The Last King of Erebos

[Ascendancy]

The findings on the collapse at Aleyonian Lake came up from the Deep Works five days after Hades turned Hermes back at the river. He had ordered them on the day the mountain came down. Kleitos had written the last line himself.

The morning's petitioners had gone, and the hall of judgment was empty but for the guards at the bronze doors. Hades read at the table beside the throne. The findings were in the hands of Kleitos's artificers, set out in the order he required of anything that left the Deep Works: what had been measured, by whom, and with what. The fracture behind the deposit had been moving for at least three days before the rupture. The marks on the slab agreed with it to the width of a fingernail. The overseers' props had been set to carry a roof that had never been in danger. The Warden had been told of the warnings twice and had ordered no examination.

The overseers had given their reasons, and the artificers had copied them without comment. The condemned god had been assigned to the lowest galleries without privilege of rank or former occupation, by order of the king. To heed his warnings would have been to grant him the privilege the sentence withheld.

Hades read that part again.

Below it, in a broader hand than the rest, the ink pressed hard enough to score the page:

The man who cut the marks. Damnameneus. I would have him in the Deep Works, if the king will allow it.

Kleitos had asked him for something once already, on the lid of a case of baetylus that went to Tartarus. Hades had not answered it.

He was still at the table when a guard came in to say that the Judge of Mourning asked to be admitted. Minos had sent word from the Pyle an hour ahead. The one time he had not, seven were dead.

He came up the length of the hall at his usual pace, with the lake wind's grit still in the folds of his sleeves, and bowed at the foot of the dais.

"My lord. You have the findings."

"I have them. Has the Warden seen them?”

"He asked, but I have not yet allowed it." Minos straightened. "There is also the overseers' slate at the shaft-head. Beneath your sentence, someone has chalked his name. Damnameneus of Telchine. The Deep Works. The overseers wipe it at the end of every shift. By the start of the next it is back."

"How many shifts?”

"Eleven."

"And who writes it?"

"No one has been seen to."

"Eleven times, at the change of shift, in a yard full of overseers."

"Yes, my lord."

Hades laid the findings face down on the table.

”And the petitions?"

"Continue. They ask what they have asked from the start: the Warden examined, conditions changed, the sentences reviewed. Since the chalk began, most of them ask for Damnameneus's transfer as well." Minos paused. "Even Kleitos sent a request to me. I told him I could not grant it."

He could not. Hades had seen to that in the Audience Chamber, with the Telchine still standing before him. No exemption is to be granted without my express permission.

Minos drew a folded sheet from inside his robe and laid it on the table beside the findings, square to their edge.

"The transfer, my lord. Drafted, in case it was wanted."

Hades did not touch it.

He had said something else on the day of Damnameneus's arrival, before he passed sentence. Your talents may find employment in time. At the time, he had meant it. Kleitos had been building toward a garden that would keep itself, and the Telchine had known more about baetylus under strain than anyone in the Fields of Mourning.

He had amended one judgment already this season, to have a girl found.

"He swore obedience to you, in Mourning. The oath answers you and the Warden."

"It does, my lord."

"No one has asked it to answer anyone else. If it does not follow him out of the Fields, I would be sending a condemned god to work beneath this hall with nothing on him but the Desmoi."

Minos considered that, and did not dispute it.

Only Styx could answer that.

"Be at the shaft-head at the change of shift. Bring the Warden." He looked at the folded sheet. "And bring that."

Minos took it up and put it away inside his robe.

***

He dressed as he would for a hearing: the black of the throne, and over it the cloak of office, fastened at the throat. He pinned the key himself.

The guards at the Pyle to Mourning knew his step, and had the seal awake before he reached it. He came out into the guardhouse at the head of the ravine and through it onto the road, where the wind off the lake came up between the walls to meet him and pulled the cloak back from his shoulders. Far below, the smoke of the settlement lay flat over the roofs.

