Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [138]
Worshipping Sekhmet. She could become the ruler of everything—
Cleopatra shook her head frantically, trying to clear it of the visions.
What had happened? How had she come to be here? Her body had been dragged suddenly up from Hades and Persephone’s throne room, and still she did not know who’d opened the box that had contained her. She’d woken in the air, returned to her body, sensing her daughter in the house somewhere, and witches, but who had released her? In the chaos, she’d been unable to tell what was happening. The smell of blood was everywhere, but she ran from it. No time.
Her bargain weighed on her, and it was her first focus. She sought the Slaughterer first. The Slaughterer, she understood. She and Sekhmet’s child had things in common. The priestess of Thessaly was a different sort of creature.
The wound her dreaming self had sustained in the Underworld burned her, though it was not visible here. Her body was perfect, unscarred, unbroken, no matter the pain she felt. The silver box she clutched in her fingers burned her, too, but it was a distraction from her arm. It was also a distraction from the pain in the place her heart had been. She’d done the right thing. She knew she had, but Antony was gone.
She shook off the pain and ran on. She had to accomplish the task or she would fail Antony, fail her children, fail everyone she loved.
The voice of the goddess was instantly back in her head. She ignored it as she ran, trying to keep it from understanding her purpose.
Kill, Sekhmet told her.
The Slaughterer had served the goddess well in the queen’s absence, Cleopatra could feel. It had sacrificed so many that Sekhmet felt nearly blissful. Nearly happy.
Blood ran through the streets of villages. Corpses rotted. Now Plague traveled, hungering always, and Cleopatra could feel its work as it moved through the country, through the world, from island to island, from mountain to mountain.
The temples, Sekhmet directed the queen.
Cleopatra considered. Surely, Plague was traveling with the same directions.
Cleopatra imagined she could see Ra’s boat traveling through the caverns of the Duat. Imagined she could see the Island of Fire. Imagined she could see Ra himself, the brilliance of his skin, the light of his face, the place on his forehead where Sekhmet had once lived.
She felt Sekhmet, her strength and her weaknesses. It took a great deal of bloodshed to release the Slaughterers. Six Arrows still waited in her quiver: Famine, Earthquake, Flood, Drought, Madness, and Violence. They hummed their deathly songs, desiring, wanting, while the seventh traveled the earth.
Cleopatra killed another man near the imperial residence. The taste of the blood flowed through the goddess, and the queen felt the blood placate her mistress.
Cleopatra killed others, several more in quick succession, and then she ran faster through the city, trying to avoid the populated areas, the smell of people, the hunger that would destroy her resistance. She was traveling nearly as quickly as Sekhmet herself, and the goddess roared, her voice echoing through the heavens as thunder, jolting Romans from their sleep and making them shake in their beds.
“What was that?” they asked one another.
None of them had an answer. They sat quietly in their beds, wide-eyed in the darkness, waiting, without knowing that they were waiting, for the queen to come for them.
Cleopatra knew that she would not kill them, but Sekhmet did not.
Sekhmet was convinced that her slave hungered for the citizens of Rome. She did not know that Cleopatra had set herself on killing one of Sekhmet’s children.
Cleopatra lifted her chin and scented the air, the pungent, bloody odor of the killing arrow. The Slaughterer. She looked up, her throat vibrating like that of a cat stalking a bird.
High above her, she could see what seemed to be a tremendous star crossing the heavens, and she followed it, bounding over the land, out of the city and into the countryside.