A moth whiter than starlight rose from the silver box and hung in the air for a moment. Then, her eyes blazing, her skin as bright as candles, shining with a web of molten metal, Cleopatra appeared in the courtyard below Chrysate’s chambers.
Her roar of fury rattled the palace, causing the servants to spring panicked from their beds.
Chrysate crouched on the stones opposite Cleopatra, shouting words in her ancient language, but Cleopatra’s body was filled with fire, as though lightning had struck it and stayed inside its veins. She reached out her hand and clawed the witch’s face, and the witch shrieked and flung herself across the courtyard. Where Cleopatra had touched her, there were long scores ripped in her flesh.
“You are my creature,” Chrysate cried. “You belong to Hecate!”
Cleopatra bared her teeth and leapt at her, tearing at her skin. The liquid that came from beneath it was not red but dark, and the witch’s skin was tattered by fangs and claws.
Chrysate hesitated, overmatched, before leaping into the darkness and fleeing.
The queen looked up to the open window above her and saw Auðr standing there, frozen. The seiðkona lifted her distaff, but Cleopatra moved like one in a dream, her eyes wide and unseeing. She lifted from the ground the silver box that had imprisoned her, pressing the spilled ash back into it, and then she, too, flew from the Palatine, her every step shaking the ground, moving as fast as fire in a dry season.
Her light blazed over the hillside, and then she was gone.
In Chrysate’s rooms, Auðr looked around, stunned.
She shouted at the top of her voice, raising the alarm, though she knew Chrysate would not be captured by any human. She would be moving amongst the spirits now, fleet as a demon, but she was terribly wounded. Creatures such as Chrysate did not travel quickly by land.
Auðr bent over Cleopatra’s daughter. She could see her heart, a precious red fruit, exposed inside her rib cage, bright as a phoenix nearing its rebirth. It was not beating.
She made a motion with her fingers, twisting the distaff in a complicated pattern, her face tense. At last, the seiðkona leaned over the girl and exhaled a word, quietly, into her lips.
Selene shuddered and gasped, taking a breath. “Where is my mother?” she croaked, her eyes darting frantically about the room. “Where is my father? Where is Chrysate?”
Auðr stitched closed the wound in her chest with a golden thread unspooled from her seiðstafr. The thread was the girl’s own fate. It seemed smooth and delicate, but it was as strong as wire. She found a tiny waxen doll stabbed with a pin, its wrists bound together with a long black hair. She tore the skein of hair from the doll’s wrists and carefully, gently, removed the pin from her heart. The girl in the bed arched for a moment, gasped, and sighed, and then relaxed again.
Auðr laid her seiðstafr against the forehead of the queen’s daughter. The girl moved. Tears ran from her eyes, and she opened them.
“I don’t want to forget,” Selene whispered. “I want to know what happened. Don’t take it away from me. I was stupid to trust her.”
Guards surged into the room, their weapons drawn, and Auðr showed them the thing that had been discarded beside the bed. Part of the beautiful, bloodless skin of the woman Chrysate had been was lying crumpled and torn on the floor, like a fine garment thrown off in the heat of passion. A breast, and an arm like an elegant glove, the skin perfect and creamy. A scrap of a throat and lovely face. One side of a curving waist and a portion of round hip. The rest had been torn away and taken by the witch as she fled.
The guards, their faces horrified, this image of the emperor’s ward and her attacker worse than anything they had seen in battle, ran about the room in disarray. They would die for this, they knew. They would be executed, or condemned to fight animals. They had let Selene be attacked and Cleopatra escape under their very noses. All of them had been sitting at dinner, drinking and laughing for hours, as though under a spell. They had no idea where the emperor was, nor his historian and bodyguard. Agrippa was away as well. The guards were alone with this, and they knew they would be blamed.
She will live, the seiðkona said to them, in their own languages, and in their minds. She will live. She contains powers of her own, and those of others as well.
