Agrippa paused, breathing heavily.

“I am done,” he said. “Do what you will with me, but do something!”

“Get out of my sight,” Augustus screamed. “I am governing Rome! You have no idea what I do!”

“With pleasure. I have a city to defend.” Agrippa smacked his hand against the theriac, and the bottle sprayed across the room. “If you care anything for that city, I suggest you stop drinking this poison. It makes you blind.”

He slammed the door as he left.

Augustus’s heart raced, his brain straining at the base of his skull. A blazing light began to flash and rotate before him, like a sun newborn in the confines of his room. His eyes rolled backward, and the lioness approached him in the crimson darkness, her golden eyes slitted, her breasts bared, and her fingers placed on a bowstring. She looked at him with such knowing. Such understanding. She was the only one who knew what he had been through.

He should give himself to her, that was it. He should give Rome to her —

He heard himself shout, and his eyes flew open. He dunked his head in a basin of cool water, raising his face from the liquid only when it felt that he might drown. In the polished glass above the basin, he saw his pallor, and a thin thread of blood trickling from his nose onto his lips.

He was losing himself.

Augustus sat down carefully, his legs shaking. Was Agrippa right? And the Psylli? He’d said the same thing.

He stood and went to the sword that hung above his mantel. He took it from the wall and swung it experimentally. It had been years since he’d fought. He was not sure he remembered how to do it. He looked at the pool of theriac on the floor. Had he hallucinated what he saw in Chrysate’s chamber?

He looked at his bloodied slippers. No. He had not.

Agrippa was wrong about the theriac, a simple medicine, but still, he’d become too used to its effects. He needed all his strength now, all his intellect. He would significantly lessen his dose, wean himself from it.

He swung the sword again, his arms shaking. He buckled on his armor. It was heavy and clammy against his skin.

Augustus peered out the window, squinting in the sunlight. Where would he go? Who would go with him?

10

A ferocious howling began, the sound of thousands of dogs left out in a freezing wind or of wolves high in the hills, making their way into a city full of children. All around, there were ghostly sounds of snapping jaws and crunching bones. The wandering dead covered their ears and fled from the region.

Hades was an echoing vault, and each sound was magnified, bouncing over and across the river and back to Cleopatra and Antony.

“Where are we?” Cleopatra asked.

“Hecate is near,” Antony said. “Those are her hounds.”

Cleopatra turned her head slowly in the direction of the noise and saw a sight that chilled her. A tremendous form, her skin veined with the darkness of a stormy sea, lay on her side nearly covered with brambles and vines, a few hundred lengths away from them. A thick chain was wrapped about her ankle. As Cleopatra looked, the goddess’s eyes opened slightly, a flickering. All around her, ghostly dogs leapt and snapped their jaws.