The Last King of Erebos

[Ascendancy]

The findings on the collapse at Aleyonian Lake came up from the Deep Works five days after Hades turned Hermes back at the river. He had ordered them on the day the mountain came down. Kleitos had written the last line himself.

The morning's petitioners had gone, and the hall of judgment was empty but for the guards at the bronze doors. Hades read at the table beside the throne. The findings were in the hands of Kleitos's artificers, set out in the order he required of anything that left the Deep Works: what had been measured, by whom, and with what. The fracture behind the deposit had been moving for at least three days before the rupture. The marks on the slab agreed with it to the width of a fingernail. The overseers' props had been set to carry a roof that had never been in danger. The Warden had been told of the warnings twice and had ordered no examination.

The overseers had given their reasons, and the artificers had copied them without comment. The condemned god had been assigned to the lowest galleries without privilege of rank or former occupation, by order of the king. To heed his warnings would have been to grant him the privilege the sentence withheld.

Hades read that part again.

Below it, in a broader hand than the rest, the ink pressed hard enough to score the page:

The man who cut the marks. Damnameneus. I would have him in the Deep Works, if the king will allow it.

Kleitos had asked him for something once already, on the lid of a case of baetylus that went to Tartarus. Hades had not answered it.

He was still at the table when a guard came in to say that the Judge of Mourning asked to be admitted. Minos had sent word from the Pyle an hour ahead. The one time he had not, seven were dead.

He came up the length of the hall at his usual pace, with the lake wind's grit still in the folds of his sleeves, and bowed at the foot of the dais.

"My lord. You have the findings."

"I have them. Has the Warden seen them?”

"He asked, but I have not yet allowed it." Minos straightened. "There is also the overseers' slate at the shaft-head. Beneath your sentence, someone has chalked his name. Damnameneus of Telchine. The Deep Works. The overseers wipe it at the end of every shift. By the start of the next it is back."

"How many shifts?”

"Eleven."

"And who writes it?"

"No one has been seen to."

"Eleven times, at the change of shift, in a yard full of overseers."

"Yes, my lord."

Hades laid the findings face down on the table.

”And the petitions?"

"Continue. They ask what they have asked from the start: the Warden examined, conditions changed, the sentences reviewed. Since the chalk began, most of them ask for Damnameneus's transfer as well." Minos paused. "Even Kleitos sent a request to me. I told him I could not grant it."

He could not. Hades had seen to that in the Audience Chamber, with the Telchine still standing before him. No exemption is to be granted without my express permission.

Minos drew a folded sheet from inside his robe and laid it on the table beside the findings, square to their edge.

"The transfer, my lord. Drafted, in case it was wanted."

Hades did not touch it.

He had said something else on the day of Damnameneus's arrival, before he passed sentence. Your talents may find employment in time. At the time, he had meant it. Kleitos had been building toward a garden that would keep itself, and the Telchine had known more about baetylus under strain than anyone in the Fields of Mourning.

He had amended one judgment already this season, to have a girl found.

"He swore obedience to you, in Mourning. The oath answers you and the Warden."

"It does, my lord."

"No one has asked it to answer anyone else. If it does not follow him out of the Fields, I would be sending a condemned god to work beneath this hall with nothing on him but the Desmoi."

Minos considered that, and did not dispute it.

Only Styx could answer that.

"Be at the shaft-head at the change of shift. Bring the Warden." He looked at the folded sheet. "And bring that."

Minos took it up and put it away inside his robe.

***

He dressed as he would for a hearing: the black of the throne, and over it the cloak of office, fastened at the throat. He pinned the key himself.

The guards at the Pyle to Mourning knew his step, and had the seal awake before he reached it. He came out into the guardhouse at the head of the ravine and through it onto the road, where the wind off the lake came up between the walls to meet him and pulled the cloak back from his shoulders. Far below, the smoke of the settlement lay flat over the roofs.

Where the ravine opened, a path left the road and climbed the mountain's flank, away from the settlement. It was narrow and well kept, its steps cut shallow for the Judges' clerks, who came up it with their jars each time a prisoner was brought to swear. Hades had not climbed it in a long time. He did not hurry. The shift would not change for some hours yet.

Styx lived where her water came out of the mountain. She was a Titan. Every other Titan in his kingdom was in Tartarus.

The rock had been left as she found it, a deep overhang with the weight of the mountain above, and under it stood pillars of silver, twelve of them in a half-ring. Hades knew them before he reached them: every pillar down through its footing into the rock, and the rock itself to a depth he did not trouble to measure. They were plumb and sound.

The water was another matter.

It rose from a cleft at the back of the overhang, crossed the floor in a channel no wider than his hand, and went out over the lip toward the lake. He put his attention into the floor around it. The firmament gave him the channel's walls and its bed, and the grains of grit lying in it, one by one. Of the water it gave him nothing. Water was not stone. He had sent prisoners to swear on this water for longer than the settlement had stood, and he could not have said what it was.

She was crouched beside the channel with her sleeves pushed above the elbow, scooping out the grit the wind had carried in from the lake, where it had settled in the shallow basin the clerks filled their jars from. She saw him come in between the pillars. She finished clearing the basin before she stood, and dried her forearms on a cloth, one and then the other, and only then came to meet him.

"My lord."

"Styx."

She did not offer him a seat. There was nowhere under the overhang to sit but the rock.

"A prisoner sworn in Mourning. If I sent him out of the Fields, would the oath go with him?"

"It goes where he goes."

"And answers to whom?"

"Whomever you name, my lord."

She waited.

He had a second question. The Lyterion had been melted before the first prisoner ever swore on her water. No one had needed to ask whether the oath could stand inside one.

"There is a weapon in the world that makes a field around itself. Inside it, workings come apart: wards, bindings, mageia. If one were carried into Mourning, would the oath survive it?"

"My water is not a working, my lord."

Then the Desmoi would go, and the oath would not. Every condemned god inside such a field would have their full strength back and still be sworn to obedience. Hades turned that over and found he could govern it.

So it could still be broken only one way. Every oath in Mourning had been sworn on her water, and every one would last exactly as long as she did. Whoever wanted her would have to come through his borders first, and down the whole length of his kingdom to its farthest edge.

He turned to go.

"My lord."

He stopped between the pillars.

"My children live beside Zeus. Is Olympus safe for them?"

Hephaestus's tablet was in his coat. Its fleck still pulled toward Olympus.

"Olympus is my brother's affair."

She inclined her head. Before he had gone three steps down the path, she was crouched at the basin again with her sleeves pushed back.

***

The yard at the shaft-head was full when he came down into it.

The incoming shift stood nearest the shaft, in work garments, with their lamps not yet lit. Behind them were others who were not bound for the mine at all, people from the settlement in the clothes of those who would go home afterward, a few with children. Word that the king was on the mountain had come down ahead of him. The crowd drew back to let him through without being asked.

Minos waited beside the board with the Warden and his officers. The folded sheet was in his hand.

The day's names ran down the slate in chalk, each beside its station. One line was not chalk. Halfway down, cut shallow with an overseer's chisel where no rag could reach it, were the words he had spoken in the Audience Chamber:

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

Beneath them, in large, uneven letters, written fast:

Damnameneus of Telchine. The Deep Works.

Hades turned from Minos to address the whole yard. He did not raise his voice. He gave the judgment as he would have given it from the throne, and the yard fell quiet to hear it.

"The Master of the Deep Works has examined the collapse. The warnings were given and not tested. The Warden is removed from his office. Until I appoint another, the Judge of Mourning commands here."

The Warden opened his mouth, and shut it, and stepped back out of the line of his officers. None of them moved to fill the place.

The sound that went through the yard was not quite a cheer, and it did not last. Most of them were watching the board.

If he moved the man now, everyone in this yard would know what had moved him. Not Kleitos's findings, which none of them had read. Not his own word in the Audience Chamber, which none of them had heard. The chalk. Eleven shifts of it, and the Warden gone on the twelfth, and on the thirteenth there would be another name under another line, and he would have taught them how it was done.

An overseer stood by the board with a rag. His eyes went to Minos, then to the king.

Hades said nothing. The overseer wiped the chalk away in three strokes, and the slate beneath it showed dark and wet.

Hades stepped to the board where the whole yard could see his hand. He meant them to know whose sentence it was. He set a fingertip in the first letter and traced the chisel's work to the last, putting the firmament into the slate as he went, and every letter cut deeper behind his finger, until the sentence could be read from the back of the yard. No one spoke while he did it. Grey dust sifted down the face of the board.

"The sentence stands."

Minos looked at the fresh-cut letters, and at the wet slate beneath them.

"My lord."

He put the folded sheet back inside his robe.

A bell sounded in the winding house, and the cage came up out of the shaft with the outgoing shift from the lowest galleries. They came off it grey to the eyes with dust, lamps guttering, and the yard had to make room for them. The press came round the board on both sides, close enough to push the overseer back against the slate, close enough to brush the king's cloak. Hades did not step back from it. He did not look among their faces.

When the last of them had passed, the chalk was back beneath his sentence.

It had been written an arm's length from him. He looked at the hands nearest him. Every one of them held a lamp, and every one was grey with the mine's dust to the wrist. Chalk would not have shown on any of them.

"Your Majesty, I—" The overseer's rag had stopped short of the slate. "I didn't see."

The outgoing shift had stopped at the mouth of the street. The incoming shift stood by the shaft with their lamps unlit, and the freeborn stood behind them. No one came forward. No one looked at anyone else.

Hades did not answer him. He looked at the overseer until the man lowered his eyes.

"Minos."

"My lord."

"Find whoever wrote it. Until that hand is found, no petition from Mourning comes before me."

The yard made no sound at all.

Minos was a moment answering. When he inclined his head, he did not look at the yard.

"Wipe it."

Hades turned up the road toward the Pyle.

[Ascendancy]

Chapter 9: Within the Four

The bed had been turned down for him three nights running. Each morning the servants found it as they had left it, made it again, and said nothing.

On the third night, in the second hour after midnight, Hades came in and found the corner of the coverlet folded back, square, as it had been the two nights before. He stood looking at it with his coat half off his shoulders.

Then he took the coat the rest of the way off and hung it over the chair at the bedside, near enough to reach. A tunic of fine black linen, unbelted, had been laid out for him on the coverlet. He put it on.

Before he lay down he put his hand inside the coat. Two tablets. He read the first through the firmament, and his attention slid off the reading halfway, and he had to read it again. The fleck under his nephew's name pulled toward Olympus, as it had every night since Corinth, patient as a plumb line. The fleck under his own name lay loose in its lead, like grit.

He put out the lamp.

* * *

The fire was dung and thornwood, and it smoked.

The Titans had pitched their council tent on the high ground above the ford and left its walls rolled up for the air. Hides on poles. A table of split cedar on trestles. Around it stood eleven of them in the old dress: long wool woven in bands of red and ochre, fleeces over the shoulders against the cold of the uplands, gold collars beaten so thin they lifted when the wearer breathed. Their hair was long and bound in spirals of bronze wire, and their beards were oiled and twisted into ringlets, the way his father had worn his at table. They spoke his father's language, and he understood every word. He had last heard it in Tartarus.

On the table lay a calfskin map, with the distances marked in days of riding.

Hades stood inside the firelight at the corner of the table, close enough to read the skin.

He wore what he had worn every night that year: a tunic of undyed wool, a belt of rawhide, leather wrappings bound to the knee. The Helm sat close on his head, dark leather, its cheek-pieces new from the forge and bright as coin. He reached to turn his ring, and his thumb found bare skin.

A Titan with a cup in his hand came around the end of the table and stepped wide of the corner where Hades stood, the way a man steps around a draft, and went on talking. Hades read the map. He knew where each of them would stand before they moved.

Across the fire, someone was looking at him.

He was built like one of their own captains, heavy through the chest and shoulders, in a plain dark cloak with the hood thrown back. The Titans moved around him as they moved around Hades. He looked straight at him.

Hades reached into the ground beneath the tent, to read the man's weight on it and the way he stood, as he would have read any stranger's. The ground did not answer. There was the trodden earth, and the smoke, and the voices over the map, and under all of it nothing he could put his hand into.

He knew then where he was, and what year it was, and that the ford had been dry for longer than Erebos had stood.

He took off the Helm.

The Titans went on with their council. The one with the cup leaned past him to point at the skin, close enough to touch.

”My lord, I have your brother's answer. He slept three nights ago. I've been at your leaf since." Morpheus came around the fire, between two Titans who went on arguing over the map. "I gave him your words as you sent them. That the weapon in Caria was a Lyterion. That the one surrendered after the war was melted, and this one has been made since." He paused. "He gave me his answer and told me to give it to you in his face. I said I would carry it as he said it. Nothing added."

"Give it to me."

Morpheus inclined his head.

The weight came off him first. The heavy chest and shoulders thinned and drew out, and the man grew longer in the limb and narrower at the waist, until what stood there was hard and spare, every muscle lying close along the bone, the build of someone who had never once had to carry anything he did not choose to. The hair came down past his shoulders in loose waves, chestnut, lighter at the ends where the sun had been in it. The beard came in close and neat. The eyes cleared to that pale color between grey and hazel. Then the ivory tunic, and the deep blue mantle worked with gold, and the eagle at the shoulder, and rings on four fingers.

He stood among the fleeces and the bronze wire like a guest at the wrong feast, and was entirely at ease.

Zeus looked at him with that whole, warm attention that made a person feel like the only one in the room.

"Mortals do not make such things. They find them. I am seeing to the finders." A small movement of the hand, the one with the most rings. "Hephaestus tells me his doors have never been better kept."

Then he came forward and embraced him.

It was exact. The weight of the arm across his back. The other hand at the nape of his neck. The smell of wine and sun came into the smoke of the tent. Hades's arms rose and returned it, from long habit, before he had decided anything.

Zeus stepped away to examine him, exactly as he had in the doorway on Olympus, the day Hades came to ask him about the Atharim. He was smiling.

