The Gates of Hell

by Michael Livingston

  Still turning to run, Selene threw her momentum toward the ground, watching as the girl—crying, trembling—closed her small, fragile hand around the Shard.

  The girl screamed, an inhuman, horrifying sound, and fire erupted from the point of the spear, ripping through the air in a white-hot line that lanced into the praetorians. For an instant she saw the clear face of one of the men who’d brought her to Caesar illuminated by the light of a second sun before him, but then that torrent of heat washed over him and melted him into a blinding glare.

  Selene closed her eyes from the shocking light of the flame. She hit the ground, rolling flat onto her belly, and the world abruptly lurched into speed once more.

  When it did, all she heard was screaming. And when she opened her eyes again, all she saw was fire.

  Juba didn’t have the Lance of Olyndicus. Neither did Corocotta. A small voice in her head wanted to laugh at what their arrogance had wrought: no one had given thought to the little girl who might kill them all.

  In seconds, the hillside around her had been engulfed in chaos and flames. The girl’s mouth was frozen open, as if she were still screaming, but no sound came from her throat now. Her body shook, quaking as the divine power of the Shard flowed through her and out through the spear point that she jerked from praetorian to praetorian, burning them alive with the fire of a hundred suns and at the same time running a barrier of flaming earth between the general staff and any help they might get from the encampment. Corocotta was behind her. He had wrestled the emperor of Rome from the saddle, and he had pulled Caesar’s own dagger in order to hold it at his captive’s throat to ward off any attacks. Most of the other officers were backing away in horror and fear. A few were running down the hillside, away from the fires, toward the line of catapults in the trees below.

  Tiberius, Selene saw, was among them. Even from behind she recognized him running away.

  As she stared after him, a part of her hoping that the little girl would turn the Lance to follow him, she heard again the sound of Juba’s voice, calling her name upon the wind that suddenly swept across her face.

  Juba!

  A wind!

  Selene’s hands scrambled into the folds of her dress, searching.

  She’d had it. The Palladium. She’d had it right here, standing right here—

  As Selene rolled to her side to look back where she’d been—already reaching across the earth in desperation to find the Shard—a darkness passed over the hillside, as if a great canopy had been passed over the sun, sending all into shadow.

  A deep, threatening rumble broke overhead.

  Selene’s arm was outstretched before her, and with wide eyes she saw the fine hairs upon it stiffening and rising, stretching toward the sky. In twin terror and fascination, she rolled to her back and stared up at a sky that had been, moments earlier, bright with the blue of dawn.

  No longer. Dark gray clouds were forming up out of the air, as if by some magic they’d been pulled out of the ether itself. They streamed together as they were born, coalescing and spinning, squeezing each other into a spinning, roiling mass that flashed and rumbled from the power within.

  It had been a long time since Selene had believed in the gods. She’d been nine years old when she’d learned that the One God, if he’d ever existed, was dead.

  But still in this moment she prayed for mercy from whatever god had come with such vengeance to behold.

  Closer, she heard Carisius shouting above the din of fire and wind and the sounds of war still raging in the valley below. “Riders! The flank! To arms!”

  Selene blinked, the world slowing again as she looked away from the gathering combustion of the heavens to where Carisius, still somehow on horseback, was pointing off down the road leading away from the encampment. There were a dozen riders pounding up the road there. Cantabrian riders.

  And another rider was in front of them: Juba. Beautiful Juba. In his hands he held the Trident of Poseidon. In his face he held agony and determination.

  He twisted in the saddle, looking back at the pursuing riders even as the hooves of his steed kicked clods of earth into a kind of thick rain. He held the Trident out, facing them.

  Selene felt the sonic pulse of the thunderous crash in nearly the same instant that she saw the bolt of lightning tear down from the clouds above. It impacted the Trident or Juba—or both—and then it ripped out and into the riders behind him. There was a flash and a crack of sound like the shattering of a stone, and the middle of the line of Cantabrian riders exploded.

