The Last King of Erebos

[Ascendancy]

Chapter 5
Even Here

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

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

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

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Whoever had organized this had held a position here, watched the Pyle, sent their two men down into the labyrinth, and withdrawn before anyone might return.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

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

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

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

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

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

EVEN HERE

Hades regarded the inscription for a long time.

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

The presumption was almost laughable.

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

He did not touch it.

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

Hades set the bread down.

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

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

Seven. Hades let the number settle before he spoke.

"Held them how?"

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

"And the oath?"

"Has answered. He is Afflicted."

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

"You may adjudicate such matters yourself."

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

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

”Was it Damnameneus?”

"Yes, my lord."

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

"I should have expected as much."

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

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

Minos did not contradict him.

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

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

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

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

"What do they want?"

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

"Every sentence."

"Some have begun to question the judgments themselves."

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

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

Minos did not immediately answer.

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

"And what do you ask?"

"I ask what I am to tell them."

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

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

He rose.

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

"As you say, my lord."

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

Minos walked beside him.

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

Damnameneus had changed considerably since their first meeting.

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

Around his wrists rested two fitted bands of metal.

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

The consequence of his broken oath was less discreet.

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

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

Hades regarded him without greeting.

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

Damnameneus raised his eyes.

"Your Majesty."

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

He turned to the Warden.

"Explain what happened."

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

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

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

The Warden stiffened.

"You will permit him to finish."

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

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

"Why was he ordered to remain outside?"

The Warden lifted his head.

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

"Even while workers remained trapped inside?"

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

Hades looked again at the Telchine.

"And you disobeyed."

"Yes."

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

"Yes, my lord."

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

"Why?"

The question appeared to surprise him.

"Because they were going to die."

"You were under a direct order."

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

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

"And the warnings you gave before the accident?"

Damnameneus hesitated.

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

"Could you have demonstrated the danger?"

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

Hades turned fully toward the Warden.

"Was his warning examined?"

The man drew himself straighter.

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

"I asked whether his warning was examined."

"No independent examination was conducted.”

"Why not?"

The Warden hesitated.

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

Hades regarded him in silence.

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

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

"The appointed overseers believed their judgment sufficient.”

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

The Warden lowered his eyes.

Hades turned to Minos.

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

"I will see it done, my lord."

Hades looked once more at Damnameneus.

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

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

He turned to Minos.

"Absolve him."

The Judge inclined his head and approached Damnameneus.

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

For a moment, nothing appeared to happen.

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

He lowered his hand from the stone.

The Desmoi remained upon his wrists, their inscriptions unchanged.

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

A murmur passed through the assembled workers.

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

"And the dead?"

Hades looked at him.

"Their deaths will be investigated."

"They cannot be investigated back into life."

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

"Take care, Damnameneus."

But the artificer had already committed himself.

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

Hades kept his voice level.

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

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

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

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

Damnameneus looked past him toward the workers.

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

The silence that followed was not reassuring.

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

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

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

Hades faced Damnameneus once more.

"I have heard enough."

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

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

Damnameneus stood very still.

"Your sentence stands. Conduct yourself accordingly."

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

"As you command, Your Majesty."

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

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

The crowd dispersed slowly.

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

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

He watched her go.

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

Minos approached once the square had begun to empty.

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

Hades turned toward him.

"Concerning the mines?"

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

"There is nothing unusual in such petitions."

"No, my lord. There is not."

Minos paused.

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

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

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

Minos inclined his head, though his expression remained thoughtful.

"As you command."

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

"See that the petitions are answered."

"Of course, my lord."

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

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

Behind him, the square remained silent.