouthfuls of food when the knock came. Before he could answer, Minos was inside.

The Judge still wore the bronze-bordered robes of his office, as though he had risen from his seat and walked straight here, and he had come without attendants. In all the time Hades had known him, Minos had never left Mourning without sending word ahead.

Hades set the bread down.

"Minos. I take it something requires my attention."

"My lord. I would not have come were the matter less pressing." The Judge bowed. "There has been a collapse at the baetylus mines near Aleyonian Lake. One of the galleries ruptured into a natural fissure beneath the mountain. Seven workers are dead. The adjoining passages would have come down on the rest had a condemned god not held them."

Seven. Hades let the number settle before he spoke.

"Held them how?"

"With Dynamis. Against the warden's express orders."

"And the oath?"

"Has answered. He is Afflicted."

Hades knew what that meant. The oath had done precisely what it was designed to do. A condemned god who could disregard a prohibition whenever he considered the circumstances sufficient would soon find necessity in everything. Hades believed that. He had believed it when the oath was sworn. It was less comfortable to believe with seven dead and a prisoner bound in pain for saving the rest.

"You may adjudicate such matters yourself."

"Ordinarily, yes. But the prisoner then accused the warden of negligence before an assembled crowd, and the dispute has outgrown the mine."

Few condemned gods would be foolish enough to provoke the officials who held their chains moments after breaking a sacred oath. Fewer still could hold a failing tunnel while wearing the Desmoi.

”Was it Damnameneus?”

"Yes, my lord."

Hades remembered the Telchine standing before his throne in the Audience Chamber, indignant at the injustice of his condemnation and incapable of moderating his accusations against those who held authority over him. The months since had evidently taught him no discretion.

"I should have expected as much."

”His conduct has been difficult,” Minos admitted. ”But there is more to this than his conduct. You should hear it from those who were there.”

"So they ignored him, and when the mountain proved him right, they punished him for it."

Minos did not contradict him.

Hades's displeasure deepened. He had sent Damnameneus to the mines because the Telchine considered such labor beneath his dignity, not because his knowledge had become worthless. Baetylus was too precious to entrust to overseers who could not tell an insult to their authority from a legitimate warning.

"Extraction has been suspended," Minos said. "But that is not why I came." He hesitated, a rare concession from one who seldom doubted his judgments. "The workers refuse to return. It began with Damnameneus and the overseers, but it has spread. Residents from the surrounding settlements have joined them. Some are condemned. Others are freeborn, with no connection to the mine at all."

That gave Hades pause. Complaint among the condemned was as old as Mourning itself. Most who labored in the Fields believed their sentences unjust, and some had kept believing it for centuries. But the freeborn owed the mines nothing.

Two days ago, mortals had tested the borders of his kingdom. Now his own subjects were testing its laws. He noted the timing and set it aside. For now.

"What do they want?"

"Damnameneus released from his Affliction. The wardens examined. Conditions changed." Minos paused. "And a review of every sentence passed upon those who reside in Mourning."

"Every sentence."

"Some have begun to question the judgments themselves."

Hades regarded him in silence. The sentences of Mourning had been adjudicated under the laws of Erebos, the evidence weighed, the judgments entered into the Mnemeion. Damnameneus's case had been heard before his own throne. A great many of the others had been heard before Minos.

"Then they have mistaken one warden's negligence for an indictment of the entire judicial order."

Minos did not immediately answer.

"Perhaps. But the distinction may not be so evident to those who watched the mountain come down, or to those Damnameneus carried out of it." He paused. "Nor, I confess, is it entirely evident to me. When an oath punishes a god for saving lives, my lord, people begin to ask what else the law punishes."

"And what do you ask?"

"I ask what I am to tell them."

Hades studied him. Minos did not exaggerate, and he did not cross Erebos over a handful of unruly laborers. If he judged the matter beyond his authority, it was.

Still, Hades disliked where it led. His kingdom was governed by law rather than the caprices of powerful gods, and its courts existed so that even those who commanded Dynamis answered for what they did with it. He would not see those courts undermined because one warden had refused to listen.

He rose.

"The mines remain closed until I have seen the damage and heard the warden's account."

"As you say, my lord."

Hades took up the key and pinned it at his breast, where it sat heavy as it always did. Then he took the cloak from its place beside the door, black and heavy, cut from a cloth that seemed to drink the brazier's light rather than return it, and fastened it at his throat so that it fell open over the key. The room seemed smaller for it.

Minos, who made gods measure their words, stepped aside to let him pass.

"Send no word ahead. I would see Mourning as it is, not as the warden arranges it for me."

***

The mining settlements near Aleyonian Lake occupied a broad basin enclosed by steep slopes of dark volcanic stone. Beyond them rose the jagged mountains beneath which rich deposits of baetylus had been found. Warm springs seeped from fractures in the rock and gathered in mineral-stained pools before running down toward the lake, while vents breathed pale columns of vapor that drifted among the lower buildings and vanished against the heights.

The settlements had grown around the extraction works over centuries. What began as temporary quarters for prisoners had acquired streets, storehouses, workshops, and dwellings occupied by families who had never known another home. The buildings were practical and crowded, stacked from the same dark stone as the mountains. Narrow roads ran from the residential quarters to the mines, where great mechanical assemblies hauled ore from the depths toward the processing houses. Hades had come here before, but only when a commission required the mines' output or some failure of the deeper workings threatened the mountains themselves. Never for the people who lived here.

Today the principal extraction yard stood nearly empty. Carts had been abandoned beside the tracks, their loads untouched. Sulfur hung in the air, mingled with the sharper smell of wet stone and heated metal. From one of the entrances, steam bled through fractures in the masonry around a sealed passage, where a handful of men worked along the outer supports under an overseer's direction.

A much larger gathering filled the square before the Warden's hall.

The crowd had been loud when Hades first approached. By the time he crossed the yard, the voices had fallen away.

Prisoners in coarse work garments stood beside ordinary residents of the settlements. Some wore fresh bandages; others wore the grey dust of the mines on their faces and clothes. Several women had brought children, who pressed close to them as the king passed. The guards along the square held their positions, spared the need to clear a path by the crowd's instinctive withdrawal.

Minos walked beside him.

At the far end of the square, before the Warden's hall, two guards stood over a figure Hades recognized immediately. No one had brought him a seat. As Hades approached, the doors of the hall opened and the Warden emerged in haste, his officers behind him, still composing his face for a visit no one had told him to expect.

Damnameneus had changed considerably since their first meeting.

Gone were the elegant blue garments of Poseidon's court. He wore the coarse tunic and dark trousers issued to condemned workers, stained with mineral dust and the grime of the mines. His once carefully kept hair had grown long, and his beard had lost its former precision. He was leaner than Hades remembered, though there was nothing diminished in the proud set of his shoulders.

Around his wrists rested two fitted bands of metal.

The Desmoi bore narrow inscriptions that circled each bracelet, their finely worked surfaces nearly hidden beneath the dust of his labor. They were not shackles in the ordinary sense. His hands remained free, but the technemata limited the Dynamis he could draw, confining his divine abilities to a fraction of what they had once been.

The consequence of his broken oath was less discreet.

Damnameneus stood with one hand braced against the wall behind him. His face was pale, and a faint tremor passed through his shoulders despite his efforts to remain still. Hades recognized the Affliction for what it was. The power of Styx was exacting, and a violation left unresolved became a considerable torment. That the Telchine remained on his feet without assistance was a measure of his stubbornness.

As Hades drew near, Damnameneus straightened with visible difficulty, his expression settling into something that might have passed for composure had the effort not been so apparent.

Hades regarded him without greeting.

"You appear to have found the work more eventful than anticipated."

Damnameneus raised his eyes.

"Your Majesty."

The acknowledgment was properly offered, though it carried little of the deference Hades might have expected from a prisoner in his circumstances.

He turned to the Warden.

"Explain what happened."

The man bowed and began. The digging had been extended into a newly exposed deposit, where rising heat and pressure had complicated conditions. The miners had encountered fissures of superheated water and gas, a familiar danger in these mountains. Reinforcements had been installed, and work had continued under the appointed overseers.

Then a fracture had opened along one of the tunnels. The sudden release of pressure shattered several supports and drove scalding vapor through the excavation. A section of the roof collapsed, cutting off the retreat of the workers farther in. Seven had been killed in the initial rupture, with others injured or trapped beneath the mountain.

"They knew the pressure was increasing,” Damnameneus interrupted.

The Warden stiffened.

"You will permit him to finish."

Damnameneus closed his mouth. A tremor passed through the hand braced against the wall, but he said nothing more.

The Warden continued. He had ordered the condemned god to remain outside the damaged section while the overseers organized a rescue. Damnameneus had refused. Entering the gallery against direct instruction, he had used Dynamis to brace the failing stone and turn the escaping vapor long enough for the trapped workers to retreat. He had succeeded, though the effort had left him severely weakened.

"Why was he ordered to remain outside?"

The Warden lifted his head.

”The condemned are not permitted to wield Dynamis without authorization, Your Majesty. The galleries were in disorder, several passages had become inaccessible, and I had no assurance that those under my authority would not exploit the confusion. My first responsibility was to secure the prisoners.”

"Even while workers remained trapped inside?"

"I believed the overseers could organize their rescue. Damnameneus was under an explicit order to remain at his station.”

Hades looked again at the Telchine.

"And you disobeyed."

"Yes."

"Knowing what you had sworn upon the waters of Styx."

"Yes, my lord."

He gave the answers without qualification, though a tightening around his eyes betrayed how much it cost him to stay upright.

"Why?"

The question appeared to surprise him.

"Because they were going to die."

"You were under a direct order."

"There were people beneath that mountain who could still be saved. The tunnel was failing, and the overseers had neither the knowledge nor the means to hold it. But I did."

Hades glanced toward the damaged entrance. The remaining supports stood in an uneven pattern, their placement suggesting the original failure had run through more than one section of the gallery. He knew the geology of these mountains more than anyone in Erebos. The daily methods of the miners, however, had never been among the matters he troubled himself with.

"And the warnings you gave before the accident?"

Damnameneus hesitated.

"I told them that pressure was gathering behind the deposit. The supports were sufficient for the weight above them, but not for what was building beneath. They mistook the movement of the stone for ordinary settling."

"Could you have demonstrated the danger?"

"I tried." His voice sharpened. "I showed them the fractures. I explained what would happen if the next dig opened the channel. They ordered me back to work."

Hades turned fully toward the Warden.

"Was his warning examined?"

The man drew himself straighter.

"The overseers considered his observations, Your Majesty. These deposits have presented difficulties many times before, and their judgment was that the existing supports remained adequate.”

"I asked whether his warning was examined."

"No independent examination was conducted.”

"Why not?"

The Warden hesitated.

"His conclusions were not shared. And he is a condemned prisoner, my lord. It would be difficult to maintain discipline if the overseers were obliged to defer to every objection raised by those in their charge.”

Hades regarded him in silence.

He had sent Damnameneus to the mines to humble him, to make a craftsman who had shaped baetylus for ages haul it from the dark himself and learn what it cost those who did. He had not sent him there because his knowledge of the stone had become worthless. The distinction ought to have been obvious. Baetylus was too valuable to entrust its extraction to overseers who could not tell an insult to their authority from a legitimate warning.

”You were given a Telchine who has worked baetylus longer than this settlement has existed. He knows how that stone behaves under heat and pressure better than any overseer in these mountains. And you dismissed his warnings because he was a prisoner.”

"The appointed overseers believed their judgment sufficient.”

"Seven people are dead. Their judgment was not sufficient."

The Warden lowered his eyes.

Hades turned to Minos.

"The mine will remain closed until its structural integrity has been established. I want the deposits examined by the artificers of the Deep Works, and a full accounting of every warning received before the accident. Neither the Warden nor the overseers involved are to direct that examination."

"I will see it done, my lord."

Hades looked once more at Damnameneus.

The oath had answered as it was bound to. Styx did not weigh the wisdom of an order; that belonged to whoever judged the breach. Here the judgment was not difficult. The Warden had forbidden the one god capable of holding the mountain from holding it, and the trapped workers were alive only because that order was broken. Hades would not let every condemned god declare his own necessity. Neither would he leave one in torment for being right.

"Damnameneus, your intervention was justified by the circumstances. The order should not have prevented you from preserving lives when no other effective means were available."

He turned to Minos.

"Absolve him."

The Judge inclined his head and approached Damnameneus.

There was no elaborate ceremony. Minos pronounced the formal judgment, acknowledging the command that had been broken and the necessity under which the prisoner had acted. He absolved the violation under the authority established when Damnameneus swore obedience upon the sacred waters of Styx.

For a moment, nothing appeared to happen.

Then Damnameneus drew an abrupt breath. The tremor left his shoulders, and he sagged against the wall before recovering his balance. The exhaustion of the mine and his injuries remained, but the Affliction that had tormented him since his disobedience was gone.

He lowered his hand from the stone.

The Desmoi remained upon his wrists, their inscriptions unchanged.

At Hades's breast, the osmium key sat cold and heavy. Mercy had been given. Nothing had been unlocked.

A murmur passed through the assembled workers.