  The other riders fell back. Juba rode on, bearing down upon her, the look on his face a near match for the wild, mindless terror in the eyes of the horse beneath him.

  Corocotta shouted out, and a blast of colder air rushed across Selene’s skin as the blazing fire of the Lance suddenly fell silent. The little slave was turning around now, following Corocotta’s instructions. The Shard in her hands was coming around, too, as she hobbled tiredly to face the other way. Toward Juba.

  At last, Selene saw the Palladium. It was on the ground, fallen into the grass where she’d stood. She lunged for it, gripping it hard, leaping into the darkness within, pulling the power up as quickly as she could.

  Faster! her mind screamed. Faster!

  In her haste she couldn’t control it. Every time she tried to pull the power up, it slid out of her grip, like a fish fumbling back into the waters from which it had come.

  She opened her eyes in the horrible realization that she wasn’t ready, that she wouldn’t be able to help. She saw the little slave girl unleash the power of the Lance once more, in a line of pure flame that shot out at her husband.

  In an instant there was an explosion that knocked the Palladium from Selene’s grip and flung her backward into the grass.

  Selene blinked up into the darkness of a stormy sky and saw that a torrent of rain was coming down like a stream, like a waterfall of slashing mist that descended down and down to the Trident in the hands of her beloved.

  Juba had dismounted, and he was trudging forward, driving the rain before him through the Trident, where it impacted against the slave girl’s fire and sent both heavenward in a geyser of angry steam.

  The slave girl made a sound like a long groan, and she staggered backward a step.

  Juba strode forward, foot by agonizing foot.

  And then he was there, almost beside Selene, nothing but the hot, wet smoke of fire and water in the air. He fell to his knees, face anguished. With one hand he reached out, straining to hold the Trident against the torrents of energy that were pounding into him, straining to reach her hand.

  Their fingertips touched, skin to skin, and began to curl around the other. A lifeline. A way out.

  A darkness beyond the storm rose up from behind her, and before she could cry out, Corocotta’s fist fell heavy against Juba’s cheek. The Trident fell from her husband’s suddenly limp hand. There was a mighty roar of air and water, fire and storm, all swallowed up into the heavens—and then the powers that had beaten down upon the hillside were gone.

  The other Cantabrian riders were there, dismounting and running. Selene saw one take the slave girl up into his arms as she collapsed. Two grabbed Octavian and began binding his hands.

  From somewhere came the sounds of shouts and blades striking one another, and a small part of her mind wondered if Carisius and the other generals were fighting to reach Caesar.

  But she didn’t really care. What mattered was Juba.

  She lifted herself to crawl forward, to cover him with her body, to somehow protect him in all this madness, but when she looked up she saw Corocotta looking down upon her, grinning. He barked something and two more of his men hurried up and began dragging Juba away. A third had a bundle of cloth and went for the Trident.

  “No!” Selene screamed, scrambling to get up, to go to her love.

  Something heavy struck her on the back of the skull. The world reeled, and she pitched forward.

  She was vaguely aw
are of her body falling on something hard and round. Some strangely detached part of her mind wondered if it was a rock of some kind, but then all the voices of her mind fell silent and she drifted away into the dark.

  13

  THE ISLAND IN THE NILE

  ELEPHANTINE, 26 BCE

  As he stood at the railing of the boat ferrying them up the Nile, Vorenus was glad for many things. There was the sun rising on another day. There was the old friend at his side whom he’d long thought dead. There was the prospect of ending his long journey to Alexandria and back. There was the fact that the ferry would reach the island long before the heat of the day sent the cooler breeze that was moving over the waters into retreat.

  But most of all, he was glad that his feet had finally stopped hurting. After surviving the ambush, he and Pullo had followed Khenti’s dying advice and left the canal, heading with all possible speed north to the road along the Mediterranean shore.

  All possible speed wasn’t as fast as it used to be.

