The Gates of Hell

by Michael Livingston

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  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  For Samuel and Elanor, who are every reason

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Writing a book is never a solitary endeavor. So first and foremost I must acknowledge my family for giving me the time and the energy to finish this novel. Thank you, Sherry, for watching the kids a bit more (not to mention driving through Book One!), and thank you, Mom and Dad, for coming out to help when I’d reached the end of my rope. Kids, I owe you so much for understanding that Daddy had to work.

  Friends gave the encouragement and the feedback I needed to cross the finish line. Catherine Bollinger continues to be the finest alpha-and-omega reader I could ask for, and Kelly DeVries is owed much for helping talk me through my moments of writer despair—with bonus Roman troop movements along the way! Kayla Moore made the last push possible, and David Allen kept the wolves at bay when I needed it most. My writer friends Mary Robinette Kowal, Ilana Myer, and Harriet McDougal were lights in times of darkness. Amy Romanczuk is the best unpaid cheerleader imaginable. Thank you all.

  At a fundamental level, of course, this novel simply doesn’t happen without the strong support of Claire Eddy, my editor, as well as my publicist, Diana Griffin, and all the other fine folks at Tor. Well done, gang.

  Last, to all the kind readers and reviewers who loved Book One, your encouragement was simply beyond anything I could have imagined. This one, I think, is even better.

  PREFACE

  The Shards of Heaven series, of which this is the second volume, is a historical fantasy. As such, its story is intended to fit within the bounds of known history wherever possible: What occurs within these pages is inspired by real events, happening in real places to real people. Vellica was real, as was Carthage. And so, too, were the writings of Thrasyllus, the sickness of Augustus, the tales of Olyndicus, and even the remarkable boldness of the outlaw king himself.

  The reader wishing a basic understanding of the facts of history as they pertain to the characters herein should consult the glossary at the end of this book.

  Do the gods build this fire in our hearts, Euryalus?

  Or is a god built of each man’s desire?

  —Virgil, Aeneid, Book 9

  PROLOGUE

  THE DARK OF THE MOON

  ROME, 27 BCE

  On the January night that the Republic finally came to an end, thirteen-year-old Cleopatra Selene fell asleep waiting for the emperor’s son.

  * * *

  Not for the first time she dreamed she was ten again, sitting on the cold stone bench of a Roman prison cell, her head against Alexander Helios’ shoulder as she pretended to sleep. The yellow light of an Italian dawn was just beginning to stream in through a barred window high on the outside wall, taunting them with unreachable warmth.

  Helios shifted his shoulder beneath the weight of her head. “Wake up, Selene,” her twin whispered.

  Selene didn’t move her head. “I am awake.”

  “Did you sleep?”

  She let the air out of her lungs, then yawned it back in again and regretted the instinct: the air was thick with the sickly humid reek of mold and mildew and human despair. She coughed and gagged.

  “Me neither,” he said.

  Through the window came the voices of the gathered crowds: jubilant cries of celebration at the festivities of the Roman Triumph, mixed with angry shouts for the death of the traitorous Egyptian royalty whom Octavian had brought back from Alexandria: the children of Antony and Cleopatra.

  Selene felt their hatred run like cold fingers up her spine. Before she could shiver she lifted her head from her brother’s shoulder and stood, rubbing at her numb arms. The roiling mass of emotion outside had been building for more than two days, but today it would come to a final climax. Today was the end.

  “Do you really think Caesarion is dead?” Helios asked.

  Selene instinctively started to reassure him, to say that no, of course he was still alive, but she knew he would recognize the lie. “Maybe. Probably.” It was the truth, painful though it was to admit. Juba, the Numidian prince she had promised to marry in order to save the life of her old friend Lucius Vorenus, had told her that Caesarion was dead, that he’d been killed in Juba’s struggle to find the Ark of the Covenant and use it against their common enemy, Octavian. She believed the Numidian, of course—he had no reason to lie—but even so she could hardly imagine that their older half-brother—tall, handsome, strong Caesarion, so much the image of his father, Julius—could be dead. It just didn’t seem possible.

  Helios, so slight, so sickly compared to Caesarion, coughed loudly, painfully, and Selene felt a pang of sorrow rise in her gut that she had to fight to keep at bay.

  “Caesarion’s not here, anyway,” she said when he had control of himself again. “Octavian would march him, too, if he was alive. He wants to make a display of us all.”

  She didn’t mention their younger brother, Philadelphus, but she didn’t have to. The child, even sicker than Helios when they last saw him, was never far from their thoughts. Was he dead, too?

  “Maybe Caesarion’s alive, though,” Helios said. “Octavian could be lying about it because he’s scared. He’s using us to keep Caesarion from doing what he wants to do. Maybe that’s another reason why Octavian hasn’t … killed us yet. Like how he wanted to use us against Mother.”

