The Shards of Heaven (43 page)

Need pushed him on. He crawled upward, step by agonized step, light growing around him, until he reached the end of the stair and heaved himself over the top onto the floor of a large chamber. He lay there for a few seconds, panting and spitting what he hoped was water, before he managed the strength to force himself to his knees. He raised his head, water pressing his hair flat against his forehead, and centered his swimming sight on the object of his dreams.

It was there. More beautiful than he would ever have imagined: shining like a new thing, all burnished gold and glory. Twin wooden poles had already been mounted to its sides, preparing it for transport. His heart soared, and for a moment he felt like singing.

Then he saw the four men standing around him. They wore dark hooded cloaks, pulled back from their shoulders to give freedom to their arms as they held notched arrows to their tightened bows, deadly points taking slow and careful aim at the intruder.

“Wait,” he croaked, but then the strings were loosed and four arrows buried themselves in his body, finding openings around his armor.

Juba slumped forward, arrows snapping and metal ringing as he struck the stone floor, and silent darkness overtook him.

*   *   *

No.

The thought was so clear, so present in Juba's floating mind that it startled him into a single, strong, undeniable realization. He wasn't dead.

He should be. Juba knew that. He'd very nearly drowned. He'd been shot through with four iron-pointed shafts—any one of which would have killed a man.

But he was alive. Somehow, someway, he was alive. How?

The answer came to him as if from another voice.
The breastplate,
it said.
Alexander's breastplate.

The memory of it came back to him through the fog of darkness in which he floated. He'd seen it in the tomb this morning and recognized it at once for its potential power, even if he hadn't recognized it for the artifact that it was. Even if he hadn't realized then it was the Aegis of Zeus until Didymus told him. The Aegis. The very armor of the father of the gods.

Not that he believed in the gods. He could no longer remember a time when he had. If what Selene and Didymus had told him was true—and he was certain now that it was—he was right to doubt the divine. There was only one God, and He was gone. All that was left were the Shards.

Despite the coldness of his thoughts, Juba felt a warmth somewhere nearby, like a deep well filled with ready flame. The breastplate again, he realized. With the blacker-than-black stone upon it. He reached out to the Shard in his mind, thinking of the silver and bronze ribbing he'd seen embedded on the inside of the armor and that odd symbol in the middle of it all, directly behind the Shard itself: a six-sided shape in a six-pointed star. Imagining himself pushing out through those metal contacts, through that symbol, he gave himself over to the power of the Shard, just as he had so often with the Trident. Like the feel of those twin snakes beneath his palms, the metal of the breastplate around him seemed to move like a thing alive as the Shard drew him ever deeper even as it pushed back and into him.

Power. He felt it coursing into the body that began to awake around him, filling his veins. Power. Life.

And rage. Deep and raw. Rage only barely contained.

The darkness around him lurched hard. Once. Then twice. Then twice more.

In his mind, Juba felt like laughing. His heart was beating again. Beating and calling for blood.

So this was how Alexander had survived so long, through so many battles, through so many wounds that should have ended his life. This was the power of the Aegis. Power that was now his. Power that would help him avenge his father. And himself. Power that would help him kill Octavian.
Kill.

Juba's sense of hearing abruptly returned, and he could hear that there was movement around him. Feet on stone, hushed voices.

“Are you sure you're okay?” someone asked.

“I am to see this,” Didymus rasped.

“More beautiful than you thought, isn't it?”

“It is,” Didymus replied.

In the pause that followed, Juba imagined Didymus staring at the Ark, the object of Juba's own desires. Unprovoked anger shook him to the marrow of his bones, even as another part of his mind—a small, shrinking part—wondered how he could hate the man who'd helped him get this far. What had Didymus ever done to him?

The thought drifted away in the storm of violent anger that swirled up and into him through the Shard upon his chest.

Then came a girl's voice. “We need to go,” she said.

He heard the sound of wood bending, and of men grunting under a heavy weight. “Keep it steady,” a male voice said. “Slow down the ramp.”

Juba cried out in his mind, quaking with ire, but his body, he was certain, did not move.

“So who is your Roman friend?” the girl asked.

“Juba,” Didymus said. He sounded distracted, as if he couldn't take his gaze off the retreating Ark.

“This is him?” asked the first voice.

“What's he doing here?” the girl asked.

Getting revenge, Juba screamed back in his mind, and he pictured himself standing, stopping them from taking away his prize, his power, his Ark. His vengeance.

But then, in an instant, he lost the focus of his energies and the pain of his wounds surged over him like a roll of thunder. His heart still pounding with the strength of the Shard, he fell out of consciousness again.

*   *   *

When he returned to his senses, the pain of his wounds was more manageable. Whether the Shard had partially healed them or his mind had found some means of separating the pain from his mind, he didn't know or care. What mattered was that the voices in the room were gone.

His eyes snapped open, focusing first on the congealed blood that had pooled around his face on the floor and then, as he slowly turned his head, on the empty dais in the middle of the chamber, where the Ark had stood.

No.

They'd taken the Ark. His vengeance. His hope. They'd taken it and left only a few oil lamps flickering hungrily in the dark.

No.

Like a command in his mind, the thought moved muscles in his weakened body. One of his fists balled up.

No.

Rage boiled in his chest, in his mind. He felt it like a wildfire behind his eyes, behind the breastplate. He gritted his teeth and tightened angry muscles to pull himself once more to his knees. Pain shook at his senses, threatened to overwhelm him again, but he dipped down into the surging heat of the Shard and felt a wave of strength push back against the screaming of his body.

