1 hour ago
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.
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.