“You should not have used my name,” Virgil said. “Augustus does not know I am in Rome. Someone else summoned me here, but the emperor wrote me in Campania, begging me to come to his bedside as a storyteller. He is having difficulty sleeping.”

“As well he should,” said Nicolaus. “A monster sleeps in his house.”

“I heard that,” said Virgil. “The emperor’s servants leak secrets. A miracle, is it not? They captured a shape-shifting creature. A wonder.”

“It is not a wonder,” Nicolaus said. “It is horrifying. You are fortunate that you have not seen what I have seen. You must get me out of this prison. I have to speak to Augustus.”

Virgil looked at Nicolaus for a moment, measuring him. “I’ve brought you writing materials, at considerable risk to myself.”

Nicolaus reached out to grasp the scroll, but Virgil held it back.

“I have a price.”

“I have no money,” Nicolaus said, frustrated. “Perhaps you misunderstand my position here.”

“There is a request for a forgery, from high up in Rome, and if I value my life, I cannot do it.”

“Why should I be capable of something you are not?”

“You are dead already,” Virgil said simply.

The Sibylline Books, Virgil explained, were a complicated fiction: The original texts, purchased by Tarquinius from the Cumaean Sibyl, had been destroyed in a fire at the Temple of Jupiter fifty years before, and since then, Rome had searched the world to replace them with copies. Naturally, it had quickly become clear that the copies might be edited to reflect favorable omens for Rome. The Sibylline prophecies were now largely, albeit secretly, the work of hired scholars pretending to be longdead prophetic priestesses. They were consulted whenever Rome’s rulers wished to justify something with an ancient prophecy. This forgery, however, was a delicate assignment.

“A group of senators desire a doomsday prophecy relating to the rise of Cleopatra and the fall of Augustus’s Rome. They wish to sway the public’s opinion of Augustus. It seems that the facts support them,” said Virgil.

“To what end?”

“The story you will write might aid them in restoring the republic. It might create a revolution against Augustus. It might merely make for entertaining reading. I cannot tell the future, Nicolaus, but a story like this is difficult to resist, even for a man like me. Sometimes, I miss the days when I wrote what I pleased.”

“You do not miss those days much,” Nicolaus said, snorting. It felt as though they were scholars debating in a courtyard, and for a moment, Nicolaus forgot that he was behind bars in a dungeon and that Virgil stood at liberty, the richest poet in Rome.

“True,” said Virgil, and smiled. “I will visit Augustus when I am finished here. I have become the emperor’s lullaby singer, but he pays me in Egyptian gold.”

“What am I to write?” Nicolaus asked.

“And you were once such a promising scholar,” Virgil said. “Can you not guess? The texts are kept under key in the Temple of Apollo, and everyone claims they’re incorrupt, but every leader has commissioned his own version of the prophecies, dependent on what he needed the world to believe. The Sibylline prophecies are a creation of convenience and full of lies. You, on the other hand, will write the truth. The emperor has employed some sort of witch to steal the memories of those who witnessed the chaos in the Circus Maximus, and the senators fear that the stories will not travel as easily as they need them to.”