The Last King of Erebos

[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.