The Gates of Hell Read online

  Tiberius blinked. She imagined him trying to decide if she was joking. “Why?”

  For weeks she’d rehearsed this exchange in her mind, knowing she couldn’t get what she wanted without his help but knowing, too, that there was no way he would help her. So now, when the moment came, the words flowed easily enough. “You remember the Triumph, don’t you? Octavian’s Triumph after Alexandria?” Of course he did. She remembered him, after all. She remembered how he rode in his stepfather’s chariot, waving happily at the adulating crowds, looking down at the suffering, burlap-clad children of Cleopatra as if they were slaves, not high-born royalty once worshipped as gods. Though they’d never spoken of that day, Selene had always felt his fear that she might remember him from it. She’d felt his guilt and held fast to it, preserving the favor that it would provide even if she didn’t know what that favor might be. When Vergilius revealed the Palladium’s presence in Rome, she’d known the time for using Tiberius’ decent humanity against him had come. “You do remember, don’t you?”

  Her adopted brother seemed to sigh back into even deeper shadows, his shoulders rising or his face falling, she couldn’t tell which. “Yes.”

  “Octavian—Augustus—took something from me that day.”

  “Your kingdom,” Tiberius whispered, the words hardly audible.

  “Yes. My home. My pride. My hope. My family.” She let that last phrase sink in for a moment, knowing how Augustus had taken Tiberius’ own father from him when he’d forced Livia to divorce because he lusted after her. “But that’s not it, Tiberius. He took something else away, too.” Selene shifted her crouch, bringing her shoulder bag around so that she could grip the statue inside. She held it up, though she didn’t expose it.

  “What’s that?”

  “A statue,” Selene said, focusing her eyes on it to help steady her nerves through the lie. “They sell them down in the market and I bought one. It’s of Horus.”

  “Horus?”

  “An Egyptian god, son of Isis and Osiris. My older brother, Caesarion, was thought to be the living Horus.”

  “I … I don’t understand,” Tiberius said. His voice sounded deeply hurt. The guilt all coming back, Selene imagined.

  “This statue is a replica of one that Augustus gave to the Vestals. It’s a statue he took from my home. It belonged to Caesarion, and I want it back. More than anything in the world.”

  “You want to steal it?”

  Selene imagined him picturing the high cliff of the Tarpeian Rock at the other end of the Forum, the promontory from which traitors to Rome were thrown, headfirst, onto the stones below, where they were torn apart by the crowds whether the fall killed them or not. “He stole it,” she said, her voice both stern and hurt. “It’s rightfully mine.” She let a few tears fall, hoping that they would catch the scant moonlight on her cheeks. “It’s all that’s left.”

  Tiberius was silent for a long time. A slight breeze rustled the trees around them, making the tiniest of singing sounds in the branches. Selene took a hand from the still-covered statue to wipe her cheeks. Whatever he said next, she hoped it wasn’t that he wanted to see it.

  “So you want me to help you get into the … gods … the Vestal Temple so you can take back the statue and … what? Replace it with that one?”

  “I … I guess so. No one would ever know,” Selene said, letting her words start to spill out as she fell into the role of the thoughtless girl. It always made men feel more comfortable, more in control. “Roman sculptors have told me that they need only see a thing once to reproduce it perfectly. The Horus statue has often been on display. And it was real simple. I remember it exactly, and no one would be able to tell the difference between the real thing and this fake one. No one but me.”

  Tiberius let out his breath. “This could kill us both,” he said. “It’s sacrilege.”

  “I’m not going to put out the sacred fire,” Selene said. “And I’m not asking you to sleep with one of the Virgins. And no one will know, anyway.”

  “But if someone—”

  “No one will find out. Even if they did, I’d tell them you didn’t know what I was doing.”

  “I don’t know, Selene.”

  The pleading tone in his voice was all Selene needed to hear to know that she’d won, that he’d do it, and she had to fight back a sigh of relief. She’d been prepared, after all, to offer him much more than guilt in return for his compliance, the sort of thing her mother, she was sure, would have tried first. But then, Selene wasn’t her mother. She was better than that. “It’ll be easy,” she said, using her gentlest voice. “I’ve got a plan.”

