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

by Michael Livingston

  “What of the Book?” Vorenus asked. That was what he’d come here to get, what the fate of his world depended upon.

  Recover it, Michael said.

  Preserve it, said Raphael.

  Protect it, Gabriel implored.

  There is no other way, Raphael said. The key of the throne must not be used again.

  The gate must be shut, Michael agreed.

  The Shards, Vorenus thought. The gate somehow had to be shut, and there’d be no coming back this way.

  The Laws, Gabriel said, nodding sagely.

  Vorenus nodded, too, hoping he would remember enough of this to have Didymus explain it all to him someday—if any of them survived at all. But it was simple enough for now. Close the gate somehow. Recover the Book. Preserve and protect.

  And survive.

  Somehow. Always and ever. Survive.

  Vorenus strode through the throne room of God as if he knew exactly what was to come. He moved into the waters of the river, and the waters of the river moved through him. The realms of God turned over upon themselves, and then he was standing before the gate, beside the great angel.

  “So I will return the moment I left,” Vorenus said.

  Michael nodded. And I with you.

  “Close the gate,” Vorenus said. “Save the Book.”

  And save me, Michael said.

  “How will I find you?” Vorenus asked, but already the angel was passing through to the other side.

  So Vorenus, feeling like he knew everything and nothing all at once, passed through behind him.

  * * *

  As if he’d never left, Lucius Vorenus passed through the indigo gate and stumbled out onto the courtyard of light and storm. For a heartbeat he stood in the tumult, disoriented and blinded. Then he saw that the demon Acme was floating across the courtyard toward Antiphilus. Juba had fallen there, and she was about to step over him. Closer still, Pantera was bleeding, screaming, desperately fighting off the three Romans arrayed against him.

  Vorenus, his gladius already in hand, made a decision. His mind was a swirl of images and voices and questions, but he shoved it all aside. He had to close the gate.

  He burst forward—faster than he’d ever moved, freer than he’d ever felt before—and his blade was pinching through the back of one of the Roman legionnaires attacking Pantera. “Shoot one with a Shard!” he shouted to the archer.

  Pantera saw and understood. Even as another of the men lunged at him, the archer dropped his blade and spun to his knees, pulling off his bow and nocking an arrow in the same smooth motion. He aimed for the first one he saw: the man holding what remained of the Trident of Poseidon.

  Before the legionnaire behind him could run him through, Vorenus slashed across the man’s wrists, then struck the third man across the face, sending him screaming into the line of fire across the ground.

  Acme floated on, but in that moment Pantera released the string. The bow snapped taut, and the arrow flew and hit its mark. In a silent death, the man let go of the Water Shard and fell backward, neatly pinned.

  The demon Acme shrieked, and Pantera and Vorenus both turned to the west. Antiphilus was still huddled over Miriam, but the intensity upon his pale face showed that his concentration was close to breaking. Acme was nearly standing just on the other side of the supine Juba, and she was turning to face the two of them.

  Vorenus saw the Book in her right arm. A simple thing in a leather cover. No jewels. No sign of its enormous power. It was no different than any of the thousands of codices amid the scrolls in the Great Library of Alexandria.

  The demon’s eyes burned with intense fire, and the nails of her left hand looked long and suddenly, impossibly sharp. She crouched as if she meant to leap upon them, a feral smile on her face. Vorenus imagined she was envisioning their dismemberment.

  Pantera still had his bow in hand, and before she could pounce he nocked another arrow and let it fly.

  The shot sailed wide of her, and for a single instant Vorenus saw the glee upon her face, the look of victory.

  But then the arrow buried itself in the chest of Antiphilus, and the demon let go of Miriam.

  The Shards in the hands of the Romans around the courtyard fell from their grips. The Ark splintered and broke apart, its black stone tumbling from the stone slab to the ground. The Shards trembled where they fell, twitching as if shaken by invisible hands, and inching closer and closer to the indigo gate along the lines of power that connected them. Miriam groaned.

