The Last King of Erebos

[Ascendancy]

The Last King of Erebos

The 6th Age

Chapter One: The King Beneath the World


*

The petitioner had been trembling for the better part of an hour, and he had not yet been asked a question.

Hades found it tiresome. The man stood on the mosaic at the center of the Hall of Judgment, the third name on the morning's list, accused of nothing worse than helping someone out of the Underworld without leave. Fear was reasonable before a king who had ruled for seven centuries. This much of it made a man useless for answering questions, and Hades had questions.

He shifted on the throne, one hand resting on the polished arm while the other turned the signet ring on his finger. It was a small movement. The petitioner's eyes dropped at once.

The throne was cut from a single mass of black stone brought up from deep beneath the palace, veined with silver and set high on its dais at the far end of the hall. Petitioners who approached it tended to find that their courage had stayed behind at the bronze doors. Some knelt without being told. Hades had never seen a reason to correct the effect.

Overhead, the crystal fixtures in the vault still held the pale light of early morning. Within the hour the keepers of the day would bring them up toward noon, in this hall and on every tier of the city below, and Erebos would take it for the day. Between the doors and the dais, columns of polished obsidian carried the history of the kingdom. The overthrow of Kronos wound up the nearest of them, the work of craftsmen who had not been born when it happened and who had made it a single battle under an open sky when it had taken ten years, most of them in the dark. Farther along came the founding of Erebos, the hollowing of the first cities, and the binding of the great rivers that watered fields cut from the rock. Hades remembered all of it.

The hall was warm. Above it lay the mountain, and above the mountain the ice of the southern continent, and the warmth came up from the heat that ran far beneath the city, carried through the palace by workings of Dynamis older than anyone on the benches. The same works kept the agricultural terraces green, sweetened the water, moved the air through the caverns, and lit cities that had never seen a dawn of their own. Nearly all of them ran now without a god's hand on them, and few of his subjects had ever been cold. Hades counted that the best of what he had done.

"Tell me who you are."

The man swallowed. "Alketas, Your Majesty."

"The record knows that much."

A faint stir went along the benches. Alketas colored and bowed so deeply that Hades could see the thinning patch at the crown of his head.

"Alketas of the western gardens, Your Majesty. Keeper of the third conservatory at Elysium."

"Better."

Hades touched the record on its narrow table beside the throne. The crystal brightened, and the next of the testimony rose in lines of silver script while the lines before it faded. "You stand accused of sending a person out of my kingdom without leave, of forging the papers that carried her through nine of my Pyles, and of deceiving the transit officials who read them. Do you dispute any of it?"

"No, Your Majesty."

"Then explain why you did it."

Alketas hesitated. He wore what a prosperous tradesman wore, a dark green tunic edged with modest embroidery, pressed badly. Soil remained under one fingernail despite what had plainly been a hard scrubbing. An honest occupation, at least, and one that put something on the kingdom's tables. His eyes had gone to the key pinned at Hades's breast and stayed there, as petitioners' eyes often did. It was easier to look at than the face above it.

"My daughter wished to leave, my lord."

"That much is evident."

"She always wanted to see the world above. Ever since she was small, she asked about the sea, and the sun, and places where the sky had no mountains around it." His eyes came up from the key, searching for something, and went back down. "She was born in Elysium. She has never known anything else."

"Many thousands of my subjects were born in Elysium. Most of them manage to stay there without forging papers."

"Yes, my lord."

"How old is she?"

"Twenty-three."

"And you?"

"Sixty-one, my lord."

Sixty-one years. Barely enough time to acquire wisdom. The warmth in this hall was older than the man's grandfather.

"Your daughter is grown. She might have petitioned to depart."

"She believed it would be refused."

"An assumption that has now cost you your liberty."

Alketas bowed his head.

Hades said nothing for a time, and the court waited with him. His judgments were rarely hurried, though he had little patience for testimony that went nowhere, and he had heard this argument in many forms. Lovers desperate to reach someone beyond the borders. Adventurers enchanted by the romance of the surface. Scholars convinced that what they wanted to know could be learned only among nations less fortunate than his own.

They seldom considered what they carried with them.

From Elysium to the trading settlement at the kingdom's edge, the girl would have passed through nine Pyles, each linked to the next across country no one could cross on foot and live. Together they carried his people and their harvests from one end of the kingdom to the other, and no one in the overworld could say where a single one of them stood. Each had taken years and rare skill to make. Hades had not built a kingdom under the southern ice so that every restless young fool who confused freedom with distance could walk out of it with the way in her head.

At the edge of the dais, Thanatos had come in by the side passage and stopped beside one of the lesser columns. He was young by the standards of the Royal Chthonian Court, with light hair swept back from a finely made face, eyes that gave away very little, and dark clothes cut close and plain. The courtier nearest him found a reason to shift a little farther along the bench. Against his sleeve Thanatos held a slender piece of black stone. A stone meant Morpheus. Thanatos stayed where he was, and Hades returned to the petitioner.

"And where is your daughter now?"

"I don't know, my lord."

Hades looked at him.

Alketas wilted.

"I swear it. She was to go north, through the trading settlement. She promised she would send word when she was safe."

"Has she?"

"No."

"How long has it been?"

"Eleven days."

He had not needed to reckon it. He had been counting.

Hades leaned back. "You understand that the papers you made may have put others in danger. The officials who accepted them may now be suspected of complicity. The way your daughter went may no longer be safe. Should she speak carelessly of what she has seen here, the consequences will reach well beyond your family."

"She would never betray us."

"She has already shown an imperfect regard for the law."

"My lord, she only wanted to see the world."

"And you wished to give it to her."

Alketas looked up from the key, all the way to Hades's face, for the first time since he had given his name.

"Yes."

Hades knew something of the impulse, though his own father had understood it differently. Kronos had preferred obedience to affection, and control to trust. It had occurred to Hades more than once that his father might have spared himself a great deal of trouble had he learned the difference between raising children and ruling them. On the nearest column, carved in black, Kronos was falling.

Hades found that he had stopped turning the ring.

"You seem to believe that your daughter's happiness excuses what you have done."

"No, my lord. I only wished her to be free."

"Free." Hades gave the word back to him without warmth. "You have lived sixty-one years under my protection. You have never suffered a winter, never feared an invading army, never wondered whether the harvest would fail. And now you presume to decide which of the laws that preserve those comforts deserve your obedience."

Alketas's gaze went back to the key.

"Tell me. When you forged those papers, did you consider the lives you endangered? Or did your daughter's wishes fill the whole of your thoughts?"

"I thought the crossing was safe, my lord."

"Precisely. You thought no further than that."

He did not go on at once. There was no satisfaction in chastising a man who had already confessed, but Alketas was not the only one who needed to hear it. Hades meant the benches to hear it as well. Along them, the courtiers sat very still.

"You will be removed permanently from your place at Elysium," Hades said at last. "Your property will remain undisturbed, save for a levy sufficient to repay the kingdom for the inquiry your actions have made necessary. You will serve fifteen years in supervised confinement, and your knowledge of growing things will be put to use in the agricultural chambers beneath Erebos.”

Alketas stared.

Hades went on before the man could misunderstand. "Your daughter will not be pursued. She has placed herself beyond my protection, and she may find the world she wanted less accommodating than she imagined. Should she wish to return, she must present herself and submit to examination before any petition for her readmission is heard."

Alketas went to his knees.

"Thank you, my lord. Thank you."

"You have been sentenced to fifteen years' confinement, Alketas. I suggest you save your gratitude for a more fitting occasion."

But the man went on bowing and thanking him until the guards raised him, gently, and walked him to the bronze doors.

The doors closed behind him, and Hades looked at them a moment longer. The man had gone down on his knees at the words about his daughter. The fifteen years he seemed not to have heard at all.

He inclined his head. Thanatos came to the foot of the dais and bowed.

"My lord. A dispatch has arrived from Morpheus."

"Another."

"The third this week."

"I had not known Olympus could produce three matters worth reporting in a single week."

Thanatos's lips moved, very slightly. Whether that was amusement or only acknowledgment, Hades had never been able to say.

"It concerns the rebellion, my lord."

Hades held out his hand.

The stone was scarcely larger than a man's palm, polished black and crossed with fine silver lines that met in a single dark gem. Hephaestus had made the Oneiroi's stones at Morpheus's asking, and no one else had ever worked out how. Each was linked to the next in a chain that ran from Erebos to the stations Morpheus kept far beyond the borders. He used them for official reports and kept the Land of Dreams for what needed haste or discretion.

At a touch the gem brightened, and words rose above the stone and hung in the air in Morpheus's heavy, upright hand. His reports were like the man: to the point and practical, with little room for speculation.

Another stronghold had fallen, this one in Thrace. The god who held it was dead, several lesser gods of his household were missing, and the mortal army that had taken the city was consolidating along the roads.

The Atharim.

Hades had heard the name often enough in recent years. What had begun as scattered risings against isolated gods had become something more troublesome. Mortals had always rebelled against their betters, and now and then they won, for a while, until they quarreled among themselves, or their leaders failed them, or a god arrived with the strength to restore order. These Atharim kept on.

He read the dispatch a second time, slower over the account of the god's death. The ground around the body had been trampled by men and by nothing else. He had died as a man dies, of spear wounds.

"Interesting," he said quietly.

Thanatos waited.

"They have learned another method."

"So it would appear."

Hades touched the stone, and the words sank back into the gem. Beyond the columns, the court waited for its business to resume. Beyond the palace, the cities went about an ordinary morning: the rivers ran in their channels, the fields grew under their fixtures, and thousands of his subjects lived lives that had known neither conquest nor war for generations.

His brothers had been warned often enough that their excesses would bring consequences. Zeus had laughed at the warnings. Poseidon had generally threatened whoever delivered them. Now the mortals were answering.

"Shall I summon the council, my lord?"

Hades gave him back the stone. "No. Tell Morpheus I want to know what was done to that god before the spears reached him, and whether anyone who should know better helped them do it."

"And Olympus?"

"What of it?"

"Will you send word?"

Hades looked toward the bronze doors. Somewhere beyond the ice, a young woman was seeing the world her father had given fifteen years for. Farther off, gods who had ruled since the Titans fell were learning that the obedience of mortals had an end.

"Zeus has never lacked for advice, Thanatos. I doubt he would welcome mine now."

He gestured toward the waiting court.

"Send in the next petitioner."

[Ascendancy]

The report had come up from Elysium's water-keepers that morning, and not from the queen.

Hades stepped out of the Pyle onto the broad terrace above the western gardens and stood a moment in the light. He had left the rest of the morning's petitions to Thanatos and declined the customary escort; his presence in Elysium required no procession, and he had no wish to spend the passage listening to courtiers discuss matters that could wait until he returned. There were few places in his kingdom where he could forget the continent he had built it on. Elysium was one of them.

Below the terrace, orchards and cultivated fields filled the valley, their boundaries traced by silver waterways that wandered between low hills and lost themselves in the green. Groves of cypress and white poplar climbed toward mountains whose upper slopes went soft in the haze. The sky was real, and so was the sun. It stood just clear of the eastern ridge, as high as it would climb at this season, and the workings of Dynamis above the valley gathered what light it gave and made a full day of it. Beyond those mountains the southern ice ran on in a dark that would last for weeks yet. Here the marble under his boots was warm.

The orchards bore real fruit, and the rivers carried real water. Whether the weather was natural or kept had never seemed to Hades a distinction worth the trouble. It was more dependable than anything he remembered of the Aegean. Persephone did not tolerate an ill-timed frost, and the Horai who managed the seasonal workings had learned not to test her patience.

A breeze came up the steps and lifted the hem of the black mantle on his shoulder. It carried the smell of damp earth and flowering citrus, and the music of a festival somewhere among the lower settlements. The harvest celebrations were beginning in the western districts. Hades had never understood why the people of Elysium insisted on celebrating an abundance they enjoyed so reliably. He supposed the alternative was to celebrate the rare occasions when something went wrong.

Something had gone wrong now. Several channels in the western gardens had begun to lose their balance, the report said, nothing serious as yet. But they fed a number of the conservatories, and the workings beneath them were among the oldest in Elysium, laid when the valley was bare rock and the plans of a young goddess. Hades remembered those plans. He had argued with most of them.

Two attendants bowed as he came down the stair into the gardens, in pale linen embroidered with leaves and running water: the queen's household. One of them hurried ahead along the path. No one had told them he was coming.

He followed a shaded avenue between flowering trees whose branches had been trained into arches overhead. Narrow channels ran beside the path, climbing where the ground rose and coming down in small cascades wherever the gardens allowed. There were no pumps or wheels. The water kept to arrangements made generations ago. Here and there attendants were at work, turning water into the roots of delicate plants, or coaxing blossoms into arrangements a little too exact to be natural.

Beside a fountain, two young water nymphs were arguing over a lesson. One held a ribbon of water above her open hands while the other tried to divide it into smaller streams. Neither saw him until his shadow fell across the paving.

The water dropped into the basin with an undignified slap.

Both bowed in haste. Hades considered the soaked hem of the nearer girl's dress.

"An improvement upon the floor, I suppose."

"My lord," she stammered.

"Continue your instruction. Preferably without drowning the roses."

He left them to their embarrassment and did not look back. There had been a time when he enjoyed teaching the younger gods himself. Most of them, he had found, needed more repetition than he had patience to give.

He found Persephone beneath an arbor heavy with pale wisteria.

She was kneeling beside a shallow channel, her skirts gathered to one side and the hem of her gown resting on the wet earth, which did not appear to concern her. Her chestnut hair had been pinned up for the work and was coming down in waves at the back of her neck, and the gold pomegranate at her throat had swung clear of her gown as she bent. Several attendants waited nearby with an elderly water nymph whose silver hair was braided into a crown. Between them lay a shallow basin of polished stone, its cover set aside, and inside it a nest of crystal channels through which a faint current of Dynamis moved in measured pulses.

Persephone had one hand pressed to the roots of a young tree. Hades stopped at the edge of the arbor.

She could hold a court's attention with a look. With her hands in the soil she seemed not to know there was a court. He read stone: what it carried, and where it would give. What she read, she had never been able to explain to him, though he had watched her draw roots a hundred paces through dry ground toward water they had no way of knowing was there. There had been a time when the difference between them was a game they played.

"You have a problem."

Persephone did not turn. "An astonishing deduction, husband. Were you hoping to impress me?"

"I had considered it. Apparently I have arrived too late."

She took her hand from the earth and sat back on her heels to study the tree. Its leaves had begun to curl at the edges, the deep green threaded with yellow.

"The distribution basin is losing its balance. The water still reaches the upper gardens, but the soil will not hold it. The nymphs have made up the difference where they can."

"How long has this been going on?"

"About nine days."

"And when were you intending to inform me?"

"When I had decided whether your help was necessary."

Hades said nothing.

Persephone looked up at him at last, and something close to amusement crossed her face. "It seems I miscalculated."

"A miscalculation. Dare I say it is the first of your life?"

"You would know, my lord."

Once he would have given her his hand and drawn her to her feet, and taken a kiss while her attendants found something else to look at. His hand had started toward her before he turned it, and himself, to the open basin.

The elder nymph bowed deeply and began to explain, pointing out the channels beneath the stone. The working was old, made on principles seldom used now outside the Underworld. Most of the craftsmen who had laid it were generations dead, and it had served well enough that no one had found a reason to replace it. Until now.

"The main conduit is sound, my lord. We have tested every binding. The trouble comes only when the channels draw their full share."

"Because the distribution is uneven."

"Yes, my lord. The worst of it is in the channels that feed the third conservatory."

"Which has had no keeper since this morning," Persephone said, without looking up from the tree.

"Its keeper is on his way to the eastern chambers, where his skill will be put to use."

She brushed a fleck of soil from a leaf and said nothing more about it.

Hades went down on one knee beside the basin and laid his palm on its stone.

The firmament answered him at once. He followed the working down through the stone, along the small, interlocking bindings in the foundation, and out into the stone-lined channels beyond. There was nothing crude in it. Whoever had built it had known the craft, and every joint had been laid with care. Something had changed all the same. He went farther, beneath the roots of the nearest trees and into the footing of the garden wall.

There it was. A seam in the wall's foundation had shifted, a thumb's width out of true. No ordinary inspection would have found it. It was enough to bend one of the conduits off its line.

"The foundation has settled."

Persephone rose and came to stand beside him, her eyes on the wall. "That would not explain the soil."

"It explains why your nymphs cannot correct the flow. They are making up for a fault that lies beneath the distribution chamber."

Her eyes went from the basin to the nearest of the flowering trees.

"Show me."

Hades carried the working out through the foundation so that she could feel the fault for herself. Persephone drew on Dynamis in turn, and he felt her attention go down into the soil and spread through the roots that had grown around the buried conduits.

For a while neither of them spoke. He held the stone still; she moved through the living roots knotted around it. He knew where she would turn before she turned, and she shaped her work around his without being told.

"Here," she said quietly.

He felt it. The roots of the wall trees had found the weak seam and were pulling at it.

"Your trees are moving my foundations."

"Your foundations are obstructing my trees."

"They were here first."

"And yet the trees seem unimpressed."

Hades glanced at her. The corner of Persephone's mouth had gone up.

He turned back to the stone. The repair itself was simple. Making it without tearing the roots was not, and Persephone would have enjoyed watching him struggle with it a great deal. He did not hurry it.

The stone moved under him by degrees, its old joints settling back into their first alignment. Persephone eased the roots aside and coaxed them into new angles where they could go on growing without troubling the conduits. In the basin, the crystal channels brightened as the working came back into balance, and the water ran harder. The change was small enough that only the elder nymph seemed to see it. She clasped her hands together.

Persephone went back to the young tree and laid her fingers on its trunk. After a moment the yellow began to go out of the leaves.

"There," she said softly. "That will do."

Hades took his hand from the basin and rose.