Where the ravine opened, a path left the road and climbed the mountain's flank, away from the settlement. It was narrow and well kept, its steps cut shallow for the Judges' clerks, who came up it with their jars each time a prisoner was brought to swear. Hades had not climbed it in a long time. He did not hurry. The shift would not change for some hours yet.

Styx lived where her water came out of the mountain. She was a Titan. Every other Titan in his kingdom was in Tartarus.

The rock had been left as she found it, a deep overhang with the weight of the mountain above, and under it stood pillars of silver, twelve of them in a half-ring. Hades knew them before he reached them: every pillar down through its footing into the rock, and the rock itself to a depth he did not trouble to measure. They were plumb and sound.

The water was another matter.

It rose from a cleft at the back of the overhang, crossed the floor in a channel no wider than his hand, and went out over the lip toward the lake. He put his attention into the floor around it. The firmament gave him the channel's walls and its bed, and the grains of grit lying in it, one by one. Of the water it gave him nothing. Water was not stone. He had sent prisoners to swear on this water for longer than the settlement had stood, and he could not have said what it was.

She was crouched beside the channel with her sleeves pushed above the elbow, scooping out the grit the wind had carried in from the lake, where it had settled in the shallow basin the clerks filled their jars from. She saw him come in between the pillars. She finished clearing the basin before she stood, and dried her forearms on a cloth, one and then the other, and only then came to meet him.

"My lord."

"Styx."

She did not offer him a seat. There was nowhere under the overhang to sit but the rock.

"A prisoner sworn in Mourning. If I sent him out of the Fields, would the oath go with him?"

"It goes where he goes."

"And answers to whom?"

"Whomever you name, my lord."

She waited.

He had a second question. The Lyterion had been melted before the first prisoner ever swore on her water. No one had needed to ask whether the oath could stand inside one.

"There is a weapon in the world that makes a field around itself. Inside it, workings come apart: wards, bindings, mageia. If one were carried into Mourning, would the oath survive it?"

"My water is not a working, my lord."

Then the Desmoi would go, and the oath would not. Every condemned god inside such a field would have their full strength back and still be sworn to obedience. Hades turned that over and found he could govern it.

So it could still be broken only one way. Every oath in Mourning had been sworn on her water, and every one would last exactly as long as she did. Whoever wanted her would have to come through his borders first, and down the whole length of his kingdom to its farthest edge.

He turned to go.

"My lord."

He stopped between the pillars.

"My children live beside Zeus. Is Olympus safe for them?"

Hephaestus's tablet was in his coat. Its fleck still pulled toward Olympus.

"Olympus is my brother's affair."

She inclined her head. Before he had gone three steps down the path, she was crouched at the basin again with her sleeves pushed back.

***

The yard at the shaft-head was full when he came down into it.

The incoming shift stood nearest the shaft, in work garments, with their lamps not yet lit. Behind them were others who were not bound for the mine at all, people from the settlement in the clothes of those who would go home afterward, a few with children. Word that the king was on the mountain had come down ahead of him. The crowd drew back to let him through without being asked.

Minos waited beside the board with the Warden and his officers. The folded sheet was in his hand.

The day's names ran down the slate in chalk, each beside its station. One line was not chalk. Halfway down, cut shallow with an overseer's chisel where no rag could reach it, were the words he had spoken in the Audience Chamber:

Damnameneus of Telchine. The lowest galleries, without privilege of rank or former occupation. By order of the king.

Beneath them, in large, uneven letters, written fast:

Damnameneus of Telchine. The Deep Works.

Hades turned from Minos to address the whole yard. He did not raise his voice. He gave the judgment as he would have given it from the throne, and the yard fell quiet to hear it.

"The Master of the Deep Works has examined the collapse. The warnings were given and not tested. The Warden is removed from his office. Until I appoint another, the Judge of Mourning commands here."

The Warden opened his mouth, and shut it, and stepped back out of the line of his officers. None of them moved to fill the place.

The sound that went through the yard was not quite a cheer, and it did not last. Most of them were watching the board.