Hades might have considered the matter settled had Damnameneus possessed the good sense to remain silent.

"And the dead?"

Hades looked at him.

"Their deaths will be investigated."

"They cannot be investigated back into life."

The remark carried across the square with unfortunate clarity. People stirred among the crowd, and Minos turned sharply toward the Telchine.

"Take care, Damnameneus."

But the artificer had already committed himself.

"I warned them. Others warned them before me. They knew there was danger, and they continued the extraction because the baetylus was too valuable to leave in the mountain. Now seven people are dead, and we are told their deaths will be investigated."

Hades kept his voice level.

"I have ordered the works closed and those responsible examined. What more do you believe should be done?"

"Perhaps the people who labor beneath these mountains should be heard before the mountain comes down upon them."

There was nothing unreasonable in the proposition itself. Hades had already concluded that the warnings deserved greater attention. He was less inclined to indulge the manner in which Damnameneus presented it, particularly before a gathering whose temper had already proved troublesome.

"Their warnings will be heard. That does not entitle you to make accusations against every authority charged with maintaining order here."

Damnameneus looked past him toward the workers.

"They have lived under that authority far longer than I have. Ask them what it has brought them."

The silence that followed was not reassuring.

Hades turned toward the assembly. He saw faces marked by labor and exhaustion, men standing beside wives and children, prisoners mingled with freeborn residents who had no obligation to share their grievances. A few lowered their eyes when he regarded them. Others did not.

Discontent was nothing new to him. Mourning had always been the least contented of his territories; its purpose ensured as much.

Yet there was something different in the assembly before him. These people had watched a condemned god defy their Warden, suffer for it, and win the king's acknowledgment that he had been right. That same god now stood before them openly challenging the administration of the mines, and many of them were listening.

Hades faced Damnameneus once more.

"I have heard enough."

The Telchine's expression tightened, but he held his silence.

"Your intervention was justified, Damnameneus. I have ruled accordingly. Do not mistake that judgment for permission to challenge every authority under which you remain condemned."

Damnameneus stood very still.

"Your sentence stands. Conduct yourself accordingly."

For several moments, the Telchine gave no answer. Then he lowered his head.

"As you command, Your Majesty."

The words were proper. The resentment beneath them was unmistakable.

Hades instructed Minos to ensure that the investigation proceeded without interference from the Warden or any overseer whose conduct was under examination. The injured were to be cared for, and the families of the dead were to receive the provisions prescribed by law. Minos accepted the instructions. The Warden bowed again, and the guards began directing the workers back toward their settlements.

The crowd dispersed slowly.

There were no further accusations, no raised voices, no attempt to resist the king's orders. Men gathered their belongings and led their families away through the narrow streets. Some regarded Hades as they passed, but few offered more than the formal acknowledgment his presence required.

A woman who had stood near the front of the assembly gathered two children to her side. She carried a miner's lamp that was plainly not her own, its glass cracked and blackened by heat. She had watched closely when Minos absolved Damnameneus, and Hades had expected some reassurance from that judgment. Instead, she drew the children away, cast a brief glance toward the guards, and disappeared into the street.

He watched her go.

The works had been closed, the negligent would be held accountable, and a condemned god whose intervention had saved lives had been relieved of his Affliction. Hades could find little fault in the judgments he had rendered. Yet the people departed with an unfamiliar reserve, as though the fact that the confrontation had ended mattered more to them than how it had ended.

Minos approached once the square had begun to empty.

"There have been other complaints of late, my lord."

Hades turned toward him.

"Concerning the mines?"

"Some. Others concern the settlements, restrictions upon movement, and the privileges granted to residents of neighboring regions. Similar petitions have increased in Asphodel. Rhadamanthys has reported several disputes in Elysium as well."

"There is nothing unusual in such petitions."

"No, my lord. There is not."

Minos paused.

"But their manner has changed. Petitioners once appealed for relief from a particular hardship. Increasingly, they question the authority by which the hardship is imposed."

Hades regarded the departing crowd. He thought of the magistrate from Elysium whose daughter had defied the restrictions upon her departure, and of the increasingly tiresome demands from Asphodel for privileges that had never belonged to its inhabitants. Every region possessed its grievances, and every generation seemed to discover fresh reasons to consider its circumstances unjust. Mankind had been dissatisfied with its lot long before Hades assumed any throne at all, and he expected it would remain so long after the present disputes had been forgotten.

"Then perhaps the Judges should take greater care in explaining the laws they administer."

Minos inclined his head, though his expression remained thoughtful.

"As you command."

Beyond the square, the last of the workers disappeared into the narrow streets. Damnameneus had already been led away.

"See that the petitions are answered."

"Of course, my lord."

Hades turned toward the sealed passage, where steam still bled through the broken masonry. The men along the outer supports drew back; he did not slow. At the touch of his palm, the hissing vapor faltered and died. Then he tore the seal from the entrance, and fragments of masonry skittered across the yard.

He went into the dark, toward the fissures Damnameneus had warned them of.

Behind him, the square remained silent.

[Ascendancy]

Chapter 6

Read by Hand

The heat met him a dozen paces in.

The seal had held most of it in the gallery, and now it pressed past him toward the yard, wet and heavy and sour with sulfur. Beyond the entrance there was no light at all. Hades made none. The stone told him where the floor went and where the walls stood, and he walked down into the dark without slowing.

The gallery sloped downward for some distance before it reached the damage. He felt the overseers' work before he came to it, in the places where it bore down on the stone: timber props and stacked stone piers along both walls, standing at uneven intervals, crowded together in some places and sparse in others, as though each had been added wherever the last had seemed to fail. Spoil and broken supports lay across the floor. Somewhere to his left, water ran down the wall and pooled where the floor dipped.

He found the fissure by its sound, a steady hiss at the far end of the gallery, where the newest cut had opened into the deposit. The stone there was hot enough to feel through the soles of his boots. He laid his bare hand on the face of the rock and read the seam beneath his palm until he found the veins that would take light. He set a small working into them.

The seam lit. Light ran out along the branches of the deposit and stopped short wherever the stone was flawed. Its color would not hold still. Where he looked directly at a vein, it burned violet; at the edge of his sight it slid toward aqua, and slid back when he turned his head. It showed him the fracture running down beneath the seam into the floor, the white thread of vapor rising from it, and the gallery behind him.

The dead had been carried out. Their picks lay where they had dropped them, the hafts bleached and split by the steam.

He had stepped over them in the dark.

He spread his fingers against the rock, and focused his mind on the firmament answered. He followed the fracture down through the floor of the gallery, past the seam, into rock that grew hotter at every fathom as it plunged into the earth. The flame showed him the rest. Far below, water lay under the weight of the mountain, driven upward by the heat beneath it, and it had found the old fracture the baetylus had grown along and climbed it. The dig had followed the seam. The seam had led them to the channel. The last cut had opened it.

Nine fathoms down, the channel narrowed to the width of his hand.

He could have closed the whole fracture at once, from top to bottom, but the water would only have gone looking for another way up, and these mountains held more than enough of them. Instead he went to the narrow place and closed that, drawing the stone together across the channel and holding it until it was as sound as the rock around it. Then he worked upward a little at a time and filled the fracture behind it.

The hiss thinned and stopped. Along the left wall, the running water slowed, broke into beads, and stood.

It had taken less time than the Warden's account of it.

Hades lifted his hand from the wall. The gallery was silent except for the tick of cooling stone. He turned his attention to the overseers' props.

Not one of them stood near the fracture. They had been set to carry the roof, and the roof had never been the danger. Hades drew the stone out from under the nearest, and it toppled and struck the floor. He did the same to the next, and the next, until none were standing. The gallery held. None of them had been holding anything.

Above him, the seam had begun to dim.

Near the rupture, where the wall had cracked but not fallen, someone had scored the rock with the point of a pick: a short, deep line cut across the end of a crack. A hand's width farther on, where the crack had continued, there was a second line. Then a third.

Hades followed them along the wall in the failing light.

Each mark had been cut where the crack ended on the day it was made. Three marks, three days. The crack had grown a hand's width each day, and each day someone had come back to measure it.

The overseers had called it settling, but settling did not move a hand's width a day.

The marks had been made by hand. Whoever cut them had not been permitted Dynamis, and had not used it. They were evenly spaced and cut to the same depth, each line square to the crack it measured, with a care the props behind him had never been given. He had seen that exactness before, in ink. Requests had come from Poseidon's court for baetylus from the underworld, every measure specified to a degree he had once thought excessive. He had questioned the quantities, and concluded that they were justified.

He laid his palm beside the third mark and read the stone again, the crack and the rock around it. Every mark was right.

Unsigned, they were scratches on a wall. Kleitos would have questions, and would want to know whom to ask.

Beneath the third mark, he laid a fingertip against the wall and drew it along the stone. The rock gave way ahead of his touch. The letters came up clean-edged, cut deeper than the pick marks above them.

DAMNAMENEUS

He cut nothing else.

Above him, the last of the color went out of the seam.

Then he carved the face of the wall, marks and name together, and pried it loose from the mountain.

The yard had emptied while he was below. The men who had worked along the outer supports were gone, and the carts still stood beside the tracks where they had been abandoned, their loads untouched. Beyond the processing houses, the vents breathed their pale columns into the air above the settlement.

Minos waited at the shaft-head.

Hades lowered the slab into the nearest empty cart. The axles creaked, and the cart settled on its wheels.

Beside Minos stood the board where the overseers posted the day's assignments, a broad panel of slate ruled into rows. The names of the condemned ran down it in chalk, wiped and rewritten with each shift, each beside its station. One line had been cut into the slate.

Damnameneus of Telchine. The deepest workings, without privilege of rank or former occupation. By order of the king.

Hades read it.

He knew the words. He had spoken them in the Audience Chamber. They had concerned the man's labor.

Minos followed his glance to the board and said nothing.

"This goes to Kleitos. Tell him it was read by hand."

The Judge looked at the slab, at the three marks along its face and the name beneath them.

"Tonight, my lord?"

"Tonight. Under guard, through the Pyle. Send the overseers' records with it."

"It will be done."

Minos did not move to go. For the second time that day, he hesitated.

"Shall the prisoner be told, my lord?"

"He has been absolved."

Minos inclined his head, accepting the answer.

Across the basin, lamps were coming on in the settlement, one window after another. He did not know which of them was Damnameneus's.

[Ascendancy]

The Pyle from Mourning opened into the guard post beneath the palace, and Morpheus was on the other side of it.

Hades stopped on the threshold.

He had put down a piece of bread when Minos knocked, and had not thought of it since. Since then he had stood in a square full of people who would not meet his eyes, gone nine fathoms down into a mountain to close what it had opened, and cut a prisoner's name into the rock by the light of a dying seam. Somewhere above him, in his own rooms, that bread was still on the table.

His herald reported by stone. He came to Erebos when he was summoned, and the overworld had kept him too busy to be summoned often. Yet here he stood among the duty guards with his arms folded, so broad through the shoulders that the post looked as though it had been built for smaller men, his traveling cloak still dark from rain somewhere far to the north.

For the space of a breath, Hades did not move.

"I take it this will not keep until morning."

"No, my lord. We have him."

"Where?"

"Asleep. But not for long. He sleeps badly and wakes before dawn, and my father thinks we have a few hours." Morpheus unfolded his arms. "Lethe found him."

Behind Hades, the conjunction closed. He stepped down from the threshold, and the guards found other places to look.

The palace had gone to its night. The fixtures along the corridors burned at their lowest, and footsteps carried. Hades had come from the mines without stopping, and their dust still greyed the hem of his cloak.

Hypnos kept his hall in the lowest reaches of the palace, beneath the courts and the offices of state, where no business was conducted at any hour. There were no doors. The archways were hung with wool so thick and heavy that it took Morpheus's arm to lift it, and the rooms beyond opened one into the next without a hinge or a latch anywhere. Hades had approved the plans himself, a long time ago, and had thought then that it was an odd thing to ask of a builder. He thought so again now. There was nothing in the place he could have closed.

The air was warm and smelled of lamp oil. Somewhere water ran over stone, very quietly.

Hypnos rose from a low chair as they came in. He had his brother's face. Every courtier in Erebos remarked on it, and every one of them was wrong, because nothing else about him was Thanatos's. He did not watch people. He looked at them.

He looked at Hades now, at the dust on his hem, and then at his son.

"Have you eaten, my lord?"

"There was bread."

Hypnos did not ask what had become of it.

The last time Hades had seen the two of them in one room, Morpheus had just carried his father out of Zeus's reach, and Hypnos had been too spent to stand. Hades had given them both a roof. It had seemed a small enough thing at the time.

Lethe was on the floor.

She had made a kind of nest of paper around herself, sheets overlapping sheets across half the room, and she was drawing on another with her knees drawn up and her tongue caught between her teeth. Ink ran from her fingers to her wrists. Her feet were bare. When she saw Hades she dropped the pen, came straight across the papers without looking where she stepped, and took his hand.

He let her.

"I found him."

"So I am told."