"It should stay sound for another century, provided your trees learn a greater respect for established boundaries."

"I shall speak to them."

"Do. I would prefer not to adjudicate the matter personally."

Persephone laughed.

It was an ordinary sound. Once he would hardly have noticed it among everything else their life together held. He could not now remember when he had last heard it, and he was still looking at her when it ended.

She saw him looking. The laugh left her face slowly.

"Thank you."

"You need not thank me for maintaining my own kingdom."

"Elysium is more than another district of your kingdom."

"Is it?"

He had not said it sharply. Something went out of the afternoon all the same. Persephone took a clean cloth from one of her attendants and wiped the earth from her fingers, one at a time.

"These gardens have been mine since there was nothing here but rock. You remember."

"Quite well."

"You thought this valley was too narrow."

"It is too narrow."

"And the southern ridge too steep."

"Steep and unstable."

"And yet here we are."

Hades looked out over the orchards. "I have conceded the point often enough, Persephone."

"Have you?"

It was not a question about the gardens.

She was watching him in a way he knew well, patience and calculation held in the same fine balance. Persephone had always been hard to deceive. She was harder still to read, even when he knew exactly what she was doing, and once that had been a large part of what drew him to her.

"I came because the distribution required attention."

"Of course."

"Would you rather I had sent someone else?"

"No."

It came faster than he expected.

Persephone turned toward the far orchards. A line of workers was crossing one of the lower bridges, their voices coming faintly up through the warm air.

"No," she said again, more quietly. "I am glad you came."

There were several things he could have said to that, nearly all of them easier than the one he meant. He had known her for centuries. They had defied Zeus together, widened a kingdom, raised a daughter, and come through separations that would have ended a lesser marriage. He knew the rhythm of her breathing when she slept, and the particular tilt of her head when she was deciding whether to forgive an insult.

He did not know whether she would take his hand if he offered it. He kept it at his side.

Persephone sent her attendants away with a small movement of her fingers. The elder nymph gathered her instruments from the basin, and the others went off along the shaded paths until the garden held only the two of them. For a time they stood together and did not speak.

"Melinoë has been asking after you."

Hades turned his head. "Has she?"

"Apparently you promised to examine something she has been working on."

"She has been working on a great many things. Most of them are highly inadvisable."

"Then I suggest you find out which one she means before she grows impatient."

"I have never found her impatience particularly dangerous."

"Others would disagree."

Hades did not argue. Their daughter had inherited an unfortunate share of Zeus's unpredictability, though he had always preferred to credit her more interesting qualities to Persephone. Melinoë was clever and troublesome, with gifts that called for far more discretion than she was ever inclined to use. He had spent years trying to impress that on her, with results he privately judged disappointing.

"I shall see her."

"I think she would like that."

Her voice had softened, and he heard the old affection beneath it. Whatever else had changed between them, their daughter was a subject on which they could usually agree.

Usually.

A bell rang somewhere beyond the gardens, its notes carrying clear across the valley. The light had begun to take on the deeper gold of evening, and long shadows lay across the paths beneath the trees. Soon the keepers of the day would come along the channels to light the lamps, and the greater workings over Elysium would ease the valley toward night. Beyond the mountains, the dark had already come and would stay.

Hades glanced up at the far terrace where he had come in.

"I should return to Erebos."

"Yes. I imagine there are endless petitions waiting for you."

"There are always petitions waiting for me."

"Then your subjects are fortunate that you have such inexhaustible patience."

"An opinion they seldom share."

Her smile came back, faintly.

He took a step toward her before he had decided to. It was an old habit, older than some of the cities that now lived under his protection. Persephone did not step back. She did not come forward either.

For a moment they stood facing each other across a distance hardly greater than the reach of his hand.

Then Hades inclined his head.

"Until next time, my queen."

"Until next time, my lord."

[Ascendancy]

Three times in five days, the Pyle on the far bank of the Acheron had woken for someone with no leave to cross the river.

The report had reached Hades that morning, in the middle of an accounting of the kingdom's mineral reserves. He had left the accounting to see for himself. Now he stood on the ledge of the old sanctuary above the river, the wind pulling at the long sweep of his black coat, and watched the other side.

The river had never frozen. In a land where the sea itself gave way to winter, where mountains vanished under glaciers and the wind took the warmth from living flesh in moments, the Acheron ran black and open through its gorge, between cliffs of ice and dark volcanic stone. Steam rose from it into the bitter air and collected in pale drifts beneath the overhanging granite. Snow seldom lay long on its banks.

Hades had always considered the river an elegant answer to an inconvenient problem. No one crossed it except in Charon's boat. Nothing woven of Dynamis survived being laid across it. There were more elaborate ways to secure a border, but few that asked so little of the one who kept it.

The wool of his coat had been woven to hold warmth, on a loom worked with Dynamis. A god of his strength could have stood here without it. Hades had long ago decided that suffering the cold merely because one could was a foolish kind of pride.

The sanctuary at his back was older than most of the cities of his kingdom, its black columns cut from the mountain, its broad stair to the landing worn smooth by generations of feet. It had been built to receive visitors. The steps were empty, as they were most of the year. Behind the sanctuary, the forecourt ran back to the Gates of Hades: two great leaves of a metal darker than iron, set into the cliff and cut with signs so old that some of the gods who kept them no longer knew what they had meant. No hand could open them. They answered to Dynamis, and only to those who knew how to ask. On the other side of them, through the thickness of the rock, lay the lowest tier of Erebos.

Below, a single boat was crossing the black water. It had no sail and no oars. Its long, narrow hull had been shaped from one piece of dark wood, polished by centuries on the river; the prow curved up into a bird's beak, and the head carved at the stern had been worn past knowing. It moved with a steadiness that owed nothing to the current and left almost no wake.

Charon stood near the stern with one hand on a staff of pale wood.

The ferryman was tall and spare, a little stooped under a cloak that had once been black and had gone the color of old ashes. A long beard, white streaked with iron-grey, lay across his chest, and his lined face wore the settled displeasure of a man who had spent centuries being interrupted. Only his eyes had escaped the years. They were a watery blue, sharp under heavy brows, and far too observant for the vacant expression he wore for travelers.

Hades had known Charon longer than he had known most of his court. In all that time the ferryman had been constant in three things: his devotion to the crossing, his contempt for unnecessary conversation, and his conviction that every traveler owed him something of value for the privilege. What counted as value was Charon's affair. He had taken gold, jewels, secrets, promises, and now and then objects whose worth was clear to no one but himself. Hades had never tried to standardize the practice. The ferryman was very good at his work, and there were limits to the improvements a king should impose on an arrangement that served.

A low growl came from the forecourt.

An enormous black hound came out from the shadow of the Gates, its shoulders nearly level with Hades's chest, its coat thick and glossy in the cold. Two more followed. The second was leaner, longer in the muzzle, with a streak of silver at the throat. The third was the largest of them, broad through the chest, with the look of an animal permanently dissatisfied with the world. Hades could have told them apart in the dark. Together they were Cerberus. The old stories gave the Underworld a single dog with three heads, and Hades had never troubled to correct them; they were not entirely wrong. A binding joined the three, so that what one saw, the others saw, and something of what one felt reached the others too.

The first hound came to him and lowered its head.

"There you are."

He scratched it behind one ear. Its tail thumped against the paving, and a deep rumble rose from its chest. A few paces off, the leaner hound lifted its muzzle and shut its eyes, as though the attention had been paid to it. The third stayed by the Gates and watched the boat.

Below, the boat touched the landing. Charon stepped ashore with the care of a man who had made the same step so many times that hurry no longer meant anything to him, and bent to make the boat fast.

"You're early," he said, to the rope.

"I was unaware you had appointed an hour for my arrival."

"Didn't. Expected you later."

"Then I regret the inconvenience."

Charon grunted, which Hades chose to take as acceptance of the apology. At the sound of his voice, the third hound's ears went flat. It came to the head of the stair and growled down at him.

Charon looked up then. Not at his king; at the hound.

"Found them asleep across the steps yesterday. All three. Wouldn't move."

"Perhaps they objected to your company."

"Then they can object somewhere out of the way."

Hades looked at the third hound. "Have you been troubling the ferryman again?"

It growled. The other two turned their heads toward the landing in the same instant, and three pairs of amber eyes settled on Charon with identical disapproval.

"There. You see how they look at me?"

"I see that you have managed to offend all three of them."

Charon muttered something into his beard and went back to his boat.

The first hound had settled its considerable weight against Hades's leg. He had known the line of these animals since the first years of his reign, and it had never failed him. Thanatos had raised these three, and their care had long since become more a matter of companionship than discipline. They obeyed Hades without hesitation, tolerated a handful of familiar gods, and treated nearly everyone else as a trespasser, Charon included.

"You are becoming indolent," he told the hound against his leg.

Its eyes closed. Its tongue slid out of the side of its jaw. Across the forecourt the leaner hound lay down on the stones with a long sigh, and the third gave its tail a single reluctant sweep.

"And apparently deaf."

He took his hand away and went down the stair. The first hound followed him as far as the top step and lay down there with its chin on its paws.

Charon had lowered himself onto the stone bench beside the landing.

"How many attempts to cross this week?"

"Three."

It agreed with the report. The outer Pyle had woken three times without any authorization passing its receiving wards. No one had crossed the river, and nothing suggested the inner protections had been touched. Three in five days was still more than the Pyle had seen in a year.

"And none of them presented themselves?"

"One did."

"You neglected to mention that."

"He didn't get far."

Hades waited.

Charon scratched his beard.

"Young fellow. Fine coat. Finer opinion of himself. Said he carried a message from Olympus."

"For whom?"

"You."

"A stunning coincidence, given the location."

Charon did not appear to find it so.

"Wanted passage without paying. Said the business was urgent."

"And you refused him."

"Naturally."

"On account of the payment?"

"On account of his manners. The payment didn't help."

"Did he give a name?"

"Didn't ask."

A lesser king might have found the exchange infuriating. Hades had learned to value the economy of Charon's approach. It was not the ferryman's duty to entertain envoys, or to sort the petty quarrels of Olympian courtiers, or to concern himself with the affairs of kingdoms an ocean away. His duty was the crossing, and on that there had never been cause for complaint.

Hades looked across the water.

A smaller sanctuary stood there under the overhanging cliff, its entrance little more than a dark opening between weathered pillars. Inside it lay the receiving chamber of a Pyle, one of the very few links between his kingdom and the lands of Olympus. Its counterpart stood beneath the Nekromanteion of Acheron, a temple near the mouth of the river's namesake in Epirus, hidden behind a run of chambers whose priests understood a fraction of what they tended. To those priests it was a sacred entrance to the realm of the dead. To the gods who knew how to wake it, it was a way of crossing half the world in a step.

Hermes used it now and then. Iris, less often. A handful of others knew how to wake it, though knowing how to reach the outer bank had never given anyone the right to cross the river from it. Zeus had always regarded that distinction as an unnecessary inconvenience.

Hermes had arranged the Pyle, in a long and tedious season of negotiation with Olympus. The messenger god had an unfortunate talent for making himself useful, which for a time had persuaded Hades to tolerate his equally unfortunate habit of arriving unannounced. The arrangement had lasted because it served a purpose. Now and then a message needed a god to carry it, or an agreement needed witnesses, or a visitor was granted an audience.

Everyone else met the veil. From where Hades stood, the far sanctuary lay in plain view across the river. From the far bank, there was only black water, and then a wall of darkness standing along this shore from the waterline to the top of the cliff, hiding the landing, the stair, and the Gates. It had spared him a great many uninvited visitors. Most travelers who reached the continent never learned that anyone lived inside it at all. The coasts gave them glaciers falling into a frozen sea, passes lost in storms that never ended, valleys that looked passable from a distance and ended in walls of ice. Those who came by the Pyle from Greece were another matter.

Hades went to the water's edge to read the mountain.

The firmament opened to him through the stone under his boots. The sanctuary's foundations ran deep into the cliff, joined by closed chambers and channels of carefully tempered metal that had taken some of the finest craftsmen of the kingdom's first years to lay. He felt the weight of the mountain above them and the press of the river against its banks, and through the masonry, the fine threads of the old workings. Some were his own, laid centuries ago and hardly touched since. Others carried the hand of gods long dead, their work fitted so exactly into the whole that disturbing any one of them would have put all of it at risk.

He followed the rock down under the riverbed and up again into the outer bank. The wards around the receiving sanctuary had marked each waking and refused each traveler, exactly as they were made to. No foreign working had touched their bindings. Behind him, the Gates stood sound.

Seven hundred years, and not a joint had moved.

Under the river, something in the outer bank tightened.

The bindings around the receiving sanctuary drew in, and a pulse went through the stone as the Pyle woke. Hades felt it before anything showed across the water. Above him, claws scraped on the forecourt paving. At the top of the stair, the first hound was on its feet, and he did not need to look to know that the other two had risen with it.

Charon got up from his bench.

"Another one."

Across the water, the mouth of the far sanctuary brightened. A pale light grew between the pylons and lit the mist under the cliff, and for a moment the dark beyond the threshold seemed to deepen rather than give way.

People came out of it.

Hades counted them as they came. Eleven. Fourteen. Two more, carrying a third between them. A woman holding up an old man. Nineteen, and the light behind them went out.

They had been on the road a long time; he could see it in how they stood. Their clothes were stained and their faces drawn. Several carried injuries that had had the barest attention. A man limped so badly that the others had to wait for him. The woman holding up the old man had her left arm bound against her body and was doing it with the other. Two children stood among the legs of the adults, too tired to cling to anyone. They spoke to one another in low voices, looking around them at the cliffs and the steaming river, and what they saw on this side was the black water and, beyond it, the dark.

The man at their head stepped forward and raised both hands to show them empty. He was short and thickset, perhaps fifty, his beard grown untidy on the journey. He called something toward the landing, and the wind took it apart among the cliffs.

Charon glanced at Hades.

"Shall I fetch them?"

"No."

The ferryman turned back to the water.

The wind dropped. The man called again, louder, and this time the words came across clear.

"Lord Hades! We seek sanctuary!"

The cliffs gave his voice back to him in pieces, and nothing else answered. He looked around at his companions. Several had turned toward the way they had come, but the light between the pylons was gone, and there was only the dark mouth of the sanctuary behind them.

He called again.

"Please! We beg an audience with the King of the Underworld! We have nowhere else to go!"

Charon sighed.

Hades considered them a moment longer. Their desperation was genuine enough, and nothing would be gained by prolonging it, or by testing Charon's patience further. He stepped onto the flat stone at the edge of the landing. He had cut the landing himself, long ago, so that a voice of ordinary pitch spoken from that stone would reach the mouth of the far sanctuary whole, with no working laid across the river to carry it. The gorge did the rest.

"You have reached the borders of my kingdom. State your names and the purpose of your arrival."

The man stumbled back and almost knocked into the woman behind him. Someone cried out. A young man dropped to his knees so suddenly that his palms struck the frozen stone. All of them were staring into the dark, searching it for whoever had spoken.

"My lord?" the spokesman ventured. "Is that truly you?"

Hades reached down through the stone of the landing to where the veil was anchored in the near bank, and drew it aside.

It did not thin the way mist thins in a wind. It drew back in two great curtains, without a sound, and the pale light of the forecourt fell down the stair and across the landing to the water. Across the river, nineteen faces found the black cliffs, the stair, the Gates in the rock, and the man standing at the water's edge.

Then they found the hounds.

All three stood at the head of the stair, shoulder to shoulder, and every amber eye was on the strangers. A growl rolled down the steps and out across the water. Several of the refugees flinched back toward the pillars.

The spokesman's eyes went from the hounds to Hades, from the long black coat to his face, and whatever he had prepared to say deserted him. He sank to both knees and pressed his forehead to the stone, and his lips shaped Hades's name.

Behind him, the others began to kneel. Some went down awkwardly, hampered by their injuries or what they carried. Others fell as if they had been struck. The woman with the bound arm stayed on her feet. She was trembling with the effort of keeping the old man upright.

Hades waited until the last of the others was down.

"You requested an audience. Now is the moment to make use of it."

The man lifted his head, though not quite as far as Hades's face.

"Forgive us, my lord. We did not know you were there."

"That was rather the intention."

[Ascendancy]

Chapter Two: The Gates of the Dead

*

Across the Acheron, the man struggled to find his voice.

Hades waited. The wind came down the gorge and pulled at the steam over the water, and behind him, at the head of the stair, one of the hounds shifted its weight on the stones. A man who had crossed half the world to reach a god might have been expected to know what he wanted to say when he arrived. Desperation, Hades had found, seldom prepared its speeches.

The stranger raised his head at last. His clothes had been expensive once; the fine wool was stained and torn at the hem. At his shoulder a gold clasp worked in the shape of a torch hung crooked, its setting scratched and blackened.

"My name is Lykon of Pherae, my lord. I served as a magistrate under the divine Enodia. These people are the survivors of her household and those we were able to bring with us."

The torch had told him before the name did. Enodia was a lesser goddess of respectable power, not one Hades knew well. Her influence lay around the Thessalian city of Pherae, where she had made herself patroness of the roads and the settlements along them. He remembered a solemn young woman with dark eyes, who took the duties of her office more seriously than most of her contemporaries took theirs. She had once petitioned Olympus to extend her protection over a neighboring territory and had fallen into a quarrel with another goddess whose interests overlapped her own. The dispute had run for several years and settled almost nothing. It was exactly the sort of affair that had persuaded Hades to leave Olympian politics to Olympus.

"And where is Enodia?"

The magistrate swallowed.

"Dead, my lord."

Morpheus's dispatches had carried more of these deaths every month, and few of the accounts agreed with one another. Rumor traveled fast among the gods and gathered something new at every stop. The fall of an entire city was harder to mistake.

"Explain."