  Then, one by one, the Shards began to slide toward the gate, as if they were falling into it. Earth, Air, and Fire … each dancing and spinning across the ground. And when each hit the gate, they smashed into each other like a shining star.

  The Water Shard was sliding, too, and without thinking Vorenus dove across the ground and grabbed it. Not far away, he saw Tiberius diving to do the same for the Seal of Solomon, the Shard bouncing around his fingers as if it did not want to be held.

  Pantera shouted, and Vorenus—holding down the Water Shard as if it were a live thing—looked back to see the archer drop his precious bow and run toward Miriam and the Aegis of Zeus. Whatever power was drawing the Shards to the gate, it had pulled the girl down from the sacrificial altar. She’d fallen hard, then slid quickly, crashing through the legs of Acme and toppling the demon. Miriam had slid on, and only the still-transfixed body of Juba seemed to be holding her back from crashing into the gate. Pantera dove to help stop her, even as Acme was starting to rise back up to her feet. And behind her, the demon Antiphilus was staggering to his feet, too, his hands gripping the shaft of the arrow protruding from his body.

  Between them all, the gate, as if it was taking a deep breath, seemed to draw itself inward upon the Shards that had collapsed together there.

  Vorenus, from across the courtyard, saw Antiphilus tug the arrow free and for a moment look up in fierce exultation. Then the demon saw what was happening to the gate. And Vorenus, for the first time, saw fear in his eyes.

  The green light that had been emanating from the Aegis, passing through Juba, suddenly blinked out.

  Beneath Pantera’s protective form, Miriam screamed in raw agony.

  And Juba the Numidian, beside her, cried out in a hoarse voice: “Selene!”

  Then the gate, with a flash of light and a crack of violent thunder, exploded outward. In the moment before the force of its expanding concussion slammed him back into the step of the lowered courtyard, Vorenus saw that the explosion smashed Acme against the altar of sacrifice. And Antiphilus, who’d been standing atop it, was struck off the edge of the mountain as surely as if he’d been swept away by the hand of God.

  The demon disappeared, screaming into the night.

  28

  DEATH AND LIFE

  PETRA, 4 BCE

  Juba was falling. His foot had caught on one of the many shattered stones in the lowered courtyard, and now he was going down and the man he’d been fighting was already leaping over him, pressing the attack on the beleaguered Pantera—who even as he already fought two legionnaires was far more dangerous than the one-armed Juba ever could be.

  As he fell, he saw the green line of light rising to meet him, and he rolled instinctively. When he struck the ground—when he struck that beam of pulsing power—he was looking up at the crescent moon in a sky of stars.

  The power surged into him, a jolting shock through his body, a feeling as if he’d been pulled from the soothing warmth of a hot springs and thrown headlong into a drift of alpine snow. He opened his mouth to scream, but the sounds of his throat—like the sounds of the battle around him—were gone.

  His body shook, his veins filled to bursting with the energy that was streaming down from the Aegis of Zeus toward the indigo block that stood between the Shards. It flowed into him, down through his veins, out into his wounds, and then it passed on—a continuous pump of the pure distillation of Life.

  * * *

  Juba, he heard Selene say.

  He was starin
g up at the moon, and for a moment he thought he could see her face upon the sky—but then he felt and knew that the voice came from within. Selene? God, Selene, they told me you were—

  My Juba, the voice said, we have too little time and so much to say.

  You’re gone. Juba broke inside to say it, as if it took his admission to make her death real.

  Gone, she said, and her voice was filled with sorrow.

  Am I dead, too? He felt a kind of hope at the possibility, and he immediately felt guilty for it.

  You remain, my love. You’ve much still to do.

  Then how—?

  I’m still a memory here. What was left of me in the Shard. Now to be left in you.

  I don’t want to lose you.

  You won’t, my love. Her voice ran through him, like a tender caress upon his skin. I’ll live on in you. Two halves made whole.

  I don’t think I can.

  You must. You will be whole and strong and free.

