The Gates of Hell

by Michael Livingston

  Not far away was a secluded pocket of shadows, created by piled crates and barrels. Selene floated there, then she dropped down to the ground and landed in a soft crouch, quiet as a cat on its paws—the only sound the clatter of debris that swirled about her as she descended.

  The wind cut off abruptly, but she held the power close as the noise subsided, listening. Hearing no shouts of alarm, she took her hand off the Palladium, already missing its power, and then slipped it into the satchel at her side.

  The dust that had been kicked up settled around her quickly as she lifted the shawl over her head, made herself small, and slipped between the shadows to where the little slave girl was just leaving the latrine. She had a different crutch now, Selene saw. It wasn’t the Lance of Olyndicus. That, she imagined, Corocotta kept close to himself, as Caesar did the Trident.

  Panicked, realizing that she had no real plan, Selene looked around, trying to decide what to do. She thought about calling out to the girl, luring her into the shadows, but of course she could not speak the girl’s language. To speak would only give herself away.

  But, seeing there was no one else in sight, she made a decision. Stepping out from the darkness, keeping her head low, she walked straight for the latrine herself, walking so close to the little slave that her shawl brushed against her. And then, pivoting quickly, she swung around behind the girl and clamped her hand over the girl’s mouth.

  She lifted as she pulled her back toward the shadows, surprised at her own sudden strength—was that the Aegis, too? she wondered. The little girl kicked and tried to scream, but Selene’s grip was too tight for anything but the most mumbled sound, and her legs did nothing but flail in the air. The girl dropped her crutch as she struggled, and Selene kicked it ahead of her into the darkness from whence she’d come.

  Selene carried the struggling girl in that same direction, keeping the crutch ahead of her, all the way back to the quiet spot where she had landed. There she leaned forward to whisper in the girl’s ear, “I’m going to set you down. I’m going to let go. Please don’t call out. You didn’t hurt me, and I don’t want to hurt you. Do you understand?”

  The little girl had stopped kicking as she talked, hanging limply, and when Selene was done she simply nodded her head once up and down.

  “Thank you,” Selene said, and she leaned forward to set the girl’s feet upon the ground, releasing her mouth as she did so.

  The slave took a deep breath, but to Selene’s relief she did not scream. She steadied herself by leaning on a barrel to her right, and then she carefully turned to face her. “Who are you?” the girl whispered.

  Selene leaned down and picked up the girl’s crutch, holding it forward as a kind of peace offering. “My name is Selene,” she said, keeping her voice quiet. “I need your help.”

  The little girl studied her for a moment, then took back the crutch. “You’re the one I saw with Caesar. How did you get here?”

  “I have my powers, as do you.”

  “I could call the guards. You would be no match for them. Corocotta will destroy you.”

  Selene opened her arms, allowing the shawl to part and bring the Aegis of Zeus into view. “Corocotta is nothing before the power of the gods. He’s just a man.” She released her arms and leaned forward. “He is nothing without you.”

  The crippled girl had been staring at the breastplate, staring at the Shard. “I am a slave.”

  “Only because you are not yet free,” Selene said. “What’s your name?”

  The girl swallowed hard. “Isidora.”

  Selene blinked. It was a beautiful name. A Latin name. “You’re a Roman?”

  Isidora nodded quietly. “They killed my family, took me when I was young.”

  “Your name means ‘gift of Isis.’ Did you know that?”

  The girl looked up. “Who is Isis?”

  My mother, Selene wanted to say. Me. Fate. She smiled, warmly and genuinely. “Someone who wouldn’t want you to live in chains.”

  Isidora’s eyes flashed with dampness in the growing light. “What can I do? I am only a girl.”

  “And you are more powerful than Corocotta can ever be. You are stronger than he is. That’s the reason he makes you use the Lance, isn’t it? It will destroy him. He knows that.”

  “It’s destroying me,” Isidora whispered. “That stone will destroy you, too.”

