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Fantasy Firsts Sweepstakes

It’s November, which means we are entering the last month of our Fantasy Firsts program. We wanted to say thank you with a special sweepstakes, featuring ALL the titles we highlighted this past year. That’s 40 fantastic reads from 40 different series to add to your TBR stack! Plus, we’re including an added bonus: two sandblasted book dragon mugs, so you can enjoy your coffee or tea in style while you read.

Sign up for a chance to win:

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OFFICIAL RULES

Fantasy Firsts Sweepstakes

NO PURCHASE OR PAYMENT OF ANY KIND IS NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN THIS SWEEPSTAKES. OPEN ONLY TO LEGAL RESIDENTS OF THE 50 UNITED STATES, D.C. AND CANADA (EXCLUDING QUEBEC) WHO ARE 13 YEARS OF AGE OR OLDER AT THE TIME OF ENTRY. U.S. LAW GOVERNS THIS SWEEPSTAKES. VOID WHERE PROHIBITED.

  1. ELIGIBILITY: The Fantasy Firsts Sweepstakes (the “Sweepstakes“) is open only to persons who as of the date of entry (and, if a winner, as of the date of prize fulfillment) are a legal resident of the 50 United States, District of Columbia or Canada (excluding Quebec) and who are 13 years of age or older. We are sorry for the geographic restrictions, unfortunately it is required for various legal reasons. Persons who as of the date of entry (and, if a winner, as of the date of prize fulfillment) are an employee of Tom Doherty Associates (“Sponsor“) or any of Sponsor’s Affiliates (as defined in Section 5), and members of the immediate family or household (whether or not related) of any such employee, are not eligible. Eligibility determinations will be made by Sponsor in its discretion and will be final and binding. U.S. law governs this Sweepstakes. Void in Quebec and where prohibited by law.
  1. HOW TO ENTER: The entry period for the Sweepstakes begins at 9:00 a.m. Eastern Time (ET) on Wednesday, November 1, 2017 and continues through 11:59 p.m. ET on Sunday, November 19, 2017 (the “Entry Period“). No purchase is necessary. Any entrant who is under 18 years of age or otherwise under the legal age of majority in the jurisdiction in which the entrant resides (a “Minor“) must obtain permission to enter from his or her parent or legal guardian, and the agreement of the parent or legal guardian to these Official Rules, prior to entry. To enter the Sweepstakes, during the Entry Period, entrants must access, complete and submit the Sweepstakes entry form (which will require entrant to submit his or her e-mail address and such other information as Sponsor may require), found in entrant’s Facebook newsfeed or alternatively by visiting Sponsor’s website located at https://www.torforgeblog.com/2017/11/01/fantasy-firsts-sweepstakes-15/ (the “Website”) and following the on screen entry instructions. The Facebook entry form may be pre-filled with information provided by the Facebook platform. There is a limit of one entry per person and per email address. All entries must be completed and received by Sponsor prior to the conclusion of the Entry Period. Entry times will be determined using Sponsor’s computer, which will be the official clock for the Sweepstakes. Normal time rates, if any, charged by the entrant’s Internet or mobile service provider will apply. All entries are subject to verification at any time. Proof of submission does not constitute proof of entry. Sponsor will have the right, in its discretion, to require proof of identity and/or eligibility in a form acceptable to Sponsor (including, without limitation, government-issued photo identification). Failure to provide such proof to the satisfaction of Sponsor in a timely manner may result in disqualification.
  1. WINNER SELECTION AND NOTIFICATION: Following the conclusion of the Entry Period, one (1) potential Grand Prize winner(s) will be selected in a random drawing conducted by Sponsor or its agent from among all eligible entries received during the Entry Period. The odds of winning will depend on the number of eligible entries received. The potential winner will be notified by e-mail (sent to the e-mail address provided by the entrant when entering), or using other contact information provided by the potential winner, in Sponsor’s discretion. If the initial notification requires a response, the potential winner must respond to Sponsor’s initial notification attempt within 72 hours. The potential winner is subject to verification of eligibility and may, in Sponsor’s discretion, be required to complete, sign and return to Sponsor an Affidavit of Eligibility/Release of Liability or an Affirmation of Eligibility/Release of Liability, as determined by Sponsor, and, if legally permissible, a Publicity Release, collectively, a “Declaration and Release” for residents of Canada) and any other documentation provided by Sponsor in connection with verification of the potential winner’s eligibility and confirmation of the releases and grant of rights set forth herein (as applicable, “Winner Verification Documents“), within seven days of attempted delivery of same. The potential winner if a U.S. resident may also in Sponsor’s discretion be required to complete and return to Sponsor an IRS Form W-9 within seven days of attempted delivery of same. If the potential winner is a Minor, Sponsor will have the right to request that the potential winner’s parent or legal guardian sign the Winner Verification Documents on behalf of the winner, or to award the prize directly in the name of the winner’s parent or legal guardian, who in such event will be required to sign the Winner Verification Documents and/or, if a U.S. resident, an IRS Form W-9. If the potential winner is a Canadian resident, he or she will be required to correctly answer a mathematical skill testing question without mechanical or other aid to be administered via telephone, email or another manner determined by Sponsor in its discretion at a pre-arranged mutually convenient time. If the potential winner cannot be reached or does not respond within 72 hours of the initial notification attempt or fails to complete, sign, and return any required Winner Verification Documents or, if a U.S. resident, IRS Form W-9 within seven days of attempted delivery of same, or in the case of a Canadian selected entrant, fails to correctly answer the mathematical skill testing question without mechanical or other aid, or if the potential winner does not otherwise comply with these Official Rules and/or cannot accept the prize as awarded for any reason, “then the potential winner may be disqualified and an alternate winner may, at Sponsor’s discretion, be selected from among the remaining eligible entries as specified in these Official Rules (in which case the foregoing provisions will apply to such newly-selected entrant).