  * * *

  From the far corner of the House of the Vestals, near the abomination of an arch that Augustus had built to celebrate his triumph over her parents, Selene looked eastward down the Forum, past the round, column-encircled Vestal Temple with the telltale plume of gray smoke rising slowly from its crown, to where Tiberius was approaching through plazas filled more with litter than with people. Where mingling crowds and noise would typically reign, she saw only a handful of citizens shuffling along the paths or talking in small groups. From their shuffling steps or their overloud talk, it appeared that most of them were drunk on the free libations of the night, just as she’d hoped. And not one of them was taking any notice of Tiberius, who was moving slowly but steadily—building up his nerves, she thought—now passing between the stretching length of the House of the Vestals and the Regia, where the high priest of Rome was supposed to live. The latter was empty now, Selene knew, because Lepidus has been exiled by Octavian years earlier—allowed to keep the title, but not the power. A rare act of mercy. Selene wondered if he, too, desired the emperor dead.

  She could see only the back of the temple, but she could hear the movement of only a single Virgin within, muttering arcane prayers and fussing with the sacred fire that marked their goddess’s protection over the city. Selene allowed herself a smile, confident that the five other Virgins, like the rest of the city, were fast asleep after the long day of rousing celebrations. And unless she was wrong, the Virgin left the task of tending the fire this night would be the youngest of them, the one Tiberius would know.

  “Urbinia?” Tiberius called, his voice just loud enough to be heard in the temple. Not so loud, she hoped, that it would wake any Virgins sleeping in their nearby house. “Is that you?”

  There was new movement inside, and Selene rushed quickly from her hiding place to stand in one of the little alcoves between the temple’s rear columns. Though the stone walls were thick, she could hear the individual footsteps inside. “Tiberius?” It was a young girl’s voice: both hopeful and uncertain. Urbinia.

  Selene didn’t take the time to smile now, though she felt the lightness in her heart of fortune’s grace. She moved as quickly as she dared around the southern side of the temple, in the shadows between it and the long House of the Vestals.

  “You’re honored to tend the fire this night,” Tiberius said from the front of the temple. Coming around the side, Selene could see him again, standing five or six paces from the foot of the steps. He looked strikingly natural and confident. He was a better liar than she’d ever given him credit for.

  “Everyone else was, um, celebrating,” Urbinia said.

  Sneaking closer column by column, Selene could see that the young girl—was she nine now?—was standing in the temple doorway. The backlight of the fire inside danced on the drapes of her linen mantle. There were red and white ribbons beneath her gossamer headdress.

  “Well, come down here so I can see you,” Tiberius said.

  Urbinia took a single step down, smiling—it was no secret she’d held childish feelings for her older cousin before she was chosen to become a servant of Vesta—and then she froze and started to look back toward the fire. Selene slipped behind a column foundation only a few paces away and concentrated on slowing her own heartbeat, keeping her breathing smooth and even. “I don’t think I’m supposed to,” the girl said. “
The fire—”

  “Looks strong enough for a minute or two, Urbinia.”

  After a few seconds, Selene heard the little girl give a brief giggle before she began skipping down the steps. Selene took one last breath and then hurried out of the shadows and up the stone staircase like a cat, padding on the balls of her feet. The light of the fire ahead was blinding after so long a time in the darkness, but she kept her watering eyes to the ground, watching each step fall, until she was inside the doorway and could duck out of sight.

  “What?” she heard Urbinia ask. “Is something—?”

  “Oh, nothing,” Tiberius said hurriedly. “I was … I was just thinking what a wonder it is that you get to tend to that fire. My favorite cousin, a Vestal Virgin. But here, let me look at you, all grown up.”

