Queen of Kings (43 page)

Upon the statue of a centaur, an inscription informed the reader that Chiron had died accidentally, pricked by a Hydra arrow when Hercules fired it in a display of prowess, and that, though he was a master of medicines, Chiron had not been able to cure himself.

The centaur had been an immortal, and the pain of the wound had caused him so much suffering that he had given up his immortality in order to die.

Hail Prometheus,
said the inscription engraved below the wounded centaur's hooves,
who took willingly the gift of Chiron's immortal life, and who then suffered the endless punishment of Zeus. Hail Prometheus, who gave mankind fire and offended the gods.

The chained man's liver was plucked out nightly in Hades. Cleopatra knew the story. Immortality sometimes had a steep and awful price.

She had known that already.

After a time, she moved on from the scarred place and back into the night, following behind the Slaughterer.

T
he road back to Rome was long and hard. On the rear of the emperor's horse, the bundle containing the poisoned arrows was tied, dangerously shifting and jolting, even within its metal case. Augustus feared it, irrationally. It was not as though the arrows could strike him without being fired from a bow. He had seen them only for a moment, when the case had spilled, but the knowledge of what the venom had done to Agrippa scared him.

Poisoned arrows were not the Roman way, or, at least, not a way of honor. There had been tales of poison since the beginning of Rome, however. Augustus knew it as well as anyone. He did not desire to be a poisoner, known in the annals as a man who employed such methods.

Still, the arrows tempted him.

With a poison such as they contained, a man might be the master of all he saw.

The effects of the poison were so great that Agrippa, famously stoic, moaned in his sleeping and waking, his face flushed with suffering. The last of Augustus's theriac had been given to Agrippa to take away his pain, but once it was gone, the pain dispensed with any hunger. At last, on the third day, Augustus was able to put food into his friend's mouth, and Agrippa looked at him with clear eyes.

“What happened?” he asked. “Where are we?”

“He is improving,” Augustus said. He hoped this was true.

Augustus was convinced that the world was coming to an end. They'd not seen the fireball again, but he expected they would. It was not the sort of thing that disappeared. It was not the sort of thing that was quickly vanquished. Surely, it was Cleopatra's doing.

He'd looked back at the temple as they'd ridden away, and seen a priest running down the hillside, his skin smoking. The man had thrown himself off the cliff and into the waters below.

They rode past dying villages. They saw few people on the road, and he could not help but wonder where his citizens were.

Still, he found himself in oddly good cheer.

On the sixth day of their journey back to Rome without theriac, however, conditions quickly changed. Augustus began to wobble in his saddle, his legs feeling too short for the horse, and his mind feeling once again broken and useless.

When at last, under cover of darkness, they arrived in Rome and reached the Palatine, Augustus was scarcely himself. He thirsted for his tonic so gravely that his tongue was swollen in his mouth, and he could not speak. Usem helped him from his horse and half carried him indoors. Agrippa limped behind, carrying the bundle they had risked their lives to obtain.

“We must open the box together and stab Cleopatra with the arrow as soon as she emerges,” Usem told Agrippa, and Agrippa nodded tightly.

“Physician!” Nicolaus cried, entering the residence. “Physician!”

It was not physicians who came forth to meet them but the seiðkona and the household guards, all with grave faces.

“Cleopatra is escaped,” the leader of the guard said. “And Chrysate is gone as well.”

“Together?” Augustus cried. He had misjudged everything. He had been a fool to leave for Krimissa, imagining himself a warrior.

“Not together, no,” said the guard.

Moments later, Augustus stood over Selene, gasping in horror. Her eyes opened slightly, and she looked at him. The wound stretched over her breast and up to the hollow at the base of her throat. She had been cut open like a sheep for augury.

“Where is my mother?” Selene asked deliriously.

“You should not speak,” Augustus said.

“I should not have come here,” she said. “I should not have trusted you. You said that you would protect me if I helped you. You did not protect me.”