  1. PRIZE: One (1) Grand Prize(s) will be offered. The Grand Prize consists of one (1) hardcover copy of THE GUNS ABOVE by Robyn Bennis, one (1) trade paperback copy of RED RIGHT HAND by Levi Black, one (1) hardcover copy of ROAR by Cora Carmack, one (1) hardcover copy of THE ALCHEMY OF MASQUES AND MIRRORS by Curtis Craddock, one (1) hardcover copy of CHILD OF A HIDDEN SEA by A.M. Dellamonica, one (1) trade paperback copy of TRUTHWITCH by Susan Dennard, one (1) hardcover copy of CROSSROADS OF CANOPY by Thoraiya Dyer, one (1) hardcover copy of DEATH’S MISTRESS by Terry Goodkind, one (1) hardcover copy of STEEPLEJACK by A.J. Hartley, one (1) hardcover copy of DEADMEN WALKING by Sherrilyn Kenyon, one (1) hardcover copy of EVERY HEART A DOORWAY by Seanan McGuire, one (1) trade paperback copy of THE HUM AND THE SHIVER by Alex Bledsoe, one (1) trade paperback copy of RANGE OF GHOSTS by Elizabeth Bear, one (1) trade paperback copy of A NATURAL HISTORY OF DRAGONS by Marie Brennan, one (1) trade paperback copy of SERIOUSLY WICKED by Tina Connolly, one (1) trade paperback copy of THE LIBRARIANS AND THE LOST LAMP by Greg Cox, one (1) trade paperback copy of DANCER’S LAMENT by Ian C. Esslemont, one (1) trade paperback copy of FORGE OF DARKNESS by Steven Erikson, one (1) trade paperback copy of FINN FANCY NECROMANCY by Randy Henderson, one (1) trade paperback copy of ROYAL STREET by Suzanne Johnson, one (1) trade paperback copy of THE EYE OF THE WORLD by Robert Jordon, one (1) trade paperback copy of THE SHARDS OF HEAVEN by Michael Livingston, one (1) trade paperback copy of THE MAGIC OF RECLUCE by L.E. Modesitt, Jr., one (1) trade paperback copy of RIDERS by Veronica Rossi, one (1) trade paperback copy of THE WAY OF KINGS by Brandon Sanderson, one (1) trade paperback copy of A DARKER SHADE OF MAGIC by V.E. Schwab, one (1) trade paperback copy of THE EMPEROR’S BLADES by Brian Staveley, one (1) trade paperback copy of UPDRAFT by Fran Wilde, one (1) ARC of THE MIDNIGHT FRONT by David Mack, one (1) mass market paperback copy of THE SIX-GUN TAROT by R.S. Belcher, one (1) mass market paperback copy of THE DINOSAUR LORDS by Victor Milan, one (1) mass market paperback copy of THE SLEEPING KING by Cindy Dees and Bill Flippin, one (1) mass market paperback copy of TOUCHSTONE by Melanie Rawn, one (1) mass market paperback copy by THE INCREMENTALISTS by Steven Brust and Skyler White, one (1) mass market paperback copy of CROWN OF VENGEANCE by Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory, one (1) mass market paperback copy of IMAGER by L.E. Modesitt, Jr., one (1) mass market paperback copy of LAMENTATION by Ken Scholes, one (1) mass market paperback copy of THE ETERNA FILES by Leanna Renee Heiber, one (1) mass market paperback copy of KUSHIEL’S DART by Jacqueline Carey, and one (1) mass market paperback copy of AMERICAN CRAFTSMEN by Tom Doyle, and one (1) set of two Book dragon mugs. The approximate retail value (“ARV“) of the Grand Prize is $551.56 USD. All prize details that are not expressly specified in these Official Rules will be determined by Sponsor in its discretion. The prize will be awarded if properly claimed. No substitution, cash redemption or transfer of the right to receive the prize is permitted, except in the discretion of Sponsor, which has the right to substitute the prize or any component of the prize with a prize or prize component of equal or greater value selected by Sponsor in its discretion. The prize consists only of the item(s) expressly specified in these Official Rules. All expenses or costs associated with the acceptance or use of the prize or any component of the prize are the responsibility of the winner. The prize is awarded “as is” and without any warranty, except as required by law. In no event will more than the number of prizes stated in these Official Rules be awarded. All federal, state and local taxes on the value of the prize are the responsibility of the winner. For U.S. residents, an IRS form 1099 will be issued if required by law.
  1. RELEASE AND LIMITATION OF LIABILITY: By entering the Sweepstakes, to the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, each entrant on behalf of himself or herself and anyone who succeeds to entrant’s rights and responsibilities including without limitation entrant’s heirs, executors, administrators, personal representatives, successors, assigns, agents, and attorneys, and with respect to minors entrant’s parents and legal guardians (collectively the “Entrant Parties“) releases Sponsor, each of Sponsor’s Affiliates, the licensees and licensors other than Entrant Parties including authors of each of the foregoing, all other companies involved in the development or operation of the Sweepstakes, Facebook, the successors and assigns of each of the foregoing and the directors, officers, employees and agents of each of the foregoing (collectively, the “Released Parties“) from and against any and all claims and causes of action of any kind that entrant and/or the Entrant Parties ever had, now have or might in the future have arising out of or relating to the Sweepstakes, participation in the Sweepstakes, the use of the Website, the provision, acceptance or use of any prize or any component thereof or any use of the entrant’s name as permitted pursuant to these Official Rules, including without limitation any and all claims and causes of action: (a) relating to any personal injury, death or property damage or loss sustained by any entrant or any other person, (b) based upon any allegation of violation of the right of privacy or publicity, misappropriation, defamation, or violation of any other personal or proprietary right, (c) based upon any allegation of infringement of copyright, trademark, trade dress, patent, trade secrets, moral rights or any intellectual property right, or (d) or based upon any allegation of a violation of the laws, rules or regulations relating to personal information and data security. Each entrant on behalf of himself or herself and the Entrant Parties agrees not to assert any such claim or cause of action against any of the Released Parties. Each entrant on behalf of himself or herself and the Entrant Parties assumes the risk of, and all liability for, any injury, loss or damage caused, or claimed to be caused, by participation in this Sweepstakes, the use of the Website, or the provision, acceptance or use of any prize or any component of any prize. The Released Parties are not responsible for, and will not have any liability in connection with, any typographical or other error in the printing of the offer, administration of the Sweepstakes or in the announcement of the prize. The Released Parties are not responsible for, and will not have any liability in connection with, late, lost, delayed, illegible, damaged, corrupted or incomplete entries, incorrect or inaccurate capture of, damage to, or loss of entries or entry information, or any other human, mechanical or technical error of any kind relating to the operation of the Website, communications or attempted communications with any entrant or Entrant Parties, the submission, collection, storage and/or processing of entries or the administration of the Sweepstakes. The term “Affiliate” of Sponsor means any entity that directly or indirectly, through one or more intermediaries, controls, is controlled by, or is under common control with Sponsor. The term “control” means the possession, directly or indirectly, of the power to direct or cause the direction of management and policies of an entity, or the ownership, directly or indirectly, of more than fifty percent (50%) of the equity interests of the entity.
