A fool’s hope. Even with a Nubian sword, even if he could kill with it—which he wasn’t sure he could do—he’d never fight his way across the floor of the temple. It was too far to cross. He’d need to be able to fly if he wanted to reach the Ark.
Caesarion’s eyes suddenly widened at the thought, and he lowered his shoulder as if he meant to bull the man over.
The Kushite shouted something, and he seemed to laugh as he steadied the blade in his hand.
Three steps away, Caesarion raised himself up, almost as if he intended to embrace the sword that even now the Kushite was swinging toward his chest. Then, in the same movement, Caesarion fell away, kicking his legs out in front of him and letting his momentum propel him forward into a slide.
The Nubian blade arced through the air just inches above Caesarion’s face as he passed beneath the blow—for a frozen instant he saw himself reflected in its metal surface, his face red in the firelight—and then he was reaching out with his right arm, grabbing the Kushite’s leg and pulling it out from underneath him.
Already imbalanced from his swing, the man fell awkwardly, flailing out and dropping his sword as he hurtled down toward the stone. There was a hollow cracking sound as his head hit the ground.
Caesarion let go of his leg, scrambling up to his feet. He started to go back for the Nubian sword, but he heard more shouts of alarm in Meroitic, the language of the Kushites. Footsteps were pounding, too close.
Caesarion leapt up onto the scaffolding, clambering board to board, grasping at ropes, pushing himself in a mad rush.
Below him no one followed, but he heard voices and recognized a few words, now that he knew the language being spoken. He’d never spoken Meroitic, but he’d once heard it in the palace, when his mother was holding a diplomatic meeting to resolve a dispute with their southern neighbors. A farmer from Kush had been killed by Egyptian soldiers. Caesarion remembered how, because it was the same way these men intended to kill him: archer, he heard them say. And arrows.
The scaffolding around the obelisk reached the height of the Khnum temple, and so Caesarion jumped across to its roof. He’d planned to make his way over the roof, but flames were licking it in spots. So instead he began to make his way along the flat stones that had been set across the tops of the pillars that traced the perimeter of the temple.
He couldn’t fly over it all, he thought with a smile, but a walkway above it would do just as well.
Fires began to rise in ferocity to either side of him, and he had to raise his wet sleeve before him like a shield as he ran through the smoke and heat, but he hurried on as fast as he could, eyes to the stone as he balanced one foot before the other. He took one turn, and he was heading now directly toward the temple of the Jews.
The Kushites hadn’t expected him to gain that path, and he could hear their shouts of confusion and rage from behind and below him. Then, to his displeasure, he heard it from in front of him, and the arrows began to fly.
He crouched down, making himself as small as he could while he kept moving, kept his eyes to the stone. If it was destiny for him to take an arrow and fall, so be it. But he wasn’t going to have his last thought be cursing himself for a missed step.
He carried on, arrows clattering against the rock below his feet or whistling as they carved the air around his body. One caught on his sleeve that he held before him, tearing through the cloth before it sailed off into the fog, but none struck him.
Ahead, his stone path turned, and he turned, too, looking down off the edge now at the King’s Road below, which was bustling with attackers and the men, women, and children that they were dragging from their homes. Everything was screams.
None of it mattered.
Hurrying on, Caesarion saw the corner of the Jewish temple form in the darkness as the road below constricted. The doors had been broken and Kushites were streaming inside. He heard the clash of swords and the shouts of men.
And he heard, unmistakable, the screaming of his love.
Caesarion took two more strides to bring himself above the broken doorway, then he pushed hard against the high stones and launched himself off into the fog, over the King’s Road, over the wall, and down into the courtyard of the Jewish temple.
It was no leap into the forgiving waters of the Nile this time, and Caesarion hoped that his fall might be broken by the Nubians who were entering the sacred space.
He was not disappointed.
Screaming, he crashed into the backs of the dark-skinned men, tumbling them and himself into a heap.