  Mother. Her brother’s voice cracked at the word, and then Selene’s dream spun wildly, sweeping her out of the cell, rushing her back through even more distant memories, back to the moment she stood before the vivid and all-too-real image of her mother’s agony-contorted face, staring at the world through dry, sightless eyes. The corpses of two loyal maidservants were slumped on the floor beside the throne, themselves twisted by the bite of the asp that Selene had managed to smuggle into the guarded chamber to fulfill her mother’s desire for death. The reed-woven basket of ripe-to-bursting fruits was overturned in front of them, and there was an apple in Cleopatra’s venom-clawed hand, squeezed to broken mash. The scepter of Egyptian authority was broken into two pieces at her feet, nothing more than the wooden stick that it was beneath the luminescent jewels and the fine gold casing.

  Octavian was there, too. He’d made the children come to the chamber before anything was touched, before anything was moved, so that they could see with their own eyes what he’d taken from them, as if Cleopatra’s suicide was his victory, not hers.

  Even the asp was there for the children to see, coiled in a corner where it had been trapped. Selene, for a moment, had wanted to run to the black thing, to grip its head and plunge its glistening mouth into the soft flesh of her own neck, to let it drink its fill of blood even as she drank of its terrible venom, but the d
esire for revenge had steeled her against such a surrender. As they watched, Octavian took from among his guard a spear. Then, with slow steps that echoed in that stony place, he walked to the corner and drove the sharpened point into the writhing, hissing creature.

  * * *

  Cleopatra Selene—daughter of Antony and Cleopatra, once heir to the great Ptolemaic empire of Egypt, now adopted daughter to the very man who’d brought her family to such ruin—awoke from her nightmares, gasping and reaching for the dead: her mother, her father, her brothers.

  She found, instead, another young man, a year older than herself, who recoiled from her clutching fingers. As he shrank back, the flickering lamp-shadows around the bed swallowed his gentle features, but it took only a glance for Selene to recognize Tiberius, the boy she’d fallen asleep waiting for this night, the stepson to the man who, she reminded herself, was no longer to be called Octavian. Among everything else that had happened this day, the man who had all but officially ended the Republic—who’d already been accorded the title of Emperor Caesar, son of God—had been declared by the Senate “Augustus”: the Illustrious One.

  Augustus Caesar. Much though the thought of her adopted father made her ill, Selene had to admit that the name had a certain ring to it. Not unlike the name of Augustus’ adoptive father—Caesarion’s blood father, she couldn’t help noting to herself—Julius Caesar. The Romans had made Julius into a god. Would they do the same for Augustus?

  “I didn’t mean to startle you,” Tiberius said, stirring Selene back out of her dark thoughts. “You looked like you were having another bad dream.”

  Another. Selene concentrated on breathing deep, allowing her heartbeat to slow. In the two and a half years since her world had ended, hardly a night had passed without a dream of the horrors. Walking with the basket to see Mother. Staring into those unblinking eyes. Trembling in that Roman prison. The smiths coming to their cell with their gritty, blackened hands to fasten the golden fetters to their wrists and ankles, to their necks—collars and chains of their mother’s Egyptian gold melted down and made into the very signs of the subjugation of her children, her kingdom.

  Selene rubbed at her wrists as if she could feel the weight of the metal on her skin even now. “It’s fine,” she said. “Just a dream. I must’ve fallen asleep waiting.”

  Tiberius smiled in the shadows. “That’s all right. I was just glad you were, um, dressed.”

  Though she was, as always, uncertain if there was some romantic interest behind his comment, Selene took it as mocking play and she rolled her eyes. After all, they both knew they were promised for others. Tiberius was arranged to be married to Agrippa’s eight-year-old daughter, Vipsania. And rumors were already swirling that Selene would be married to Juba the Numidian sooner rather than later. “I’m dressed enough,” she said, slipping out of bed and lacing up her best sandals. Then she stood and shrugged her shoulders as if to unencumber herself of the memory of her dead mother and the promises for revenge that she kept hidden even from Tiberius. “No one saw you, did they?”

  Tiberius gave her a look of mock anger. “No. Of course not,” he said, trying to sound exasperated. “So why’d you want to sneak out tonight, anyway? I think the whole city is drunk or passed out.” He yawned. “I could use more sleep myself.”

  The festivities to celebrate Augustus Caesar and his acclamation by the Senate had, indeed, overtaken Rome. This night more than any other, the city would be quiet and still, and the usual fun of their nocturnal walks would be taken away. Selene looked over to the curtains that were pulled shut across the balcony. The rich cloth rocked to the moving air outside as if pushed by the touch of unseen hands. “You’ll see,” she said.

  Tiberius was wearing a good traveling outfit that would keep him warm but still enable him to move easily: a necessity for climbing down from her balcony, among other things. She had already donned something similar, but she went over to her chest and quickly rifled through it to produce the shoulder bag she’d managed to make from the soft and gentle cloth of one of her old Egyptian dresses. Royal linen.

  “What’s that for?” Tiberius asked.