"I drew it until I knew it." With her free hand she pulled a sheet loose from the others. At the top was the ward casing from Hephaestus's ledger, copied from the sketch his nephew had sent with his findings: the small improvement that had cut the weight. Beneath it she had drawn the same casing again, a dozen times down the page, each a little surer than the last. "He dreams about it. Not every night. But it's his. He's proud of it."

Other drawings lay around her feet. Cerberus asleep, all three heads in a heap. A stair going down. A fish with too many fins. Melinoë laughing at something out of frame. And among them, more than once, a figure he could not place, drawn in quick lines that never quite met: a woman coming apart, the lines of her edges drifting loose from the lines of her middle.

"Who is this?"

Lethe glanced down. "I don't know. I draw her a lot."

She had already lost interest. She led him toward the couch along the far wall, and Hypnos turned to her.

"From the gate until he wakes, you hold his hand. Whatever you see in there. Whatever he asks of you."

"I know."

"If you let go, he wakes here, and the man remembers a stranger's face."

"I know." Her grip tightened on Hades's fingers, as if to demonstrate.

Hades lay down. Morpheus stood at the foot of the couch, Lethe at its side with his hand in both of hers. He could not remember the last time anyone had stood over him while he lay down.

Hypnos laid two fingers above his brow, not quite touching.

Nothing happened. Hades lay with his eyes open, looking at the dark stone of the ceiling and knowing exactly how thick it was.

Hypnos's brows drew together. He moved his hand a fraction and waited, and still nothing happened.

"You've drunk nectar."

"That was days ago."

Hypnos hooked a stool with his foot, drew it to the side of the couch, and sat, as a man sits who expects to be there a while.

"Let go of it, my lord."

He understood that Hypnos did not mean the nectar. He had drawn deep upon Dynamis all day, and even now he held it, lightly, as he always did, the way a man keeps a hand on a rail he no longer notices. He opened his hand.

The stone above him went quiet. Then everything else did.

* * *

He stood before a gate of horn.

It was taller than the Gates of Hades and far plainer, the horn gone yellow and translucent with age. Beyond it there was nothing he could name. Lethe's hand was in his. On his other side stood Morpheus, and Morpheus had wings.

Hades had seen them before. He looked at them anyway. They were dark, and wider than a man's reach, and they folded against his herald's back with the ease of something that had always been there.

"Through horn, my lord. You'll want what's true."

They went through.

They stood inside a hollow, close and dark, curving about them like the inside of a split trunk. Hades reached for the ground out of habit, to learn what it was made of.

Nothing answered.

There was something under his boots, and he could not say what it was, or how deep it ran, or whether it held anything up. He had not stood on anything he could not read since before he had a name for the reading. For a moment the lack of it was almost—

He set the thought aside. Lethe's fingers tightened on his, as though she had felt it.

"Mine," Morpheus said of the place, and nothing more. He did not bring people here. Hades understood that he had been shown something.

The hollow opened on one side, and beyond it was the tree.

It was an elm. Hades knew it by the deep furrows of its bark and by its leaves, toothed along their edges and lopsided where they met the stem. But no elm in the world had ever grown so large. Its branches went up and out past where he could follow them, its roots went down past where he could follow those, and around it there was nothing at all, no ground and no sky, only the tree.

Every leaf on it was murmuring.

It was not the wind. Nothing moved the branches. The sound came from beneath the leaves themselves, a voice under each one too low to make out, and there were so many leaves that together they made the sound the cities of Erebos made at night from the palace terraces: every voice in it, and none of them clear. Each leaf was a sleeper somewhere in the world, and under each one a dream was talking to itself.

Lethe did not hesitate. She led him out along one branch and onto another, the way a child leads a guest through her own house, until she stopped beside a leaf no different from ten thousand others.

"This one."

Hades listened. He heard what he had heard from the first: a low murmur with no words in it he could catch.

"How do you know?"

She looked at him as though he had asked how she knew her own name. "He keeps saying it."

She slipped her free hand beneath the leaf.

* * *

They were in Hephaestus's workshop.

Hades knew it at once: the long hall under the mountain, the suspended mechanisms, the great assembly of inscribed rings turning about its sphere of silver light. The golden eagle stood on its perch on the raised platform with its wings half open.

There was no one in it.

No apprentices argued over wheels. No craftsmen bent over drawings on glowing glass. The worktables were bare and the floor was clean, and Hephaestus's chair beside the platform stood empty, his staff nowhere. Hades looked for the things such a hall ought to show, a scorch on a bench, a tool left where it fell, and found none.

"Nobody's ever worked here," Lethe whispered. "He's never seen it like this. He made it up."

A craftsman's daydream, then: the master's hall with the master gone and the bench his own. Hades had employed enough ambitious men to recognize the shape of it. He turned his attention to the man at the bench.

The bench stood at the end of the hall, where there had been nothing a moment before. The man at it was younger than he could possibly be. Hephaestus had spoken of long service and a departure years ago; this man had the unlined face and quick hands of an apprentice in his first decade. He was working at something small, and he did not look up.

"He dreams himself at twenty," Morpheus said quietly. "I spent two nights looking for a man of forty-five."

Then he walked forward, and somewhere between one step and the next he was Hephaestus.

Hades had known it was coming. He watched it anyway. The wings were gone. The shoulders narrowed and settled. The hair went fair, darker at the roots, the beard came in short and neat, and the walk broke into the uneven, practiced gait Hades had matched three days ago in the passages beneath Olympus. There was a staff in his hand, dark metal with a narrow silver grip, and when he leaned his weight on it Hades saw the hidden joints give along its length.

He had the joints right.

"Eupalamos." It was Hephaestus's voice, warm and a little amused, the voice that had said Uncle. "Show me what you've done."

Eupalamos looked up, and his whole face opened.

The hall went away.

They stood in a workroom that was nothing like Hephaestus's. It was low and close and lit by a single lamp, and it was real. Hades saw that before Lethe could tell him. The bench was scored with a thousand small cuts. Ink had soaked into the grain at one corner, where a bottle had gone over and never been properly cleaned. A crack ran across the plaster of one wall, and someone had filled it badly. Where the plaster stopped short of the floor, the stone beneath it showed: a pale limestone softened by damp. He had stood among that same stone only days ago, at the foot of a broken stair in Caria, with goats grazing over his head.

Acharaca, or near it. A day's ride, perhaps less.

Instruments covered the shelves.

He counted them, because counting was a thing he could still do. There were thirty-one. Each was built around a central housing with a needle beneath a cover, and the covers were scratched, every one, in the particular ways a man remembers the things he has handled most. The instrument in the Nekromanteion had been the first Hades had seen. It had not been the only one.

"You built it to stop," Eupalamos said to the god with the staff. He was older now; the room was letting him be what he was. "I taught it to watch."

"So you did."

Eupalamos colored like a boy. He drew back a cloth from the end of the bench.

Beneath it lay three bars of dark metal bound with bands of silver, each as long as a man's forearm, set side by side. They were perfect. The bands met without a seam. The lamplight lay along their surfaces without finding a mark anywhere. Hades had heard such a thing described once, by a magistrate of Pherae on the far bank of the Acheron, while the woman beside him held her bound arm against her chest.

"Not yet," Lethe breathed.

"And what else?" Hephaestus's voice asked, easy and curious. "What are you working toward?"

Eupalamos did not answer. His eyes went past the bars to the wall above the bench, and slid off it again, and the wall stayed blank. Whatever belonged there, it was not his, and he was not going to show it to his master.

Morpheus looked at Lethe.

She went down.

It was the only word Hades found for it afterward. Her hand never left his, but he felt her go beneath the room the way a swimmer goes beneath the surface of a pool, and the room changed around them, not in what it held but in how it held it. The lamplight steadied. The wall above the bench was no longer blank.

Two sheets were pinned there.

The first was a map. It had been folded in quarters and opened so many times that the creases had worn white, and there was a thumbprint of ink in its lower corner. Hades knew its shape before he had read a line of it.

It was his kingdom.

Whoever had drawn it had traveled part of it, and had drawn only what she had seen. There was no coastline. There was Elysium, drawn with great love: its valleys, its waterways, the terraces of the western gardens, the white poplars on the slopes set down as tiny upright flames. From Elysium a line of short paired strokes ran north across the sheet, each pair a Pyle she had passed through, every one where it stood, to the trading settlement at the kingdom's edge, marked with a small, careful set of scales. Erebos was a ring of mountains with a name written inside it, roughly placed. Asphodel was a smudge.

Across a wide blank stretch to the east, someone had written FIELDS OF MOURNING and drawn nothing else at all.

Hades read the map as he had read the marks on the gallery wall a few hours before, distance by distance, against everything he knew. The Pyles were right. The distances between them were right. The valleys of Elysium were exactly where they were.

It was good work.

The second sheet was Elysium's sky.

The same hand had set it down in columns. The height of the sun above the eastern ridge, day after day, through what must have been years. The days in high summer when it had not set at all, but gone round. Stars, given names Hades did not know, each placed by its distance from the ridge and from its neighbors. Down the right side of the sheet, in a different and older hand, someone had worked figures against hers, line after line of a reckoning he could not follow. At the bottom stood a single number. It had been circled twice.

Hades did not know the method. He did not need to know it to know what a number circled twice was for.

"Where did this come from?"

Lethe took hold of the map. Not the paper; something beneath the paper, a thread he could not see. She pulled.

Eupalamos flinched. Somewhere above them the room shook, the way a room shakes when a loaded cart goes by in the street. The lamp guttered.

Morpheus laid a hand on the craftsman's shoulder. "Easy," he said, in Hephaestus's voice, as Hephaestus might have said it to an apprentice whose hands had begun to shake. "There's no hurry."

The craftsman steadied. Lethe did not look up, but her pull on the thread eased.

The memory came partway and stopped: a table in lamplight, soft at its edges, like a page held too near the eye.

"Again."

Lethe looked at Morpheus. Morpheus inclined his head.

She pulled again, harder, and the table came clear.

It was the same workroom, earlier; the crack in the plaster had not yet been filled. A young woman sat at the bench with a pen in her hand and the map before her, half drawn. The skin across her nose was red and peeling, as a face peels under a sun it has never met. She drew quickly and without hesitation, and when she stopped it was to close her eyes and remember, and then she drew again.

There was someone at her shoulder. The memory held a sleeve, a hand resting on the table, the edge of a dark coat. It did not hold a face. Eupalamos had never looked up from the paper long enough to keep one.

"The sun," the craftsman said, from somewhere behind the lamp. "How high does it go?"

"Never higher than the poplars on the east ridge. Not even at midsummer. At midsummer it doesn't set at all. It goes round." She drew a short arc in the margin, and another inside it. "I used to count the days."

"Write them down."

She wrote them down. While he read them, she bent to the map again and drew something small in the western gardens: a building, square, under a pitched roof, and inside the square a grid of tiny panes, each one ruled separately.

"We don't need the buildings."

"I know."

She finished the panes anyway.

"That's my father's. The third conservatory, in the western gardens." She put down the pen and looked at what she had drawn. "When this is done, can he come up? He's never seen the sea."

No one answered her. Eupalamos had already turned back to her columns.

Hades knew the words. He had made her father say them in the Hall of Judgment, before the full court, because the first time the man had forgotten to say where he came from.

He searched the memory for her name. It was not there. The craftsman had never asked it.

Neither had he.

On the bench beside her elbow lay one of the instruments, and its needle had begun to move.

Hades watched it. It was not following the young woman, or the pen, or anything else in the memory. It swung, and steadied, and swung again, and each time it came a little farther round toward the place where he and Lethe stood.

"He keeps one beside his bed," Morpheus said, and for the first time it was not Hephaestus's voice. "He's dreaming what it does."

The room shook again. The lamp shrank to a bead.

"I can take it." Lethe had not let go of the thread. Her voice in here was not the one she used in Hypnos's hall; it was quick and level and entirely unafraid. "All of it. The maps, the sky, her. Him, if you want. Before he wakes."

"Do it."

She began. At the table, the young woman's face went soft at its edges, the red across her nose fading, the pen in her hand thinning toward nothing—

"No."

Lethe stopped. The face came back.

"My lord—"

"He is Apollo's."

The needle swung the rest of the way round and stood still, pointing at him.

Then the light went out of everything, and Hades woke.

He was lying on the couch in Hypnos's hall, and his hand was closed hard around Lethe's. He opened it. She shook out her fingers and smiled at him as though nothing had happened.

"Eupalamos is awake," Hypnos said. "He woke frightened."

"He'll look at that needle before he does anything else." Morpheus was himself again, broad and plain, and he had not sat down. "And he'll remember that he was dreaming of his old master when it moved."

Hades sat up. His head was clear, and when he reached for the stone beneath the hall it answered him at once, as it always had, as if it had never been gone.

"Those bars weren't on his bench yet, my lord. They will be."

"Then Apollo will find him at it."

Morpheus said nothing.

"Send word to Apollo. His name, that he works in Caria within a day of Acharaca, and what stands on his shelves. I promised my brother that Apollo would receive what I learned of this man."

"And the rest?"

"Nothing else."

Morpheus bowed.

"Tell Thanatos the trading settlements on that map close immediately. No one passes through their Pyles in either direction, and nothing is bought or sold. Every Pyle she passed through is sealed until I have examined it myself."