What did the witch want with Cleopatra's daughter? He'd left Rome, and hell had broken free from its boundaries. This was all his fault.

Augustus staggered away from Selene, and ran through the house until he reached the room where he'd arranged for Cleopatra's sons to be held in his absence. It had seemed the safest course of action to cage them in the same room where the queen herself was caged. The silver box had been kept in a separate case, safe from the children's hands, but if Chrysate had gotten to Cleopatra, she surely would have gotten to the children as well. He fumbled with the key, and then threw open the gleaming door to the silver-lined chamber.

Amazingly, the two children were there, Alexander Helios and Ptolemy Philadelphus, their small faces blinking in the sudden light. He had that, at least. He still had her children.

Augustus swayed. If he gave them up, she might leave him alone. She might cease attacking him. Another thought occurred to him. If he killed them, he might avenge all the pain Cleopatra had caused him, all the strife and chaos. He'd nearly lost control of Rome, and the sons of his enemy would only grow into new enemies.

And yet—

It was not Cleopatra who had attacked Selene. It was his own witch, Chrysate. He'd brought the creature into the house. He had done this.

Augustus closed the door to the princes' prison. He slid to the floor, his back against it. What was he doing? What had he become?

“I failed,” Augustus moaned. “I thought to fight monsters, and I became one.”

Agrippa came upon Augustus and looked at him with infinite concern.

“We have a weapon against Cleopatra now,” he said. “We will fight her, and we will fight the witch, too.” But Augustus could not hear him. Augustus could not understand the words the man was speaking. Were they in another language? Agrippa picked the emperor up like a child and, limping with his own wound, carried him from the corridor and into his own bedchamber.

“Where is she?” Usem asked the wind, and a wisp of air fluttered past him.

The Psylli's face shifted as he walked down the corridor, the arrows of Hercules in his arms. He would not wait much longer, but for his wife, he would stay his hand.

C
leopatra waited for Sekhmet's arrow. She'd seen it crossing the sky hours before, arcing downward into a mountain village and eventually returning to the heavens. She'd draped herself in her cloak and hidden herself in the mouth of a cave in the area known as Cumæ. The sun still burned her skin slightly as she gazed out over the landscape. She did not care.

Her task would be accomplished tonight.

She sheltered in the ancient lair of the Sibyl of Cumæ, who had once called out prophecies to loyal citizens, her voice echoing from the crater walls. She'd asked for an extended life but had forgotten to ask for eternal youth, and as a thousand years passed, as many years as the grains of sand she'd foolishly demanded equal her days, she'd grown smaller and smaller, older and older, until all that was left of her was a voice, and a body so tiny that it had to be kept inside a bottle to avoid being lost. At last, even those things had gone. She was long absent from here now.

Cleopatra had listened for her when she arrived and heard nothing, only the whispers of bats roosting in the dark cave corners.

She closed her eyes and felt the Slaughterer journeying. She felt Sekhmet, her back stretched against the sky, catlike, taking the light of the sun as succor while she awaited sacrifices by Cleopatra and by her arrow.

Cleopatra had sacrificed more to her on the journey here. A shepherd calling to his sheep, his blood tasting of an old grudge against a scholarly brother. A prostitute painting her face for evening, her blood tasting of the time she fell down a flight of stairs and was picked up and bandaged by a man who turned out not to love her. A slave drawing water for an evening meal, his blood tasting of a spice market, of a wooden cage shared with a dying friend. A fisherman reeling in his nets, his blood tasting of a mistress in another port, mother to several bastard children. An old widowed man left outdoors to see the stars, who looked up at Cleopatra with dazzled eyes, smiling in the face of his death. He had no secrets left.

Each one of her killings weighed on her.

She'd never thought of these things when she was in power, when she was mortal. Thousands had died in battle, acting on her orders or killed by her soldiers. She'd ordered killings of the families of traitors, of opponents. She had been a queen, and as queen she had done what she thought necessary, regardless of the human cost.

