Hermes's Arc

Chapter 2 of 13

Hermes stood at the red circle on his map and tapped it with the butt of his winged staff. The descent was the wound. Now he had to stop the bleeding. He whistled, and his ram trotted close, scroll bags swaying. "How many are waiting?" The ram nudged open a bag. Hermes pulled a small bone tally from the staff's hollow grip. Forty-three notches. Forty-three souls, standing in a line that grew while he stood here counting. He flew down to see the gates himself. Bronze and obsidian, taller than a tower, set into red broken stone. The doors breathed orange light like a banked fire. He tried to dart through with a soul at his shoulder. The gates groaned. His sandals went heavy. His winged hat sagged. White feathers fell, one, two, three, drifting like ash. Past these doors, speed meant nothing. Souls could only be walked through, slow as grief. "Fine," Hermes muttered. "If I can't carry them faster, I'll carry more at once." He shook out a long rope of woven laurel from the ram's bag. He looped it gently around the first soul's wrist, then the next, then the next. A quiet chain. A caravan. He counted aloud as he tied. Twelve. Twenty. Thirty. The souls did not resist. They blinked at him like sleepy children on a long road. He stepped through the gates with the chain trailing behind him. The descent was still slow. Still a walk. But this time, when he reached the dark shore at the bottom, thirty souls stepped off behind him instead of one. He turned and looked back up the long throat of the gate. The line at the top had shrunk by a third. He climbed back up. He tallied again on the bone. He tied another chain. He walked again. By the fourth descent, the ram bleated from the top of the steps — the waiting crowd was nearly gone. Hermes leaned on his staff, breath steady for the first time in days. The bottleneck was still there. He could not break it. But he had widened what passed through it. He pinned a new note beside the red circle on his map: walk slow, carry many. Then he frowned. The chain had worked. But word would travel. If the gatekeeper below noticed thirty souls arriving at once, unannounced, ungreeted, there would be questions. And the one who asked them would not be kind.