"There are families in those settlements who live by the trade, my lord."

"Then they will live by something else for a time."

Hypnos lowered his eyes and did not press it.

"What was seen tonight stays in this hall. All of it."

"What about Melinoë?"

"Not even Melinoë."

She nodded with perfect seriousness. Of the three of them, Hades thought, she would keep it best.

He looked at his herald. "You even had the joints of Hephaestus's staff right."

"She found him," Morpheus said. "I set her to it."

Lethe was not listening to either of them. She was watching Hades's face, and whatever she found there seemed to be enough.

"The girl at the table. Find her."

Lethe tilted her head. "I'd need something that's only hers. Not the sky. Everyone dreams the sky."

Hades rose and took up his cloak.

"Then I will bring you something."

* * *

The guards brought Alketas in the last hour before the palace's dawn.

He had not been told why. Hades could see it in the way he came through the great bronze doors, quickly and then slowly, as he understood where he was. The chandeliers burned at their night setting. The columns stood half in shadow, the overthrow of Kronos and the founding of Erebos carved into a dark the guards' lamps did not reach.

Alketas wore the grey of the confinement chambers. He was thinner. There was soil under every one of his nails now, and he had stopped trying to scrub it out.

The guards halted him at the center of the hall, on the mosaic of gold and black marble, where he had stood before.

Hades did not take the throne. He stood at the foot of the dais, near enough to speak without raising his voice.

"Your Majesty."

"Tell me about your daughter."

Alketas stared at him. For a moment Hades thought he would not manage to speak at all.

"What would you know, Your Majesty?"

"What she looked at."

"The sky." It came out of him at once, and the rest came after it, as though it had been waiting all this time for someone to ask. "Always the sky, from the time she could stand. There's a long frame on the east side of the third conservatory that faces the ridge. When she was eight, she started cutting a notch in it every morning, where the sun came up over the poplars. With my pruning knife. I told her she'd weaken the frame." He almost smiled. "She didn't. She cut them very small. She kept it up for years, every morning she was home. When the sun stopped setting, she marked that too. I meant to sand them out before the inspectors came round, and I never did."

Hades heard it through without moving. A row of small cuts in a window frame, each one made where the sun had stood on the day she made it.

"Are they there still?"

"Unless the new keeper has replaced the frame. I wouldn't know, my lord." He hesitated. "Has there been word of her? It has been a hundred and thirty-one days."

Hades let the number settle.

"She has been seen. She was well."

Alketas put his hand over his mouth. Then he bowed, low, and the thinning patch on the crown of his head showed in the lamplight as it had on the day of his sentence.

"Thank you, my lord. Thank you."

Hades did not correct him.

The guards took him out through the bronze doors, and Hades stood alone in the hall.

The record lay on its narrow table beside the throne. He touched it. The dark crystal brightened, and he called the judgment up through the months behind it until his own words rose into the light, exactly as he had spoken them.

Your daughter will not be pursued.

He wrote beneath them.

Amended by order of the king. The daughter of Alketas is to be found.

[Ascendancy]

The scales had been taken down.

Two iron brackets stood out from the wall above the counting house door, and between them the plaster was a shade paler where the sign had hung for longer than anyone in the settlement had been alive. The sign itself leaned just inside the doorway: a painted beam with a brass pan hung at either end. It was the device the daughter had drawn in the corner of her map, small and careful, to show where the kingdom stopped.

No one passed through the settlement's Pyles in either direction, and nothing was bought or sold. Hades had given the order himself, in Hypnos's hall, five days ago.

The market street was shuttered from end to end. Bales stood roped under the awnings where carters had left them when the Pyles went dark. Near the far end, a man sat on a doorstep with two children leaning against his knees. He was not doing anything. He had the look of someone who had already done everything there was to do and found the day still in front of him. His eyes followed the black of Hades's coat down the street, and went no higher, and he did not get up.

Hades went on to the Pyle.

There were nine of them between the settlement and Elysium, every one where she had drawn it. He had examined each himself, as he had said he would, reading the pylons and their baetylus for any sign that someone had tampered with them. He found none. She had broken nothing. She had walked through nine doors with her father's forged credentials in her hand, and at each one someone had looked at them and let her pass. He had sealed the doors behind him one by one. Now there was only the last.

Elysium's sun stood at the crowns of the poplars on the eastern ridge when he came through into the western gardens. It would climb no higher. The light ran long and level across the terraces, and the white trunks on the slopes threw shadows that reached the water.

The third conservatory stood where she had drawn it, square under its pitched roof. The new keeper was waiting at the door. He was young for the post, he had been told the king was coming, and it had not made him easier. He bowed, and his eyes went to the key at Hades's breast and stayed there, as though it were the safer place to look. Then he opened the door and said nothing at all, which Hades considered the most sensible thing anyone had done in five days.

Inside it was warm and close and smelled of wet soil. Alketas's vines had been kept. Someone had tied them in properly.

The frame ran the length of the east wall, facing the ridge. Its glass had been taken out at his instruction and stacked in straw against a bench. Without the glass it was only a long bar of old oak, grey with years of damp, set into a stone sill at either end.

He found the notches without looking for them.

They began near the southern end, a hand's width above the sill, and they were very small, as her father had said. Each was a single cut with the point of a knife, angled a little where a child's wrist had turned. They climbed along the wood and fell again with the seasons, and climbed, and in places they crowded so close he could not have laid a fingernail between them. In one stretch they stopped altogether for the length of a forearm. Then they began again, cut by a steadier hand.

He read them as he would have read a seam. Each summer the cuts climbed toward the end of the frame where the sun stood highest, and each winter they fell back. Fifteen summers, one of them missing.

Toward the northern end, where the summer sun ran nearly level with the ridge, there were marks unlike the others: short grooves drawn along the grain instead of across it. When the sun stopped setting, she marked that too. There were eleven.

The last notch stood a little apart from the rest. After it the wood ran on, bare, to the end of the frame.

Hades laid his hand on the sill.

The stone answered him as stone always did. The mortar gave way grain by grain around the foot of the frame until the oak stood free in two clean sockets, and he lifted it out. It was lighter than it looked. Wood always was.

The keeper had come in behind him and stood by the door with his hands folded. Hades gave him the frame.

"Wrap it. It goes to the hall of Hypnos in the palace, and through no other hands."

The young man took it in both arms and began to look about for cloth.

Somewhere beyond the terraces the queen kept her court. Hades could have been there before the sun had moved a finger's width along the ridge. He did not send word.

He was still standing at the empty sockets when Alecto found him.

He had not seen her since the Nekromanteion. She had been in Greece ever since, and Greece had stayed on her: the hem of her traveling coat was white with dust to the knee, and there was a pallor under her composure that the overworld's sun had not managed to burn away. She inclined her head.

"My lord."

"You have come a long way to stand in a conservatory."

"I would not have come if a message would serve." She glanced at the keeper, who found something to do at the far end of the house. "The merchant had a visitor. Four nights ago. The first in all the time I have watched him. A man off a ship into Kenchreai, who asked for him by name on the quay and was at his door before dark."

"From the east."

She looked at him a moment longer than she needed to. "The ship came from Halicarnassus. I could not learn where he boarded."

Hades did not enlighten her. Somewhere within a day of Acharaca, a craftsman had woken frightened with an instrument beside his bed, and remembered that he had been dreaming of his old master when its needle moved.

"Go on."

"The merchant went up the hill that same night. Up Acrocorinth by the road, past the temple of the Fates, and into the sanctuary of Demeter and Kore. The sanctuary keeps dining rooms on its lower terraces for the festivals. Most stand empty between them. One does not." She paused. "There are four of them in it, my lord, and they have been there a long while. Since the courier came, they have been packing."

"How long have we?"

"They will be gone by tomorrow night. Sooner, if the courier frightened them as much as he seemed frightened himself."

Hades considered it.

Apollo had charge of the Atharim. Hades had undertaken to share what he learned and to leave the pursuit beyond his borders to Olympus. Apollo's people were in Caria at this moment, looking for the man Hades had given them. By the time a message reached Olympus, and Olympus reached Corinth, the dining room would be swept and empty and the sanctuary would be keeping its festivals as before.

None of which altered the agreement.

But a temple of his, standing on mortal ground, had never been mortal ground. He had closed the lower chambers of the Nekromanteion and set a trap in them without asking anyone's leave, and Zeus had not thought to object. The precinct belonged to the god it was given to. That was what consecration meant.

"The sanctuary is consecrated to the queen."

"And to her mother."

"Then confine yourself to the queen's half."

The corner of Alecto's mouth moved. It was the nearest she came to smiling.

"Take them. All four, alive if they allow it. Everything they have packed, and everything they have not."

"And Apollo?"

"Apollo will receive what I learn. As I promised."

"And the queen? It is her house."

"She will have it back as she left it."

Alecto inclined her head and went. At the far end of the house, the keeper was winding cloth around the oak, a turn at a time, as though it were something that could bleed.

Hades went back to the Pyle.

* * *

Alecto came back the following night with all four. One of them was dead.

The Keres had taken the living ones before Hades came down. He did not ask to see them. He found Alecto in a room off the guard post beneath the palace, where a table had been cleared and lamps set out along it, and she told him the rest standing, as she had told him everything else.

"He chose to fight. I had not much choice in it. The merchant is alive, and two others. One of those cut the letters."

"You are certain."

"His hands are grey to the second knuckle. Lead does that." She set something down on the table between them: a bead of yellow wax no larger than a lentil. "This was in his back teeth. I looked before I did anything else."

Hades looked at the bead. He remembered a small movement of a man's jaw, in a corridor beneath the Nekromanteion, that he had thought little of at the time.

"Good."

"They had no weapon. Nothing like what was seen on the road at Pherae." She laid her hand on the box beside her. "They had this."

It was a plain box of cedar, iron at the corners, the kind a merchant keeps his accounts in. It was heavier than its size. When he opened it, the lamplight found lead.

Most of it was old. Thin sheets of it, rolled tight or folded small, each pierced through with a bronze nail gone green. There were dozens. He knew them before he touched one. His priests at the Nekromanteion lifted such things out of the oracle's precinct every year, and mortals had been dropping them into graves and wells since long before there was a temple there to drop them in.

He drew a nail and unrolled the nearest. The letters were scratched, not cut, by someone who wrote seldom and pressed hard.

I bind Philon the potter, his hands and his wheel and his kiln, that nothing he fires comes whole from it. Hermes who holds fast, hold him. Lady below, take him. Fates of the hill, see to it.

The next bound a man's tongue so that he could not speak in court against the writer. The one after it bound a woman's eyes, so that she would not look at anyone but the writer again. Not one of them used his name. A few asked the Lady below, by which they meant his wife. Two asked Plouton. Most asked Hermes, who was thought to be more obliging.

"They kept these?"

"They kept them among these." Alecto lifted out a bundle wrapped in oiled cloth from the bottom of the box. "I think the old ones were for anyone who opened the box. The sanctuary has been full of them for as long as there has been a sanctuary. A few more would not be noticed."

She unwrapped it. There were five.

These were new. The lead was still bright where the folds met, and the nails were new bronze with the file-marks on them. Hades drew the first and opened it on the table.

It had been cut, not scratched: a clean, even hand, the strokes struck with a graver and never gone over twice. The form was the one he had just read a dozen times. The words were almost the same.

I bind APOLLO.

There was nothing else on it. There was no god at the head of it, and no one asked to hold him.

He drew the second.

I bind HERMES.

The third.

I bind ZEUS.

He laid it with the others and drew the fourth.

I bind HEPHAESTUS.

Below the name, hammered into the lead, was a fleck of baetylus no larger than a grain of barley. He did not need to touch it. He touched it anyway.

The firmament gave it to him at once. It was bound, tight as the stone in a Pyle's crown is bound to its counterpart, pulling toward something very far away with the patience of a thing that had been made to pull. And he knew the stone. It had come out of the lower galleries at Aleyonian Lake, from the seam where the gallery had opened into the fissure and seven men had not come up again. He had signed the commission himself.

He set the tablet down, name upward, square with the edge of the table.

Alecto said nothing.

The fifth tablet had been cut by the same hand.

I bind HADES.

None of the old tablets had dared it. Mortals had asked favors of him for as long as there had been mortals, and always by some road around his name: Plouton, or Klymenos, or the Lady's lord. This cutter had written it plainly, in the same even hand as the rest. Someone had told him what Hades's own kingdom called him.

There was baetylus in this one too. Hades laid his finger on it.

It lay in the lead like a pebble in a riverbed. Nothing pulled at it. Nothing held it. It was stone, and nothing more.

"Is that one yours?"

"It would appear to have been meant for me."

He set it apart from the other four..

* * *

Hecate was in the Mnemeion before him, as she generally was, though he had sent for no one. She closed her folio when she saw what he carried, and cleared a space on the table, and did not ask where it had come from.

He gave her the potter's tablet first.

She read it as a magistrate reads a petition she has heard a thousand times. "Mortals have been writing to me on lead for as long as there has been lead. Half the wells in Attica have my name in them somewhere." She turned it to the light. "This one is honest work, at least. He meant it."

Then he laid the four new tablets before her, one by one, and she stopped talking.

