The Realms of God--A Novel of the Roman Empire (The Shards of Heaven, Book 3)

by Michael Livingston

  The demon smiled, its head turning in a look of curiosity as its hand twisted in her stomach.

  She felt a tug and pull deep inside of her, but her eyes never looked away from the beast before her. She would not cry. She would give it no satisfaction. Her parents didn’t beg in the end, and neither would she.

  She heard a roar, and she saw the shine of a blade swiping through the clearing air. The head of the demon, still smiling, broke loose and fell away from its once-perfect body.

  Pullo was behind it, already reaching out to catch her.

  Miriam wanted to smile, but the silent stone was quickly rising at her back. And, with it, a welcoming darkness.

  20

  DAUGHTER OF PHARAOHS

  PETRA, 4 BCE

  The right side of her body rippling with flame, Selene tumbled into the shadows of the tomb like a fallen angel. Out of instinct she closed her eyes and ducked her head to her chest, trying to make herself small, and she bounced once against the stone floor, then struck again and rolled, careening into the back wall of the tomb.

  For the next heartbeats, her world was nothing but a surging fire that engulfed her flesh.

  It was the Lance of Olyndicus, she knew. The Shard of Fire. She’d seen herself how it set men ablaze with molten heat and left behind only the ash and char.

  How she still lived if she’d been hit, she didn’t know.

  Had the demon missed?

  Or was it the power of the Aegis that kept her breathing, kept the pain muted enough for her to think?

  There was no doubt that she could feel the Shard of Life at her chest. Its presence coursed through her with every heartbeat. Sustaining. Empowering. Invigorating.

  Buoyed by its presence, she opened her eyes and saw what the Lance had done.

  Most of the clothes on the right side of her body had turned to cinder, but the actual blaze seemed to have been snuffed by her impact. Otherwise the rest of her clothes would be gone, too.

  What was left at her side was a raw tear from her shoulder to her thigh, deep and undoubtedly mortal. Remarkably, there was no blood. The elemental heat of the Shard had cauterized her veins even as it stripped away her skin and the layers beneath it. What remained was just the wound, wide and terrible, exposing flashes of white ribs amid red-brown muscle. The smell of cooked meat hung in the air.

  She wanted to throw up at the sight of it, at the sheer horror of it, but the Aegis pulsed at her chest. It made her calm. It made her think clearly.

  This was always going to end in death, she reminded herself. No life lived forever. Didymus had taught her that when she was young, long before she’d seen the deaths pile up around her. What mattered was what a person did with whatever time they were given.

  She’d done much wrong. She knew that.

  But this, here and now, was a chance to do something right. It might be a fool’s cause to fight against such power, such horror—but it was the right cause.

  The room was not large. Beyond the open doorway she’d plummeted through, it extended into the mountain perhaps only twenty feet to the wall behind her back. It was squarish, and to her left and right there were deep recesses carved into the walls—places, no doubt, for entombment. They were empty.

  Which meant that the Ark, the Shard of Earth, was in a third recess behind her.

  Her right leg and shoulder weren’t working, but fortunately she’d slid to a stop on her left side. Gasping, convulsing between her body’s expectation of death and the Shard’s will to live, she pushed herself up to a sitting position on the floor.

  While her back rested on stone, her head leaned back into space and touched wood.

  Selene thought of what her beautiful Juba had once done to try to possess it, the lives he’d taken in his anger and his thirst for revenge. And then she thought of her beautiful half-brother, Caesarion, who’d given his life to protect it in his love and his thirst for a better world.

  My turn, she thought.

  She’d lost her grip on the Palladium when she’d been struck, but it hadn’t fallen from her satchel. She reached down with her left hand and gripped the broken statue, lifting it out.

  Such a simple thing, she mused. How long had it sat in the Temple of the Vestal Virgins in Rome, untouched and unnoticed? Its power was there the whole time, hidden in its beating heart, just waiting for someone to unleash it.

  The light in the tomb changed. A shadow had risen up to fill the doorway. A man, with his back against the light.