Lykon glanced back at the people behind him. Several were still on their knees. Others had pressed in among the pillars, out of the worst of the wind. The old man had been set down against a ledge, and his breathing was labored. Near him, the two children had fallen asleep under a single cloak, too tired now even to be afraid of where they were.

"The rebellion began in the villages. We heard the rebels had killed several gods, but there had been reports like that before. Enodia told us the roads were secure, and that no army of mortals could threaten Pherae while she protected it."

"How large was the force that attacked you?"

"I couldn't say. A hundred, perhaps, on the road. There were more beyond the walls. They came from the settlements around us, and some of our own people joined them."

That interested Hades a good deal more than anything he had said about the fighting.

"Your own citizens?"

Lykon's mouth tightened.

"Yes, my lord. People who had lived under Enodia's protection all their lives. Families she had favored. Some of them opened the gates."

Hades had seen enough cities fall in the war against the Titans to know what that admission was worth. A walled city was seldom taken by force alone. Someone sold the enemy a way in, or opened a gate, or decided that the army outside offered better prospects than the rulers within. The Atharim seemed to understand that very well.

"Continue."

"Enodia went out to meet them. She believed that if they saw her, if they understood whom they were facing, they would go home."

An unfortunate assumption, Hades thought, given what they had come for.

"When the fighting began, she broke their first ranks. I watched it from the walls. Their weapons ran like wax in their hands, and the road opened under them. They fell back. But more came forward, and they had brought something with them. I don't know what it was."

"Then describe what you saw."

Lykon hesitated, his brow drawn with the effort of bringing back what he had likely spent every hour since trying to put down.

"Some of them were carrying a long thing between them. It looked like a bar of dark metal, bound with bands of silver. They laid it on the road and drove something into the ground beside it. When Enodia came toward them, there was a flash. Not fire. The air seemed to fold around her."

Behind Hades, at the head of the stair, the third hound lifted its head.

"What became of her?"

"She fell."

"Did she die at once?"

"No. She tried to get up. The rebels ran in, and I saw her draw on her power again, but something was wrong with it. She could hardly stand. They closed around her."

The magistrate looked away.

"When they carried her head through the city, the fighting stopped."

For a time there was only the sound of the river.

Hades had asked Morpheus what was done to a god in Thrace before the spears reached him. A magistrate of Pherae had just described it from a city wall.

He knew of such things. The war against the Titans had produced weapons that could interfere with a god's command of Dynamis, made by gods desperate enough to make them, and the Covenant that ended the war had named the worst of them and required them destroyed. Lykon's description was too vague to say which, if any, this had been. It was not too vague to be worth knowing.

"Who commanded the Atharim?"

"I don't know, my lord."

"Did they carry other such weapons?"

"I saw only the one."

"And how did you escape?"

The man seemed relieved to reach a question he could answer.

"There was an old passage under her sanctuary. Enodia had ordered it closed years ago, but the foundations of the sanctuary still joined the tunnels that run outside the walls. Those of us in her household knew they would come for us next, so we barred the palace and went out that way while the Atharim were busy at the gates. A priest of Hermes helped us reach the temple where the Pyle stands. He knew how to wake it."

"A priest of Hermes knew how to wake a Pyle into my kingdom?"

The magistrate faltered.

"He… he said it was our only chance."

"That was not my question."

"Forgive me. I don't know how he learned it. He made a series of movements, and the way opened. He stayed behind."

Hades had no objection to Hermes's priests knowing where the temple stood. The sanctuary had needed attendants from the first. Teaching them to wake the Pyle was another matter entirely. There would have to be a conversation about that.

"How many others escaped Pherae?"

"I don't know, my lord. Everyone scattered when the city fell."

"And how many were sent toward this entrance?"

Lykon hesitated again.

"I couldn't say. The priest spoke to others before us."

Hades's eyes went past him to the dark mouth of the receiving sanctuary. The three wakings before this one might have been other refugees who reached the river, met the veil, and turned back. Or the Atharim might already know what this temple was for. He liked neither answer.

Among the refugees, the woman with the bound arm had risen from beside the old man and was coming down toward the water. She was tall and narrow-faced, with dark red hair escaping a loose arrangement of braids, and she walked with the stiff care of someone hiding a great deal of pain. Hades felt the presence of Dynamis in her as she came: a god, and not a strong one.

She stopped beside the magistrate.

"My lord, this is Dione," Lykon said. "She served in Enodia's household. She was hurt when we got out."

The woman inclined her head. She did not kneel.

"I saw the weapon more clearly than Lykon did."

Her voice was strained but steady. Hades let a moment pass before he acknowledged her.

"Then speak."

"It was no ordinary weapon. Enodia had destroyed the men coming at her, and the others were afraid to come closer. But when they woke that thing, her working came apart. I felt it from the wall. She drew on Dynamis, and the weapon turned her own working back on her."

"You felt this yourself?"

"Yes."

"And you recognized the working?"

"No, my lord."

Hades had expected as much.

"But I know what I felt. They were doing something to the power itself."

She said it with conviction. Conviction was not understanding. A frightened witness could describe what a device did and be entirely wrong about how it did it. Still, the detail was useful.

"You have my thanks for the information."

Surprise crossed Dione's face, and then it hardened.

"Will you help us?"

There it was.

Hades looked from the wounded goddess to the magistrate, whose face had filled with sudden hope that the exchange had improved their chances.

"You may present your petition."

Lykon stepped forward again. He had plainly rehearsed this, and his voice took on the careful formality of a man used to addressing those above him.

"Lord Hades, we seek the protection of your kingdom. We have lost our homes, our patron, and nearly everyone who might have defended us. We ask only that you let us pass beyond the river and remain until the danger is past. We will submit to your laws and accept whatever restrictions you place on us."

"No."

There was no pause before it.

Lykon stared at him.

"My lord?"

"Your petition is denied. You will return through the Pyle and seek sanctuary in the territories of Olympus or of Aegae. Your circumstances do not give you a right to enter my kingdom."

"But the Atharim are everywhere. We cannot go back to Pherae."

"Then do not return to Pherae."

The magistrate blinked.

"Olympus holds lands far beyond the city you have lost. Poseidon rules settlements and islands this rebellion has not touched. You have more than one possible refuge. My kingdom is not among them."

"We came because we believed you would protect us."

"You came because someone told you where to find me. The difference is not a small one."

A murmur went through the people behind him. Lykon glanced back at them, then turned to Hades again, and the fear in him was giving way to something closer to desperation.

"If you will not admit us, perhaps you would let us stay at this sanctuary for a few days. Some of us are hurt. We have little food, and the journey has worn us down. Even a little help would—"

"No."

The magistrate fell silent.

"I have heard your circumstances. Repeating them will not change my judgment. Your people are the responsibility of their sovereign, not mine."

"Our sovereign is Zeus, my lord. We have no way of reaching him."

"Then I suggest you dedicate your efforts to finding one."

Hades had ruled long enough to know how requests multiplied once the first was granted. A night's shelter became a week. A week became a settlement, and the settlement acquired needs, expectations and grievances that its people came to believe their host was obliged to satisfy. Such arrangements might suit Olympus, whose rulers had always shown a remarkable willingness to take on other people's troubles along with their own.

He had no intention of starting the practice here. More to the point, he had no reliable way to know whether these people were as harmless as they looked. At least one was a goddess, low as she was. One had just told him she had felt an unknown weapon at work. All of them had come through a Pyle that should have woken for a handful of trusted gods and no one else. Even if their innocence was genuine, it was no guarantee that they had not been followed, or used.

He would not put his subjects at that risk.

Dione stepped forward.

"You would send us back to die?"

"I am sending you nowhere. I am refusing you entrance. What you do afterward is your own affair."

"You know what waits for us."

"I know what you have told me."

"And you believe we have told the truth! You would still turn us away?"

"Whether I believe it has no bearing on my decision."

She stared at him in open disbelief. Hades found it faintly tiresome. She seemed to have mistaken their exchange of information for the beginning of a negotiation, and now resented learning that the two were not the same thing.

"Enodia died protecting mortals who betrayed her. Perhaps she was a fool to do it. But she died trying to save them."

"Then I suggest you honor her sacrifice by surviving long enough to find another place of safety."

Color rose in Dione's face. Whatever she meant to say next was lost when Lykon caught her good arm.

"Please," he said, low. "Let me speak."

She pulled free.

"Speak? What is left to say? He has made himself perfectly clear."

Hades could hardly disagree.

Lykon bowed his head once more.

"My lord, forgive her. We have been through a great deal, and our tempers are not what they should be."

"Your apologies are unnecessary. Your departure is not."

He turned to Charon.

"I will open the way for their return. Once they have gone, restrict its activation to those already possessing my authorization. No further arrivals are to be admitted to the receiving sanctuary without my express consent."

Charon inclined his head.

"And if they won't leave?"

"They may stay long enough to reconsider. After that, remove them."

Charon nodded once. Of everything said at the river, it was the first instruction he seemed to find entirely reasonable.

Across the water, the refugees had begun to argue among themselves. Some wanted to go back at once. Others would not go near the dark mouth of the sanctuary they had come out of. The old man could barely stand, and Lykon had to help him up while trying to quiet the rest. Hades watched without much interest. He had given his judgment, and he had no intention of presiding over what came after it.

Dione had not moved.

She stood at the water's edge, looking past him to the Gates she could see behind him at the top of the stair. Her bound arm was shaking against its sling. He sensed a gathering in her, more than she had shown him yet, and he knew what she meant to do before she had finished deciding it.

"Do not."

He did not raise his voice, and from the stone he stood on he did not need to. She looked up at him. For a moment he thought she might have the sense to give it up.

Then she gathered her strength in earnest.

A narrow span formed above the water, pale and closely braided, reaching out from the far bank toward the landing. It trembled with the strain of holding together; she had little strength to give it. Dione stepped onto it, her jaw set with effort. Several of the refugees shouted at her to stop. Hades did not move.

Her first few steps carried her out past the bank. The span held, though it shook under her. Her eyes went to the Gates, and for an instant something like triumph came into her face.

Then the Acheron answered.

The black water under the span went perfectly smooth, so still that it gave back nothing of the cliffs above it.

The working began to come apart. She felt it at once. Hades watched her try to shore it up, drawing harder, putting more into it than she could spare. It made no difference. The river had already taken hold of what she had laid across it, and the span unraveled under her feet inch by inch, until there was nothing left to stand on.

Dione fell into the Acheron. There was a single splash, and the river closed over her.

For a moment something moved under the black surface. Hades felt her gather a short, desperate pull of strength, and then nothing at all. The water settled.

On the far bank, Lykon stood with his mouth open. One of the women screamed Dione's name. Several of them ran toward the water, and stopped when Charon brought his staff down on the landing.

He had come down to stand at the edge of the stone beside his king.

"Back from the water."

They went back.

The Acheron ran on through the gorge, slipping between the rocks without hurry, and brought nothing to the surface.

Hades considered the place where she had gone under. It was an unfortunate waste of a life, after the trouble she had clearly taken to keep it. The river had done exactly what it was made to do.

Lykon turned slowly to face him.

"You could have saved her."

His voice had gone hoarse.

Hades met his eyes across the water.

"She was warned."

For a moment Lykon seemed about to say something more. Whatever had carried him through his petition had gone out of him. He lowered his eyes, and his shoulders sagged under something heavier than tiredness.

The matter was settled. Hades saw no need to dress it.

"You will leave through the Pyle. I suggest you do it before anyone else mistakes my refusal for an invitation to test the crossing."

The magistrate inclined his head, a small, stiff movement made out of habit rather than respect. Then he turned away.

Hades reached down through the stone of the landing, under the riverbed and up into the outer bank, and woke the Pyle. Pale light grew between the pylons in the mouth of the far sanctuary.

There was no more argument about staying. The refugees gathered what little they had. Those who could walk helped those who could not, and someone woke the children. The old man needed two of them now. One by one they went between the pylons and were gone.

Hades counted them through. Eighteen.

Lykon was the last. He stopped at the threshold and looked back across the river, and Hades could see his face plainly: the untidy beard, the blackened torch at his shoulder, the eyes that had stopped asking him for anything. Then the magistrate stepped through, and the light went out behind him.

Charon set the foot of his staff on the landing.

"Do you expect more?"

Hades regarded the empty mouth of the sanctuary.

"Yes."

[Ascendancy]

Four days after the refugees went back through the Pyle, Hades came to Elysium to ask about weapons that should no longer exist.

He had spent most of those days with the records of the war against the Titans. Several accounts described devices that could disrupt a god's command of Dynamis. All of them agreed that the things had been rare, costly, and notoriously unreliable, and none said much about how they were made; once the war was over, no one had seen a reason to write it down. Under the Covenant that divided the world among the three brothers, they had agreed that the surviving weapons would be destroyed and the knowledge of making them let die. So Hades had believed.

The magistrate's account suggested that someone, somewhere, had been less diligent. It was that, rather than any particular wish for his wife's company, that brought him to Elysium.

The queen's palace stood above the cultivated valleys, its terraces of black basalt following the shape of the hillside. Slender colonnades curved around sheltered courtyards, their dark columns crowned with bronze worked like unfurling petals. Water spilled over polished stone into shallow pools where pale blossoms drifted under flowering trees, and cypress and white asphodel lined the paths and the broad stairs of deep green marble. Inside, the galleries opened onto gardens enclosed by the building itself, and the air smelled of blossom, water and cool stone. Nothing in it had been left to chance. Persephone cultivated beauty the way she cultivated everything else.

He had dressed for her court with more care than he gave most visits: a long coat of black brocade, its high collar cut on the angle, open over silk of midnight blue. The blue was the one color she had ever persuaded him into. He had never understood why some gods equated dignity with dressing as though they had been wrapped in their own bed linens.

The guards at the entrance bowed. An attendant hurried ahead to announce him, and Hades was through the receiving gallery before she had finished the formalities. He had always found the procedures of Persephone's household mildly excessive.

The queen was holding court in the principal audience hall, a long chamber of green marble and basalt under a vault carried on slender columns. Flowering trees stood in alcoves along the walls, their branches reaching out over pools of dark water. At the far end, on three broad steps, stood her throne: dark stone and warm bronze, its back curving up into the shape of an opening flower, its seat cushioned in pomegranate silk. Hades privately admired it. Persephone had a gift for taking the practical requirements of royal ceremony and making something beautiful of them.

She sat it with practiced ease, in a gown of wine-colored silk draped to leave one shoulder bare. Her eyes were the thing to watch. They could go from warmth to calculation with almost no warning, and Hades had been on the receiving end of both.

At present she looked bored. The petitioner before her was explaining a dispute over the upkeep of an irrigation reservoir. Hades listened for a while. It was a dull problem whose neglect would not stay dull for long. Persephone asked two precise questions, corrected an error in the man's figures, and sent one of her attendants to arrange an inspection before she would approve anything further.

Only when the matter was closed did she turn to her husband.

"My lord husband. This is an unexpected pleasure."

Nothing in her voice said whether it was a pleasure at all. Her eyes went once over the midnight blue and came back to his face.

Hades inclined his head. "I trust I have not interrupted anything important."

She glanced after the departing petitioner. "Only the water for half the valley. Nothing that should inconvenience the King of the Underworld."

"Then I am relieved."

Persephone considered him a moment before she rose. At a small movement of her hand, the attendants withdrew.

"You might have sent word that you were coming."

"Would it have made a difference?"

"To the arrangements? Considerably."

"Then I shall endeavor to be more predictable."

"A promise I have learned not to rely upon."

She came down the steps, her hem whispering over the polished floor, and stopped on the last one, where her eyes were level with his.

"What brings you to Elysium?"

"I require Hecate's assistance."

Something in her face shifted, very slightly.

"Hecate?"

"Yes."

"Not mine?"

There had been a time when he would have answered that differently.

"That depends on how much you remember of the war against the Titans."

"Only what I have been told. Some of it by you, as I recall."

"Then Hecate will be of greater use."

Persephone arched a brow. "How flattering."

"I did not intend it as a comparison between the two of you."

"Of course you didn't."

He knew that tone, and he knew where it led. He did not follow it.

"There has been an incident in Thessaly. A goddess named Enodia was killed by the Atharim. Survivors of her household brought me an account of the weapon used against her."

The amusement went out of her face.

"I know of Enodia's death. My mother has been receiving reports from that country."

"Then you know how it happened."

"I know that Pherae has fallen and her household was scattered. I have heard very little about how she died."

"The Atharim had a device that broke her gatherings of Dynamis. I suspect it came from a weapon made in the war against the Titans."

Persephone said nothing for a breath.

"And you believe Hecate will recognize it?"

"She may recognize the principle. More to the point, she may remember what became of the ones that survived the war."

"I thought those weapons were destroyed."

"So did I."

That gave her pause. He saw it.

Hades seldom spoke of the war in any personal way. Persephone knew what the songs said: that armies had broken in front of him, that cities thought impregnable had fallen to him, that the Titans had learned to fear his name. The songs said nothing of what he had done in the dark between the battles to make those victories possible, and he had never told her. They had won, and he was proud of it still. But some of what he had done to win belonged to a man she had never known, and he had no wish to bring that man back into the room.

Persephone turned to the doors.

"Have Hecate brought to the inner chamber," she told the attendant waiting beyond them. "And see that we are not disturbed."

Then she faced him again.

"You may as well tell me the rest."

He considered refusing, if only because most of it concerned matters on which he had already given judgment. But Elysium was hers to govern, and what touched the kingdom touched her administration. He could see no advantage in keeping her ignorant.

So he told her as they walked. They went through an archway and along a short gallery to a smaller room above one of the enclosed gardens, where a single white-flowering tree stood over a basin of polished stone. A long table of dark green marble filled the room, ringed by low-backed chairs, and the walls were carved with restrained reliefs of leaves. He told her of the refugees at the Acheron, of Pherae, of the priest and the Greek Pyle. He told her that he had refused them, and what he had ordered so that no one would arrive that way again.

