Though Cleopatra was imprisoned, he suspected she would not be for long. Allegiances would shift. He heard she’d met with Octavian, and perhaps seduced him. The people of the city were convinced that soon she’d be ruling again, this time with more power than before, new mistress to the Roman emperor. Their queen was resourceful in such matters.

There were things about Cleopatra that only Nicolaus knew, however, and they disturbed his sleep.

He’d felt it the moment she summoned Sekhmet. In the air over Cleopatra and Antony’s mausoleum, a flock of birds fell out of the sky. He knelt in the courtyard of the Museion, and picked up one of them. Its feathers were mysteriously singed, as though it had flown in the path of a meteor. Something had gone wrong with the spell.

His spell. Nicolaus took off at a run for the mausoleum and Cleopatra, but he was too late.

When he arrived, it was only to witness the queen of Egypt, her wrists tied behind her, being lowered out of the upstairs window by Octavian’s centurions. Her hands, face, and gown were covered in blood, and her eyes were black and bottomless with suffering. Nicolaus quickly turned away so she would not see him.

He’d be blamed, whether the spell had failed or succeeded.

It did not appear that it had succeeded.

Later, though, Nicolaus bribed a physician to view the body of the legionary Cleopatra had killed. In the underground chamber in the Museion, he stood paralyzed with horror, looking down upon the raw wound where the corpse’s heart should have been. The queen had been in possession of a weapon of some kind, the doctors concluded. An exceedingly sharp though strangely rough-edged knife.

Nicolaus feared that he knew better.

He’d never understood why he, lowly tutor to the queen’s children, had been the one chosen to seek and then to translate the summoning spell, but he’d done it eagerly, nurturing some small thoughts of finding a deeper favor with Cleopatra, even as the city seemed poised to fall.

Before all this had happened, he’d been convinced that she would rise again, regain power over Egypt and perhaps other territories as well, and that when she did, he would rise with her. The queen’s historian. The queen’s lover, yes, say it, was what he most desired, and the summoning had been too tempting a project to resist. The opportunity to be near her, to meet with her in secret. He’d loved paging through the motheaten and worm-bitten records, catching the scents of ancient herbs, running his fingers across the brilliant colors of the hieroglyphs. At last, a crackling scroll of papyrus bound in a red cord. As he spread it out to view, parts of it disintegrated in his hands.

The scroll depicted a summoning, a pharaoh kneeling over an altar, making cuts in his hands. The goddess herself was unmistakable, with her lioness head and the sun disc balanced over it, with her voluptuous female body. Nicolaus made a deep if somewhat rushed study into the elements of the spell, the snake skins and venoms, the honey, the herbs, the pigments and proper designs. The most important thing was, of course, the blood sacrifice. He made some guesses as to what else the spell might contain, some conclusions based on instinct, thinking of it as an academic exercise.