  “Selene,” Tiberius said.

  Before she could answer, another shadow rose up behind him like a silent fog. It reached a long-fingered, almost skeletal hand up to the back of her rapist’s neck.

  Tiberius visibly stiffened. His hands rose up before him.

  The Lance. Fire. Death.

  Selene’s working hand lifted the Palladium to the thrumming Aegis upon her chest. Air. Life.

  Heat surged into the room from the air outside the tomb, focusing down and through the two men. But tendrils of that same air swept around them, snaking across the walls and floor and ceiling of stone, gathering into a vortex that pulled at Selene’s black hair.

  When the roiling flame shot across the space between them, a gale of wind uncoiled to meet it with the roar of a thousand storms.

  Air and Fire impacted with a concussive blast, fanning the flames out until they were an infernal wall of slashing fire that radiated across the breadth of the tomb. Selene shut her eyes against the shock of the blinding light.

  She screamed as the power coursed through her, as it fed from her. From beyond the wall of flame she heard another scream, and she knew that it was Tiberius. A small corner of her heart wanted to revel in whatever pain he felt, in whatever ways he was being torn apart, but in truth she felt sorry for him. She pitied him, for he was not strong. He did not have love.

  And love, she had learned, was the greatest power of all.

  Selene opened her eyes to the glare. The barrier of wind she was holding between them was bent back toward her, threatening collapse from the edges where it met the stone walls.

  “No,” she said. And then again, more forcefully, “No.”

  She lifted her head from where it rested against the wood of the Ark. She bent forward, and the wall bent, too: moving ever so slightly back again.

  Caesarion had given everything.

  Her right side still useless, she bent her left leg underneath her.

  Slowly she pushed herself upward, her back sliding up the wall, then inch by inch up the side of the Ark.

  She wanted to look at it, she wanted to turn and use it, but there was no time. And her power would be enough. Against these demons, against the whole of the world, her love would be enough.

  She was standing, leaning against the Ark.

  Her left leg came forward, and the right slid forward behind it. She rose away from the wood. Fresh waves of pain raged up from her torn body, but she pushed them aside. They would have their moment. But not now. This moment was hers.

  She stepped forward, and the wall of air stepped forward, too.

  The agony of Tiberius was a wail now. She limped another step closer, and the wall of wind moved with her. The edges where it met the stone on either side of her were straightening out.

  Another step, and the fire was thinning. She could see the two figures beyond it now, shimmering through the coursing veil of flame. Tiberius. The demon.

  And another demon, too. The female. She was clamoring up beside the first.

  She looked scared.

  Selene limped forward again, and now she saw another figure through the flames. Beyond the demons, beyond the tomb, a hulking man who could only be Titus Pullo was lumbering through the sunlight with a sword in his hand.

  The demon had something in her hand. She clawed for the neck of Tiberius. When she reached it, the fire stopped. For an instant she saw that Tiberius was starting to go limp, his eyes rolling to white, his mouth agape. But then he and the two demons cli
nging to him folded in upon themselves and in a flash of pale light were gone.

  Unhindered now, Selene’s wind launched forward even as she released her grip on the Palladium. It spun out from the tomb in a frenzy of dust, kicking the mighty Pullo to his back as if he were a rag doll.

  The Palladium fell into her satchel, and Selene managed to stumble forward toward the open doorway. She caught herself there against the right side of it, leaning against the stone.

  Pullo was on his back. Beyond him, she could see, lay one of the demons and Miriam.

  “Oh God,” she whispered.

  The demon’s corpse was headless. The front of Miriam’s shirt was shredded. Bright blood was everywhere.

  From the ground, Pullo groaned. Selene leaned her right side farther into the stone where he wouldn’t see.

  “Pullo!”

  The big man coughed. “Selene?” One of his hands was lifted to his head. The other seemed to be scrambling for the blade that had fallen from his grip. “Where are they?”

  “Gone,” she called out. “But I need you to get up, Pullo. I need your help.”

