Wheezing, moaning, Hephaestus glances at the linen-wrapped body of Penthesilea and says, “What brings you up to Olympos, fleet-footed Achilles? Bringing your laundry up to be washed?”

“Shut up,” gasps Achilles. The three days without food and the exertions of climbing sixty thousand feet on an airless mountain have taken too much out of him. He can feel his superhuman strength ebbing like water out of a sieve. Another minute and he’ll have to release Hephaestus—or kill him.

“Where did you get that knife, mortal?” asks the bearded and ichor-bleeding god.

“Pallas Athena entrusted me with it.” Achilles sees no reason to lie and unlike some—crafty Odysseus for one—he never lies anyway.

“Athena, eh?” grunts Hephaestus. “She is the goddess I love above all others.”

“Yes, I have heard this,” says Achilles. Actually, what Achilles has heard is that Hephaestus pursued the virgin goddess for centuries, trying to have his way with her. At one point he came close enough that Athena was batting Hephaestus’ turgid member away from her thighs—and Greeks coyly used the word for “thighs” to mean a woman’s pudenda—when, dry humping for all he was worth, the bearded cripple of a god ejaculated all over her upper legs just as the more powerful goddess shoved him away from her. As a child, Achilles’ stepfather, the centaur Chiron, had told him many tales in which the wool, erion, that Athena used to wipe away the semen, or the dust in which that semen fell, all played interesting roles. As a man and the world’s greatest warrior, Achilles had heard the poet-minstrels sing of “bridal dew”—herse or drosos in the language of his home isle—but these words also meant a newborn child itself. It was said that various human heroes—some included Apollon—had been born of this semen-impregnated wool or dust.

Achilles decides not to mention either tale right now. Besides, he’s almost out of strength—he needs to conserve his breath.

“Release me and I will be your ally,” says Hephaestus, gasping again. “We are like brothers anyway.”

“How are we like brothers?” manages Achilles. He has decided that if he has to release Hephaestus, he will drive the god-killing Athena dagger up through the god’s underjaw and into his skull, skewering the ar-tificer’s brain and pulling it free like spearing a fish from a stream.

“When I was flung into the sea not long after the Change, Eurynome, daughter of Okeanos, and your mother, Thetis, received me on their laps,” gasped the god. “I would have drowned had not your mother—dearest Thetis, daughter of Nereus—caught me up and cared for me. We are like brothers.”

Achilles hesitates.

“We are more than brothers,” gasps Hephaestus. “We are allies.”

Achilles does not speak because to do so would be to reveal his approaching weakness.

“Allies!” cries Hephaestus, whose ribs are snapping one after the other, like saplings in the cold. “My beloved mother, Hera, hates the immortal bitch Aphrodite, who is your enemy. My adored beloved, Athena, sent you on this task, you say, so it is my will to aid you in your quest.”

“Take me to the healing tanks,” manages Achilles.

“The healing tanks?” Hephaestus breathes deeply as Achilles relinquishes the pressure a bit. “You’ll be found out there now, son of Peleus and Thetis. Olympos is in the thrall of kaos and civil war this day—Zeus has disappeared—but there are still guards at the healing tanks. It is not yet dark. Come to my quarters, eat, drink, refresh yourself, and I will then take you directly to the healing tanks in the dead of night, when only the monstrous Healer and a few sleepy guards are there.”

Food? thinks Achilles. It’s true, he realizes, that he will hardly be able to fight—much less command others to bring Penthesilea back to life—unless he gets something to eat soon.

“All right,” grunts Achilles, pulling his legs from around the bearded god’s middle and pushing the Athena-blade back in his belt. “Take me to your quarters on the summit of Olympos. No tricks, now.”

“No tricks,” growls Hephaestus, scowling and feeling his bruised and broken ribs. “But it is an ill day when an immortal can be treated this way. Take hold of my arm and we will QT there now.”

