He lurched backward, jerking himself away from her touch, but she’d seen enough to condemn him or save him. He did not know which she planned.

She nodded to Agrippa, and the man took the scholar roughly by the shoulder and steered him from the cell, up endless passages and finally into the light of afternoon.

“You will tell us what you know, myth or not,” Agrippa said. “You will be of use to Rome.”

“There is a temple of Apollo, located at Krimissa,” Nicolaus stammered. “There we may find what we need to defeat an immortal.”

“May?” asked Agrippa.

“We will,” Nicolaus corrected. “Or so the legends say. What we need will be guarded, but it is there.”

Auðr nodded, satisfied. This was her doing, or some of it. Something to destroy Sekhmet, something to wound her and make her retreat back to Egypt, and beyond. Back into the vault of the sky. She had not known what the historian knew, and now that she did, she directed all her strength to accomplishing it. If there was a weapon, it would be found. The fates of Agrippa and Nicolaus wrapped around her distaff, and she directed them to Krimissa.

9

Usem did not bother to ask for admission to Augustus’s chambers. The wind had returned to him for the first time in days, bringing an ice storm to his chamber, and news that the plague had traveled still farther, that Sekhmet gloried at the edge of the sky, and now his mind was filled with his own responsibilities. He threw open Augustus’s door and found the emperor dozing in his chair, clearly drunk. Augustus sat up, startled but not on guard, and Usem snorted with disgust. The man was no warrior. He was scarcely a man. Even as Usem looked at him, Augustus drank another draft of his potion, the theriac. The smell of the potion put the Psylli off. It smelled like witchcraft, like Chrysate’s influence.

“There is a plague,” Usem said. “It has broken out in the villages surrounding Rome, from one end of the country to the other, even to Sicily.”

“I have no help for plague,” Augustus scoffed. “You are the sorcerer, not I, and to cure a plague requires magic. It must run its course and kill whom it will. The countryside has always been vulnerable.”

“The plague is traveling,” said Usem. “It is not merely a summer sickness but something of the spirit world.”

Augustus suddenly looked more alert. “Cleopatra?”

“Cleopatra may be captured, but the Old One is not. My wife has seen the goddess, and she has seen the plague traveling around the world at Sekhmet’s pleasure. You might see it yourself if you went outdoors and looked at the sky. Have you not seen the flashes of light at the edge of the world? The stars streaking across the heavens? Surely, even the Romans do not think such things meaningless. I ask leave to go, assemble my people, and fight. The queen should have been destroyed when we captured her. Now it will be harder. I thought Rome shared my goals, but perhaps you do not. You keep the queen imprisoned, but the goddess she serves is more dangerous than she. What do you plan to do with her?”