The scholar walked forward, past the lead praetorian, and he paced back and forth in front of the three passageways, now and again pausing to look up at the ceiling above one of them, or at the floor at his feet. He wasn’t, Juba was certain, looking for signs of the Jews’ passage: they’d already learned that the sealed doors to these passages had prevented even the faintest traces of dust from collecting on its floors. What then, Juba wondered, was he looking for?
Didymus abruptly stopped pacing, his head whipping up to nod at each of the passages as if counting them. “How many steps have we gone down?” he asked over his shoulder.
“Steps?” the praetorian asked from behind Juba. “We were supposed to be counting steps?”
The librarian shook his head impatiently as he turned around to face them. “No, no. Not individual steps. Those occasional little sets of stairs. How many? Five? Six?”
Juba had balled his fists to keep them from tearing at his cloak, but the scholar’s question allowed him to relax them as he thought back. “Five, I think.”
The praetorian who’d been leading agreed, the light cast by his lantern bobbing over the scholar in front of them. Didymus grinned like a little boy. “Then we go left,” he said as he started to walk in that direction, his pace fast with resolution. “Always left.”
Juba and the others hurried to catch up to him, the praetorian stepping around him to once more take the lead. “How do you know?” Juba asked. They were quickly moving past a turn in the new passageway. “Are you sure?”
Didymus shrugged, but his face was still beaming as they walked. “It’s the Nile. The whole passageway is a model of the river. This must be the start of the delta.”
“But how do you know we go left?”
“The Ark is here in Alexandria, and Alexandria is off the Canopic branch of the Nile. The farthest west,” the librarian answered.
Juba was starting to ask how he could be so certain that the passageway had anything to do with Egypt’s great river when the praetorian in front raised his arm to signal for silence. Juba strained his ears as they crept forward, feet making soft noises on the smooth stone. Another turn, and at last he could hear what the praetorian already had: voices, faintly echoed from the rock around them, too dim to discern their words but clearly near at hand. And then, at the far reach of the light of their lamps, they saw a large wooden entryway at the end of the passage, bolstered with iron.
“They must be on the other side of the door,” the praetorian whispered.
At a motion from Juba, the second praetorian joined his fellow in front of the door. They both drew their swords.
For all his experience at war, Juba had been fortunate to take part in few fights. Feeling close to it now, his heart thrilled in both anticipation and fright. He signaled four of the legionnaires to move up front, confident that there was little danger from behind.
He didn’t desire a fight. He’d made that order clear enough, he hoped. But if the Jews didn’t quickly agree to terms, if they didn’t quickly surrender the Ark, Juba knew he wouldn’t let them stand in the way of his vengeance. As he’d told Didymus back at the Library, the need for it burned in his veins, burned with a smoldering rage that threatened at any moment to consume him.
The men ahead exchanged nods of readiness as one of the praetorians gripped the door handle. Juba took a deep breath and pulled his own sword. Then he turned to Didymus.
The scholar, he saw, wasn’t paying attention to the assault about to happen. He was fingering something on the wall beside him, an indentation just the size of a man’s hand, and he was looking at the ground beneath his feet, where faint sweeps of chalky dust—glaringly apparent against the otherwise spotless tunnel—showed that something heavy had recently moved there.
Juba’s gaze traced the lines on the ground, and he saw it all for what it was. He reached past Didymus to the stone, gripped what he could see now was a hidden handle in the rock, and began to pull the secret door open. He turned to whisper a warning not to open the wooden door, but his realization had come to him too late.
Time seemed to slow, as if he were moving through thick sand. He saw, in terrible clarity, the handle of the wooden door lifting in the praetorian’s hands. He saw him turn to his fellow with a look of final satisfaction as he pulled.
Then time lurched forward, actions speeding into sudden fast motion. Juba found his voice, only to have it drowned out by the splintering boom of the wooden door blasting inward. The world seemed to scream.
The next moments came to Juba in flashes. Blood flinging into the air. A plank hitting the Roman in front of him, grotesquely doubling the man over. Shadows reeling as lanterns flew and clattered. And then the shock of bitter cold as a pent-up tide of water roared forth from the doorway, flooding the passage.
Parts of the door and the men in front of it swept down through the passage, knocking down those still standing and driving them back. Juba felt his own legs being pushed out from beneath him as he fought to hold on to the handle in the stone door. Didymus slammed into him, the older man somehow catching into the folds of Juba’s cloak.
The full weight of the water crashed into them then, a buffeting blow that struck like a great hammer in the hands of an unseen and very angry god. The wall of water drove them off the floor, Didymus clinging desperately to Juba, whose grip on the door was the only thing keeping them both from being swept away. Juba’s body swung in the passing wave, his eyes closing against the cold and the spin as everything in his being concentrated on holding his straining grip. He felt his body slam up against the scholar’s, then the wall, but neither of them let go. For a heartbeat his face found air. Then a second wall descended and they were surrounded by water.
Juba opened his eyes to see only the slightest haze of shapes through the rush of water in the flooding passage. The lamps had all been extinguished by the onslaught, but a dim light reflected down from somewhere beyond the exploded door. It was, Juba thought, a way out.