If he moved the man now, everyone in this yard would know what had moved him. Not Kleitos's findings, which none of them had read. Not his own word in the Audience Chamber, which none of them had heard. The chalk. Eleven shifts of it, and the Warden gone on the twelfth, and on the thirteenth there would be another name under another line, and he would have taught them how it was done.

An overseer stood by the board with a rag. His eyes went to Minos, then to the king.

Hades said nothing. The overseer wiped the chalk away in three strokes, and the slate beneath it showed dark and wet.

Hades stepped to the board where the whole yard could see his hand. He meant them to know whose sentence it was. He set a fingertip in the first letter and traced the chisel's work to the last, putting the firmament into the slate as he went, and every letter cut deeper behind his finger, until the sentence could be read from the back of the yard. No one spoke while he did it. Grey dust sifted down the face of the board.

"The sentence stands."

Minos looked at the fresh-cut letters, and at the wet slate beneath them.

"My lord."

He put the folded sheet back inside his robe.

A bell sounded in the winding house, and the cage came up out of the shaft with the outgoing shift from the lowest galleries. They came off it grey to the eyes with dust, lamps guttering, and the yard had to make room for them. The press came round the board on both sides, close enough to push the overseer back against the slate, close enough to brush the king's cloak. Hades did not step back from it. He did not look among their faces.

When the last of them had passed, the chalk was back beneath his sentence.

It had been written an arm's length from him. He looked at the hands nearest him. Every one of them held a lamp, and every one was grey with the mine's dust to the wrist. Chalk would not have shown on any of them.

"Your Majesty, I—" The overseer's rag had stopped short of the slate. "I didn't see."

The outgoing shift had stopped at the mouth of the street. The incoming shift stood by the shaft with their lamps unlit, and the freeborn stood behind them. No one came forward. No one looked at anyone else.

Hades did not answer him. He looked at the overseer until the man lowered his eyes.

"Minos."

"My lord."

"Find whoever wrote it. Until that hand is found, no petition from Mourning comes before me."

The yard made no sound at all.

Minos was a moment answering. When he inclined his head, he did not look at the yard.

"Wipe it."

Hades turned up the road toward the Pyle.

[Ascendancy]

Chapter 9: Within the Four

The bed had been turned down for him three nights running. Each morning the servants found it as they had left it, made it again, and said nothing.

On the third night, in the second hour after midnight, Hades came in and found the corner of the coverlet folded back, square, as it had been the two nights before. He stood looking at it with his coat half off his shoulders.

Then he took the coat the rest of the way off and hung it over the chair at the bedside, near enough to reach. A tunic of fine black linen, unbelted, had been laid out for him on the coverlet. He put it on.

Before he lay down he put his hand inside the coat. Two tablets. He read the first through the firmament, and his attention slid off the reading halfway, and he had to read it again. The fleck under his nephew's name pulled toward Olympus, as it had every night since Corinth, patient as a plumb line. The fleck under his own name lay loose in its lead, like grit.

He put out the lamp.

* * *

The fire was dung and thornwood, and it smoked.

The Titans had pitched their council tent on the high ground above the ford and left its walls rolled up for the air. Hides on poles. A table of split cedar on trestles. Around it stood eleven of them in the old dress: long wool woven in bands of red and ochre, fleeces over the shoulders against the cold of the uplands, gold collars beaten so thin they lifted when the wearer breathed. Their hair was long and bound in spirals of bronze wire, and their beards were oiled and twisted into ringlets, the way his father had worn his at table. They spoke his father's language, and he understood every word. He had last heard it in Tartarus.

On the table lay a calfskin map, with the distances marked in days of riding.

Hades stood inside the firelight at the corner of the table, close enough to read the skin.

He wore what he had worn every night that year: a tunic of undyed wool, a belt of rawhide, leather wrappings bound to the knee. The Helm sat close on his head, dark leather, its cheek-pieces new from the forge and bright as coin. He reached to turn his ring, and his thumb found bare skin.