The smile went first. Then the tunic, and the rings, and the chestnut hair. The shoulders broadened and the chest filled out, and the dark cloak came back last, its hood still thrown back. Morpheus put his hands behind his back.

"He made me give it back to him. All of it."

For one word the voice was Zeus's again, with all the warmth gone out of it.

"Again."

Then it was Morpheus's own.

"That is everything, my lord."

Hades looked down at the map. The distances were still marked in days.

"You have done more than you were asked."

Morpheus turned and walked out past the tent poles, into the dark beyond the fire, and was gone.

Hades woke.

Hephaestus tells me his doors have never been better kept.

Kept with wards. He had written it himself, in this room, with Thanatos standing by the door: the wards on the workshop should be drawn close. And below the fourth weapon in the war inventory, in a clerk's cramped hand: Within the four, nothing woven holds.

He dressed in the dark. Coat off the chair, arms into it, the tablets heavy against his ribs. He pinned the key by touch on the way to the door, and was in the corridor with the last button still undone.

* * *

The Sovereign's Pyle stood in its own court beside the palace, two pylons of black stone with plain faces. The guards saw who came and stood aside.

He drew Dynamis into the pylons in the pattern they kept for three men, and the stone knew his hand. Pale light spread between them, and he went through.

On Olympus the sun was already high.

The receiving hall beside Zeus's palace had been built to be crossed by a king: marble floor, gilded columns figured with victories, sunlight falling through it from end to end. The heat met Hades on the threshold and soaked into the black wool of his coat.

A chamberlain was crossing the hall with an arm full of papyrus rolls. He looked up as the light faded between the pylons, saw who had come through them, and bowed so low that the rolls slid, and stayed bent until the king had passed.

Palace doors stood open on empty rooms. On the terrace where his brother had poured for him, the low table was still laid: an amphora on its side, two cups, a dish of figs gone soft and split in the sun. A servant at the far end of the colonnade saw the black coat and went the other way.

Beyond the palace lay the Propylaia: a long square open to the sky, ringed by pylons gilded and figured as everything here was, one pair for every court and sanctuary Zeus thought worth reaching. Most stood dark. One was awake.

Its pylons were carved with double axes, and at their capitals stood his brother as the Carians carved him, bearded, with the axe on his shoulder. Labraunda, Zeus's own sanctuary in the hills of Caria.

Through it lay a hillside in morning light. Terraces of olives stepped down toward a valley. A small town stood on the lower slope behind a wall of grey stone, the kind of town that kept one temple and one well. Smoke went up from it in five or six columns, straight in the still air, and leaned together higher up into one.

A minor god came through the conjunction while Hades watched, carrying something in both arms. It was wrapped in a blue temple curtain and was half the length of a man. One corner of the curtain had slipped. Underneath was a painted wooden face, very old, the paint worn to the grain on the cheeks where hands had touched it for generations. Apollo. The god carried the statue carefully across the court and through an arch, and the town's smoke came off his clothes as he passed.

The god holding the conjunction leaned on the left pylon with one hand flat on the stone, the way a man holds a door open for whoever is coming. Hades knew him. Whenever Zeus sat enthroned, at a feast or a judgment, this one stood at his right shoulder, and his sister at the left. He was Styx's son. He had his mother's habit of looking only at what he needed to, and he kept his eyes on the hillside.

My children live beside Zeus. Is Olympus safe for them?

The conjunction had stood open since before Hades entered the Propylaia. It stood open while he crossed it. Anyone in that olive grove with an instrument in their hand could have measured it from end to end, and walked through behind it.

The town had been sentenced without a hearing.

It was his brother's affair. He went out by the western side, and down.

* * *

The sentinels stood at the head of the workshop passage. Their hollow gazes turned to him, and they stepped aside, as obedient as before.

At the neighboring entrance, where mortal craftsmen had shown their seals, a chain of new bronze hung across the way.

The air below smelled of cold metal.

The great hall was lit by the panels in the ceiling and the drawings glowing on their sheets of glass. Over the empty benches the rings turned about their sphere of silver light, slowly. The suspended mechanisms hung where they had last been sent. The golden attendants stood among the worktables in the postures they had stopped in, one with its hands raised to a shelf, one turned half toward the passage. They were waiting for their next instruction.

His heels were the only sound in the hall.

In the laboratory the worktables stood around the raised platform, and on the platform the golden eagle sat on its marble perch with its wings half open. The apprentices' stools had been pushed back from it. On the table beside the empty chair, five golden feathers lay in a row, where his nephew had set them down the day he looked up and said Uncle.

The eagle turned its head and watched him come in. Its polished eyes followed him across the floor, as they had followed the apprentices. When he stopped, it stopped.

He put his hand inside his coat, took out his nephew's tablet, and read the fleck.

It lay loose in its lead.

The eagle's head came round fast to follow him. He was across the laboratory and into the passage, the tablet still in his hand.

* * *

Twenty paces down the passage, the strips of baetylus that lit the walls went grey, as if burned to ash. The line curved across the floor and up both walls and closed overhead.

He stepped across it, into the ring.

Beyond, the only light came low and yellow from ahead: a wick.

He stopped in the doorway.

The mark beside the door, which had brightened under his nephew's staff, was the same grey as the strips in the passage. Inside, the shelves that rose and fell at a touch had come to rest wherever the field had caught them. One hung halfway down the wall, its instruments tilted on it. The worktable beside the chair stood at the height it had last been set for. The bronze sphere sat on its stand in two open halves, dark.

The only thing in the room that moved was a flame.

The lamp was clay, the kind mortals buy by the dozen. Someone had filled it and set it on the floor at the foot of the worktable. Someone sat on the floor beside it. A man stood at the far wall.

Hades looked at the wards first.

Three housings, his nephew's own design, on the jambs and the lintel of the door. They had been laid in close to the frame on every side, as tight as their limits allowed, exactly as he had written. All grey.

The holes were in the floor. There were four, at the corners of a ring that took in the chair and most of the room and the first stretch of the passage. Each was the width of two fingers, bored clean into the mountain's rock, and deep. He crouched beside the nearest and laid his fingertips on its lip.

The stone remembered the iron: a banded stake driven down by a mallet in a man's hands, struck many times, without hurry. The sleeve of stone at its foot had ground against the rock with every blow, and when the stake was wrenched out again it had left its grains along the sides of the hole, grey and dead. It was his. It had come out of the lower galleries at Aleyonian Lake, from the seam where the gallery opened into the fissure. Every load that left that seam had gone out under his seal, to whatever forge could pay for it, long before he had issued the order that no more baetylus leave the kingdom.

He rose.

The tray was on the side table, where he had left it: shallow, lined with cloth. In it lay the instrument from the Nekromanteion in its pieces, the mismatched housings, the scratched cover, the needle. Beside them lay the two components his nephew had set side by side the day he showed them to him, the altered ward and the intact one.

Hades picked up the intact ward.

It had been made to stop a working that failed, before the failure could do harm, and it stopped it by putting the working out entirely. Eupalamos had cut away the stopping and taught the ward to watch. Someone had taken the stopping instead, and made it larger, and driven it into the earth on four stakes, so that it put out every working inside the ring at once: every ward, every light, every god's mageia.

He laid it back in the tray, beside its twin.

The staff stood against the wall by the door, upright and neat, the way a guest's stick is put away.

They had laid Hephaestus out on his own long worktable, and laid him out properly. His eyes were closed. A strip of linen bound his jaw, knotted at the crown of his head beneath the fair hair, darker at the roots as it had always been. His hands lay one over the other on the breast of his crimson tunic, below the clasp of his own making. Under them the cloth was darker, and stiff. Someone had straightened the folds around his legs, the lame one and the sound one, so that they lay alike.

On his lips there was a coin, the mortal fare for the ferryman.

The jaw had settled under the linen since it was laid, and the coin had slid toward the corner of his mouth, askew.

Hades set it straight with one finger.

Then he looked at the woman beside the lamp.

She was sitting on the floor.

[Ascendancy]

She looked up from the lamp, and he knew her.

Until Persephone spoke of her in the armory, he had forgotten the girl on the floor of the queen's hall. Psyche, the only living woman he had ever allowed to leave the kingdom. She had crossed his river and walked his road, and he had let her go home knowing the way.

She had been watching him since he came in. Now that he had turned to her she drew a breath and seemed not to know what to do with it.

"Lord Hades." It came out half a question. Her hair, a mass of auburn curls, had come half down in the night, and her eyes were very dark in the lamplight.

The man at the far wall came off the stone all at once, toward her. Psyche lifted one hand from her lap, a small movement, and he paused. He was young, his brown hair fallen over his brow, and he was in his shirtsleeves. The front of his shirt had gone stiff and brown. His cloak was on the floor under his wife.

Eros. Olympus told a story about this man, and an arrow, and how the lord of the dead had come by his queen. The two of them had never met.

He was standing at his nephew's head, near enough to touch the bound jaw, in the place that belonged to the women of the house. He put the lead tablet inside his coat, and went to stand by the door.

"I've been getting up to set that coin straight all night," Psyche said. "It won't stay." She looked at him a moment longer. "Thank you."

She gathered her skirt in one hand, to rise and give him her place.

"Would you like to sit with him, my lord?"

"No."

She let go of her skirt. Hades stayed by the door.

"Was he alone?"

"No." She looked down at the lamp. "His own men were with him. Four of them. They'd been in and out of here for days, drawing the wards in close to the door, the way your letter said. He chose them for it. He said nobody in the workshops knew this rock better."

Her hands lay open on her knees, the knuckles brown in the creases under the lamp oil. ”They stayed late into the night to finish. He'd been at the tray since supper and hadn't touched his plate, so I went down to the kitchens to bring him something he could eat with one hand. Eros came with me." She did not turn her head toward the wall. "I asked him to."

Eros was looking at the floor between the table and the door, where a stretch of the stone was paler than the rest and still dark at its edges with water.

"When we came back, the lights in the passage had gone grey. He was there." She did not point. "They'd used a knife."

Hades looked at the nearest of the four holes, and went on looking at it while she told him the rest: that the men had gone down the craftsmen's way with their seals, and the sentinels had stood aside for them.

"Aglaea needed to be with the girls, so I stayed with him."

Aglaea. His nephew's wife, the youngest of the Graces. He had met her once, and remembered her voice better than her face.

"I wanted to," Psyche said. "He cooked the food for our wedding banquet."

Her eyes went across the room to Eros. He was already looking at her. The corner of his mouth lifted, and then he looked down at his stained cuffs.

Hades looked toward the passage, at the grey line across its floor.

"Queen Hera came at first light. She stood at the grey line in the passage a long time, and then she went back up. The others came as far as the great hall. None of them will come past that line."

The field had died with the stakes. Anyone could have walked into this room.

"And my brother?"

”He’s in Caria." Eros said it from the wall, flatly. "He sent Bia down with the guard. They hung a chain across the craftsmen's way this morning, and they're throwing every mortal off the mountain. The ones who were asleep in their beds too."

Caria. On his way down, beyond the Labraunda Pyle, he had glimpsed a town burn, and a god carry a wooden Apollo out of it in both arms, wrapped in a temple curtain.

Psyche was watching him again. When she spoke, her voice was gentler.

"He did everything you wrote. The ones who'd left and come back, he sent away the morning your letter came. He paid them first." The ghost of a smile. "He read your letter out at supper, and then he laughed, and said you still hadn't told him how deep the heat runs, or whether a forge in the underworld would ever go out."

Hades's thumb found his ring and turned it, and turned it again.

Psyche waited until it was still. Then she said the rest to the lamp as much as to him.

"Aglaea and the girls aren't safe here. Whoever sent those men reached him in his own room. There isn't a house on this mountain they can't reach, ours included." She lifted her eyes. "I've walked your road, my lord. Nothing crosses your river that you don't allow. Take them through with you, and the ones being put off the mountain, too."

Hades's thumb stopped on the ring.

Lykon at the river, with his blackened torch clasp. Hermes on the landing, Apollo's lyre in his arms. Persephone naming his own court back to him, officer by officer. And now this one, on the floor of his nephew's room, with his nephew's blood in the creases of her hands.

"The men who did this were his own. He chose them himself. Aglaea and her daughters live on my brother's mountain. When my brother asks me to shelter them, I will give him my answer."

Psyche went still.

"He won't ask," Eros muttered.

The Sovereign's Pyle stood in a court outside the palace walls and inside every defense Hades had built. On his way here he had stood in the Propylaia and watched a god lean on a pylon and hold a conjunction open for anyone on the far side to measure. A household was not a widow and her daughters. It was nurses, and servants, and whoever carried their belongings, and whoever had a reason to stand near the children; and behind all of them, whoever had followed.

"No."

Eros crossed from the far wall to where she sat at the foot of the table and went down on one knee beside her. He took her hand, turned it over, and began to work his thumb along the creases of her knuckles, where the stain had stayed.

By now Persephone would be back from the lake. She would be in her hall among the pools, hearing whoever had come to her.

Over Psyche's bowed head, Eros's eyes came up and found him watching. He looked at Hades a long moment, at his face and nowhere else.

Hades turned his eyes to his nephew.

Eros's thumb went still. When Psyche raised her head, he tipped his own, very slightly, toward the door. She closed her hand over his thumb, and nodded.

They rose together. She took up the cloak and shook it out, and as it opened Hades saw the grey wool of its outer side, dark from collar to hem where a man had been carried against it. She swung it round her shoulders with the blush silk outward, over the brown at her knees and hem, and Eros fastened it at her throat.

"We'll give you some time with him, my lord."

Hades inclined his head.

At the door she stopped.

"There's oil on the shelf by the door if the lamp burns down.”

Eros bowed as he passed.

When they had gone, there was nothing left in the room for him to do.

He went back to his nephew.

They had closed his eyes. The linen under the jaw was knotted at the crown, in the fair hair. His hands lay one over the other, a smith's hands, broad across the knuckles, the backs seamed white with old burns, a thumbnail split once and grown out ridged. Beneath them was the clasp he had made for himself, and beneath that, the brown.