She read them in order. When she reached Hephaestus, she glanced at him, once, and went on. Then she rose without a word, went into the next chamber, and came back with a folio Hades recognized: the inventory from which she had copied the seven weapons surrendered after the war, and the eighth that no later record accounted for.

She found the page. Below the seventh, in the same cramped hand, was a line he had read before and passed over, as everyone had.

With the same: a coffer of cedar, inscribed lead, forty leaves. Votive. Given to the smiths.

"Given to the smiths," Hecate said. "Melted down. No one asked what was written on them."

"We were destroying weapons. Lead was not a weapon."

"No." She laid her hand flat beside the four, and the silver at her sleeve caught the lamplight. "It was what told the weapons where to point."

He described the fleck in Hephaestus's tablet: how it was bound, and to what, as near as he could say. Then he gave her the fifth tablet and told her what was not in it.

She read the two names. Something that was almost amusement came and went in her face.

She read the name. Something that was almost amusement came and went in her face.

"They have written it as though it were a name."

"It has not taken."

"It could not. The binding wants the name you were given at your naming, which is laid into a god as the pairing is laid into a Pyle. That is what the stone finds." She touched the fleck in Apollo's tablet without quite touching it. "His name is his name. Yours is something the Titans called you, because they could not find you."

Hades said nothing.

"Those who knew you before the war will have known the other. And the Titans had these. If they had a name for you, they cut it."

"I expect they did."

"But they never reached you."

"I was seldom where they looked."

"The Helm," Hecate said.

He inclined his head.

She looked at him then, as a scholar looks at a gap in a record. She did not ask. He did not offer. The last person to say the name aloud had said it in Tartarus, and Hades had closed the door on him.

Hecate turned back to the four.

"There is no such difficulty with the others. Apollo's name is on every altar from Delos to Delphi. Anyone who can hold a graver can cut it. A tablet like this costs them an afternoon and a little of your beatylus." She looked up. "Send these to Olympus, my lord. All of it. The merchant, the sanctuary, the box."

Olympus. Zeus sat there behind every defense his son had ever built him, with whatever he had kept back from the war within reach of his hand. Of the four names in the box, his brother's was the one that troubled Hades least.

"You have just told me they can cut another in an afternoon."

"I have told you they will. Apollo should know what is being cut for him, and where."

"Apollo will know that the Atharim cut curse tablets, and whose names are on them. That is what I have learned. That is what I undertook to share."

"And how you learned it?"

"Is mine."

She did not close the folio. She laid two fingers on the fourth tablet and turned it on the table, so that the name faced him.

"Your nephew's name is in this box, my lord."

"I can read."

"Then send him the box."

Hades let the silence go on long enough that she would hear it.

"I will write to my nephew tonight. He will know everything he needs to keep his doors."

"A letter."

"A letter."

Hecate held his eyes a moment longer. Then she took her fingers from the tablet.

Hades took up the slack one and turned it over in his hands. A tablet could not find him, and the instruments could not see him. To reach him, they would need something that did neither: something that would not have to find him at all. He could think of nothing in the world that would serve.

He set it down.

"And the stone?"

"No baetylus leaves the kingdom. Not to Olympus, not to the sea, not to anyone, until I say otherwise."

She wrote it down. She was still writing when she spoke again.

"There was no tablet for the queen."

"No."

"They cut one for you."

"To no purpose."

"This time. And yours is the first they have cut for this house." She set down the stylus. "The queen's name is sung at Eleusis every autumn. Hers will take. She should be told, my lord."

"She will be. By me."

"When?"

It was not a question a minister asked her king. She waited for the answer anyway.

Hades thought of Persephone told tonight.

She would go to Eleusis to warn her mother's priests herself, whatever he said; no order of his had ever stopped her. And when she came back, she would lay the four tablets in front of him and ask him to open the gates. In her court she had said she was not asking about the next thousand. This time she would ask about one, and put Hephaestus's tablet in his hand.

He did not intend to have that argument again.

"When I judge it useful."

"I am the queen's minister."

"You are a minister of this house. You will say nothing of this to her."

The lamps burned without a sound. In the next chamber a folio settled on its shelf.

"Yes, my king."

She gathered the inventory and her stylus, and bowed exactly as low as courtesy required.

* * *

Thanatos was waiting outside his rooms. He followed Hades in without being asked and stood by the door, and said nothing, which was his way.

Hades wrote the letter himself.

He wrote that the Atharim were cutting tablets of lead with the names of gods on them, and that one of the names was Hephaestus. He wrote what the tablets did and what they did not, and how far the binding seemed to carry, and that every one of them ran on baetylus. He wrote that the wards on the workshop should be drawn close, and that no mortal craftsman who had once left his service and lately come back should be let through the doors. He wrote it plainly and in order, the way his nephew liked a thing explained, with nothing left for him to guess.

It was a good letter. It left out nothing Hephaestus would need.

Once, over cups in the long gallery beneath Olympus, Hephaestus had asked him how deep the heat ran under Erebos, and whether a man might build a forge there that never needed feeding. He had asked it laughing. He had asked it twice.

Hades read the letter through from the beginning. He added nothing.

He warmed the wax at the lamp, unpinned the key from his breast, and pressed its bow into the seal.

[Ascendancy]

Aiakos was at the door before him, with his ledger open on the ledge of stone beside it and a single key on a cord around his wrist.

He had signed it out to himself. Hades could read the entry from three paces: the day, the hour, the door, and beneath them, in the same unhurried hand, at the king's request. Below that he had left a space for the hour of return.

"My lord."

The Judge of Asphodel looked older than Minos, though no one at court could have said by how much. He was spare and upright, his white hair cropped close, his face weathered rather than lined, as though he had spent more of his life out of doors than any judge had cause to. He wore the undyed grey wool of the plains he kept, and his hands were a countryman's, broad across the knuckles. He held the pen as if it too had been signed out.

The door stood at the foot of the stair, cut from the living rock and set flush with it. There was nothing on its face but two locks, a hand's breadth apart. They could not have kept him out for the space of a breath. The door was stone, and it would have opened for him as every stone in Erebos did.

They were not meant to keep him out. Long ago, when he decided what he would keep from the war, he had also made a law: this room would open only to his key and the keeper's turned together, and every opening would go into the keeper's ledger. If the king of Erebos wanted what lay behind this door, someone would watch him take it, and it would be written down.

"Your key, my lord."

Hades unpinned the osmium key and set it in the left-hand lock. Aiakos waited until it was seated before he set his own in the right. He had never once turned his key first. They turned them together, and the door went inward on its pivot without a sound.

The fixtures woke along the ceiling as the air moved, one after another down the length of the room. It was dry and cold, and smelled faintly of oil and old leather. Hades withdrew his key and laid it on the table just inside the door.

Hecate had said the word in the Mnemeion as though it settled the matter. He meant to know whether it did.

Most of what the room held he had not looked at in a long time, and he did not look at it now. He went down the length of it between the racks. The dust on them lay so even that it might have been laid there by hand.

The Covenant had listed the devices that unmade gods one by one, and he had surrendered every one it listed. It had not named what the Cyclopes forged for the three brothers; no one had imagined it would. Zeus still wore his thunder at his side, and Poseidon his trident. Nor had it named what hung on these racks. Hades had read it as he read every agreement his brothers drafted, closely. Nothing here had been made to unmake a god. Zeus, he did not doubt, had read it less closely.

He had meant to pass the scepter as he had passed the racks. He stopped instead.

It lay on its own rest along the far wall: a scepter of purest baetylus, long as a walking staff, dark and smooth as glass, violet where the light went down into it. He had carried it through ten years of war. Armies had broken in front of it, and walls built to stand forever had come down. At the end, every god who had fought had watched him strike the ground with it, and the ground had opened all the way to Tartarus. His father had gone down into the dark beneath without once looking up at him.

He had not carried it since. His hand had gone to the rest beside it; he took it away. There was dust on his fingertips, and he rubbed it off with his thumb. There was none on the scepter.

Beside it on the shelf stood a row of bottles of the same stone, each small enough to close a hand around, or to carry in a pocket, and just as clean. He counted them. Six. He had never asked Persephone how she got them out of Olympus.

The Atharim's instrument had been given a shelf of its own, with a tag on a length of string in Aiakos's hand: Taken in the labyrinth. Delivered by the Keres. Hades picked it up. It was not the thing he had carried to Hephaestus. That had been a cobbling of mismatched housings, held together by its maker's stubbornness. This was slender, its case of a single piece, and the needle sat under a cover no one had yet had time to scratch. He turned it over and found no seam on the underside either.

It was good work. It had not been long since the Nekromanteion.

He moved it to the table beside his key.

The Helm sat on its stand at the end of the shelf: a close cap of dark leather, with cheek-pieces of bronze gone brown at the edges. It might have belonged to any foot soldier of the war who had come home with his head. It had never looked like much.

Aiakos stayed on the threshold, where the ledger said he should wait.

Hades drew on Dynamis, no more than he would have needed to light a lamp. The needle swung round at once and stood still, pointing at him.

He let the working go. He took the Helm from its stand and put it on.

The leather was cold, and then it was not. Nothing else changed that he could feel. He drew again, exactly as before.

The needle stirred. It went past him, came back, went past him again, and wandered the face of the dial like something that had lost the scent and could not think where to look. Then it found Aiakos in the doorway and settled there.

The Judge, who could no longer see his king, looked at the place where Hades had last stood and waited.

Hades crossed to the far wall and drew again. The needle stayed on Aiakos. He went to the corner behind the scepter's rest and drew a third time, more than he needed. The needle did not move.

He was still standing there when it swung off the Judge and came round toward the stair.

He had heard nothing. A moment later he did: a step on the stair, light and quick, and the brush of a hem.

Aiakos turned, bowed to whoever was coming, and went out past her. He drew the door to behind him, though he did not close it.

Persephone came in with a traveling mantle of dark green thrown over her court dress, as though she had put it on at the Pyle and not stopped since, and a small dark bottle in her hand. She looked at nothing in the room but the key on the table, and she took it up as she passed. She came straight across, between the table and the racks, and stopped an arm's length from where he stood.

There was a binding between them, laid long ago, of the same kind that had made one hound of three, though narrower. It told each of them where the other stood, and nothing more.

Her fingers found the lapel of his coat without looking for it. She pinned the key where it belonged, and it was gone under her hand. The gold pomegranate at her throat touched his coat as she leaned in to fasten it.

His hands stayed where they were.

"You were in my gardens," she said, to the air a little above her eyes, which was where his face was, "and you did not come up to the house."

"I had business with a window."

"So the keeper told me." She smoothed the lapel flat, and left her hand there. "My mother writes that your Erinyes have been in her dining rooms too."

"In yours. Alecto was particular about which half."

She looked down at her own hand on his coat. Her mouth pressed shut against what it wanted to do, and lost.

"Of course she was." She took a moment to recover herself. ”The priestesses said that everything was left exactly as it was found. They found that the most frightening part."

She laughed.

He did not interrupt it.

When it was done she stepped past him to the shelf and set the bottle among the six. It was the same stone and the same make, and it weighed nothing.

"Your stewards sent this back."

"No baetylus leaves the kingdom."

”The bottle is empty."

”The bottle is baetylus."

She looked at the seven bottles in a row, and then at the place where he was.

"The Erinyes on my hill, and then my bottles stopped at the Pyle, in the same two days." Her voice had not changed. "What did they find on my hill?"

"Lead."

She waited.

"Old curses. Mortals have been leaving them on that hill since before there was a temple to leave them in."

She studied the air in front of her as she would have studied his face. For a moment neither of them spoke. Then she looked away, and asked nothing else.

Hades took off the Helm and set it back on its stand. Erebos had never needed its king hidden.

Persephone reached up and put his hair back where the leather had pressed it flat. He stood still for it. Her fingers smelled of damp earth and citrus. She was not looking at him, only at what her hands were doing, with the small frown she gave a tree that would not grow straight.

Then her hand stopped. She drew something out between two fingers and held it up to the light.

It was silver.

"You should drink one of those."

"When there is a reason."

She held the hair a little higher.

Then she let it fall, and stepped back, and turned to the shelf. She touched the nearest bottle with one finger.

"Zeus made Psyche a goddess with less than that."

"Who?"

This time she looked at him.

"The only living woman you ever let go back up."

Hades did not recall letting anyone go anywhere.

"She sat on my floor."

He had her then. Two and a half centuries ago, in the queen's hall in Elysium, on some business of his own he no longer remembered: a girl with river mud dried at her hem, standing among the pools with whatever errand had brought her down. Persephone had had a chair brought for her, cushioned in the same pomegranate silk as the throne, and a table laid. The girl had thanked her but sat down on the floor instead. She had asked for bread, plain bread, and when it came she ate it slowly with both hands, as though no one had ever set anything so good in front of her. Hades had taken it for caution. Someone had told her the old stories about eating in the house of the dead, and she was keeping to the rules. He had noticed that she enjoyed it, and had not wondered why. She had brought honey cakes for the hounds, Thanatos told him afterward, as though they were a toll to be paid, and the third, which approved of no one, had followed her all the way down to the river. He had let her go back up without a second thought. He had not thought of her since.