For the first time, Auðr noticed the ring on Selene’s finger, a blazing opal engraved with the face of Hecate. The witch had won the hand of the queen’s daughter, if not her heart, and her dark power remained there.
The war was not over. There was no hope of a peaceful end. Cleopatra was free, Chrysate lived, and Hecate’s bonds had been loosened. Even the failed sacrifice had yielded blood, and Auðr could feel Hecate pulling at her chains. The Underworld shook.
It was only beginning.
The seiðkona looked at the threads, the fates spinning about Rome, the possibilities.
Gods walked the earth, and the sky shone with arrows. The Underworld was at war, and the upper world as well. Emperors and queens, daughters and sons, witches and sorcerers.
The seiðkona did not know what would happen. She had changed the fates, and yet the chaos remained, the rift in the tapestry, the darkness.
Someone still tried to end the world, and someone tried to save it.
Auðr could not tell the two lines apart. They seemed the same.
Chrysate ran, the streets of the city unfriendly and unfamiliar to her. She was buffeted by a strange wind, which pressed against her face, tearing at her torn skin, beating at her injured body, reminding her that she had lost the queen.
She stumbled, scraping her withered hands on the stones. She was not supposed to be this misshapen thing, this hag, half covered in sweet skin, half covered in scales and darkness. Hecate had been so close. She had felt her coming.
She turned her face, the part of it that still existed as human, toward the moonlight, moaning. The wind would not offer her a respite, though. It raged against her broken cheek, threw sand into her one, bloodied eye.
She snarled, clawing at the wind. Nothing she did eased it, though she could see, outside of her vicinity, still air. The trees stood calm in the darkness. Only about Chrysate was there this bitter thing.
She screamed with fury, chanting curses, chanting spells, tearing at the air itself, but nothing kept the wind from whistling around her, shrill and violent. Nothing kept the wind from spinning her in wrong directions. Nothing kept the wind from surging into her lungs, filling her with dusty air and her own spells, blown backward into her mouth.
She could hear horses in the streets, pursuing her, perhaps, but she could not tell where they were. She could hear howling dogs, but she could not find them. They would protect her. They were the creatures of her mistress. But they howled, and they howled, and finally, Chrysate realized that there were no dogs. The sound she heard was the wind mocking her.
As she raised her hand to fight off the tornado, she noticed her finger. Naked. Her ring was gone. She’d left it on the hand of the queen’s daughter.
Chrysate concealed herself in a doorway, shielding herself from the wind. The moon was high in the sky now, a pointed crescent, each edge sharp and wounding. It did not heal her. A tear slid down her cheek, scalding as it went, and she tasted the sour salt of it.
She watched the wind pass by, and she waited until it had gone. She listened for the footsteps of legionaries patrolling for her, and waited until they had moved on. Then she began to move again, whispering spells of concealment and searching for a dark and secret place to hide herself more effectively.
She thought, muttering to herself frantically.
She could still accomplish what she had planned. It would be bloody, and it would be difficult, but it was still possible.
15
A grippa woke, bound in a bright room. It was full daylight, and the elderly priest was sitting opposite him.
“Water?” he asked, and Agrippa laughed. His throat was swollen and so sore that he could not imagine swallowing, let alone swallowing a
drink provided by the very man who’d poisoned him.
“Where are my men?” he croaked.
“They live,” the priest said. “We do not kill our guests, unlike the men of the emperor’s armies.”
“Why did you poison me? I did nothing to wound you.”
“You did not?” the priest asked. He ran his finger over his throat. The scratch was already healing. “One does not steal from Apollo. We are guards, and this is our lifelong task. Perhaps you do not understand that there is a reason for our devotion. I would not have thought Augustus’s general was a fool.”
“You guard something precious,” Agrippa said.
“We guard something lethal,” the priest informed him. “It kills. It has always killed, and yet it still exists. We keep it safe from the world.”
“It’s true, then,” Agrippa said. “The arrows are here.”