He had written that the wards should be drawn close. For days there had been mallets in this room because he had written it. He had written that no craftsman who had left his nephew's service and lately come back should be let through the doors, and Hephaestus had sent them away and paid them. He had set it all down in order, the way his nephew liked a thing explained. He had named the men he could find in a ledger. The four who drove the stakes had never been in one.

Hephaestus had followed all of it.

Four holes. Three wards. Four men.

He counted the holes again. There were still four.

The staff stood against the wall by the door, upright and tidy. He went and took it up, and stood with it. It was heavier than it looked. His hand closed on the silver grip and found it worn smooth to the shape of another hand. He laid it on the table along his nephew's right side.

Then he sat down on the stone at the foot of the table, beside the lamp.

Over cups, years ago, Hephaestus had asked him how deep the heat ran beneath Erebos, and whether a forge there would ever go out. He had been laughing. He had asked it twice.

"It would never have gone out."

The lamp flame swam and doubled.

When he looked at it again it was guttering, low in the last of the oil, and there was a dull ache behind his eyes.

The oil was where she had said, in a kitchen jar on the shelf by the door. He knelt and poured slowly, so the flame drank and leaned, and put the jar back where she had left it.

Steps in the passage, a man's. Hades was on his feet before they reached the grey.

Eros came in wearing a clean shirt, plain linen, unlaced at the throat, his hair wet at the temples. He bowed, and took the place just inside the door. His eyes went to the staff on the table, and stayed there while the king went past him.

She had said it happened late in the night.

He had read the fleck in the second hour after midnight, and it had pulled. He had put out the lamp and slept. Some time after that, four men had laid down their mallets in this mountain. Some time after that, or before it, there had been a tent above a ford, and his brother's arm across his back.

He could not put them in order.

At the Sovereign's Pyle he fastened the last button of his coat.

* * *

Thanatos was waiting at the inner gate of the receiving court, so still that he might have been standing there since the king left.

"My lord."

"Hephaestus is dead."

Thanatos blinked. His lips parted, and he closed them again.

Hades walked on across the court, and Thanatos fell in a pace behind him.

"Recall Tisiphone and Megaera. They are to hold the entrances to the kingdom until I relieve them. Alecto stays where she is."

The stone in those four holes had come out of Mourning.

"Tell the Judge of Mourning that every mallet, wedge, drill and length of iron in the galleries and forges of Mourning is to be counted against the overseers' tally at each change of shift. Any shortfall is to be brought to him within the hour."

Thanatos's step checked, half a pace, and came on.

At the palace doors Hades stopped.

”Shall I send word to the queen, my lord?"

Thanatos waited.

"Tell the queen that Hephaestus is dead."

Hades crossed his own threshold and pulled the doors shut behind him.

[Ascendancy]

Chapter 10
Two Were Left

Every morning since Hephaestus died, Hades had come out to the parapet of the palace terrace to read the river reports, already dressed for the day and with the key pinned at his breast. The terrace stood high on the head wall of the great cavern, and below it the city went down in tiers to the cavern floor. The fixtures in the roof were climbing toward the day, and the colonnades came out of shadow one level at a time. Warm water fell from the walls in long white threads, caught the light, and vanished into the chasm, and its steam drifted up past the parapet. Over the market one fixture lagged the rest by a breath. He would have the keepers of the day see to it.

The report was the ninth of its kind, from the Kakodaimones, his soldiers on the outer approaches. Ships at the river's mouth, where the Acheron ran warm into the sea and kept its own stretch of black water open. A camp on the shore above. Lamps coming up the gorge along the outer bank: twenty-six last night, four more than the night before, and a little nearer the Gates. The Atharim were doing exactly what he had expected of them.

He was folding it when Thanatos came out onto the terrace with a letter.

"From your man at Aegae, my lord. He came through at Elis before dawn."

He had posted the Kakodaimon there after Hephaestus, to watch the sea god's court and send word if anything at it changed.

He set the river report on the parapet and took the letter. It was folded small and sealed in plain wax. Eleven seals had been abroad that morning. With this one home there were ten.

He broke the wax.

Tritonis, six days past. Lord Triton is dead, killed in his workshop by men in his own service, the artificers he hired to keep its works. They did not leave. They held the workshop inside a field and let his court see them do it. Word came to Aegae within the hour. Lord Poseidon went alone. Queen Amphitrite asked him not to.

Bait.

He read on. He was reading for one thing: whether they had kept his brother alive.

Triton's people say that King Poseidon opened the sea-gates and brought the sea over the whole city. Their field broke when the water covered its stakes. But he faltered while the water was still rising, and fell. No one was near him.

The queen's people who went back for the bodies say that King Poseidon was in the broken gates at low tide. He had drowned where he fell. Lord Triton was in the workshop. The trident was not found. The court reckons four thousand dead in the town.

Queen Amphitrite remain at Aegae. I came at once.

They had not kept him. That was the one thing he had sent the man to Aegae to learn. Poseidon had known the name their father gave him, and he had died without anyone asking him for it.

Hades found that the broken wax was still between his finger and thumb, and that he had pressed it flat.

Apollo, in a street in Caria. Hephaestus, on his own worktable, inside the wards of Olympus. And now his brother, in the sea-gates of his son's city. Of the three who had divided the world between them, two were left.

Three months, and nothing. He had read the quiet as caution. They had spent it on Tritonis, and on the ships that lay now in the mouth of his river.

Below him the first carts were coming out onto the tiers.

He put the wax down on the parapet beside the river report, and the letter with it, and stood looking at them.

Thanatos waited a pace off, at the head of the terrace stair.

He faltered while the water was still rising. In the sixth year of the war, below Othrys, Poseidon had shaken the ground under a Titan army for a day and a night. Hades had kept the rock still beneath their own army, and not once had the shaking crossed into it. His brother did not lose control of a working. Something had done this to him, and no one had been near him when it did. Whatever broke Enodia on her road had needed its carriers close.

The eighth had never been surrendered.

Men in his own service. Hephaestus had paid his.

Four thousand. As many as lived on the lowest tier below him.

The trident had not been found. Of the three gifts the Cyclopes forged for the brothers in the war, Zeus still wore his thunder, and the Helm lay in the armory below. The third was gone, and nothing said where.

On the night Apollo died he had sent a warning to Olympus, by way of Morpheus and a dream. He had sent nothing to Aegae.

Hades held the letter out.

Thanatos looked at it a moment before he took it. He read it through, and then again from the top. When he looked up, it was not at Hades but past him, across the city to the far wall of the cavern, where the Gates were.

"Both of them."

"Let their deaths be read in every hall of the kingdom. Their deaths, and nothing of how."

Thanatos inclined his head.

"Has anything come from Olympus?"

"Nothing, my lord."

Thanatos went. Hades stayed at the parapet and looked where Thanatos had looked.

* * *

The Sovereign's Pyle had been built for three men and no more. He went down to the receiving court to see what the stone would tell him.

He laid his hand on the nearer pylon and read the pattern the stone kept for each of them. Two parts of it showed the wear that comes to worked stone with use: his own, from Olympus and back, and Zeus's, worn deeper by centuries of coming and going on business that rarely concerned the Underworld. The last was as clean as the day the Covenant was made. He had cut it to the same depth as the others because the Covenant required it, and it had waited seven hundred years for a man who never came.

It lay slack.

He had last seen his brother at that wedding on Olympus, forty years gone. Hades had taken the far end of the table and kept it. Halfway through the hymn one of the cupbearers spilled wine on Poseidon's sleeve, and Poseidon sent a crack through the marble toward her. Hades held the floor shut. The crack ran to the edge of her sandals and stopped there. From the other end of the table his brother looked at him, once, and went back to his cup. It was the nearest they came to speaking.

His hand went from it to Zeus's part, which answered under his fingers as it always had, and stayed.

Beyond the inner gate the nearest guard did not shift his weight, and did not look round.

If it ever came to it, every Pyle into the kingdom could be brought down except this one, which the Covenant forbade him to touch.

It had not come to that.

He took his hand away.

* * *

The deaths had been read across the kingdom by the time the Judge of Mourning came up to the terrace. Hades had sat down at the stone table there, with the letter from Aegae under his hand. Minos had sent word before he came, as he had made a habit of doing, and he carried a bundle of tally rolls from Mourning under one arm. He set them down on the end of the table and bowed, lower than the courtesy of the hour required.

"My lord."

"It was read in Mourning."

"At the board, at the change of shift. The yard heard it to the end." Minos straightened. "Damnameneus asked whether the sea-gates at Tritonis held."

The letter lay under Hades's hand. The sea-gates had been the first thing his brother broke.

"I told him I would ask."

"That is a petition."

Minos inclined his head.

"He said you would tell me so."

Hades looked at the tally rolls, then drew the nearest toward him and opened it.

Shift by shift, in an overseer's hand: every mallet, every wedge and drill, every length of iron, counted against the tally.

Exact.
Exact.
Exact.

Three months of it, without a mark against a single shift.

"The board has been clean since the day you were there," Minos said. "The hand has not been found. And no one has asked me for anything since, but him."

"Then the order is working."

Minos was a moment answering.

"The yard is quiet, my lord."

Beside each count the overseer had written the hour it began and the hour it ended. The better part of an hour, every shift. The incoming shift stood in the yard while it was done, and the yard at the shaft-head was open to the lake wind.

"Have them wait in the lamp house during the tally."

Minos gathered up the rolls. At the door he stopped, with the bundle under his arm. Then he went out.

* * *

The Pyle from the palace set him down on the lowest tier of the city at dusk, a short walk from the Gates, when the fixtures in the cavern roof had warmed toward their evening gold. The deaths had been read here at midday, as in every hall in the kingdom, and someone had hung a strip of dark cloth over the nearest doorway. There was another over the next, and the next, all along the tier: mourning for a god none of them had ever seen.

The noise of the tier went quiet ahead of him and came back behind him once he had passed. Men stepped back against the walls. A mason cutting new steps into the face of the tier set down his mallet and straightened. A woman drew a child against her skirts by the shoulder, and when the child went on looking, she turned its face away. By the basin where the warm water came down from the wall, an old man lowered himself to one knee on the wet stone, slowly, and stayed down until the king had gone by.

The new steps ran true to their line. Hades noted it, and went on toward the Gates.

Where the tier met the cavern wall, the gate passage ran through the thickness of the rock, and at its end the Gates stood shut. He laid his hand on the dark metal. Deep in their foundations the old workings answered him, and the Gates drew back far enough to let one man through, and closed again behind him.

Out here the light was the sun's. The summer was nearly over, and it had begun to set again. It stood low over the far cliff, and would be down only a few hours before it rose.

The hounds lay along the forecourt. The first thumped its tail once on the stone as he passed. Beyond them the old sanctuary looked down over the river, and he took its broad stair down to the landing. Charon was on his bench with a net across his knees, and did not look up.

On the opposite bank the lamps had come as far as the receiving sanctuary. They were strung back along the ledge path toward the foot of the gorge, a long uneven line of them, and the nearest were close enough that he could make out the men carrying them: hooded against the cold, setting down loads and taking up others, unhurried. They knew he had watched them come up the gorge. They had come anyway.

He could have dropped that ledge into the river. He had read every pace of it through the stone. He had not done it. Nor had he touched the gravel bar. It lay a little downstream, just past where the veil thinned to nothing over the water, across from the path that ran along the near bank to this landing: a skin of ice over river silt and loose stone, a thin bed of it over the bedrock. He could have bound it solid in moments, but he had left it soft. Soft ground was what their stakes would choose, and he wanted them to choose it.

He wanted those stakes whole, and their officers alive for the Keres to question: who had built the weapons, and where, and what had become of a man who once called himself a priest of Hermes. He wanted to see what they had carried up this gorge, and whether the eighth was among it. A buried company of corpses would tell him none of that. Poseidon had gone to them, on ground they had chosen. They would come to him, on his.

He had considered the Helm. He had walked enemy camps in it before. But when the stakes went in he meant to be standing exactly here, reading the bar through the rock under the river, and no one else could do that for him.

He read it now.

Four holes in the gravel, a little way back from the water: driven and drawn again, at the corners of a ring perhaps twenty paces across. Their sides had already begun to slump. No sleeve bearing baetylus had gone into them. Plain iron, to try the ground.

They had chosen the bar.

Alecto came through the Gates at the hour he had named, and down the stair at the head of a file of Kakodaimones. She had changed out of the garden hand's homespun into their grey, hooded as they were, with nothing on her that would catch the light, but there was soil still in the creases of her hands. With them came a god in a mantle of dark wool, his hair worn long and pushed back off his face, darker at the roots than where it fell past his shoulders.

"My lord." She bowed.

"How many mornings?"

"Ninety-one. No one behind the queen on any of them."

"Then she can spare you."

She glanced across the river at the lamps, and back.

"You cross tonight. Get up onto the far cliff, above their line, and keep watch from there. Count them. Find who gives the orders, and where he sleeps. When they move to the water, strike the rock. I will know."

"And when they go to the river?"

"The leaders alive. You know where to look first."

"Their teeth."

He turned to the god beside her.

Pyriphlegethon stood with his hands loose at his sides, unmarked, though he had worked heat since he was a boy. His face was pale and narrow, his eyes paler still and heavy at the lids, and he met Hades's eyes and held them, as few would dare. Hades looked away insteadd. No one in the kingdom knew heat better. He had sent for him for that.

The Kakodaimones had fallen still behind them, grey cloth and plain steel, a strip of undyed wool knotted at every hilt.

"You cross with Alecto, and wait below their camp, between it and the sea, out of sight. Their field puts out anything woven at its edge."

"Not what is already burning."

"No. Their boats. Their stores. The path back down the gorge."

Hades looked at him then.

"They carry a weapon that turns a god's own working back on him. I do not know how far it reaches. Keep your fires small, and keep away from it."

