The Realms of God--A Novel of the Roman Empire (The Shards of Heaven, Book 3)

by Michael Livingston

  These were the only Shards they had left now. The Lance and the Trident had been taken by the demons at Carthage. It was only by a miracle that she’d been able to use the Palladium and the Aegis to whisk them away to safety.

  A miracle.

  She sighed at the thought. There were no miracles. Not really, for there were no gods left to perform them. That meant there were only the acts of people like her. Selfless or selfish. Intentional or random. Each little decision reverberating out into the lives of other people like ripples on water.

  So be it. She’d made her decision.

  Selene took in her breath, then let it out again, focusing her thoughts. In the stillness that followed, she raised the Palladium to the Aegis of Zeus. The Shard of Life warmed against her skin, giving her strength that rushed into her and filled her as if she’d been empty, pouring more and more as she opened herself to it and drank it in. Then, slowly, she raised her right hand to the broken top of the Palladium and pressed her flesh against the blacker-than-black stone exposed there.

  She fell down into it suddenly. Like a violent, rushing stream the power carried her down into the stone that was and was not her. Slipping and sliding into the pooling darkness, she struggled to grab hold of something to arrest her descent as she fell deeper and deeper into herself. She felt one of her legs lose strength, and she was dimly aware that she sank to one knee.

  For a moment she thought she heard herself scream, but it was like the distant echo of thunder behind mountains.

  No, she called out. No!

  In response she heard Juba’s voice, calling out from the memories of her youth, when he’d first taught her how to control the power by giving into it, by letting it ride through her. Let go, he had said.

  But that’s how it took control of him, another voice cried out in her mind. You can’t let it control you.

  But to fight was to die, she shot back. Like quicksand, the harder she would fight against it, the harder it would pull her down into oblivion.

  In panic, straining with the effort, her mind reached out through the surrounding dark, found her grip on the Palladium, and released it.

  The air flexed around her, popping as the pent-up power let go. Selene opened her eyes, panting as she stared at the Shard fallen in the grass beside her knee. She slowed her breathing into deep, steady breaths, feeling the thrumming warmth of the Shard in the breastplate.

  The Aegis was a comfort. Its steady presence supported her, giving her what she needed. She remembered that from before, when she’d used it at Vellica. When she needed calm, the Aegis gave her calm. When she needed strength, it gave her strength. It had done the same for Juba, he’d said. When he was wounded it healed him. When he could fight no further it gave him the power to go on. When he was angry …

  Selene blinked, looked up at the stars above her.

  Juba had said that when he was angry, when he had thirsted most for revenge, the Aegis had fed that, too. He’d done things he couldn’t remember. He’d killed and killed and killed again. All to get what he wanted.

  The Aegis might not have ever seemed a threat to her, but of course it was. Used for the wrong reasons, any power was a threat.

  From the beginning they’d been using the Shards wrong. She could see it now. She thought she’d been letting herself fall into the power of the Shard. She’d let that power carry her into itself. She’d used it, but she’d never understood it.

  The darkness into which she’d fallen when she touched the Shard was not in the stone. It came not from some Heaven or Hell. The dark power she’d tapped was inside of her. The darkness that had overtaken Juba in Carthage had been inside of him, too. His rage. His despair.

  The one God had wanted to give them freedom. He’d died to do so. And in the Shards they’d been given a power that was just as free. It was a power that would be shaped by their mortal, willful desires. What to do with that power was one more decision they had to make, one more ripple. She’d been making those decisions all along, each time she’d touched a Shard, but she’d never seen it so clearly before now.

  Selene took in a long, deep breath of the cooling night air. When she released it from her chest, she watched the exhalation rise like a slow cloud. It drifted, thinning, then dissipated into the great nothingness between the earth and sky.

  No. Not nothingness. The sky was filled with the breath of life. Hers. Her husband’s. Their son’s. She breathed the air of countless souls. Her mother’s breath was up there, too, a whisper in the wind of the world.

  Selene smiled, imagining how her mother’s breath mingled with hers, how life touched life across the spans of time and space, how her parents—so long dead—were still keeping her alive.

  The darkness wasn’t the only source of power. There was love, too.

  Selene reached down into the grass and picked up the Palladium from where it had fallen. She stood. She held it before her and stared at its broken top. The stone there was blacker than black, forever seemed to be swallowing the light, yet even so it glinted almost as if it was wet. Almost as if light were held there, trapped and yearning to get out.

  No darkness lasts forever, she thought. The sun rises. Hope survives. Love empowers.

  Selene thought of her mother and father, her brothers, her husband and son. She thought of laughter and love. She thought of the sun and the light that even now was within herself, as trapped as the light in the stone.

  With calm certainty, Selene closed her eyes and wrapped her free hand over the Shard. The power of the darkness was there, but instead of bending herself into that pooling black and falling into it, instead of drawing it up and out into the impossible stone in her hands, she pushed herself away, up toward a pure, streaming light that she now knew had always been there, waiting.

  Touching her skin, the Shards of Heaven came alive.

  The Aegis gave her strength. It gave her a surety of purpose. Through it she felt the life of her breathing. She felt, too, the memory of other lives lived. Even here, she wasn’t alone.