Persephone heard him out without interrupting. When he had finished, she asked only one question.

"And Dione was among the survivors?”

"She tried to cross the Acheron without leave."

The queen's eyes narrowed.

"Tried."

"You know what becomes of anyone foolish enough to make the attempt."

"I see."

She looked away, out through the window to the dark water of the basin below. Hades waited.

"You could have let them stay in the sanctuary," she said at last. "It stands on the far bank. They would have been no nearer your kingdom than they already were."

"For how long?"

"Until they had the strength to go on."

"And the next company that comes? Shall I house them as well? And the next thousand after that?"

"I did not ask about the next thousand."

"Which is precisely why I must."

It came out sharper than he had meant it to. Persephone folded her hands in front of her and lifted her chin, very slightly, so that the gold pomegranate at her throat caught the light. Neither of them spoke.

"You always did prefer the consequences of a thing to the thing itself."

She did not press it. Hades knew she disagreed with him. Agreement had never been a condition of his marriage, and he had never expected it to be.

"And the priest who opened the Pyle?"

"I have sent Alecto to find him. She left yesterday."

Persephone looked up sharply. "You have sent one of the Erinyes into Greece?"

"I have sent an investigator to learn how a priest came to know the waking of my Pyle."

"Does Hermes know?"

"Not yet. Unless someone has told him."

"He will certainly have something to say about it."

"I would be far more astonished if Hermes had nothing to say."

She almost smiled. "And Zeus?"

"I imagine my brother has more pressing concerns."

That earned him a longer look. Persephone knew him well enough to hear when a remark was meant to be both accurate and insulting. Before she could answer it, the door opened and Hecate came in.

Persephone's minister wore none of the ornament favored by most of the queen's household. Her gown was long grey silk under an open mantle whose lining held a faint metallic sheen, with narrow bands of silver at the sleeves and a small setting of black stones at her throat. Her dark hair, streaked with grey, was drawn back into an intricate knot, and her face gave away very little.

Hades had known her a long time. She inclined her head to her queen first, and then to him, more formally.

"My king. I understand you have need of my counsel."

"I do. Something has surfaced in Thessaly that should no longer exist."

Hecate's eyes went briefly to Persephone.

"That is an unfortunately broad category."

"Then perhaps you will help me narrow it."

Hades took a chair without ceremony. Persephone took the one nearest him. Hecate remained standing until the queen indicated that she should sit.

He gave them Lykon's account and Dione's together: the bar of dark metal, the silver bands, the thing driven into the ground beside it. The flash, and the air folding around the goddess. Enodia's working coming apart, and her own Dynamis turned back on her each time she gathered it. Hecate listened with growing attention.

"Did either witness see the device touch her?"

"No. It stayed on the road."

"And the silver bands. Did they say how they were set?"

"They did not."

Hecate turned one of the silver bands at her sleeve, thinking.

"There were several attempts during the war to break a Titan's gathering of his power. Most of them failed spectacularly. A few did not."

"I remember."

"Then you remember how hard they were to keep working."

"They needed a god to sustain them. A mortal could not simply set one going and walk away."

"Not the ones you saw."

Hades looked at her.

”Go on.”

Hecate chose her words with care, and glanced once at her queen before she went on.

"Near the end of the war, certain artificers tried storing the working in prepared materials, so that a device could run without the one who carried it needing to gather Dynamis at all."

Persephone leaned forward. "So a mortal could use it?"

"In principle. The designs were unstable. They needed a great deal of power, and the materials that held it broke down quickly."

"Yet some worked."

Hecate met his eyes. "Briefly."

It was not a reassuring word.

Hades remembered enough of those experiments to know that the hard part had never been interfering with Dynamis. The hard part had been doing it without destroying the device, the men carrying it, or both. He had watched one such attempt fail in the field. The thing had come apart almost as soon as it was woken, killing the four men who carried it and leaving its target untouched, and an entire offensive had waited while the surviving artificers argued over whose fault it was. The enemy had not waited. Hades remembered his anger a good deal better than the excuses. They had been proud of an invention whose only proven achievement was killing the people sent to use it.

"The device at Pherae was carried by mortals. They woke it, brought Enodia down, and lived long enough to kill her. That argues either a great improvement in the design or a great deal of luck."

"Luck is seldom so obliging."

Persephone looked from one of them to the other. "Are you saying the Atharim have learned to make these things?"

"I would not go so far. A surviving piece could have been altered. Its containment repaired, perhaps, or the old design adapted to better materials."

"Who still living could do such work?"

"Very few. The war killed most of the artificers who knew it, and the peace scattered the rest."

"I was given to understand that every surviving weapon had been destroyed."

"Many were."

"Many."

Hecate glanced toward Persephone before she answered.

"The orders were not always carried out at once. Some devices were kept back for study, particularly those no one could explain. Others were taken apart, and the parts kept. I cannot tell you how many were still whole when the last inventories were closed."

"I was assured that none were."

"You may have been told what those responsible believed."

"I was told what they wished me to believe."

Persephone was watching him now. "Who gave you that assurance?"

"Zeus."

No one spoke.

Hecate lowered her eyes to the green marble of the table. Persephone's face stayed carefully still, though Hades could very nearly hear the observations she was choosing not to make. He had no wish to hear them.

"Hecate. I want to know what became of those inventories. If any designs passed into private hands, I want to know whose. If they were destroyed, I want to know who saw it done."

"That may mean records kept outside the kingdom."

"Then send inquiries. Use whatever contacts you trust. I have no intention of sending an army to search my brother's neglected storerooms."

Hecate looked to her queen. Persephone inclined her head.

"It will be done, my king."

Persephone had been quiet through most of it. Hades knew better than to take her silence for lack of interest.

"If the Atharim have such weapons, will the protections around the kingdom hold against them?"

It was a fair question.

Hades weighed a device that could break one goddess's command of Dynamis against the great, layered works that kept his kingdom alive. They were not remotely comparable. The protections over the inhabited lands had been built across centuries, strengthened and revised by generation after generation of craftsmen, and anchored in foundations far deeper than any single god.

"The weapon at Pherae was made to interfere with one god. Our defenses are a great deal more complicated."

"That isn't quite what I asked."

"Then I shall be more precise. A weapon that can kill a lesser goddess like Enodia is not necessarily able to threaten Elysium, much less Erebos."

"But you don't know that it cannot."

Her voice was neither accusing nor afraid. She was following a question to its end, as she always had. Once, it had been one of the great pleasures of talking to her.

"Which is why I am looking into it."

She accepted that with a small inclination of her head.

Hecate laid her hand flat on the marble.

"There is something else I would suggest."

Hades waited.

"Do not concern yourself only with the weapons. Concern yourself with the people who understand them. The knowledge it takes to adapt such a device is rare, but it is not unique. If the Atharim have found someone who can reproduce the parts, destroying one weapon will accomplish very little."

"Agreed."

"Then I shall begin with the artificers who survived. Some are still known to me."

It was a sensible approach, and one that might bring answers without committing his kingdom to anything beyond the gathering of old history.

"Proceed discreetly. I have no wish to alarm every collector of old relics from here to Olympus."

"Discretion has always been among my better qualities."

Persephone laughed softly. "Among the more useful ones, certainly."

For the first time since he had arrived, Hades found himself in the company of two women who appeared to be enjoying themselves. He regarded them both with faint suspicion.

"I shall leave you to your inquiries, then."

Hecate rose, took her leave of both of them, and went to begin. Hades stayed in his chair a moment longer. That some of the war's weapons might have survived it was troubling, though hardly a reason for alarm. He kept an armory of his own, everything in it lawful by the letter of the Covenant, and supposed his brothers kept theirs. He had seen far worse things made in the war, and most of them had proved as dangerous to their makers as to anyone else.

Still, Enodia was dead, and the people who had killed her had walked away with their weapon.

Persephone rose and went to the window. Beyond it, the flowering branches stirred in the gentle currents kept moving through the palace, and now and then a pale petal came down onto the dark water below.

"Will you tell Zeus what you have found?"

Hades stood.

"When I have found something worth telling him."

"He might know where the weapons were kept."

"Then he is welcome to enlighten me whenever he wishes."

She faced him. "You know he won't."

"Then we understand one another perfectly."

It was an old rhythm between them, though the ease that once went with it had not survived. Persephone watched him a moment longer, then turned back to the gardens.

"My mother says the country around Pherae is nearly empty. The roads are full of people running toward cities that may be no safer than the ones they left."

"War has a tendency to produce such inconveniences."

"You always make it sound so simple."

"It rarely is. That is why I prefer not to take part."

She did not answer at once.

Hades went to stand at the window beside her. From here the gardens fell away in terraces toward the valley, where groves and fields lay under the steady weather of Elysium's sky. It was as beautiful and as orderly as it had been the last time he stood here, and it took no notice at all of what was happening half a world away.

He meant to keep it that way.

"You believe this trouble will stay beyond our borders."

"I believe the Atharim have more pressing concerns than invading a kingdom they cannot reach."

"They found the way in Greece."

"And learned that finding it is a good deal easier than crossing my river."

She turned her head and studied him, with a look he had learned over centuries of marriage.

"There is a considerable difference between confidence and complacency, husband."

Hades glanced at her.

"Indeed there is."

"I sometimes wonder whether you remember it."

He might have answered that sharply.

"I have survived rather longer than most who confuse the two."

Persephone looked at him a little longer, and then away.

There was little more to say. He had the help he had come for, and what Hecate found would occupy him for some time. He was already thinking about what records might still lie in Erebos, and whether Morpheus had heard of such weapons anywhere else.

He turned to go.

"Hades."

He stopped.

Persephone had not moved from the window. Her hair had fallen over one shoulder.

"You know I would never question your right to protect this kingdom."

"I should certainly hope not."

"But protecting it and pretending the rest of the world no longer exists are not quite the same thing."

Hades's fingers curled slowly against his palm, until the heavy ring on his hand pressed into the skin. He held them there a moment.

"I have never pretended the world does not exist, Persephone. I have simply found very little reason to invite it inside."

He left her with that, and went back through the galleries and the flowering courts toward the Pyle that would take him home to Erebos.

[Ascendancy]

Chapter Three: The Inheritance of Stone

*

Hades felt the mountain shift long before the Deep Works' instruments found it.

It was nothing anyone in the galleries could have felt, only a strain gathering somewhere deep in the old rock, pressing on foundations he had laid centuries ago. He came down to see it for himself on a morning some weeks after his visit to Persephone's court. The weeks had been quiet. Hecate's inquiries went on in Elysium, Alecto had not yet come back from Greece, and Hades had seen no reason to hurry either of them. There would be reports when there was something to report.

He stood now on the observation platform above the largest of the working chambers, one gloved hand on the rail.

Below him the excavation opened into a cavern whose vault was lost in the dark above the fixtures. Bridges of living stone spanned it from gallery to gallery. Lifting frames stood on platforms at every level, their chains running down into the shafts, and long chutes of polished stone carried broken ore down to the sorting floors. Along the cut walls, veins of copper and gold caught the light, and here and there among them ran darker minerals worth far more than either.

It was one of hundreds of such chambers. The Deep Works ran beneath the inhabited lands of the kingdom for leagues, and Hades had spent centuries widening them, drawing up the wealth of the earth to keep a civilization that the southern ice should never have allowed. Few things he had made gave him more satisfaction.

Kleitos stood beside him.

The Master of the Deep Works was a broad-shouldered god with silver in his dark beard and deep lines at the corners of his eyes. He wore a sleeveless working garment of heavy red cloth under a leather harness hung with measuring instruments and several small devices of his own design, and his hands carried the fine scars of a man who worked with substances that sometimes objected to being handled. Hades had appointed him nearly two hundred years ago, after his predecessor showed an unfortunate enthusiasm for ambitious experiments carried out without precautions. Kleitos had what that god had lacked: patience, discipline, and the understanding that an extraordinary discovery was worth very little if bringing it out killed the people doing the work.

"We found the first cracks some weeks ago, my lord. They have widened since, but the foundations are holding. We found nothing to suggest the danger is close."

"You have underestimated it."

Kleitos turned to him. "What have I missed?"

A sensible question. Hades appreciated it.

He drew off one glove and laid his bare hand on the black stone of the rail. For a moment he only listened.

Stone had a language, and no one alive read it as he did. Every formation had its own character, made by pressure and heat and more time than any god had lived. The mountains of the southern continent hid old fractures; deep strata pressed against one another under weights beyond reckoning; and far below them, slower than anything that breathed, the earth itself was still moving. He had spent his life learning how those things bore on one another. He had spent seven centuries changing them.

When Erebos was young, he had reinforced the rock under these lands so that the Deep Works could be cut at a scale the mountains would never otherwise have tolerated. Great networks of shaped stone and bound mageia spread the load through the formations around them, so that the cities above stood untroubled while the wealth beneath them came up.

But the rock had not forgotten its first shape.

He closed his eyes and the firmament opened at once, layer below layer, through the worked stone of the galleries and his own old reinforcements to the rock beneath them. He added a little heat to the reading, enough to tell the warm currents deep in the mountain from the cold, and followed the strata down.

There.

"You are watching the wrong part of the mountain." He opened his eyes. "Those cracks are a symptom. Far below your foundations, the mountain is settling onto a fracture. Given time, its weight will bring this whole excavation down."

Kleitos looked out over the chamber.

"That ground has been stable for three hundred years."

"Then it has been remarkably patient."

"What would you have us do?"

"First, show me what you have found."

They went down by one of the Pyles that joined the greater works beneath Erebos. This one was not the usual pair of columns. It was a single sweep of black stone veined with silver, set at its crown with a sphere of baetylus, and Kleitos laid his palm on the small seal worked into its side. Pale light filled the arch. A moment later they stepped through onto a gallery above the newest excavation.

The chamber was magnificent. Great pillars had been left standing where the rock around them was cut away, and they carried a vault far overhead. Broad terraces stepped down toward the floor, joined by stairs and bridges cut from the mountain itself. Crystal fixtures hung from the vault, and under their steady light the seams of copper and gold showed along the walls, with heavy masses of dark rock waiting to be taken out. Far below, miners tended lifting frames whose bronze arms and stone counterweights moved with slow, deliberate care. Some answered to the strength of men, others to bindings of mageia. Between them they had opened a hollow in the mountain large enough to hold a palace.

At the center of it lay something worth more than gold.

It ran through the rock like a branching seam of dark glass. Smooth faces of mineral broke the surface here and there and caught the light in violet and aqua, and beneath them the deposit went deep into the stone. Hades could already feel its shape through the firmament. He suspected the men who had found it understood a fraction of what they had uncovered.

A baetylus core.

He went to the edge of the gallery.

The Titans had believed many extraordinary things of such stone, and for once their legends had not much exaggerated. Prepared properly, some baetylus would receive a binding of Dynamis and keep it. Some would carry the fine arrangements the most sophisticated technemata depended on. The rarest could bear concentrations of a god’s power that would shatter any lesser material. A stone suited to sustaining light might be useless in the pairing of a Pyle; another would strengthen the flow of Dynamis through an auxeton, if its inner structure was pure enough. The finest artificers spent their lives learning the differences.

The Underworld held deposits of rare quality. Some had been found in its first years, when Hades first turned his attention to what lay under the southern ice; others had come to light only after long digging. Gold, gems and precious metals had made him wealthy long before the first cities were finished. Baetylus had proved more useful than all of them together. His brothers had always been fond of demanding tribute. Hades preferred to know that his kingdom could produce more than theirs could ever extract combined.

"That vein is unusually pure," Kleitos said. "We think it may have exactly the qualities the new regulators need."

That interested Hades more than the sight of the deposit.

"How much of it is worth taking?"

"Nearly all of it, my lord. Even the small branches look clean. The artificers have been hoping for a formation like this for a long time."

"Then I assume there is a reason you have not already brought it to them."

Kleitos pointed to the exposed face. "The richest part lies past the oldest workings, in rock we have only just opened. We tried a small separation along the outer seam. The mountain shifted before we had cut a hand's breadth."

Hades looked again at the deposit, and saw it at once. The baetylus had grown along the same old fractures that were taking the mountain's weight. Cut the stone away from it, and that weight would have nowhere to go but onto the supports he had raised long ago.

"And you stopped."

"At once."

"An uncommon virtue in those who have just found something valuable."

Kleitos accepted that with a restrained smile.

There was no question of leaving the deposit where it was. Baetylus of this quality was too rare, and what it might do for the artificers' work was worth too much. The mountain would have to be secured first. It was difficult work, given the weights involved, but well within his ability.

"Clear the lower galleries. Withdraw the lifting frames, and see that everyone is well away from the excavation before I begin."

Kleitos looked down at the floor of the chamber.

"That is a large part of the works, my lord."

"I am aware of it."

The god bowed and went to give the orders.

Bronze bells began to sound at measured intervals, and the notes ran out through the cavern and into the passages beyond. Workers put down their tools and filed up the terraces. The lifting frames were made fast, their chains drawn tight and their loads lowered to the stone, and one after another the machines went still.

Hades watched it all from above. He knew this chamber as well as he knew the halls of his own palace; he had shaped most of it himself. Every pillar stood where it stood for a reason. Some had carried the mountain for centuries. Others had been added as the workings went deeper and the demands on the rock changed.

When Kleitos came back to tell him the galleries were empty, Hades went down. A long stair cut through the rock brought him to the central platform. He drew off the other glove and tucked both into his belt. Kleitos stayed above to watch.

At the end of the platform Hades laid both hands on the damp face of the mountain. Dynamis came to him as easily as breath, and he turned his attention to the baetylus.

The richest of it lay some fathoms in, where narrow veins of the dark mineral converged on one central mass. Some branches were no thicker than his fingers; others ran off deep into the rock. He had no intention of taking them all. The central mass was the prize. The lesser veins could stay for Kleitos's people to cut out in their own time.

He found the places where stone pressed on mineral and began to draw them apart.