Up in the forecourt, the hounds had lifted their heads as the grey file went past, and they had watched the procession all the way to the boundary of the veil.

They waited for the sun. It went down behind the far cliff, and the gorge filled with a grey dusk that at this season went no darker. Across the river the lamps brightened against it. Whoever stood among them would see nothing past their own light.

Charon set the net aside and stepped down into the boat. Pyriphlegethon was the first in after him. Charon took them over a few at a time, upstream of the lamps where the dusk lay deepest, and came back empty, and went again. Alecto went over last. Hades watched from the landing until all crossed.

The bar lay as soft as he had left it. He went up the stair toward the Gates. In the morning the queen would walk in Elysium with no one behind her.

[Ascendancy]

The knock came in the deepest of the grey night, halfway between sunset and sunrise: one hard tap in the rock, struck high on the far cliff, downstream.

Hades felt it through the step under him, between two of the black columns of the old sanctuary, the hall the kingdom's first builders had carved to receive visitors. He had been sitting there since the light began to go, as he had the dusk before and all through the night after it, reading the far bank cliff by cliff down the gorge for any other place they might cross. Everywhere he read, the cliff went straight down into deep water, or the rock was hard enough to grind their stakes to nothing. The gravel bar was the only soft ground in the gorge, and it stretched out into the river toward the path on his own side, and that path led to his landing and the landing led to the Gates to Erebos. They had to cross here. When he stood, his knees had set with the cold of the stone, and the damp off the river had gone through his coat to the shoulders.

He took the broad stair two steps at a time.

The far bank showed through the veil to his eyes as shapes in the grey: the receiving sanctuary, the ledge running from it down the gorge toward the sea, and the Atharim's lamps strung along it, bright against the dark. They were moving, coming down the ledge in a long uneven file toward the place where it dipped to meet the bar.

Charon was on his bench with the net across his knees. His hands went on with the knots without looking up.

Hades went to the edge of the landing and looked downstream, past the point where the veil along his own shore ran out. The bar lay across the black water like a crooked finger, pale under its skin of frost, catching what light there was. It stretched three quarters of the way across.

The first lamps came onto the gravel. As each one reached it, it went out.

Through the rock under the riverbed, he read the shelf of bedrock that held the gravel bar up out of the water.

The first blow came up through the bedrock before he had found the men. Iron was going down through the gravel where the bar joined the far shore, struck fast by someone who knew the work. A second stake followed a few paces off.

The blows moved out along the bar, to where it bent downstream.

While they drove the third stake, he went looking for the seam he had read the night before, where the shelf that held the bar above the river’s surface joined the cliff on the far side. He found it and opened it, a hair at a time, until the shelf rested on almost nothing. A breath more, and it would drop, and the current would sweep the gravel away completely.

The fourth stake went down near the end of the bar, just short of where the gravel sank back under the water.

He counted the blows on it.

Three. Four.

The seam held where he had left it.

Six. Seven. Eight.

On the ninth, the field went up.

Where it stood, the gravel stopped answering him. He lost the stakes, and the men on the bend, and the weight of the water inside the bend. In their place lay a blank, a circle cut out of his own senses. Under it the bedrock answered as it always had, and so did the seam he had opened. The field reached exactly as deep as its stakes.

Inside that field, he was blind.

He faltered while the water was still rising.

Whatever had turned Poseidon's sea back on him had done it from a long way off. From that far, it could only have found him by his name. The name the world had for Hades was a war name, and a tablet cut with it lay slack in his coat, beside Hephaestus's. His hand found the shape of it through the wool.

He set his feet, and held the seam where it was.

On the bar they could stand a field, and inside it the river was only water. But the bar stopped short of his side. The last quarter of the river was the whole Acheron rushing through a gap of less than twenty paces. A stake wants ground. Whatever boat they put on that current, once it left the field, the Acheron would swallow it.

They brought the boats out along the bar on their shoulders: hide over frames of bent wood, light enough to carry up a gorge. The first went into the pocket of still water inside the bend, and the men climbed in, and it rode the water like any boat on any river.

At the edge of the field where the current was rushing swiftest a man knelt in the bow and let a lead line go over the side into the gap, and fed it out, and fed out more.

The second boat went in, and the third.

Among the boats, one man stood out. He was lean, in a sheepskin belted over brown wool, and he moved only to give an order. When he lifted an arm, men moved. When he lowered it, they stopped. Hades had watched commanders across worse ground than this, and he knew he watched one now.

Alecto was to have taken the man who gave the orders from the camp. He had come down to the water himself.

The commander walked out along the bar, past the stakes, onto the bend, out over the shelf Hades was holding up. If the shelf went now, the river would take him with the boats, and everything he knew with him.

Hades eased the seam a hair closed.

His weight had gone onto the balls of his feet.

At the end of the bar the commander stopped. He had a coil of rope over one shoulder, and in his hand a hook of iron with four curved fingers. He swung it twice at his side and threw.

It flew out of the grey and struck the path on Hades's own bank, skidded across the stones, and caught in a crack. The rope rose out of the water, streaming, and drew taut. Behind the commander, two men took the far end round the head of the nearest stake and made it fast.

Hades looked at the rope, and at the water rushing under it, and at the crack in his own path where the hook had caught. A touch would open it and drop the hook into the river, and leave the commander out on the bend, over the shelf, where he would go down with the bar.

Hades muttered a word in his father's language. He let the crack hold, stepped down off the landing, and started along the path to meet whoever came across that rope.

The commander came himself. He took the rope in his leather-bound hands and swung his legs up over it, and as he hung beneath it, Hades saw what was strapped across his back: a length of dark iron about as long as his arm, its silver bands catching what light there was. Only one. Enodia's people had described it to Hades: a rod of iron set in the road, something driven into the ground beside it, and the air folding around her when she came near.

The commander started across.

Then Hades saw what the boats were waiting for. Lykon had watched a woman drown in this river at a word from the king. The Atharim thought the river was his working. They meant to plant the weapon near him, and then either their boats would cross, or Hades would strike at them and the working would come back into him, as Poseidon's sea had.

He had moments to decide. If he dropped the bar now, the river would sweep away every man on it, and the commander and his rope with them. If he waited until the weapon was planted, the working might come back into him.

The commander was halfway across, the leather on his palms gripping the rope, his face set. Even a strong man would strain to hold on, and he had the iron strapped across his back. There would be a moment when he reached the path and took hold of its edge, and Hades could let the bar go and the man would live through it. After that the man would have to climb before he could plant the weapon. That climb was Hades's chance.

He went on to the very edge of the veil, and stopped there, where the far bank could not see him. His eyes went from the man on the rope to the boats on the water and back. The last boat was filling at the gravel.

The last of the men pushed it off and pulled himself in over the side.

The commander's hand came up and closed on the edge of the path, twenty paces ahead of Hades.

Hades let the shelf go.

The seam under the Acheron opened, and the gravel did the rest. The whole bar slid off into the river, the near end first and the rest after it, and the water came up the four stakes and over them.

His reading came back: four stakes lying on the riverbed, and bare rock where the gravel bar had been washed away.

The water went still and black around the hulls and pulled them downward. Men stood up in them, shouting, and went under with the boats.

Below the path, the commander hung by his hands with his head turned toward the shouting, and kept it turned there until the river was quiet.

His rope had gone into the river after its stake. His boots hung just clear of the water, the iron across his back, something wired under its middle, a square of dull grey. He drew his legs up and scrabbled at the cliff for a hold, and his fingers began to slide.

He would be in the river before Hades could reach him, and everything he knew would go in with him.

Hades put workings into the cliff below the man and raised the rock: grips under his hands, and below them shelves, one above another, like the rungs of a ladder. Then he left the edge of the veil and ran.

The man looked at the grip that had come up under his hand, fresh-broken from the cliff, and then along the path at the god running toward him. His lips drew back from his teeth. He glanced once at the top of the ladder, an arm's reach above him, and stayed where he was. He hooked an elbow over a grip, wrenched the iron off his back with his free hand, and rammed its point into the cliff beside him, into the slot Hades had opened for his fingers.

Hades felt the iron bite into his rock, and he was already drawing, reaching to tear it out.

He stopped so hard his boots slid on the wet stone. The working died half made. He stood very still on the path and waited for it to come back into him. The air in the gorge was cold on his face. His hands were his own. Either he stood outside its reach, or he had stopped in time.

The man came up the ladder and over the edge onto the path, ten paces from Hades, holding a knife long as his forearm. He looked once across the river to the far ledge, where his people were fighting, and came on.

Bait.

While that weapon was lodged in the rock, Hades was only a man on a cliff path, and if he went into the river, it would swallow him as it would any other. In the war the ground had done his fighting for him. This was a narrow path, a knife, and his own two hands.

He had the coat half off when the man reached him. He tore his arm out of the sleeve and swung the coat at the knife coming up low and edge up under it. The blade went into the heavy wool and caught. The man wrenched it back, and the coat tore out of Hades's grip, and knife and coat went over the edge together. The coat turned once on the black water, heavy with what was in it, and went under.

The key. His nephew's tablet.

The knife.

Then the man's hands were on him.

The man fought to put him over the edge, and Hades fought to stay on the path, and every way Hades knew to break a man's hold ended with the man in the river. He let each one go.

The man was stronger and quicker, and the rope had spent his arms, and still it was all Hades could do to stay on his feet. They went against the cliff and off it and back toward the edge, and each time the river was closer under Hades's heels. The man grunted with every shove, and so did Hades, and below them the river roared through the gap.

The man glanced past him at the river. Then he locked both arms round Hades's chest and threw himself backward off the edge, with all his weight, and took the king with him.

The edge went out from under them both.

Hades slid down the cliff, scraping, grabbing at anything. His hands closed on a grip, and the jolt of his weight wrenched through his shoulders. His boots kicked at the cliff and found a shelf he had raised for the man minutes before. It held. The man caught the same way just below him and hung there by one hand. The river ran close beneath them both, fast and black.

The weapon stood out of the cliff right beside his face. Hades took it in both hands and wrenched. It was wedged tight. He wrenched again, his whole weight hanging back on it, and it gave a finger's width.

The man's hand closed on his ankle and dragged his boot off the shelf. Hades's whole weight came onto the weapon, and it shifted in the slot. He let go of it and snatched at the nearest grip as his weight swung out over the water. For a moment the grip was all he had, and the river under his heels.

The man went up past him. He reached for the weapon to haul himself up by it, closed his fist round its middle, set his weight on it, and it slid out of the slot. He let it go and swung by his other hand. The weapon dropped past them both into the river, silver bands and all, and the current took it. The wire tore as it went, and left a twist of it hanging from the man's fist.

The earth came back to Hades: the cliff under his hands, the path above, the man's weight on the rungs. The shelf under the man's boots rose over them and closed at the ankle. The grip in his hand curled over his fingers and closed at the wrist. The man hung in the cliff, held fast. Hades raised a ledge under his own feet, wide enough to stand on, and stood.

The man looked at the stone around his boots. His jaw set.

The poison.

Hades lunged. He drove his hand into the man's mouth, fingers raking past the teeth for a pellet, a bead of wax, anything held there. At the back, one tooth moved the way a tooth should not. He tore it out, and the man's jaws closed on his hand.

The teeth went into the back of his hand and ground there, and held on as he pulled, and took the skin with them when he wrenched it free. A sound came out of him, short and low. The cold air found the raw flesh, and burned there. Blood welled up across it and ran down between his fingers. The tooth was still in his grip, whole in its band of gold, and the man was spitting blood that was Hades's own, and was alive.

Hades stood a moment on his ledge with the hand held away from him, dripping. Below him the man hung still against the rock, all but one hand. It was a fist, pressed tight against his chest, with the broken wire trailing out of it.

Hades caught it by the wrist and pried the fingers open one at a time with his good hand, and took what was in them.

He went up the last of the ladder and over the lip onto the path, and sat with his back to the cliff and his knees up, and breathed. Blood ran off his right hand onto the stone between his boots, and the tooth was still pinched in it.

In his other hand lay a sheet of lead, folded twice and pierced with a bronze nail, bent to the curve of the iron it had been wired to. He pressed it flat against his knee and unfolded it. His hand left blood on it.

I bind HADES.

Below the name, the fleck lay slack.

He went to tuck it in beside the key, and his hand found the wet linen of his shirt.

The key was somewhere down the gorge on his coat, and both tablets with it. One of them was Hephaestus's. He looked downstream, where the current had taken them. Then he folded the lead along its creases and closed his hand on it.

When his breathing slowed, the sky over the far cliff had begun to pale.

He lifted his head and looked across the river. The far ledge had gone quiet. Grey shapes stood over others lying down, and beyond them the river ran over the place where the bar had been. He counted the ones standing, and counted again, looking for Alecto.

Below the edge, the man hauled at the stone round his wrist. Hades felt each pull through the rock, and each one harder.

Boots came down the path from the landing, running. Alecto came round the cliff with two of the Kakodaimones behind her, and stopped.

Her eyes went over him: the king sitting on the wet stone with his back to the cliff, in his shirtsleeves, grit in his hair, his right hand dripping onto the path. They went to the lead in his other hand and then to the man hanging below.

Hades climbed to his feet. He held out his right hand and opened it. The tooth lay in a smear of blood across his palm, and she picked it out.

"Keep him alive for the Keres."

Alecto went to the edge and crouched there, turning the tooth in her fingers.

Through the rock, Hades felt the man go still.

* * *

By full morning, where the bar had been, the river ran black over bare rock.

Hades stood on the landing in his shirtsleeves, with the lead folded into his belt. He had bound the hand in linen torn from his shirt, and it had swollen in the hours since until the binding cut into it.

Alecto set five teeth in a row on the end of Charon's bench, each in its narrow band of gold.

"There was a sixth, my lord. He didn't make it."

Hades looked downstream, toward the mouth of the river.

"How many did the ships put ashore?"

