I see what happens next in retinal echo, it occurs so quickly.

Achilles’ hand comes up from his own belly and belt with a short blade in his fist.

He rams the blade in under Zeus’s bearded chin, twists the knife, rams it deeper, rotates it with a cry louder even than Zeus’s scream of horror and pain.

Zeus stumbles backward into the hallway, crashing into the next room. Hephaestus and I run to follow.

They are in Odysseus’ and Penelope’s private bedchamber now. Achilles pulls the knifeblade free and the Father of All Gods raises both his massive hands to his own throat, his own face. Golden ichor and red blood both are pulsing into the air, flowing from Zeus’s nostrils and open, gaping mouth, filling his white beard with gold and red.

Zeus falls backward onto the bed. Achilles swings the knife far back, plunges it deep into the god’s belly, and then drags it up and to the right until the magical blade rasps on rib cage.

Zeus screams again, but before he can clutch himself lower, Achilles has pulled out yards of gray gut—gleaming god intestine—and wrapped it several times around one of the four posts of Odysseus’ great bed, tying it off in a mariner’s swift and sure knot.

That post is the living olive tree Odysseus fashioned this room and bed around, I think in a daze. The lines from The Odyssey come back to me from the Fitzgerald translation I first read as a boy, Odysseus speaking to his doubting Penelope—

An old trunk of olive grew like a pillar on our building plot, and I laid out our bedroom round that tree, lined up the stone walls, built the walls and roof, gave it a doorway and smooth-fitting doors. Then I lopped off the silvery leaves and branches, into a bedpost, drilled it, let it serve as a model for the rest. I planned them all, inlaid them all with silver, gold and ivory, and stretched a bed between—a pliant web of oxhide thongs dyed crimson.

Now more than the oxhide thongs are dyed crimson as Zeus struggles to free himself from the restraining tether of his own tied-off intestines, golden ichor and all-too-human-red-blood flowing from his throat, face, and belly. Blinded by his own pain and gore, Mighty Zeus feels for his tormenter by swinging his arms. Every step and tug in search of Achilles pulls more of his gleaming gray insides out. His screaming makes even the unflinching Hephaestus cover his ears.

Achilles prances lightly out of reach, dancing in closer only to slash and hack at the blind god’s arms, legs, thighs, penis, and hamstrings.

Zeus crashes down on his back, still connected to the living olive tree bedpost by thirty feet or more of knotted gray gut, but the immortal being still thrashes and howls, spewing ichor across the ceiling in complicated Rorschachs of divine arterial spray.

Achilles leaves the room and returns with his battle sword. He pins Zeus’s thrashing left arm with one battle-sandaled foot, raises the sword high, and brings it down so hard it strikes sparks on the floor after passing through Zeus’s neck.

The head of the Father of All Gods tumbles free, rolling under the bed.

Achilles goes to one gory knee and seems to be burying his face in the giant open wound that had been Zeus’s bronzed and muscled belly. For one perfectly horrible second I am sure that Achilles is eating the guts out of his fallen foe, his face largely hidden in the abdominal cavity—a man turned pure predator, a ravaging wolf.

But he was only hunting.

“Ahah!” cries the fleet-footed mankiller and pulls a huge, still pulsating purplish mass from the tumble of glistening gray.

Zeus’s liver.

“Where is that goddamned dog of Odysseus’?” Achilles asks himself, his eyes gleaming. He leaves us to carry the liver out to the dog Argus cowering somewhere in the courtyard.

Hephaestus and I stand aside quickly to give Achilles room as he passes.

As the sound of the mankiller’s—godkiller’s—footsteps recede, both the god of fire and I look around the room.

Not a square inch of bed, floor, ceiling, or wall appears to have remained unsplattered.

The huge, headless corpse on the stone floor, still tethered to the olive-tree post, continues to twitch and writhe, its bloodied fingers flexing.

“Holy fuck,” breathes Hephaestus.

I want to tear my gaze away but cannot. I want to leave the room to go vomit quietly somewhere, but cannot. “What… how… it’s still… partially… alive,” I gasp.

Hephaestus grins his most insane grin. “Zeus is an immortal, remember, Hockenberry? He’s in agony even now. I’ll burn the bits in the Celestial Fire.” He stoops to retrieve the short knife Achilles had used. “I’ll burn this god-killing Aphrodite blade as well. Melt it down and pour it into something new—a plaque commemorating Zeus, maybe. I never should have made this blade for the bloodthirsty bitch.”

I blink and shake my head, then grab the hulking fire god by his heavy leather vest. “What will happen now?” I ask.

Hephaestus shrugs. “Just what we agreed on, Hockenberry. Nyx and the Fates, who have always ruled the universe—this universe, at least—will allow me to sit on the gold throne of Olympos after this mad second war with the Titans is over.”

“How do you know who will win?”

He shows me his uneven white teeth against his black beard.

From the courtyard comes a commanding voice. “Here, dog… here Argus… here, boy. That’s a nice pup. I have something for you… good dog.”

“They don’t call them ‘the Fates’ for nothing, Hockenberry,” says Hephaestus. “It will be a long and nasty war, fought more on Ilium Earth than on Olympos, but the few surviving Olympians will win… again.”

“But the thing… the cloud-thing… the Voice thing…”

“Demogorgon has gone home to Tartarus,” rumbles Hephaestus. “It cares not the least fucking fig what happens now on Earth, Mars, or Olympos.”

“My people…”

“Your pretty Greek friends are fucked up the ass,” says Hephaestus and then he smiles at his own wit. “But, if it makes you feel any better, so are the Trojans. Anyone who stays on Ilium Earth will be in the crossfire for the next fifty to a hundred years while this war goes on.”

I grab his vest harder. “You have to help us…”

He removes my hand as easily as an adult male would remove the clinging hand of a two-year-old child. “I don’t have to do a goddamned thing, Hockenberry.” He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, looks at the twitching thing on the floor behind, and says, “But in this case I will. QT back to your pitiful Achaeans and your woman, Helen, in the city and tell them to get their asses out of all high towers, off the walls, out of the buildings. There’s going to be a nine-point quake in old Ilium Town in a very few minutes. I need to burn this… thing… and get our hero back to Olympos so he can try to talk the Healer into waking his dead bimbo.”

Achilles is coming back. He is whistling and I can hear Argus’s nails scrabbling on stone as the dog eagerly follows.

“Go!” says Hephaestus, god of fire and artifice.

I reach for my medallion, realize it’s not there, realize I don’t need it, and QT well away from there.