A Titan with a cup in his hand came around the end of the table and stepped wide of the corner where Hades stood, the way a man steps around a draft, and went on talking. Hades read the map. He knew where each of them would stand before they moved.

Across the fire, someone was looking at him.

He was built like one of their own captains, heavy through the chest and shoulders, in a plain dark cloak with the hood thrown back. The Titans moved around him as they moved around Hades. He looked straight at him.

Hades reached into the ground beneath the tent, to read the man's weight on it and the way he stood, as he would have read any stranger's. The ground did not answer. There was the trodden earth, and the smoke, and the voices over the map, and under all of it nothing he could put his hand into.

He knew then where he was, and what year it was, and that the ford had been dry for longer than Erebos had stood.

He took off the Helm.

The Titans went on with their council. The one with the cup leaned past him to point at the skin, close enough to touch.

”My lord, I have your brother's answer. He slept three nights ago. I've been at your leaf since." Morpheus came around the fire, between two Titans who went on arguing over the map. "I gave him your words as you sent them. That the weapon in Caria was a Lyterion. That the one surrendered after the war was melted, and this one has been made since." He paused. "He gave me his answer and told me to give it to you in his face. I said I would carry it as he said it. Nothing added."

"Give it to me."

Morpheus inclined his head.

The weight came off him first. The heavy chest and shoulders thinned and drew out, and the man grew longer in the limb and narrower at the waist, until what stood there was hard and spare, every muscle lying close along the bone, the build of someone who had never once had to carry anything he did not choose to. The hair came down past his shoulders in loose waves, chestnut, lighter at the ends where the sun had been in it. The beard came in close and neat. The eyes cleared to that pale color between grey and hazel. Then the ivory tunic, and the deep blue mantle worked with gold, and the eagle at the shoulder, and rings on four fingers.

He stood among the fleeces and the bronze wire like a guest at the wrong feast, and was entirely at ease.

Zeus looked at him with that whole, warm attention that made a person feel like the only one in the room.

"Mortals do not make such things. They find them. I am seeing to the finders." A small movement of the hand, the one with the most rings. "Hephaestus tells me his doors have never been better kept."

Then he came forward and embraced him.

It was exact. The weight of the arm across his back. The other hand at the nape of his neck. The smell of wine and sun came into the smoke of the tent. Hades's arms rose and returned it, from long habit, before he had decided anything.

Zeus stepped away to examine him, exactly as he had in the doorway on Olympus, the day Hades came to ask him about the Atharim. He was smiling.

The smile went first. Then the tunic, and the rings, and the chestnut hair. The shoulders broadened and the chest filled out, and the dark cloak came back last, its hood still thrown back. Morpheus put his hands behind his back.

"He made me give it back to him. All of it."

For one word the voice was Zeus's again, with all the warmth gone out of it.

"Again."

Then it was Morpheus's own.

"That is everything, my lord."

Hades looked down at the map. The distances were still marked in days.

"You have done more than you were asked."

Morpheus turned and walked out past the tent poles, into the dark beyond the fire, and was gone.

Hades woke.

Hephaestus tells me his doors have never been better kept.

Kept with wards. He had written it himself, in this room, with Thanatos standing by the door: the wards on the workshop should be drawn close. And below the fourth weapon in the war inventory, in a clerk's cramped hand: Within the four, nothing woven holds.

He dressed in the dark. Coat off the chair, arms into it, the tablets heavy against his ribs. He pinned the key by touch on the way to the door, and was in the corridor with the last button still undone.

* * *

The Sovereign's Pyle stood in its own court beside the palace, two pylons of black stone with plain faces. The guards saw who came and stood aside.

He drew Dynamis into the pylons in the pattern they kept for three men, and the stone knew his hand. Pale light spread between them, and he went through.

On Olympus the sun was already high.