  Selene let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding, then concentrated on letting her eyes adjust to the inside of the temple. The sacred fire of Vesta dominated its single chamber, blazing in a large brass bowl set atop the blunted, fat pillar of a carved stone base at the rear center of the room. The polished marble floor around it reflected back both the light of the fire and the darkness of the thin, climbing column of smoke that forever rose toward the hole at the apex of the domed roof. Around the thick stone walls were inscriptions of dates and names, reliefs of gods and men, and a waist-high circle of marble-wrought cabinetry of extraordinarily beautiful red and black tones, flecked with a gold that matched tiny plaques over its low doors. Inside, she knew, were the most important documents in the Republic. It was here that Julius Caesar had supposedly placed the will that adopted Octavian as his son and heir, cutting out Caesarion, his natural child with Cleopatra. It was here that her father, Mark Antony, had eventually placed his own will, granting everything he had to his children by Cleopatra and expressing his traitorous wish to be buried with her in Alexandria rather than in Rome. The war that had taken away Selene’s family and her home had begun when Octavian had forced the Virgins to hand the will over, an act of terrible sacrilege that was somehow forgiven in the face of the greater betrayal that it exposed. For a moment Selene felt the urge to open all the doors, to turn over the sacred fire and burn it all to cinders and ash, but it would be a small victory. Not the true vengeance she sought.

  Atop the cabinets were some of the greatest treasures of Rome: golden eagles, skulls, consecrated stones, and—she saw it on the other side of the room as her eyes adjusted at last—the Palladium, standing beside the statue of Horus that had been so precious to her family.

  Glancing outside and seeing that Urbinia’s attentions were still thoroughly engaged by Tiberius, Selene padded over to stand before the statues, lifting from her shoulder bag the replica she’d purchased two weeks earlier. The object in her hands was not, as she’d told Tiberius, a replica of the delicately crafted statue of Horus beside her. It was, instead, a roughly cone-shaped lump of rock the deep red-brown color of clay, but with the foggy transparency of quartz. In and around it were laced lines of a darker black that gave it the vague external appearance, she thought, of wet wood. No taller than her forearm, the rock was misshapen by rounded protrusions that—seen through the eyes of imagination—could make the stone seem as if it were the statue of a strong woman, the details of her limbs and the drape of her gown somehow melted away. Where the statue’s eyes and mouth should have been the black veins were bolder, creating the appearance of a face. Holding it up next to the real Palladium, Selene could see that it was, indeed, a nearly perfect match. The Roman sculptors were right to boast.

  Saying an instinctive prayer to a goddess she didn’t believe in, Selene snatched up the Palladium and put it into her bag, placing the replica in its place. She felt a wash of extra heat in the moment it was done, even beyond the roiling warmth of the fire behind her. Nerves, she thought. Must hurry.

  As Selene turned to head back toward the doorway, she heard Tiberius’ voice, too loudly asking a question. And Urbinia, very close beyond the doorway, replying to him. “I’ll just check on it.”

  Selene spun away, looking but knowing that there was no way out of the temple but the way she’d come in, and that there was no place to hide. Hoping that Urbinia would just glance at the fire, Selene dove behind the round stone base of the sacred flame just as the Virgin appeared in the doorway.

  “But, Urbinia!” Tiberius called.

  “You can’t be on the steps,” the girl said, sounding strangely authoritative for her age.

  “Oh, I know … I—”

  “Just wait. It’s time for more wood.”

  Crouching behind the short stone pillar opposite the door, feeling the heat of the fire above her radiating into her skin and singeing the hairs on her flesh, Selene didn’t have to turn to know that the small stash of wood was against the wall behind her. All was lost.

  “Can’t it wait?”

  “It’ll be only a second.”

  Feeling tears rising in her eyes, wanting to scream at the injustice of it all, Selene closed her eyes and pulled the Palladium from her bag and embraced it, holding her last hope to her chest. It felt warm there. Comforting.

  She heard the footsteps of the girl moving through the doorway. Coming closer.

