The staircase ended on Floor Ninety-Nine.
Zeus had stopped counting steps long ago. His knees were raw from the stone, and his collar had rubbed his throat to a bleeding ring, but none of it reached him anymore. All he could hear was the breathing. It had grown with every flight of stairs, vast and slow, until it filled the whole stairwell like the lungs of a mountain.
Antares dragged them out into a chamber that had no ceiling.
It was a cavern the size of a city, lit from below by a dull, sick glow. The floor was black glass, cracked in a thousand places. At the center, rising out of the stone like a frozen wave, stood a crystal larger than any tower in Orario. Light pulsed inside it in slow beats, the way a heart beats in a sleeping chest. Within the crystal, dim and huge and very still, there was a shape.
Odin knew it. He had not seen that shape in ten thousand years, and he knew it at once.
Before the crystal stood an altar of black stone, and on the altar stood a frame.
It was tall, two pillars joined at the top by a heavy crossbeam, with a wooden yoke set at its base for a pair of necks. The blade hung in the dark between the pillars. It was not made of steel. It was made of claws, hundreds of them, fused edge to edge into a single curved sheet, each one a different shade of scale and bone. Black claws, green claws, claws as pale as milk. The oldest were as long as a man's arm. The smallest were barely larger than a thumb.
"Every dragon you killed in the war," Antares said. He walked along the edge of the altar and touched the blade with two fingers, gently, the way a man touches a grave. "I collected them myself. Every one. Some I had to dig out of the ground with my hands." His voice did not rise. "I promised I would make something of them. It took a long time to decide what."
He threw the chains aside and shoved both gods toward the yoke.
Zeus screamed and tried to run. Antares caught him by the back of the collar and slammed him down onto the wood. Odin did not resist. He walked to the altar on his own feet and knelt beside his brother, and the yoke closed over their necks with a heavy clack.
"In the end," Antares said, "the dragons will have their vengeance."
Silence filled the cavern.
Odin did not speak to Antares. He had turned his head against the wood until his one eye could see the crystal, and he looked up at the shape inside it for a long, quiet time.
"Father," he said at last. His voice was rough but steady. "I do not know if you can hear me. I do not ask for mercy. I only want you to know whose fault this is."
The light in the crystal pulsed once.
"Ouranos put you in that stone..... And you deserve it! You stood by while lizards took the throne of the finest thing you ever made. YOU let them rule it, and you called it balance." Odin's mouth twisted. "I am going to die. I accept that. I cannot say I lived well enough to deserve more. But I know something now, and it is not wisdom, and it is not foresight. It is only a fact."
He drew a breath.
"You will fail again. The Shadow you made will rise above you, as it did before. I have seen it. I saw it in the dark, and I will carry it with me."
He turned his head forward and closed his eye.
Zeus was weeping.
He had been weeping since the stairs, in thick wet gasps that shook the whole frame. Now the sound rose into words. "Antares. Antares, please. Please. I will go. I will go far from here. I will hide in the farthest corner of the world and none of you will ever hear my name again. I will give you anything. Anything!"
"You have nothing," Antares said.
"I have Pandora!"
The cavern went very quiet.
Antares did not move. For a heartbeat his face showed nothing at all. Then something sharpened behind his eyes, slow and hungry, and he stepped closer to the yoke.
"Say that again."
"Pandora's Box." Zeus's voice cracked on every word. "I know where it is. I can tell you. But you must swear. You must swear you will let me live."
"I see." Antares crouched until his eyes were level with the weeping god's. "Yes. I will spare you."
Zeus's face crumpled in relief.
"But I will take your legs."
The relief died. Zeus stared at him, and his lips shook, and for a long moment he said nothing. His legs were a god's legs. They had carried him across a hundred wars. They had strode the halls of Heaven. Then the stones of the cavern pressed against his cheek, and he thought of the breathing in the walls.
"Yes," he said. "Yes. Take them. Only let me live."
"Where is the Box?"
"My daughter has it." The words came out in a rush. "Heracles. The girl who escaped. She serves the Shadow Monarch now. She has had it all this time, she took it from me, she took it..."
Antares threw back his head and laughed.
It was a dry, bitter, astonished sound, and it rolled around the cavern until the cracks in the glass floor began to hum. He remembered the office in Orario. The calm, level voice. The way the Shadow Monarch had sat with the Box in his own house, in his own lover's hands, and said nothing as Antares counted his three conditions on his fingers. Pretending not to know what it was. Pretending to be curious.
"Oh, he is good," Antares said softly. "He is very good."
He rose and turned to face the crystal, and the laughter drained out of him. For the first time, there was something almost like tenderness in his face.
"This sacrifice is for you, Father," he said.
"Antares." Zeus's voice was thin and shaking. "Antares, the promise. You swore."
The Dragon King looked back at him with a slow, quiet smile.
"I lied."
He snapped his fingers.
The blade of claws fell.
It made hardly any sound at all, a single clean sigh of air, and two heads dropped into the baskets at the altar's foot. They did not roll. They only lay there, eyes open, one with a look of stubborn peace and the other with a look of utter, childlike disbelief.
The bodies began to glow.
Golden motes lifted from the stumps of their necks, thousands of tiny drifting lights, rising like sparks from a dying fire. In every legend, the death of a god sent its light climbing up through the dark toward Heaven. These did not climb. They turned. They drifted sideways through the air and sank into the walls of the crystal, one by one, like rain soaking into dry earth.
The crystal drank them.
The pulse in its heart quickened, then flared, then surged so bright that the whole cavern flashed white. A long, loud crack rang out. A line of black split down the face of the stone from the crown to the base, and then another beside it, then a hundred. Pieces fell. Dust rolled off the sides of the seal in great clouds. Where there had been a mountain of ancient crystal there was now a thin, trembling shell.
There was almost nothing left.
Antares stood alone before it, with the dust drifting past his shoulders and the light of two dead gods fading in his hair. He looked up at the dim shape inside the cracks, and he smiled.
"Ah," he said. "Soon."
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