  Through the Palladium she reached out into the air around her. Before she had twisted that element, churned it into winds, but now she felt it surrounding her like a calm and silent sea, at once peaceful and brooding with possible danger. She let it flow around her, beneath her, and she began to rise.

  Selene opened her eyes. No wind disturbed the grass that was falling away beneath her feet. No storm clouded a sky now lit by the moon. Slowly, she turned to face the hill beyond the Colossus. She’d find the villa of Tiberius up there. And there she’d find Lapis, a prisoner because of what she had done.

  Selene was done running. It was time to set things right.

  * * *

  It was after midnight when the daughter of Antony and Cleopatra settled out of the night sky and into the open square atrium of Tiberius’ villa. She descended in silence, like a feather draped onto cloth. Her sandaled feet touching the ground, she let go of the Shard that she had held in her hands, and she quietly slipped it into the satchel that still hung at her side.

  Around and through the atrium was a large garden of carefully potted plants, their leaves delicately trimmed. The colored tiles of the floor beneath her feet were freshly swept. Not far away, in the center of the atrium, a small fountain burbled in a steady rhythm.

  Nothing else could be heard. Nothing else moved.

  Thrasyllus had said that Lapis was being held here. But if so, where?

  In the back of the villa, surely. No doubt in some cold and forgotten corner.

  Selene began to make her way through the manicured atrium, thankful that the swept floors kept her footsteps light.

  There was a hallway at the back of the atrium, leading out into the rear yards, and Selene hurried into its shadows. She paced along it, stopping only to peer into opened doorways or to listen at locked doors. She passed kitchens and storerooms, but no place to hold a prisoner.

  The hallway ended at an arched passageway, and beyond it Selene could see an op
en portico that emptied out into a moonlit slope of grass. In the distance, but growing closer, she heard the whispers of two men walking outside.

  Selene pressed herself into the shadows of the archway and peered around the corner to her right.

  The portico was deep in darkness, backlit by the brightness of the moon. She could see little of it to her right beyond a cushioned bench facing two columns not far away. Iron rings were fixed to the columns there, and bindings of rope hung from them.

  Whatever took place here, Selene was glad not to witness it.

  Out in the moonlight beyond the silent reminders of torture, she saw two imperial guards making their way across the grounds, just coming into view from the darkness between a stack of hay and a small shed.

  Perhaps that was where they had her?

  In the same moment that the thought occurred to her, Selene heard movement to her left, on the other end of the portico. Her heart skipped a beat, expecting to see another set of guards appearing there, but for the moment she saw no one else.

  The sound had been close, though.

  Selene took a quick glance back at the two guards outside in the moonlight—they were still far away, and she felt sure she couldn’t be seen in the shadows—then she stepped out from the passageway and began to make her way across the portico.

  She could see doors across the back of the villa on this side, and she abruptly caught the scent of human waste. Her stomach curdled, but Selene pressed forward, creeping closer to the farther door, which seemed to be the source of the smells.

  It was a heavy oak door, and it was bolted with iron. Swallowing her urge to be sick, Selene pressed her ear to the wood, listening.

  Labored breathing. The sound of cloth scraping on stone.

  The smells, the sounds … for a moment Selene remembered being ten years old, shoved into a dank and despairing cell with her twin brother, awaiting their turn to be paraded through Rome as a measure of Augustus Caesar’s conquest of Egypt. He’d made them wear chains of gold, fetters wrought of their dead mother’s hard-won treasures.

  But Alexander Helios was dead. Their kingdom was lost.

  Once again, Selene found herself shaking away dark thoughts.

  That was the past. It was done. She couldn’t forgive Rome for what it had done, but she understood now that no measure of revenge could recover what she’d lost. What mattered now was the living.

  Lapis was here because of the Shards, because of her.

  She’d lost Isidora to dreams of vengeance. It was long past time to start making things right.

  Selene pulled away from the door and looked behind her. The two guards were close enough for her to hear that they were chatting with one another. And she could see now that their circuit would bring them around this same corner of the villa, far too close to her. If she stayed where she was, they’d see her for certain.

  She took a step back toward the passageway to hide, then heard movement from that direction, too. Footsteps were echoing up through the arched passageway.

  Cursing silently, Selene spun and stared at the metal latch of Lapis’ cell. It was a heavy loop of iron that slipped over a thick wooden peg on the door. There was no lock. She’d only need to lift the latch free, then pull the bolt out from the hole in the stone wall.

  Her fingers wrapped around the metal, and when she strained at lifting it she felt the Shard upon her chest feeding her new strength.

  The loop came up from the wood, caught for a moment, and then with the slightest of creaks it came free.

  The footsteps were very close.

  Concentrating, forcing herself to move slowly, Selene now pulled at the bolt, sliding it out of the stone as fast as she dared.

  She could hear now that the footsteps approaching from inside the villa were from another pair of guards. She could hear them whispering now, too.