  “I’ve come only to take my husband back. That’s all.” That was all, wasn’t it? She could leave the power behind after that, couldn’t she? Or perhaps she could use it just awhile longer.

  Tiberius. In her mind she saw his pleading, his begging as her powers ripped him apart. Yes. Tiberius.

  “Selene?”

  Selene shook herself. “Yes?”

  The girl had a look of confusion on her face. “I asked who your husband was.”

  “I’m sorry,” Selene said, trying to get her bearings again. What had she been thinking? Those thoughts of destruction didn’t feel like her own. “My husband … He was the one who fought you.”

  “The water.” Isidora nodded in remembrance. “He is a slave, too.”

  Selene started to object, then nodded. “In a way. But in our land a slave can be a prince. He is that, too.”

  “And you are a princess? You answer to this Caesar?”

  “No man rules me. I am a queen, and I have come to take back my king. No matter who or what stands in my way.”

  Isidora nodded again, then her eyes got wide. “I can’t—”

  “You tried to warn me,” Selene interrupted. “Back on that hillside. You didn’t want to hurt me any more than I want to hurt you. So I know you won’t call out for help. But please, just tell me where my husband is. Where are they holding him?”

  Isidora’s mouth opened and closed. “I cannot tell you,” she finally said. She looked Selene in the eyes. “But I can show you.”

  “You will take me there?”

  Isidora nodded, and a smile crept across her face. “Yes, Queen Selene. And then you will take me with your king to this place where I will not be a slave.”

  “I will, Isidora,” Selene said, thankfully. “I swear it.”

  The little girl nodded curtly and adjusted her weight on the crutch. “But first you will help me get my things. You’re going to need my help in more ways than one.”

  18

  UNQUENCHABLE FIRES

  CANTABRIA, 26 BCE

  Octavian—Augustus Caesar, son of the god Caesar and emperor of Rome—was dying. Juba laid another wet rag upon his stepbrother’s fevered brow.

  “Such a fool,” Juba said, though Caesar could not hear him and there was no one else in the cramped little cell. “Such a fool.”

  Octavian had indeed been a fool, thinking that he could grab the Trident and use it so easily. He’d seen with his own eyes what it had done to Quintus back in Rome. And yet to have done it anyway … “Such a fool.”

  And why? What could he have been thinking? It had all happened so fast. Juba replayed it in his mind: Octavian lunging out, wrestling the Trident from the little girl, and shouting. What was it that he had shouted?

  Juba removed the rag and squeezed it out into the little basin of tepid water they’d granted him. He resoaked it, vainly hoping it would be cooler than the air in this closed space, and resettled it on Octavian’s brow.

  His stepbrother moaned but did not otherwise respond.

  Run, Juba abruptly remembered.

  That was what he’d shouted. Right before the power of the Shard had taken him and sent him to wherever he was now—Caesar had told him to run.

  “You were saving me,” Juba whispered, staring down at the man he had hated for so long. “You were giving me a chance to get away.”

  It didn’t make any sense. When Juba had awoken in this cell after the battle, Octavian had been relieved. Easy enough to understand, since he was the one who could use the Trident for him. A slave. That’s what Corocotta had thought him. No different than that little girl whom
he’d he been using to wield the Lance. Of course Octavian didn’t want him to die.

  And yet this—so foolishly seizing the Trident, trying to give him a chance to get away—this was something else.

  Was it caring?

  After all that Octavian had made him do—Quintus, those first men at sea, the hundreds at Actium—after all the death, was it possible that all along Octavian had truly viewed him as a brother? As family?

  Sudden sounds stirred him from his thoughts. There was shouting, distant and muted. A noise like a roar.

  Juba stood, trying to listen, the sodden rag in his hand dripping into the little basin. There was a bang that sounded as if it came from the building above them, and on the other side of the cell door heavy steps pounded down the hall as a guard shouted something he could not understand.

  Screaming. A heat in the air.

  Then a sudden eerie silence between the door and the distant commotion.

  “Juba?” a voice suddenly shouted. “Juba? Are you down here?”