The receiving hall beside Zeus's palace had been built to be crossed by a king: marble floor, gilded columns figured with victories, sunlight falling through it from end to end. The heat met Hades on the threshold and soaked into the black wool of his coat.

A chamberlain was crossing the hall with an arm full of papyrus rolls. He looked up as the light faded between the pylons, saw who had come through them, and bowed so low that the rolls slid, and stayed bent until the king had passed.

Palace doors stood open on empty rooms. On the terrace where his brother had poured for him, the low table was still laid: an amphora on its side, two cups, a dish of figs gone soft and split in the sun. A servant at the far end of the colonnade saw the black coat and went the other way.

Beyond the palace lay the Propylaia: a long square open to the sky, ringed by pylons gilded and figured as everything here was, one pair for every court and sanctuary Zeus thought worth reaching. Most stood dark. One was awake.

Its pylons were carved with double axes, and at their capitals stood his brother as the Carians carved him, bearded, with the axe on his shoulder. Labraunda, Zeus's own sanctuary in the hills of Caria.

Through it lay a hillside in morning light. Terraces of olives stepped down toward a valley. A small town stood on the lower slope behind a wall of grey stone, the kind of town that kept one temple and one well. Smoke went up from it in five or six columns, straight in the still air, and leaned together higher up into one.

A minor god came through the conjunction while Hades watched, carrying something in both arms. It was wrapped in a blue temple curtain and was half the length of a man. One corner of the curtain had slipped. Underneath was a painted wooden face, very old, the paint worn to the grain on the cheeks where hands had touched it for generations. Apollo. The god carried the statue carefully across the court and through an arch, and the town's smoke came off his clothes as he passed.

The god holding the conjunction leaned on the left pylon with one hand flat on the stone, the way a man holds a door open for whoever is coming. Hades knew him. Whenever Zeus sat enthroned, at a feast or a judgment, this one stood at his right shoulder, and his sister at the left. He was Styx's son. He had his mother's habit of looking only at what he needed to, and he kept his eyes on the hillside.

My children live beside Zeus. Is Olympus safe for them?

The conjunction had stood open since before Hades entered the Propylaia. It stood open while he crossed it. Anyone in that olive grove with an instrument in their hand could have measured it from end to end, and walked through behind it.

The town had been sentenced without a hearing.

It was his brother's affair. He went out by the western side, and down.

* * *

The sentinels stood at the head of the workshop passage. Their hollow gazes turned to him, and they stepped aside, as obedient as before.

At the neighboring entrance, where mortal craftsmen had shown their seals, a chain of new bronze hung across the way.

The air below smelled of cold metal.

The great hall was lit by the panels in the ceiling and the drawings glowing on their sheets of glass. Over the empty benches the rings turned about their sphere of silver light, slowly. The suspended mechanisms hung where they had last been sent. The golden attendants stood among the worktables in the postures they had stopped in, one with its hands raised to a shelf, one turned half toward the passage. They were waiting for their next instruction.

His heels were the only sound in the hall.

In the laboratory the worktables stood around the raised platform, and on the platform the golden eagle sat on its marble perch with its wings half open. The apprentices' stools had been pushed back from it. On the table beside the empty chair, five golden feathers lay in a row, where his nephew had set them down the day he looked up and said Uncle.

The eagle turned its head and watched him come in. Its polished eyes followed him across the floor, as they had followed the apprentices. When he stopped, it stopped.

He put his hand inside his coat, took out his nephew's tablet, and read the fleck.

It lay loose in its lead.

The eagle's head came round fast to follow him. He was across the laboratory and into the passage, the tablet still in his hand.

* * *

Twenty paces down the passage, the strips of baetylus that lit the walls went grey, as if burned to ash. The line curved across the floor and up both walls and closed overhead.

He stepped across it, into the ring.

Beyond, the only light came low and yellow from ahead: a wick.

He stopped in the doorway.

