The chained man’s liver was plucked out nightly in Hades. Cleopatra knew the story. Immortality sometimes had a steep and awful price.

She had known that already.

After a time, she moved on from the scarred place and back into the night, following behind the Slaughterer.

17

The road back to Rome was long and hard. On the rear of the emperor’s horse, the bundle containing the poisoned arrows was tied, dangerously shifting and jolting, even within its metal case. Augustus feared it, irrationally. It was not as though the arrows could strike him without being fired from a bow. He had seen them only for a moment, when the case had spilled, but the knowledge of what the venom had done to Agrippa scared him.

Poisoned arrows were not the Roman way, or, at least, not a way of honor. There had been tales of poison since the beginning of Rome, however. Augustus knew it as well as anyone. He did not desire to be a poisoner, known in the annals as a man who employed such methods.

Still, the arrows tempted him.

With a poison such as they contained, a man might be the master of all he saw.

The effects of the poison were so great that Agrippa, famously stoic, moaned in his sleeping and waking, his face flushed with suffering. The last of Augustus’s theriac had been given to Agrippa to take away his pain, but once it was gone, the pain dispensed with any hunger. At last, on the third day, Augustus was able to put food into his friend’s mouth, and Agrippa looked at him with clear eyes.

“What happened?” he asked. “Where are we?”

“He is improving,” Augustus said. He hoped this was true.

Augustus was convinced that the world was coming to an end. They’d not seen the fireball again, but he expected they would. It was not the sort of thing that disappeared. It was not the sort of thing that was quickly vanquished. Surely, it was Cleopatra’s doing.

He’d looked back at the temple as they’d ridden away, and seen a priest running down the hillside, his skin smoking. The man had thrown himself off the cliff and into the waters below.

They rode past dying villages. They saw few people on the road, and he could not help but wonder where his citizens were.

Still, he found himself in oddly good cheer.

On the sixth day of their journey back to Rome without theriac, however, conditions quickly changed. Augustus began to wobble in his saddle, his legs feeling too short for the horse, and his mind feeling once again broken and useless.

When at last, under cover of darkness, they arrived in Rome and reached the Palatine, Augustus was scarcely himself. He thirsted for his tonic so gravely that his tongue was swollen in his mouth, and he could not speak. Usem helped him from his horse and half carried him indoors. Agrippa limped behind, carrying the bundle they had risked their lives to obtain.