  Juba blinked in the dim light. “Selene?” It couldn’t be her. But it sounded—

  “Juba? Are you down here?”

  “Selene!” Juba dropped the rag in the water and jumped to the door of the cell. He banged on it and shouted into the wood, “Selene!”

  There was a thump against the wood beneath his hands, and then her voice was close. “Juba! Get back from the door!”

  “Selene! What are you doing here? How did you—”

  The air in the room seemed to groan, and Juba felt himself being pulled against the damp wood. The flame of the tallow candle flickered as it stretched in his direction.

  “Get back!” he heard her shout.

  Juba shoved himself away from the door, and—feeling as if he were fighting a horrible tide—he managed to throw himself on top of Caesar just moments before the wooden entry to the cell exploded inward with a splintering crash.

  Wind erupted into the room, and clattering, broken boards. Juba shielded his eyes with one hand as he steadied himself with the other, the wood scattering across his back as he covered the emperor of Rome.

  In a second, the wind was gone.

  The little light had guttered out, and when Juba shook the debris off his neck and looked up at the open doorway, he saw Selene, his love, backlit against the light in the hallway. The shawl about her shoulders was drifting in what looked like a leftover breeze, and she was cradling something in her hands.

  “Selene?”

  “You’re all right,” she said, and she dropped what she had been holding into a satchel at her side.

  “Selene, how did—”

  She rushed forward as he stood, and she threw her arms around his neck, cutting off his words with kisses as if she’d never thought she’d see him again.

  Juba embraced her in return, and as he did so he felt the hard plate between them. The Aegis of Zeus. The Shard.

  Selene pulled away from his lips. Her eyes and cheeks were wet, but she was smiling. “We need to hurry,” she said. She kissed him one last time, and then she let go of him and ran back to the hall. She was out of sight for only a heartbeat, and when she returned she had the Trident. She threw it to him, and he caught it.

  “I don’t understand how—”

  Above the tumult they both heard a girl shouting Selene’s name.

  Selene’s eyes were wide. She grabbed Juba’s arm and started pulling him forward. She was far stronger than he ever remembered. “We need to go.”

  Juba took two steps, feeling like this was some kind of dream, and then he snapped out of it and stopped. He looked back at Octavian upon the bed. “I can’t just leave him.”

  Selene’s grip bruised his arm. “There’s no time!”

  Juba met her eyes. Her big, beautiful, bold eyes. “I can’t, Selene.”

  The love of his life looked back and forth between them. Then she nodded. “Hurry,” she said, already reaching down for the fevered Caesar. “Come on.”

  * * *

  Outside, the world was on fire.

  Selene had helped to carry the unconscious Octavian up the steps out of the little prison, and when they reached the top all Juba could see at first was smoke and flame. The walls of several buildings nearby were ablaze, and at least three men were blackened, smoking corpses in the open area around them. Corocotta’s slave girl stood at the top of the steps as they came up. Her back was to them, but Juba could see the Lance of Olyndicus was once more in her little hands, a tongue of fire flashing out against a group of men who’d tried to come around one of the buildings to their left.

  Selene pushed Caesar’s weight onto Juba, then spun away from him and knelt, facing to the right.

  Juba turned in that direction—speechless, paralyzed with shock—and he saw that four archers had taken position behind an overturned and smoldering wagon. They were drawing back on their bows.

  Selene once more had something in her hands. Juba opened his mouth to cry out, knowing that it was already too late as the men loosed their strings. For an instant he could see the heads of the missiles flying straight and true, the wood shafts behind them vibrating from the acceleration of their flight, the rising curtain of gray smoke curling and twisting behind them as they sliced through it.

  In the same moment a wind struck him against his back, pushing him forward a step toward the killing shafts. But a step beyond Selene the wind bent, turning upward toward heaven in a glorious sweep of natural power that he could see in the dust that it scraped from the ground and carried up with it in what seemed a wall of cloud. The four arrows hit it and were pushed upward, sailing high.