"A hundred and sixty, my lord. A hundred and forty-four came up the gorge. Eighty-four went into the boats, and eleven were on the bar when it was swept away. Forty-three ran back down the ledge toward the sea, and met Pyriphlegethon's fire. The five are with the Keres. Sixteen stayed with the ships."

Hades picked up one of the teeth and turned it to the light. The gold band was thin and even, seated without a seam. He picked up a second. The same gold, the same width, the same hand.

A hundred and sixty men, fitted for this before they sailed, and months at sea to reach him. Somewhere a goldsmith had banded these by the hundred.

He returned the teeth to the row.

Charon went over for Pyriphlegethon. He stepped off onto the landing smelling of smoke, his hands as unmarked as ever.

"Their boats. Their stores. The path."

Pyriphlegethon's eyes went from his face to his shirtsleeves, and down to the hand, and stayed there. Then he looked up, met Hades's eyes, and held them.

"Burned."

"And the ships?"

"You said boats, my lord." Pyriphlegethon looked downstream, toward the mouth of the river. "One put out at the first fire. The others are still at anchor."

Hades's hand came down flat on the bench, and the teeth scattered.

"Burn them."

Pyriphlegethon turned back to the boat, and Charon took up his pole.

Hades went down to the water's edge and set his left hand flat on the landing. The shelf came up slower than it should have, dragging at him through the shoulders the way the cliff had. The river poured off it in sheets, and the four stakes rose with it, streaming, whole.

Charon brought them in two at a time, and Hades sent the shelf back under the river and crouched beside them.

The sleeve at the foot of each was baetylus, still holding its charge. It was Mourning stone. His. From the same seam as the grey grains in Hephaestus's floor.

He read the edges where the baetylus had been broken from its seam. Baetylus broken this season would read sharp. These had dulled. They were older than the chalk. Older than Damnameneus's sentence on the board.

And since his order had gone down to the Judge of Mourning, every mallet, wedge, drill and length of iron in Mourning had been counted against the overseers' tally at every change of shift. Whatever had left Mourning had left long before.

The eighth was older than his mines. It was somewhere else.

He stood. The light over the far cliff had cleared. In Elysium it would be coming up over the gardens, and the queen would be on the stair. This was the second morning she had walked there alone.

Everything that had come for them had come up this river, and the river had held.

"Take the Kakodaimones down the far bank to what is left of their camp. Watch the coast until winter closes the sea."

Hades went up the broad stair. In the forecourt the first of the hounds thumped its tail on the stone and got up and came to him. He put his left hand on its head as he passed, and it turned and licked the right.

He went in through the Gates.

[Ascendancy]

The commander had not said a word in two days.

The Ker was waiting at the head of the stair below the guard post when Hades came down, and she told him so in as few words as it took. Then she turned and went down ahead of him. He took a lamp from the niche at the top of the stair and followed. He had given the Keres two days.

The other four had talked. Their orders had brought them up the gorge, across the river and to the Gates, and past the Gates there was nothing; she had asked each man alone, more than once, and found no lie in any of them. They knew the banded bars, and lead with names cut into it, and no more. Of the man who had once called himself a priest of Hermes, they were silent. She chose that word. A man who knew nothing said so, and the Keres could hear when he meant it.

The stair went down a long way. Far below the palace the rock was warm. The passage at the foot of the stair was dry and swept and so quiet that the lamp's flame stood straight up. It had no doors, and neither did the cells along it. No one kept here was meant to leave by walking. The Keres came to them by their own way, and the king came through the rock.

He read the wall as he passed it. In the first cell, a weight lay on its side: the man from the labyrinth, who had given the Keres his orders and nothing else, and had been here since. In the next were three, the merchant from Corinth and the two taken with him, one sitting, two lying still. The one who had cut the letters lay nearest the wall. Hades knew him by where he chose to lie. Then four cells with one man in each, the four from the river.

The last cell was the newest. The Ker stopped short of it and stood aside.

Hades laid his left hand flat on the wall. The block that closed the cell had been cut from this rock when the cell was made, and set back so close that no blade would find the joint. He found it. He drew the block out toward him, a hand's width, then the length of his forearm, grinding a little at the edges, and turned it aside against the passage wall. Behind it the cell was dark. He stepped through with the lamp, and drew the block back into its place behind him.

The cell was three paces deep. A bench had been left in the rock at the back of it. The floor had closed around the commander's left ankle in a ring of its own stone, and he was on his feet when the light came in, as far back as the ring would let him go, his shoulders against the rock and both hands spread flat on it. His sheepskin had been taken from him. He wore the brown wool he had worn on the path, stiff now at the knees with river mud, and the rope had taken the skin from his palms. It had begun to heal.

For two days his only visitors had come to him out of the dark, without a lamp, in masks. His eyes went to Hades's face. The breath went out of him all at once.

Then he knew whose face it was, and drew it back in.

He had not slept. The skin under his eyes had gone the color of a bruise, and his breath was coming short through his nose while he worked to make it slow. He was sweating, though the cell was no warmer than any room in the palace. Under his beard a muscle jumped in his jaw.

He took his hands off the wall. Then, without being told, he sat down on the bench and lifted his chin into the light, a man taking his seat in front of a king who was standing.

Hades set the lamp down to one side.

The last time they had been this close, this man had locked his arms round the king of Erebos on the king's own cliff and thrown them both at the river, and had set his teeth in the king's hand. His knife had taken the king's coat into the Acheron, and the key of his office with it, and the lead that held Hephaestus's name. Under the linen Hades's hand began to throb, hot and slow, keeping time with his heart.

The floor moved before Hades did. The ring round the man's ankle drew in a hair's width, and the man's foot jerked against it. Hades stopped it there, and eased it back. He let the bound hand hang at his side, where the man could see it.

"Where is the man who called himself a priest of Hermes?"

Nothing.

The flame stood straight. The commander's breath went in and out through his nose.

Hades took one step forward, which brought him within reach.

Through the bench he felt the man's weight gather, the small shift forward that comes before a man stands. The commander's eyes went down, once, to the ring round his ankle, and came back to Hades's face. The weight settled back onto the bench. A drop of sweat ran from his hairline down beside his eye, and he let it run.

He had seen the rock take a gravel bar off its shelf. He had felt it close round his wrist on the cliff.

A man who would not answer for himself might still answer to his own dead.

"A hundred and sixty came ashore."

The man's eyes came up.

"A hundred and forty-four came up the gorge. Eighty-four went into the boats. Eleven were standing on the bar."

He gave each number the weight he would have given it from the throne. Every one of them had been a man, and he had counted them.

"Forty-three ran back down the ledge toward the sea. They met fire on the path. Five are in this rock. You are one of them."

The man's jaw had set. He was breathing slow and even now, the way a man breathes when he is taking care to.

"Sixteen stayed with the ships. The ships burned at anchor."

The man spoke for the first time in two days.

"All of them?"

His voice was hoarse from the river and from not being used. Through the gap at the back of his mouth the words came a little thick.

Hades could have let him believe it. He watched the man's face and decided that the truth would show him more.

"One stood out to sea at the first fire."

The man closed his eyes. His shoulders came down, and his back went against the rock behind him, and for a moment he sat as a man sits at the end of a long march when he has been told he may.

In the war, Hades had watched commanders hear which of their men had lived, and they had sat exactly so. They all did. It was the one thing about them that never varied.

The commander opened his eyes.

"How many days?"

"Two, since the river."

The man's lips moved, without sound, and stopped.

"Tonight."

He said it to himself, not to the king.

On the cliff he had reached for the tooth before he reached for anything else. A man did not carry his death across the world in his mouth and give it up because a king had taken it. He would look for another.

"Where is the man who sent you?"

The commander closed his eyes again.

Hades read the cell. The bench had been left square, and its front edge was still sharp from the cutting. Low on the far wall, a corner of rock stood out where the stone had broken badly. The ring round the ankle had a lip. He went over them one at a time and drew each one smooth, without hurry, the way he would have finished a stair. The stone shifted with a faint dry sound in the quiet. The commander's eyes came open and went round the cell, from the walls to the floor to the king, who had not moved.

When there was nothing left in the cell with an edge, Hades bent and took up the lamp.

The commander's eyes tracked the light. They stayed on it while Hades turned and laid his hand on the block, and while the block came out of the wall. Then Hades stepped through, taking the light with him, and the rock slid back into its place behind him.

In the passage the Ker waited.

"Watch him close tonight. He is to be fed."

She inclined her head.

He went back along the passage the way he had come, reading the cells through the rock as he passed: the man from the labyrinth on his side; the three from Corinth; the four from the river; and at the end, in the dark, a weight sitting upright on a bench, exactly as he had left it.

He climbed.

Thanatos was waiting at the head of the stair, in the guard post where the Kakodaimones kept their watch over the Pyles from Elis and Mourning. Hades handed the lamp to the nearest of them.

One ship would be well beyond the ice by now, carrying home news that the river had taken a company.

"The far shore is to be watched until the ice closes the coast. Two of the Kakodaimones. If anything moves on the ledge, I am to hear the knock."

Thanatos inclined his head.

"And Olympus, my lord?"

Apollo had been sent a man's name and his street, and had gone to Caria on it. Hephaestus had been sent everything: the wards, which craftsmen to turn away, how close to draw the doors. Psyche had sat beside his body and told Hades that his nephew had done every last thing the letter asked. To Aegae, Hades had sent nothing at all. A letter, a letter, and none, and all three of them dead alike.

No letter had kept the Atharim out of his kingdom. He had built against them, and waited for them at the river, and the river had held.

"Nothing."

Thanatos inclined his head again, and left him.

Hades turned from the stair that led up into the palace and took the passage that ran back beneath it, toward the Pyles that woke for only two people: himself and Nyx.

His hand throbbed as he walked. Two nights ago a mortal had driven iron into his rock, and for as long as it stood there he had been a man on a wet path with the Acheron under him. The Acheron bore no one but Charon’s boat. It would have taken him as it took the boats, and kept him.

He always presumed to live centuries more. He had spent seven building toward a kingdom that would not need him for any of them: the Deep Works opened league by league, the regulators under the gardens, Kleitos's new stones that might keep themselves a hundred years once they were set. He had reckoned on time. He had not reckoned on a path and a knife.

Any god might go to the Moirai with one question, once in a life, and have a true answer, exactly as wide as what was asked. In seven hundred years Hades had never spent his.

Apollo had gone to them for something else. He had taken wine, and sat with them until they agreed that another might go down in place of a mortal king of Pherae he loved.

He woke the nearest Pyle and stepped through into the dark of the labyrinth, and let it close behind him.

He knew the way as the rock knew it. Where the passage divided, one branch dropped toward the warders' hall, and the rows beyond it, and the chamber where the original lay cased in Kleitos's baetylus. He took the other, and climbed. Nyx's household kept the upper ways on this side of the prison, and in all his reign he had walked them perhaps a dozen times, and never for himself.

The way ended at an opening in the rock no wider than a man's shoulders, hung across with net. Thanatos had stood on this threshold once and argued that the king of Pherae should die when he was meant to, and lost.

Beyond the net, three women were talking.

He stopped to listen. It was not the speech of his own court, nor his father's language, which he had learned at his father's table and had last heard spoken in Tartarus. He followed the rise and fall of it for a long moment and could not find one word. He had not known there was a language left in the world that he could not follow.

He put the net aside and stepped in.

* * *

The rock told him the room before his eyes did: long and low, cut by the prison's original builders, older than anything of his in Tartarus. A spring ran somewhere at the back of it. Oil burned in great shells along the walls.

That was all the room would tell him. The cups on the table were nacre. The jars were clay, and he could read them; the beads in the hangings he could not, and when he reached for what the women wore, it gave him nothing. Shell. Pearl. Coral. Bone. None of it had come out of the ground.

Two of them sat at the table. The third sat apart, near the spring, with a length of net across her knees, knotting it, a red bead at every knot. Her own veil was the same work, drawn down over her face, and through the net a little of her hair showed, red as the beads. Her hands did not stop when he came in. That was Klotho, the youngest.

The fair one at the table rose. White wool, and pale hair falling straight past her waist; on her head, a crown taller than a hand's span, arched like a halo and built of pearls strung on a frame so fine he could not tell what held them, with her net thrown back over it. Between her fingers was a stem of violet lilies. He knew them. They grew at the edges of the queen's pools in Elysium, and nowhere else in the world.

The dark one stayed where she was. Her crown had the black polish of jet, and he would have named it so if it had answered him. Her lips were dark. Under the crown she had her mother's face. Atropos, the eldest. Nyx's daughters, all three.

In his father's tents the Titans had worn gold and bronze, and Hades had thought them the old world. Mortals said the Moirai came to every birth by the third day. So these three had stood in Kronos's house on the third day after Hades was born, and not one of them looked older than the woman who had sat on Hephaestus's floor.

The fair one came round the table to him. Lakhesis.

"You have not come before."

She spoke his language the way a careful foreigner speaks it, every word set down whole.

"No."

She reached for his hand. He would have given her the left. She took the right, bound as it was, and turned it palm up in both of hers. His fingers stayed open. He watched her face, but it told him as much as her pearls had. Her own fingers were long and cool. She held it for a few moments, and gave it back.

At the end of the table stood a row of wine jars sealed in grey clay, and the nearest seal was stamped with Apollo's name. One jar was open. Rings were worn into the stone where a great many others had stood. The Moirai went abroad to every birth by their mother's ways, not his, and somewhere out there Apollo had been finding them for a long time, and sending them home with wine.

He had not known.

"He always brought something."

Hades had brought nothing. It had not occurred to him to.

"I have come to ask."

Lakhesis poured anyway, into a cup of nacre thin as a fingernail, and set it on the table at his side, and went back to her place. She laid the lilies down beside her own cup.

"Once," she said. "Whatever you ask, my sister will answer, and only that."

Atropos had not moved. Near the spring, Klotho tied a knot and drew the net along to the next.

He could ask where the priest was sleeping tonight, and they would tell him. He could ask after the eighth weapon. He had the lead with his war name on it folded inside his coat, cut a second time for a man it could not touch.