A crack rang through the chamber, and another, sharper. A web of fractures spread out from under his palm and ran up the face high above him. Slabs came away as he parted the mountain from what it held, and he caught each one and set it aside before it could fall. Dust poured down the face and settled on his sleeves, and through it, violet began to show beneath the black.

It was good stone. Finer than most of what he had seen brought up from every corner of his kingdom, and more of it than the artificers had dared to hope for.

He followed a narrow vein deeper and parted it from the central mass, and something gave beneath him.

A faint tremor ran through the platform, hardly enough to shift his footing. Hades knew what it was before it had finished. With the stone around the baetylus gone, the mountain's weight had found a new way down. Far below, a mass of rock had begun to slide, driving its whole burden toward one of the supporting pillars.

He caught the sliding rock through the firmament and stopped it.

It stopped. It did not stay stopped by itself. The whole weight of the mountain leaned on what he had done, and kept leaning, and he felt it come up through his palm and into his shoulder as if he were bearing it on his own back. He could not keep it there for long. It needed somewhere else to rest.

He knew that resistance. During the war there had been a fortress high in the mountains, set to command the passes below. Iapetus had boasted that no army would ever breach his walls, and Hades had not tried. He had reached under the foundations and torn the mountain out from beneath them, and towers, battlements and the soldiers on them had gone down together into the valley. He remembered the noise of it for days afterward.

A low groan ran through the galleries overhead. One of the great pillars had begun to take the strain, and pieces of black stone broke from high on its shaft and struck the platform a few paces from him with sharp, ringing blows. Hades did not move. He had emptied the galleries for exactly this. But he had raised that pillar with his own hands, and to watch it shed stone offended him.

It had stood since the first widening of the Deep Works and carried everything the mountain had put on it since. He would not see it damaged for a piece of baetylus, however fine.

He reached deeper, past the failing rock, looking for something that could bear its weight. Far below, he found it: a body of hard stone, old and unbroken, sitting on the bedrock of the continent itself. Slowly, and with care, he began to move the burden off the pillar and down toward it. The mountain fought him. It ground against itself as he made one vast mass settle onto another. Sweat ran down under his collar, despite the cold of the deep rock.

He could have forced it faster. The wish was there, out of the same confidence that had once brought down Iapetus's fortress. But a weight forced into place would only find the next weakness. So he guided it down, and strengthened the stone around it as it came, until the burden lay squarely on its new footing. The trembling eased. The pillar stood whole. The mountain went quiet.

Hades kept his attention in the rock a little longer, testing what he had done. It would last.

He went back to the baetylus. The central mass sat in the hollow he had opened, joined to the mountain now by one thick branch. He cut it through cleanly and drew the mineral out into the light, violet and aqua over every rough face of it, not a mark on it for all the violence of its taking. He brought it across to an empty dais beside the excavation and set it down there without a sound.

A considerable prize.

But what pleased him more was the mountain. The galleries would stand, the work could go on, and the artificers would have their stone. He had taken what he wanted and given up nothing he had built to get it. Only then did he ease his attention out of the stone, and a deep silence came into the chamber.

Not a branch of the baetylus had broken. He drew his gloves back on.

Kleitos came down from the upper gallery. He walked past the baetylus without a glance, went to the edge of the platform, and looked out across the chamber, at the pillars and the vault they carried and the new face of the mountain that Hades had laid open. For a while he said nothing. Then he laid a hand on the nearest pillar. Hades felt the faint stir of Dynamis as the Master of the Deep Works read down through the stone and into the rock beyond it.

He did not take his hand away at once.

"You have strengthened the whole excavation."

"It seemed prudent, if you are to go on taking stone out of it."

Kleitos looked up at the galleries, and back at the mountain.

"We could take the works a long way farther now."

That had not been the point of it, though Hades had seen the possibility while he was laying the new supports.

"Then have your people study what I have done before you go on. There is much more to be had from this mountain."

"Of course, my king."

Only then did Kleitos turn to the baetylus.

"This may be the finest core we have brought up in living memory."

"I trust you have some use for it."

Kleitos smiled. "As it happens, there is something I would like you to see."

Hades brushed the stone dust from his shoulders and considered with some displeasure the pale film it had left on the dark cloth. He flicked away the last of it.

"Something more valuable than what I have just taken out of your mountain?"

"Possibly, my king."

That was enough.

The artificers' halls lay in a quieter part of the works. The rough stone of the galleries gave way to polished walls, graceful arches and broad passages lit by fixtures of pale crystal. Reliefs along the walls showed the founding of the Deep Works, the sinking of the first shafts, the laying of the great foundations under Erebos. Behind the doors, artisans practiced crafts the equal of any court's in the world. They worked precious metals into impossibly delicate settings, prepared rare minerals by methods they guarded closely, and shaped pieces of baetylus for purposes that would have bewildered the kings of Greece.

Kleitos led him into a broad chamber at the heart of the halls. Most of its floor was taken up by a garden enclosed in tall walls of clear crystal, a courtyard under the high vault. Inside it, a slender tree grew beside a shallow pool among beds of flowering plants and mossy stone. A light mist hung over the water, lit by a warm glow that seemed to come from the garden itself.

Hades went to the enclosure. It was remarkable enough to find such a thing so far under the mountain, but what held him was what stood around it. Six great pieces of baetylus stood at measured intervals outside the crystal walls, each held in a frame of bronze and silver, and fine bands of worked metal joined each stone to the next all the way around the garden.

Dynamis rested in the stones, in bindings of extraordinary delicacy. Hades could feel their work through the whole enclosure: the warmth of the air, the damp gathering on the leaves, the water moving through the soil. Everything the little garden needed to live was given to it by the technema, and every part of the work was hidden in the frames.

"The seventh arrangement," Kleitos said. "It has kept the enclosure for thirty-two months without anyone renewing a binding."

"And the last arrangement?"

"Its bindings held for twenty-one months before they began to fail."

Nearly a year longer. A real improvement.

Hades walked around the dais, studying the stones. He could feel the separate bindings in each one, every one made for its own task. Some kept the warmth and light. Others moved the water, kept the air sweet, held the soil to what the plants required. The whole was extraordinarily intricate. But its real achievement was the thing that was not there. No god stood beside it. No artificer waited to renew its power or correct its work. The prepared stones kept their bindings and kept the garden alive entirely on their own.

"How long do you expect it to last?"

"If the bindings go on as they have, forty years."

"And you are pleased with that?"

Kleitos glanced at the garden. "It is far more than I first hoped for."

"An admirable achievement, for a household ornament."

Kleitos kept his smile mostly to himself. "Its purpose is rather more ambitious than that, my lord."

"Then forty years will hardly suffice."

The garden was the newest step in work that had occupied the best artificers of the Underworld for generations. Its aim was simple to say and immensely hard to do: to keep life going under the southern ice without Hades himself.

Every habitable place in his kingdom lived by workings of Dynamis like nothing else in the world. Under Erebos, across Elysium, and in every sheltered settlement scattered through his lands, technemata not unlike this one held off the killing cold, kept the light, and moved warmth and water where they were needed. Some were small enough to hold in one hand. Others filled whole chambers. The greatest were bound into the foundations of the kingdom itself, vast works that carried Dynamis through arrangements Hades had laid down long ago.

Artificers tended the lesser works, and skilled gods the greater ones, strengthening old bindings and renewing those that had worn. But the deepest foundations were beyond all of them together. Some of that work needed a command of the firmament, and a strength in Dynamis, that no one else in the Underworld possessed. For seven centuries Hades had done it himself, and he had always known he could not do it forever.

He was some eight hundred years old. He was in his strength still, and there was little reason to think his life would end for another two centuries, perhaps somewhat more. But the gods did not live forever, whatever the mortals chose to believe. Even the greatest of them gave way to time in the end. The kingdom could not be allowed to depend on how long one god lived.

He had put too much into it: its foundations, its laws, the frozen continent made into a land where cities flourished, fields bore, and people lived in comforts most of the world had never known. He meant all of it to outlast him. One day, the great works under his kingdom would have to run without him, carried by many separate technemata, each able to keep its own country alive, each kept by artificers who understood it. No single failure would endanger the whole. No king after him would need what he had.

It was work worth half his life.

"What made the earlier bindings fail?"

Kleitos came to the dais and pointed to the stones around the central vessel.

"They last very well while what is asked of them stays the same. But a garden does not stay the same. It grows. The water has to be renewed, the warmth changed, the light measured out to what the plants are taking. Every correction puts a little more strain on the stones."

"Until the bindings come apart."

"Eventually."

"And you cannot replace a worn stone without stopping the whole."

"Not yet. We can keep the garden ourselves while the work is done, but that is hardly the independence we are after."

Hades leaned closer and read the bindings in the outer stones. The workmanship was excellent. Even so, he could feel strain gathering, very slowly, around several of the finest of them.

"These are carrying more of the load than the central vessel."

"We have tried several arrangements. The difficulty is finding stone pure enough to stand the constant changes."

Hades straightened.

"Then perhaps your difficulty has just been solved."

Kleitos smiled. "That is exactly what I wanted to discuss."

The core they had brought out had a consistency seldom found in nature. Prepared properly, it might take the finest bindings without the flaws that made them fail. It was a promise, and Hades knew better than to take a promise for a certainty. Every new arrangement would need careful preparation and years of watching before the artificers could trust it.

"Have the finest of today's stone set aside for this work. I want a new arrangement made, with the outer stones cut from the core."

"It will take a long while."

"Take what you need."

Kleitos inclined his head. "If the new stones do as we hope, we may finally have an arrangement that can keep itself for a century."

Hades did not answer at once. He was looking at the tree, standing in flower under the soft light of the technema. The bindings were imperfect, and in the end they would fail. Yet for thirty-two months this small enclosure had lived without a god's hand on it, and his artificers had found the way to that themselves. It was nothing he could have ordered out of them.

"I should like to see that," he said.

Kleitos looked at him a moment. Hades had added no correction and asked for nothing more.

"Then we shall try not to disappoint you, my king."

"You have not yet."

He left Kleitos to his work, though at the threshold he stopped to look at the garden once more.

Few gods could claim to have built as much, and fewer still were gods he would trust to keep it. One day he would have to trust it to someone all the same.

It was not a pleasant thought. Hades had never been suited to giving things up, least of all a kingdom. He liked ruling it. He liked the regard of his subjects, the pleasure of solving what would have defeated lesser gods, the knowledge that his will had made something extraordinary. There was so much still he meant to do.

Behind the crystal, the mist over the pool thinned, and a moment later, with no one's hand on it, it gathered again.

[Ascendancy]

Tisiphone had come back from the sea with a condemned god in her custody and Poseidon's seal on his sentence, and a seal of that rank required the king and queen of the Underworld to receive it together.

So the Hall of Judgment had been made ready for two. Hades sat the black throne in the cloak of office, fastened at the throat, with the key pinned at his breast. A chair had been set for the queen on the dais beside him, a step lower, as the custom of his hall required. Persephone had not sat in it. She stood at his right hand instead, in burgundy silk darkening toward charcoal in its lower folds under a tracery of gold, a long black cape lined in the same deep red, and a slender crown of golden stems with garnets and emeralds set among the leaves. She was dressed as a queen who expected to be admired, and standing, she was the only person in the hall whose head was higher than the king's.

They had said little to each other since she came in. Whatever lay between them was not for the servants of another sovereign to see.

At the foot of the dais, a chamberlain finished reading out the particulars. Hades watched the closed doors with some interest. Alecto was still in Greece on his business. Tisiphone had been sent to Poseidon's court to take charge of a prisoner whose sentence had evidently caused a good deal of feeling there, and the Erinyes were often given the errands others found distasteful. Their thoroughness was one of the reasons he valued them.

The doors opened, and Tisiphone came in first. She was tall and spare and moved without waste in a fitted cuirass of dark bronze. Her cloak was stained at the hem from the road, and her black hair was drawn into a severe braid threaded with fine wire, which left nothing to soften her face. She swept the hall once with her eyes and stopped at the dais.

Two guards of Erebos followed her with the prisoner between them. Hades knew him before the chamberlain spoke the name. Damnameneus.

The Telchine had once had a formidable name among the artificers of the sea. Hades had never met him, but he remembered approving shipments of baetylus for several of his commissions, and his work had been spoken of with real admiration among Kleitos's artificers, who seldom praised anything made abroad.

He looked like a man used to much better circumstances. He was broad-shouldered but lean, with a long, angular face and dark brown hair, and his short beard had been carefully shaped before several days of travel undid it. His coat was rich blue cloth over a fine tunic, rumpled now, and the metal fittings had been cut from his cuffs, leaving small scars in the fabric where ornamental clasps had been. There were bands of worked metal locked on his wrists.

He had kept what dignity he could. He stood very straight, and his eyes went around the hall with the quick attention of a man who noticed how everything was made: the carved columns, the bronze doors, and then, for longer, the throne itself, the way one craftsman looks at another's work. Only after that did they come to the king. He did not kneel. Few reached the foot of that dais with their courage still about them. Damnameneus seemed to have brought all of his.

Tisiphone bowed. "My king. My queen."

Persephone inclined her head. Hades signed for the Erinys to go on.

"I have received the condemned under the authority of the Covenant of the Division of the World. His identity has been confirmed, and the decree bears the seal of Poseidon."

She held out a narrow case of dark wood. A chamberlain took it up the dais and opened it before Hades. Inside lay a scroll on rollers of polished blue stone, written in silver ink, with Poseidon's seal pressed into a disk of metal at the clasp beside the marks of the witnesses.

Hades unrolled it and read.

The charges were many. Disobedience to the heir of Poseidon's realm. Theft of restricted treasures. Concealment of designs belonging to the prince. False accusation against a prince of the realm. Treachery.

The sentence was simple: banishment to the Underworld, for good.

He returned it to its case.

"The seal is authentic?" It was a formality. He had no doubt of it.

"It is. I witnessed its acknowledgment before I took custody."

"Very well."

Damnameneus shifted.

"Your Majesty, I ask leave to speak."

Hades looked at him. The request was properly made. The man had at least the sense to keep the customs of a foreign court.

"You may."

"I believe there has been a grievous misrepresentation of the circumstances of my condemnation."

"That may be so."

Damnameneus had not expected that answer.

Hades had little reason to doubt the charges were embellished. Such things happened often enough in his brothers' courts, where judgment was sometimes guided by considerations Hades thought wholly unworthy of a sovereign.

"Then perhaps you will let me explain."

"You may, though I would advise brevity."

Damnameneus glanced at Persephone, who regarded him with polite curiosity.

"I served my prince, Lord Triton, for forty-seven years. Much of what is celebrated among his inventions was conceived in my workshop. The technemata that govern the movements of his great sea creatures, the locking works of his harbors, the mechanisms beneath Tritonis—"

"Yes. I am familiar with some of your work."

The prisoner went still.

"You are?"

"Your name was multiple requests for baetylus from the Deep Works. The requirements were unusually exacting. I recall questioning whether the quantity justified the expense."

"It did."

"So I concluded. The descriptions of the finished devices were impressive."

Damnameneus drew himself up, the bands on his wrists forgotten for a moment.

"Then you know what I am capable of."

"I know you are an accomplished artificer."

"An accomplished artificer whose work has been stolen!"

Hades said nothing.

"Triton claimed my latest invention as his own, before his own court and before his father's. He took their praise and let my name be forgotten. Then he ordered the designs destroyed, so that no one could ever reproduce the thing and learn the truth."

"And you disobeyed."

"I kept what belonged to me."

"That was not my question."

Damnameneus pressed his lips together. "Yes. I disobeyed."

"And accused the prince of theft."

"I spoke the truth!"

"Possibly."

The prisoner's brow drew tight.

"Possibly? Lord Hades, I can build that device again from memory. I can explain every binding in it, every proportion of the material. Triton could not reproduce its simplest mechanism without me."

Persephone stirred.

"Then I imagine he was particularly displeased to find you had kept the designs."

Damnameneus turned to her. "He was furious."

"Naturally." Her voice was pleasant. "There is little more embarrassing than having one's accomplishments explained by the person who actually accomplished them."

Hades heard the satisfaction under it. Persephone had met Triton often enough to form opinions of his talents, and few of them were generous.

Damnameneus took heart. "Then Your Majesty understands."

"Oh, I understand perfectly. I am only surprised that you imagined humiliating Poseidon's favored son in front of his own court would end well for you."

His face fell. Persephone adjusted the fall of her cape and said nothing more.

Damnameneus turned back to Hades.

"I have given my life to my craft. I have served faithfully, brought wealth to my sovereign's realm, and made works that will last long after those who commissioned them are forgotten. Surely such service deserves some consideration."

There was real merit in what the man had done. Kleitos and his artificers would certainly have welcomed the chance to study his methods. Skill of that order was rare, and Hades thought it a remarkable waste for Poseidon to throw it away. Then again, Poseidon had always had a peculiar talent for prizing trinkets and overlooking treasure.

"Your achievements are considerable. It is unfortunate that my brother has chosen to dispense with your services."

Damnameneus seized on it. "Then surely you understand what it means to have another claim the fruit of your labor. Everything I made, everything I gave myself to, Triton has taken."

Hades had no trouble believing it. He had no particular affection for Triton, and such behavior would not have surprised him. But the matter had already been judged, and not by him.

"Whatever my opinion of your circumstances, Poseidon has given his judgment. It is my responsibility to carry out his sentence, not to reconsider it."

"You speak of my whole life's work as though it were nothing!"

"On the contrary. I have already told you what I think of your work."

That only seemed to anger him more. He stepped forward, and one of the guards moved toward him. Tisiphone lifted a hand, and the guard stopped.

"And for all that, you would send me to the Fields of Mourning?"

"Yes."

The name reached him. Hades supposed he knew the stories, as every condemned god did. Mortals had a talent for embellishing the harsher parts of the Underworld, though the Fields needed remarkably little embellishment.