  Then Selene’s cupped hands jerked forward, and the wall hurtled forward as well, as if commanded—bowing down upon itself and rushing forward like a wave. It crashed into the charred wagon, slamming it back into the archers, who fell screaming.

  The booming voice of Corocotta split the crackling noise, echoing off the walls of the fort and the buildings around them, shouting commands that Juba could not understand.

  “This way,” the slave girl urged.

  Juba turned back toward her, saw that she was pointing toward a break in the fires. Through it he could see a gate of the hillfort. A way out.

  Caesar was a dead weight, so Juba crouched down and let his stepbrother fall over his back and shoulders. With a grunt, still feeling barely recovered from his own weakness but knowing there was no other choice, he stood up and hefted him onto his shoulders, just barely managing not to drop the Trident in his right hand. “Selene!” he shouted. “Let’s go!”

  There was no need. Selene was already passing him, calling the crippled girl by name—Isidora, Juba noted—and half-picking her up to help them move faster.

  Corocotta continued to shout, and when they were nearly to the break in the fire, Juba finally saw why: Cantabrians were storming up the stairways to take positions above the gate. Dozens of bows were already being drawn against them.

  No wind, no fire could stop them all.

  “Down!” he shouted, and in the same moment he flung Caesar from his shoulder into the backs of the two girls—bruises are better than holes, he thought—and held out the Trident of Poseidon. He wrapped his hand around the Shard.

  In an instant the power was there. In an instant he was a god.

  The lightning crackled into being around him like sharp fractures of a hidden light.

  For the space of that single heartbeat Juba had shut his eyes. When he opened them, men began to die.

  The bolts pulsed out of him, through him, ripping across the air, searing it with a speed beyond the eye. The hungry tongues cracked out like whips of the purest white fire and men were struck down where they stood: shaking with the energy, unable to move or scream. The thunderous boom of the torn air threatened to send Juba backward, but he held on.

  Hungry. He was hungry. The Shard was hungry.

  More and more power rushed down and out of him. He felt like laughing and crying all at once. This is
life, this is power, he thought. And a voice answered, No, this is death, this is destruction.

  Only when the wind of God struck him across the face did he let go.

  Juba staggered, and he buckled over, his hand falling off the Shard and onto the wooden shaft of the Trident as he leaned on it for support. He gasped for air, and for a moment he could hear nothing else.

  Blinking, he looked around and saw the broken fog of smoke twisting angrily through the violated air. Bits of paper and cloth fluttered in the quiet. And all those who’d stood before them were dead. They had been scattered upon the walkway above, some crushed back against the battlement, others fallen with their black-streaked limbs dangling obscenely over its edge. Still others had fallen to the ground and lay in broken piles before them.

  He’d killed them.

  In a second, he’d killed them all.

  No bird called out. Nothing and no one made a sound, as if the world itself could not accept what he had done.

  “Juba,” a voice said. “My love, Juba.”

  He blinked, looked over, and saw Selene. She was crouched, her hands held up in front of her open satchel, palms out as if she meant no threat to him. Her face was dirty and streaked with tears. Behind her Isidora was pushing herself to her feet, her eyes wide in fright. She appeared to be backing away.

  “Selene,” Juba said. “I don’t know how—”

  She nodded. She smiled. And she bent down to put her head under one of Caesar’s motionless arms. “Help me. We have to hurry.”

  Juba hesitated for a moment, then he nodded, too. He stepped forward, feeling dizzy, and he set the Trident down upon the earth in order to help Selene carry Octavian between them. “Take it,” he said to the girl. “I can’t.”

  Isidora looked to Selene, who nodded. Then she came forward and picked up the Trident, leaning into it and the Lance as if they were walking sticks.

  Selene started forward, and Juba simply followed. They stepped over bodies, and he saw the twisted expressions upon their smoking faces. His stomach heaved, and he vomited upon the ground, upon his feet. Still he trudged on in mute horror, climbing steps as she climbed them, bearing the weight as she bore it.