Persephone was watching him remember. Whatever she saw, she kept.

He looked at the shelf. Six full, and one that was not.

"Then that is the last of it."

"The last of it here."

She drew the mantle closer at her throat.

"I should go back. My mother will want an answer, and I shall have to think of one."

"Tell her the queen's half is in good order."

The corner of her mouth moved. She went to the door, and there she stopped with one hand on the frame and turned back to him. She said nothing.

He stayed where he was.

"My queen."

She looked at him a moment longer.

"My lord."

She went up.

On the table, the needle had turned with her. It followed her through the door and up the stair, a little at a time as the stair climbed, until it was pointing at the ceiling. Then it lost her. It swung, and wandered, and finally came to rest on him.

Hades picked it up and laid it face down on the shelf, beside the empty bottle.

Aiakos was waiting at the door with his pen. He wrote the hour of return in the space he had left for it, and waited for the king's key to be seated in its lock.

Then the two keys turned.

[Ascendancy]

Two alignments had been tried in the night, the Ker had said, at a gate no one had woken in two hundred years. The first had held for a breath. The second had held for a count of ten.

The gate stood on a ledge above the gulf, its pylons pale against the rock behind them.

He had set it there himself. It had once opened from a shrine whose last priest he had outlived by four hundred years, and when no one came through it anymore he had not broken it. He had turned its pairing down into the labyrinth instead, so that anyone who woke it from above would arrive on this ledge with the gulf in front of him and no way onward. He had done the same with every gate he retired, thirteen in all. Acharaca was rubble now. That left twelve, and until Acharaca, a dead end had seemed answer enough.

The man the Keres still held had told them his orders: enter the Pyle, study the destination, and continue until further movement became impossible. A dead end stopped a man who wanted to come home. It did not stop a man who had been sent not to.

He was still standing before the pylons when the light came.

It spread between them pale and slow, the way it did when a Pyle was woken by someone who did not quite know how. Hades laid his hand on the nearer pylon and read what was pushing into it from the far end: baetylus that was not his, prepared by no one who understood the stone, driving a stored charge into the pairing a little at a time and feeling for the place where it would hold. They were better at it than they had been at Acharaca. The light steadied. Beyond it, the dark began very slightly to look like a passage.

He put Dynamis into the baetylus in the capital.

It went dark first. Then the capital split, and the crack ran down through the fluting to the base, and the second pylon followed it. The light went out between them. Pieces of the capital went over the edge, and he did not hear them land. Somewhere under a sky across the world, a handful of mortals were looking at two columns that had just become ornaments.

They had found one of the twelve. They would find the rest. And if they ever found their way past all of it, past the gates and the warders and the rows Nyx kept, there were prisoners at the bottom of Tartarus who had known him before the war, and who could give them what the curse tablet in his coat was missing.

He felt the corner of the lead against his ribs when he turned.

He would break the other eleven today. Then he would go down to the cells.

His way to the next gate passed the pylons the two men had come through from Caria, below the shrine mortals had raised the year he married. Nothing was bound in them now. Dust had begun to settle on the baetylus in the capitals, a fine grey film over the violet, the way it settled on any stone that held nothing. The rock around them had always been dirty.

He went past without slowing.

None of the other eleven had been tried. He broke them anyway. When it was done, the only Pyles left in the labyrinth that opened onto anything but the labyrinth itself stood behind the palace, and they woke for only two: himself, and Nyx.

* * *

The labyrinth ended where the Hundred Hands began.

The Keres stopped at the mouth of the warders' hall and set down the cases of new baetylus they had carried from the Deep Works. They went no farther. They never did.

The three who kept Tartarus had been made while the Titans still ruled, in the years before such making was forbidden, and they had been made for war. Zeus had bound them to this prison when the Titans went into it. Hades kept them there. Below them, at every cell door in the prison, lay one of the hundred warders made from their flesh, and what the three wanted, the hundred knew.

Furrows crossed the floor of the hall, each deep enough to lose a man in, running from the far wall almost to the place where he stood. They dated from the first time he had told them no. He had not had them filled.

Kottos and Gyges were at the far end of the hall, where the air never settled. Aegaeon was nearer. He sat on the floor with his back against the wall and his forearms across his knees, the way soldiers sit between watches, and sitting, his eyes were level with Hades's own. His hide had grown in plates, dark and ridged, the way armor might be made by someone who meant it never to come off, and his horns swept back from his brow past the line of his shoulders. Where the plates met, the hide had split, and a red light showed in the splits, low and steady, like a forge banked for the night. Bronze chains crossed his chest and shoulders. Zeus had put them there. They had been on him so long that the hide had grown over them in places.

Hades had always thought the three the best-made things in Tartarus. 

Hades drew in as much Dynamis as he could, and spent none of it. Anywhere else, he drew that much only to use it.

"Give him to us."

Beneath his feet, through the firmament, he felt the demand go down into the prison: a hundred great weights shifting on the rock at once, each warder at its own door lifting its head. Then all of them turning the same way, toward one door.

It was what Aegaeon said first, always, before any other greeting. He had said it at the end of the war, when the brothers divided the world and Tartarus came to Hades with the rest of it. He had said it every time since.

Those who knew you before the war, Hecate had said. There were few of them left. The oldest sat at the bottom of this prison, behind a door Hades had closed himself.

He let the request stand a moment longer than he ever had.

"No."

The light in the splits of Aegaeon's hide came up, the way a banked forge comes up when its door is opened, and held there. Then, slowly, it went down again.

His father had been sentenced to Tartarus. He had not been sentenced to them.

Below, the warders turned back to their own doors.

"You took longer to answer this time."

"I was thinking of the mortals."

Aegaeon already knew about them. Nothing came into the labyrinth that the three did not hear of.

"The next ones are ours, son of Kronos."

"None will get this far."

Aegaeon did not trouble to argue. The mortals had never been what he really wanted.

His eyes, with the same light at the back of them, went to the key at Hades's breast and stayed there, as though that were the part of Hades he had always been speaking to. Then they went past him and down, to the floor of the hall, toward the one door at the bottom of the prison.

"We can wait."

Aegaeon had never said that before.

Hades looked where Aegaeon had looked, toward the far distant door he had closed on his father. Hades looked down a moment longer than Aegaeon had.

"Then you will wait a long time."

He crossed the hall to the far arch. Beyond it, Dynamis eased away, and he laid his hand on the wall of the stair. The rock showed him the way down, every turn of it, as it always did.

* * *

The Keres were waiting beyond it with the cases. They had their own way down, and did not use his. From there the way narrowed and went down, and at the bottom of it Nyx had laid three rows around the neck of the prison.

In the first, all light went out. It did not dim. It was simply not there, and neither was the glow that had followed the Keres down the stair. He walked it as he always had, by count, forty-one paces with his left hand on the rock and the brush of the Keres' hems ahead of him. The two men from Caria had carried lamps and an instrument. Here they would have walked blind, and their needle would have wandered the dial with nothing to find. From outside this row, nothing beyond it could be seen, or heard, or found by any instrument yet made. He had never asked Nyx how she crafted it.

The second row had no edge he could feel. He crossed it in the returning light and felt nothing at all, and somewhere out there, Nyx knew that he had entered. She would have known as much of them: how many, and where, and what they carried.

The third came on behind the eyes, a weight like the last hour of a long night's work, and lifted before he had gone three steps. He had held leave for seven hundred years, but it still took the sleep a moment to recognize its king. It would not have recognized the men from Caria. They would have lain down where they stood and slept until the Keres came for them, and the Keres did not hurry.

In seven hundred years, nothing had crossed all three rows without her leave.

She was beside him when the weight lifted. He had not heard her come. He never did; he had never seen her arrive anywhere.

She looked younger than he did now. She had looked younger than him when he was a boy. Her dark hair was drawn back from a face that every sculptor in Greece had tried to carve at one time or another, and none had got right. She wore black, cut in no fashion he had seen at any court, with a single crescent of silver at her waist. There were rings on every one of her fingers. He knew every metal and every stone that came out of the earth, but he could not have named what any of them were made of.

"How is the child?"

Nyx had more grandchildren than Hades had ever troubled to count. She had raised only one of them herself, down here, and only Lethe did she call that.

"She found the craftsman. By what he remembered."

Nyx did not ask about the craftsman.

"Does she eat?"

"When Hypnos reminds her."

"Then someone should remind Hypnos."

He took the lead tablet from his coat and gave it to her.

She held it to what light there was and read the name. Her face did not change. She laid her thumb on the fleck of baetylus hammered beneath it, and it lay under her thumb as it had lain under his: a pebble in a riverbed, pulling at nothing.

"Can it be made to take?"

"Not with that name."

She did not look at the tablet when she said it. She looked at him, the way she had read the name: as though he were something she had read a long time ago and was checking against what she remembered.

He let her look.

She was one of the few still living who could cut a tablet that would take. He had always known that. It had never seemed worth considering, and it did not now.

She gave the tablet back, and he put it away.

* * *

The cells stood in a ring at the bottom of the prison, each behind a door carved from the rock, and before each door waited its warder.

He began with Iapetus, because Iapetus was pushing. He was always pushing. His warder lay across the threshold, a smaller thing than its master but made from the same flesh, bound to this door and no other and made to know the Titan behind it by their soul. It lifted its head as Hades came, knew him, and lowered it again.

Hades laid his palm on the door and felt it through the rock: the whole weight of a Titan leaning on his confinement, and the confinement leaning back exactly as hard, and a little harder each time he pressed. The restraint held his power; the warder held the door. Neither needed anything from Hades. Hades had brought down the walls Iapetus once boasted no army could breach, and he had done it from underneath. Iapetus had been trying to come through this door ever since.

The restraint was bound into a piece of baetylus set in the doorframe, the finest his mines could give him seven hundred years ago. He could feel where the binding had thinned along a flaw no one could have seen when it was laid. It would hold another two hundred years. Until mortals learned to open his doors, that had seemed time enough.

The baetylus in the Keres' cases was purer: the new core from the Deep Works, which Kleitos had meant for the regulators of his garden. There was enough for every door in the ring, and one case more. He had kept that one back.

A worn restraint could not be mended, only copied fresh from the pattern. He turned from Iapetus's door. Every door in the ring faced the chamber at its center, and the chamber's one door faced his father's.

He crossed to it and laid his hand on the rock, and the firmament gave him what lay within: the first restraint, the one all the others had been copied from, bound into a mass of baetylus finer than anything his mines had ever yielded. Nyx had brought that stone from wherever such stone was found before there were mines, and where that was, he had left to her. One did not cut a master to make its copies. Nothing had settled on it in seven hundred years. It held far more power than a pattern needed, as it always had; Nyx built with more margin than he did. And it had been made for no one. Narrowing it to fit each prisoner had been her part of the work, and the part he had never needed to understand.

The Keres opened the cases and held the new pieces up for him, and into each he copied the pattern, a thread at a time. He worked small. Near the cells, every working was answered the way a prisoner's effort was answered, his own included; he had insisted on that when the place was made, so that no king who came after him could open a cell by wanting to. A working the size of a lamp flame went into the new stone and came back up his arm heavier than it had gone in. It was tiring work.

Then he went round the ring. At each door he cut a socket in the rock beside the worn piece, set the new one, and drew the restraint across. It passed without a gap; whoever was behind the door would not have felt it change. The old piece went dull in its socket, the violet gone out of it. At Iapetus's door the new stone took hold, and the cell closed on its prisoner as it always had, harder as he pushed.

Nyx followed him from door to door. At each one, the rock opened under his palm to take the socket and closed again around the new stone, and she watched his hands while it did.

His father's cell was last.

He laid his hand on the door.

Nothing was pushing against it. His warder lay across the threshold with its eyes open, and there was dust on its back. It had not needed to move in a very long time. The restraint lay quiet in the baetylus, holding nothing, because nothing asked to be held. Of all of them, his father was the only one who had understood how the cell caged him.

The door was his work, like all the others in the ring, and like the others it was sealed true, except along one edge, where the rock had been driven home harder than it needed and had cracked a finger's length along the seam. He had closed it himself.

He ran his thumb along the crack. He left it as he always had.

When he looked up, Nyx was not watching his hands. She was looking at the door. She had known his father before he was king.

He cut the socket, and set the new stone, and drew the restraint across. The old piece went dull, as all the others had, and a Ker took it from his hand.

* * *

He had kept back the last case. On its lid, Kleitos had asked whether any part of it might come back to him afterward. Hades had read the note before coming down, and had not answered it.

He did not go into the chamber. He walked the ring again, as he had walked it for the doors, but this time he faced inward, and laid the last of the baetylus over the chamber's outer walls piece by piece, joining each to the one before, until the chamber stood from floor to crown under a shell no thicker than a fingernail. Here, beside the pattern, every working came back to him heavier than anywhere else in the ring. Twice he stopped with a piece half set and waited for what had come back up his arm to ease. His hands were steady. He waited anyway.

When the shell was whole, he bound a working into it. The Atharim's instruments found a Pyle by the unsteadiness of its mageia, and found a god by the power he used. Through this they would find nothing at all to read. Last, he laid his hand on the chamber's door and closed it into the rock around it, so that there was no longer a door, only wall.