Even as he hit the ground, the lessons learned so long ago in hours of training with Pullo and Vorenus in the courtyards of the Alexandrian palaces kicked in as an instinct, a single, overriding thought: Keep moving. Don’t stop. To stop is to die.
He heaved his weight and rolled, ignoring the pain of sudden bruising. Bodies pushed and fought beneath him, but his feet finally gripped and he scrambled up and over them.
Somehow the Shard had been moved into the open out of the shrine. There was a cart, and his friends had clearly been trying to load the canvas-covered Ark up onto the back of it when they had, apparently, simply run out of time. Pullo and Vorenus were valiantly holding back the oncoming Kushites. Pullo had been defending the door that Caesarion had jumped over, and Caesarion’s slamming into the mass of men there had bought him time, but there were too many of them. Vorenus was on the far side of the courtyard, and he was staggering back, step by step, being driven ever closer to the Ark. His face and body were smeared with blood.
They needed help.
Hannah screamed again, and Caesarion at last saw where she had crumpled down beside the Ark that her family had sworn to protect. The canvas covering the artifact was partially pulled away behind her, so that her back was against its gleaming side, and the symbol of the Shard that was inlaid upon the acacia wood made a kind of circle about her head. Her face, framed by that thin curve of metal, was pale and contorted with agony. Her legs were drawn up, and she was holding her hands against her belly. Madhukar was on his feet beside her, the wiry little monk grappling with a Kushite who’d somehow made it past the former legionnaires. The Nubian had a dagger in his hand, and Madhukar was holding on to his wrist, trying desperately to keep the blade away.
Time, he thought. I need to give them time.
For a second Caesarion stood, hesitating, choosing among his love, his friends, and the Ark.
Then he felt the icy touch of a blade sinking into his back, just below the ribs.
Time.
He took in the smoky air with a short lurch of his lungs, which sent a jolting shock of pain down through his body.
The blade pulled free with a sudden, sharp jerk. What had been a cold finger became hot and terribly wet.
Time.
Caesarion gasped. Somewhere he heard screams. His. His friends’. Hannah’s.
Time.
He crumpled down to his knees. His eyes fluttered for a moment. The world seemed to slow.
The end, he thought. No time.
A blade bright with blood—his blood—passed in front of his eyes, lowering to draw across his neck and speed the death that his wound had made inevitable. When it passed, he saw beyond it, across the courtyard, that Madhukar had been thrown backward against the Ark, and he was falling to the other side of it from Hannah. The canvas—now stained with sprays of crimson—was falling away with him, exposing the rest of the artifact. The two angels standing upon its top shone brightly in the firelight.
No, his mind whispered. No. No. No.
And then the whisper was a shout, and the voice that cried it belonged to Titus Pullo, whose gladius jabbed into the shoulder of the man holding the blade across Caesarion’s neck. The man screamed, the blade jerked for a moment, and then it fell from his hand.
“Move!” the big man shouted. He filled Caesarion’s field of vision, and the fist of the Roman’s free hand swung overhead.
Caesarion blinked. Move. Move.
Another Nubian tried to take Pullo in the side, just as the legionnaire’s gladius pulled free from the flesh he’d stuck it into. With no time to turn the weapon, Pullo just swung his arm backward, slamming the heavy pommel of his sword into the attacker’s face. “Get up!”
Caesarion began to rise, and he realized that Pullo’s fist must have gripped the back of his robes. The big man was lifting him up, trying to pull him out of harm’s way.
Move. Time.
He gasped, and as the air filled his lungs Caesarion was aware that behind the pain there was still life to be had. Not long. Seconds, perhaps.
But it could be long enough.
His muscles twitched as Pullo pulled him, jerked him back into motion. Then his feet were underneath him, and he was stumbling forward toward the Ark.
Pullo was shouting behind him to run, to get away, but Caesarion knew there wasn’t time enough for that.
And where would he go?
The Nubian who’d killed Madhukar was standing in front of the Ark, and the knife with which he’d killed the monk was still in his hand. Caesarion pitched into him, his lowered shoulder pushing the man off-balance even as his right hand reached around him, wrapped around the man’s knife hand, and jerked it up and into his chest.
