“Then, ignoring my objections as all husbands will, the well-meaning but meddling Peleus carried our babe off to Chiron, the wisest and least man-hating of all the centaur race, rearer of many heroes himself, who tended Achilles through childhood, healing him by herbs and salves known only to the centaur savants, then growing him strong by nourishing him with the livers of lions and the marrow of bears.”

“Would that the little bastard had died in the flames,” said Aphrodite.

Thetis lost her mind at that and rushed at the goddess of love, wielding no weapons but the long fishbone-nails at the ends of her fingers.

As calmly as if shooting for a prize during a friendly picnic game, Aphrodite raised her bow and shot an arrow through Thetis’ left breast. The Nereid fell lifeless to the grass and the black pregoddess essence of her whirled around her corpse like a swarm of black bees. No one rushed to claim and capture the body for repair by the Healer in the blue-wormed vats.

“Murderess!” cried a voice from the depths, and Nereus himself—the Old Man of the Sea—rose from the trackless depths of Olympos’ Caldera Lake, the self-same lake he’d banished himself to eight months earlier when his earthly oceans had been invaded by moravecs and men.

“Murderess!” boomed the giant amphibian again, looming fifty feet above the water, his wet beard and braided locks looking like nothing so much as a mass of writhing, slithering eels. He cast a bolt of pure energy at Aphrodite.

The goddess of love was thrown a hundred feet backward across the lawn, her god-blood-generated forcefield saving her from total destruction, but not from flames and bruises as her lovely body smashed through two huge pillars in front of the Hall of the Gods and then through the thick granite wall itself.

Ares, her loving brother, cast his spear through Nereus’ right eye. Roaring so loudly that his pain could be heard in Ilium an infinite distance below, the Old Man of the Sea pulled out both spear and eyeball and disappeared beneath the red-frothed waves.

Phoebus Apollo, realizing that the Final War had begun, raised his bow before Hera or Athena could react and fired two heat-seeking arrows that honed on their hearts. His drawing and firing were faster than even immortal eye could follow.

The arrows—unbreakable titanium both, coated with their own quantum fields to penetrate other forcefields—nonetheless stopped in midflight. And then melted.

Apollo stared.

Athena threw back her helmeted head and laughed. “You’ve forgotten, upstart, that when Zeus is well and truly gone, the aegis is programmed to obey our commands, Hera’s and mine.”

“You started this, Phoebus Apollo,” white-armed Hera said softly. “Now feel the full force of Hera’s curse and Athena’s anger.” She gestured ever so slightly and a boulder weighing at least a half a ton, lying at water’s edge, tore itself loose from Olympos’ soil and hurtled at Apollo at such speeds that it twice broke the sound barrier before striking the archer in the side of his head.

Apollo flew backward with a great crash and clatter of gold and silver and bronze, tumbling head over heel for seven rods in his fall, his tightly curled locks now covered with dust and soiled with lake mud.

Athena turned, cast a war lance, and when it fell some miles across the Caldera Lake, Apollo’s white-columned home there exploded in a mushroom of fire, the million bits of marble and granite and steel rising two miles toward the humming forcefield above the summit.

Demeter, Zeus’s sister, cast a shock wave at Athena and Hera that only folded air and blast around their pulsing aegis, but which lifted Hephaestus a hundred yards into the air and slammed him far across the summit of Olympos. Red-armored Hades answered back with a cone of black fire that obliterated all temples, ground, earth, water, and air in its wake.

The nine Muses screamed and joined Ares’ rallying pack. Lightning leaped down from chariots that QT’d in from nowhere and the shimmering aegis lashed up from Athena. Ganymede, the cup bearer and only nine-tenths immortal, fell in the no-man’s-land and howled as his divine flesh burned away from mortal bones. Eurynome, daughter of Okeanos, cast her lot with Athena but was immediately set upon by a dozen Furies, who flapped and flocked around her like so many huge vampire bats. Eurynome screamed once and was borne away over the battlefield and beyond the burning buildings.

The gods ran for cover or for their chariots. Some QT’d away, but most massed in war groups on one side of the great Caldera or the other. Energy fields flared in red, green, violet, blue, gold, and a myriad of other colors as individuals melded their personal fields into focused fighting shields.

Never in the history of these gods had they fought like this—with no quarter, no mercy, no professional courtesy of the sort one god always gave another, with no assurance of resurrection at the many, many hands of the Healer or hope of the healing vats—and worst of all, with no intervention from Father Zeus. The Thunderer had always been there to restrain them, cajole them, threaten them into something less than a killing rage against their fellow immortals. But not this day.

Poseidon QT’d down to Earth to oversee the Achaean destruction of Troy. Ares rose, trailing bloody golden ichor, and rallied threescore of outraged gods—Zeus loyalists all, Trojan supporters all—to his side. Hephaestus QT’d back from where he had been blasted and spread a poison black fog across the battlefield.

The War between the Gods began that hour and spread to all Olympos and down to Ilium in the hours that followed. By sunset, the summit of Olympos was on fire and parts of the Caldera Lake had boiled away to be replaced by lava.

Riding out to meet Achilles, Penthesilea knew without doubt that every year, month, day, hour, and minute of her life up to this second had been nothing more than prelude to today’s sure pinnacle of glory. Everything that had come before, each breath, every bit of training, each victory or loss on the battlefield, had been but preparation. In the coming hours her destiny would be fulfilled. Either she would be triumphant and Achilles dead, or she would be dead and—infinitely worse—cast down in shame and forgotten to the ages.

The Amazon Penthesilea did not plan on being cast down in shame and forgotten to the ages.

When she awoke from her nap in Priam’s palace, Penthesilea had felt strong and happy. She had taken time to bathe, and when she was dressing—standing in front of the polished metal mirror in her guest quarters—she paid attention to her own face and body in a way she rarely if ever did.

Penthesilea knew that she was beautiful as judged by the highest standards of men, women, and gods. She did not care. It simply was not important to her warrior soul. But this day, while unhurriedly donning her cleaned garments and shining armor, she allowed herself to admire her own beauty. After all, she thought, she would be the last thing that fleet-footed mankilling Achilles would ever see.

In her midtwenties, the Amazon had a child-woman’s face and her large green eyes seemed even larger when framed, as they were now, by her short blond curls. Her lips were firm and rarely given to smiling, but they were also full and rosy. The body reflected in the burnished metal was muscled and tanned from hours of swimming, training, and hunting in the sun, but not lean. She had a woman’s full hips and behind, which she noticed with a slight pout of disapproval as she buckled her silver belt around her thin waist. Penthesilea’s breasts were higher and rounder than most women’s, even those of her fellow Amazons, and her nipples were pink rather than brown. She was still a virgin and planned to stay that way for the rest of her life. Let her older sister—she winced at the thought of Hippolyte’s death—be seduced by men’s tricks and carried away to captivity to be used as breeding stock by some hairy man; this would never be Penthesilea’s choice.