Moira shook her head. “Hephestia sends no message.”

“And the God of Thieves? Have I failed him, that he did not defend me? Are my gifts at his altar insufficient, that I lost his favor?”

“I cannot say, Eugenides.”

“Then I will wait here.” He laid his head back against the edge of the table.

“Eugenides,” said Moira, “you cannot demand the presence of the Great Goddess. The gods are not accountable to men.”

“I can,” said Eugenides without lifting his head. “I can demand. Whether my demands are met or not, I can demand. I can act as I choose and not as some god directs.”

“Eugenides,” Moira warned.

“You betrayed me,” said Eugenides. “Betrayed me to Attolia. You are the gods of Eddis, and you betrayed me to Attolia and to the Mede.” His hand fanned out for a moment in the sticky blood on the table before clenching again into a fist. “You betrayed me, and I can demand to know why if I choose.”

“Eugenides, no,” Moira warned for the third time.

“Yes!” screamed Eugenides, and the windows of the solarium shattered and the air was filled with broken glass.

“Rare the man whose gods answer him,” the queen of Attolia said dryly when an agitated household reported shattered windows throughout the palace.

As every pane of glass broke into a hundred pieces that filled the air and dropped and shattered again on the stone floor, Eugenides threw himself to the floor, covering his head with his arms. Glass pattered down over him. He lay and listened as the glass slid across stone, the fragments rubbing against each other in quiet music. The wind stopped, and the sound of the moving glass faded, but the pressure in the room grew. He could feel it against his eardrums. He was terrified. Not frightened as he had been in the past, but panicked like an animal caught in a trap or a man whose solid world shifts under his feet in an earthquake. He’d been in earthquakes before, in the mountains. He took a deep breath.

“You betrayed me,” he shouted, his voice muffled by his arms. He remembered the Mede who had appeared on the mountainside without any explanation. “Twice,” he wailed. “You betrayed me twice. What are the Medes, that you support them? Am I not your supplicant? Have I not sacrificed at your altars all my life?”

“And believed in us all your life?” a voice asked, a voice that was a variation in the pressure in his ears. Eugenides shuddered at the gentleness. No, he hadn’t believed. Most of the sacrifices had been for form’s sake, a meaningless ritual to him at the time.

“Have I offended the gods?” he asked in despair before rage burned the despair away. “And if I have offended the gods,” he yelled, almost unable to hear his own words, “then why didn’t I fall? It is the curse of thieves and their right to fall to their deaths, not—not—” He folded his arms across his chest, tucking the crippled one under and curling over it, unable to go on.

“Who are you to speak of rights to the gods?” the voice asked, gentle still.

The room was dark around Eugenides, and the darkness pressed him until he couldn’t breathe, until he was aware of nothing but the pressure. He was nothing, the smallest particle of dust surrounded by a myriad of other particles of dust, and put all together, they were…nothing but dust. Alone, separated from the others, in the eye of the gods he may have been, but he remained, still, dust. He struggled to inhale and whispered, “Have I offended the gods?”

“No,” said the voice.

“Then why?” he sobbed, clutching his arm tighter, though the blisters under the cuff were individual pains as sharp as knives. “Why?”

In the darkness behind his closed eyelids, Eugenides saw red fire flicker. When it was gone, the darkness afterward was a vision of a night with stars in the sky and a black silhouette that was the Sacred Mountain in Eddis. There was a gray plume of smoke, lighter than the surrounding blackness. The plume of smoke lightened, and the stars faded as the day dawned. Then, without warning, the top of the mountain exploded and the fire returned, flashing on the undersides of a cloud of ash and smoke wider than the mountain, wider than all the valleys of Eddis. Eugenides watched as boiling rock swept down the remains of the mountain, filling the valleys with smoking ruin. He saw the houses of the city exploding one after another and the people running, a woman with a little child suddenly engulfed in flame. The ground shuddered under his feet. The red, heaving wall of melted rock bore down on him, and he couldn’t move. His skin grew warm and then hot until it felt as dry as paper and as ready to burn. He could smell the hair of his eyebrows singeing, and he still couldn’t move. He squeezed his eyes shut, but they were shut already, and the vision remained as clear. He threw himself backward and could feel the broken glass around him cutting into his skin. But he was still on his stomach and no farther from the intense heat. The magma rolled closer. He screamed and screamed again.

On her throne Attolia sat and waited. The room was empty, and the silence echoed. All night the clouds had gathered above the palace, and the thunder had rumbled. After many hours she rose and left the throne room, collecting the inevitable retinue of servants and courtiers as she left the palace and rode to the temple of the new gods. The priests must have been warned of her coming. They met her in the pronaos and stood silently by while she wandered through the temple to the altar. She lifted the heavy gold candlesticks and carefully replaced them. She tilted the ceremonial offering bowl and listened to the musical jingle of the gold and silver disks carved with praise and supplications as they slid across the metal bottom of the bowl. She walked again the length of the temple. It was cold and empty. Perhaps the invaders’ gods had left with the invaders. She didn’t know. She knew only that the room was empty, as empty as her throne room, to which she returned. She sent her court away and her servants to bed and settled herself on the throne. When everything was still, she bowed her head and spoke to the darkness.

“Give him back to me,” she said, “and I will build your altar at the highest point of the city’s acropolis and around it build a temple in which you will be honored so long as Attolia remains.” There was no answer. She sat and waited.

“Eugenides.” A voice as gentle as rain and as cool as water called his name, and he ceased his screaming to listen. “Nothing mortals make lasts; nothing the gods make endures forever. Do you understand?”

“No,” said Eugenides hoarsely. Slowly the vision of the Sacred Mountain faded. He was still on his stomach on the floor of the solarium. He sensed the solid stone walls all around him.

“Do you know me?” the new voice asked.

“No,” Eugenides whispered.

“You sacrificed once at my altar.”

“Forgive me, goddess. I do not know you.” Beyond his conviction that it was a goddess who spoke, he could make no guess at her identity. He wasn’t sure if she meant that he had sacrificed to her years ago and stopped or that it was only once that he had made a sacrifice in her honor. He could only wonder how many different gods he had sacrificed to just once. All his life he had left sacrifices in passing at various tiny temples and altars in his own country and in Sounis and Attolia as well: a coin, or a piece of fruit, a handful of olives, a piece of jewelry he’d previously stolen and didn’t care to keep. Lately he’d been more thoughtful in his sacrifices, but he still didn’t remember most of them, only that he was careful to offer at whatever temples and altars of water immortals he encountered, hoping to make up for any lingering disfavor on the part of Aracthus. He’d made a particularly nice sacrifice at the altar of Aracthus before he’d stepped into the chasm of his watercourse, but that hadn’t been his first sacrifice to the river, and anyway, it was a goddess who spoke. A goddess to whom he clearly should have paid greater attention.