Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [153]
Chrysate pushed herself back to her feet, dragging her prisoners with her. The small one kicked at her legs, and she shook him until he was limp. The larger flung himself at her, and she hit him in the brow with the hilt of her stolen sword. Easier now. She laid them, almost gently, on the grass. No one was watching her. Everyone fought, insensible to what was about to happen.
Across the battlefield, she could see the queen, hear her battle cries, and watch the legions falling before her strange army of beasts. She was wreaking havoc, and Sekhmet was within her, all around her. She battled the Psylli, and all her attention was on him.
Chrysate whispered, and the sky shifted at her urging. A star came closer to light her work, sending a glow down upon the witch of Thessaly and her charges.
The moon’s pale surface turned red as Chrysate laced her spell about the moon’s surface and drew it down from its orbit until it hung just above her hilltop. She’d placed herself purposefully. There was a price, of course, but she had planned for this. For all of this.
Alexander Helios and Ptolemy Philadelphus, sons of Egypt. Royal children. The girl would have been more powerful, but the boys would do.
Were they unwilling sacrifices? It no longer mattered. They were drugged, and Chrysate, priestess of Hecate, psuchagoĝoi of Thessaly, supplemented her diminished strength with the borrowed power of the sky. The waters at the bottom of the crater opened for her, and the bitter lake of hatred shone in the moonlight.
She drew her dagger from her belt and slit the younger child’s throat, the skin soft and yielding. The child’s eyes widened as she cut him, but he did not protest. The drug had him quieted, and he was frozen, scarcely capable of movement. She laid Ptolemy back on the bank for the moon to take as her fee.
Chrysate held Alexander out over the waters, and slit his throat—dull-eyed, she thought, like a goat, and dull-spirited, no match for his royal title—letting his blood pour down into the crater. It splashed in the dark liquid, Hecate’s gift.
“I summon you,” she shouted, exultant. “Come to me!”
The world froze in a moment as Hades opened, frost riming the armor of the Romans.
From the darkness, snow began to fall.
Pale shapes surged up through the boundary. There was a wailing deep in the lake. Fingers breached the surface of the freezing water, and then thousands of shades, hundreds of thousands of shades, crying for the royal blood that had been spilled in their sacrifice. Suicides and heroes, warriors and women, infants and ancients, they came surging upward into the cruel red light of the moon, and behind them, the Underworld emptied.
“Hecate! Hear me!” Chrysate cried. “Take them, take these fighters, take these wounded, take these dying and these dead! I dedicate their sacrifice to you! Feast on them and join me!”
The earth shook, and from beneath the hillside, the hounds of Hecate began to howl. Chrysate could hear the great Cerberus growling with fury.
The shades drank of life, their mouths wide-open. The blood poured from the child into the dead.
Chrysate was listening to one more sound below all of them, the rattling of a tremendous chain, a song, twisting and ecstatic, the song of a goddess rising from her banishment, when the shade of Antony rose from the crevasse, his body whipping with anguish, moving faster than light.
The witch laughed as he emerged. He was too late.
Antony screamed, his wails echoing through Hades and across the upper world. He held his children in his dark arms, but the younger was gone already. The elder was dying. Antony cursed, a dead man holding his dead children.
Cleopatra, battling with Usem and his wife, heard Antony’s screams, gathered her haunches beneath her and leapt over the Roman army, across the impossible distance at Chrysate,