  He pushed himself upright, wincing, battered by wounds old and new.

  “Hurry,” she urged. “I know it hurts. But you’ve got to make it. Just a little longer.”

  He lumbered to his feet, swaying, still in a kind of shock. He started to stumble toward her, catching and recatching his balance like a drunken man. “You’re hurt?”

  Selene swallowed hard. “Just hurry,” she said.

  He was trying not to cry, she could see. “Gods, Selene … Miriam, I tried—”

  “There’s time,” she said, willing away her own pain, sloughing it off and letting what was left of her feed back into the Shard upon her chest. “Just hurry.”

  He reached her, and his eyes were still disoriented.

  Selene gripped one of his arms fiercely, willing him to look into her eyes. “Focus, Pullo. Look at me. Take me to Miriam.”

  Her own wounds were still in the shadows. But he could see enough of her tattered clothes to know there was a problem. “You’re hurt.”

  She nodded toward the courtyard, sending his attention there even as she used her left arm to pull herself painfully into the crook of his right elbow. “To Miriam, Pullo. Now.”

  Titus Pullo was a soldier. He knew an order. He knew to obey. And so he lifted her weight, knitted his brow in concentration to keep himself upright, and together they hobbled out into the sunlight, out through the destruction, to where a young girl lay in a pool of red upon the stones.

  “Set me beside her,” Selene said. She couldn’t tell if Miriam was still breathing. She couldn’t tell if her heart was stilled. But she had hope that there was time for one last miracle.

  Pullo started to lower her down, and only then did he see the right side of her body. “Oh, gods. Selene—”

  She ignored him, her working left arm reaching for the clasps of the breastplate. “Help me get it off,” she said.

  Pullo was frozen. “Without it—”

  “I die either way,” she said. “Miriam might yet live. Help me. Now.”

  Pullo reached down. His big, strong hands shook as he fumbled with the first of the clasps she couldn’t reach.

  Selene reached up and touched his quaking arm. “It’ll be all right, Pullo. It’s my choice. Do this for me.”

  He was weeping openly now. But his arm had stopped shaking. And his fingers undid the first clasp, then the second.

  Selene closed her eyes for a moment, pushing her will to live into the throbbing black stone, imagining her soul being drawn into it.

  “Selene,” Pullo said.

  She opened her eyes and looked into his. For all that he’d been torn apart, his eyes were the same kind eyes she’d known as a child. She nodded. “Do it,” she said.

  The Aegis had fused into her charred flesh on the right side, and she ground her teeth as her skin tugged, cracked, and tore. But she did not cry out.

  As the Shard pulled away she could almost feel its power grasping at her essence like invisible fingers. She did not fight it.

  And then it was off, and Pullo was putting it on Miriam.

  Waves of pain were surging up at Selene from everywhere, but she felt them only like a distant rumble in the back of her mind. Her left hand had fallen back to the ground, and somehow it had found the hand of Miriam beside her. She gripped it.

  “Move the Ark,” she whispered.

  Pullo was kneeling. He was saying something, though she couldn’t hear him. He knew what he needed to do, though. He was a smart man, despite his protests. It would take time for the demons to come back, but not long. And they’d come better prepared this time. Petra wouldn’t be safe. He knew that.

  She thought of Juba and wondered what he would tell their son. She loved them. She would give anything to see them again. But she wasn’t sad. She had done what was right. No regrets.

  She thought, too, of her parents and her brothers. Of all the ones who’d gone before.

  If there was anything more to come, she hoped she would see them there.

  She felt herself falling away. The sky was but a point of light as the darkness rose. And she saw that Pullo was there. But it was a memory, a younger, unscarred man from a more innocent time. He was frightened, for he did not belong.

  “Go back,” she tried to say, and her voice breathed like a final sigh. “You’re not done.”

  And then he was gone, but she wasn’t alone. The sun was coming up. She was rising, her back to the sun as dawn broke the shadow and cast its light over green and fertile lands that stretched and stretched like a never-ending song. Children were running there, laughing as they danced below her feet, and she was certain she knew their names.