The lilies lay on the table at Lakhesis's hand.

The queen's name would take, and she did not know where anyone was cutting it. She walked in her gardens every morning; gardens that lay inside his borders, inside the river and the Gates and every Pyle he had restricted. So did the city on its tiers, and the Deep Works, and every soul in Asphodel and Mourning. If the kingdom held, it held them all. One question could cover every one of them.

His right hand had closed on itself.

"Will the kingdom hold?"

Atropos lifted both hands and drew her net down over her crown and her face. The beads in it were black and caught the lamplight. Behind it she closed her eyes.

The only sound in the room was the drawing a thread tight through a knot.

"The kingdom will outlast its king."

That was all.

Lakhesis said something to her sister in their own language, low, and Atropos answered with a word or two, and neither of them looked at him. Klotho's hands went on with the net.

A few more centuries. He had built the Deep Works to run beneath leagues of ice without him, and set the regulators so that the gardens would warm themselves, and asked Kleitos for baetylus that would keep itself a hundred years. He had never once asked anyone whether he would live to see it finished. He had only asked whether it would stand.

It would stand after him.

He took up the cup Lakhesis had poured and drank it, all of it. It was very good wine. Apollo had always known where to find it.

He set the cup down, empty, beside the lilies. Atropos was still behind her net when he turned to go, and Klotho had not looked up, and Lakhesis watched him all the way to the net.

* * *

Thanatos was waiting at the palace end of the Pyle, as though he had been told the hour.

Hades let the conjunction close behind him. Beyond the walls the fixtures in the cavern roof had gone down to their evening gold, and somewhere below, on the lowest tier, a mason would be sweeping freshly hewn steps.

"Has anything come from Olympus?"

"Nothing, my lord."

He went up to his rooms. The bed had been turned down, the corner of the coverlet folded back, square. He hung his coat over the chair at the bedside and laid the lead on the table beside it, and did not unfold it.

He lay down, and slept as he had not slept in longer than he could remember.

[Ascendancy]

Chapter 11

When My Brother Asks

"My lord."

There was no dream for him to come into. There was the dark, and then Morpheus in it, close enough to touch, in the plain dark cloak he wore in other men's sleep, the hood thrown back. He was breathing as if he had run.

And Morpheus did not run.

"You have to see this. Now."

He held out his hand, and Hades took it.

The gate of horn stood where it always stood, pale and worn. Morpheus took him through it without slowing, and the elm rose out of nothing all around them. He walked its branches fast, his eyes fixed on the way ahead, black cloak swinging behind him, and did not let go.

Hades heard the difference before they reached it. Everywhere else on the elm the sleepers murmured under their leaves. Here there was a whole cluster of branches where no one murmured at all.

Someone was waiting there, his hands clasped behind his back, his eyes on the leaves above him. It took Hades a moment to place him. Icelus kept to Morpheus's palace with the rest of the Oneiroi, and Hades had seen him perhaps five times since Morpheus took command of them, always a pace behind Morpheus and never the first to speak.

His lips were moving. He was counting.

Morpheus stopped. Three or four leaves lay on the branch at their feet, caught in the furrows of the bark, and more had caught on the branch below. Morpheus touched the nearest with his foot.

"Athena."

Above them a leaf came loose. Nothing had touched it, and nothing moved the branches. It turned once in the air, struck the bark beside Hades's foot, and slid off the edge into nothing.

"Hebe."

Hades looked up. Every leaf on this part of the elm hung silent. Not one sleeper among them. In the middle of the night, every soul here was awake.

He knew this shape. A camp at its cups after dark, every man in it awake and not one of them watching, and by morning the council tent standing empty. He had made that shape himself, a long time ago, walking through his father's camps in the Helm.

Another fell, and caught on a twig below them, and hung there by one edge.

"Hestia."

Then another.

"Eros."

Morpheus said it the way he had said the others.

Hades had last seen him on one knee on his nephew's floor, working his thumb along the creases of Psyche's knuckles where the blood had stayed. She had sat beside a clay lamp and asked Hades to take Aglaea and the girls through to Erebos with him, and the ones being put off the mountain too. He had told her that when his brother asked him, he would give his answer.

Morpheus tipped his head toward two leaves hanging a little apart from the rest, one just below the other. The upper one came away. As it fell it brushed the one beneath, and that one came away with it, and the two dropped past the branch together and were gone.

"The queen."

Morpheus's hand closed on his, hard, once.

"Iris."

Icelus glanced at Morpheus, who kept his eyes on the dark where they had fallen.

The silent leaves hung over them, still.

Hades stood as he had stood since the first leaf. His hand lay in Morpheus's, steady. It had been steady in his father's tents too.

He had been counting with Icelus. Five, since he came onto the branch.

”Zeus?”

Morpheus lifted his free hand toward a leaf a little higher than the rest. It hung silent. But it hung.

"He is awake."

Awake, then, on a mountain where gods were dying in the dark. And one of the two men left alive who could wake the Sovereign's Pyle, which opened beside Hades's own palace.

Hades turned from the leaves.

"Come to me in the Sovereign's court. Now."

"My lord." Morpheus turned his head, addressing Icelus. "Keep watching."

Hades let go.

* * *

He woke on his back in the dark of his own room, his arm across the coverlet.

He was on his feet before he had decided to be. He pulled the coat from the bedside chair over the unbelted linen he slept in, and took the folded lead from the table into it. His left hand moved to his breast for the key and found wool.

He was already crossing the room.

The Kakodaimon at the head of the stair straightened as he came out.

"Wake Thanatos. He is to bring the tablets from the Mnemeion to the Sovereign's court. All of them. Then summon twelve from the guard post to the same court, all with swords."

He took the stair down, and the long gallery after it, past rooms where no one had woken, and out through the inner gate into the court of the Sovereign's Pyle.

The court was dim. Overhead, the fixtures in the cavern roof had sunk to the low gold they kept through the night, and at the far end the two pylons stood black, their faces plain.

The guards at the inner gate came to attention when they saw who it was. The younger one's eyes dropped once, to the linen open at the king’s collar, and snapped back to the far wall. The elder had already turned his head toward the pylons, his hand on his sword, looking for whatever had brought the king down at this hour. Then they stood aside.

He laid his left hand on the nearer pylon. Poseidon's part lay slack within it. His own answered. His brother's answered too.

His brother was alive.

His hand stayed on the stone a moment longer than it needed to. He reached into his part of the pattern, and a hair of pale light rose between the pylons.

He let it go out.

If the Pyle woke tonight, it would be his brother waking it. Whose hands would be on his brother when he did, the stone could not say.

His brother knew the name.

His bound hand went to his coat, to the folded lead inside it, and pressed it flat against his ribs.

He felt the Kakodaimones in the stone of the gallery before he heard them, and took his hand from the pylon. Twelve came through the inner gate in file, quick and in step, in the grey they wore against the rock, and drew as they crossed into the court. He put them in a line facing the pylons. The nearest of them looked once at the king's face and set his feet. Whatever came through would meet steel first.

Two nights ago a man had driven iron into his rock within reach of his hand. Hades stepped back twenty paces, to the inner gate.

The floor came up into him: twelve men, the nearest with his weight forward, the last shifting from one heel to the other; the footings of the pylons, deep in whole rock; and below everything, the city on its tiers, quiet.

Athena's leaf had lain in the furrows of the bark at his feet, and mortals had put it there.

He let the city go from his reading, and kept the pylons.

Thanatos came in at the inner gate with a bundle of black cloth in both hands. His eyes went once to the king's breast, where the key should have been, and came back to his face. He opened the cloth.

Apollo's tablet held to nothing. Hermes's pulled. His brother's pulled, as steady as ever, and Hades took it.

"The Keres say the commander ate everything he was given. Then he slept,” Thanatos said.

A man who meant to die tonight did not eat what was put in front of him, and he did not sleep. A man whose work was done did both.

Tonight.

The man had been counting. Two days from the river to tonight meant a date had been fixed before any ship ever sailed. It meant the Atharim had spent a company at the Acheron to keep the king standing at it, looking out at the far shore.

Bait.

"Send for Alecto. She is to come back, and every Kakodaimon on the far shore with her."

Thanatos glanced at the Pyle, then left to send the messenger. When he returned, the fixtures above had begun to warm toward morning.

Morpheus arrived not long after, through the guards at the gate, broad in his long black cloak. He came to Hades's shoulder and stood there.

He had his stone in his hand. As they watched, the gem brightened, and words rose above it in a script Hades did not recognize, small and upright, every letter standing apart from the next.

Falling stopped. Some dreaming.

"Icelus," Morpheus said, then slipped the Oneiroi’s stone into a pocket.

Olympus was going to sleep. Whoever slept on that mountain tonight believed it was over.

The court was still.

"Three more fell before I woke. Artemis. Aphrodite. Dionysus.” He kept his voice low, and it carried anyway.

"Demeter? The queen’s mother usually kept to her own house.

”Dreaming of a threshing floor.”

He thought of Persephone, and found her where she should be, far off in Elysium and not moving. Asleep. His eyes drifted in her direction.

He brought them back to the pylons.

The Sovereign's Pyle had woken from the other side.

Light came up between the pylons. The twelve raised their swords. In Hades's hand, the fleck swung hard.

[Ascendancy]

His brother's weight came onto the stone moments before his brother appeared between the pylons.

Hades read the ground as he walked: one man stepping off between the pylons, long in the stride and light in the heel, setting his weight down the way he always had, as if the floor had been laid that morning for him to cross. One man, and no other weight beside him.

In Hades's hand the fleck lay hard over toward the light.

He closed his fingers on his brother's tablet and put it inside his coat, beside his own. Then he took his place at the center of the line, six swords on either side of him, and Morpheus came to his shoulder.

The light between the pylons steadied. Through it lay the receiving hall on Olympus, dark from end to end, the gilded columns standing grey in it.

Zeus stepped clear of the light. The blue mantle he wore was sooted to the knee. His hair hung loose and dull with ash. Blood had dried black over his right hand and up the wrist, across the rings, and he had not washed it off. A haft of baetylus the length of a forearm rode in a ring of gold at his belt, bound in more gold at either end, the one thing on him the soot had not touched. Violet ran along the veins inside it and laid its color over the blood on his hand.

Thunder.

He crossed the paces of the court at the same long stride, straight at the steel, until the swords of the two soldiers flanking Hades crossed in front of his chest. There he stopped, a blade's length from his brother. He glanced at Morpheus, and his lips thinned. Behind him the light of the Pyles remained bright.

Neither soldier's arm moved. Their eyes stayed hard on the king of the gods.

Zeus looked down at the steel crossed against his chest, then up at his brother.

"Lower these swords at once."

The twelve kept their points where Hades had set them.

On his nephew's floor, Hades had told Psyche that when his brother asked him to shelter Aglaea and the girls, he would give his answer. From the wall, Eros had predicted what his father would do.

He won't ask.

"Are you bringing all of Olympus into my kingdom?"

Zeus's eyes came to him and stayed, with the whole of their attention, as they had on the terrace. There was no warmth in them now.

"The Covenant gives me this Pyle, and I will pass as I please, brother."

Zeus turned his head toward the light and called out to those on the other side.

"Come through."

Through the Pyle first came Bia, a sword at her belt and her sleeves black to the elbow, and took her place at his left shoulder. Styx's daughter. Blood spattered her face.

After her they came in twos and threes. Cupbearers and stewards, a herald, the gods who kept his brother's house, in feast clothes under whatever they had snatched up against the cold. Each one stepped off and stopped at the steel behind their king. The floor gave Hades every one of them: weights crowding the court, shifting to make room, never still. Behind him, Thanatos stood at the palace’s entrance with the black cloth in both hands, and Hades knew without turning that he would be counting them too.

"And what am I to do with refugees from Olympus? Brother."

"Don't be absurd." He ignored the swords.

"Every working on the mountain is gone," Zeus said. "The lights. The warmth. The air. Your stone failed us."

At his shoulder, Morpheus turned his head and looked at his king.

His stone had not failed. It had been unbound, as the light in his nephew's passage had been, dead in a ring where the field stood.

And a mountain that high, with nothing working on it, would kill whoever stayed.

He looked at the soldier on his right. The two swords crossed before his brother's chest drew apart.

The Covenant gave his brother this Pyle. It gave nothing to whoever came through it behind him.

"They stay here until the Pyle is dark. Morpheus names them all."

He gestured at Morpheus, who left his shoulder at once, his cloak brushing against Zeus as he passed without looking at him. The god of dreams walked among them, peering into each face and naming them, low, one after the other.

Then two more came through shoulder to shoulder.

The first was talking before he was clear of the light. His eyes went over the court in one sweep, and he came to the steel.

"You came yourself." Hermes looked from one king to the other. "I'd ask who died."

He had Apollo's lyre across his back still, and a woman's shawl knotted round his throat over his traveling cloak, and his eyes were tight in the corners. He planted himself in front of Morpheus.

"Well? You've been in and out of my sleep so many times I ought to be flattered. Go on, I'm freezing, say it, or shall I—"

"He'll name you sooner if you stop talking."

Hermes stopped talking.

Hermes came up to the jaw of the man at his side. He was broad through the chest and shoulders and heavy with muscle, and his weight came down into the floor like a column's. Dark hair over his eyes, an oxblood cloak, feast linen stiff with blood to the elbows. None of it was his. In one hand he carried a simple clay lamp, cold and black with soot.

Ares stepped up to the sword in front of him until its point rested against his chest. Then he set two fingers on the flat of the blade and turned it aside, unhurried. The Kakodaimon brought it back. The corner of Ares's mouth moved, there and gone, and he let the point rest where the soldier had put it.

"Ares."

He looked at Hades as he said it, and Hades could not tell whether it was courtesy or contempt.

Neither of them tried to pass. Hermes stayed where he had stopped, at Ares's elbow, and crossed his arms.

Hades looked at his brother.

"What of the men who did this?"

