23
Cleopatra’s vision blurred with blood and
light. It was as it had been aboard the ship, her hunger, her fury.
She lost moments and then found herself with blood on her hands.
The waters below were red and the lake was dotted with Roman
corpses. The ground was slick and the fallen lay in heaps, arms
spread out, their gods nowhere to be seen.
She could feel Sekhmet’s glory. She was Sekhmet’s
glory.
It was all going according to her plan. Her army of
beasts and Romans spread across the field, fighting at her command.
Her body surged with the violence, with the bloodshed, and she felt
her strength growing with every kill. Sekhmet, high above,
roared.
Nicolaus dashed across the battlefield, too near
her, and she leapt at him.
“Betrayer,” she hissed.
“I did not mean to be,” the historian whispered,
and she could see that he had not. Still. He would be
punished.
She clawed him, only once, from his shoulder to his
wrist, his writing hand. Then she left him on the field and moved
on, closer, closer, to the emperor.
Suddenly, before her was an unexpected warrior. The
snake charmer. She hissed at him, and he hissed back, his knife
dancing from hand to hand. She clawed at him, spitting with fury as
his blade nicked her arm, in the very place where the Hydra venom
had wounded her. He danced faster than light, faster than air, and
suddenly, it seemed as though he was flying.
What was she fighting?
The Psylli rose on the back of a beast, and the
beast spat dust and bone in her face. It spat salt water, a tidal
wave of ocean, and fish, gasping, plucked from the deep, and still
Usem attacked her, his eyes blazing.
Vengeance. Reckoning. Augustus was standing behind
the man, fumbling with something behind his back, but she couldn’t
get past Usem.
The warrior and the wind were stronger than she had
expected, and it took all her power to fight them.
The elder boy struggled, drugged though he
was, but the witch had him, a rope twisted about his neck. What was
left of Chrysate’s face contorted as she dragged the child up the
hillside path, invisible to those battling above her. The other boy
she had by the wrist, her fingernails digging into his flesh. Her
scry had revealed strange things, changes in the fates. She’d
consulted it just before the battle. What had happened? What had
the Northern witch done?
The end of everything, but she saw nothing for
herself. No Chrysate. No Hecate. No cave in Thessaly.
Nothing.
Chrysate tripped on a soldier’s body and fell, her
fingers slipping in his blood. The children were wailing. She heard
their high tones over the deeper ones of the battle. Music. The
heavens bent to listen. The gods, even the gods of love, loved
war.
Chrysate pushed herself back to her feet, dragging
her prisoners with her. The small one kicked at her legs, and she
shook him until he was limp. The larger flung himself at her, and
she hit him in the brow with the hilt of her stolen sword. Easier
now. She laid them, almost gently, on the grass. No one was
watching her. Everyone fought, insensible to what was about to
happen.
Across the battlefield, she could see the queen,
hear her battle cries, and watch the legions falling before her
strange army of beasts. She was wreaking havoc, and Sekhmet was
within her, all around her. She battled the Psylli, and all her
attention was on him.
Chrysate whispered, and the sky shifted at her
urging. A star came closer to light her work, sending a glow down
upon the witch of Thessaly and her charges.
The moon’s pale surface turned red as Chrysate
laced her spell about the moon’s surface and drew it down from its
orbit until it hung just above her hilltop. She’d placed herself
purposefully. There was a price, of course, but she had planned for
this. For all of this.
Alexander Helios and Ptolemy Philadelphus, sons of
Egypt. Royal children. The girl would have been more powerful, but
the boys would do.
Were they unwilling sacrifices? It no longer
mattered. They were drugged, and Chrysate, priestess of Hecate,
psuchagoĝoi of Thessaly, supplemented her diminished
strength with the borrowed power of the sky. The waters at the
bottom of the crater opened for her, and the bitter lake of hatred
shone in the moonlight.
She drew her dagger from her belt and slit the
younger child’s throat, the skin soft and yielding. The child’s
eyes widened as she cut him, but he did not protest. The drug had
him quieted, and he was frozen, scarcely capable of movement. She
laid Ptolemy back on the bank for the moon to take as her
fee.
Chrysate held Alexander out over the waters, and
slit his throat—dull-eyed, she thought, like a goat, and
dull-spirited, no match for his royal title—letting his blood pour
down into the crater. It splashed in the dark liquid, Hecate’s
gift.
“I summon you,” she shouted, exultant. “Come to
me!”
The world froze in a moment as Hades opened, frost
riming the armor of the Romans.
From the darkness, snow began to fall.
Pale shapes surged up through the boundary. There
was a wailing deep in the lake. Fingers breached the surface of the
freezing water, and then thousands of shades, hundreds of thousands
of shades, crying for the royal blood that had been spilled in
their sacrifice. Suicides and heroes, warriors and women, infants
and ancients, they came surging upward into the cruel red light of
the moon, and behind them, the Underworld emptied.
“Hecate! Hear me!” Chrysate cried. “Take them, take
these fighters, take these wounded, take these dying and these
dead! I dedicate their sacrifice to you! Feast on them and join
me!”
The earth shook, and from beneath the hillside, the
hounds of Hecate began to howl. Chrysate could hear the great
Cerberus growling with fury.
The shades drank of life, their mouths wide-open.
The blood poured from the child into the dead.
Chrysate was listening to one more sound below all
of them, the rattling of a tremendous chain, a song, twisting and
ecstatic, the song of a goddess rising from her banishment, when
the shade of Antony rose from the crevasse, his body whipping with
anguish, moving faster than light.
The witch laughed as he emerged. He was too
late.
Antony screamed, his wails echoing through Hades
and across the upper world. He held his children in his dark arms,
but the younger was gone already. The elder was dying. Antony
cursed, a dead man holding his dead children.
Cleopatra, battling with Usem and his wife, heard
Antony’s screams, gathered her haunches beneath her and leapt over
the Roman army, across the impossible distance at Chrysate, her
teeth bared, her claws outstretched.
There was a shudder across the battlefield as
Chrysate raised her hands into the air and pushed her long nails
into the moon, holding it tightly. She hurled it across the crater,
the crescent’s points serving as spears. It spun in the air,
bright, lighting the world, but Cleopatra raised her hand, heaved
the moon aside and kept coming.
Cleopatra grew larger as she charged, swollen with
chaos, swollen with war. Her body was lioness, and her arms were
serpent. Her face was her own.
Screaming, she bared her teeth to sink them into
Chrysate.
The moon careened across the battlefield, slaying
those it touched, igniting the grass. The shades surged across the
battlefield, an army of teeth and claws, their mouths open, and all
the blood in the world not enough for them.
The lake was filled with souls, and beneath them,
something else began to surge upward, a darkness streaming with all
the waters of Lethe.
The moon, flying through the sky and bouncing
against the crater walls, was one moment blinding and the next
blackness, and in the crater, tremendous fingers began to be
visible, dark and drowned hair streaming in the waters, the skin
blue with cold, the eyes deeper than night, reflecting their own
moons and stars.
“Hecate,” Chrysate cried, rapturous.
“HECATE!”
And then the daughter of the Western Wind, pushed
too far by the sacrifice of still more children, by the rising of
Hecate from beneath the earth, switched from fighting against
Cleopatra to fighting against Chrysate.