“A minute,” says Achilles. He can barely lift Penthesilea’s body to his shoulder, he is so weak. “All right,” he says, grabbing the god’s hairy forearm, “we can go now.”

The voynix attacked a little after midnight.

After helping to make and serve dinner to the Ardis Hall multitudes, Ada had joined in the evening heavy outside work of reinforcing Ardis’s defenses. Despite requests from Peaen, Loes, Petyr, and Isis—all of whom knew she is pregnant—she stayed outside in the cold and light snow, helping to dig the ditches about a hundred feet inside the fences of the palisade. It had been Harman and Daeman’s idea—fire ditches, filled with their precious lantern oil and ignited if the voynix managed to break through the palisade—and Ada wished that Harman and Daeman were there that night to help dig.

The earth was frozen and Ada found that she was too weary to break through the soil, even though she had one of the sharper shovels. This frustrated her so much that she had to wipe away the tears and snot as she waited for Greogi and Emme to break through the frozen dirt before she could lift and shovel it away. Luckily, it was dark and no one was looking at her. The embarrassment of being seen crying would have made her blubber harder. When Petyr came from where he was working in the hall to finish first-floor defenses and asked her again to come in the house, at least, she told him truthfully that she loved working on the line out here with the hundreds of other laborers. The manual labor and the proximity of so many made her feel better and kept her from thinking about Harman, she said. It was the truth.

Some time after ten p.m., the ditches were finished. They were crude things, at best—five feet across, less than two feet deep, lined with plastic bags scavenged from Chom in previous weeks. Cans of the precious lamp oil—kerosene, Harman had called it—were in the hallway, ready to be carried out, poured, and ignited if the palisade defenders had to fall back.

“What happens after we use a year’s worth of lighting fuel in a few minutes?” Anna had asked.

“We sit in the dark,” had been Ada’s response. “But we’ll be alive.”

In truth, she had reservations about that assessment. If the voynix got past the outer perimeter, she doubted if a little wall of flame—if they even had time to ignite it—could hold them back. Harman and Daeman had helped draw up the plans for reinforcing Ardis’s doorways and attaching the heavy shutters on the inside of all the first—and second-floor windows—the work had been going on for three days and was almost completed, according to Petyr—but Ada had her doubts about that line of defense as well.

When the ditches were finished, guards doubled on the palisades, cans of kerosene set in the outer hall and people assigned to deliver them to the trenches in case of attack, the new flechette rifles and pistols distributed—there were enough to arm one out of every six persons at Ardis, a far cry from the two flechette rifles they’d had before—and Greogi was circling overhead in the sonie, keeping watch, Ada went inside to help Petyr with the interior defenses.

The heavy shutters were almost finished—large, solid planks of wood set deep into the ancient oak frames of Ardis Hall’s windows and ready to be swung shut and latched with iron locks forged in Hannah’s cupola out back. It looked so ugly that Ada just nodded her approval and then turned away to weep.

She remembered how beautiful and gracious Ardis Hall had been less than a year ago—part of a tradition that stretched back almost two thousand years. It had always been a wonderful place to live and to entertain—sophisticated, gracious, elegant. Less than a year ago they had celebrated Harman’s ninety-ninth birthday here in comfort with a huge feast out under the spreading elm and oak trees—lighted lanterns in the trees, food from all over the planet being served by floating servitors, docile voynix pulling carrioles and droshkies up the crushed-stone drive to the lighted front porch, with men and women from everywhere showing up in their finest robes and linens and elegant hairdos. Looking around at the scores of people in rough tunics milling in the cluttered main parlor, lanterns hissing and spitting in the dark, bedrolls on the floor and flechette rifles and crossbows stacked close to hand, fires burning in the fireplace not for ambience but for survival warmth with a score of exhausted and grimy men and women snoring near the hearth, muddy bootprints everywhere and heavy wooden shutters where her mother’s beautiful drapes once hung, Ada thought Has it come to this?