She'd never thought about where their souls went.

Now, since Hades, it was all she could think of. As she drank of their blood, she knew all of their hidden things, all of their failures and glories, and she tried to send their souls to wherever they should go. There was no time for ritual. She left their bodies in the open so that they might be found and buried, so that they might not wait on the shores of Acheron, unmourned. Having seen that place, she could not doom souls to it knowingly.

A light appeared in the sky, brighter than the dying sun, brighter than the rising moon, moving toward the Cumæan temple as she watched.

Cleopatra leapt from her hiding place and bounded out into the daylight, her skin searing, her eyes blurring as she ran at the murderous grandchild of the sun god.

“You will not kill here!” she shouted.

It hissed at her, and its mouth was infinite, deep and black as the heavens and filled with uncountable fangs. Cleopatra knew, horribly, that her soul was bonded with this creature as well as with its mother.

What was she giving up to kill it? Her soul weighed heavier, heavier yet.

The Slaughterer shifted its face toward her, and she saw its mindless eyes. It did not care what she said. Once it had hissed, it did not bother to truly acknowledge her again.

She threw herself upon it as it turned its back to fly toward the temple and to its killing task there.

Cleopatra clutched its pulsating throat, its burning body, feeling its knife-sharp feathers cutting into her palms. She gasped as it twisted and bit her hand—and this was true pain, unlike the echo of pain her bloodless body had experienced since her transformation—but she held it still tighter, straining all of her muscle and bone against its escape. Its feathers sliced into her as it struggled, and its slender, arrow body twisted in her grasp.

“You will not kill,” she told it, and for the first time, she heard its voice, faint, strangely musical.

And what of you? Will
you
not kill?

She screamed with rage, feeling a tearing pain as she broke the Slaughterer's back, snapping its spine.

Her fury was replaced with devastating agony as she held the broken arrow up to the light, Sekhmet's roar of sorrow rattling her own bones.

“I dedicate this soul to Hades,” Cleopatra shouted, and then she hurled the body of the Slaughterer down, into the dark waters of Avernus, as she'd promised the god of the Underworld she would.

Cleopatra waited for the sky to open and strike her down, but nothing happened.

The waters steamed and boiled as Plague sank into them.

 

 

H
er skin blistered, her body smoking, her hands burning, and healing cruelly even as they burned, Cleopatra limped back into the cave of the sibyl, sobbing at the loss of the thing she had killed. She did not love it, no,
she
did not, but Sekhmet did, and what Sekhmet felt, Cleopatra felt. The loss of a child. A dear one.

And what was she? A betrayer. A child killer. Was she not the same as the creature she had murdered? Was she not herself a murderer? At the same time, she had torn herself from Sekhmet. She had done something on her own, something in opposition to the goddess. She had delivered the first portion of her bargain. One more act, the sacrifice of Chrysate, and she would win Antony's soul and those of her children as well. They would go to the Duat. If that was all she could do, it would be enough. She might be a slave to a goddess, but they would be in heaven.

She stretched herself on the cold stones of the sibyl's cave. The bats looked down upon her, their faces curious. Their high-pitched song filled her ears and gave her no comfort.

At last, she slept, dreamless.

As she slept, snakes slithered into the cave. Cats twined their sleek forms against the rock walls. In the valley beyond the crater, a bear trundled down a hillside, and a tiger traveled silently across the field. The rhinoceros immersed itself in the lake of Avernus, washing the dust of the road from its rough skin. A small splash, and a crocodile surfaced in the lake, having traveled by water through underground caverns and along coastlines for days.

An elderly lion, toothless and mangy, padded across the mouth of the cave, lashing its tail, and guarding the queen who slept within.

S
ekhmet reeled on her hilltop, gasping and shaking. The quiver of Slaughterers hummed with confusion. Only six were left, and one had gone into the dark, where she could not see it. Where she could not feel it. Where she could not find it.