  1. GENERAL RULES: Sponsor has the right, in its sole discretion, to modify these Official Rules (including without limitation by adjusting any of the dates and/or timeframes stipulated in these Official Rules) and to cancel, modify or suspend this Sweepstakes at any time in its discretion, including without limitation if a virus, bug, technical problem, entrant fraud or misconduct, or other cause beyond the control of the Sponsor corrupts the administration, integrity, security or proper operation of the Sweepstakes or if for any other reason Sponsor is not able to conduct the Sweepstakes as planned (including without limitation in the event the Sweepstakes is interfered with by any fire, flood, epidemic, earthquake, explosion, labor dispute or strike, act of God or of public enemy, communications failure, riot or civil disturbance, war (declared or undeclared), terrorist threat or activity, federal, state or local law, order or regulation or court order) or in the event of any change to the terms governing the use of Facebook or the application or interpretation of such terms. In the event of termination of the Sweepstakes, a notice will be posted on the Website or Sponsor’s Facebook page and a random drawing will be conducted to award the prize from among all eligible entries received prior to the time of termination. Sponsor has the right, in its sole discretion, to disqualify or prohibit from participating in the Sweepstakes any individual who, in Sponsor’s discretion, Sponsor determines or believes (i) has tampered with the entry process or has undermined the legitimate operation of the Website or the Sweepstakes by cheating, hacking, deception or other unfair practices, (ii) has engaged in conduct that annoys, abuses, threatens or harasses any other entrant or any representative of Sponsor or (iii) has attempted or intends to attempt any of the foregoing. CAUTION: ANY ATTEMPT TO DELIBERATELY DAMAGE ANY WEBSITE OR SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM ASSOCIATED WITH THIS SWEEPSTAKES OR UNDERMINE THE LEGITIMATE OPERATION OF THIS SWEEPSTAKES IS A VIOLATION OF CRIMINAL AND CIVIL LAW. SHOULD SUCH AN ATTEMPT BE MADE, SPONSOR HAS THE RIGHT TO SEEK DAMAGES (INCLUDING ATTORNEYS’ FEES) FROM ANY PERSON INVOLVED TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW. The use of agents or automated devices, programs or methods to submit entries is prohibited and Sponsor has the right, in its sole discretion, to disqualify any entry that it believes may have been submitted using such an agent or automated device, program or method. In the event of a dispute regarding who submitted an entry, the entry will be deemed to have been submitted by the authorized account holder of the email address submitted at the time of entry. “Authorized account holder” means the person who is assigned an email address by an internet provider, online service provider or other organization (e.g., business, educational institute, etc.) that is responsible for assigning email addresses for the domain associated with the submitted email address. An entrant may be required to provide proof (in a form acceptable to Sponsor, including, without limitation, government-issued photo identification) that he or she is the authorized account holder of the email address associated with the entry in question. All federal, state, provincial, territorial and local laws and regulations apply. All entries become the property of Sponsor and will not be verified or returned. By participating in this Sweepstakes, entrants on behalf of themselves, and to the extent permitted by law on behalf of the Entrant Parties agree to be bound by these Official Rules and the decisions of Sponsor, which are final and binding in all respects. These Official Rules may not be reprinted or republished in any way without the prior written consent of Sponsor.
  1. DISPUTES: By entering the Sweepstakes, each entrant on behalf of himself or herself and the Entrant Parties agrees that, to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, (a) any and all disputes, claims and causes of action arising out of or connected with the Sweepstakes, or the provision, acceptance and/or use of any prize or prize component, will be resolved individually, without resort to any form of class action (Note: Some jurisdictions do not allow restricting access to class actions. This provision will not apply to entrant if entrant lives in such a jurisdiction); (b) any and all claims, judgments and awards shall be limited to actual out-of-pocket costs incurred, including costs associated with entering the Sweepstakes, but in no event attorneys’ fees; and (c) under no circumstances will any entrant or Entrant Party be permitted to obtain any award for, and each entrant and Entrant Party hereby waives all rights to claim, punitive, special, incidental or consequential damages and any and all rights to have damages multiplied or otherwise increased and any other damages, other than for actual out-of-pocket expenses. All issues and questions concerning the construction, validity, interpretation and enforceability of these Official Rules or the rights and obligations of the entrants, Entrant Parties and Sponsor in connection with the Sweepstakes shall be governed by, and construed in accordance with, the laws of the State of New York in the United States of America without giving effect to any choice of law or conflict of law rules or provisions that would cause the application of the laws of any jurisdiction other than the State of New York. Any legal proceedings arising out of this Sweepstakes or relating to these Official Rules shall be instituted only in the federal or state courts located in New York County in the State of New York, waiving any right to trial by jury, and each entrant and Entrant Party consents to jurisdiction therein with respect to any legal proceedings or disputes of whatever nature arising under or relating to these rules or the Sweepstakes. In the event of any conflict between these Official Rules and any Sweepstakes information provided elsewhere (including but not limited in advertising or marketing materials), these Official Rules shall prevail.
  1. USE OF INFORMATION: Please review the Sponsor’s Privacy Notice at https://us.macmillan.com/privacy-notice. By entering the sweepstakes, entrant hereby agrees to Sponsor’s collection and use of their personal information in accordance with such Notice, including the use of entrant’s personal information to send email updates about Tor Books and other information from Sponsor and its related companies.
  1. WINNER NAME AND RULES REQUESTS:For the name(s) of the winner(s), which will be available two weeks after the conclusion of the Entry Period, or a copy of these Official Rules, send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to Fantasy First Sweepstakes, Tom Doherty Associates, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Winner name requests must be received by Sponsor within six months after the conclusion of the Entry Period.
  1. Sponsor: Tom Doherty Associates, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. The Sweepstakes is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Facebook.

