The Last King of Erebos

[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.