  If they’d not stolen two horses from a farm on the second day, Vorenus feared that they would be out there still, trudging along in the dirt. He was fifty-two now, and while that didn’t seem to him to be a particularly lengthy age, Vorenus had to admit that he’d not been entirely kind to his body over those decades. And now he could hardly remember having felt so many pains in his feet and in his aching joints—except that he seemed to be thinking that very same thought more and more these days.

  That’s what getting old was, he guessed. Each day more tired than the last.

  Each day, perhaps, less useful than the last.

  Yet whatever toll those years had taken on him, Vorenus knew that they’d done far worse to his friend.

  Pullo had tried hard to be strong, to keep up with Vorenus, just as he had for so many decades of their serving together in the Roman legions—just as he had in their last posting in Alexandria, when they’d served the royal family of Cleopatra—but his body was simply too broken to do so.

  Of course, it was a kind of miracle that he had lived at all.

  Pullo had refused to tell the tale of his survival and his subsequent years—“I’ll only speak it once,” he’d said when they lay down to sleep that first night—but if he didn’t know better about the nonexistence of divinity, Vorenus would think it truly the work of a god that the man still breathed. He had seen with his own eyes the amount of rock that Pullo had brought down upon himself in order to secure their escape from Alexandria with the Ark. It was impossible to think any man could have lived through it.

  Except here he was. Bent and battered. Scarred and sore. But breathing. And despite it all, still the man he’d always known: quick to laugh, loyal to the end.

  Ahead of them, the wide, slow surface of the Nile split apart. Between the two arms of the river was the sandstone head of an island ringed by a shoreline of round rocks and thick water grasses. Palms and other green trees rose beyond them, adding their lighter scents to the heavier smells of the mud-laden river.

  “Is that it?” Pullo asked.

  Vorenus nodded, forcing himself to swallow down the instinctive smile he felt forming on his face whenever Pullo spoke. “It is. Elephantine Island.”

  “It’s so close to Alexandria.”

  “I suppose so.” Vorenus glanced over his shoulder. There were a dozen other passengers on the ferry, all of them native Egyptian laborers. Not one of them showed the slightest interest in the conversation between the two Romans in traveling clothes standing at the bow of the vessel. And even if they had been interested, from the looks of them, Vorenus was quite sure none would understand the Latin in which he conversed with Pullo. “The Ark had been housed here before, though. There was a temple for it already here. That was important to Hannah. And there were allies here. It was safe.”

  “Was,” Pullo said.

  Vorenus sighed in agreement. Pullo had known little about the young man who’d hired Seker to ambush them on the canal, but he’d known that he was probably a scholar of some kind. One of the prostitutes that Pullo had helped protect during his years as Seker’s personal thug had called the man her “little astrologer.” That and the fact that he’d known where to find Vorenus could point to only one conclusion: the visit to the Great Library had been compromised. And that meant that anything discussed there, including the location of the Ark, had also been compromised.

  Vorenus had been brooding on the matter during the days of their journey across the plains to the sea and thence to the Nile. He’d been thinking about it every day since, as they made their way up the mighty river, passing ancient pyramids and temples.

  No matter how much he turned the matter over in his mind, though, his conclusion was always the same.

  The Ark had to be moved.

  Hannah would fight it, he knew. She believed it was somehow the bonds of fate that the Ark had returned to the temple where it had lain in secrecy from the time it had been stolen away from Jerusalem, until it had been moved to the land of Kush, farther up the Nile to the south. Her family had kept the Ark safe through those centuries, had kept it safe through the centuries beyond after it had fallen into the hands of Alexander and been placed in the hidden chamber built beneath his greatest city to protect it. And now Hannah had managed to bring it safely back here, a new home in old ruins. Her brother had died to see it happen. The other keepers had died. She wouldn’t want to leave.

  And that meant Caesarion wouldn’t want to leave. He was twenty-one years old and in love.

  “A nice place to live,” Pullo said.

