Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [154]
There was a shudder across the battlefield as Chrysate raised her hands into the air and pushed her long nails into the moon, holding it tightly. She hurled it across the crater, the crescent’s points serving as spears. It spun in the air, bright, lighting the world, but Cleopatra raised her hand, heaved the moon aside and kept coming.
Cleopatra grew larger as she charged, swollen with chaos, swollen with war. Her body was lioness, and her arms were serpent. Her face was her own.
Screaming, she bared her teeth to sink them into Chrysate.
The moon careened across the battlefield, slaying those it touched, igniting the grass. The shades surged across the battlefield, an army of teeth and claws, their mouths open, and all the blood in the world not enough for them.
The lake was filled with souls, and beneath them, something else began to surge upward, a darkness streaming with all the waters of Lethe.
The moon, flying through the sky and bouncing against the crater walls, was one moment blinding and the next blackness, and in the crater, tremendous fingers began to be visible, dark and drowned hair streaming in the waters, the skin blue with cold, the eyes deeper than night, reflecting their own moons and stars.
“Hecate,” Chrysate cried, rapturous. “HECATE!”
And then the daughter of the Western Wind, pushed too far by the sacrifice of still more children, by the rising of Hecate from beneath the earth, switched from fighting against Cleopatra to fighting against Chrysate.
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The battle seemed to slow about Cleopatra as she spun, her arms flying, her hair twisting in a wind that had come from nowhere. Where was the Psylli? Augustus looked frantically around. The wind began to blow in the face of Augustus’s forces, and dust blew up into their eyes.
Cleopatra hurled herself onto Chrysate as the beasts of the whirlwind surrounded her.
Standing beside Augustus, Auðr lost her hold on the strands of fate that kept the queen and the goddess apart, and they snapped back together again. She sagged, her body conquered by the Fates. What would be would be. She could not control it all. What happened to Sekhmet would happen to Cleopatra. What happened to Cleopatra would happen to the world.
The witch’s body was everywhere, clawed and scaled, writhing and snarling, and Cleopatra wrestled her over the void that led to Hades. The witch bit at the queen, twisting in her grasp.
Usem shouted directions to the wind, but the wind had ceased to listen to him. The beasts came at the witch of Thessaly, and Cleopatra came at her as well, and Augustus, screaming in the storm, threw his fists into the air and came at his enemies from still another direction.
In his hands, the emperor bore the shining bow of Hercules, strung with a shining arrow.
He saw the thing rising in the crater. He knew, as he had known nothing before, that it could not be allowed to rise.
Behind Chrysate, Mark Antony got to his feet. He was strong now, with the blood that had been spilled and the spells that had been cast. His fingers could grasp and his feet could touch the ground. Rage propelled him toward the witch, and she saw him, incandescent with it.
Chrysate did not care. He could not hurt her. Her spells were working. She could feel Hecate coming from beneath the earth, filled with the sacrifices made in her name. She stood her ground, and the ghosts swarmed about her feet, killing the dying and drinking of the dead.
Cleopatra tore at Chrysate’s throat, but it made no difference. She drank of darkness, endless darkness, and the witch was renewed. Her laughter flowed into the queen, drunken and rapturous, as the sky filled with monsters, and the world shook. Cleopatra dug her fingers into the witch’s heart but felt nothing but night. On the ground, her children stared up at nothing. In the air above them, two bewildered ghosts, wisps of pain, fluttered.
Cleopatra screamed with agony and rage, and it did no good.
Augustus aimed the bow, first into the crater, then at Chrysate. Then at Cleopatra. Which was