© 2017 Macmillan. All rights reserved.





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Building the Great Library of Alexandria

Poster Placeholder of - 56Welcome back to Fantasy Firsts. Today Michael Livingston, author of a historical fantasy series set in the ancient world, discusses how to reverse engineer the most famous library of all time. The series begun in The Shards of Heaven concludes in The Realms of God, available November 7th.

Written by Michael Livingston

My new novel, The Shards of Heaven, is a historical fantasy. Part Indiana Jones, part Game of Thrones, this adventure takes place within our historical past, incorporating fantasy elements like the Trident of Poseidon as seamlessly as possible into the known facts of history. Indeed, if I have done my work well, one might argue that the Trident really was there at the rise of the Roman Empire—we just haven’t heard about it before.

As you can imagine, this approach placed limits on what I could or could not do with the power of the Shards, and I confess this has always been a part of my fascination with the story. I wanted to do the mythological and historical interweaving of luminaries like Tolkien and Jordan (and now Martin), but I also wanted to take the extra step of making it a part of our “real” historical world.

Which meant research.

Lots and lots of research.

In a recent post on my website, I discussed how I had to construct a map of ancient Alexandria for my story, and here I’d like to share a little about researching a specific building in that city: the Great Library of Alexandria.

Though the ancient city of Alexandria is perhaps best known for the magnificent Pharos Lighthouse, which was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, it was the Great Library that was surely the more important cultural artifact. Constructed under the orders of Ptolemy I Soter (Alexander the Great’s general, who succeded him in ruling Egypt) and organized under the direction of Demetrius Phalereus (who had been a student of Aristotle), the Great Library was the single greatest repository of knowledge for some three centuries.

We have little idea now about where it stood or what it looked like.

This factual vacuum left me with a great deal of freedom in designing the building for my novel, though I was certainly constrained by the architectural and technological capabilities of the fourth century BCE. Within those limitations, I wanted the building to be impressive as a construction, beautiful in its aesthetics, and true to the spirit of the building’s purpose as a repository for knowledge. I also wanted it to have a formal centrality within the complex of the Museum, the sprawling Alexandrian complex dedicated to the Muses. In The Shards of Heaven I describe it thus:

“Built of white marble and stone, the Library sat in the middle of the Museum like the physical embodiment of the flowering within the complex: a six-sided, multi-tiered building crowned with a magnificent cupola that was itself mounted by a glimmering gold statue of a man holding aloft a scroll, opened to the heavens.”

Tolzmann, Don Heinrich, Alfred Hessel and Reuben Peiss. The Memory of Mankind. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2001
Because the Library was originally organized by a student of Aristotle, I imagined that its vast array of holdings would be initially organized according to Aristotle’s ten divisions of knowledge.

This, then, was part of the reason I chose a six-sided building: drawing walls between the outer hexagon and another at its center would give me six “halls” within the construction, all radiating out from a central hall that I pictured as being open all the way to the top of the dome, a reflecting pool at its center and staircases spiraling around its interior walls between the three floors of the building. One of these radiating halls would be a great entrance hall, lined with ten pillars and otherwise filled with scriptoria and administrative offices. The remaining five halls would each have two of Aristotle’s ten divisions, neatly and logically giving order to the hundreds of thousands of books and scrolls that would have been housed there.

There was another reason I chose a hexagon shape: in symbology the hexagon is emblematic of the natural honeycomb, representing both the sweetness of knowledge and the busy, cooperative “bees” of the librarians toiling within. More than that, a hexagon fit into the symbolism of the Shards of Heaven themselves, which is grounded in a symbolic revision and representation of the classical elements.

Plus, well, I thought a hexagon would just look pretty amazing.

Whether it was reimagining the Great Library or reconstructing the Pharos Lighthouse, one of the immeasurable joys of writing The Shards of Heaven (and its coming sequels!) has been my need to breathe new life into our past by rebuilding it—sometimes brick by brick—for a modern audience.

I can only hope that readers will love seeing the results of this work as much as I enjoyed building it behind the scenes.