  Juba’s body shook. His torn and broken left side felt as if it was in flames. But Juba pushed it away to focus on the whisper in his mind. What will I tell Ptolemy?

  That his mother loves him still.

  You make it sound so simple.

  Love is.

  Something struck his body, but he didn’t know or care what it was. What will I do now?

  Fight. Live. Go home. Raise our son.

  Ptolemy. Juba saw the boy’s face in his mind, and saw her face in his. A memory. A reminder. Will we see each other again?

  When the sun sets on this shore, it rises on another. We all sail west, my love, and I believe we will see each other there.

  Her voice was softer, as if she was slipping away like sand through his fingers. Please don’t go, Selene. Please.

  I must. And I never will. Be strong, my husband.

  I love you.

  And I you, she whispered back.

  * * *

  The power that had been surging through him shut off like a doused flame, and breath returned to Juba’s lungs.

  A woman was screaming. Close at hand.

  “Selene!” he cried out, and then the whole world seemed to be fire and lightning.

  Juba was lifted from the ground and violently shoved forward in a kind of tumbling heap with other arms and legs and bodies. The earth rolled around him. He bounced off the ground, then hit something hard and stuck.

  The wave of power passed, and Juba gasped breaths into his lungs, his head spinning. He was on his side, back against stone, and instinctively he reached out with his arms to right himself.

  He was up against the altar of sacrifice. The strange lights that had been crisscrossing the summit had all disappeared. Only a couple of oil lamps still sputtered light out upon the lowered courtyard. The others had all been toppled over or snuffed. The strange monolith that had stood in the middle of it all was gone. Where it had stood, sitting inert and lifeless, was a large black lump of glassy stone.

  Pantera was at his feet, huddled over Miriam. The archer had already pulled the breastplate from her body. It sat abandoned at his side, a gaping hole where the Shard once had been. The girl was awake, but she appeared to be in shock, staring down at her chest with wild eyes. Her clothing was partly burned away there. Embedded just below the point that her collarbones met, the faintest of white lights gleaming within its black depths, was the Shard of Life.

  She was no longer screaming, but her fingers were scrabbling at the foreign thing with probing panic. “Pantera,” she gasped. “Pantera.”

  The archer was simply staring. His hands were frozen above her as if he had no idea what to do.

  Me neither, Juba thought, reaching up with his left hand to feel at his throbbing head.

  His left hand.

  Juba pulled his hand away and looked at it like it, too, was a foreign thing.

  Two halves made whole, Selene had said. And so it was. “Selene,” he whispered.

  “I saw her hit,” came a silky voice from behind him. “I knew it would grieve you, Father.”

  Acme came down the steps beside him, her footfalls light and methodical, as if she had no care in the world. She had a book in her hand, a leather-bound volume, and she stood upon the bottom step like a triumphant queen.

  He pulled his eyes from the perfect curves of her, searching the ground for a weapon. There was nothing. Nothing at all. Even Pantera was unarmed. “I told you not to call me that,” he said.

  “Oh,” she said, her lips extending into the slightest pout. “But I don’t think you meant it. You brought us here. And now that she’s gone—”

  “You can rot in hell.”

  Acme’s dark eyes blinked. The smile that spread across her face was no longer seductive. It was knowing and dangerous. “But you see I have, Father. We all have. Rotted in hell, banished for believing in the superiority of the superior.”

  “For believing you’re better than us.”

  “Because we are,” she said.

  They were indeed perfect to the eye. But Juba knew in his heart what they lacked. It was what he and Selene had shared. The power that even now burned within him. “You’re broken.”

  “Broken?” Her voice lilted at the absurdity of the notion. “We are perfect.”

  Juba shook his head, more sure with every breath, with every pang of the memory of his loss. “You don’t have love.”

  “Love?” She said the word like it was an alien thing.

  Juba nodded. That was the difference, in the end. They were angels once, he recalled from his books. That made the demons immortals. And perhaps it was because they were immortals, because they lacked death, lacked loss, that they couldn’t understand what it was to truly love. “Yes,” he said.

