[SPOILER: When the bodies are dragged out and the floors scrubbed and the tables put back where they belong, someone brings sulfur from the storeroom. It burns with a bitter reek that strips the inside of the nose and throat. The smoke rises through the high windows, carrying the ghost of death out into the clear air. It is ritual purification, the ancient way of cleaning a space the gods would otherwise refuse to look at. Odysseus walks through the hall from one end to the other, the only sound his footsteps on the stone. The blood has come out of the tile. The room looks like a hall again. But the smell of sulfur hangs everywhere, and underneath the sulfur is the thing the sulfur is trying to cover, and the cover is not complete. Cleansing the space takes one afternoon. Cleansing what happened in it does not.]
The Cleansing with Sulfur
After the slaughter, fire and bitter smoke. Sulfur burned in braziers to strip the death out of the air. It mostly works.