The prisoner swallowed.

"I have heard what happens there."

"Then your arrival should hold few surprises."

"Those are places of suffering. Darkness and misery. People are sent there to be forgotten."

"Some are."

"You would put me among murderers and thieves?"

"And traitors," Persephone added, with a faint smile. "You mustn't overlook the traitors."

Damnameneus's eyes went from one of them to the other.

"How long must I stay there?"

"Your sentence is banishment."

"I understand that."

"Then you understand that it has no appointed end."

"I cannot spend the rest of my life in a mine."

"That will depend on the work you are given."

Tisiphone spoke for the first time since she had presented the decree.

"You are picturing a pit. It is a town. There is smoke from the chimneys, a market at the change of shift, children in the lanes. The condemned dig. The freeborn keep everything else, and most of them were born there, to the condemned. Under the king's law they are nobody's prisoners." Her eyes went to the blue of his coat. "They have cut stone for gods all their lives. They will not much care what you made from it. You will be given a pick the morning after you arrive."

Damnameneus had nothing to say to that.

Hades let her answer stand. The order of the Fields was generations old, and there was nothing remarkable in it. The condemned could hardly be expected to work if they were left to starve first, and when they died, the courts of the overworld sent more. The settlements were poor places and often violent, but the wardens kept the mines working and the condemned where they belonged. Hades saw no reason to interfere with an arrangement that did what it was for.

Damnameneus found his voice.

"You expect me to live among these people?"

"They will be your neighbors," Persephone said. "I suggest you cultivate their goodwill and do your work without complaint."

Hades glanced at her. The remark was unnecessary, though not without practical merit.

At the far end of the hall, one of the attendants let a small sound of amusement escape him. Tisiphone turned her head toward it, and the man lowered his eyes at once.

Hades knew him. He was the attendant who had once objected to the appointment of a clerk whose family came from the Fields. The clerk was freeborn, literate, and efficient, and Hades had approved her without understanding why her birthplace had been brought to his attention at all. He had no patience for prejudice that got in the way of competent service. That did not mean he meant to make the Fields agreeable.

Damnameneus drew a slow breath.

"I ask to be allowed to stay in Erebos. I can work here. I can serve your artisans. I know the properties of baetylus better than many who have spent their lives working it. Surely there is some place in this kingdom for what I can do."

Hades was silent a moment.

Under other circumstances, it would have been an interesting proposal. He thought of Kleitos's garden and its flowering tree, kept alive without a god's hand on it. Damnameneus might well know things that would help that work along. It might even be possible, once the terms of his confinement were settled, to use him in some limited way.

"Your talents may find employment in time. For now, your sentence stands."

"You would waste them!"

"That remains to be seen."

The Telchine's composure broke.

"I have been robbed of my work, stripped of everything I owned, and thrown out by a prince who could not bear to hear the truth of his own incompetence. And now I stand before a king who admits what I have achieved and would still send me to die breaking stone!"

It rang through the hall. The guards stiffened. Tisiphone did not move at all.

Until then, Hades had taken the man's complaints for the natural anger of someone robbed of his life's work. This was something else. Every one of the wonders Damnameneus had been describing had been made from baetylus, and every measure of that baetylus had come out of the mountains of the Underworld, cut from the rock at great cost and not without danger to the people who cut it. Not long ago, in the deep galleries, Hades had felt the weight of one mountain leaning on what he had done, and kept it off a single pillar. The gods of the overworld were very fond of what his kingdom produced. They had always been quick to forget what it cost to bring it out.

He leaned forward. Damnameneus fell silent.

"You speak of breaking stone as though it were work fit only for those who lack your remarkable gifts."

"I meant no insult to your… workers."

"And yet you have given one."

Hades rose. There was no haste in it, but every eye in the hall went to him.

"For forty-seven years you made wonders out of the wealth of my kingdom. You took its finest materials, enjoyed the admiration they brought you, and never once troubled yourself over what it took to put them in your hands. Now you stand in my court and call that work a waste."

Damnameneus opened his mouth. Hades had not finished.

"You will go to the Fields of Mourning, as my brother has decreed. And since you have taken such an interest in the proper employment of your talents, I shall choose your assignment myself."

He turned to Tisiphone.

"Tell the Warden that Damnameneus is to be assigned to the lowest galleries of the penal mines near Aleyonian Lake. He will labor in the extraction of baetylus alongside the other condemned, under the same conditions and without privilege of rank or former occupation. No exemption is to be granted without my express permission."

The last of Persephone's amusement went out of her face. Her eyes went once to Damnameneus and came back to her husband, still standing before his throne.

Tisiphone bowed her head. "As you command, my king."

Damnameneus stared at them both.

"The lowest galleries?" It came out quieter than he had meant it to. Hades did not answer. "Lord Hades, I did not mean—"

"You have spent your life learning what can be made from the wealth of the earth. It is time you learned what it costs to bring it into the light."

The Telchine's eyes went to Tisiphone, as though the woman who had brought him here might somehow speak for him. She returned his look exactly as she had for the whole of the journey.

The color left his face. His lips parted once, and closed again.

"Take him."

Tisiphone inclined her head.

Damnameneus did not turn at once.

"One day," he said, lower now, "you may have cause to regret what you have thrown away."

Tisiphone signed to the guards. Damnameneus let himself be led out, though the set of his shoulders said what the obedience cost him. The doors closed behind them.

For a while the hall was quiet. Persephone was looking at the doors he had gone through.

"He seemed quite determined that you should regret it."

"He will have ample time to reconsider his words."

"In the lowest galleries of Mourning? I should think he will remember every one of them."

Hades sat, and smoothed the black cloth over his knee.

"Then perhaps he will learn something of value in that time."

Persephone studied him. "You were prepared to make use of his talents."

"I was."

"Until he offended your pride."

Hades turned his head toward her.

"He insulted the subjects who dug out the materials for his life's work."

"Of course he did." She very nearly smiled. "And I am certain your pride had nothing whatever to do with it."

He regarded her coolly. Persephone had always had an unfortunate gift for finding the truths he preferred to leave alone.

And there was something else in the way she was looking at him now. Her eyes stayed on his face, then went down over the severe black lines of his dress and the figure he made on the throne, and came back. Persephone had always found authority attractive, which was hardly surprising given how fiercely she wanted it herself. Even now, having just taken such pleasure in exposing the pride of the man on the throne, she seemed to enjoy the sight of his power.

Under other circumstances he might have encouraged it. He had not yet finished being angry with Damnameneus, and he was not about to concede that pride had shaped what was an entirely appropriate sentence. He remembered that look well enough to like it, even if he no longer trusted what lay behind it as he once had. He met it a moment, and then looked elsewhere.

"The assignment is appropriate."

She let it rest.

Hades addressed the chamberlain, who was preparing to announce the next business.

"That will be all."

The official bowed and began to clear the hall. When the doors had closed behind the last of the servants, Persephone drew a narrow scroll from her sleeve.

"Hecate asked me to bring you this."

Hades held out his hand for it.

"When did it come?"

"This morning. She has gone on with the records of the weapons made in the war against the Titans."

The note was short, in Hecate's precise hand. An early war inventory listed eight weapons made to break a god's command of Dynamis. Seven had been surrendered for destruction after the war. For the eighth, she had so far found no later record of any kind.

Hades read it again.

"Eight weapons. Seven accounted for."

He handed it to Persephone. Her eyes narrowed slightly at the last line.

"It may be nothing more than a gap in the records."

"It may. But I would rather know what became of it."

"And whether it has anything to do with what happened to Enodia?"

Hades inclined his head. A missing entry proved nothing by itself. Nor would he dismiss it as an oversight, not now that there was reason to think weapons of that kind had outlived the war.

"Tell her I want the name of its last keeper. And I want the original inventory examined, not a copy of it."

"She expected you would."

Persephone sounded almost satisfied.

"Then she may proceed."

Persephone stepped down from the dais. The burgundy silk gathered at her feet and fell smoothly into place, and at the foot of the steps she turned back.

"One wonders how many other things were supposed to have been destroyed at the end of that war."

"Fewer than should have been, I suspect."

He thought, briefly, of his own armory.

She did not speculate further. He could see that she shared his concern.

"I shall tell Hecate."

He inclined his head, and Persephone went out by the side passage.

Hades sat a while longer with Hecate's note. One missing weapon did not make an enemy who could enter his kingdom. But it spoke of a carelessness, in the disposal of exactly such dangers, that he found profoundly irritating. He would have preferred certainty.

At length he rose, came down from the dais, and went out, already thinking of the eighth weapon.

[Ascendancy]

Hades watched the seam close beneath the floor of the passage. It went without a sound and left no mark. A man might walk the length of the corridor a hundred times and never guess that the stone under his feet had been changed.

The Nekromanteion had grown up around the Pyle it hid, not the other way round. Long before any priest tended its altars or any petitioner came to ask counsel of the dead, the two pylons had stood on this hill above the Acheron valley in Epirus. The first sanctuary had been built to guard them, and generations of worshippers since had widened it into a temple whose rites now hid what it had been built for. Hades did not admire all of their additions. Crossing the upper precinct that afternoon, he had passed a particularly unfortunate likeness of himself. The sculptor had given him a beard of extraordinary proportions and a belly that might have been intended to suggest prosperity but instead struck Hades as a case of indigestion. He meant to have it replaced.

For now, his attention belonged to the floor.

"Again."

Alecto stepped onto the stretch of passage he pointed to. She wore a dark traveling coat over close-fitting clothes made for the roads of Greece, and her black hair was drawn back from her face and fastened at the nape of her neck. Where Tisiphone's severity suited the work the Erinyes were usually given, Alecto kept a certain elegance even in traveling dress. Her features were finely made, almost delicate. There was nothing delicate about the way she studied the passage.

A low vibration ran through the stone under her boots. She glanced at Hades. He studied the floor, dissatisfied. The slab he had cut lay loose in its bed with nothing woven into it to hold it there, and it had rocked under her weight. He eased it a hair's breadth lower, until it sat in the floor as though it had grown there, and she crossed again. This time she felt nothing.

"Better."

There was nothing in the slab to give it away. It held no binding and no mageia. It was a block of the temple's own stone, sitting in the temple's own floor. A man who came to measure a Pyle would bring something to measure it with, and Hades meant there to be nothing in this corridor for it to find until the moment he woke the slab himself.

Beyond them, at the end of the corridor, stood the Pyle: two tall columns of stone, round shafts rising from carved bases and tapering toward broad capitals worked with the severe patterns of the Underworld. Fine inscriptions ran along the shallow fluting, so delicate they were nearly invisible in the dim light. Nothing joined the columns, and the space between them looked like any other space. Woken, the pylons opened a conjunction to their counterparts on the far bank of the Acheron, half the world away, and made the two places one passage. Opening that passage was one thing. Keeping it stable enough to cross took far more knowledge, and Hades had seen to it that the difference mattered.

Alecto's weeks in Greece had turned up a good deal more than the refugees' story. The priest of Hermes who had found them in Pherae held no appointment at any sanctuary. He had given the Thessalians supplies, arranged their journey, and sent them to this temple with directions that showed a remarkable familiarity with its lower chambers. Whether he had meant them to be admitted or only wished to see what would happen to them, neither she nor Hades could yet say. Either was worth knowing.

What Alecto had found afterward troubled him more. Several people had been asking quiet questions about the temple: its attendants, its lower chambers, and on what terms anyone was allowed down to them. None of them seemed to care much about the refugees.

So Hades had authorized a deception.

Alecto had put out three different stories about changes at the temple, each through a different go-between. One said that all passage below was suspended. One said that the foundations of the lower chambers had settled, and masons were to be hired to repair them. The third said the restrictions would be lifted for one evening, for the arrival of a delegation.

It was the repairs that brought someone running.

"Has our visitor tried to come down again?"

"Twice since midday. The attendants turned him back both times."

"And he is still in the sanctuary?"

"He is. He says he is a mason, come to look for work on the repairs."

There were no repairs. They existed only in the story Alecto had let loose, and that the stranger had taken them for his excuse to be here was encouraging. He matched the description of a man who had left Corinth three nights before, not long after one of Alecto's go-betweens carried the story to a merchant's house there. He had reached the Nekromanteion that morning, apparently with no idea he had been watched on the road.

It proved nothing. It was promising enough to prepare for.

"And the merchant?"

"Still in Corinth. He has made no move to leave. I have him watched."

"Good. I would prefer he not know we are interested in him."

The merchant might prove more useful than the man upstairs. An intruder could be caught, questioned, and dealt with as his conduct deserved. A working line of communication, watched carefully, might lead to whoever was giving the orders.

"And if he notices what you have done to the floor?"

"Then he is more observant than I expect. We shall see how he takes it."

He had been careful to leave everything that could be seen exactly as it had been. Anyone studying the Pyle would find what he expected to find, until Hades decided otherwise.

The trap itself was simple. The corridor narrowed as it neared the pylons, and Hades had cut a single slab across it a few paces short of the Pyle. When the intruder passed over it, it would rise behind him and close the way back to the stair. The other end of the box would be the Pyle, and Hades standing in front of it.

"One of the attendants has agreed to take a bribe, if our visitor tries again."

"One of yours, I presume."

"Naturally."

Hades approved. Alecto had run the whole thing with care, putting chances in the stranger's way that would seem to him to be of his own making. If the man believed himself clever enough to buy a corrupt temple servant, he would have no reason to wonder why the servant took his money.

"Then we are ready."

They withdrew into a small antechamber that opened off the passage between the slab and the Pyle. Alecto left its heavy wooden door open a hand's width and took her place beside it. Hades did not need the gap. He had the floor.

Above them, the temple had gone quiet for the evening. The damp air that drifted down through the passages carried the smell of mint from the incense burned upstairs. Somewhere in the upper chambers a priest was finishing the day's observances. Few mortals sought the favor of Hades, and fewer still stayed in his sanctuary after dark. It was an agreeable enough place, apart from the statue.

They waited. Hades had sat through sieges that lasted months and campaigns that turned on patience more than strength, and an hour spent waiting on a corridor was no hardship. He passed it with a manuscript borrowed from the temple's small collection, an account of his own deeds that was a good deal more imaginative than accurate. He was considering a particularly inventive passage when a weight came onto the top of the stair. He closed the book.

"One man," he said quietly. "Alone."

Alecto put her eye to the gap.

Hades followed him through the stone. A man of middling size, carrying something under one arm. He came down slowly, stopping every few steps to listen, and at the foot of the stair he stood for a long while without moving at all. Then he came on down the passage.

"He has something in his hand," Alecto breathed. "Metal, in pieces, around a dark stone. He is holding it to the wall."

Through the floor, Hades felt the man crouch. He had stopped one pace short of the slab, beside the seam that had closed that afternoon, and he was holding very still.

Hades did not move. Neither did Alecto.

The man stayed there a long time. Then his weight shifted, and he moved on along the wall a stride, and another, and crouched again.

Hades could not tell what the thing was measuring. He could tell what the man was doing with it. Someone was trying to learn how the Pyle had been built, not merely how to wake it. That difference mattered. Anyone could be taught to open a conjunction. Understanding what held one steady enough to cross was another thing altogether.

The stranger took several more readings and stood. Then he stepped over the slab and walked on toward the pylons.

Hades woke it.

Stone rose out of the floor behind the man with a deep, grinding boom and met the ceiling, and the way back to the stair was gone. The mortal spun at the sound. He put both hands flat on the new wall and felt along it for a gap, and the thing he had been carrying clattered to the floor.

Hades came out of the antechamber, Alecto behind him, and stood between the man and the Pyle.

"The foundations are sound.”

The stranger turned. His eyes went from Alecto to Hades, to the long black coat and the key pinned at its breast, and they knew him. He put his back to the stone.

He was neither imposing nor remarkable to look at: perhaps forty, of middling height, with a narrow face and a closely trimmed beard. His clothes were those of a reasonably prosperous tradesman, and their plainness looked deliberate. A small satchel hung under one arm.

Hades crossed to the instrument and picked it up.

It was small enough to sit in a man's palm: several narrow pieces of metal arranged around a dark central stone. It had none of the elegance Hades associated with a good artificer. Its proportions were clumsy, and the workmanship suggested someone who had put the pieces together by instruction without understanding what they were for.

The mortal’s eyes followed it.

"An unusual possession for a mason."

"Masons build for gods."

His voice was steady. Hades could hear what it cost him to keep it so.

"Then whoever built this was not one."

Alecto went around the man, searched his clothes for weapons, and took the satchel from him. He let her do it, watching her as though he were thinking about something other than where he stood.

"Who sent you?"

He turned his head to her.

"I came of my own choosing."

"And taught yourself to measure a Pyle."

Hades turned the instrument in his hand. There were minute markings along its inner fittings, half hidden by the crude work, and they matched no maker's mark he knew. One of its parts held a trace of baetylus alloyed with some other mineral, so little that it was hardly more than an impurity.

Alecto had brought back a description of the priest from Pherae. This was not he.

"You are not the priest who sent Enodia's household to this temple."

Through the floor, Hades felt the man's weight go back onto his heels.

"But you know him."

Nothing.

The stranger was silent a long moment. Then, unexpectedly, he smiled.

"So you were waiting."

Alecto's eyes went briefly to Hades. The man was pale, but he was steadier now than when they had first stepped out, which was a strange thing in someone who had just been shut in a stone box by the King of the Underworld and one of the Erinyes. Hades had expected resistance, perhaps an attempt to bargain once he understood there was no way out. Instead the stranger seemed almost pleased to have their attention.

"Naturally."

"And you believe that means you have won."

"That depends on what you tell me."

"You cannot keep every door closed forever."

"I have kept them closed for seven hundred years."

"Seven hundred years." He said it as though it confirmed something he had long believed. "You speak of kingdoms and centuries as though the world belongs to you."

"This part of it does."