"Dead. Every one."

Ares's voice was low, and in that court it carried without trying.

"Athena fell first. Then whoever stood up first.” He looked at nothing, at the light. "They even knew who sat where."

"And they are dead."

Ares said nothing more. Zeus did not look at him.

The light at the Pyle moved, and a woman came through with a child on her hip and three more round her skirts.

Hephaestus's daughters. His nephew had asked him once to come and meet them.

"Eukleia," the goddess said to Morpheus, before he could ask. "Eupheme. Euthenia. Philophrosyne." Her hand touched each head as she said it.

Hades remembered the voice before he had placed her face. Aglaea.

"Aglaea," Morpheus said, and the girls with her.

Eupheme was perhaps six or seven, with her father's fair hair, thick and in want of a comb, and her sister's sleeve in her fist. Her eyes went from the swords to the king commanding them.

When the girl reached Hades's eyes, she stepped back against her mother's knees. Aglaea drew the child in against her.

Thirty-four weights inside the court now, and the light behind them still open.

"Close it."

"More are coming."

A god came out of the crowd with an armful of papyrus rolls: his brother's chamberlain, the one who had bowed so low at the sight of Hades in the receiving hall that the rolls had slid from his grasp. He crossed to the left pylon and laid his free hand flat on its plain face.

"Majesty."

Zeus let the Pyle go without turning. The light dimmed for a breath, and steadied. His brother could hold a Pyle from wherever he stood; the chamberlain needed his hand on the stone.

"Zeus. Close it now."

The chamberlain looked from Hades to Zeus, and did not move.

Hades spoke to the end of the line without taking his eyes from his brother.

"Remove his hand from the pylon."

A Kakodaimon turned his blade aside and took a step toward the chamberlain.

Zeus did not look round. His bloodied hand came down onto the haft at his hip.

The air in front of Zeus thickened. It came against the line like a hand laid flat: it pressed on Hades's ears and lifted the hair along his arms, and down the line the soldiers set their shoulders into it. In twelve hands the swords began to sing, thin, all on one note. Overhead, the fixtures above them shivered in their settings.

Behind his brother, the air lay still. Among Zeus's people Morpheus stood untouched, his eyes on the haft at Zeus's hip.

Hades stepped out of the line, one pace, and stood before his brother with nothing between them. The air bore down hardest there. His breath came thin, and the steel sang on at his back.

Behind him the line held. The last Kakodaimon brought his point round to the chamberlain.

Zeus looked at his brother for a long moment. Then his eyes left him and moved over his own people: the herald, the cupbearers, Aglaea with the child on her hip, his two sons. Every face inside the line was turned toward the kings.

His hand left the haft. The air eased off the line, and the swords fell silent, one after another. Hades's breath came full again.

"Inside, brother."

He said it low, for his brother alone. Then he walked through the gap in the line without a glance at the steel on either side of him.

Hades looked to the light standing open between the pylons, the chamberlain's palm flat on the stone, and the twelve still holding their line before it. Then he turned his head.

"Morpheus. They are yours until the Pyle is dark."

Morpheus came out of the crowd to the line.

"My lord."

Hades looked back up the court to the most senior of the guards and tipped his head toward Morpheus.

"Give him a sword."

The guard drew and walked it down the court, hilt first. Morpheus took it, turned it once in his hand to find its weight, and let it hang at his side, point down, the way the twelve held theirs at rest.

Zeus was waiting at threshold to the palace. As Hades reached him, Thanatos following, his eyes went once to Hades's breast, to the bare wool where the key should have been, and down to the linen bound round his right hand.

"What happened to your hand?"

Hades gave him no answer to that.

"We will speak in the guest rooms. You remember where they are."

Hades walked his brother inside.

[Ascendancy]

Hades stopped in the doorway of the guest rooms.

They opened off the passage inside the entrance to the court, and their far wall was the wall of the court itself. As the air stirred, the fixtures overhead came up slowly, the way they did in rooms no one had entered in years, and their light found the couches under linen covers, a brazier swept cold, and two cups set upside down on a side table. Across the room, the door to a bedchamber stood shut.

Zeus looked at that door. Then he walked past his brother into the room. At the side table he stopped. It was a single block of milky quartz, threaded with gold exactly where the mountain had laid it. Zeus drew one finger across it between the cups and looked at the grey that came away on it.

Thanatos had stopped in the passage behind them.

"Wait here," Hades said, and closed the door.

The court beyond was still his, through the wall and the floor beneath it. Thirty-five weights crowded the paving before the pylons, shifting, never settling. Twelve stood in a line where he had put them. One moved among the newest arrivals, pausing before each in turn, and at the left pylon one leaned its weight onto the stone.

"I need baetylus." Zeus rubbed the grey from his fingertip with his thumb and turned to face his brother, the gold thread of his mantle dull under the soot. "You haven't let a grain of it out since the spring, and I'll want the best you have. And find my people somewhere—" His eyes moved over the covered couches and the cold brazier. "—somewhere fit to sleep."

Hades stayed by the door.

"Ask me."

Zeus looked at him.

"It's clear what you want. Now ask me for it."

"The Covenant gives me—"

"The Covenant gives you two pylons and the ground between them. Nothing past them. Nothing to whoever comes through behind you. And no one on this side of them. Your household stays in my court until you ask."

Zeus swore in their father's language. Hades had not heard that word from his brother's mouth in centuries. "There are children out there."

"Hephaestus's daughters."

"And you'd hold my granddaughters at sword's point until I say please."

"Then say it."

Zeus's eyes moved to the wall, toward the court beyond it, and stayed there.

"They sing my name in every city. Yours, they don't even know."

The cursed lead lay flat against Hades's ribs, under his coat, bearing a name that would never take.

"I know. Yours, they cut into lead."

In the court, another weight stepped off the Pyle. Thirty-six. Then two more, close together, as if one held the other up. Thirty-eight.

Zeus let that pass.

"Your stone failed us tonight."

Hades's eyes dropped to the haft on his brother's belt. Violet ran along the veins inside it, and its light lay over the blood on Zeus's knuckles. A field would have put it out for good.

"Not all of it."

Zeus said nothing.

"Where were you when the lights went out?"

The fixtures in the room had warmed to their full gold. Dawn. In the court a small weight had begun to move from foot to foot, and a larger one bent over it. The children.

"Where were you?"

"Under my palace."

On the terrace, with his brother's nectar warm in his chest, he had felt a hollow in the mountain's core, deeper than any stake could reach. He had taken it for a cellar.

"What do you keep there?"

Zeus looked at him a long moment.

"The same as you keep under yours."

It was not the same, and his brother knew it. Hades had given every device the Covenant listed to the smiths to destroy.

"Nothing under my palace breaks the Covenant. I have obeyed every word of it."

"I know. I wrote it for you to obey."

He remembered the tent at the end of the war. The three of them had fought side by side for ten years, and he had walked into it expecting to change the world with his brothers. Zeus read the terms aloud with the thunder at his belt. Poseidon stood at Hades's shoulder with his hand on the trident the whole time. There had been two ways out of that tent, and only one of them on his feet.

He had taken their binding. Before the month was out he had been given a kingdom at the bottom of the world, under the ice, to guard their father, they said.

Hades found he had stopped breathing. He began again.

"And what you kept down there? Where is it now?"

Zeus's fingertips found the gold binding at the end of the haft, and stayed on it.

"Gone."

The thunder at his brother's belt still held its color. Zeus had been under the mountain when the fields went over his palace. He had gone down to his vault and found it already empty.

So that was where the eighth had gone. Seven had been broken up by the smiths; the eighth had never been accounted for. It was the one that had held their father helpless long enough to be put away, and every Titan with him. His brother had kept it under his own palace all along, and tonight it was in mortal hands.

There were two sons of Kronos left for it to hold.

The hollow he had felt in the mountain had been large for a single device. His brother had never kept anything in moderation.

"You kept it in breach of the Covenant."

"I kept it against what lies under your floor. Our father is alive in your prison, and every Titan with him, because you would not finish them. Someone had to keep the means to do it, if your locks ever failed." Zeus came a step closer. "Or if you did."

Hades turned the ring on his finger, once.

"I gave you my word in that tent. I have kept it every day since."

Thirty-nine stood in the court.

"Your word sent Apollo to Caria."

The name of the town had been in Hades's own hand.

"Hephaestus drew his wards close because you wrote that he should, and they found him on his own table inside them. Athena. Hebe. Artemis. My wife." It came out level, in the same breath as the rest. "I have lost more children since the spring than you have ever had, and you keep what is left of my house at the point of a sword and tell me to ask."

His eyes moved past Hades to the inner door, and came back.

"And you bring me here. As if I still owe you for this room. She came to me, brother. You kept your naiad at court where your wife had to pass her every day, and you called it fair." A breath. "Menthe."

Persephone was in Elysium, a long way off, and lay still.

The first time the binding had put her in this room, he had walked in on them, and walked out again, and in the morning he had cut the carving from the faces of the Sovereign's Pyle. It had put her here eleven times after that. Each time, he had known exactly where she was.

Menthe was a long time dead. Persephone had seen to that, years after this room.

He had forgiven the room.

"You will not say that name in my house."

Zeus's hand closed on the haft.

Hades stepped away from the door and crossed the room to him, until a single pace of floor lay between them.

Soot had settled into lines at the corners of his brother's eyes. A fleck of blood lay on one temple.

Zeus's eyes dropped to the bare wool at his brother's breast, and came back up.

"Where is your key, brother?"

They stood there. Then Zeus's eyes moved past him, to the inner door.

"I hear Melinoë is a great deal like me. Maybe I should finally meet the girl."

Among Lethe's drawings there had been one of Melinoë, laughing at something beyond the edge of the page.

In all her life, his brother had never once asked to see her.

He closed the last pace between them, caught the haft in his right hand, and dragged it halfway up through its ring. Under the linen the bite split open.

Zeus's hand slammed down over his and drove it back, the gold of the belt ring biting into both their knuckles. Hades braced against him. Their arms shook with it. The haft held where it was, between them, and the violet along its veins burned brighter.

The rock under the room was his, all the way down.

Zeus's breath was hot on his face.

A man's voice came through the wall from the court, made larger than any man's.

"Get ba—"

It shook in Hades's chest and set the cups chattering on the side table.

Both of them went still, their hands locked on the haft, listening.

No man's throat could make a sound like that without a working.

"Ares."

Hades reached into the floor for the court he'd forgotten to follow, and it came up into him wrong. There were too many weights in too little floor, all of them crushing toward the palace. Near the Pyle, iron was going into a joint of the paving under a hammer. Then the reading turned back on him. It dragged through his shoulders as it had on the cliff path above the Acheron, and he eased it down to the lightest touch he had. It still pulled.

An Antistrophe, near enough to reach this room.

The hammer stopped. Another started, a few paces off, then a third. Then the far end of the court went out of his reading. It ran across the paving and stopped at a line, and past the line there was nothing to read.

A field.

Violet ran up the haft as his brother's grip tightened over the weapon at his hip.

Hades drove the haft back down into its ring, against his brother's hand, and held it there.

"If you draw, you die."

He let go, and was at the door before his brother answered. Thanatos had already turned toward him.

"Half the guard post to the court. The rest stay where they are."

Thanatos ran one way. Hades and Zeus ran the other.

He met the crowd in the passage. They poured into the palace toward him, packed close, feast clothes torn, and he counted them as they pushed past. A cupbearer with blood at her mouth. Two stewards carrying a third between them. Aglaea, with Eupheme on her hip and the girl's face turned into her neck, the three behind her holding to her skirts and to each other. The chamberlain was the last through, his rolls clutched against his chest. He had not lost one.

Hades stepped out through the entrance into the court. It was full of fighting.

At the far end the fixtures in the cavern roof had gone out in a circle, and under the dark the pylons stood grey. Men fought in knots and pairs around the dead. Eight grey cloaks were still on their feet, each with two or three Atharim on him. Bia fought with her back to the wall, Hermes beside her with a blade. Morpheus was in the thick of it at the center, and wherever he moved, the fight moved with him.

Near the middle a Kakodaimon went down under three of them, and the three came on toward the entrance.

Just as the first rushed him, Hades realized he had nothing in his hands.

Zeus shouldered past him. A blur of violet crossed the air, and the haft of the thunder struck the man across the helmet. He dropped. Zeus bent, took the sword out of his hand, and held it out to his brother hilt first.

Hades took it.

The second man met the haft across his face, and Zeus took his sword too. With a weapon in each fist he turned toward the open ground where his son lay, and Hades kept to his shoulder.

The last of the three was a head taller than Hades and drove at him as if Hades were a door to be put through. Hades gave ground, and gave it again. When the man pressed in once more, Hades dropped under his sword and slashed across the ankle of his forward leg. The man fell to one knee, and Zeus's blade finished him before Hades had his own up again.

His brother had already turned to the next man.

Hades set his back to his brother's. The last time they had stood like this, there had been an army of Titans on every side.

For every man they put down, another stepped over the body to take his place. Hades's sword arm had begun to burn, and each blow he turned came down a little harder than the one before.

He heard the boots only when they were almost on him, many of them, running hard down the passage behind.

The palace guard poured out of the entrance at a run, and Thanatos with them, a sword in his hand that Hades had never once seen him hold. They spread through the court and threw themselves into the fighting, two and three to every Atharim still standing.

It was over quickly after that. The Atharim fell back toward their ring and died there. None of them asked for quarter.

Then there was no one left to fight. Near the pylons, one of the Atharim lay calling a woman's name, over and over. Morpheus crossed to him without breaking stride and drove his sword down through his chest. The calling stopped.

Hades lowered his sword.

Bia was wiping her blade on a dead man's tunic. Hermes sat against the wall with his legs out in front of him, very still. Three of the first twelve Kakodaimones were on their feet.

Zeus stood over Ares with a sword in each hand, the thunder returned to his belt. The god of war lay on his side where he had fallen. His bracers were still on his wrists. The clay lamp lay a hand's breadth from his fingers, whole.