“Everything is true,” the priest informed him. “Once a story is told, it becomes true. Every unlikely tale, every tale of wonders, has something real at its core.”
“I need them. There is an enemy greater than any Rome has known,” said Agrippa, shifting painfully in his bonds. Though he’d fought for years, he’d never before been captured.
“So you say,” said the priest. “Just as anyone would, to gain possession of the arrows. They are too dangerous to use.”
“It is too dangerous not to use them,” Agrippa countered. “We fight an immortal, and there is no other way to kill her. We fight to save the world from a monster.”
The priest looked at Agrippa and grimaced.
“And what monster will you create in using them? No one has ever used Hercules’ arrows without paying the price. Now we have them here, safe from fools.”
“I am no fool,” Agrippa said. “I act to save Rome.”
“Perhaps Rome should not be saved, if you need such a weapon to save it. Only a true hero may wield the bow of Hercules, but heroes are fools, too. The venom on these arrows killed the greatest hero of the world. Hercules died screaming, begging his friends to light his funeral pyre while he still lived, and that was from only a droplet of blood mixed with the Hydra’s venom and smeared on his tunic. Do you know what happened to Philoctetes, the patron of this temple?”
“I do not,” Agrippa answered. He did not care.
“Philoctetes was the only one who dared light the pyre, and so Hercules willed the bow and quiver to him. He wounded himself in the foot with his new arrows, on a ship destined for the Trojan War. He was left on an island by his friends, and his wound festered for ten years, while he went mad with the pain. At last, his friends returned. There had been a prophecy that only those arrows could win the war. In some stories, it is said that Philoctetes was healed on the battlefield, that by the time he fired the shot that killed Paris and won the war, he was cured of his agonies. We know better. There is no cure for the Hydra’s venom, and these wounds take a long time to kill. Hercules knew this much, and he should never have saved the Hydra’s poison. I do not trust you to make a better choice than he did.”
“Trust me, then,” someone said. The voice was familiar. Agrippa turned his head, stunned, just as the priest made a strangled sound.
Blood splashed, speckling Agrippa’s robes.
Augustus stood in the window, sweating and pale, his eyes furiously bright. With him stood Nicolaus, whose mythic hopes had sent Agrippa on this doomed mission, and Usem, whose face was lit with the fire of war. He wiped the priest’s blood from his dagger. Usem looked at Agrippa and smiled.
“You should have let me join you,” he said. “Did you think I was only a sorcerer?”
“I made them bring me here. I will not stay hidden in my study any longer,” Augustus said. “I will not stay in Rome, waiting to die in my sleep.”
He swayed, the skin beneath his eyes bluish. The hand that held the sword trembled, but he was resolved.
“You must leave here,” Agrippa said. “You must not risk yourself!”
The emperor put his sword to Agrippa’s bonds and slashed them. Agrippa stood, and rubbed his wrists.
“I climbed a wall,” Augustus said, grinning suddenly, his crooked teeth lending a strangely youthful expression to his face. “I crept undetected into a fortified temple. You would not have thought I could do it, but I have! Cleopatra’s scholar acquitted himself nicely, by the way. It was kind of you to leave him with me. He rode hard beside me, though he is a scribe and poet, not a warrior. I would imagine you would do as much for me as my historian has done, would you not? Nicolaus has trusted me to save my own country. Will you do the same?”
Agrippa bowed his head.
“I will do the same,” he said, and took the priest’s walking stick from the dead man’s hand. He removed the covering that—yes—hid the suspected blade, and tested its sharpness on his finger. He tossed it to the scholar, who flinched slightly, but then gripped it. Agrippa turned the priest over and found his own knife tucked into the man’s belt. He smiled.
The priest had feared his prisoner. They were not so secure here as they seemed.
He took the priestly robe from the man’s body and threw it over himself. Augustus and Nicolaus pulled their hoods up over their heads, and Usem slipped out the window, pulling himself up onto the roof of the temple, followed by Augustus, wavering but courageous, and Nicolaus, gulping. Usem held out his hand for Agrippa, and the general took it.