Alecto had finished with the satchel. There was little in it: writing things, a length of cord, a little food, and a folded scrap of papyrus covered in figures. She gave the scrap to Hades.

The figures recorded the height and girth of the pylons, the distance between their bases, and how they stood in relation to the rest of the temple. There were notes on the inscriptions along their shafts, and on the stone of the floor. Several measurements had been taken twice, as though whoever made them had been trying to learn which features the Pyle could not work without.

It was a survey. Not an attempt to enter the kingdom, or not yet.

"You were sent to measure it. For whom?"

The man did not answer.

"For the Atharim," Alecto said.

The stranger's eyes went to her, sharp and quick. That was answer enough.

So this was what the Atharim looked like at close range. Hades considered him. There was nothing remarkable about the man. He showed no sign of any gift, no trace of Dynamis, nothing about him that should have made him dangerous to a god. Yet someone had trusted him with one of the most important ways into the Underworld.

"You serve the Atharim."

"I serve humankind."

Hades did not think the distinction worth an answer.

"Who gave you this instrument?"

The mortal's eyes dropped to it.

"The great Hades does not know what it is."

"Not yet."

The man had recovered remarkably well. His hands were steady, and his eyes had stopped searching the walls for a way out. Hades had one lever left. The man would not be leaving this corridor, so there was no harm in letting him see it.

"I have your instrument and your survey. I know how the story that brought you here reached you, and the merchant in Corinth is being watched as we speak. Your silence will cost me time. It will not cost me the answer."

For the first time, the man's composure slipped, though only for a moment.

He made no attempt to deny Corinth, or to bargain for the merchant's safety. Hades had watched men keep their dignity before a sentence, and others hide their terror behind bravado. This was neither. The prisoner behaved as though whatever came of his capture had been settled before he ever came down the stair, and nothing Hades said would change it.

"You really do think this is about your kingdom."

He glanced at the stone that had closed the way back, and then at the two of them. Something in his face changed, though not as Hades expected. The fear that had come with his capture was going out of him.

As Alecto came round behind him, the man turned his head a little, so that for a moment his face was hidden from Hades. His jaw moved, as if he were working moisture into a dry mouth. When he looked back, the tension around his eyes had eased.

Hades took little notice of it. He had seen plenty of prisoners gather themselves before questioning.

"You have gone to uncommon trouble to reach it."

"Your kingdom. Your temples. Your people." The mortal gave a short laugh with no humor in it. "It has always been the same with the gods.”

Alecto stepped in.

"Enough. You will answer the king's questions."

The stranger looked past her.

"There should be no kings like him."

Hades said nothing. It was hardly an original sentiment; he had heard it from rebellious subjects and beaten enemies all his life. What set this man apart was how he said it. The others had complained. This one had passed judgment, as plainly as Hades passed it from his own throne. And he no longer stood like a man who expected to suffer for it.

Hades drew breath to question him further.

The mortal's face tightened, and he staggered.

Alecto caught his arm before he could fall. "My king—"

Hades was already moving.

The stranger sank to his knees. His breath had begun to drag, and the color was leaving his face too quickly. Whatever he had done, it was well under way before either of them saw it.

Hades caught him before his head struck the stone.

The man convulsed once.

Hades reached for him the only way he knew. Through the floor he had the man exactly: his weight, his knees on the stone, the shudder that went out of him into the paving. Of what was happening inside him, the earth gave back nothing at all, and Hades had no other way in.

The stranger's eyes found Hades once more. There was no fear left in them.

Then he was dead.

For a while neither of them spoke.

Hades took his hand from under the dead man's head and stood.

Alecto stayed crouched beside the body, two fingers at the throat. At length she took them away.

"When I came behind him, he turned his face away."

Hades remembered the small movement of the jaw. He had thought nothing of it.

"He came down that stair ready for this."

The man had robbed him of an interrogation, but he had not undone the work. The trap had done exactly what it was built to do. They had the instrument, the survey, and the go-between through whom the false story had passed. But Hades had expected fear. Even the most devoted conspirators usually had something left to protect: a life, a family, the hope that obedience might buy mercy. This one had weighed all of it and found it wanting.

"Have the body examined. I want to know everything he carried, and how he did this without our seeing it."

Alecto rose. "And the merchant in Corinth?"

"Do not take him."

She studied him. "You mean to let them keep their messenger."

"For now."

Whoever had sent this man would learn sooner or later that he had not come back. What mattered was what they did about it.

"He came to learn about our defenses. I would like to know whether those who sent him will try to learn what became of him."

"They may abandon the merchant after this."

"Then we shall have learned how readily they throw away their arrangements. If they use him again, we may learn a great deal more."

He gave her the survey.

"Go back to Corinth. I want to know everyone who goes to that house, and where they go after."

"And the temple?"

Hades turned to the Pyle. The pylons stood untouched. The Atharim had gained nothing tonight, but he had learned enough to rethink some of his arrangements.

"The Pyle stays open to those entitled to use it. The priests are to admit no stranger to the lower chambers until they know who he is. And I want the Pyles at Nysa and Elis examined for the same kind of attention."

Alecto inclined her head. "It will be done."

Hades weighed the crude instrument in his hand. Whatever it was, it told him that the Atharim were no longer satisfied with finding the entrances to his kingdom. They wanted to know how the entrances worked. Whether they hoped to open a conjunction of their own or to find a way to destroy one, he could not yet say. He liked neither possibility.

He put it in his coat.

Then he lowered the slab across the corridor back into the floor, and the passage was as it had been, with no sign that anything had ever closed on anyone in it.

Alecto went to fetch the attendants and left him alone with the dead man.

He stood over the mortal a moment longer. The man had given up his life for a cause that offered him nothing he would live to see. Hades had commanded men willing to die for their homes, their families, their kings. This was something else. These people did not want better gods, or kinder ones. They wanted none over them at all, and a man who wanted that could be neither threatened nor bought.

Hades went up through the quiet chambers of the temple. His mind was on the instrument in his coat and the irritating fact that the man had cheated him of his answers.

Then he came to the statue.

There it stood in its alcove, hung with garlands and heaped with offerings, its tremendous beard flowing down over a belly whose proportions the sculptor had evidently considered majestic. Hades stopped in front of it.

He had already decided to have it replaced. Ordinarily he would simply have told the priests to commission a better likeness.

He reached into the stone of its pedestal instead.

The pedestal lurched under the great bronze figure. Robbed of its footing, the statue pitched forward and struck the floor with a crash that rang through the whole precinct. Its head broke off and rolled across the sanctuary, scattering offerings as it went.

Someone cried out behind him.

Hades turned. An old priest stood in the doorway in a voluminous chiton, a black wool himation half covering it. His eyes went from the broken statue to Hades, and what color there was in his weathered face drained out of it. He dropped to his knees and pressed his forehead to the floor, begging for mercy.

For a moment Hades considered telling him to get up and go about his business.

Instead he stepped around the head of his own likeness and went on toward the courtyard, and left the priest face down among the scattered offerings.

[Ascendancy]

Chapter 4 

The Instruments of Power

The last time Hades came to Olympus, it had been for a wedding. He could no longer remember whose.

He remembered the banquet, though, and the remarkable quantity of wine drunk by gods who should have known better. Hymenaios had lost his place in the wedding hymn halfway through and insisted on starting again, over the protests of nearly everyone present. Hebe had finally taken his cup away, though not before his third attempt reduced the guests to helpless laughter.

That had been nearly forty years ago. He had come back now with a dead man's instrument in his coat and a question for his brother.

The Sovereign's Pyle set him down in the receiving hall beside Zeus's palace, and Hades walked out of it into the light. Olympus had changed little. Its pale terraces still rose above a sea of cloud, and its gardens still flourished at a height that should have killed them. Fountains ran under gilded roofs, and the great halls were laid with mosaics of victories Zeus had never let anyone forget. Hades admired the workmanship. He had never understood his brother's need to commemorate quite so much of it.

The warmth was another matter. Even this high, the morning was far warmer than any hall in Erebos, and he had left the heavier coats at home for one of light, unlined black wool. It was not enough. The heat settled on his skin, and the sun, mild as it was, seemed determined to find him wherever he stood. He had lived so long under the ice that the cold had stopped being a hardship a very long time ago. He found he missed it.

His arrival was noticed. Conversations thinned as he crossed the terraces. Several lesser gods stepped out of his way, and others watched him go by with open curiosity. A servant rounding a corner with a silver tray came face to face with a long black coat and very nearly dropped it. Hades acknowledged the few who actually greeted him. By evening, he suspected, his visit would have several competing explanations.

A chamberlain met him at the inner palace and led him through a run of airy rooms toward a terrace above the mountains. Laughter came through the open doorway ahead.

"Tell him he may compose whatever he likes, so long as he doesn't expect me to listen to all of it."

A woman's amused answer was lost in the sound of footsteps.

Zeus appeared in the doorway with a cup of wine in one hand. For a moment he only stared. Then his face broke open into a broad smile.

"Well. This is a sight I never expected today!"

Before Hades could say a word, Zeus embraced him.

It caught him wholly unprepared. His brother had always been affectionate when the mood took him, but Hades had forgotten what it was to be held by someone who did not think twice about it. There was little occasion for it in Erebos. His subjects kept a respectful distance, and he and Persephone had hardly touched in months. For an instant his arms did not know what to do. Then he returned the embrace, briefly.

Zeus stepped away to look at him.

He was much as Hades remembered: lean and long in the limb, hard and spare, the muscle lying close along the bone. His chestnut hair fell in loose waves past his shoulders, lighter at the ends, and a close, neat beard framed his face. His eyes were light, somewhere between grey and hazel, and when they rested on someone they gave that person the whole of their attention, so that for a little while he felt like the most important man in the world. Under the gold the sun had put into his skin and hair, the bones of the face were their father's: the long, straight nose, the brows set low and level, the hard line of the jaw. They had looked more alike once, before seven centuries of sun.

Zeus wore an ivory tunic under a mantle so heavy with gold thread that it caught the sun at every movement, an eagle-shaped clasp at the shoulder, and rings on several fingers. Even at his ease, he looked the king of the gods in every particular.

"You ought to have sent word." He was still smiling. "I'd have had you met at the Pyle, as one king meets another."

"I doubt Olympus has forgotten how to receive a visitor."

Zeus laughed, and seemed to mean it. "Then come and be received. Have a drink. You remember how."

He waved the chamberlain away and took Hades out onto the terrace. A small company was gathered around a low table laid with fruit, bread and cheese, a dish of figs, and several amphorae of wine. Two young goddesses rose as Hades came near. Zeus made the introductions with his usual carelessness, evidently assuming his brother would not trouble to remember the names. Hades greeted them with general courtesy.

"Leave us a while, would you?" Zeus said, when it was done. "I haven't seen my brother in an age."

The company withdrew. Zeus dropped into a cushioned chair facing the mountains, pointed Hades to the one opposite, and poured him a generous cup.

"And Persephone? How is she?"

Hades took the cup. There were several ways he might have answered, and he cared to discuss none of them with Zeus.

"Well. Much occupied with Elysium."

"More gardens? I should come and see what she's made of it."

Hades drank. His brother knew the way to Elysium well enough without being shown it. He left the suggestion where it lay.

For a while they talked of the world beyond Erebos. Zeus spoke of a festival being prepared in his honor, and of two neighboring cities quarreling over his patronage. Both had sent delegations with gifts and petitions, and Zeus seemed especially entertained by how far each had gone to outdo the other.

"One offered a monument of truly shocking size. The other brought six goats and a petition written on a board."

"I presume you found for the monument."

"Certainly not. The goats were excellent."

Zeus laughed at his own story. Then the laugh was gone, and the whole of his attention was on his brother.

"Now. Much as I'd like to believe you came all this way because you missed me, I imagine something is on your mind."

"There is." Hades set down his cup. "The Atharim."

Zeus considered him over the rim of his wine.

"The mortal zealots? They've caused some trouble. I've put Apollo in charge of dealing with them."

"Himself?"

"Hardly. I have better uses for my son than sending him into cellars after men with clubs and kitchen knives." Zeus smiled. "His people have broken up several of their gatherings, taken in men suspected of organizing them, and doubled the guard at the places that seemed at risk. The trouble has grown less frequent."

"And whoever is behind it?"

"Some of these groups are little more than unhappy mortals borrowing the name. Others have money and discipline enough to suggest someone is directing them. Apollo will find out how they're connected."

It was a more serious effort than Hades had expected. He had come to learn whether Olympus understood the danger to its own lands, and whether Erebos might profit by what Olympus did about it. If Apollo could break the thing apart before it spread, Hades would have little reason to concern himself with anything beyond his borders.

"Enodia is dead."

"Ah, yes. An unfortunate loss."

Zeus said it the way a man remembers a debt already settled. Hades wondered whether a more prominent goddess would have earned a different tone.

"The Atharim killed her with a weapon capable of interfering with Dynamis itself."

"So I have been told."

"Have you recovered anything like it?"

"A few relics, but nothing that suggests these mortals can reproduce them."

"Someone has learned enough to use them."

"Certainly. That's why I'm recovering them. But owning an old weapon and knowing how to make another are very different accomplishments. Until I see evidence of the second, I see no reason to treat these people as an army."

The distinction was a reasonable one. Hades had come across enough abandoned technemata in his life to know that a thing could outlast every memory of how it was made. But there were other kinds of knowledge that might prove just as dangerous.

"One of their people came into the Nekromanteion in Epirus. He was studying the Pyle there."

For the first time, Zeus's attention, which had been everywhere at once, came to rest on a single thing.

"Did he try to open it?"

"No. He was studying how it was built. Taking measurements, with a technema made for the purpose."

Every god who used the Pyles knew that waking one was the easy part, and that what held a conjunction steady enough to cross was another matter altogether. Hades had never expected a mortal to understand it, let alone set out to learn it.

"And the man?"

"Dead by his own hand. Alecto is watching his contacts in Corinth."

"The Pyle is secure?"

"Yes."

"Where is the instrument now?"

"With me."

He had come here to ask the questions.

Zeus nodded, as if Hades had made a satisfactory report.

"Have it examined. If it tells you anything of value, Apollo should know it. I'll have his people work with yours, if you like."

He offered it without hesitation. Hades had come expecting to argue for that much, and was satisfied to find his brother needed no persuading.

"Agreed."

"There. Something accomplished already. You should visit more often."

The smile was back, and Zeus's attention was already drifting toward the figs. Hades had not finished.

"They have weapons that can kill gods, and yet they sent a man to study a way into the Underworld instead of attacking it. I would very much like to know why."

"So would I. But he didn't open it, and you have secured it. Whatever they hoped to accomplish, they've failed."

"In Epirus."

"There are a great many temples in the world. If they try another, Apollo will hear of it."

"After they have tried it."

Zeus spread his hands, still smiling. "What would you have me do in the meantime?"

It was a fair question, though Hades disliked the suggestion that concern must mean a demand. He had not come to ask for an army. He had certainly not come to take on the defense of Olympus or anyone else's lands. What happened beyond his kingdom was the business of those who ruled it.

"I would see that whatever Apollo learns reaches everyone whose lands may be threatened. It should not stop at attacks on isolated temples. The Atharim may want a great deal more than the sanctuaries they have already struck."

Zeus studied him a moment.

"You've always been particularly protective of your borders."

"For good reason."

"No one disputes it." Zeus smiled. "Though I sometimes wonder whether you'd sleep better if you could build a wall around the whole world."

Hades did not smile. He suspected Zeus would find the idea a good deal less amusing if he were asked to pay for it.

"But the world is not yours to fortify, brother. We settled that a very long time ago."

Hades's thumb found the ring on his finger and stopped on it.

Zeus spoke of the settlement as though three men had reached it freely, each as content with its terms as the others. Hades remembered it differently. He remembered his brothers standing together, and the two choices they had set in front of him, and the Covenant of the Division of the World that came after. It bound him as firmly now as on the day he accepted it. No one had been in any doubt about the alternative.

For a moment he thought about reminding Zeus of that. He could almost hear the patient answer, and the observation about the sacrifices asked of all three of them that would come with it. Zeus had always been remarkably generous in accounting for the sacrifices of others.

He said nothing.

"After all," Zeus went on, "if you're proposing some broader arrangement for the affairs of the other kingdoms, that would be a rather different discussion."

So the request for information had become a question of jurisdiction, and Hades was the one being asked to explain himself.

"I am not proposing to interfere."

Zeus kept his eyes on him a moment longer.

"Of course not."

There was nothing threatening in it. There did not need to be.

"Apollo will carry on. If his people find anything that touches the safety of Erebos, you'll hear of it. I'll see to it myself."

It was exactly the assurance Hades had come for. He had been told what he would be told, and by whom.

"Very well."

Zeus smiled, plainly content, and reached for the dish of figs.

"Now have one of these. They're excellent."
Hades took one. His brother had closed the subject, and there was nothing to be gained by reopening it. He had what he had come for: a share in Apollo's work, and the knowledge that Olympus was taking the Atharim seriously, within the limits Zeus thought proper. It would have to do.

When Zeus asked him to stay for dinner, he declined.

"You never do. One of these days you ought to visit without some calamity to discuss."

"Olympus has calamities enough of its own to entertain you without my bringing more."

Zeus laughed, then seemed to remember something.

"Wait. Before you go."

He called an attendant and gave quiet instructions. When the man came back, he carried an ornate tray with a decanter of dark material and two shallow cups to match. The decanter was smooth as glass but for a band of fine inscription around its neck, and its stopper fitted so exactly that no seam showed.

Hades knew the material at once. Pure baetylus, worked as finely as any craftsman outside his own kingdom could manage, and a great deal of it, spent on a pair of cups and a jug. There was a certain satisfaction in seeing so much of his stone put to use on Olympus. He doubted his brother had ever thought about where it came from.

