Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [118]
“You are a servant to Cleopatra,” Agrippa said, and Nicolaus shook his head.
“No longer.”
“You smuggled her into the city. Do you know how to kill her?”
Nicolaus was startled.
“Is she escaped? Where is she? What has she done?”
“She is still caged, or so the priestess swears,” said Agrippa. “But I have looked into her eyes. I know what she is capable of.”
“I have only an idea of what to do,” Nicolaus said. “And that idea is a myth, not a certainty.”
From behind Agrippa stepped Auðr. Nicolaus backed farther into the corner of his cell, convinced that she was a death bringer. He’d seen her working in the arena, her hands spinning, the light of her power surrounding her. His legs had grown spindly, and he doubted he could run when his cell door opened, but he planned to try.
She peered through the bars at Nicolaus.
Agrippa watched her fingers tracing complicated patterns in the air, winding them about that wooden spindle. He opened the door of Nicolaus’s cell for her to enter.
Somehow, Nicolaus found that he could not move. Her eyes were strangely hypnotic. He felt himself tilting, and she put the flat of her palm against his forehead. Her brow furrowed, and she cocked her head as though listening.
His mind sped unwillingly through the events of his life, from his childhood to the present, dwelling on Alexandria. He felt it happening but could not control it. He watched as he paged through scrolls, filling in gaps in the text with his own inventions. He watched as he taught the summoning spell to Cleopatra and as he discovered her in the hold of the ship, the child in her hands, the dead slaves at her feet. At last, she came to his revelation. The Hydra.
He lurched backward, jerking himself away from her touch, but she’d seen enough to condemn him or save him. He did not know which she planned.
She nodded to Agrippa, and the man took the scholar roughly by the shoulder and steered him from the cell, up endless passages and finally into the light of afternoon.
“You will tell us what you know, myth or not,” Agrippa said. “You will be of use to Rome.”
“There is a temple of Apollo, located at Krimissa,” Nicolaus stammered. “There we may find what we need to defeat an immortal.”
“May?” asked Agrippa.
“We will,” Nicolaus corrected. “Or so the legends say. What we need will be guarded, but it is there.”
Auðr nodded, satisfied. This was her doing, or some of it. Something to destroy Sekhmet, something to wound her and make her retreat back to Egypt, and beyond. Back into the vault of the sky. She had not known what the historian knew, and now that she did, she directed all her strength to accomplishing it. If there was a weapon, it would be found. The fates of Agrippa and Nicolaus wrapped around her distaff, and she directed them to Krimissa.
9
Usem did not bother to ask for admission to Augustus’s chambers. The wind had returned to him for the first time in days, bringing an ice storm to his chamber, and news that the plague had traveled still farther, that Sekhmet gloried at the edge of the sky, and now his mind was filled with his own responsibilities. He threw open Augustus’s door and found the emperor dozing in his chair, clearly drunk. Augustus sat up, startled but not on guard, and Usem snorted with disgust. The man was no warrior. He was scarcely a man. Even as Usem looked at him, Augustus drank another draft of his potion, the theriac. The smell of the potion put the Psylli off. It smelled like witchcraft, like Chrysate’s influence.
“There is a plague,” Usem said. “It has broken out in the villages surrounding Rome, from one end of the country to the other, even to Sicily.”
“I have no help for plague,” Augustus scoffed. “You are the sorcerer, not I, and to cure a plague requires magic. It must run its course and kill whom it will.