“Can’t it wait?”
“It’ll be only a second.”
Feeling tears rising in her eyes, wanting to scream at the injustice of it all, Selene closed her eyes and pulled the Palladium from her bag and embraced it, holding her last hope to her chest. It felt warm there. Comforting.
She heard the footsteps of the girl moving through the doorway. Coming closer.
No! she screamed in her mind, squeezing the Palladium into her body as if she could hide it there, deep down inside her. No, no, no—
Power suddenly shot into her hands, a fire coiling up her arms like a fast-moving snake and lancing into the core of her chest. Selene gasped, falling backward into the small woodpile, her eyes snapping open. Beyond the smoke of the sacred fire she saw the foggy shape of Urbinia, paralyzed at the realization that someone was inside the temple. Between them Selene expected to see her arms engulfed in flame, a trail tracing out from the Vestal fire to her body like a flickering, hungry tongue. Instead, she saw the Palladium, its ghostly face turned toward her, eyes and mouth somehow an even darker black. And within its depths, visible now as an almost pulsing heart, was a blacker-than-black stone within the stone.
The Shard, she thought with sudden realization. Yes.
The tide of the fire coursing into her body pulled back for a moment, and time seemed to slow around her. Selene closed her eyes and let the tendrils of night pull down inside her like buckets diving for the bottom of a well. She felt the coils of power gather up within herself, deep down in a core of her being that she’d never known. Then, when she could take no more, when she thought that if they grabbed anything more there’d be nothing of her left, she released them back out with a sickening, exhilarating, frightening belly surge of energy.
The air in the Temple of the Vestals unfroze, rushing forward in a roiling storm of smoke and burning embers drawn up from the sacred fire. The force of it threw Selene backward into the woodpile again, and she could hear nothing but a wail of wind like the roar of a vengeful god. Then, a heartbeat later, the throaty storm was moving away and she could hear, in its place, Urbinia’s screams.
Selene was dazed from striking the back of her head on the woodpile, her thoughts scattered, churning from fire to flight, from Urbinia’s screams to the Shard of Heaven whose power she’d somehow tapped.
Move, she reminded herself, as if she stood outside her body. People will come. Get up. Get away. Go.
The Temple of the Vestals was filled with a fog of dust and ash and smoke, vexed to spinning in slow puffs of cloud flashingly lit by the agitated but still-burning fire. Selene rolled over with a cough and saw through tear-filled eyes the statue that she must have let go when the wind burst out from … her? She had done it, hadn’t she?
Pulling the now lifeless rock to herself she slipped it into her shoulder bag as quickly as she could, then stood, crouching, feeling a pain in the back of her head and an exhaustion down to the very marrow of her bones.
No, she thought as she started to move. An exhaustion down to the core of her soul.
The air was clearing before her as she stumbled out of the temple and saw the wave of wind still rushing eastward through the Forum, a moving wall of dirt and debris. How long, she wondered, before it lost its energy?
Closer, at the foot of the stone steps, she saw Tiberius kneeling beside a crumpled Urbinia. The girl’s screams of horror had turned to the half-wails of pain from the ashes in her eyes. Tiberius looked up at Selene, his own eyes trembling with shock and fear and something that looked like grief. There were shouts from around the Forum. Sounds of people moving. His mouth moved in a silent whisper: Go.
Selene thought about going down to him, about trying to see if there was anything she could do to help Urbinia, to assure him that everything was okay, that he’d not betrayed Rome, that there was no Vesta, that there were no gods to be angry … but then the shouts were getting closer and she merely nodded her head and ran as fast as her tired legs could take her, back for the wood and the darkness and her dreams of vengeance.
PART I
THE REACH OF ROME
1
FIRST LIGHT
ALEXANDRIA, 26 BCE
Perched on the leading edge of the barge, his back to the rising sun, Lucius Vorenus watched as the hulking mass of Alexandria rose above the still waters ahead. The last time he’d seen the great city, parts of it were in flames. From the deck of the ship upon which they’d fled that day—a stolen Roman military trireme, far different from this flat-bottomed Egyptian cargo vessel—Vorenus had watched through his tears as gray snakes of smoke grew in size and number, slithering lazily into the bright blue sky above the tiled roofs and great white blocks of Alexandria’s buildings, which were fading to the horizon. He remembered how there had been no sound of it, and upon the water he had only been able to smell the sea. Seen from afar those tendrils of destruction could almost have seemed beautiful. But Vorenus knew better. He was a veteran of enough campaigns, a participant in enough slaughter, to know the kind of death and destruction that the conquering Romans had brought that day. He knew what fed the hungry fires.
Yet the city he returned to this morning—that very city—showed no scars of its conquest. The only fire he could see was the one that was shining brightly in the sky, hanging above the rooftops like a beckoning star of morning or a signal upon a towering summit: the beacon of the Great Lighthouse that burned day and night above Alexandria’s harbor on the other side of the city. There were no riotous fires of tumult and death. The buildings, which were growing more dense along the canal, seemed to be untouched by war and conflict. The five years that had passed had been more than enough for the Romans to rebuild whatever they had destroyed.
Except for the lives, of course.
Those scars took far longer to heal.
Monuments might outlast the memories of the dead, but among the living there were few things so real as the recollection of loss. Despite all his experience, Vorenus didn’t think he really understood that until he’d watched the rising columns of smoke that morning.
The morning Titus Pullo had died.
“Excuse me, sir,” said a voice behind him.
Vorenus turned, saw Petosiris, the barge captain he’d hired to take himself and Khenti along the long canal between Schedia on the Nile to Alexandria. Rarely did Vorenus find himself in the company of men who made him feel tall—he was of average height and build for a Roman, quite unlike his friend Titus Pullo, who’d been a towering giant of a man who filled door frames—but the stocky captain made him feel just that: Petosiris was at least a full hand shorter than him. The Egyptian was stout, though, compact in a way that gave Vorenus no doubt that a life working on the decks and the docks had left him a good man in a fight. And that made him just the sort of company Vorenus liked to keep—especially when he was returning to Alexandria as a wanted man. “Yes, Captain?”
“We will be in the city soon.” Petosiris didn’t frown. He didn’t smile. His demeanor was businesslike, which was another of the things Vorenus liked about him. Combined with his native Egyptian skin—darkened further from a life spent under the high, hot sun—the captain’s quiet professionalism meant that he could disappear in a crowd, and disappearing was precisely what Vorenus might need. Romans, after all, did not forget. “You weren’t specific about where the two of you would like to be let off the ship,” the captain said.
“No, I was not,” Vorenus agreed. “You’ll be going to the granary docks?” Aside from himself, the Egyptian swordsman Khenti, and a wiry young lad who worked as the captain’s deckhand, the only thing the flat-topped barge carried on this route was grain: a load of barley making its way from the rich farmlands of the great river to the great city on the sea.