  “A Shard,” Selene whispered, feeling the small but heavy stone statue inside the bag and thinking how maybe after tonight she’d have no more nightmares. Maybe after tonight she’d dream of Caesar in golden chains, Caesar in sackcloth, Caesar begging her for mercy. It would take time to master the Shard, but she was certain she could be patient. Once she’d learned that killing Octavian wouldn’t be enough to sate her thirst for vengeance, after all—once she’d learned, as Juba had before her, that true vengeance meant destroying Rome itself—she’d lived among his family in his house, never once making an attempt on his life. Yes, she could be patient. Even with the Shard, she could bide her time. Find it, take it, master it. Then strike.

  “What did you say?” Tiberius asked.

  Selene turned back to look at her friend, smiling at possibilities he could never understand, possibilities he would surely think treasonous, even if he had his own reasons to hate Octavian. First things first, though: she had to get it. And if she was going to slip inside the Temple of the Vestal Virgins, the keepers of Rome’s eternal fire and its most sacred relics, she was going to need his help. “I told you,” she said, lifting the bag with its hidden statue to her shoulder. “You’ll see.”

  * * *

  From Augustus’ house on the crest of Palatine Hill they moved through the quiet, darkened streets, shadow to shadow, ever downward toward the ancient Forum. Tiberius was quiet, as he so often was, and Selene was glad for it. Her mind was on the Shard.

  She still found it difficult to believe that one of the Shards of Heaven had been here, in Rome, all this time. How often had she walked past the House of the Vestals, past the ever-burning fire of their temple, not realizing that a piece of her vengeance was so close for the taking? Staggered at the thought of it, she’d had to ask Vergilius to repeat himself at a dinner with old Varro two months earlier, when he’d made an offhand comment that he was planning to mention the Palladium in the poem he was writing in honor of the man who’d restored the glory of Rome, the man soon to be Augustus. Yes, Vergilius had assured her. That Palladium. The statue of the goddess Pallas Athena that had such mysterious power that its presence alone had kept the Greeks at bay during their decades-long siege of Troy. Stolen from the city by Ulysses, the Palladium, the poet said, had eventually been brought to Rome by Aeneas—the Trojan exile and legendary founder of Rome who was the hero of Vergilius’ poem in progress—and the artifact now rested under the protection of the Vestals.

  Conversation at the dinner had gone on as if the foreign-born girl had never interrupted, but to Selene it was as if the gods of old—gods she had become certain did not exist—had inexplicably handed her the key to her vengeance. Sitting in the Great Library of Alexandria so many years earlier—before the fall of their city, when her brothers were still alive, when she still thought herself, in the tradition of the pharaohs, a goddess on the earth—she’d listened to Caesarion, their tutor Didymus, and a now-dead Jew discuss the Shards of Heaven.

  The Shards of Heaven. It was hard for her to imagine a time when she had never heard of the fragments of divine power that had been cast out across Creation when the angels—there’d been a time she’d not heard of them, either—tried to open a gate to the highest heaven by giving up the greatest gift of God, the gift He’d given of himself: their souls. Caesarion had died in the struggle over the Jewish Ark of the Covenant, one of the most powerful of the Shards. Her husband-to-be, Juba, had held two more: the Aegis of Zeus and the Trident of Poseidon—the latter now kept under the personal control of Augustus. And here, now, was the fourth and final Shard she’d learned about on that distant morning in the Great Library. The Palladium.

  Her mother had defined herself by men: first by Julius Caesar, then, after his death, by Selene’s father, Mark Antony. Looking back, Selene could see how Cleopatra had never really had control of
her own destiny.

  “Not me,” Selene whispered to herself as she turned off the paved path, skirting through a shoulder-breadth alley between stone buildings. With the Shard, she’d have power her dead mother could never have imagined. With the Shard, she could be her husband’s equal. And if he joined his power to hers—if they gathered the Shards once more—their shared power would reshape the world. Destroy their Roman enemies. Achieve vengeance for them both. Juba had been meant to rule Numidia before Rome seized it, after all, before he, too, had been left an orphan in the house of his family’s conquerors.

  The alley emptied out into the sacred grove that spread across the base of the Palatine Hill, its darkness thick and deep, impervious to the slight sliver of moon in the sky. Selene forged onward until she felt the stands of growth closing in all around her. When she stopped, Tiberius stumbled into her back.

  “What are you stopping for?” he asked, voice quiet in the hushed wood. He moved around through the grassy, winter-dried underbrush between the trees to stand beside her. “And why are we going this way? Thought you wanted to go down to the Forum.”

  Selene looked around and saw nothing but silent trees in front of her and the black expanses marking walls behind. The air was chilled, but not unbearably so, and it smelled of earth and dried leaves. It was as good a place as any to tell him what he had to know. “Not to the Forum in particular, no,” Selene said, crouching down to the ground and keeping her voice at a conspiratorial hush.

  Tiberius crouched down, too: close, but not too close. “So? Where?”

  “The Vestals.”

  Even in the shadows of the wood she saw his eyes widen, and he seemed to lean back from her slightly. “Vestals?”

  “That’s right,” she said, trying to keep her tone even, as if she wasn’t talking about potential treason. “I want to get into the Temple of the Vestals.”