Queen of Kings (42 page)

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 tentatively 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.

“Ride!” Usem shouted. “We cannot stay here!”

Agrippa stumbled and fell against Nicolaus, who dropped the box containing Hercules' arrows. Agrippa grabbed the arrows and bow in his arms, smashing them back into their vessel.

Usem flung Nicolaus onto his horse, using strength he did not know he possessed. He took Augustus in his arms and pushed him atop his horse as well.

Agrippa started to mount. They must get away from here before the beast, whatever it was, noticed them. None of them were strong enough to fight it.

Agrippa's eyes blurred suddenly, and he staggered.

The world went dark. Agrippa could hear shouting, feel hands pounding his shoulder, feel himself being dragged along the stones and heaved onto the back of a horse.

He could see nothing. He could hear running feet, the clashing of swords, shouting, and a searing heat overtook his body, beginning in his calf. He could smell metal. A naphtha firepot? The contents would attach to a soldier's skin and ignite, not quenchable with water but only by smothering. Agrippa had seen them in the Circus Maximus. He'd spent a fortune to obtain the fire that had failed to burn the queen, but he'd never been touched by naphtha.

He prepared himself for the end, whispering what prayers he could remember, wishing only that he had been able to save Augustus. He felt himself beginning to detach from everything he'd been.

In Agrippa's mind, the world was white and covered in snow.

Then the world was black and covered in raining ash.

Hades would take him. It was an honorable death for a soldier, to die protecting his commander. He tasted his own blood filling his mouth. He inhaled the scent of burning. A pyre, he thought. The rites were being performed for him. He would not wander the shores of Acheron, improperly buried.

Suddenly, though, the smell of burning was replaced by that of sea.

He opened his eyes and found himself tied to a saddle, seated, the ground bouncing beneath him. He thought in a flash of the many captives he had carried over his own saddle. He'd been captured by some invading, fire-wielding army. Were they Parthians? Warriors from Babylonia? He strained his ears for their language, flexed his muscles for any give in the ropes.

Agrippa gritted his teeth and began to twist in the saddle. Before him, he saw a dark, muscled arm, decked in war ornaments.

He became aware of a pain in his calf. It felt as though a red-hot ember had lodged beneath his muscles, as though he were caught in a million-toothed trap. He moaned.

“He wakes,” a voice said in Latin. The horse slowed, and Agrippa found himself looking into the gray eyes of his oldest friend. Augustus's face showed deep concern.

“My leg,” Agrippa managed.

“You fell on one of the arrows,” Usem said grimly, from in front of Agrippa. The general discovered that he was riding on the Psylli's horse.

“The temple,” Agrippa managed.

“Sekhmet's Slaughterer hit it, just as we got you on the horse,” Nicolaus said.

Slaughterer?
Agrippa felt himself writhe, his leg cramping and contracting. There was a piece of fabric tied tightly about his thigh. He looked down, expecting his leg to be grievously injured, but it was not. There was a tiny wound on his calf, its edges bright and swollen with inflammation. A clean wound made by a sharp arrow, but pain radiated out from it like lava from the mouth of an erupting volcano. He felt himself, shamefully, screaming in agony. A vial was pressed to his lips, and a caustic, sickly sweet liquid dripped into his mouth.

He knew nothing more.

T
he queen sprinted through the city, her bare feet scarcely touching the street. She fed on the first meat she saw, a fuller stumbling from a doorway, his robes reeking of his profession, his blood hot and sweet as she bit into his throat and drank of him. Feeding would make Sekhmet stronger, but it was necessary. Cleopatra could not function without it. She left the man, pale and withered, in another doorway, and felt the now familiar rushing of love, of power, of satisfaction. Somewhere in her mind was the sound of singing, ancient temple songs, and priestesses worshipping her.

Worshipping Sekhmet. She could become the ruler of everything—

Cleopatra shook her head frantically, trying to clear it of the visions.

What had happened? How had she come to be here? Her body had been dragged suddenly up from Hades and Persephone's throne room, and still she did not know who'd opened the box that had contained her. She'd woken in the air, returned to her body, sensing her daughter in the house somewhere, and witches, but who had released her? In the chaos, she'd been unable to tell what was happening. The smell of blood was everywhere, but she ran from it. No time.