  The bolt at last slid free, and with a gentle tug the door began to swing open. A new wash of smells made her eyes water and her throat constrict as she fought the urge to gag and retch, but Selene held her breath as she spun herself through and inside. She caught sight of the two guards walking out into the portico a speeding heartbeat before she pulled the oak shut behind her.

  Selene froze there, huddled against the door in the sudden blackness of the cell, trying to listen past her own suddenly panicked breathing—praying they’d heard nothing, praying they wouldn’t see the undone latch. Calm, she told herself. Calm.

  Behind her, Lapis moaned.

  On the other side of the door, the guards were approaching.

  Selene looked around as if she might find something in the black to help her. Foolishness, of course. There would be nothing in the cell but the prisoner.

  Groping across damp stone, she searched for Lapis and finally found her huddled against the back wall of the little room. Her fingers touched her leg first. It was gaunt, the skin slack. Selene felt sores and open wounds, but no fetters.

  Whatever they’d been doing to her, it ended now.

  Lapis moaned to be disturbed, and her limbs contracted in protective instinct.

  “Shhhh,” Selene hushed. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  The limbs froze. “My queen?”

  Not anymore, Selene thought, smiling grimly in the dark. “Yes,” she whispered. “Quiet now.”

  She heard the sound of Lapis nodding—cloth shifting on stone—and she felt her way to the woman’s thin fingers and gripped them reassuringly. Just hang on, she thought.

  Outside, the footsteps approached along the portico. One of the men chuckled. She heard them hail the other guards. And then she heard one set of footsteps stop just outside the door.

  He’d seen it.

  Selene squeezed Lapis’ hand again, then she let go of her and stood. She turned to face the door. The guards had all stopped there. She could hear their voices. One man had pulled his gladius.

  Calm, serene, Cleopatra Selene reached into the satchel at her side. At her feet, Lapis had gathered herself to her knees, and she was clinging to her leg.

  The door shook as hands found the open latch and began to pull.

  Selene’s fingers found the Palladium. Her hand enclosed the Shard. “Hold on,” she said.

  The full, pure power of the Shard erupted outward.

  Iron split. Stone fractured. Wood splintered.

  The door launched from its shattered hinges, flung out into the moonlight like a child’s toy thrown from the hand of a god.

  The guards were blown back with it, their bodies scattered away with a sound of screams that was replaced a moment later by an ear-splitting pop as air rushed back into the void of the little cell.

  Lapis was still gripping her leg, shaking. Selene dropped the Shard back into her satchel and reached down to her. Feeling the strength of the Aegis, she lifted the woman easily to her feet and put her arm under her shoulder to help hold her upright.

  “It’s time to go,” she said.

  Selene turned and strode toward the broken mouth of the cell. The two guards who’d been standing immediately outside had been crushed by the heavy door as it flew outward. They were awkwardly heaped on the ground outside, unmoving. The other two had been kicked out into the moonlight, too. They’d been slung to the ground, where they were moaning from bruises and broken bones.

  Her back straight and her head held tall, Selene stepped over the debris where the door had stood. If she could get Lapis outside, she could fly away.

  Heartbeat by heartbeat, the two women made their way to freedom. They crossed the portico. They started down the steps, down toward the grass below. They passed out of the shadows and into a moonlight that seemed less bright.

  “Stop!”

  The voice came from their right, out from where the first pair of guards had come. Selene’s head snapped in that direction, but already she was feeling the shifting weight of Lapis. The other woman had seen the danger first. Even as the fifth guard loosed his arrow across the open yard, Lapis was flinging
herself forward with the last of her strength.

  The shaft buried itself in the woman’s chest, the air in her lungs coughing out into the moonlight as the impact drove her out of Selene’s grip.

  Selene watched her fall in slow motion, in shock, but then her eyes were spinning back to the distant guard. He was already lifting another arrow to the string.

  As he loosed again, as Lapis slid onto her back, Selene knelt. The second arrow sailed over her head, snapping into the stone cell behind her, but already her left hand had found the Palladium.

  As it did so, her right hand pulled back and struck out, a punch into the empty air. It carried across the distance—in slow time Selene could see the air compressing wave to wave, growing in power—and it impacted against the man’s chest, pounding into him like a massive and unseen hammer.

  She spun at her knees and backhanded another pummeling wave toward the villa’s passageway behind her. The supports of the archway snapped and gave way. Bricks and wood fell. The portico cracked. It began to give way.

  “My queen,” Lapis gasped.

  Selene let go of the Shard. As the portico was collapsing behind her, she turned back to the woman in the grass. The arrow seemed an obscene thing, rooted in her chest. Bright red blood was seeping into the tattered remnants of her fouled shift.

  No. Isidora. Now Lapis. Oh gods, no.

  “Thrasyllus,” the dying woman managed to say, “… taking him to Jerusalem.”

  Selene nodded as she knelt. “Just stay with me, Lapis. We’ll get him together.”

  Lapis shook her head, weakly but firmly. “No,” she said. “An Ark.”

  Selene’s mind raced with questions, but they fell away with her tears. “Just stay with me, please.”

  “Petra,” Lapis said, her voice urgent. “Petra.”

  “We’ll go,” Selene said, gripping her frail hand. “Together.”