“Follow me,” she says, rising fluidly and walking out the private side door of her white marble room.

I jump and follow.

The Muse is god-sized—that is to say, over seven feet tall but in perfect human proportions, less voluptuous than some of the goddesses but built like a Twentieth Century female triathlete—and even in the lessened gravity here on Olympos, I have to scramble to keep up as she strides across the close-cropped green lawns between white buildings.

She pauses at a chariot nexus. I say “chariot” and it is vaguely chariotlike—low, roughly horseshoe shaped, with a niche in the side allowing the Muse to step up into it, but this chariot lacks horses, reins and driver. She grips the railing and beckons me up.

Hesitantly, heart pounding wildly now, I step up and stand to one side as the Muse taps her long fingers across a gold wedge that might be some sort of control panel. Lights blink. The chariot hums, crackles, becomes suddenly girdled by a latticework of energy, and rises off the grass, twirling as it climbs. Suddenly a holographic pair of “horses” appears in front of the chariot and gallop as they seem to pull the chariot through the sky. I know that the holographic horses are there for the Greeks’ and Trojans’ need for closure, but the sense that they are real animals pulling a real chariot through the sky is very strong. I grab the metal bar along the rim and brace myself, but there is no sense of acceleration even as the transport disk jigs and jags, swoops once a hundred feet above the Muse’s modest temple, and then accelerates toward the deep depression of the Lake of the Caldera.

Chariot of the gods! I think and blame the unworthy thought on fatigue and adrenaline.

I’ve seen these chariots a thousand times, of course, flying near Olympos or above the plains of Ilium as the gods shuttle to and fro on their godlike business, but I’ve always seen them from my vantage point on the ground. The horses look real from that angle and the chariot itself seems far less substantial when you’re in one, flitting a thousand feet above the summit of a mountain—volcano, actually—that itself rises some 85,000 feet above the desert floor.

The summit of Olympos should be airless and ice-covered, but the air here is as thick and breathable as it is some seventeen miles lower where the scholic barracks huddle at the base of the volcanic cliffs, and rather than ice, the broad summit is covered with grass, trees, and white buildings large enough and grand enough to make the Acropolis look like an outhouse.

The figure eight of the Lake of the Caldera at the center of the summit of Olympos is almost sixty miles across and we zip across it at near-supersonic speed, some forcefield or bit of godly magic keeping the wind from tearing our heads off at the same time it muffles the sound. Hundreds of buildings, each with acres of manicured lawn and gardens around it, gods’ homes, I presume, surround the lake, while great three-tiered autotriremes move slowly across the blue waters. Scholic Bruster Lin once told me that he estimated that Olympos was the size of Arizona, its grassy summit equaling approximately the surface area of Rhode Island. It was strange to hear of things here being compared to states on that other world, in that other time, from that other existence.

Clinging to the thin railing with both hands, I peek out beyond the mountaintop. The view is breathtaking.

We are high enough that I can see the curve of the world. To the northwest, the great blue ocean extends to that inverted cusp of horizon. To the northeast runs the coastline, and I fancy that even from this distance I can see the great stone heads that mark the boundary between sea and land. Due north is the scythe of the unnamed archipelago just visible from the shoreline a few miles from our scholic barracks, then nothing but blue again all the way to the pole. To the southeast I can see three other tall volcanic summits thrusting above the horizon, obviously lower than Olympos’s summit but, unlike climate-controlled Olympos, white with snow. One of them, I guess, must be Mount Helicon, home to my Muse and her sisters, if sisters she has. To the south and southwest, for hundreds of miles, I can make out a succession of cultivated fields, then wild forests, then red desert beyond, then perhaps forest again, until land blends with clouds and haze and no amount of blinking or rubbing of eyes can resolve the detail there.

The Muse sweeps our chariot around and descends toward the west shoreline of the Lake of the Caldera. I see now that the white specks I noticed during our crossing of the lake are huge white buildings, fronted with columns and steps, graced with gigantic pediments, and decorated with statuary. I am sure that no scholic has seen this part of Olympos . . . or at least seen it and lived to tell the rest of us about it.

We descend near the largest of the giant buildings, the chariot touches down, and the holographic horses wink out of existence. Several hundred other sky chariots are parked helter-skelter on the grass.

The Muse removes what looks to be a small medallion from her robe. “Hockenberry, I have been ordered to take you somewhere where you cannot be. I have been directed by one of the gods to give you two items that might keep you from being crushed like a gnat if you are detected. Put these on.”

The Muse hands me two objects—a medallion on a chain and what looks to be a tooled-leather hood. The medallion is small but heavy, as if it is made of gold. The Muse reaches forward and slides one part of the disc counterclockwise from the rest. “This is a personal quantum teleporter such as the gods use,” she says softly. “It can teleport you any place you can visualize. This particular QT disk also allows you to follow the quantum trail of the gods as they phase-shift through Planck space, but no one—except the god who gave me this—can trace your path. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I say, my voice almost quavering. I shouldn’t have this thing. It will be my death. The other “gift” is worse.

“This is the Helmet of Death,” she says, tugging the ornate leather headpiece over my head, but leaving it folded around my neck like a cowl. “The Hades Helmet. It was made by Hades himself and it is the only thing in the universe that can hide you from the vision of the gods.”

I blink stupidly at this. I vaguely remember scholarly footnotes about “the Helmet of Death,” and I remember that Hades’ name itself—in Greek, Äidès was thought to mean “the unseen one.” But as far as I knew, Hades’ Helmet of Death was mentioned only once by Homer, when Athena donned it to be invisible to the war god, Ares. Why on earth or Olympos would any goddess loan this thing to me? What are they setting me up to do for them? My knees go weak at the thought.

“Put the helmet on,” orders the Muse.

Clumsily, I tug up the thick leather. There are devices embedded in the material, circuit chips, nanotech machines. The helmet has clear, flexible eyepieces and mesh material over the mouth, and when I’ve pulled on the full cowl, the air seems to ripple strangely around us, although my sight is otherwise unaffected.

“Incredible,” says the Muse. She is staring right past me. I realize that I’ve achieved the goal of every adolescent boy—true invisibility, although how the helmet shields my entire body from sight, I have no idea. My impulse is to run like hell and hide from the Muse and all the gods. I stifle the impulse. There has to be a catch here. No god or goddess, not even my minor Muse, would give a mere scholic such power without safeguards.

“This device will shield you from the sight of all the gods except the goddess who authorized me to give it to you,” the Muse says quietly, staring at the empty air to the right of my head. “But that goddess can see and track you anywhere, Hockenberry. And although sound, scent, even heartbeat is muffled by the medallion, the gods’ senses are beyond your understanding. Stay close to me in the next few minutes. Tread lightly. Say nothing. Breathe as lightly and shallowly as possible. If you are detected, neither I nor your divine patroness can protect you from the wrath of Zeus.”