Order Your Copy

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Follow Michael Livingston on Twitter at @medievalguy and on his website.

(This is a rerun of a post that originally ran on December 7th, 2015.)

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$2.99 eBook Sale: The Shards of Heaven by Michael Livingston

Image Placeholder of - 72Our Fantasy Firsts program continues today with a sale on the ebook edition of The Shards of Heaven by Michael Livingston. In the chaos of the fall of the Roman Republic, history may be determined by a secret war that has been raging much longer. This offer will only last for a limited time, so order your copy today!

About The Shards of Heaven: Julius Caesar is dead, assassinated on the senate floor, and the glory that is Rome has been torn in two. Octavian, Caesar’s ambitious great-nephew and adopted son, vies with Marc Antony and Cleopatra for control of Caesar’s legacy. As civil war rages from Rome to Alexandria, and vast armies and navies battle for supremacy, a secret conflict may shape the course of history.

Juba, Numidian prince and adopted brother of Octavian, has embarked on a ruthless quest for the Shards of Heaven, lost treasures said to possess the very power of the gods—or the one God. Driven by vengeance, Juba has already attained the fabled Trident of Poseidon, which may also be the staff once wielded by Moses. Now he will stop at nothing to obtain the other Shards, even if it means burning the entire world to the ground.

Caught up in these cataclysmic events, and the hunt for the Shards, are a pair of exiled Roman legionnaires, a Greek librarian of uncertain loyalties, assassins, spies, slaves…and the ten-year-old daughter of Cleopatra herself.

Order Your Copy

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This sale ends November 3rd.

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Fantasy Firsts Sweepstakes

Welcome back to Fantasy Firsts. Today we’re offering the chance to win these fantastic titles on Goodreads! For details on how to enter, please click on the cover image of the book you are interested in.

The Eterna Files by Leanna Renee Hieber

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London, 1882: Queen Victoria appoints Harold Spire of the Metropolitan Police to Special Branch Division Omega. Omega is to secretly investigate paranormal and supernatural events and persons. Spire, a skeptic driven to protect the helpless and see justice done, is the perfect man to lead the department, which employs scholars and scientists, assassins and con men, and a traveling circus. Spire’s chief researcher is Rose Everhart, who believes fervently that there is more to the world than can be seen by mortal eyes.

Their first mission: find the Eterna Compound, which grants immortality. Catastrophe destroyed the hidden laboratory in New York City where Eterna was developed, but the Queen is convinced someone escaped—and has a sample of Eterna.

Seriously Wicked by Tiny Connolly

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Camellia’s adopted mother wants Cam to grow up to be just like her. Problem is, Mom’s a seriously wicked witch.

Savvy Cam has tons of practice thwarting the witch’s crazy schemes. But when the witch summons a demon to control the city, he gets loose—and into the cute new boy in Tenth Grade. Now Cam’s determined to stop the demon before he destroys the new boy’s soul. Which means she might have to try a spell of her own. But if she’s willing to work spells like the witch. . .will it mean she’s wicked too? With the demon squashing pixies, girls becoming zombies, and the school one spell away from exploding in phoenix flame, Cam has to realize that wicked doesn’t lie in your abilities, but in your choices.

The Shards of Heaven by Michael Livingston

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Julius Caesar is dead, assassinated on the senate floor, and the glory that is Rome has been torn in two. Octavian, Caesar’s ambitious great-nephew and adopted son, vies with Marc Antony and Cleopatra for control of Caesar’s legacy. As civil war rages from Rome to Alexandria, and vast armies and navies battle for supremacy, a secret conflict may shape the course of history.

Juba, Numidian prince and adopted brother of Octavian, has embarked on a ruthless quest for the Shards of Heaven, lost treasures said to possess the very power of the gods—or the one God. Driven by vengeance, Juba has already attained the fabled Trident of Poseidon, which may also be the staff once wielded by Moses. Now he will stop at nothing to obtain the other Shards, even if it means burning the entire world to the ground.

Truthwitch by Susan Dennard

Truthwitch by Susan DennardOn a continent ruled by three empires, everyone is born with a “witchery,” a magical skill that sets them apart from others. Now, as the Twenty Year Truce in a centuries long war is about to end, the balance of power-and the failing health of all magic-will fall on the shoulders of a mythical pair called the Cahr Awen.

 

The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson

The Way of Kings by Brandon SandersonIn The Way of Kings, #1 New York Times bestselling author Brandon Sanderson introduces readers to the fascinating world of Roshar, a world of stone and storms.

It has been centuries since the fall of the Knights Radiant, but their mystical swords and armor remain, transforming ordinary men into near-invincible warriors. Men trade kingdoms for them. Wars are fought for them and won by them.

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Excerpt: The Shards of Heaven

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Image Placeholder of - 18Welcome back to Fantasy Firsts. Today we’re featuring an excerpt from The Shards of Heaven by Michael Livingston, a historical fantasy set at the birth of the Roman Empire. Civil war rages in Rome, but it is a secret war for the lost treasures of the gods that will shape the first century BC. The Realms of God, the conclusion of the trilogy, will be available November 7th.

Julius Caesar is dead, assassinated on the senate floor, and the glory that is Rome has been torn in two. Octavian, Caesar’s ambitious great-nephew and adopted son, vies with Marc Antony and Cleopatra for control of Caesar’s legacy. As civil war rages from Rome to Alexandria, and vast armies and navies battle for supremacy, a secret conflict may shape the course of history.

Juba, Numidian prince and adopted brother of Octavian, has embarked on a ruthless quest for the Shards of Heaven, lost treasures said to possess the very power of the gods—or the one God. Driven by vengeance, Juba has already attained the fabled Trident of Poseidon, which may also be the staff once wielded by Moses. Now he will stop at nothing to obtain the other Shards, even if it means burning the entire world to the ground.