  It was true. Elephantine was like a bright green teardrop in the rolling waters of the Nile. It was beautiful, and it was peaceful in ways that Vorenus had learned more and more to appreciate. “It’s not Alexandria,” he said.

  “Some parts of Alexandria are nicer than others.”

  “True,” Vorenus said, once more wondering what Pullo had done and seen in their time apart.

  The boat tacked and slid through the water to the east. Soon Elephantine began to pass by on their right as they made their way under sail against the current. Looking ahead, Vorenus could just see the first blocks of old buildings and weathered columns rising out from the verdant vegetation that covered the quiet island.

  Pullo saw the architecture, too. “It’s beautiful. But an odd place for a Jewish temple.”

  “Well, this all started as a trading center,” Vorenus explained. “A real mix of people. The first cataract has long marked—”

  “Cataract?”

  “Rapids in the river. There are five or six of them, I’ve heard. You’ll see the first just upstream of the island. For a long time, the first cataract marked the border of Egypt. Farther south was the kingdom of Kush.”

  “Where the Ark was before Alexandria?”

  “Good memory,” Vorenus said, beaming over at his friend. As Alexandria was falling to Rome, their old friend Didymus had brought them to the Temple of Serapis, where they’d met Hannah and the other keepers of the Ark. There they’d learned much about the history of the Shards and how that particular artifact had passed from Egypt to Jerusalem and back. “I’m impressed you can remember that,” he teased.

  Pullo grinned, and for a moment it felt as if they were back in the legion. “Don’t be too impressed, though. It’s about all I remember. The king kept it, right? And then he made an agreement with Alexander the Great: the conqueror would leave Kush alone, but in return the Ark would be kept safe in Alexandria. Is that close?”

  “Essentially. They secretly used the Ark to help build the city, including the construction of the Third Temple to house it.”

  “A third one?”

  “That’s what Hannah calls it, though as many places as the Ark has been I don’t know what makes something a temple or not in her eyes. I think maybe it has something to do with the design of it. Or maybe how long the Ark was there. The first two were in Jerusalem. The third was in Alexandria, and she sometimes calls this one the fourth. But sin
ce it was here before it ever went to Alexandria, and somewhere in Kush between … well, I don’t know. I guess I haven’t actually thought to ask, but I’m sure Hannah has her reasons.”

  “She’s a remarkable girl,” Pullo said. “I remember that.”

  “A woman now,” Vorenus corrected. “We’re getting old, remember?”

  “Can’t forget that even if I’d like to.”

  “Also, you’d figure it out soon enough, but I might as well tell you: she and Caesarion—”

  “I knew it!” Pullo cut him off with a hearty laugh that also reminded Vorenus of younger times. Then the big man clapped his back—a sudden blow of camaraderie that, while painful, was something else he had missed all these years. “I knew it that night. The way he looked at her. I knew it.” Pullo beamed—proud, Vorenus suspected, of both his own keen observation and Caesarion’s choice.

  Either way, Vorenus couldn’t help but smile, too. “I think everyone saw it. And the important thing is that he’s happy. Truly so. She’s been good to him. And good for him. It was hard, you know. He lost his mother and his home that night.”

  “A kingdom, too. Egypt would have been his, Vorenus. Rome, too. All of it should be his.”

  “You know he never wanted any of that,” Vorenus replied. Caesarion’s status as the son of both Julius Caesar and Cleopatra had meant he was destined to rule the world, and they both knew that he would have been an extraordinary ruler—most especially because he didn’t want the power for its own sake. It was that same status that had made him Octavian’s foremost enemy during the civil war, the reason that his continued existence couldn’t be known to anyone.

  They were silent for a minute as the ferry swept into another tack on its way up the river. The colonnade that marked the location of the small harbor on the southeast corner of the island was just coming into view. Farther upstream, on the mainland shore of the river, a group of fishing boats was moving into the little town of Syene, which housed the local Roman garrison.