[SPOILER: The doors of the megaron close. The bronze bolt slides home. Telemachus and the loyal herders had set it up — weapons stripped from the walls earlier, the suitors’ way out quietly removed. Once the bolt is in, the room stops being a hall and starts being a trap. Some of the suitors try to rush the doors anyway. They die before they reach them. The bolt is a small bronze object that makes the rest of the night arithmetic — fixed number of men, fixed number of arrows, no exit. Cunning expressed as a piece of metal sliding into a slot.]
The Bronze Bolt / Hall Doors
The lock that turned a banquet hall into a killing room. Once the bolt slid home, the suitors had nowhere to run.