The mark beside the door, which had brightened under his nephew's staff, was the same grey as the strips in the passage. Inside, the shelves that rose and fell at a touch had come to rest wherever the field had caught them. One hung halfway down the wall, its instruments tilted on it. The worktable beside the chair stood at the height it had last been set for. The bronze sphere sat on its stand in two open halves, dark.

The only thing in the room that moved was a flame.

The lamp was clay, the kind mortals buy by the dozen. Someone had filled it and set it on the floor at the foot of the worktable. Someone sat on the floor beside it. A man stood at the far wall.

Hades looked at the wards first.

Three housings, his nephew's own design, on the jambs and the lintel of the door. They had been laid in close to the frame on every side, as tight as their limits allowed, exactly as he had written. All grey.

The holes were in the floor. There were four, at the corners of a ring that took in the chair and most of the room and the first stretch of the passage. Each was the width of two fingers, bored clean into the mountain's rock, and deep. He crouched beside the nearest and laid his fingertips on its lip.

The stone remembered the iron: a banded stake driven down by a mallet in a man's hands, struck many times, without hurry. The sleeve of stone at its foot had ground against the rock with every blow, and when the stake was wrenched out again it had left its grains along the sides of the hole, grey and dead. It was his. It had come out of the lower galleries at Aleyonian Lake, from the seam where the gallery opened into the fissure. Every load that left that seam had gone out under his seal, to whatever forge could pay for it, long before he had issued the order that no more baetylus leave the kingdom.

He rose.

The tray was on the side table, where he had left it: shallow, lined with cloth. In it lay the instrument from the Nekromanteion in its pieces, the mismatched housings, the scratched cover, the needle. Beside them lay the two components his nephew had set side by side the day he showed them to him, the altered ward and the intact one.

Hades picked up the intact ward.

It had been made to stop a working that failed, before the failure could do harm, and it stopped it by putting the working out entirely. Eupalamos had cut away the stopping and taught the ward to watch. Someone had taken the stopping instead, and made it larger, and driven it into the earth on four stakes, so that it put out every working inside the ring at once: every ward, every light, every god's mageia.

He laid it back in the tray, beside its twin.

The staff stood against the wall by the door, upright and neat, the way a guest's stick is put away.

They had laid Hephaestus out on his own long worktable, and laid him out properly. His eyes were closed. A strip of linen bound his jaw, knotted at the crown of his head beneath the fair hair, darker at the roots as it had always been. His hands lay one over the other on the breast of his crimson tunic, below the clasp of his own making. Under them the cloth was darker, and stiff. Someone had straightened the folds around his legs, the lame one and the sound one, so that they lay alike.

On his lips there was a coin, the mortal fare for the ferryman.

The jaw had settled under the linen since it was laid, and the coin had slid toward the corner of his mouth, askew.

Hades set it straight with one finger.

Then he looked at the woman beside the lamp.

She was sitting on the floor.

[Ascendancy]

She looked up from the lamp, and he knew her.

Until Persephone spoke of her in the armory, he had forgotten the girl on the floor of the queen's hall. Psyche, the only living woman he had ever allowed to leave the kingdom. She had crossed his river and walked his road, and he had let her go home knowing the way.

She had been watching him since he came in. Now that he had turned to her she drew a breath and seemed not to know what to do with it.

"Lord Hades." It came out half a question. Her hair, a mass of auburn curls, had come half down in the night, and her eyes were very dark in the lamplight.

The man at the far wall came off the stone all at once, toward her. Psyche lifted one hand from her lap, a small movement, and he paused. He was young, his brown hair fallen over his brow, and he was in his shirtsleeves. The front of his shirt had gone stiff and brown. His cloak was on the floor under his wife.

Eros. Olympus told a story about this man, and an arrow, and how the lord of the dead had come by his queen. The two of them had never met.

He was standing at his nephew's head, near enough to touch the bound jaw, in the place that belonged to the women of the house. He put the lead tablet inside his coat, and went to stand by the door.

"I've been getting up to set that coin straight all night," Psyche said. "It won't stay." She looked at him a moment longer. "Thank you."