Her bargain weighed on her, and it was her first focus. She sought the Slaughterer first. The Slaughterer, she understood. She and Sekhmet's child had things in common. The priestess of Thessaly was a different sort of creature.

The wound her dreaming self had sustained in the Underworld burned her, though it was not visible here. Her body was perfect, unscarred, unbroken, no matter the pain she felt. The silver box she clutched in her fingers burned her, too, but it was a distraction from her arm. It was also a distraction from the pain in the place her heart had been. She'd done the right thing. She knew she had, but Antony was gone.

She shook off the pain and ran on. She had to accomplish the task or she would fail Antony, fail her children, fail everyone she loved.

The voice of the goddess was instantly back in her head. She ignored it as she ran, trying to keep it from understanding her purpose.

Kill,
Sekhmet told her.

The Slaughterer had served the goddess well in the queen's absence, Cleopatra could feel. It had sacrificed so many that Sekhmet felt nearly blissful. Nearly happy.

Blood ran through the streets of villages. Corpses rotted. Now Plague traveled, hungering always, and Cleopatra could feel its work as it moved through the country, through the world, from island to island, from mountain to mountain.

The temples,
Sekhmet directed the queen.

Cleopatra considered. Surely, Plague was traveling with the same directions.

Cleopatra imagined she could see Ra's boat traveling through the caverns of the Duat. Imagined she could see the Island of Fire. Imagined she could see Ra himself, the brilliance of his skin, the light of his face, the place on his forehead where Sekhmet had once lived.

She felt Sekhmet, her strength and her weaknesses. It took a great deal of bloodshed to release the Slaughterers. Six Arrows still waited in her quiver: Famine, Earthquake, Flood, Drought, Madness, and Violence. They hummed their deathly songs, desiring, wanting, while the seventh traveled the earth.

Cleopatra killed another man near the imperial residence. The taste of the blood flowed through the goddess, and the queen felt the blood placate her mistress.

Cleopatra killed others, several more in quick succession, and then she ran faster through the city, trying to avoid the populated areas, the smell of people, the hunger that would destroy her resistance. She was traveling nearly as quickly as Sekhmet herself, and the goddess roared, her voice echoing through the heavens as thunder, jolting Romans from their sleep and making them shake in their beds.

“What was that?” they asked one another.

None of them had an answer. They sat quietly in their beds, wide-eyed in the darkness, waiting, without knowing that they were waiting, for the queen to come for them.

Cleopatra knew that she would not kill them, but Sekhmet did not.

Sekhmet was convinced that her slave hungered for the citizens of Rome. She did not know that Cleopatra had set herself on killing one of Sekhmet's children.

Cleopatra lifted her chin and scented the air, the pungent, bloody odor of the killing arrow. The Slaughterer. She looked up, her throat vibrating like that of a cat stalking a bird.

High above her, she could see what seemed to be a tremendous star crossing the heavens, and she followed it, bounding over the land, out of the city and into the countryside.

 

 

I
n an untended orchard, far from where Cleopatra ran, a beady, black eye flickered. An ivory horn, its tip lethally sharpened, its protective cap of cork long since disappeared, shone slightly in the moonlight. The dark and scaly creature turned its armored head quickly and lumbered to its feet. Horses whinnied around it, bewildered by their companion.

The rhinoceros stood, and pushed its way through a gap in the fencing.

Three crocodiles slipped into the Tiber, fitting their reptilian forms through the gutters and into the river.

The snakes of Rome slithered into their tunnels, their burrows, their underground passages.

A tiger crouched and leapt, silently, to the top of the Temple of Apollo, on the Palatine, where a peacock was roosting.

A wild-eyed gazelle looked frantically about her, hearing something, hearing everything, before there was a swift flurry of wind, and her breast was pierced by an arrow. She was slung over a set of broad shoulders and brought home by an ambitious hunter for dinner.

Feathers fell from the sky, and blood pooled in the street, and the rhinoceros trotted through the darkness of the city, far from his home, shaking the dreams of every house he passed.

He followed behind his queen.

 

 

A
s night fell, Cleopatra arrived in Krimissa at the Temple of Apollo, following the trail of the Slaughterer. In twilight, she examined the fallen bodies of Romans from the Praetorian Guard and of priests from the temple's order.

For a moment, she was sure she smelled the scent of the emperor. Surely, that was impossible, though. He could not have been here. It was shadowed with something else, an herbal scent, and that with horseflesh and metal.