But there was no way to swim against such a current. And it was not the way to the Ark.
He looked toward his grip, saw that the stone door was already partially ajar. Water was streaming into the crack that he had opened. Willful determination shook him into action. He pulled himself against the current, kicking to pivot his legs against the stone near his hands. His lungs burned, and his mind wailed at the horror of drowning. He fought the emotion down, only to have it replaced by the terrible doubt that he wouldn’t be able to open the door further. He would be too weak, or it would be frozen in place, or …
He pulled. His surroundings grew dimmer, becoming a narrowing circle of light.
He pulled.
In his tunneling vision Juba saw that Didymus had swung himself around, too, to join him. The Greek planted his feet beside Juba’s. Juba thought that the stone beneath his grip moved, and he didn’t know if it was from the scholar’s help or if the rush of the water was actually pushing the crack open.
Together they pulled, straining against oblivion.
The door came free, the current catching it and pulling it wide even as the water slammed them, one after the other, into the void behind it.
Once more he spun and rolled as they rode through churning waves. Juba felt himself pop free of the water into the air and he inhaled instinctively, but just as he did so his ribs crashed against an edge of stone and the air in his lungs was coughed out again. His body bounced upward, vision fading to black, before he at last bobbed out for good, gasping for air.
Juba kicked with what little energy he had left, keeping atop the rising surface. When it ceased pushing him upward, his feet found purchase on the stone of a stair and he scrambled up out of the water in an exhausted push. Didymus came up out of the water beside him, somehow alive. Juba helped pull him up onto the stairs, where the scholar collapsed facedown, coughing.
Juba’s ears rung, his vision sparkled with flashes of light, and his lungs felt like they were torn and raw, but he’d made it.
He was alive. And the Ark was near. His vengeance was near.
Need pushed him on. He crawled upward, step by agonized step, light growing around him, until he reached the end of the stair and heaved himself over the top onto the floor of a large chamber. He lay there for a few seconds, panting and spitting what he hoped was water, before he managed the strength to force himself to his knees. He raised his head, water pressing his hair flat against his forehead, and centered his swimming sight on the object of his dreams.
It was there. More beautiful than he would ever have imagined: shining like a new thing, all burnished gold and glory. Twin wooden poles had already been mounted to its sides, preparing it for transport. His heart soared, and for a moment he felt like singing.
Then he saw the four men standing around him. They wore dark hooded cloaks, pulled back from their shoulders to give freedom to their arms as they held notched arrows to their tightened bows, deadly points taking slow and careful aim at the intruder.
“Wait,” he croaked, but then the strings were loosed and four arrows buried themselves in his body, finding openings around his armor.
Juba slumped forward, arrows snapping and metal ringing as he struck the stone floor, and silent darkness overtook him.
* * *
No.
The thought was so clear, so present in Juba’s floating mind that it startled him into a single, strong, undeniable realization. He wasn’t dead.
He should be. Juba knew that. He’d very nearly drowned. He’d been shot through with four iron-pointed shafts—any one of which would have killed a man.
But he was alive. Somehow, someway, he was alive. How?
The answer came to him as if from another voice. The breastplate, it said. Alexander’s breastplate.
The memory of it came back to him through the fog of darkness in which he floated. He’d seen it in the tomb this morning and recognized it at once for its potential power, even if he hadn’t recognized it for the artifact that it was. Even if he hadn’t realized then it was the Aegis of Zeus until Didymus told him. The Aegis. The very armor of the father of the gods.
Not that he believed in the gods. He could no longer remember a time when he had. If what Selene and Didymus had told him was true—and he was certain now that it was—he was right to doubt the divine. There was only one God, and He was gone. All that was left were the Shards.
Despite the coldness of his thoughts, Juba felt a warmth somewhere nearby, like a deep well filled with ready flame. The breastplate again, he realized. With the blacker-than-black stone upon it. He reached out to the Shard in his mind, thinking of the silver and bronze ribbing he’d seen embedded on the inside of the armor and that odd symbol in the middle of it all, directly behind the Shard itself: a six-sided shape in a six-pointed star. Imagining himself pushing out through those metal contacts, through that symbol, he gave himself over to the power of the Shard, just as he had so often with the Trident. Like the feel of those twin snakes beneath his palms, the metal of the breastplate around him seemed to move like a thing alive as the Shard drew him ever deeper even as it pushed back and into him.
Power. He felt it coursing into the body that began to awake around him, filling his veins. Power. Life.
And rage. Deep and raw. Rage only barely contained.
The darkness around him lurched hard. Once. Then twice. Then twice more.
In his mind, Juba felt like laughing. His heart was beating again. Beating and calling for blood.
So this was how Alexander had survived so long, through so many battles, through so many wounds that should have ended his life. This was the power of the Aegis. Power that was now his. Power that would help him avenge his father. And himself. Power that would help him kill Octavian. Kill.
Juba’s sense of hearing abruptly returned, and he could hear that there was movement around him. Feet on stone, hushed voices.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” someone asked.
“I am to see this,” Didymus rasped.
