Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [121]
He looked at his bloodied slippers. No. He had not.
Agrippa was wrong about the theriac, a simple medicine, but still, he’d become too used to its effects. He needed all his strength now, all his intellect. He would significantly lessen his dose, wean himself from it.
He swung the sword again, his arms shaking. He buckled on his armor. It was heavy and clammy against his skin.
Augustus peered out the window, squinting in the sunlight. Where would he go? Who would go with him?
10
A ferocious howling began, the sound of thousands of dogs left out in a freezing wind or of wolves high in the hills, making their way into a city full of children. All around, there were ghostly sounds of snapping jaws and crunching bones. The wandering dead covered their ears and fled from the region.
Hades was an echoing vault, and each sound was magnified, bouncing over and across the river and back to Cleopatra and Antony.
“Where are we?” Cleopatra asked.
“Hecate is near,” Antony said. “Those are her hounds.”
Cleopatra turned her head slowly in the direction of the noise and saw a sight that chilled her. A tremendous form, her skin veined with the darkness of a stormy sea, lay on her side nearly covered with brambles and vines, a few hundred lengths away from them. A thick chain was wrapped about her ankle. As Cleopatra looked, the goddess’s eyes opened slightly, a flickering. All around her, ghostly dogs leapt and snapped their jaws.
Cleopatra felt repulsed, but also something else.
“Who jails her?”
“The gods,” Antony said. “She interfered.”
“I was a queen, too,” a soft voice said, the sound echoing around them, rattling and hungry. “Do not be so proud.”
“Don’t look at her,” Antony told her. Cleopatra could not help herself.
She shuddered, but Antony strode on past the apparition, Cleopatra’s hand in his.
“The witch who imprisoned me serves that goddess. She sought to use you and Sekhmet to bring Hecate up from the Underworld,” Antony said. “To release her and upturn Hades.”
“How would she do that?”
“She would sacrifice you,” Antony said. “The longer we stay here, the more likely it is she will get her way. She still has your body. It is only luck that she does not know how to kill you.”
“No one knows how to kill me,” Cleopatra said. “I do not. Do you?”
“I don’t want to kill you,” Antony said. “I am the only one who feels that way.”
At last, before them, crouching in the darkness at the mouth of a cave, was an enormous black dog with three heads, its throat wreathed with a tangle of hooded serpents.
The dog’s eyes glowed red, and its fur shone with a dark and oily iridescence. Each of its teeth was as long as a ritual dagger, and it tossed its heads, rotating each one to look upon Cleopatra. The creature was as tall as an elephant, and its tremendous body filled the entrance to the cavern. It snorted and slavered, and its fur rippled with muscle and sharp bones. Its eyes were as bright as flames.
Cleopatra felt her body flexing, twisting, and preparing itself for battle.
“She does not live,” Antony informed Cerberus. “And we will pass. You will clear the way for us.”
Growling, the dog inhaled the air about Cleopatra’s face.
Cleopatra felt her own jaws stretching into a hiss, whether serpent or feline, she was uncertain. Antony looked at her, clearly startled.
She gazed into the eyes of the snakes twined about the dog’s throat and spoke with them in a language she did not know. She felt the empty chamber where her heart had been, filling with a rippling endlesstongued chant.
A version of the song that had flung her own body into the dust at the arena poured from her mouth. She was mistress of this new language, as easily as she’d always understood foreign tongues. The words were hers now.
“Give me your everything,” the song went. “You belong to me. We are one thing, and we have the same longings. We are one thing, and we have the same desires. Sing with