The Psylli led, creeping along the roofline, bending low. He looked down into the protected courtyard of the temple, regretting all of this. The emperor was in no condition to be with him, and Nicolaus was not a soldier. Only Agrippa was a warrior, and he was still suffering the aftereffects of the poisoning.
“Watch them,” Augustus said, pointing into the courtyard. A guard walked a circle around the statue of Philoctetes. Another guard walked in the other direction, and they crossed each other. The priests were perfectly synchronized, perfectly prepared, though Usem could see only swords, not crossbows.
Agrippa nodded. He was meant to be unconscious in his room. The rest of his legionaries were similarly captive. The temple was not at the same level of readiness it had maintained the night before.
“The quiver will be in a box,” Nicolaus said. “A metal box. The arrows are too dangerous to be left uncovered. The priests will have them secured.”
Agrippa looked at Augustus and smiled. Long ago, in their youth, they’d fought and tricked, learning techniques for attack from a leader of the guard in Apollonia. The emperor smiled back at him. Still, he was not well. He’d lost weight over the past months, and he looked spindly and pale. It was a miracle he was on his feet. He seemed hardly to be drinking the theriac now, and that was a blessing, but Agrippa mistrusted the shaking of his hands.
They were barely concealed on a rooftop overlooking their quarry. It was time for action, not worry. There would be time enough, should they survive this.
Usem waited, counting. The rhythm of the guards marching regained its previous perfection.
“On my signal,” Usem whispered, and he positioned his dagger over his head, aiming carefully. He’d have only one chance. He threw the dagger, watching it twirl through the air, end over end, like a metal bird, a flying, winging thing.
The priest it was aimed at did not see it coming until it slid up to the hilt into his chest.
Agrippa was already leaping down from the rooftop, his sword drawn, Augustus in his wake, gasping with exertion.
The remaining priest had instantly drawn his blade, and he crouched, defending the statue behind him. His eyes were wide and startled, but his hands were steady, and Usem could see by the graceful way the man moved that he’d been trained as a fighter. He motioned to Nicolaus and retrieved the bayonet from the scholar, whose breath could already be heard in panting wheezes. The first fight was never easy. He motioned him back, away from the fighting. He’d be more of a liability than an asset.
Followed by Usem, Agrippa began to circle around the guard, Augustus more tent
atively behind them. Agrippa’s focus was divided in order to monitor the terrain. More priests could arrive at any moment, and he needed to hear them. He could hear Augustus’s heart pounding. The priest clearly could as well, for he lunged toward the weakest of the three fighters, his sword flashing in the air.
Augustus seemed to momentarily rally, his back straightening, his jaw tensing. He parried fiercely, in a way that Agrippa remembered from their youth. Suddenly, he saw Augustus as he had been, the wiry fighter of their training days, how he’d fought up and down the hillsides, his small size and reach balanced by his determination to win.
Augustus edged forward, his blade meeting his opponent’s, gaining ground. Behind him, Usem closed in, jabbing with the bayonet.
The priest looked up over the emperor’s shoulder, and squinted. He raised a hand to shield his eyes.
A ploy, certainly.
“Out of the way!” Usem shouted, and Agrippa glanced up, certain he’d see nothing, and instead saw a tremendous blaze of light, a fireball, speeding across the sky.
Agrippa threw his body against the emperor and heaved him clear. At the same moment, he heard Nicolaus shout. The historian waved a metal box at Agrippa.
“Run!” he yelled.
Agrippa grabbed Augustus by the arm, half carrying him to the gate, pursued by priests and swords. Usem was close behind them, defending their rear, his bayonet slashing.
As they launched themselves through the gate and toward the horses waiting for them outside the wall, the fireball arrived in the air above the courtyard.
Agrippa glanced up and glimpsed something with thousands of teeth, something made of molten metal, something with maddened eyes, something humming a strange, ecstatic song. Then it was gone.
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