Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [109]
It was a beautiful day.
2
In her bed in the imperial residence, Auðr sat up with a choking gasp, her heart racing. The fates were suddenly shifting more quickly than she could spin them. She felt the Old One’s thread divide, and another strand arc away from it. Where that strand went, lives ended.
The tear in the tapestry of the fates, once centered in Rome, had begun to spread throughout the world.
Frantic, Auðr focused herself to search for Cleopatra’s fate in the tangle. The queen had been tied to Sekhmet. Had she escaped from the box she was caged in? Was this how the goddess drew new strength? The seiðkona’s fingers twisted in the air, plucking at strands, but she could find nothing. Where Cleopatra’s fate had been, an endless thread too strong to cut, too entwined with the fates of the world to remove, there was now an absence.
The queen was gone.
Auðr felt Cleopatra’s thread descend into the world of the dead, and disappear there.
For the first time, she wondered if Sekhmet and the queen could truly still be their own beings. Though Auðr had not been able to separate their fates, for the moment Cleopatra was free. What she did now might shift her destiny.
The future was open, and Auðr watched, her eyes wide in the darkness, as the Slaughterer flew through the world, destroying everything in its path. She watched as Sekhmet’s fate grew stronger.
After a moment, she focused herself on what she should have been thinking of from the beginning. A weapon to destroy an immortal. She did not possess such a thing. Even at the height of her strength, Sekhmet would have been beyond her, and she knew it now.
Others were working on the same thing, she realized. She felt in the dark for their fates and found them, one strong and warlike, the general Marcus Agrippa, and the other a historian, fearful and confused. She began to twine them together, quietly, slowly.
Cleopatra was free of Sekhmet for now, and that meant that the goddess had a weakness. Auðr sought to find it.
The Psylli sat on the roof of the imperial residence, looking up at the sky and listening to the wind. Her predictions had come true, and now she returned, furious, to tell him of the plague that Sekhmet had brought to the land. She blew across the world, and in some places, she swept through empty villages, over forgotten thresholds, through broken windows. She whipped across deserts and over seas and found that the plague had touched everywhere. She flew beside the Slaughterer and watched its rampage, helpless to do anything. Sekhmet’s arrow rode on the wind’s unwilling back, shrilling with pleasure, flinging itself through the clouds and into the world.
“What would you have me do?” Usem asked.
The only way to hurt the Old One is through the queen.
“And how might I wound the queen?”
The wind did not have an answer. The silver box that was Cleopatra’s jail waited inside the residence, but Usem’s dagger and poison had only pained her, not wounded her. He did not know what to do. He sat, sharpening his dagger, his snakes coiling about him.
3
They crossed Acheron in Charon’s ferry, Antony telling the reluctant boatman that the spirit he carried was a gift for Persephone and that her passage was paid. Cleopatra lay silently as wizened fingers passed over her, determining, after some examination, that she was lifeless. Her skin was cold enough to pass for that of a corpse and scarred with silver veins. The boatman threw a ragged blanket over her body.
Antony kept his hands on her, and where he touched her, she lived. She knew she’d left her body behind somehow, trapped in the witch’s hands. She knew that she was traveling in the land of ghosts, an Underworld not her own. Still, she was content.
She was with her love again, and nothing else mattered.
The boat rocked beneath her. A drop of river water splashed onto her wounded skin, and she felt the tears of tens of thousands of mourners sobbing over graves, strewing flowers and libations