Altogether they seemed to make a likely fantasy that would fit well with my dreams during the past week. I wondered if I could have invented the cloth on Oceanus’s robe and the way it had felt, first satin cool and then velvet soft. My fingertips brushed against each other at the memory, and I looked down to see what I held in my hand. Still caught in my palm after a night in the river was the poor, plain, gray-and-white spotted stone—Hamiathes’s Gift.

Covering that hand with the other, I closed my eyes and thanked Hephestia, and Eugenides, Oceanus, Moira, Aracthus, and every god and goddess I could remember. Then I pulled my feet out of the river and dragged myself up to where the sand was dry and lay down to sleep a little longer. The magus, Pol, and Sophos found me there. They had seen the stone door from the cliff lying in the clear water beyond the waterfall and had walked downstream with their packs in case they might find my body and give it a decent burial before turning toward home. I woke to find them standing around me.

“Well,” the magus said when I rolled over, “that is good news at least.” As I sat up, he leaned over me. “It is a great relief to my conscience that you are not drowned, Gen.” He patted my shoulder awkwardly. “We are alive and you are alive, so this expedition was at least not the disaster of earlier ones. If we failed to retrieve Hamiathes’s Gift, well, perhaps someone else found it first, or perhaps it was never there at all.”

I had meant to make him wait a little, but he sounded so bleak that without meaning to, I rolled my hand over and opened the fist so that he could see the Gift, resting on my palm.

His knees seemed to weaken, and he squatted down beside me with his mouth open. I smiled at his wonder and my own delight. I was taken aback when he put his arms around my shoulders and hugged me like his own son, or anyway like a close relative.

“You are a wonder, Gen. I will carve your name on a stele outside the basilica, I promise.”

I laughed out loud.

“Where was it?”

I told him about the obsidian door and the stairway to the throne room, but I stumbled a little. When it came time to mention the gods, I passed over them. It didn’t seem right to talk about them in the light of day, with people who didn’t believe and might laugh. If the magus noticed, he didn’t comment.

“The river came down just as you said it might,” he told me. “And washed right across our campsite on the lower bank. So we owe you for our lives as well as for this.” He looked down at the stone he held in his hand.

“Is that really it?” Sophos asked. “How can you tell?”

The magus flipped it over so that he could see the lettering carved there, the four symbols of Hephestia’s ancient name.

“But it’s just a plain gray rock,” said Sophos.

“Do you have any doubts?” I asked.

“No,” Sophos admitted. “I just don’t understand why I am so sure.”

“In the story the other night,” I told Sophos, “when Hephestia rewarded Hamiathes at the end, she was supposed to have taken an ordinary stone from the river and dipped it in the water of immortality.”

“So it is just a rock?” he asked.

“Not entirely,” said the magus. “Look carefully at it in the sun.” He handed it back to me. I bounced it a moment on my palm. It was a rounded oval and just the weight, I thought, to go in a slingshot. But I looked closer at the letters carved in the side of it and saw the sun glint off something blue at the bottom of the carving.

“It’s a sapphire,” I said, “at least part of it is.” I peered down the hole bored from top to bottom, then flipped it over and, looking closely, could see where the water had worn the stone smooth and uncovered a few blue flecks of the gem inside.

“There is a description of it in the scrolls of the high priests of Eddis,” said the magus. “Whenever anyone produced a stone, the high priest compared it to the scroll’s description. No one but the priest could read the description, and so no one ever offered a successful copy. Probably because someone who is already as wealthy and powerful as the high priest of Eddis is difficult to corrupt.”

“Or he’s corrupt already and doesn’t want to share his power,” I said.

“But you know the description?” Sophos said to the magus.

“Yes.”

“How?” I asked.

“My predecessor visited the high priest during a trip as ambassador to Eddis. He offered the priest a drugged bottle of wine and then looked through his library while he was unconscious. He didn’t think that the description of the stone was particularly important at the time, but I found it noted in his journals after he disappeared.”

I shuddered at the idea of poisoning a high priest. For that sort of crime they were still throwing people off the edge of the mountain.

“You’re wet, Gen,” said the magus, mistaking the cause of my shivers. “Get into some dry clothes and get something to eat. Then if you have the strength, I’d like to get at least partway across the dystopia. The rest of our food is with Ambiades.”

So I ate the last of the jerky. The bread was gone. Sophos filled a cup with river water for me and set it aside until the silt settled. I had once again lost the tie for my hair, so I asked Pol for some string. He offered me two pieces of leather thong, one longer than the other. I tied up the end of my braid with the long one and kept the short one to use later. Then we began to pick our way back across the dystopia, the magus wearing Hamiathes’s Gift around his neck. It had passed out of my hands only a few hours after I had stolen it.

When the sun got hot in the middle of the day, we crawled into the shade of the tilted rocks and slept for a few hours. We reached the edge of the olive trees as the sun was setting, but we were still more than a mile above the campsite where we had left Ambiades. The sky was light as we walked south, but the groves were dark. Through the darkness we saw Ambiades’s fire blazing.

The magus shook his head. “He’ll have the fire watch out from fifty miles away.” He sent Pol ahead to put it out, or at least reduce the blaze, so that when the magus, Sophos, and I got to the clearing, Ambiades was over the first shock of seeing us return alive.

“I thought you were all dead,” he said. He didn’t admit that he’d kept the fire burning bright because he’d been afraid of our ghosts wandering back across the dystopia. While we were gone, he’d eaten most of the food, but the magus spared him any lectures, and we all went to sleep. I didn’t wake to see if anyone was keeping watch over me. I didn’t stir until the sun was up and I heard Ambiades moving around the camp, cleaning up the mess he’d made while we were gone. There was nothing for breakfast.

The magus intended to go down the edge of the Sea of Olives until we reached the nearest town to buy food for ourselves as well as some for the horses. “We’ll take a more direct route home. Now that we have the Gift, the quicker we go the better,” he said.

The horses must have been as happy as I was about the prospect of fresh food. The grazing was poor among the dried-up grasses. We packed up and rode back into the olives until we came to the overgrown maintenance road that turned toward the distant Seperchia. We came to a wide, shallow stream. As our horses stepped into the water, a group of mounted men swung out from behind a patch of dry oak and brambles where they had been hidden. I saw that they had swords in their hands. I didn’t wait to learn anything else.