Queen of Kings (47 page)

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.

T
he battle seemed to slow about Cleopatra as she spun, her arms flying, her hair twisting in a wind that had come from nowhere. Where was the Psylli? Augustus looked frantically around. The wind began to blow in the face of Augustus's forces, and dust blew up into their eyes.

Cleopatra hurled herself onto Chrysate as the beasts of the whirlwind surrounded her.

Standing beside Augustus, Auðr lost her hold on the strands of fate that kept the queen and the goddess apart, and they snapped back together again. She sagged, her body conquered by the Fates. What would be would be. She could not control it all. What happened to Sekhmet would happen to Cleopatra. What happened to Cleopatra would happen to the world.

The witch's body was everywhere, clawed and scaled, writhing and snarling, and Cleopatra wrestled her over the void that led to Hades. The witch bit at the queen, twisting in her grasp.

Usem shouted directions to the wind, but the wind had ceased to listen to him. The beasts came at the witch of Thessaly, and Cleopatra came at her as well, and Augustus, screaming in the storm, threw his fists into the air and came at his enemies from still another direction.

In his hands, the emperor bore the shining bow of Hercules, strung with a shining arrow.

He saw the thing rising in the crater. He knew, as he had known nothing before, that it could not be allowed to rise.

Behind Chrysate, Mark Antony got to his feet. He was strong now, with the blood that had been spilled and the spells that had been cast. His fingers could grasp and his feet could touch the ground. Rage propelled him toward the witch, and she saw him, incandescent with it.

Chrysate did not care. He could not hurt her. Her spells were working. She could feel Hecate coming from beneath the earth, filled with the sacrifices made in her name. She stood her ground, and the ghosts swarmed about her feet, killing the dying and drinking of the dead.

Cleopatra tore at Chrysate's throat, but it made no difference. She drank of darkness, endless darkness, and the witch was renewed. Her laughter flowed into the queen, drunken and rapturous, as the sky filled with monsters, and the world shook. Cleopatra dug her fingers into the witch's heart but felt nothing but night. On the ground, her children stared up at nothing. In the air above them, two bewildered ghosts, wisps of pain, fluttered.

Cleopatra screamed with agony and rage, and it did no good.

Augustus aimed the bow, first into the crater, then at Chrysate. Then at Cleopatra. Which was he meant to kill? He could not tell. Usem shouted at him from across the crater, but he could hear nothing. He could see Agrippa's mouth moving as well, signaling Augustus, but the emperor did not know what to do.

He aimed the bow at Chrysate's heart at last, the fiend he himself had summoned to Rome. She smiled at him, daring him to shoot, and that was what made his decision.

“You will die,” he said, and pulled at Hercules' bowstring, but it did not move. How could this be? It was his bow. He had taken it from its hiding place. He, Augustus Caesar, the emperor of Rome. This was his destiny.

The witch looked into his eyes and laughed.

Augustus pulled with all his might, but the string did not move. Augustus, his heart despairing, his shame infinite, his fury unalloyed, recalled the words of the priest of Apollo.

The bow of Hercules could be drawn only by a hero.

Mark Antony looked at him, a shade, his enemy, the man he had painted as a coward, as slave to a woman. He held out his ghostly hands.

Augustus handed the bow to him without a word. There was no other choice.

Antony pulled back the string and drew the bow easily. He aimed, trying to find a clear shot at the witch, but it was impossible.

Cleopatra's mouth was covered in blood, and her hair flew in the wind. Her eyes were lit with golden wrath, and her body was nothing human any longer. She was a goddess, shining and tremendous. Her feet did not touch the ground as she grappled with the witch. She tore at the woman's throat and lifted her high into the air, their bodies entwined.

Antony squinted at the light that emanated from her. He could not see for brightness.

“Shoot!” Cleopatra screamed. “Shoot her now! Hecate is coming!”

Antony could not shoot the witch without risking his wife. His fingers hesitated on the bowstring, the arrow trembling. The witch gained the upper position, and he caught a glimpse of her gaping jaws, her claws tearing at Cleopatra's breast, her strength increased by Hecate's presence.

Antony looked down. On the grass at his feet, Ptolemy stared sightless at the moon. Alexander lay covered in blood, drained by ghosts. The shades of his children moaned, bent over their lost bodies. He did not know what had happened to Selene.

Antony felt himself falling, felt his fingers weakening. Cleopatra twisted, her body between Antony and the witch. She strained to hold Chrysate, looking at her husband.

“If you love me, you will do it!” Cleopatra screamed.

He looked at her. His love. His wife, her hair bloodied, her hands talons, and her eyes golden. He could see her inside all of the chaos. Cleopatra was there.

“I am yours,” Cleopatra said, and then Antony shot her.

T
he arrow of Hercules pierced them both, stabbing into Cleopatra's back and passing through her into Chrysate's body.

The sounds ripped through the sky. The Earth herself roared. The Earth herself cried out, and Antony's cry mixed with Cleopatra's scream of agony and Chrysate's wailing howl of despair. Sekhmet, bonded to Cleopatra, sharer of her soul, screamed in unison with her, doubled over, holding the place where the Hydra's immortal venom had entered her body. Stars dropped and scattered.

Cleopatra pressed her hands to the wound, and, for the first time since she had summoned the goddess, there was blood.

The queen released Chrysate, and the witch fell, spinning and screaming.

“I dedicate this soul to Hades!” Cleopatra shouted, her voice strangled.

In the crater, Hecate's shine dimmed, the water taking her back into itself, the chain of the dead wrapping about her ankle and pulling her down. The crater awaited Chrysate, and in it, the millions of ghosts she had called from Hades.

The army of shades rose up and took her beneath the waters, and Chrysate, witch of Thessaly, was gone into the darkness with her goddess, swept under and fallen upon.

Holding her wound, tears running down her face, Cleopatra hung in the air over the abyss and turned her gaze to Augustus, who stood, stunned, looking up at her.

She smiled at him, and he shuddered, unable to move. Her gaze was the deep indigo of twilight, and darkness rose within it. Cleopatra shone upon him, tremendous, blinding, looking through him. A god.

We are not finished
, she said, and her voice was only in his mind. She reached out her hand, and though she did not touch him, Augustus felt a chill invade him. He felt her touching his heart, clenching it in her talons, and then he felt her tear it from him. Was it his heart? Or something else? He could not tell what was happening.

He gasped, feeling a sudden absence at his center, a loss. A searing pain, like lightning striking, shot through the absence, and he felt a wind whirling inside his chest. Cleopatra smiled.

Augustus fell to his knees, limp, bewildered, curling around the missing place.

Cleopatra turned away from the emperor and looked down at her husband.

Antony stood at the edge of the crater, his skin already flickering and fading as the witch who had summoned him died.

“I will see you again,” Antony said to his wife.

“
Te teneo,”
said Cleopatra.

“As you are mine,” said Antony. “I will wait for you.”

Cleopatra's face clenched with pain as she pulled the arrow from her body and threw it into the crater.

“You may wait until the end of time,” she said.

Antony smiled at her. “I will wait,” he said. He gathered their dead children into his arms, and there was a flash in the west, as though the sun had appeared at the edge of the sky and looked over it, onto the battlefield.