It had all made them human again.

The human race had returned to Earth after more than fourteen hundred years of coma and indifference.

Harman realized that his and Ada’s child would have been fully human—perhaps the first real human being to be born after all those comfortable, inhuman, watched-over-by-false-post-human gods’ centuries of stasis—confronted by danger and mortality at every turn, forced to invent, pressured to create bonds with other human beings just to survive the voynix and the calibani and Caliban himself and the Setebos thing…

It would have been exciting. It would have been terrifying. It would have been real.

And it all would have led, could have led, might have led, back to The Sword of Allah.

Harman rolled to one side and vomited again. This time the vomitus consisted mostly of blood and mucus.

More rapid than I thought.

Eyes closed against the pain—all the varieties of pain, but most especially against the pain of this new knowledge—Harman felt on his right hip. The pistol was still secure there.

He undid the strap, pulled the weapon free of the stick-tite pad, used his other hand to rack the chamber the way Moira had shown him—chambering one of the shells—clicked off the safety, and held the muzzle to his temple.

The Demogorgon fills half of the flame-filled sky. Asia, Panthea, and the silent sister Ione continue to cower. The rocks and ridges and volcanic summits nearby are filling with gigantic, looming shapes—Titans, Hours, monster steeds, monster-monsters, Healer-type giant centipedes, inhuman Charioteers, more Titans, all coming to their positions like jurors showing up for a trial on the steps of a Greek temple. The thermskin goggles allow Achilles to see everything and he almost wishes they didn’t.

The monsters of Tartarus are too monstrous; the Titans too shaggy and titanic; the Charioteers and the things the Demogorgon had called the Hours aren’t really possible to bring into full focus at all. They make Achilles think of the time he cleaved a Trojan’s belly and chest open with a sword stroke and found a small human homunculus staring out at him, blue eyes seeming to blink at him through the shattered ribs and spilled entrails. It had been the only time he’d ever vomited on the battlefield. These Hour and Charioteer things were equally as difficult to look at.

As the Demogorgon waits for the monstrous jurors to sort themselves out and gather, Hephaestus pulls a slim cord from the helmet bubble of his absurd suit and clips the end of the line into the cowl of Achilles’ thermskin.

“Can you hear me now?” asks the crippled dwarf-god. “We have a few minutes to talk.”

“Yes, I hear you, but can’t the Demogorgon also? He did before.”

“No, this is a hardline. That Demogorgon is a lot of things, but not J. Edgar Hoover.”

“Who?”

“Never mind. Listen, son of Peleus, we have to coordinate what we’re going to say to this giant rabble and the Demogorgon. A lot depends on it.”

“Don’t call me that,” growls Achilles with a glare that has frozen battlefield enemies in their tracks.

The god Hephaestus actually takes an alarmed step back, accidentally pulling tight the communications cord between them. “Call you what?”

“Son of Peleus. I never want to hear that phrase again.”

The god of artifice holds up his heavily gauntleted hands, palms outward. “Fine. But we still have to talk. We only have a minute or two before this kangaroo court commences.”

“What is a kangaroo?” Achilles is growing tired of this mini-god’s double-talk. The fleet-footed mankiller’s sword is in his hand. He has a strong suspicion that all he has to do to kill this so-called immortal is slash a gash in the bearded fool’s metal suit, and then step back to watch the god of fire choke to death on the acid air. Then again, Hephaestus is an Olympian immortal, even without the big bug’s Healing tanks back on Olympos. So perhaps, as Achilles had, the impudent bearded cripple, exposed to Tartarus’ acid air, would just cough, gag, retch, and sprawl around in pain for an eternity until one of the Oceanids ate him. It is a powerful impulse in Achilles to find out.

He resists the urge.

“Never mind,” says Hephaestus. “What are you going to say to the Demogorgon? Shall I do all the talking for us?”

“No.”

“Well, we need to get our stories straight. What are you going to ask the Demogorgon and the Titans to do other than kill Zeus?”

“I am not going to ask this Demogorgon thing to kill Zeus,” Achilles says firmly.

The bearded dwarf-god looks surprised behind the glass of his head-bubble. “You’re not? That’s why I thought we were here.”

“I am going to kill Zeus myself,” says Achilles. “And feed his liver to Argus, Odysseus’ dog.”

Hephaestus sighs. “All right. But for me to sit on the throne of Olympos—the deal you offered me and which Nyx agreed to—we still need to convince the Demogorgon to intercede. And the Demogorgon is insane.”

“Insane?” says Achilles. Most of the monstrous shapes seem to be in position now among the ridgelines, cindercones, and lava flows.

“You heard the thing going on about the God supreme, didn’t you?” says Hephaestus.

“I don’t know which god Demogorgon speaks of, if not Zeus.”

“Demogorgon is speaking of some single, supreme god of the entire universe,” says Hephaestus, his already raspy voice rasping even more over the communications line. “One god with a capital ‘G’ and no others at all.”

“That’s absurd,” says Achilles.

“Yes,” agrees the god of fire. “That’s why the Demogorgon’s race exiled him to this prison world of Tartarus.”

“Race?” says Achilles incredulously. “You mean there’s more than one of these Demogorgons?”

“Of course. Nothing living comes in complete sets of one, Achilles. Even you must have learned that. This Demogorgon is as crazy as a Trojan shithouse rat. He worships some single all-powerful capital-G god and sometimes refers to him as ‘the Quiet.’ ”

“The Quiet?” Achilles tries to imagine any god being a silent god. The concept is certainly something out of his experience.

“Yes,” growls Hephaestus over the cowl earphones. “Only this ‘the Quiet’ isn’t all of the single all-powerful capital-G god, but is just one of many manifestations of Him… capital H there.”

“Enough with the capitals,” says Achilles. “So the Demogorgon does believe in more than one god.”

“No,” insists the god of fire and artifice. “This big God just has many faces or avatars or forms, sort of like Zeus when he wants to screw a mortal woman. You remember once Zeus turned into a swan to…”

“What the fuck does all this have to do with the hearing that’s going to start in about thirty fucking seconds?” shouts Achilles over his thermskin microphones.

Hephaestus claps his hands over his glass bubble where his ears should be. “Hush,” hisses the dwarf-god over the intercom. “Listen, this has everything to do with our argument to convince the Demogorgon to release the Titans and the others here to attack Zeus, wipe out the current Olympians, and install me as the new king on Olympos.”

“But you just said the Demogorgon is a prisoner here.”

“I did. But Nyx—Night—opened the Brane Hole from Olympos to here. We can go back that way unless it closes before this goddamned hearing, trial, town meeting, whatever it is, gets under way. Besides, I think the Demogorgon can leave whenever it wants to.”

“What kind of prison is it that allows you to leave whenever you want to?” asks Achilles. He’s beginning to think that it’s the bearded dwarf-god who’s the lunatic here.

“You have to know a little about the Demogorgon’s race,” says the bubble-head on top of the iron-bubbled body. “Which is all anyone knows about them… very little. This Demogorgon is imprisoning himself here because he was told to. He can quantum teleport anywhere, any time… if he thinks it’s important enough to. We just have to convince him it’s important enough to.”