When he took his hand away, he could not close it. The arm was cold and stiff from the fingers to the shoulder and heavy, as though it belonged to someone else and he had been given it to carry. He stepped back until there was rock behind him, and stood with his shoulders against it. It was his father's door.

”That took more from you than the doors did."

"It is the first."

"Yes."

He worked his fingers closed and open again, and closed, until they answered him. Nyx watched him do it.

* * *

Nyx came with him as far as the Pyle that would take him home to Erebos. She did not usually see him out. He put it down to the day.

He woke the Pyle, and had his foot over the threshold when she spoke.

"Hades."

He stopped, but did not turn.

"Is there anything else you would ask me?"

"No."

He had what he had come for. She said nothing more. He went through, and let the conjunction close behind him.

[Ascendancy]

He had come down to the Mnemeion to put the gates into the record. He had broken them himself, so he would write them himself.

Hecate was there before him, with the folio of the seven surrendered weapons open at her elbow. She inclined her head without rising, and the lamplight caught the silver at her sleeves as she turned back to it.

The four curse tablets from Corinth lay at the far end of the table on a square of black cloth. He had touched them whenever he passed since the night he brought them here, the way a man tries a door he knows he has locked.

He laid two fingers on the first as he went by.

It pulled at nothing.

He stopped.

He took his fingers away, and set them down again, and read it through the firmament as carefully as he had ever read a seam. The fleck was where it had been, hammered into the lead below the name, a grain of his own stone. When he last passed this table it had strained toward something very far away, steady as a plumb line. Now it lay in the lead and held to nothing, and he could not have told it from the fleck in the tablet inside his own coat.

A true name did not stop being true. There was only one other reason for a fleck to lie still.

He read the others with his free hand. He did not take his fingers from the first. Hermes pulled. Zeus pulled. He came to his nephew's last, and that pulled too, toward Olympus, as steadily as on the day it was cut.

Hecate had looked up from the folio. She could not read stone. She could read the hand that had not moved.

"Apollo is dead."

She rose.

"When?"

"It does not say."

He took his fingers from the tablet.

The gates could wait.

* * *

Hades came into the hall of Hypnos without slowing, sweeping the heavy wool aside with one arm as he went through. He looked first for the stone. Hypnos kept one of the Oneiroi's stones on a shelf beside the lamp oil, for no better reason than that his son was somewhere at the far end of it.

Hypnos was already on his feet beside the low stool where he had been keeping watch, his eyes on the wool still swinging in the archway. Hades had never come into this hall without sending word first.

"What do you need, my lord?"

"Apollo is dead."

Hypnos put out a hand and found the wall.

"I need Morpheus."

Lethe was asleep on the floor between them, curled on her side along the window frame from the conservatory, one arm over the oak and her fingertips resting in the notches. Her papers had drifted out around her across half the floor.

Hades stepped around her, and around the papers, and took the stone down from its shelf. It was black and smooth and no larger than a palm, with fine silver lines running in toward a single dark gem. Hephaestus had made the stones in pairs, each bound to one other and no more.

He traced the words on the gem with one fingertip, and the silver lines took them in.

Apollo is dead. Find whoever dreams of him tonight. Has anything come from Olympus?

The light ran out along the silver and was gone.

Behind him, Hypnos lowered himself back onto the stool.

Hades looked down at Lethe. Her lips were moving, as if she were reading something to herself.

"She's looking for the girl," Hypnos said, low, so as not to wake her. "She has been at that frame since the second hour."

"Is that usual?"

"For her. It's best to leave her be, my lord. She'll come up when she has something."

Hades did not sit. He read the floor of the hall through the firmament, down through the foundations to the bedrock under the palace, every course and seam of it. When he reached the bottom, he began again. Hypnos trimmed a lamp.

The gem brightened. The words rose above the stone in Morpheus's square, impatient hand, and hung there in the lamplight.

Nothing from Olympus. I have him. Through horn.

He read the first three words twice.

Hades lay down on the couch along the far wall without taking off his coat. The corner of the lead in its inner pocket found his ribs as he settled, and he let it. Hypnos came to stand over him, and his hand came to rest a little above Hades's brow.

He had drunk no nectar since Olympus. Sleep took him before Hypnos had sat down again.

* * *

The gate of horn rose before him, and Morpheus beside it with his wings folded.

"Half of Greece dreams of Apollo, my lord. Most of them dream him in a temple. One man dreams him in a street."

"Who?"

"One of his priests from Didyma. He was holding the horses."

Morpheus took his hand. They crossed the hollow without stopping and came out onto the elm, into the murmur under every leaf of it. Lethe had led him here branch by branch, like a child showing a guest her house. Morpheus went the way a man walks a road he has worked for years, without looking at it, and stopped at a leaf no different from the thousands around it.

He slipped his free hand beneath it.

The temple was whole.

Columns ran away on either side of a long court, fluted to the capital and unmarked, the marble the color of new cream. No lichen at their bases; no chip on any step. Hades had walked through too many temples to mistake this for one that had stood a single winter.

"Didyma," Morpheus said. "As he would have it."

At the far end of the court a figure stood in a light too strong to look at.

Then the marble underfoot was paving, and the paving was cracked, and there was goat dung in the cracks.

It was a village street in Caria, and it was real. The limestone had gone soft and pale with damp, the way it did everywhere in that country. A wineshop's shutter hung by one hinge. Three doors down, a doorway stood open on a low room.

The priest stood at the corner with the reins of four horses gathered in his fists. He was young, not much past twenty, in the white of Apollo's house, gone grey at the hem from the road. Hades stood where the priest stood and saw what he saw. Whatever the young man had not looked at that day stayed soft at the edges, like a drawing begun and abandoned. Whatever he had looked at was exact.

He had looked at Apollo.

Apollo walked up the middle of the street with two of his people a step behind him. He had his father's height and none of his father's beard; there was nothing on his jaw at all, and never would be. His hair was dark and curled loose to his collar, and the road had pushed it every way at once. He was dressed for riding and for work: a short tunic belted at the waist, laced boots, a traveling cloak pinned at one shoulder and thrown back to free his arm. Dust lay on him to the ankles. The hem of the cloak had torn on something, and he had not troubled to see to it.

He was beautiful. Hades had known him long enough to stop noticing but noticed it now. Everything else in the memory carried its marks, the god's own dust and torn cloak among them. His face was the only thing that did not. Hades could not have said whether that was the priest's love or simply the truth.

The street looked at him.

A woman at an upper window stopped with a wet cloth in her hands. Two boys under the wineshop's shutter forgot whatever they had been quarreling about. An old man sweeping his step leaned on his broom and watched him pass. Hades had seen processions turn fewer heads. Apollo did not notice any of it. He had been looked at all his life.

Across from the open door, a man sat on a step with his elbows on his knees, studying the paving between his boots. He was the only one in the street who did not look up.

Apollo glanced back toward the corner.

"Stay with the horses."

The priest must have asked something with his face, because the god answered it.

"For what? We know where he is."

He smiled as he said it. The priest had kept the smile.

Somewhere at the soft edges of the street, a hammer began. Then a second. Hades looked for them, and the dream gave him only as much as the priest had: a man kneeling at the far corner with a mallet rising, another by the wineshop, a third he had to search for, and the fourth almost at the priest's own shoulder. Four. They struck out of time with one another. The priest had taken them for men setting posts, and had not turned his head.

They were driving stakes into the limestone.

Apollo went in at the open door. His two people stayed on the threshold, facing the street.

He was not inside long. He came back and stood in the doorway, and behind him Hades could see the room: a bench scored with a thousand small cuts, the corner where the ink had soaked into the grain, the crack in the plaster someone had filled badly.

Hades knew it.

The shelves were bare. All thirty-one instruments were gone, and so was the man who had made them.

The man on the step stood up.

He did not hurry. Nor did the men from the corners, who had laid their mallets down and were walking in, nor the two who came out of the wineshop, nor the old man, who leaned his broom against the wall. Eight of them, or nine. Their hands were empty. They looked like a village coming to see what the god wanted.

Apollo's people moved to stand in front of him. He put them aside with a hand on each shoulder and stepped down into the street.

He turned to face the man from the step.

"Stand."

The priest had heard Apollo say it once before, at the harbor in Miletus, to thirty men who had come down the quay with oars and boat-hooks. Every one of them had stopped where he was, as if he had walked into deep water. It was why the priest had not been afraid in this street.

The man kept walking.

"Stand."

This time the priest saw the effort go through the whole of Apollo, from his heels to the set of his jaw, the way it goes through a man who puts his full weight against a door.

The man did not so much as break his stride. The dust did not stir at his feet.

Apollo turned his head toward the corner, where the first hammer had been.

Hades had seen that look in the war, on gods whose names were known only in the records now, in the moment they understood. The priest had never seen it on anyone. Then Apollo took a step back, and the priest had never seen that either.

Between one breath and the next, the god was no brighter than the street. He stood in the same flat sun as the paving and the hanging shutter and the broom against the wall: a tall young man with a torn hem and dust to his ankles, among men who had stopped just out of his reach.

Hades's fingers had closed hard in Morpheus's grip. Morpheus's had not tightened at all.

The man from the step reached inside his coat. They all did. What came out was iron: knives, a short sword, a cleaver from the wineshop. Plain blades, the kind any village smith sold by the dozen.

One of Apollo's people shouted.

The priest turned and ran. The reins were still in his fists, and the horses came with him, and the street went by in pieces: the corner, a wall, a slice of sky over a roof. Behind it all came a sound he did not turn back for.

Then the paving was whole under Hades's feet again. The woman stood at her window with her wet cloth, the boys quarreled under the shutter, and Apollo was walking up the middle of the street with dust to his ankles, looking at nothing in particular.

Hades turned.

"He must have seen more than this. Find it."

"He didn’t," Morpheus said. ”He didn't look."

Apollo glanced back toward the corner, and smiled.

Morpheus drew his hand out from under the leaf without warning.

It was not done gently. One moment Hades stood in the street; the next he was on the branch, with Apollo's smile still in front of his eyes and the elm swinging under him.

Beside them, the leaf went on murmuring. To Hades it was only the low sound every leaf made.

"They were in the street before he was."

It was all Morpheus said.

Lethe had offered to take everything the craftsman knew, and Morpheus had told her to, and Hades had stopped her, because the man was Apollo's. The craftsman had woken frightened, with a needle pointing at the place where the king of Erebos had stood in his dream. A man off a ship from Halicarnassus had come asking for a merchant at Kenchreai, and Hades had known the ship's port before Alecto named it. He had sent Apollo a name, a town in Caria, and what stood on a man's shelves.

He had not sent that the man knew he had been found.

Hades's hand pulled against Morpheus's. Morpheus held on.

After a moment, Hades let him.

It would go into the record. Everything the king did went into the record.

Morpheus said nothing more. He took him on along the elm, and they found Lethe sitting on a branch with her bare feet hanging over nothing, her head bent toward a leaf.

She looked up at Morpheus, not at the king.

"Someone's put a piece of wood under my hand. Out there." She turned her palm up and looked at it, as if she expected to find it there. "It's hers. I can feel that much. I don't know what it is."

"It's what found her."

That seemed to satisfy her.

"There's a needle by her bed. I listened first. You said if there was one, I wasn't to press."

"That's right."

"So I haven't. I can take him in lightly." She glanced at Hades at last, and back at Morpheus. "He mustn't touch anything."

"I won't."

Morpheus laid the king's hand in hers, the way a man passes a rope, and only then let go. Her grip was light and sure. She slipped her other hand beneath the leaf.

A room by the sea.

Hades knew it was the sea before he saw it. The light off the water came in under the ceiling and moved there. There was a narrow bed, and a window, and through the window a long line of grey water with the sun going down into it.

The daughter of Alketas stood at the doorpost with a knife.

It was a pruning knife, short and hooked, its wooden handle gone dark from a gardener's grip. He had heard of it once, in the Hall of Judgment before dawn, from the man who owned it.

The skin across her nose had healed brown. She watched the water until the last edge of the sun went under it, and then she cut a notch in the doorpost at the height of her eye. Others ran above and below it, a column of them, small and exact.

Up here the sun went down every night. She marked each one.

Then the room was gone, and they were in the gardens of Elysium in the early morning, with the sun coming through the poplars, and she was walking.

Not to her father's conservatory. Past it, down the long terraced path toward the lake, where the stair went down between two stone basins to the edge of the water. Ahead of her on the path a woman walked in a morning gown, her chestnut hair loose down her back, in no hurry at all.

Hades had walked that same path with her, a long time ago.

The girl was counting. He could see her lips move, and her fingers fold down one at a time: at each turn of the path, at each basin, where the stair began and where it ended. When the woman ahead stopped at the water's edge, the girl stopped too, a long way back. She looked about her at the hedges and the basins and the trees, the way a person looks about a room to decide where to stand.

Hades looked at the woman by the water for longer than the girl did.

"She's learning the queen." Lethe said it quickly and without fear, as she said everything in this place. "Like I learned the craftsman."

Persephone bent and touched something growing at the edge of the stair.