No. Vengeance was supposed to be his. By right of his father, who died after Caesar's defeat. By right of the crowds who'd jeered and mocked him when, as a little boy, he was dragged through Rome in Caesar's Triumph.

Vengeance.

By right of the Roman faces mocking his skin, his speech. By right of the blood on his own hands, blood that he'd spilled by order of Octavian, Caesar's son. The countless men at Actium. The innocent, unknowing sailors off the coast of Italy. Quintus. Even Syphax.

Vengeance. Power.

There was an open door on the other side of the chamber. Juba heard voices, just barely audible, coming from it.

Juba bared his teeth in a smile, and a pulse of strength brought him to his feet.

The Numidian strode, eyes focused and unblinking in his rage, across the stone floor. Ignoring the broken man slumped against the wall, he marched down the ramp. He drew his sword.

The ramp ended at an underground canal. He turned to follow the sounds to the right, moving quickly, making no effort at stealth. They had carried the Ark down through an open gate and onto a platform beside the harbor waters of the city. The hooded men who'd shot him were now standing around the edges of that stone platform, bows ready to fire at any threats from above or without.

Feeling the dull pain of an iron point scraping against his ribs, Juba felt like laughing. Let them shoot, he thought. Let them try.

A girl was among the archers, her hand reaching out to grip that of a man standing beside her, a man of royal complexion and bearing—Caesarion, Juba was sure. Behind the Ark, just inside the open gate, stood another young man who was laughing about something, a massively muscular tall man holding an oil lamp, and Didymus.

Everyone but the Greek was looking out to sea as if they were waiting for something.

Didymus had just turned to look back along the canal when Juba reached them from behind. The librarian's eyes widened in shock, but he could say nothing before Juba tossed him aside like a harmless sack of wheat, his focus on the more threatening men standing between him and his rightful destiny.

As it had in the tunnel, time shifted into slow motion. But now, instead of feeling as if he couldn't move, Juba's movements felt faster than life, faster than he'd ever thought possible. Even as Didymus was smashing against the stone wall beside him, the Numidian was moving past him, to the large man with the lamp, who was instinctively swinging his upper body around to confront the noise behind him.

In one smooth motion, Juba ducked beneath the big man's powerful but slow swing, the short sword in his hand jabbing forward to cut a deep gash across the back of the man's left knee, slicing the tendons there and hamstringing him. The lines on the massive man's face deepened as he screamed in slow time, his body starting to buckle. Juba, grinning like a feral cat, stopped his own lunge when the edge of his blade had run its course through the man's flesh and his own knee was almost touching the ground. Then he kicked himself into a spin that drew his sword back across the man's ripped leg, his reach extending as he spun in order to carve a swath over and through the right knee, too. The big man started to collapse over the other way, sprawling toward a jumble of large clay pots beside the gate.

Blood was hanging in the air like frozen red rain, the big man still falling, as Juba's momentum carried him around and he drove his blade to the hilt up and through the lower back of the young man standing between him and the Ark.

Juba let go of his grip, allowing the young man to crumple, blade protruding from his gut, onto the stones behind the Ark. Juba stepped over him, the wave of power from the Aegis ebbing and time shifting back into proper speed.

He heard screaming and crashing, wet sounds close to his feet. Caesarion and the girl on the other side of the Ark were spinning and preparing to defend themselves. Four bows started to turn in his direction. Too late.

Imagining the power to come, feeling the power that he already had, Juba smiled. Then he reached out and calmly placed a hand on each of the angels atop the Ark.

 

28

T
HE
E
ND
OF
A
K
INGDOM

ALEXANDRIA, 30 BCE

The island of Antirhodos appeared tranquil in the early morning light. The harbor waves still broke on its sandy shores. The palm trees still swayed along its promenades. Its small royal palace still stood, no differently than it had for years.

Vorenus, standing beside Khenti on the foredeck of the Roman trireme they'd taken at Actium, thought the island seemed a perfect, peaceful antithesis to the chaotic fall of the city around it.

He and Khenti had seen the beginnings of that chaos as they'd run, hardly stopping for breath, from the Serapeum across the city to the Lochian palace and its sheltered, royal harbor. Fast-moving Roman scouts had already been riding through the streets on horseback, setting fire to the occasional building and happily racing down the few civilians daring the daylight, trampling them with their hooves. Fires were being set, too, by the Alexandrians themselves; Vorenus had never known a community to fall without some of its citizens turning on each other, beginning the process of looting and execution before the invaders arrived en masse and controls could be put in place by the conquering commanders. He and the Egyptian had been forced to take a long path to reach the palace as a result of the many predawn terrors, and by the time they'd reached the harbor, the sun was rising and the trumpeting calls of the invading army's horns were echoing close indeed.

What chaos was going on in the streets now, Vorenus could only imagine, though he could see the evidence of it in the form of at least a dozen smoke columns threading up into the sky above Alexandria. Buildings were being torched. Stores were being robbed. Women were being raped. People—innocent people—were dying.

He could hear none of it. He could see none of it. But he knew it was so. No matter how often the Romans claimed to be civilized, men were all barbarians in the heat of battle. And never more so than when they won.

Vorenus knew. He'd been one of them.

“The city begins to smoke,” Khenti said.

Vorenus was accustomed to the dispassionate, businesslike nature of the Egyptian's voice, but to hear him speak so about the destruction of his home nevertheless made him shiver. “I don't think Octavian will let it all burn.”