She gathered her skirt in one hand, to rise and give him her place.

"Would you like to sit with him, my lord?"

"No."

She let go of her skirt. Hades stayed by the door.

"Was he alone?"

"No." She looked down at the lamp. "His own men were with him. Four of them. They'd been in and out of here for days, drawing the wards in close to the door, the way your letter said. He chose them for it. He said nobody in the workshops knew this rock better."

Her hands lay open on her knees, the knuckles brown in the creases under the lamp oil. ”They stayed late into the night to finish. He'd been at the tray since supper and hadn't touched his plate, so I went down to the kitchens to bring him something he could eat with one hand. Eros came with me." She did not turn her head toward the wall. "I asked him to."

Eros was looking at the floor between the table and the door, where a stretch of the stone was paler than the rest and still dark at its edges with water.

"When we came back, the lights in the passage had gone grey. He was there." She did not point. "They'd used a knife."

Hades looked at the nearest of the four holes, and went on looking at it while she told him the rest: that the men had gone down the craftsmen's way with their seals, and the sentinels had stood aside for them.

"Aglaea needed to be with the girls, so I stayed with him."

Aglaea. His nephew's wife, the youngest of the Graces. He had met her once, and remembered her voice better than her face.

"I wanted to," Psyche said. "He cooked the food for our wedding banquet."

Her eyes went across the room to Eros. He was already looking at her. The corner of his mouth lifted, and then he looked down at his stained cuffs.

Hades looked toward the passage, at the grey line across its floor.

"Queen Hera came at first light. She stood at the grey line in the passage a long time, and then she went back up. The others came as far as the great hall. None of them will come past that line."

The field had died with the stakes. Anyone could have walked into this room.

"And my brother?"

”He’s in Caria." Eros said it from the wall, flatly. "He sent Bia down with the guard. They hung a chain across the craftsmen's way this morning, and they're throwing every mortal off the mountain. The ones who were asleep in their beds too."

Caria. On his way down, beyond the Labraunda Pyle, he had glimpsed a town burn, and a god carry a wooden Apollo out of it in both arms, wrapped in a temple curtain.

Psyche was watching him again. When she spoke, her voice was gentler.

"He did everything you wrote. The ones who'd left and come back, he sent away the morning your letter came. He paid them first." The ghost of a smile. "He read your letter out at supper, and then he laughed, and said you still hadn't told him how deep the heat runs, or whether a forge in the underworld would ever go out."

Hades's thumb found his ring and turned it, and turned it again.

Psyche waited until it was still. Then she said the rest to the lamp as much as to him.

"Aglaea and the girls aren't safe here. Whoever sent those men reached him in his own room. There isn't a house on this mountain they can't reach, ours included." She lifted her eyes. "I've walked your road, my lord. Nothing crosses your river that you don't allow. Take them through with you, and the ones being put off the mountain, too."

Hades's thumb stopped on the ring.

Lykon at the river, with his blackened torch clasp. Hermes on the landing, Apollo's lyre in his arms. Persephone naming his own court back to him, officer by officer. And now this one, on the floor of his nephew's room, with his nephew's blood in the creases of her hands.

"The men who did this were his own. He chose them himself. Aglaea and her daughters live on my brother's mountain. When my brother asks me to shelter them, I will give him my answer."

Psyche went still.

"He won't ask," Eros muttered.

The Sovereign's Pyle stood in a court outside the palace walls and inside every defense Hades had built. On his way here he had stood in the Propylaia and watched a god lean on a pylon and hold a conjunction open for anyone on the far side to measure. A household was not a widow and her daughters. It was nurses, and servants, and whoever carried their belongings, and whoever had a reason to stand near the children; and behind all of them, whoever had followed.

"No."

Eros crossed from the far wall to where she sat at the foot of the table and went down on one knee beside her. He took her hand, turned it over, and began to work his thumb along the creases of her knuckles, where the stain had stayed.

