10 hours ago
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.
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.