The man shuddered and gasped. He would take time to bleed out—as he himself would, an absent part of Caesarion’s mind noted—but once the Nubian’s hand fell away from the dagger, Caesarion let his body fall away, too.
He fell to his knees beside his only love. Her eyes were wide with horror and shock, and they seemed not to focus on him. Her breathing was in shallow, sharp, halting gasps. And the bottom of her dress looked as if it had been dipped in blood.
Like him, she was dying.
“Hannah,” he managed to say. “Hannah, love…”
“Caesarion?” Her eyes blinked, winced as she tried to focus on his through the haze of pain. “Oh, God, love,” she whispered. “So … sorry. Should’ve moved it … before.”
“I’m here. It’s okay. It’s all fine.”
A tear rolled down her cheek, then another, but something like a smile lit her face. “Up to you now. Ark … Save it, my love.”
He nodded. “I will.”
She smiled at that, as if she couldn’t hear the sounds of battle around her, as if she couldn’t see through his lies. “I think Pullo is right. About heaven.”
Caesarion touched her cheek. “I know he is.”
“He is,” Hannah repeated.
She sighed out her breath.
He took in another.
Her chest did not rise again.
Caesarion bowed his head for a moment, then he leaned forward and kissed her cheek one final time. The tears on his cheek mixed with hers. “I’ll see you there soon,” he whispered.
He used the Ark to pull himself up, and he looked around at the temple for the last time. Pullo and Vorenus still lived. Helped by Caesarion’s surprise tackle of so many of them, Pullo had beaten most of his attackers, but Vorenus was nearing the end of his strength. He was outnumbered, and he was staggering backward from the door he’d been trying to defend. His fight was only to prevent being outflanked now, and it was a fight he’d lose.
Hannah was dead. Caesarion wanted to weep, to curl up against her as he gasped out his last. Madhukar had died trying to protect her even as he must have known she was bleeding out her last moments on this Earth. Even as Caesarion watched, Vorenus parried one blow, twisted away from another, and then fell awkwardly onto his back.
God help us, Caesarion thought.
And in the same moment he remembered that there was no god anymore.
There’s only us. Our choices. Our actions.
And she’d told him to save the Ark.
In his last act on this Earth, with the last resolve of his failing body, the child of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, the once-pharaoh of Egypt who by every right should have ruled the world, fell forward across the Ark.
And this time, Caesarion’s hands did not grasp it by the bronze and silver angels that adorned its surface. Instead, his hands fell palms-down upon the black disk set within the wooden surface.
This time he touched the Shard.
28
THE GATE OPENED
CARTHAGE, 25 BCE
On either side of him, Selene and Isidora were screaming, but all Thrasyllus could do was stare. He had, as a small part of his mind noted, never seen anything like it before.
He had known little of what the Shards were—they were artifacts infused with divine powers; he’d gleaned that much from what he’d overheard—but the full exposure of their reality left him petrified with fright, astonishment, and a yearning deep within to have the power for himself. Didymus and Apion could have the Great Library. With power such as this, he was certain he could have the world.
Before them, barely visible through a swirl of storm sparked with shocks of lightning that ripped through the vortex of air like probing, angry snakes, Juba was holding both the Trident and the Palladium. The Aegis on his chest glowed metallic blue with every flash of the energy surrounding him. In one moment he seemed to be laughing. In another he seemed to be crying out.
And through it all the power grew.
Thrasyllus looked up and saw that the spinning energy thickened and tightened as it rose, a column of pulsing black against the night sky. One by one, the stars seemed to be going out above them, and the analytical part of the scholar’s mind decided that the column must be opening up far above, unfolding itself and curling back down around them, like the curvature of a great dark dome.
To his right, Selene’s screams took on a new pitch of horror, and he turned to see that Juba had hugged the Trident and the Palladium to the Aegis, and that he was reaching down for what they’d told him was the Lance of Olyndicus.