Caught up in these cataclysmic events, and the hunt for the Shards, are a pair of exiled Roman legionnaires, a Greek librarian of uncertain loyalties, assassins, spies, slaves…and the ten-year-old daughter of Cleopatra herself.

PROLOGUE

THE BOY WHO WOULD RULE THE WORLD

OUTSKIRTS OF ROME, 44 BCE

Hidden amid the shadows outside Caesar’s marble-columned villa, the assassin Valerius gazed back across the valley to Rome. Coiled around and upon her seven hills, the Eternal City often seemed like a living thing, her old streets pulsing with life. But now, on this fading day, the city was quiet and still. Her ancient stones, alight with the reds of a setting sun, appeared to be weeping blood. Valerius saw in the image a sign of favor.

The dictator was dead. And the gods approved.

Caesar’s blood, he did not doubt, still stained the tiled floor of the east Forum. Pushing his way through the astonished throngs of onlookers after the deed, Valerius had seen for himself the mangled corpse, wrapped in the tattered remains of Caesar’s purple robes, and in his mind’s eye the thick crimson pooled there was the perfect mirror to the strong light before him now.

Valerius’ knife, which he absently turned over in his hands as he watched Rome’s red walls slowly fade to gray, had not been among those that drank of Caesar, and he thought it a pity. The rich senators who’d done the killing were emotional men, ineffective at murder. Even with so many cuts to his body, Caesar had taken some minutes to die. The sprawled trail of blood on the tiles had told the tale. And though Valerius felt no particular love for the would-be emperor, he nevertheless thought it shameful that any man should shake out his last breaths under the eyes of dishonorable men.

Shameful, but little for it: Valerius was under no employ for that killing, and the man who had arranged to hire him only hours afterward would never have wished Caesar dead. Octavian still called the dictator “Uncle Julius” despite all the titles and glories that Caesar had won over his great-nephew’s nineteen years. In the streets some citizens were even saying that Caesar had adopted the young man, that Octavian might well be his heir. That was certainly what Octavian seemed to think.

Valerius spit into the vines that gathered about the foot of the villa wall at his back. He knew little of politics himself: he cared for them only insofar as they affected his own movements. Heir or not, adopted son or not, Octavian was his employer now. So Valerius cared only that his employer’s beloved uncle was dead and that he had been hired to see that Caesarion, the son of Caesar and Cleopatra, the only blood child of the now-dead dictator, would follow his father to the grave.

As he stopped to think about it, it seemed for a moment odd to Valerius that Octavian should wish the child of Julius such harm. The assassin had never seen the boy, but it was said that, aside from his slightly darker tone of skin and more delicate Egyptian features, Caesarion had every part the striking resemblance to his father. Then again, as heir of Egypt and the only surviving child of Julius Caesar himself, Caesarion did stand in line to inherit the world. And if Octavian thought himself rightful heir to at least part of that world … well, no price would be too high to see the boy dead.

Not that it really mattered. Octavian’s reasons were immaterial in the end. Not like the hundred weight of gold Valerius had been promised for the killing. That was material indeed.

Up the hard-packed dirt road from the bridge over the Tiber came the sound of hooves, a punishing gallop of men in fury. Valerius took a deep breath to clear his mind of reasons in order to focus on the simple facts of the task at hand: to get into the villa and end the child’s life. With practiced speed he pocketed his blade, fearful of any glint it might give off despite the deep shadows and brush in which he crouched.

The staff emblem rattling above the lead rider showed the markings of Caesar’s famed Sixth Legion, and even before they were close enough for the assassin to see the details of the faces of the riders themselves, he knew the man at their center to be Mark Antony: the general was broad-shouldered and handsome in his signet robes, with thick curls of red hair bouncing at every downbeat, and he exuded arrogance and assumptive power with every movement. Even the strong and impassioned way he drove his steed, completely heedless of consequence to the beast, seemed emblematic of the man. If the citizens of Rome knew but one thing about Antony it was that he was full of fire, his eyes never alight on anything but his goal. He’d been Julius Caesar’s finest general, perhaps his best friend, and for some reason—Valerius couldn’t fathom why—his life had been spared by the conspiratorial senators.

Valerius slowly and methodically stretched some of his tense muscles, grateful for Antony’s appearance. He’d counted on an emissary coming to call on the distraught queen of Egypt, but none could be more ideal than Antony. Chaos followed the man like the wake of a passing ship, and his arrival would be sure to send the household into even greater confusion than that which it already labored under, making it far easier for the assassin to complete his work.

Tucked behind the drapes of a momentarily calm foyer, his lungs moving shallow and silent, Valerius listened to the sounds of the villa: servants’ feet rushing between rooms, pots and dishes being moved about in the kitchens, the muted sobs of a woman crying, and, very close, the quiet breathing of someone waiting in a nearby doorway. A male someone, by the sound of the breathing. Octavian’s contact, he hoped.

Valerius lifted himself to the balls of his feet, floating out from his hiding place. A long wide swath of torchlight cut across the darkened floor of the foyer, spilling out from the doorway where the man waited, effectively blinding whoever it was to anything moving in the shadows. The assassin glided carefully around the periphery of the room until he stood beside the doorway. Then he took a small rock from his pocket and tossed it lightly out into the open.

The man in the doorway started at the sound of the pebble clattering across the floor, and he took a few hesitant steps into the open. “Hello?” he whispered. His voice cracked. “Is someone—”

The man’s quaking voice was frozen by the dull back of the assassin’s blade against his throat. Valerius guided him with it, pulling him into the darkness away from the doorway. “Yes,” the assassin breathed in his ear. “Someone is here.”

