A group of legionaries had caught him breaking into the emperor’s chambers at the Palatine, and he had been arrested immediately. He demanded to see the emperor or Marcus Agrippa, but the legionaries took him to the prison without hearing anything he had to say.

He’d languished here for days, surrounded by madmen.

The prisoners, mainly soldiers who had collapsed or betrayed Rome by serving Antony in the battle at the Circus Maximus, compared visions of the queen’s transformation, gibbering and wailing from their cells. They told one another tales of Mark Antony, once their fellow, walking as a shade and hiring them to defend his queen, and of wild animals slavering. They spoke of serpents that swarmed through the streets of Rome.

They spoke of the queen dancing in the center of an endless fire, undamaged.

He had to get to the emperor. His life was already ruined, and if he did not wish to spend the rest of it rotting belowground, he must tell his story to the Romans. He must get access to other materials, other libraries. Something to find a way to defeat Sekhmet. It must exist. They did not understand that though they had Cleopatra, they did not contain her. Sekhmet still walked, and she was the daughter of the sun. It was very likely that the burning had made her stronger.

He was tormented by a scrap of memory, something he’d read in the Museion about Sekhmet’s Slaughterers, seven ferocious children in the form of monstrous arrows, who served as bringers of chaos, plague, and destruction. They had been punished along with Sekhmet, and if she was free, they were, too.

In desperation, he begged a guard for writing materials, hoping to craft a letter to the emperor, and when they scoffed at him, he mentioned Virgil’s name.

Days later, a visitor arrived. He was a head taller than any of the guards, draped in a dark, hooded cloak. Nicolaus watched hopelessly as the man passed coins to the guard. He expected this was some assassin buying his way into the cell, but when the man took off his hood, Nicolaus recognized the poet’s face, long and grim.

“You should not have used my name,” Virgil said. “Augustus does not know I am in Rome. Someone else summoned me here, but the emperor wrote me in Campania, begging me to come to his bedside as a storyteller. He is having difficulty sleeping.”

“As well he should,” said Nicolaus. “A monster sleeps in his house.”

“I heard that,” said Virgil. “The emperor’s servants leak secrets. A miracle, is it not? They captured a shape-shifting creature. A wonder.”

“It is not a wonder,” Nicolaus said. “It is horrifying. You are fortunate that you have not seen what I have seen. You must get me out of this prison. I have to speak to Augustus.”

Virgil looked at Nicolaus for a moment, measuring him. “I’ve brought you writing materials, at considerable risk to myself.”

Nicolaus reached out to grasp the scroll, but Virgil held it back.

“I have a price.”

“I have no money,” Nicolaus said, frustrated. “Perhaps you misunderstand my position here.”

“There is a request for a forgery, from high up in Rome, and if I value my life, I cannot do it.”

“Why should I be capable of something you are not?”

“You are dead already,” Virgil said simply.

The Sibylline Books, Virgil explained, were a complicated fiction: The original texts, purchased by Tarquinius from the Cumaean Sibyl, had been destroyed in a fire at the Temple of Jupiter fifty years before, and since then, Rome had searched the world to replace them with copies. Naturally, it had quickly become clear that the copies might be edited to reflect favorable omens for Rome. The Sibylline prophecies were now largely, albeit secretly, the work of hired scholars pretending to be longdead prophetic priestesses. They were consulted whenever Rome’s rulers wished to justify something with an ancient prophecy. This forgery, however, was a delicate assignment.

“A group of senators desire a doomsday prophecy relating to the rise of Cleopatra and the fall of Augustus’s Rome. They wish to sway the public’s opinion of Augustus. It seems that the facts support them,” said Virgil.

“To what end?”

“The story you will write might aid them in restoring the republic. It might create a revolution against Augustus. It might merely make for entertaining reading. I cannot tell the future, Nicolaus, but a story like this is difficult to resist, even for a man like me. Sometimes, I miss the days when I wrote what I pleased.”

“You do not miss those days much,” Nicolaus said, snorting. It felt as though they were scholars debating in a courtyard, and for a moment, Nicolaus forgot that he was behind bars in a dungeon and that Virgil stood at liberty, the richest poet in Rome.

