Immortals had been killed before, he knew it, though their deaths were portrayed only in myth. Hercules had used his sword to chop off forty-nine of the heads of his enemy, the Hydra, and then cauterized the wounds with fire to keep them from renewing. He’d buried the furiously immortal head deep below the ground on the road to Lerna, and placed a boulder over the spot. Poison seeped from it and into the darkness, but the Hydra lived now only in Hades. It had not come back to the surface. Thus far.

The thought of the Hydra spurred some memory deep within the historian’s mind. He pressed his hands to his temples, searching for the connection. Some fragment read in Virgil’s library, something in the tasks of Hercules. Deaths of immortals. The Hydra’s venom.

Nicolaus looked down at his task and discovered that he had heedlessly signed the prophecy he’d been writing with his own name. He swore, dropping it on the floor. He would have to begin again.

He paused, still thinking, and at last, the idea he’d been searching for came swimming into the light of his consciousness.

He knew how to defeat the queen. Immortal to immortal. Chaos to chaos. There was a way.

5

The queen lives” went the refrain whispered in the streets of Rome.

“Cleopatra has returned from the dead to kill the emperor.”

The scrolls said as much. A newly published set of oracular texts informed the public that the fall of Rome was imminent, that Despoina had risen from her imprisonment, and that her anger at Augustus would destroy everything in the world.

A centurion read from the text, sitting beside a campfire on the shores of the Black Sea. “And thou shalt be no more a widow,” he said, and one of his young legionaries laughed.

“They only mean Cleopatra was a whore who went to our leader’s bed after her husband killed himself,” he said. “Trying to buy freedom for Egypt. Augustus likes a conquered woman, too, just like Caesar did before him. I was in Alexandria. I guarded the queen in her private chambers.”

“How did you guard her?” another legionary snorted. “From your knees?”

“She was the one kneeling,” the first legionary boasted.

The centurion looked sharply at them.

“These are ancient prophecies, god-given. Have some respect. Listen. ‘But thy soul shalt cohabit with a man-eating lion, terrible, a furious warrior. And then shalt thou be happy, and among all men known; for thou shalt leave possessed of shameless soul.’”

“What do you make of that?” another legionary asked, a feeling of unease creeping through his belly.

“Cleopatra is not a mortal woman, if she ever was. Some say she was a witch and that was how she got Mark Antony to do her bidding.”

The company made a sign against witchcraft. Antony had been their idol, and then he had betrayed them. It would be a comfort if that had not been his fault. It would be a comfort if, in fact, Augustus, who was known to be no warrior, who had fled several battlefields, turned out to be a liar. Stranger things had happened in the history of Rome.