“I’m … I’m…”

“That’s not the code word,” Valerius said, pressing the steel against his skin.

The man’s body shook in fright, and his neck spasmed before he finally controlled himself enough to remember the arranged sign. “Tiber,” he croaked. “Tiber.”

Immediately Valerius released and spun Octavian’s contact around to get a good look at him. The man was younger than he’d anticipated, perhaps not even twenty. He had the smooth skin of someone unaccustomed to manual labor and the outdoors, and the tone of his complexion showed he was not Italian stock, though it was also more olive than the deeper tan of Cleopatra and her Egyptian court. A Greek, probably. Or a Cretan.

“I’m Didymus,” the man said. “I didn’t—”

“Where’s the boy?”

“The boy?”

“Little Caesar,” Valerius hissed.

A new fear crossed Didymus’ face. “Varro said you wanted Cleo—”

The assassin’s voice turned low and dangerous. “Octavian will pay you, yes?”

Didymus nodded, his expression numb.

“Pay you well?”

“Yes,” Didymus managed.

“Then don’t waste my time,” Valerius whispered, raising the knife for emphasis. “Where?”

Didymus swallowed carefully, his eyes dark. After a moment he lifted his arm in the direction of the lighted, open doorway. “Through my room, left beyond the curtains. Two rooms down there. Caesarion’s is the first.”

“Guards?”

“One inside. Abeden. An Alexandrian.”

“And the Egyptian whore?” Octavian hadn’t ordered it, but Valerius was certain there’d be a substantial bonus if both mother and child died tonight. No one in Rome had approved of Caesar’s dalliance with the foreign queen.

The fear in Didymus’ face was replaced with something more focused and harsh. Something more like the jealousy of a jilted lover. “Her room’s beside his. You’ll know it for the moaning.”

Valerius nodded, lowered his blade, and padded into Didymus’ room. The furnishings were simple enough, but the walls were lined with tables, each stacked tall with scrolls in various states of binding. The traitor was a tutor, he surmised. Probably the boy’s. It would explain his hesitation.

The household was still busy at the front of the villa. He could hear Antony bellowing commands, sending the servants scurrying to tend to his horse and to bring wine for his own dust-dried throat. Soon, the assassin imagined, Antony would dispatch one of his legionnaires to fetch Cleopatra.

The assassin doubled his speed as he made his way through the curtained rooms and hallways, keeping to the shadows as much as he could, closing in on the sound of the sobbing woman he now knew for certain to be the queen of Egypt. He encountered no one before he reached Caesarion’s door, where he paused to listen for sounds of movement within.

Valerius smiled once more. If the bloodred light of the sunset and the ease of his passage were not surety enough of the gods’ blessing on his task, the few noises inside the room would have passed all doubt from his mind. The boy was playing quietly, and from the sound of it Didymus was right about the single guard.

The assassin knocked lightly on the door, then right-palmed his knife. The door cracked, filled with an Egyptian face.

Valerius bowed slightly, kept his voice low and his posture submissive, like a servant’s. “The queen requests your presence, Abeden. There’s talk of moving the boy.” He stood to one side, so as to let the guard pass into the hallway. “I’m instructed to stand at the door in your absence.”

The guard glanced back at the room, then stepped out into the hall, pulling the door shut behind him. He turned in the direction of Cleopatra’s room. As he did so, Valerius came forward at his back, knife moving in a rapid strike up and into the center of his throat, puncturing his voice box. Then, in a smooth and practiced motion, he pulled the blade back and up and out, severing the vital arteries on the right side of the guard’s neck even as his free hand gripped the man’s weapon arm and used it as a lever to turn his body and send the bright red spray against the wall, out of sight of the boy’s doorway. He pinned the man there for a moment as he shook and gurgled, then he stabbed him once more, this time in the left center of his chest.

The guard sagged, only twitching now, and Valerius let him down to the floor quietly before checking his own body for blood. As he expected, only his knife hand had met with the stain, and this he was quick to wipe clean on the dead guard’s tunic. Pocketing the weapon, Valerius dragged the man into a slumped position with his back against the wall. From a distance, he’d look like he was sleeping. Valerius would have liked to hide the body completely, but then he’d need to clean up the blood. And, besides, he planned to be finished with his tasks and fleeing through one window or another in a matter of minutes.

Shaking out his own shoulders and straightening his back, the assassin approached the door, knocked once, opened it, and stepped inside.

The room was modest but not small: perhaps fifteen feet square, with only a single wood-shuttered and curtained window above a well-cushioned bed. Caesarion, the boy who might inherit the world, the three-year-old child he had been sent to kill, was kneeling in the middle of the floor, surrounded by a small toy army: chariots, horses, and warriors. The assassin hadn’t been sure what to expect, but he was surprised nonetheless to find the little prince dressed in a simple belted Roman tunic and thong sandals, no different than any three-year-old one might find in a market in the city. Even more surprising, though, was how much he resembled his father: he had dark hair cut round and flat against a strong brow, the prominent nose of the Julians, and, when Caesarion looked up, his dead father’s piercing dark brown eyes.

“I’m one of Antony’s men,” Valerius said, smiling as he did to all children. “We’re going to go see your father.” Behind his back the assassin carefully pushed the door’s bolt into position, locking the room.

Caesarion nodded, and his voice was quiet and even. “See Father,” the little boy said.

Valerius took a step forward in the room, nodding solemnly. “That’s right. I’m sorry for your loss, my lord.”

Little Caesar blinked, then looked down to the wooden figures gathered around him on the floor. His hands moved a Roman chariot forward, knocked over an Egyptian warrior.

Two steps closer. “Your father was a great man. He often won victory over unspeakable odds.”