“More beautiful than you thought, isn’t it?”
“It is,” Didymus replied.
In the pause that followed, Juba imagined Didymus staring at the Ark, the object of Juba’s own desires. Unprovoked anger shook him to the marrow of his bones, even as another part of his mind—a small, shrinking part—wondered how he could hate the man who’d helped him get this far. What had Didymus ever done to him?
The thought drifted away in the storm of violent anger that swirled up and into him through the Shard upon his chest.
Then came a girl’s voice. “We need to go,” she said.
He heard the sound of wood bending, and of men grunting under a heavy weight. “Keep it steady,” a male voice said. “Slow down the ramp.”
Juba cried out in his mind, quaking with ire, but his body, he was certain, did not move.
“So who is your Roman friend?” the girl asked.
“Juba,” Didymus said. He sounded distracted, as if he couldn’t take his gaze off the retreating Ark.
“This is him?” asked the first voice.
“What’s he doing here?” the girl asked.
Getting revenge, Juba screamed back in his mind, and he pictured himself standing, stopping them from taking away his prize, his power, his Ark. His vengeance.
But then, in an instant, he lost the focus of his energies and the pain of his wounds surged over him like a roll of thunder. His heart still pounding with the strength of the Shard, he fell out of consciousness again.
* * *
When he returned to his senses, the pain of his wounds was more manageable. Whether the Shard had partially healed them or his mind had found some means of separating the pain from his mind, he didn’t know or care. What mattered was that the voices in the room were gone.
His eyes snapped open, focusing first on the congealed blood that had pooled around his face on the floor and then, as he slowly turned his head, on the empty dais in the middle of the chamber, where the Ark had stood.
No.
They’d taken the Ark. His vengeance. His hope. They’d taken it and left only a few oil lamps flickering hungrily in the dark.
No.
Like a command in his mind, the thought moved muscles in his weakened body. One of his fists balled up.
No.
Rage boiled in his chest, in his mind. He felt it like a wildfire behind his eyes, behind the breastplate. He gritted his teeth and tightened angry muscles to pull himself once more to his knees. Pain shook at his senses, threatened to overwhelm him again, but he dipped down into the surging heat of the Shard and felt a wave of strength push back against the screaming of his body.
No. Vengeance was supposed to be his. By right of his father, who died after Caesar’s defeat. By right of the crowds who’d jeered and mocked him when, as a little boy, he was dragged through Rome in Caesar’s Triumph.
Vengeance.
By right of the Roman faces mocking his skin, his speech. By right of the blood on his own hands, blood that he’d spilled by order of Octavian, Caesar’s son. The countless men at Actium. The innocent, unknowing sailors off the coast of Italy. Quintus. Even Syphax.
Vengeance. Power.
There was an open door on the other side of the chamber. Juba heard voices, just barely audible, coming from it.
Juba bared his teeth in a smile, and a pulse of strength brought him to his feet.
The Numidian strode, eyes focused and unblinking in his rage, across the stone floor. Ignoring the broken man slumped against the wall, he marched down the ramp. He drew his sword.
The ramp ended at an underground canal. He turned to follow the sounds to the right, moving quickly, making no effort at stealth. They had carried the Ark down through an open gate and onto a platform beside the harbor waters of the city. The hooded men who’d shot him were now standing around the edges of that stone platform, bows ready to fire at any threats from above or without.
Feeling the dull pain of an iron point scraping against his
ribs, Juba felt like laughing. Let them shoot, he thought. Let them try.
A girl was among the archers, her hand reaching out to grip that of a man standing beside her, a man of royal complexion and bearing—Caesarion, Juba was sure. Behind the Ark, just inside the open gate, stood another young man who was laughing about something, a massively muscular tall man holding an oil lamp, and Didymus.
Everyone but the Greek was looking out to sea as if they were waiting for something.
Didymus had just turned to look back along the canal when Juba reached them from behind. The librarian’s eyes widened in shock, but he could say nothing before Juba tossed him aside like a harmless sack of wheat, his focus on the more threatening men standing between him and his rightful destiny.
As it had in the tunnel, time shifted into slow motion. But now, instead of feeling as if he couldn’t move, Juba’s movements felt faster than life, faster than he’d ever thought possible. Even as Didymus was smashing against the stone wall beside him, the Numidian was moving past him, to the large man with the lamp, who was instinctively swinging his upper body around to confront the noise behind him.
In one smooth motion, Juba ducked beneath the big man’s powerful but slow swing, the short sword in his hand jabbing forward to cut a deep gash across the back of the man’s left knee, slicing the tendons there and hamstringing him. The lines on the massive man’s face deepened as he screamed in slow time, his body starting to buckle. Juba, grinning like a feral cat, stopped his own lunge when the edge of his blade had run its course through the man’s flesh and his own knee was almost touching the ground. Then he kicked himself into a spin that drew his sword back across the man’s ripped leg, his reach extending as he spun in order to carve a swath over and through the right knee, too. The big man started to collapse over the other way, sprawling toward a jumble of large clay pots beside the gate.
The Shards of Heaven Page 31
