The Shards of Heaven (13 page)

The assassin's smile was thin. “My mistake,” he said. “But I think only you know where it is. It's an important book. Important enough I thought you might keep it here.”

The Greek's mind raced, wondering what volume could be important enough for someone to send a killer to procure it. But it was useless. The Royal Library held countless volumes that could be priceless to someone. Nothing, after all, was more precious than knowledge. He sighed. “What book?”

The scar-faced Roman fished from the folds of his clothing a small sealed letter. “A scroll,” he said, handing it over to Didymus. “Maybe a set of them. Very important. Very unique.”

Didymus looked at the red-wax seal and felt his heart skip a beat. It was Octavian's. The same as he'd seen on the letter from Varro some dozen years earlier, the letter promising him Senate support for the position of librarian if he aided the man sent by Octavian to kill Cleopatra—or so Didymus had foolishly thought.

All at once the memory of that night broke through the barriers of his mind, and he was there once more. Nineteen years old again. Walking the halls of Caesar's villa as if in a dream. Certain it couldn't be real. Certain he hadn't just told Octavian's assassin where to find the boy. Certain he'd wake up any moment. Half-driven to insanity by his youthful yearnings for Cleopatra—a yearning churned to anger at her clear lack of interest in the young Athenian scholar hired to tutor her children—he'd agreed to help the conspirators kill her. But not the boy. Not the innocent boy. Surely it was a dream. Surely he'd never spoken those words.

But then Cleopatra's moans turned to screams, cutting through his daze. A banging began. A horrible, hollow banging that reverberated through the villa: the sound, he would soon discover, of a legionnaire named Vorenus pounding against the barred wooden door to Caesarion's room. Didymus ran toward the sounds, the horror of what he'd done suddenly real. Quick as he was, Cleopatra and Antony were there already, the queen half-collapsed in her soon-to-be-lover's arms. Vorenus, his face red, was throwing his shoulder, his body, again and again and again into the unyielding barrier. Against the wall, slumped like a discarded sack of wheat, lay one of Caesarion's guards, his throat slit because Didymus had told the assassin where to find him. There were shouts and crashes from within, Cleopatra's high-pitched wail from without. And then a moment of terrible, awful quiet before the door suddenly came open to reveal a massive veteran Roman legionnaire—Pullo—holding the frightened boy in his arms. And beyond him, bleeding out on the floor of the little bedroom that Didymus had almost made the child's tomb, the assassin himself. They looked into each other's eyes—assassin and traitor—and in that moment everything that Didymus had thought he'd wanted died. His desire for power. His foolish desire for Cleopatra. If Antony had pulled Didymus' name from the lips of the dying assassin, he would have met his inevitable death without sorrow. More than that, he would have welcomed it.

Even now, sitting in his littered room, holding the sealed letter, he wondered if it would have been better if he had died that night. It would have been easier than living with the guilt of knowing that he'd been the one to betray the boy he'd taught for all these years. Far easier.

But, then, he'd grown to love the boy as his own. He'd done all he could for him, and for the other children, too, when they came along. That had to be worth something, didn't it? Nothing could make up for what he'd done, nothing could make it right, but the world was a better place for him having been in it since then, wasn't it?

“Librarian?”

Didymus blinked himself back to the present, smiled grimly at the assassin. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I was just thinking it had been a long time since I'd seen the seal of Octavian.”

As soon as the name escaped his lips, Didymus heard a sound from the hallway outside the room. It was muted by the wood, but clear enough to the scholar: Selene had just choked off her own involuntary gasp.

The assassin heard it, too, but he didn't recognize it at once. His head turned in the direction of the door, and he rose up to the balls of his feet as he took a step toward it.

Selene!
Didymus cleared his throat and kicked at one of the scrolls on the floor with his toe. It made a kind of scuffing sound, somewhat like the girl's half-gasp. “You picked a good night to come, my Roman friend,” Didymus said, his voice louder than it had been. “The guards are all in the council.”

The assassin froze, confused by the Greek's familiar address and the origin of the sounds he'd heard. “Yes, I know.”

“Of course you do,” Didymus said as he grunted and cracked open the seal. Again his foot pushed a scroll, and he was relieved to hear it make a sound almost perfectly attuned to Selene's. “A clever way to slip past the guard.”

The assassin's eyes narrowed, suspicious, and he didn't answer. But he didn't take another step toward the door, either.

Didymus let out his breath slowly, fighting to appear at ease. He looked down at the letter, concentrating to keep his hands from shaking as they unwrapped it, then let his eyes pass over the whole of it to calm his nerves.

Octavian's seal meant it was from someone close to the family of the Julii, if not from Octavian himself. That the vellum was fresh, not scraped and reused, certainly pointed to a man of some position, too. And the formal Latin script meant an educated man. The handwriting was neat and even, unhurried and precise. Probably from a young man, then, or a middle-aged one at the latest. Not Varro this time. Someone much younger, but with a calm mind, thinking clear, practiced thoughts.

Didymus nodded, feeling his own mind at last beginning to calm itself. Only then did he raise his eyes to the greeting at the top of the page and begin to read.

Juba
.

Unexpected, certainly. Didymus paused to consider all he knew about the young man. A year older than Caesarion. That would make him sixteen, nearing the age when Roman nobles would begin their military training. Like Octavian, an adopted son of Julius Caesar. His father, the king of Numidia, had killed himself when the boy was two, refusing to be paraded through Rome in another of Caesar's Triumphs. The child Juba, his only son and heir, had taken his place instead, before Caesar had made a show of adopting the boy. Unexpected, but interesting.