  Somewhere, in a distant, dry land, she still felt the touch of Miriam’s fingers in her own. And just before that last bright point of light went out, she felt them move.

  Somewhere, somewhere far away behind her, she smiled.

  PART III

  THE GATE OF HEAVEN

  21

  GABRIEL’S REVELATION

  MOUNT NEBO, 4 BCE

  Standing on a rocky slope, not far from the summit of the mountain, Juba looked out upon the darkness of Judaea. In the distance, he could see that Jericho was still burning. Herod had kept a royal treasury there, and Simon’s ragtag army had been merciless in taking it and destroying anyone who opposed them.

  Not that they were stealing it, of course. Not from their perspective. To them, Simon was a Messiah. He was the rightful king of the Jews, proclaimed—so they said—by the archangel Gabriel himself. The riches, like their lives, were his.

  Juba had never seen anything quite like such combined passion of religious and military devotion. It was both stirring and frightening, and he wondered at the political implications of such a mentality. It was just the sort of thing he enjoyed talking to Selene about.

  Selene.

  Juba couldn’t help but sigh longingly. By whatever gods were in this world, he missed her. The chance to see her again could not come soon enough.

  He hoped that Didymus would be successful in steering the rebels south, toward Petra. They’d joined with Simon and his growing force just outside of Jerusalem, and as they’d ridden west Didymus had left Thrasyllus in the care of Juba while he worked to endear himself to the leaders. It hadn’t taken long for the white-haired old librarian to prove himself a helpful source of information for the slave-turned-Messiah. It had been Didymus who suggested the assault on Jericho—riches, and a ride east when Simon had been planning a turn north.

  The crunch of earth nearby signaled the approach of Thrasyllus. Three days had passed since they’d left the Temple Mount, and the astrologer’s strength was increasingly improved. “I won’t ask,” he said.

  Juba smiled. They’d known each other long enough to know that they were both missing their loves tonight. They were certain that if Selene was in Petra, Lapis was, too. “I’m sure they’re fin
e,” he said.

  “I hope so.” The scholar came up to stand beside Juba and joined him in staring west at the glowing fires in the distance. “But Jericho cost us a day. If Didymus can’t convince them to turn south now—”

  “We steal horses,” Juba said. He’d already made his mind up on that point. “We’ll go just before the dawn. I’ve helped myself from some of their supplies. We’ll be hungry on the way, but we’ll have water.”

  Thrasyllus let out a breath in obvious relief. “Hunger I can take. Just need speed.”

  “I agree. But we also need to get there. The roads are dangerous. The whole countryside seems at war with itself. The longer we can stay with this band, the better off we are.” It was a balance, Juba knew. The sort of decision he’d been judging for years back in Mauretania.

  “Let’s hope Didymus can do it, then,” Thrasyllus said.

  “He can indeed,” Didymus said from the darkness behind them.

  Juba felt his heart thrill in his chest as he turned and saw Didymus making his way down from the tents gathered around a little shrine at the summit of the mountain. “We’ll turn south?”

  Didymus nodded in the moonlight. “We will indeed, though I can’t take all credit. It was a near thing between my advice to raid south and John, who wants Simon to go back to the Temple Mount and bring God’s glory there. He continues to talk about a rather desperate battle between good and evil happening upon the Mount of God.”

  John was one of the most vocal priests in the army. A young man with a soaring charisma, he’d caught the attention of many with his devotion to the idea of a Messiah and his soaring proclamations of the change that would come with him. Juba was naturally distrustful of him. “Another of his prophecies?” he asked.

  “They’re saying it is. I’ve found out he was born not far from here, actually. A place called Qum’ran.” The scholar pointed to the darkness of hillsides south of Jericho, near the beginning of the deep flat of black that was the Dead Sea. “There somewhere, I’m given to understand. Secretive community. Very secluded. The sort of place I would like, I think.”