Zeus sent the attendant off and lifted the decanter himself. He poured a small measure into each cup. It was golden, deep and clear where the sun came through it, and it carried a faint scent Hades remembered well.

Nectar.

"A fresh preparation, sent up this very morning. Fortunate timing, wouldn't you say?"

"Very."

Zeus held one of the cups out to him.

It was the one wonder of Olympus that Erebos could not make. Hades knew the flowering plant it came from, and the rare god’s gifts needed to turn its harvest into something worth more than gold. Olympus kept both close. Zeus had never let either go beyond his own court, except in whatever measure he chose to give away.

Hades took it.

"You don't come often enough to enjoy it as you should."

Hades looked at the cup, and then at his brother. The timing had not escaped him. A few minutes ago Zeus had reminded him of the Covenant that fenced him in. Now, with that settled to his liking, he was offering something no one else in the world could give. And yet the generosity was real. Zeus took genuine pleasure in giving such things, most of all to someone who understood what they were worth, and perhaps more still in knowing that the pleasure depended on him.

Hades inclined his head. Zeus raised his own cup, and they drank together.

The nectar was delicate on the tongue, a sweetness and then a warmth that spread through his chest and out along his arms. Then the firmament came to him.

He had not reached for it. It was simply there, wider than it had been a moment before: the marble of the terrace under his boots, the foundations under the marble, and under those the mountain itself, all of it at once, down to the bedrock under Thessaly. He could feel the palace sitting on it, every hall and colonnade a weight he could have named. Far down on the eastern slopes, heat moved steadily through the rock where the forges were. The cup in his hand was his own stone. He could have told Kleitos which seam it came from.

Under the terrace, a crack ran through the old rock, fine as a hair, a little wider than it had been forty years ago. He could have closed it before he set the cup down.

It was not his mountain. He let it be.

It was exquisite all the same. Whatever he thought of where it came from, he could not deny what it did.

Mortals believed that a single taste of nectar made a god immortal, and the Olympians had never been in any hurry to correct them. Hades knew better. It could strengthen him and lengthen his years. It could not keep him from dying. He had killed too many gods to believe otherwise.

Still, he would take whatever years it gave him.

Zeus watched him with evident satisfaction.

"Better?"

"Considerably. I had forgotten."

"Good. You see? There are advantages to visiting your family."

Hades gave back the empty cup. Zeus stoppered the decanter and handed both to the attendant, who withdrew with them.

His brother walked him back through the rooms to the threshold of the inner palace, and there he embraced him again.

"Don't wait so long next time to visit your brother."

This time Hades was ready for it. He returned the embrace. He had learned long ago that refusing his brother these small things gained him nothing, and that giving them cost him less than the alternative.

Behind him, he heard Zeus calling the company back to the terrace, already laughing.

The palace had gone back to its afternoon pleasures. Music came from a gallery nearby, and somewhere beyond the colonnades a quarrel over a game of chance had grown loud enough to draw a crowd. Two young goddesses broke off their talk as he passed. One of them recovered in time to greet him. The other seemed far more interested in where he had come from than in where he was going.

On the way down to the outer terraces, his hand went to the instrument in his coat.

He had meant to go straight back to Erebos. But the thing was still an unanswered question, and Zeus had been right about one thing: owning a device and understanding how it was made were very different accomplishments. Hades meant to learn which of the two the Atharim had managed.

There were few gods whose knowledge of such work he trusted with the question. One of them was on this mountain.

Hades turned aside before he reached the steps.

[Ascendancy]

Mortals came into Hephaestus's workshops by a door of their own. It stood on the mountain's eastern slope beside the passage the gods used, and a line of craftsmen waited at it, each holding up a seal for the bronze sentinel there to read before it let him by. Few mortals were ever permitted on Olympus. These had been, so long as they went no farther than the workshops.

The sentinels at the head of the other passage were a pair, taller than the doorway they kept. Their hollow gazes turned to Hades, and they stepped aside.

The scent of the gardens gave way to hot metal as he went down. Vents in the walls drew the foundries' smoke and heat away into the rock, and the galleries below were cool. Hades opened his coat at the throat for the first time that day.

The passage let him out into a hall so long that its far end was lost in its own light. Mechanisms hung from tracks in the ceiling and carried metal from bench to bench. Golden attendants moved among mortal craftsmen and lesser gods bent over drawings etched in glowing glass. Above them all, a great assembly of inscribed rings turned about a sphere of silver light. Hades stopped to look at it. He could not tell what it was for. No one but Hephaestus would have cut the rings so fine.

Several of the mortals worked with no one standing over them. At one bench a grey-bearded man was showing two lesser gods where a part should go, and the gods set it where he pointed. Hephaestus had always cared more for what a pair of hands could do than for whose hands they were.

At the nearest bench, a craftsman looked up. His glance passed over the black coat and stopped at the key pinned at its breast. He put his tools down, one at a time, and went to find someone.

The woman who came back with him was mortal too, with a stylus pushed through the knot of her hair. She bowed.

"My lord. We were not told to expect you."

"I have come to see Hephaestus."

"He is in his laboratory, my lord. I can send word."

"There is no need. Show me the way."

She glanced once down the hall, as though someone there might tell her otherwise. Then she led him.

Their way led past channels of heat over which lengths of metal hung in the air, each one level with the next. Farther on, a knot of apprentices was arguing over a set of interlocking wheels, and none of them glanced up as the King of the Underworld passed. On the terraces above, a servant had nearly dropped a tray at the sight of him.

Hephaestus's laboratory was a broad room lit by panels set into the ceiling. Worktables stood around a raised platform, and on the platform a golden eagle sat on its marble perch with its wings half open. Every feather had been made by itself and laid over the next as a living bird's would lie. Apprentices were working at the wings. The eagle turned its head after them, its polished eyes moving from one to the other.

Hades did not need to ask whom the eagle was for.

Hephaestus sat beside the platform with a row of golden feathers laid out on the table in front of him. He looked up when Hades came in, and for a moment he only looked. Then he smiled.

"Uncle?"

Hades had expected courtesy. What he heard was pleasure, and nothing in it had been arranged for him to hear. He was already crossing the floor.

Hephaestus called over his shoulder to the platform.

"Leave the eagle on its perch. No more attempts at flight until I come back."

One of the apprentices began to answer, but Hephaestus had already taken up the staff that leaned against his table and was coming to meet him. He walked with an uneven gait, his weight on the staff at every other step. The staff was dark metal with a silver grip worn smooth to his hand, and only up close could Hades see the joints hidden along its length.

He had his father's brow and his father's shoulders, and the same pale grey eyes, under blond hair that darkened toward the roots. Zeus used those eyes to take the measure of whoever stood in front of him. Hephaestus used them to look at things. He wore crimson, fastened with a clasp of his own making.

He shifted the staff and held out his free hand. It was a smith's hand, broad across the knuckles, the back of it seamed white with old burns.

"Forty years."

Hades took it.

"I had business with your father. I thought I might make use of the occasion."

"I'm glad you did." Hephaestus tipped his head toward the platform. "You've come at a fortunate hour. Another one and I'd have been poor company."

"A difficult problem?"

"An unnecessary one. Someone decided my instructions could be improved upon." He did not lower his voice. "I explained why the design had to be as it was. They disagreed. They have spent twelve days trying to prove me wrong."

"And have they?"

"Not yet. Would you care to see?"

He did not wait for an answer.

"Show Lord Hades what happens when you try to fly it. Once, mind you."

The eagle spread its wings. Air moved across the platform and lifted loose drawings from the nearest table. The talons let go of the perch, and for an instant the bird rose.

Then the left wing faltered. The eagle lurched sideways, and an apprentice caught it with Dynamis before it struck the floor and lowered it, crooked, onto its perch.

"The left wing is moving a moment behind the right."

"You always did have a good eye, Uncle. It is."

"And they cannot find why?"

"They know perfectly well why. I've told them twice. But they're certain their improvement is sound, so the fault must lie somewhere else."

One of the apprentices went back to examining the right wing.

"You may be here another twelve days."

Hephaestus laughed.

Hades remembered that laugh. His nephew had always had patience for other people's mistakes, so long as they might learn something from them. There had been a time when Hades sought his company whenever he came to Olympus. Few of the Twelve would listen to Hades talk about foundations for a whole evening. Hephaestus had.

Their work was not the same. Hades built in stone, at the size of halls and roads. Hephaestus built things a man could hold, that did what their maker could not do with his own hands. Hades understood how they worked, but he could not have made one.

Once, when Hephaestus had no place on Olympus, Hades had asked him to bring that gift to Erebos. Hephaestus had thought about it longer than Hades expected, and asked a good many questions. Then he had gone back up the mountain. Hades had not asked again.

"Come. Somewhere quieter."

Hephaestus led him into a side passage. The nectar was still in Hades's limbs, and beside his nephew he could feel the ease of his own stride. He kept to Hephaestus's pace and did not offer an arm. Hephaestus would have found the offer more tiresome than the walk.

They passed a gallery of finished work. A small figure of gold on a pedestal followed them with its head as they went by. Farther along, a set of silver rings revolved around a stone that hung in the air, and shifted their turning as the two gods passed.

"You have been busy."

"More than you'd believe. Half of Olympus is convinced that anything which stops working must be brought to me in person."

"The price of being indispensable."

"The price of letting everyone else forget how." He said it cheerfully.

At the end of the passage, Hephaestus touched the head of his staff to a mark beside a door. The metal brightened, and the door swung open without a sound.

Beyond it was a private workroom with deep chairs and broad tables crowded with instruments. Shelves of half-made technemata could be raised or lowered from where a man sat. Drawings covered one wall, nearly all of them his. One, pinned low beneath the rest, was of a horse with six legs.

Hephaestus touched a plate in the arm of his chair, and the nearest table rose to the height of his hands. He lowered himself into the chair and leaned the staff against the table within reach.

"I heard Damnameneus finally used up Triton's patience and was sent to you."

"He is serving his sentence in the mines of Mourning."

Hephaestus sighed.

"What a waste. Brilliant apprentice. He never learned when to hold his tongue."

His thumb moved once along the grip of the staff. He said nothing about Triton, and Hades did not ask.

"I could spend the rest of the day showing you what I've made. But I don't think that's why you came."

Hades took the instrument from his coat and set it on the table.

"I would value your opinion of this."

Hephaestus picked it up and turned it in his scarred fingers. It was compact and ungainly, its housings of mismatched metal joined by fine tubes, with a needle at one end under a scratched cover. None of it showed the care Olympus put into anything it made.

"Where did you find this?"

"On a mortal who was measuring the Pyle at the Nekromanteion in Epirus."

"A mortal? What was he doing there? Don't tell me he wanted a look at your kingdom."

"He was one of the Atharim."

"The zealots?" Hephaestus turned it over and studied the underside. "I'd heard they were causing trouble." He slid it beneath a lens that hung over the table. "And you think this was telling him something about the Pyle?"

"I hoped you could tell me."

For some time Hephaestus studied the outside in silence. He brought the lens lower, peered at the needle, then took a narrow tool from a drawer beneath the table.

"An ugly thing."

He drew two pins and lifted the housing away. Inside, parts had been fixed straight onto a frame of poor metal, and fine tubes ran from them to a round piece set near the center.

"Whoever put this together didn't much care whether it lasted."

"Can you tell what it is for?"

"Perhaps."

He worked the round piece free and brought it up into the light. As he turned it, a faint pattern showed along its inner rim.

"Now this is interesting."

He touched the plate in his chair again, and one of the shelves came down to him with a small metal case on it. Inside lay several pieces of the same shape. Side by side, Hades could see it.

"An attunement ward."

"Part of one. An old pattern, but sound in its day. I'd know those marks anywhere."

"I thought they were made to stop a working that fails."

"They are. This one has had the part that stops it cut away. Which is why you didn't know it."

He laid the two pieces next to each other. Across the face of the whole ward ran a narrow bridge of worked metal. On the other, the bridge had been cut out, and in its place someone had fitted filaments of a kind Hades did not know.

"They have given up its protection."

"Entirely. Which ought to have made it useless. Let me show you."

He reached for a small bronze sphere. At his touch it opened into two halves on a pale flame that burned on nothing and gave no heat. Hades knew the little technema. Every workshop on Olympus kept one, for testing whether a mageia would hold its shape.

Hephaestus placed the whole ward beside it.

"If the mageia fails, the ward stops it before it can do harm. This pattern stops it by putting the working out altogether."

He troubled the flame with a little Dynamis. It shook, and went out.

He woke it again and put the whole ward aside. Then he fitted the altered piece back into the Atharim instrument and joined its filaments to the needle.

"Now watch."

He troubled the flame as before. It twisted hard, but this time nothing put it out. Under the scratched cover, the needle swung after it, back and forth, as the flame fought to keep its shape.

"Remarkable."

"It does not stop the failure. It measures it."

"It follows it. Look how quickly." Hephaestus leaned in. He troubled the flame again, several times and more lightly, and the needle went after each disturbance, though not always to the right place. "An ordinary ward notices a fault and acts. This one has been left to notice, and do nothing else."

He let the flame alone. The needle did not come back to its mark. It lay a little to one side, toward his own hand. He tapped the cover with his thumbnail, which had been split once and had grown out ridged. The needle stayed where it was.

"And it can't even find its own rest."

Hades watched the needle. The thing was crude enough to have been put together on a mortal's bench. What it did was not crude at all. Whoever had made it understood that the surest way past a defense was to learn first what the defense did when it was touched. Hades had spent most of his life building defenses.

"The workmanship is dreadful," Hephaestus said. "The idea is not."

"Could it be used to examine a Pyle?"

Hephaestus looked up.

"To learn how one is made? Not with this alone. But if someone took readings at particular points, and compared one Pyle with another, and troubled them a little to see what they did..." He did not finish.

"The man I took had drawn up a survey. Of the Pyle and the ground around it. He was most interested in how it was built."

"Was he."

"Could readings like these show him how a conjunction is held?"

"Not on their own. A needle's worth of readings won't teach anyone that. But they might show where a Pyle is tender, and how it behaves when it's pushed. What that's worth depends on who reads them." He put the instrument down. "Give a man who has never seen an arch built the measurements of every stone in it, and he learns nothing. Give the same measurements to a master builder."

"Would these changes have needed an artificer?"

"To make the ward, yes. To change one?" Hephaestus shook his head. "A skilled mortal could do it, if he understood what he had in his hands."

"You know the design."

"I should. It's mine. We stopped making this pattern years ago." He worked the altered piece free again and turned it to read the rim, and stopped. "Wait."

He held it closer to the light and traced a line of marks so fine Hades could barely see them.

"This part was never in my design. One of my mortal craftsmen worked out a better casing, and we used it for the rest of the series. These marks are his."

"Then you know who made it."

"Who improved it. Whether he had anything to do with this is another matter."

He touched the plate in his chair, and a compartment swung open on a row of ledgers. He chose one and laid it on the table.

"I can tell you which workshop made it. Perhaps when."

He turned through pages of close writing and stopped at an entry.

"Here. It came in during the last years we made them. Good work. Less metal, less weight, and it lost nothing." He swung the book round so Hades could read.

It was a small change, the kind no one would notice who did not know the original well.

"Is he still in your service?"

"No. He left some years ago." Hephaestus ran his finger down the facing page. "So did two others from the same workshop, though not together. One took a place in Lydia, if I remember. The other meant to set up a workshop of her own."

"And the man who made this change? Where did he go?"

"I don't know."

He searched the ledger again. The man's work had been recorded in detail, every change he had proposed and every commission he had worked on. His leaving had been given a date and nothing else.

"What was his name?"

Hephaestus turned back a page, though he did not seem to need it.

"Eupalamos."

"Was there anything unusual in his leaving?"

"Not that I remember. Mortals come and go, and this was years ago. I can ask the ones who worked beside him."

"I would be grateful for anything you learn."

Hephaestus frowned at the altered piece.

"It would be a mistake to think he had anything to do with this because his casing is in it. We made hundreds of these. Any number of them could have gone anywhere."

"You may be right. But someone came by one, understood enough of it to change it, and found it a new use."

Hephaestus picked up the empty casing. Beside the ward, it was almost an insult.

"That is what troubles me. Not that someone took my work apart. I've always told my apprentices to do exactly that. But whoever did this understood what the ward could do once it stopped doing what I made it for." He put it down. "And they cared enough about a Pyle to send someone to measure it."

Hades thought of the name in the ledger. The man was worth finding, if only to learn whether his knowledge had gone anywhere with him. But he was somewhere beyond the borders of Erebos, in lands that were his brother's affair, and not an hour ago Hades had sat on Zeus's terrace and left the Atharim to Apollo.

"I promised your father that Apollo would have whatever I learned of this device. He should have the name, and what you have found."

Hephaestus nodded. He laid a marker between the pages and closed the ledger.

"Do you think these Atharim understand what they've got?"

"The man I took did not. He was making observations to someone else's instructions."

"Then I should like to know what those observations were meant to show."

He began to put the pieces back into a shallow tray, and he took the most care with the ward.

"Keep it a while. I would appreciate your full account of it before it goes to Apollo. Send it to me first."

Hephaestus looked at him a moment longer than the request needed.

"Of course. I'll send you what I find."

"You have my thanks."

Beyond the door, voices went up in the laboratory, and then a burst of laughter.

"I should leave you to your apprentices. It sounds as though someone has tried to fly it again."

"Then you must come again, Uncle. Preferably before my children have children of their own. I'd like you to meet them before they're old enough to be frightened of you."

Hades's eyes went to the horse with six legs.

"I shall endeavor to be less neglectful."

Hephaestus laughed and held out his hand. Hades took it, and held it a moment before he let go.

The sentinels stepped aside for him, as obedient to his going as they had been to his coming. Hades thought them fortunate in their instructions.

He had promised Apollo the name, and Apollo would have it. He had promised nothing about where else he might look.

The waking world was not the only place a mortal man could be found.