“Where is she?” Usem asked the wind, and a wisp of air fluttered past him.

The Psylli’s face shifted as he walked down the corridor, the arrows of Hercules in his arms. He would not wait much longer, but for his wife, he would stay his hand.

18

Cleopatra waited for Sekhmet’s arrow. She’d seen it crossing the sky hours before, arcing downward into a mountain village and eventually returning to the heavens. She’d draped herself in her cloak and hidden herself in the mouth of a cave in the area known as Cumæ. The sun still burned her skin slightly as she gazed out over the landscape. She did not care.

Her task would be accomplished tonight.

She sheltered in the ancient lair of the Sibyl of Cumæ, who had once called out prophecies to loyal citizens, her voice echoing from the crater walls. She’d asked for an extended life but had forgotten to ask for eternal youth, and as a thousand years passed, as many years as the grains of sand she’d foolishly demanded equal her days, she’d grown smaller and smaller, older and older, until all that was left of her was a voice, and a body so tiny that it had to be kept inside a bottle to avoid being lost. At last, even those things had gone. She was long absent from here now.

Cleopatra had listened for her when she arrived and heard nothing, only the whispers of bats roosting in the dark cave corners.

She closed her eyes and felt the Slaughterer journeying. She felt Sekhmet, her back stretched against the sky, catlike, taking the light of the sun as succor while she awaited sacrifices by Cleopatra and by her arrow.

Cleopatra had sacrificed more to her on the journey here. A shepherd calling to his sheep, his blood tasting of an old grudge against a scholarly brother. A prostitute painting her face for evening, her blood tasting of the time she fell down a flight of stairs and was picked up and bandaged by a man who turned out not to love her. A slave drawing water for an evening meal, his blood tasting of a spice market, of a wooden cage shared with a dying friend. A fisherman reeling in his nets, his blood tasting of a mistress in another port, mother to several bastard children. An old widowed man left outdoors to see the stars, who looked up at Cleopatra with dazzled eyes, smiling in the face of his death. He had no secrets left.

Each one of her killings weighed on her.

She’d never thought of these things when she was in power, when she was mortal. Thousands had died in battle, acting on her orders or killed by her soldiers. She’d ordered killings of the families of traitors, of opponents. She had been a queen, and as queen she had done what she thought necessary, regardless of the human cost.

She’d never thought about where their souls went.