Morpheus picked his way through the dead to Hades's shoulder, breathing as hard as he was.

"Near sixty came through behind the last of the Olympians. They cut down the nearest before anyone knew who they were, and while the crowd broke, they drove the first bar in. Every god who reacted after that died where they stood." He looked down at Ares. "Then the stakes went in, and after that—"

The baetylus in the pylons had gone grey from base to capital. Four stakes ringed them, driven into the joints of the paving. A fifth, a single bar of dark iron, stood alone outside the ring on the near side.

Hades let his sword clatter to the ground and crossed to the bar with silver. Feet set, his bitten hand screaming under the linen, he put his whole weight into it and pulled. It tore free of the joint with a long scrape of iron on stone. He flung it away across the court and read the floor beneath the ring.

The stone answered him, all the way down, everywhere but the ring itself. Beneath it, past the reach of any stake, the bedrock ran on whole. He opened it there, a hand's breadth, and let the ring settle into the gap. The paving sagged. One after another the stakes tipped in their joints, and their feet came free of the rock.

When the last stake fell, Hades looked up. The fixtures in that circle of the roof still hung dark, and they would stay dark; nothing the field had touched would ever wake again. Under them the pylons stood grey from base to capital, and the air that came off them was colder than any he had felt since he first cut a city out of the ice.

He had kept that Pyle through every quarrel with his brothers, because the Covenant gave him no choice, and because some part of him had never stopped expecting one of them to come through. It had been cut for the three of them. Now it would answer none.

Zeus was kneeling beside his son. He had been watching Hades work, and when Hades turned, he took the clay lamp from beside Ares's hand, set it on his son's chest, and looked up at his brother.

"Help me lift him."

The lamp on Ares's chest was plain clay, black with soot. He had filled one like it on his nephew's floor, the night Psyche asked him to take in Aglaea and the girls. He had said that when his brother asked, he would give an answer.

Hades knelt on the other side of Ares and took him under the shoulders. Together they lifted him, and carried him across the court and out of the cold.

The survivors in the passage fell quiet as they pressed back against the walls to let them by. Near the end of them stood the chamberlain, his rolls still gathered against his chest. He bowed his head as the two kings passed.

This time, none of the rolls slipped.

[Ascendancy]

Chapter 12

Where He Fell

The cupbearer's breath showed white.

She stood flat against the passage wall with the rest of his brother's household to give the two kings room, and each breath hung before her bloodied mouth for a moment before it thinned. Beside her, a steward's did the same. In all the years since the first fixtures were lit under the ice, no one in Erebos had seen their own breath.

The cold had followed them in from the court.

Hades turned in at the first doorway past the entrance, walking backward with Ares's shoulders in his arms. It was the room where the watch on the Sovereign's court took its meals: bare walls, a shelf beside the door, and a table cut from a single slab of grey stone, long enough for six men to sit at. Someone had left a cup on it. Zeus knocked it to the floor with his elbow, and they laid his son down.

Ares lay with his head toward the door, but Hades took him under the shoulders again and turned him on the stone until his head lay to the wall and his feet to the door. The lamp slid on his chest, and Hades caught it.

"What are you doing?"

"What was done for Hephaestus."

Psyche had done it for his nephew, and sat on the floor beside the lamp afterward.

Zeus looked at him across the table.

Hades moved the lamp to Ares's feet. The eyes were a little open, the way a man's are when he is listening hard, and he laid his palm over the lids to ease them shut. The jaw had begun to sag. His nephew's had been bound with a strip of linen knotted at the crown, and there was nothing in this room to bind it with.

"I need linen to bind his jaw."

Zeus looked at his son's mouth. Then he took the hem of his own feast tunic in both hands and tore a strip from it the length of his arm, and held it out across the table.

Hades took it. He drew the linen under the jaw and up on either side of the face, and knotted it at the crown, in the dark hair. He laid the hands one over the other on the chest. They were broad across the knuckles, and the bronze bracers were still buckled at the wrists. Above them the feast linen had dried stiff and brown to the elbow. None of it was Ares's own blood.

He had kept his brother's household in the court until his brother asked. Ares had died while they argued.

Hades straightened the legs, one and then the other.

Thanatos had followed them in. He took the oil flask down from the shelf without being told and set it on the end of the table for Hades to fill the lamp. Thanatos struck a light and held it to the wick, and the flame took, small and upright, at Ares's feet.

Zeus unpinned his mantle. He laid it over his son from the chest down, the gold thread dull under its soot, and drew it straight across the bracers.

Out in the passage, a woman began to sing.

It was the lament for the dead, sung low enough not to wake the children at her knee, and every weight along the passage stopped shifting to hear it. Hades knew the voice. He had heard it once before, forty years ago at a wedding on Olympus, raised with her sisters' in the marriage hymn, and a hall full of gods had gone still for it then. At the end of each verse she sang Ares's name, and two or three women farther down the wall answered it after her, softly.

Zeus stood at his son's head and kept his eyes on his face. When the women answered Ares's name, he shut his eyes.

Hades turned to Thanatos. "Send for the Embalmer."

Thanatos bowed and was gone.

For centuries, the man Hades had named had helped Thanatos with the hounds, and no one had ever sent for him to do anything else.

"Who?" Zeus asked.

"A guest of mine."

"You don't keep guests."

"I keep one."

Hermes had brought him through the Greek Pyle long ago and paid Charon the fare for them both. By the time word reached Hades and he walked down to the Gates, the hounds were lying at the stranger's feet, and the third had its head on his knee. Hermes had asked him, for once, to let the man stay, and to leave his name out of the record if he did. Hades had granted both requests. The record named him by his work, and so did Hades.

Hades left the table and took the place just inside the door. Zeus stayed at his son's head.

Hermes appeared in the doorway. Apollo's lyre was still slung across his back. He looked at the table, and at his father, and came no farther than the wall beside Hades, where he set his back to the stone and crossed his arms. Zeus's eyes remained low.

From the door Hades could see down the passage, where his brother's household had sunk down along the walls, too tired now to stay on their feet. Aglaea sat among them with her daughters asleep against her, still singing. Thanatos turned in from the stair at the far end, and a man walked a pace behind him. She sang on as they passed.

He was tall and narrow through the shoulders, his skin a dark, even brown, his black hair swept back off his forehead. His face was young, as young as it had been the day Hades found him at the Gates. The brows lay heavy and straight, and his mouth was set a little down at the corners. He wore the black of Hades's court, but in linen. Nothing fastened his coat. A broad band of the same black crossed him from one shoulder to the opposite hip and was wound once about his waist, and its end hung loose to his knee and swung as he walked. There was no metal on him anywhere: no clasp, no ring, no pin.

He stopped in the doorway, an arm's length from Hermes.

Hermes uncrossed his arms. He said one word, low, in a language Hades did not know. The man's hand closed on his wrist, once, and let it go.

Then he turned to the king and inclined his head, no lower. The scent of dry salt and cedar followed him in. He looked past Hades to the table, and Zeus, after a moment, gave up his place at the head of it.

The Embalmer set his bundle on the end of the table beside the oil flask and turned back its cloth to reach the folded linen at the bottom of it. Above it lay the rest of his trade. A bronze hook. Linen rolled tight in narrow bands. A stoppered jar. A knife of black volcanic glass, knapped to an edge. Hades knew the kind; the islanders on Melos worked it. But when he read it, it answered like none he had touched before. It had come out of no rock in his kingdom, nor any he had walked across in the world above.

The Embalmer lifted the mantle from Ares, folded it in three, and held it out to Zeus.

"I laid that on him."

"Nothing of wool goes with the dead."

His Greek was plain and exact. He stood with the folded mantle held out between his hands, and waited.

Zeus took the mantle.

The Embalmer unpinned the bronze wheel at Ares's shoulder, drew the oxblood cloak out from under him, folded it close around the brooch, and held that out as well. Zeus took it. Then the Embalmer turned Ares's wrist on the stone and found the strap that closed the bracer.

Zeus put his hand over the stranger's.

"Leave them."

The Embalmer looked at him. Then he took his hand from the bronze and inclined his head.

Zeus's eyes went over the instruments in the open bundle beside his son.

"What is he going to do with my son?"

Zeus had put it to Hades, but it was Hermes who answered from the wall.

"Keep him as he is. It takes seventy days."

Zeus looked at him then, for the first time since he had come in. Hermes looked back at him and said nothing more.

"Seventy days. And then what?" Zeus said to his brother.

"He will rest in a tomb in Erebos."

"No. He goes home."

"To what? Olympus is dark."

"I will light it again."

"In seventy days?"

Zeus looked down at the folded wool in his arms.

"He will be entombed as a king's son. You have my word."

Zeus looked at him for a long moment. Then he let his breath out hard through his nose, the way he had when they were young and Hades had won an argument Zeus meant to win himself.

His eyes went to the wall, toward the court beyond it.

"Then he rests where he fell. Not some hole."

Hades looked up at the ceiling for the space of a breath, and then back at his brother.

The Embalmer's eyes went from one king to the other, and then to Hermes at the wall. Hermes's mouth moved at one corner, the nearest thing to a smile his face had held all night.

Hermes, it seemed, had been talking about the family.

The Embalmer drew the folded linen from the bottom of his bundle and shook it out. He wound it about Ares over his stained feast clothes, from his feet to his crown, the bracers under it, and closed the bundle over the rest of his tools.

In the passage, the three Kakodaimones left standing of the twelve came with a bier. They lifted Ares onto it between them and carried him out, the Embalmer leading their path down toward his house by the Gates on the city's lowest tier. The household pressed back against the walls again to let them by. Hermes followed the bier out with the lyre on his back. Zeus stood in the doorway with his son's cloak and his own mantle in his arms, and watched them to the stair.

On the empty table, the lamp burned on.

Hades crossed back through the entrance into the court.

The palace guard were bringing out the dead. They had laid his own along the foot of the wall beside the entrance, nine grey cloaks in a row, and the Atharim lay heaped where they had fallen at the edge of the ring. Morpheus stood among the guard directing them, his black cloak torn at the hem, the sword Hades had given him held point down at his side. The only sounds were the scrape of the dead being drawn across the stone and the guards' breathing, harsh in the cold.

The court was colder now than it had been at dawn. Under the dead fixtures the pylons stood grey in the half dark, and frost had started in the joints of the paving, a white line in every seam, spreading out from the ring toward the entrance.

He walked the row of his fallen Kakodaimones. He had chosen every one of them for this court himself. At the last of them he stopped, and drew the grey cloak straight over the man's chest where it had folded back.

The captain of the palace guard stood at the heap of Atharim, looking from the bodies to his king.

"Put them out on the ice beyond the Gates, and leave them."

The captain bowed. Two of his men had already stooped to the nearest body. They straightened, and looked at each other, and stooped again.

Morpheus left the guard to their work and crossed to his king.

"My lord. Icelus has been alone on the elm since the night began."

"Go."

Morpheus bowed and was gone through the entrance, his sword still bare in his hand.

The four stakes lay where they had tipped in the sagging paving. Hades crouched beside the nearest. Its foot was wrapped in a thin collar of stone where the silver bands held it, and in the light from the far end of the court he could see what was in it: grey overworld rock with a few threads of violet through it, the poorest baetylus he had seen worked in a long time.

Scraps. With scraps like these they had killed the Pyle he had kept for his brothers, and every light in this end of his court.

Four stakes like these had held a ring he could cross in twenty strides. A field reached only as far as the quality of the baetylus could carry it, and stone this poor would carry it no farther. Wherever the Atharim had found this stone, they had found nothing better. At least their fields would be small.

He rose, and for the first time since the guest room he drew a full breath.

The Antistrophe lay across the court where he had flung it. He stood over it. It was a bar of dark iron the length of a man's arm, banded with silver at its foot where the stone was held, the same make as the stakes. It had taken Ares's voice and turned it back into him, mid-word.

He had a guardsman carry it away with the stakes, down to Kleitos in the Deep Works, to be taken apart.

The chamberlain was waiting at the entrance when Hades turned back to it, a single roll held out in both hands and the rest gathered in the crook of his arm.

"Majesty. The names of everyone who came through the Pyle." A breath. "The living, and the dead, as far as I could learn them."

Hades took it and unrolled a hand's breadth. The writing was small and even. Ares's name headed the dead. Below them, the living ran on in the same hand to the foot of the roll.

"You wrote this since dawn."

"It is my office, Majesty."

Hades rolled it closed and put it inside his coat, against the lead.

In the guest rooms off the passage, the fixtures had warmed to their full gold. Frost lay on the two upturned cups on the side table, white over their bases, and in the grain of the quartz between them. He laid his palm flat on the wall the room shared with the court. The cold came through the stone into his hand.

The fixtures that had kept the ice out of the court were dead, and nothing would wake them. Until his artificers cut new ones, only stone would keep that cold out of his palace.

When the court was empty, he read the palace for iron. Iron in a man's hands was weight like any other; only driven into his stone did it leave a blank in his reading. There was no blank anywhere. He cut a block from the bedrock beneath the threshold and drew it up, and the court dropped from sight behind it.

He turned back down the passage.

The children were asleep along the foot of the wall under a steward's cloak, the smallest of them with her head in Aglaea's lap. Aglaea was still singing, so quietly now that the words reached Hades only as he passed. Farther on, Zeus sat on the floor among his people with his back to the wall, the mantle and the oxblood wool folded across his knees, and the bronze wheel in his fist.

Hades stopped beside him.

His brother looked at the far wall. His fist tightened on Ares’s brooch until the pin stood out between his knuckles.

Hades stood there a while longer. Then he walked on.

Every soul in Hades's kingdom had its place by law. These had come under none of his.

Thanatos stood at his shoulder again.

"Ask the queen to come to Erebos."

Thanatos looked down the passage at the children asleep against the wall, and back at his king.

"My lord."

The binding told Hades where she was: awake, in her own palace in Elysium, crossing a room.