“No, I mean Absolute Sleep was the fucking drug Hera used to knock him out,” says the Artificer. “It was a potion I helped develop into aerosol form, although Nyx was the original chemist.”

“Can you wake him?”

“Oh, I think so, yes, yes, I think so,” says Hephaestus, pulling small bags and boxes off the ribbons laced to his leather vest and harnesses, peering into the boxes, rejecting some things, setting other vials and small devices on the tapestry-rumpled table next to Zeus’s giant thigh.

While the bearded dwarf-god fusses and assembles things, Achilles takes his first close-up gaze at Zeus the Father of All Gods and Men, He Who Marshals the Storm Clouds.

Zeus is fifteen feet tall, impressive even as he sprawls on his back, spraddle-legged on the tapestry and table, heavily muscled and perfectly formed, even his beard oiled into perfect curls, but other than the minor matters of size and physical perfection, he is just a big man who has enjoyed a great fuck and gone to sleep. The divine penis—almost as long as Achilles’ sword—still lies swollen, pink, and flaccid on the Lord God’s oily divine thigh. The God Who Gathers Storms is snoring and drooling like a pig.

“This should wake him up,” says Hephaestus. He holds up a syringe—something Achilles has never seen before—ending in a needle more than a foot long.

“By the gods!” cries Achilles. “Are you going to stick that into Father Zeus?”

“Straight into his lying, lusting heart,” says Hephaestus with a nasty cackle. “This is one thousand cc’s of pure divine adrenaline mixed with my own little recipe of various amphetamines—the only antidote to Absolute Sleep.”

“What will he do when he wakes?” asks Achilles, pulling his shield in front of him.

Hephaestus shrugs. “I’m not going to hang around to find out. I’m QTing out of here the second I inject this cocktail. Zeus’s response to being wakened with a needle in his heart is your problem, son of Peleus.”

Achilles grabs the dwarf-god by the beard and pulls him closer. “Oh, I guarantee it will be our problem if it is a problem, Crippled Artificer.”

“What do you want me to do, mortal? Wait here and hold your hand? It was your fucking idea to wake him up.”

“It’s also in your interest to awaken Zeus, god of one short leg,” says Achilles, not relinquishing his grip on the immortal’s beard.

“How so?” Hephaestus squints out of his good eye.

“You help me with this,” whispers Achilles, leaning closer to the grungy god’s misshapen ear, “and in a week it could be you who sits on the golden throne in the Hall of the Gods, not Zeus.”

“How can that be?” asks Hephaestus, but he is also whispering now. He still squints, but suddenly there is an eagerness in that squinting.

Still whispering, still holding Hephaestus’s beard in his fist, Achilles tells the Artificer his plan.

Zeus awakens with a roar.

As good as his word, Hephaestus has fled the instant he injected the adrenaline into the Father of the Gods’ heart, pausing only to pull the long needle free and fling the syringe from him. Three seconds later Zeus sits up, roars so loudly that Achilles has to clasp his hands over his ears, and then the Father leaps to his feet, overturns the thirty-foot-long heavy wooden table, and smashes out the entire south wall of Odysseus’ house.

“HERA!!!!” booms Zeus. “GOD DAMN YOU!”

Achilles forces himself not to cringe and cower, but he does step back while Zeus rips out the last of the wall, uses a timber to smash the overhanging chariot-wheel candle-chandelier to a thousand pieces, destroys the heavy, tumbled table with one smash of his giant fist, and paces wildly back and forth.

Finally the Father of All Gods seems to notice Achilles standing in the doorway to the vestibule. “YOU!”

“Me,” agrees Achilles, son of Peleus. His sword is in its belt loop, his shield politely strapped over his shoulder rather than on his forearm. His hands are empty and open. The god-killing long knife that Athena had given him for use in murdering Aphrodite is in his broad belt, but out of sight.

“What are you doing on Olympos?” growls Zeus. He is still naked. He holds his forehead with his huge left hand and Achilles can see the headache pain throbbing through Zeus the Father’s bloodshot eyes. Evidently Absolute Sleep leaves a hangover.

“You are not on Olympos, Lord Zeus,” Achilles says softly. “You’re on the isle of Ithaca—under a golden cloud of concealment—in the banquet hall of Odysseus, son of Laertes.”

Zeus squints around him. Then he frowns more deeply. Finally he looks down on Achilles once again, “How long have I been asleep, mortal?”

“Two weeks, Father,” says Achilles.

“You, Argive, fleet-footed mankiller, you couldn’t have awakened me here from whatever potion-charm white-armed Hera used to drug me. Which god revived me and why?”

“O Zeus Who Marshals the Thunderheads,” says Achilles, lowering his head and eyes almost meekly, as he has seen the meek do so many times, “I will tell you all you seek to know—and it is true that while most of the immortals on Olympos abandoned you, at least one god remained your loyal servant—but first I must ask for a boon.”

“A boon?” roars Zeus. “I’ll give you a boon you won’t forget if you speak again without permission. Stand there and be silent.”

The huge figure gestures and one of the three remaining walls—the one that had held the quiver of poison arrows and the outline of a great bow—mists into a three-dimensional vision surface much like the holopool in the Great Hall of the Gods.

Achilles realizes that he is looking at an aerial view of this very house—Odysseus’ palace. He can see the dog Argus outside. The starved hound has eaten the biscuits and revived enough to crawl into the shade.

“Hera would have left a forcefield beneath my cloaking golden cloud,” mutters Zeus. “The only one who could have lifted it is Hephaestus. I will deal with him later.”

Zeus moves his hand again. The virtual display shifts to the summit of Olympos, empty homes and halls, the abandoned chariots.

“They have gone down to play with their favorite toys,” mumbles Zeus.

Achilles sees a daylight battle in front of the walls of Ilium. Hector’s forces seem to be pushing the Argives and their siege machines back to Thicket Ridge and beyond. The air is filled with volleys of arrows and a score or more of flying chariots. Thunderbolts and bright red beams lash back and forth above the mortal battlefield. Explosions ripple across the battlefield and fill the sky as the gods do battle with each other even as their champions fight to the death below.

Zeus shakes his head. “Do you see them, Achilles? They are as addicted as cocaine addicts, as gamblers at their tables. For more than five hundred years since I conquered the last of the Titans—the original Changelings—and threw Kronos, Rhea, and the other monstrous Originals down into the gaseous pit of Tartarus, we have been evolving our godly, Olympian powers, settling into our divine roles… for WHAT???”

Achilles, who has not been explicitly asked to speak, keeps his mouth shut.

“DAMNED CHILDREN AT THEIR GAMES!!” bellows Zeus and again Achilles has to cover his ears. “Useless as heroin junkies or Lost Era teenagers in front of their videogames. After this long decade of their conniving and conspiring and secret fighting though I forbid it, and slowing time so they can arm their pet heroes with nanotech powers, they simply have to see it all to the bitter end and make sure their side wins. AS IF IT MAKES ONE GODDAMNED BIT OF DIFFERENCE!!”

Achilles knows that a lesser man—and all men are lesser men in Achilles’ view—would be on his knees screaming from the pain of the divine bellow by now, but the ultrasonic boom and roar of it still makes him weak inside.