  She blinked, and for a moment Juba felt like he saw doubt tick at the corners of her knowing smile. “We are perfect,” she repeated. The nails of her long fingers clicked together.

  “No,” Juba said. He tightened the muscles of his left leg, which had been useless so shortly before. It was, as Selene promised, whole again. He felt like he could stand, he could jump, he could run. He also felt more certain than ever. “You lack love,” he said. “And without that, I think, you don’t have a soul.”

  Whatever doubts Acme might have had, they melted away. Her grin creased even more sharply. “A soul?” she said. She patted the cover of the book in her arms. “You’ll not have your own soon. None of you will.”

  “Love wins,” Juba said. He didn’t know how, but he knew it was true.

  “Not tonight,” the demon said, and her long fingers began to fold into the pages of the book, as if she intended to open it. “I think I’ll start with your love,” she said.

  Juba saw movement to his left, as Lapis rose up out of the dark. He saw her arm swing. “You bitch,” she cried out, and the blade she threw buried itself hilt-deep in the demon’s shoulder.

  The demon shrieked, and as she recoiled from the strike, she dropped the book in her hands.

  Juba dove over and caught it as the demon staggered backward, then he rolled away onto the courtyard as she caught her balance and swiped at him with her clawed hand.

  She missed, and he hit the stone and got to his feet. He stumbled backward, clutching the book, and Lucius Vorenus was calling to him from behind, begging him to run.

  Acme had been struck off balance, but she was rising up in control now. She pulled the blade out of herself, and she smiled over at Juba. “A little knife won’t stop me, Father.”

  Pantera abruptly rose up to stand between them. “Go,” he said over his shoulder. “Run!”

  Acme laughed. “You’re an unarmed boy,” she said.

  Juba turned, saw that Vorenus was waving him onward, away from the demon. On the ground, not far away from the lump of cold stone, Didymus was on the back of Tiberius. “Go!” the old man shouted.

  Acme cackled in glee, and Pantera cried out in pain, but Juba was already running. Clinging to the book, still not knowing what it was, he followed V
orenus out into the dark.

  29

  A GOOD DAY TO DIE

  PETRA, 4 BCE

  It was disappointing in its way. Long ago, Titus Pullo had joined the legion. And in time he’d been not just a legionnaire, but a commander of legionnaires. He knew what they ought to be capable of doing. He’d trained them.

  So when he’d rushed into battle with the men guarding the processional gate—four against one in order to free the others to disrupt whatever was happening on the summit—he had assumed that his death was unavoidable.

  His life in that moment amounted to a temporary delay, gladly given that the cause might succeed—whatever the odds.

  It was, as he had so often told Vorenus before battles, a good day to die.

  But now he stood—an old and broken man—over the corpses of four younger men. His leg dripped with blood equal to the rivulets beading on his blade, but he was alive. Unquestionably and somewhat disappointingly alive.

  Standards in the Roman army, he was certain, had fallen far since the days of the one true Caesar.

  He had been aided by the bewildering lights, the explosive crashes, and the terrifying screams from higher up on the mountain—distractions, he knew, were a focused fighter’s best friend—but despite his concern for what was happening upon the summit, he was too tired to run when the killing of the guard was finished.

  A steady lope was the best he could do.

  He had not gone far when shapes approached, running toward him. It was only two men, and though he did not recognize them both, he would have known the gait of Lucius Vorenus in a snowstorm. His old friend, a man he loved as dear as life itself, was unmistakable.

  “Vorenus!” he called out.

  “Pullo! By the gods, you’re alive!”

  “So far,” Pullo replied. The man running beside his friend was a dark-skinned man. Juba the Numidian, Pullo knew. The man who’d once tried to hamstring him, who’d left him a limping and broken man.

  Pullo felt his blood start to rise, but he pushed it back down. Didymus said that the man had not been himself. Vorenus had said the same.

  And if Pullo could not trust in his friends, what was left in this world?