By now Persephone would be back from the lake. She would be in her hall among the pools, hearing whoever had come to her.

Over Psyche's bowed head, Eros's eyes came up and found him watching. He looked at Hades a long moment, at his face and nowhere else.

Hades turned his eyes to his nephew.

Eros's thumb went still. When Psyche raised her head, he tipped his own, very slightly, toward the door. She closed her hand over his thumb, and nodded.

They rose together. She took up the cloak and shook it out, and as it opened Hades saw the grey wool of its outer side, dark from collar to hem where a man had been carried against it. She swung it round her shoulders with the blush silk outward, over the brown at her knees and hem, and Eros fastened it at her throat.

"We'll give you some time with him, my lord."

Hades inclined his head.

At the door she stopped.

"There's oil on the shelf by the door if the lamp burns down.”

Eros bowed as he passed.

When they had gone, there was nothing left in the room for him to do.

He went back to his nephew.

They had closed his eyes. The linen under the jaw was knotted at the crown, in the fair hair. His hands lay one over the other, a smith's hands, broad across the knuckles, the backs seamed white with old burns, a thumbnail split once and grown out ridged. Beneath them was the clasp he had made for himself, and beneath that, the brown.

He had written that the wards should be drawn close. For days there had been mallets in this room because he had written it. He had written that no craftsman who had left his nephew's service and lately come back should be let through the doors, and Hephaestus had sent them away and paid them. He had set it all down in order, the way his nephew liked a thing explained. He had named the men he could find in a ledger. The four who drove the stakes had never been in one.

Hephaestus had followed all of it.

Four holes. Three wards. Four men.

He counted the holes again. There were still four.

The staff stood against the wall by the door, upright and tidy. He went and took it up, and stood with it. It was heavier than it looked. His hand closed on the silver grip and found it worn smooth to the shape of another hand. He laid it on the table along his nephew's right side.

Then he sat down on the stone at the foot of the table, beside the lamp.

Over cups, years ago, Hephaestus had asked him how deep the heat ran beneath Erebos, and whether a forge there would ever go out. He had been laughing. He had asked it twice.

"It would never have gone out."

The lamp flame swam and doubled.

When he looked at it again it was guttering, low in the last of the oil, and there was a dull ache behind his eyes.

The oil was where she had said, in a kitchen jar on the shelf by the door. He knelt and poured slowly, so the flame drank and leaned, and put the jar back where she had left it.

Steps in the passage, a man's. Hades was on his feet before they reached the grey.

Eros came in wearing a clean shirt, plain linen, unlaced at the throat, his hair wet at the temples. He bowed, and took the place just inside the door. His eyes went to the staff on the table, and stayed there while the king went past him.

She had said it happened late in the night.

He had read the fleck in the second hour after midnight, and it had pulled. He had put out the lamp and slept. Some time after that, four men had laid down their mallets in this mountain. Some time after that, or before it, there had been a tent above a ford, and his brother's arm across his back.

He could not put them in order.

At the Sovereign's Pyle he fastened the last button of his coat.

* * *

Thanatos was waiting at the inner gate of the receiving court, so still that he might have been standing there since the king left.

"My lord."

"Hephaestus is dead."

Thanatos blinked. His lips parted, and he closed them again.

Hades walked on across the court, and Thanatos fell in a pace behind him.

"Recall Tisiphone and Megaera. They are to hold the entrances to the kingdom until I relieve them. Alecto stays where she is."

The stone in those four holes had come out of Mourning.

"Tell the Judge of Mourning that every mallet, wedge, drill and length of iron in the galleries and forges of Mourning is to be counted against the overseers' tally at each change of shift. Any shortfall is to be brought to him within the hour."

Thanatos's step checked, half a pace, and came on.

At the palace doors Hades stopped.

”Shall I send word to the queen, my lord?"

Thanatos waited.

"Tell the queen that Hephaestus is dead."

Hades crossed his own threshold and pulled the doors shut behind him.

[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.