Isidora was trying to step forward to Thrasyllus’ left, but the strength of the storm was too great. She staggered and fell, her walking staff tumbling away from her.
The lightning grew in its intensity, and for a moment Thrasyllus could see clearly that fire danced in horrible waves up the flesh of Juba’s arms, and the skin there was peeling back and forth—one moment flayed off by the heat, the next moment restored. It was as if his body fought against itself, whether to be unmade or kept whole. Through it all, Juba appeared to be smiling and crying and screaming an inhuman wail of horror.
At last the Lance came together with the other Shards at his chest. The world erupted in a flash of fiery light, and there was a great sucking sound riding the blinding glare. For the span of a heartbeat Thrasyllus was being pulled forward, feet sliding on the soiled rock floor, and then a wave of yawning sound burst against Thrasyllus’ chest, propelling him backward against the stone and into fresh darkness.
* * *
Quiet. A silence as still as the grave.
No, Thrasyllus realized. Not silent. There was a sound of straining. Teeth grinding. Breath coming in short bursts. And voiceless weeping.
The scholar opened his eyes.
The storm, the lightning, the wind … all of it was gone. All but two of the torches had been snuffed out by the tumult, but those that remained licked hungrily at the suddenly stilled air in the ruined temple. By their light, Thrasyllus could see that Juba was kneeling where he had stood. He was trembling, and his arms were close about him, presumably still holding the other three Shards against the Aegis. He was the one who was crying, the scholar realized. Soundlessly crying.
“Juba?”
Thrasyllus turned at the sound of Selene’s voice, and he saw that the beautiful young queen was on her hands and knees in the dim light, not ten feet away to his right. There was blood trickling down her forehead.
Juba was looking away from her. He did not turn. “You need to go.” His voice was hushed, strained through clenched teeth. “Don’t think I can stop it.”
“Stop what?” She crawled forward a few feet. Thrasyllus could see the fear and despair on her face. Something w
as wrong. Everything was wrong. She knew it. She didn’t want to believe it.
Thrasyllus had been lying on his back, and he rolled himself upright. Selene had crawled a few feet farther.
“What I’ve done, Selene. God … I don’t even know why, Selene … it … it made me do it. The voice. The darkness.”
She trembled now, too. Thrasyllus saw her swallow hard, building her courage. “Juba, my love, put them down. Please. Come—”
“I can’t. You don’t know. Just go.” His voice trembled into a groan. “Please. I … can’t hold it back.”
She started to reply, but there was no time. Something broke in Juba. He gasped—a sound of both pain and relief—and power flowed out through him into the earth. Like tendrils of red-white fire it radiated outward, tracing along cracks in the stones, forming into glowing patterns that Thrasyllus dimly recognized as runes and glyphs, though he did not know the language.
Selene gasped as the lines shot across the ground and under her, but they left her unharmed. A moment later they were passing under Thrasyllus, too, an eerie line of ghost fire that whispered in an ancient tongue but touched him not.
It wasn’t looking to harm them, Thrasyllus realized. It was searching for something. “Selene,” he finally managed to say, overcoming his cowardice and fear. “I think—”
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the dancing, darting lines find the edge of the black pit of Ba’al Hammon and then plunge into it like little rivers of phantom flame. Beneath them the glyphs and patterns dissolved, as if the power was flowing away, draining into that shadowed place of sacrifice that was soon glowing with a fierce light the molten color of fresh blood.
Juba groaned again, a long and agonized sound.
There was a snuffling from the pit, like that of a trapped beast scenting at the open door of its cage. And then a hand appeared at the lip of the stone. Long fingers with nails sharp as claws. The skin was crimson as it arose in the glow of the red light from the pit’s depths, then pale and bloodless as it came over the edge and stretched out upon the surface of the rock. It seemed almost to caress that hard surface, and then the knuckles strained as it pressed down, beginning to leverage up the body that lay beneath it. Another hand arose and gripped the stone.
The Gates of Hell Page 29