"I can go under. I can find who asked her to do this." Lethe's head tilted, as though toward something only she could hear: the needle, on its table, beside a bed above the sea. "But it will know someone came."

"No."

Lethe shrugged, and took him up.

* * *

He woke on the couch with the corner of the lead against his ribs.

Across the hall, Lethe sat up a moment after him. She took her arm from the window frame as though she had never seen it, and reached for paper.

She drew without looking at anyone. A doorpost, with a column of small cuts down it. A line of sea. A stair going down between two stone basins, and on the stair a woman seen from behind, with her hair down her back. The pen went quickly and surely, and there was ink to her wrists before she was done.

She held the sheet up and frowned at it.

"I don't know who she is."

She sounded mildly sorry, the way she might have sounded about a pen she had lost. Then she laid the sheet among the others on the floor and began on something else.

Hades looked at the woman on the stair. He did not tell her who it was.

He rose, straightening the coat that had folded under him. At the archway he turned back to Hypnos, who had not moved from his stool.

"See that she eats."

Hypnos looked at him the way he looked at anyone whom sleep had done no good.

"Of course, my lord."

* * *

The fixtures in the Mnemeion had begun to come up toward the palace's morning when he came back. The folio lay where it had been, and Hecate had not left it.

He told her what he had seen, in the order he had seen it, as he would have given evidence. The street. Four stakes driven at its corners, about the door, perhaps twenty paces across. A god who told a man to stand and was not obeyed, and told him again with his whole weight behind it, and was not obeyed again. Men inside the four whom nothing touched. Iron.

He had seen it before. Not in a dream; in war, with his own eyes, on gods of the first rank who had walked into something they could not see and stood there spending power that went nowhere until they were cut down. Hecate had read him one such death out of that folio, not long ago. He had remembered the battle, but not the weapon.

"It was not what killed Enodia."

Dione had felt Enodia's own working turned against her. Apollo's had gone nowhere at all.

"Was it among the seven?"

Hecate turned the leaves back, one and then another, and stopped. She laid her finger under the fourth entry.

The fourth: stakes of dark iron banded with silver, four, to be driven in earth about the place. Within the four, nothing woven holds. Lyterion, its makers called it. Surrendered whole. Given to the smiths.

"The unbinder."

He had never troubled to learn what the clerks called it.

"Not the eighth."

"The eighth was never surrendered. This one was melted. I have the smiths' receipt."

"Then someone has made another."

Hecate did not answer. There was no need.

He read the entry again. To be driven in earth. Limestone, soft with damp. From the end of that street, awake, he could have drawn all four out of it before the last hammer fell.

His eyes went to the far end of the table, where Apollo's tablet still lay among the others.

"The queen will hear of this from her mother before she hears it from you."

She waited long enough for him to answer. He did not. She closed the folio and took it into the next chamber.

Hades drew the record to him.

Apollo had once argued a death out of these records. A king of Pherae, long ago. Apollo had loved him, and had sat with the Moirai over wine until they agreed that someone else might go down in the king's place. Thanatos had argued the matter at the door himself, and lost. The record had balanced, as it always did; another name had gone into it, the king's wife's, and Hades had entered it with his own hand.

He had never approved of it. He had always admired the method.

He wrote.

Apollo, son of Zeus. Killed in Caria, in the street of the craftsman Eupalamos, within a lyterion. The rest was not seen.

He wrote a second line beneath it.

The craftsman's name and place were sent to Apollo by order of the king, and nothing more.

He laid Apollo's tablet on the open page and left it there. Then he took up Hephaestus's. The fleck pulled at his fingers toward Olympus, steady and unhurried, wanting nothing but what it had been made to want.

He put it inside his coat, with his own.

Only one of them pulled.

[Ascendancy]

Hades found the gravel a little after first light.

He had been reading the outer bank since he came down to the landing, pace by pace through the rock under the river. Solid rock beneath the sanctuary. Solid rock along the cliff. Then, a little downstream, a shelf of ice laid over loose gravel, the kind four men with mallets could drive iron into.

He was measuring the length of it when the Pyle woke.

The wards knew the seal. Hermes's. They let the conjunction open and passed up to him the weight of one traveler stepping onto their stone, the way a messenger always came.

Then the weight of another.

Then a third and a fourth, close on each other's heels, and more behind them, all under the one seal.

Up by the Gates the hounds came to their feet together. On his bench beside the landing, Charon set down the net he had been mending.

Hades stopped where he stood and lifted his eyes to the dark mouth of the sanctuary.

He counted.

Priests came out first, in the white of Apollo's house. Then women with children by the hand or on the hip. A man with the temple's ledger clasped to his chest. An old woman with a cord of loom-weights knotted at her belt, who had to be helped over the threshold.

Sixty-three.

The conjunction held ten breaths more with no one in it. Then Hermes came through, and it closed.

He had a lyre slung across his back. It was Apollo's.

On the far bank they gathered along the water and stared into the dark where the landing was. Hermes went down the line of them, a hand on a shoulder, a word bent to a child, already moving on before anyone answered him. Near the front, among the priests, stood a young man holding his hands a little away from his body, the palms wound in strips torn from the hem of his robe.

Hermes turned to face the dark.

"Charon! I've a fare for you."

On his bench, Charon looked at the king.

"Fetch him. Only him."

The boat crossed without a ripple. On the far bank Hermes put something into the ferryman's palm without looking at it and stepped down into the hull, and the old woman with the loom-weights called something after him that made two of the priests take her by the arms.

The boat had not touched the landing when Hermes stepped off it. He saw who stood at the foot of the steps, and his brows went up.

”You came yourself. Someone must have died."

He held the king's eyes after he said it, and kept holding them.

Hermes came up the landing without waiting to be received, and stopped a stride from the king.

He had the smooth, unlined face of a man who had never been made to wait for anything: heavy dark brows, brown hair fallen into his eyes, a traveling cloak still pinned for a journey. His eyes were pale and red at the rims.

Up close, the linen on the lyre's strings had been knotted by someone in a hurry, and knotted again.

"You have brought company."

"I've brought my brother's house. What's left of it. The Atharim were already in Miletus when I reached Didyma, asking at every door for anyone who'd worn the white."

"My order was plain."

"Your orders are always plain." He repeated it back in Hades's own cadence. ”’Those already possessing my authorization. No further arrivals to be admitted without my express consent.’ Well, I possess it.” He flung an arm out toward the far bank. "Consent, my lord. I've come down for it. Or did you write that line so you'd never have to give any?"

”That authorization was for you alone.”

"Then you should have said so. There's not one word in it about who comes through after me. I read it three times on the road to be sure."

On his bench, Charon made a sound in his beard that in other men may have been a laugh.

”Take them to Olympus.”

Hermes laughed once, with nothing in it.

"My father kissed me on both cheeks. Then he looked past me at them, and said a household that let its god die in the street could find its own roof. He has never refused me anything in my life. He chose today."

Hermes pointed across the water without looking, straight at the young man with the wrapped hands.

"That one held Apollo's horses in the street. He's the only one of the three who came back. He hasn't said ten words since, and he wouldn't let me look at his hands."

Across the water the young man stood looking at the dark where the landing was. Dust on a god's ankles. A smile thrown back over a shoulder at the boy with the horses.

Hermes waited. So did Charon.

"They will not be admitted."

Hermes flung both hands wide and turned clean away from him, a full turn on the stone, as though there must be someone else on the landing who had heard it too. On his bench, Charon leaned forward to watch.

"You had to think about it. I watched you." He came round to face the king again. "And that's still your answer?"

"Hermes."

Hermes went fully still. It was the first time since he stepped off the boat.

Then he leaned in.

"So tell them yourself. They've been frightened of you their whole lives. Let them see your face while you do it."

"They do not need to see me to be refused."

"No. You'd hate to be looked at."

Hermes stepped back from him and turned his face to the river.

Through the binding, Hades felt the queen come into the sanctuary on the ledge above, and start down the stair.

He kept his eyes on Hermes.

Hermes's gaze came back from the gorge, went past the king to the stair, and stayed there. When he spoke again his voice had gone light and easy, and it carried.

"Apollo went to Caria because of your letter. A name, a town, and what stood on a man's shelves. He read it out to us at dinner like a gift."

Then, quietly, for the king alone:

"He said it was the kindest letter you ever wrote him."

Under Hades's boots, a seam opened in the landing, no wider than a hair, and ran toward the water.

Hermes looked down at it, and set his foot across it.

"Apollo had charge of the Atharim. He asked for it, and my brother gave it to him. I sent him what I learned, as I undertook to do, and what he did with it was his own affair." Hades's voice had gone very quiet. "This audience is over."

"What you learned. You sent him a street." His hand closed on the strap of the lyre. "And the lead. You wrote him the names they're cutting. Mine was on it. You wrote to me about your door. You never wrote to me about my name. I heard it from my brother over the fish course, Uncle, and three days later I was carrying his lyre out of his house. Two lines. It would have cost you two lines."

Hades waited until he had finished.

Two of those tablets were in his coat: his own, and Hephaestus's.

Hermes looked at him a moment longer. Then he folded his arms and turned his face down the gorge.

Persephone reached the landing.

Her eyes went to the seam in the stone, and then to Hermes. She crossed to him, drew his hand out from the fold of his arms, and held it.

"Hermes. I am so sorry."

He glanced at her, once. Then his eyes went back toward the river.

"Lady."

He took his hand back, and folded his arms again.

She turned to the king, with a glance across the river.

"You are not refusing them. You are refusing whatever may have come through with them."

Hermes swung round from the gorge before Hades could answer.

"Hephaestus had a letter. He showed it to me. Wards, doors, which of his old craftsmen to turn away, all of it in your own hand. The rest of us heard about it at dinner.”

"Hephaestus's own craftsmen are building against him. I told him which. Your priests taught my Pyle to a man who was no priest of yours, and I told you that."

Hermes opened his mouth. Persephone spoke first.

"Then find what came through. Put the Keres at the sanctuary door and have them read every one as they come out."

"The Keres questioned a man the Atharim sent into the labyrinth to die. They found nothing false in him."

She came a step nearer. "Then put Aiakos beside them with his ledger. Every name, every hour, and who examined them. Charon brings them over one at a time, and they go to Asphodel and nowhere else."

"A ledger records who passed. It does not—"

"It tells you where to look when you find out. You keep a door like that for your weapons, husband. Or is it only your weapons you trust your court to keep?"

Hades looked past her to Hermes.

"Who watched the Pyle close behind you?"

"No one. I closed it on the last of them."

"It stood open with no one in it long enough for anyone in that temple to take its measure."

Hermes's chin came up.

"I was getting the old woman up the temple stair, because she wouldn't leave without her loom-weights. Forgive me for not standing in the doorway with a lamp."

Nine doors. A girl with her father's forged papers, and at every door a man who read them and let her through.

Hades turned to the ferryman.

"Charon. Take him back across. When the last of them is through, his authorization is withdrawn, and Iris's with it. The outer Pyle wakes for no one."

Hermes threw up one hand, as though handing the whole landing back to him, and went down to the boat. At the edge of the landing he stopped, one foot on the gunwale, and looked back.

"When it's your name on the lead, Uncle, see who lets you in."

He stepped down, and Charon pushed off.

Up by the Gates, the third hound laid its head back on its paws.

"Your Erinyes on my mother's hill. My bottles stopped at your Pyle. Lead."

He waited.

"You found a law wide enough to carry men off my mother's hill. You will not find one wide enough to carry those people across a river."

"The sanctuary is consecrated to you. The river is not.”

"No. The river is yours!"

It came back to them off the far cliff.

"In the armory you were wearing the Helm when I asked what they had found on my hill. I pinned your key on your coat and talked to the empty air where your face should have been, and the air told me lead."

"It was lead. Tablets, cut by one hand. Apollo, Hermes, Zeus and Hephaestus."

"Was there one with your name on it?"

Your name.

"No."

"With mine?"

"No."

"Would it find me if there was?"

"If they cut one as they did the others, it would find you."

She sat down on Charon's bench.

He had never seen her sit anywhere that had not been made ready for her.

"When were you going to tell me?"

He held her eyes. After a moment she looked away, to the river.

"Stay in the kingdom until I know who is cutting them. Do not wake the Pyle at Eleusis."

"Is that a command?"

"No. I am asking you, Persephone.”

She looked up at him for a long moment, as though he had spoken in a language she used to know.

"What else aren't you telling me?"

He thought of a girl on the path above the lake, folding down a finger at every turn. If the queen walked that path differently by so much as a step, whoever had the girl's count would know they had been seen.

He turned and looked across the river at the far bank.

After a time he heard her rise and go up the stair. She did not stop at the top.

* * *

Alecto came to his rooms in Erebos as the fixtures were dimming toward night.

"My lord."

”Elysium’s western gardens. The path from the conservatories down to the lake."

"I know them.”

"The queen goes down it in the mornings, before the light reaches the stair. She goes alone. At the water she stops to touch whatever is growing at the edge of the steps, and she comes back by the far side of the lake.”

"What would you have me do, my lord?"

"Be on that path before she is. Mark anyone who walks it behind her."

Alecto waited.

"The queen is not to know."