  No! she screamed in her mind, squeezing the Palladium into her body as if she could hide it there, deep down inside her. No, no, no—

  Power suddenly shot into her hands, a fire coiling up her arms like a fast-moving snake and lancing into the core of her chest. Selene gasped, falling backward into the small woodpile, her eyes snapping open. Beyond the smoke of the sacred fire she saw the foggy shape of Urbinia, paralyzed at the realization that someone was inside the temple. Between them Selene expected to see her arms engulfed in flame, a trail tracing out from the Vestal fire to her body like a flickering, hungry tongue. Instead, she saw the Palladium, its ghostly face turned toward her, eyes and mouth somehow an even darker black. And within its depths, visible now as an almost pulsing heart, was a blacker-than-black stone within the stone.

  The Shard, she thought with sudden realization. Yes.

  The tide of the fire coursing into her body pulled back for a moment, and time seemed to slow around her. Selene closed her eyes and let the tendrils of night pull down inside her like buckets diving for the bottom of a well. She felt the coils of power gather up within herself, deep down in a core of her being that she’d never known. Then, when she could take no more, when she thought that if they grabbed anything more there’d be nothing of her left, she released them back out with a sickening, exhilarating, frightening belly surge of energy.

  The air in the Temple of the Vestals unfroze, rushing forward in a roiling storm of smoke and burning embers drawn up from the sacred fire. The force of it threw Selene backward into the woodpile again, and she could hear nothing but a wail of wind like the roar of a vengeful god. Then, a heartbeat later, the throaty storm was moving away and she could hear, in its place, Urbinia’s screams.

  Selene was dazed from striking the back of her head on the woodpile, her thoughts scattered, churning from fire to flight, from Urbinia’s screams to the Shard of Heaven whose power she’d somehow tapped.

  Move, she reminded herself, as if she stood outside her body. People will come. Get up. Get away. Go.

  The Temple of the Vestals was filled with a fog of dust and ash and smoke, vexed to spinning in slow puffs of cloud flashingly lit by the agitated but still-burning fire. Selene rolled over with a cough and saw through tear-filled eyes the statue that she must have let go when the wind burst out from … her? She had done it, hadn’t she?

  Pulling the now lifeless rock to herself she slipped it into her shoulder bag as quickly as she could, then stood, crouching, feeling a pain in the back of her head and an exhaustion down to the very marrow of her bones.

  No, she thought as she started to move. An exhaustion down to the core of her soul.

  The air was clearing before her as she stumbled out of the temple and saw the wave of wind still rushing eastward th
rough the Forum, a moving wall of dirt and debris. How long, she wondered, before it lost its energy?

  Closer, at the foot of the stone steps, she saw Tiberius kneeling beside a crumpled Urbinia. The girl’s screams of horror had turned to the half-wails of pain from the ashes in her eyes. Tiberius looked up at Selene, his own eyes trembling with shock and fear and something that looked like grief. There were shouts from around the Forum. Sounds of people moving. His mouth moved in a silent whisper: Go.

  Selene thought about going down to him, about trying to see if there was anything she could do to help Urbinia, to assure him that everything was okay, that he’d not betrayed Rome, that there was no Vesta, that there were no gods to be angry … but then the shouts were getting closer and she merely nodded her head and ran as fast as her tired legs could take her, back for the wood and the darkness and her dreams of vengeance.

  PART I

  THE REACH OF ROME

  1

  FIRST LIGHT

  ALEXANDRIA, 26 BCE

  Perched on the leading edge of the barge, his back to the rising sun, Lucius Vorenus watched as the hulking mass of Alexandria rose above the still waters ahead. The last time he’d seen the great city, parts of it were in flames. From the deck of the ship upon which they’d fled that day—a stolen Roman military trireme, far different from this flat-bottomed Egyptian cargo vessel—Vorenus had watched through his tears as gray snakes of smoke grew in size and number, slithering lazily into the bright blue sky above the tiled roofs and great white blocks of Alexandria’s buildings, which were fading to the horizon. He remembered how there had been no sound of it, and upon the water he had only been able to smell the sea. Seen from afar those tendrils of destruction could almost have seemed beautiful. But Vorenus knew better. He was a veteran of enough campaigns, a participant in enough slaughter, to know the kind of death and destruction that the conquering Romans had brought that day. He knew what fed the hungry fires.