“True,” said Virgil, and smiled. “I will visit Augustus when I am finished here. I have become the emperor’s lullaby singer, but he pays me in Egyptian gold.”

“What am I to write?” Nicolaus asked.

“And you were once such a promising scholar,” Virgil said. “Can you not guess? The texts are kept under key in the Temple of Apollo, and everyone claims they’re incorrupt, but every leader has commissioned his own version of the prophecies, dependent on what he needed the world to believe. The Sibylline prophecies are a creation of convenience and full of lies. You, on the other hand, will write the truth. The emperor has employed some sort of witch to steal the memories of those who witnessed the chaos in the Circus Maximus, and the senators fear that the stories will not travel as easily as they need them to.”

“I want to write to Augustus,” Nicolaus insisted.

“He reads the prophecies,” Virgil said.

“Augustus has put Rome in danger. He has put the world at risk by capturing her.”

“Then write that,” Virgil said. “Terrify him. Terrify Rome. Make them think their doomsday is coming, and all because of what Augustus has done. Is that not what you believe? This is an opportunity. Didn’t you dream of becoming a historian? This is a history, though it claims to be prophecy. Tell them what they have done, and if it serves the senators, it serves you, too.”

Thus it was that Nicolaus the Damascene began to write prophecy, passing each page to a bribed guard as he finished it. His mind was vague and scattered, but writing kept him from falling over the edge of sanity. He wrote the truth, or at least as much of it as he could, in the guise of a sibyl, thinking back on the various books he’d scanned in Virgil’s library and the tone of the prophets’ voices.

“Then shall all declare that I am a true prophetess, oracle-singing, and yet a messenger with maddened soul. And when thou shalt come forward to the Books, thou shalt not tremble, and all things to come and things that were, ye shall know from our words,” he wrote, pretending that these same words had been written centuries before.

The prophecies would be published as newly discovered, unearthed from an ancient ruin, scrolls found rolled into an amphora or entombed with some hero. They would be read aloud in the Forum and all across the country, drawing support away from Augustus and toward his foes. If the emperor would not deal rationally with Cleopatra, if he would not understand that he caged an immortal, then perhaps someone else would. She must be destroyed, and though Nicolaus did not know how to destroy her, he hoped that someone who read his words might. As for Sekhmet, Nicolaus could only hope that if Cleopatra were killed, the goddess would go back into oblivion, back to where she had been before they summoned her.

Nicolaus was not permitted to use Cleopatra’s name—even oracles could not know everything—and so he named her “the widow.”

He was not permitted to speak directly of Augustus, so he referred to him obliquely. “And then shall come inexorable wrath upon Latin men. Three shall, by piteous fate, endamage Rome. And perish shall all men with their own houses, when from heaven shall flow a fiery cataract.”

Three men and the eye of Ra. Augustus, Antony, and Agrippa, he meant, though he might as well add himself amongst that group. Sekhmet, a flaming vengeance making her way across the heavens. They all would perish, and it was all of their fault. Antony for inciting Cleopatra into trading herself for his life, Augustus for warring against her in the first place, and Agrippa for serving as his general.

As he wrote, his mind chewed over the possibilities. Somewhere in his reading, somewhere in his books, there was an answer.

Immortals had been killed before, he knew it, though their deaths were portrayed only in myth. Hercules had used his sword to chop off forty-nine of the heads of his enemy, the Hydra, and then cauterized the wounds with fire to keep them from renewing. He’d buried the furiously immortal head deep below the ground on the road to Lerna, and placed a boulder over the spot. Poison seeped from it and into the darkness, but the Hydra lived now only in Hades. It had not come back to the surface. Thus far.

The thought of the Hydra spurred some memory deep within the historian’s mind. He pressed his hands to his temples, searching for the connection. Some fragment read in Virgil’s library, something in the tasks of Hercules. Deaths of immortals. The Hydra’s venom.

Nicolaus looked down at his task and discovered that he had heedlessly signed the prophecy he’d been writing with his own name. He swore, dropping it on the floor. He would have to begin again.

He paused, still thinking, and at last, the idea he’d been searching for came swimming into the light of his consciousness.

He knew how to defeat the queen. Immortal to immortal. Chaos to chaos. There was a way.