Didymus took a moment to look up at the deliverer of the letter. The man was watching him impassively, and Didymus wondered if he knew that he worked not for the Imperator Octavian but for his foreign-born, youthful adopted brother.

Youthful but ambitious, Didymus corrected himself. As for his ambition, his reason to write a careful letter to the librarian of Alexandria, sealed under the imperatorial wax of Octavian …

Didymus read on.

It wasn't a long letter, but even so it took the scholar several minutes of starting and stopping to get through it.

The Scrolls of Thoth
.

Didymus couldn't imagine more shocking words to be written on the page. He kept reading the words again and again to be certain they were there.

The Scrolls of Thoth
.

The scholar's mouth felt suddenly dry. The Scrolls of Thoth, the most powerful book imaginable, the secrets of the god of wisdom supposedly inscribed by the hand of Thoth himself. A book with the incantations Thoth taught Isis to resurrect her husband, Osiris. A book that would reveal the secrets of the universe to whoever held it. A book long sought by pharaohs and scholars alike: here said to rest in seven nested boxes, watched over by an immortal serpent, buried beneath the deepest depths of the Nile, there said to be hidden in a secret crypt under Thoth's own city, Hermopolis. A legend. A dream.

The Scrolls of Thoth
.

And, in return, Juba promised the release of Greece from Roman control. The return of freedom to Didymus' homeland. The end of more than a century under foreign oppression. The return to glory the likes of which they'd not seen since the days of great Alexander, who even now rested in his golden coffin in the splendid mausoleum not an hour's walk from where Didymus sat.

The Scrolls of Thoth
.

The parchment trembled in the scholar's hands, and he had to close his eyes against the frightening weight of it all. “I can't,” he whispered.

“Not what I want to hear.”

“I can't give it to you,” Didymus said. He opened his eyes, hoped their dampness wouldn't show in the dim light. “I don't care how much you need it.”

“Oh, but you see,
I
don't need it, librarian. It's our employer who needs it.”

“Our?”

“Yes,
our
. You're not one to forget favors, are you?”

“I try to remember my friends.”

“I'm pleased to hear of it. Octavian will be pleased, too.”

“Octavian. I've not worked for Octavian for years.”

The assassin shook his head sadly, as if disapproving of a delinquent student. “Isn't what I was told. You do answer to the title ‘librarian,' yes? Head librarian of the greatest library in the world? I'm not one for books myself, but—”

“And I'm not a man for games.”

“No, but you are a man for sale.”

The finality of it cut so close to Didymus' soul that he actually leaned back as if recoiling from a strike. “But … I…”

The assassin pulled from his pocket a second note. “You're a tutor to the royal family. Our employer has tutors, too. One of them is Marcus Terentius Varro. An old friend of yours, yes?”

Didymus just stared, knowing what was coming even as he prayed that it would not.

“I have here a letter from Varro himself, testifying that he helped arrange for you to be librarian here. All for the death of the Egyptian pretender. And the whore mother, too, if possible.”

“Enough,” Didymus croaked, voice weak.

The assassin looked up from the page, the corners of his mouth turned up in a look of abusive amusement. “It seems you've been working for Octavian all along,
librarian
. No reason to stop now. Your other option is for this little note here to find its way to the royal family. And that just wouldn't do at all, would it?”

Didymus swallowed hard, fighting to keep their faces out of his mind. “I can't.”

“You're offered fair payment?”

Greece. Home. Freedom. Alexander's glory. “Yes.”

The assassin moved slightly, and Didymus saw that he was reaching for his weapon again. “I've no payment to give, but I can offer pain.”

Didymus felt his heart race. “Kill me and you've nothing to take back,” he blurted out.

“No,” the assassin admitted. “But there's much pain on this side of death.” He took a step forward, his hand curling around the hilt exposed at his side.

“Do you know what this asks me to give you?” Didymus asked quickly.

The assassin paused, left the blade in its sheath. “A book,” he said.

“Not just any book.”

The assassin smiled, let go of the weapon completely. “So you know it.”

“Of course.”

“Good,” the assassin said. He motioned with his hand toward the door. “Take me to it.”

Didymus didn't move. “I told you. I can't.” Didymus sighed, the image of Alexander's golden coffin shimmering away from his mind like a mirage on the horizon. “I can't, because I don't think it exists.”

“Our employer believes it does,” the assassin said. “Says it's in the Royal Library. You're the librarian.”

“And I know every volume in its halls. It's not there. I don't think it ever existed.”

The assassin, just two steps away, cocked his head slightly, gauging the Greek for long moments. “You're telling the truth,” he finally said.

The scholar's eyes were locked on the Roman's face. “I've no reason to lie,” he said, disturbed by how true it was now.

“No, you don't,” the assassin admitted.

Didymus was certain the relief must be apparent on his face. He looked down at the letter in his hands, swallowed hard. “I just don't know where it is.”

“I know. So you don't have a reason to live, either,” the assassin said, pulling his blade free with a metallic ring.

The sound of it snapped Didymus' eyes back up, and he instinctively tried to stand, to jump away from the bared blade. But his feet slipped on the scattered drafts of his book, sending papyrus and vellum skittering out into the air even as he flailed backward and struck the back of his skull on the stone ledge beneath the window.

For a moment the room was a spinning haze of manuscripts floating in the moonlight, a slow-time dance through which the blade in the assassin's hand moved gracefully, like a metal hawk angling against the wind, glinting hungrily. Didymus thought he cried out, but there was no sound. He tried to move, but darkness descended over his mind like a falling curtain.

Then, all at once, the doorway behind the assassin burst open. And light—blinding light—flooded the room.

 

8

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