The boy nodded more strongly this time. He picked up the fallen Egyptian warrior, stood it on its feet and then stared, his face blank, at the pieces before him. “I know,” he said.

Valerius took another step to stand behind Caesarion, his hand moving stealthily to his pocket to retrieve the warm knife. Slowly, deliberately, he bent at the knees, crouching behind the child and gauging his neck. “I am sorry,” he said, and he started to reach forward.

An alarmed shout rang out in the hallway, the hard voice of a man. It froze the assassin’s hand as his head turned instinctively toward the locked door and his mind recalled the possible escape routes he’d mapped out beyond the window.

Caesar’s son, his own head turning at the shout, saw the assassin’s weapon and pushed himself away, scattering toys. He backed into the wall, brandished a wooden play knife in his shaky hands.

Valerius, still crouched with his own knife in hand, was mildly surprised when he looked back to the boy. “You’re fast, little one.”

“Don’t hurt me,” Caesarion whimpered.

The assassin stood. In another context, with a man before him instead of a boy, he would have smiled. But not here. No smiles, but no lies either. “I have to.”

Caesarion shook his head, swallowed hard. His eyes were dampening, but he didn’t cry.

There were answering shouts from within the villa. A sudden crash jolted the locked door, but it held. Valerius found it ironic that Caesar’s slaves had kept the house in such good working order that he’d be able to murder the man’s son in peace. By the time they breached the door he’d be out the window and on the run, the child dead. Alas that he’d not get the chance at the queen, too. The bonus would have been nice.

“No,” Caesarion stammered. “Please … no.”

Valerius settled his knees a little for balance, eyes taking stock of the child’s fake knife. The boy couldn’t do him any real harm with it, but the assassin didn’t intend to take home even a scratch from this assignment.

There was a crash from Cleopatra’s room next door, like the toppling of a great table, and the queen’s lament turned to sudden screaming. Not seconds later there was another crash, and Cleopatra’s voice grew even louder.

Caesarion’s wooden weapon trembled more violently in response to his mother’s terrified wails, and Valerius took a single step backward, giving himself room for a blade-dodging feint as he charged. He took a breath. Tensed.

Before Valerius could engage, heavy, running footfalls sounded beyond the shuttered window, and he had chance enough only to turn in the direction of the sounds before the wood slats separating the room from the growing night exploded inward as a massive legionnaire came through, tumbling over the bed and into his side.

The two men flailed to the floor together, grunting as splintered wood fell like rain in the little room. Valerius hit the ground first, but he was able to kick his lower body up in continuation of the legionnaire’s momentum, sending the far bigger man hurtling against the barred door. The assassin then rolled quickly, recovering his balance even as the dazed legionnaire scrambled to get his feet under him and began pawing for the gladius at his side.

Valerius came forward at him, knife ready in his grip, but before he could strike he screamed and buckled to one knee as Caesarion jammed his little wooden blade into the soft flesh at the back of his right leg. The assassin swung his arm back at the boy instinctively, catching him above the eye with the butt of his knife, sending him sprawling.

Gritting his teeth against the pain, Valerius turned back around in time to see the big legionnaire draw an arm back and forward, pushing a gladius into his belly, just below his rib cage. Gasping against the cold steel in his gut, the assassin still tried to swing his knife, but the legionnaire held fast to his sword with strong hands, and his thick arms flexed as he twisted it in his grip, scratching the blade into bone. Valerius groaned, strained, then dropped his weapon and sank against the killing stroke, watching, helpless and gasping in broken breaths, as the legionnaire stood, wincing from wounds of his own, and pushed forward until the assassin collapsed to his back.

For a few short gasps, Valerius could see nothing but the ceiling, and then the legionnaire returned into his view. The assassin stared in paralyzed shock as the bigger man painfully lifted a foot and planted it on his chest. Valerius heard a crunch that he strangely could not feel as the foot pressed down and the gladius was pulled free with a jerk of the legionnaire’s burly arms. Thick warmth washed over the assassin’s chest. Then the legionnaire was gone, limping over him and out of view.

“Caesarion,” Valerius heard the man say somewhere over his head. “You hurt?”

The child was crying now, and he heard the flex of leather and a grunt.

“There, there,” the legionnaire was saying. “All’s well, my boy. All’s well. You’re a brave lad.”

Valerius was having a hard time focusing now, but he saw the legionnaire come back into view. With an effort, Valerius turned his head to follow the man as he made his way toward the heavy door, holding the sobbing boy in one massive arm. Someone was pounding on the door—the assassin absently wondered how long that had been going on—and the legionnaire shifted the boy to his hip so he could unbolt it.

The door swung open to a crowded hall. There was a second legionnaire, smaller than the first, who must have been doing the pounding. Mark Antony was beside him, holding back a weeping, panic-stricken Cleopatra. And among the faces gathered behind them he saw Didymus, his Greek complexion gone pale with terror.

“Caesarion!” Cleopatra shouted, rushing forward to take the boy from the bigger legionnaire’s arms. By the gods, Valerius suddenly thought, she truly was beautiful. He’d heard talk of the queen’s beauty, and certainly from afar she had been remarkable enough for him to half-believe the talk that she was part-goddess herself, but seeing her up close he saw the honest truth: she was a woman of flesh and blood, a mother with fears and hopes. And also perhaps the most beautiful creature he’d ever seen.

The smaller legionnaire came forward, too, offering a shoulder to his injured comrade after he handed over the boy, but Antony pushed past them all to kneel before Valerius, filling his fading world with a flushed face and the scents of stale wine. “Who hired you?” the general demanded. His thick fingers rooted in the assassin’s tunic, causing the room to shift and bringing Antony’s face even closer. “Who let you in?”

Valerius looked to the Greek tutor, but when he tried to speak it came out as a wet cough. He felt an odd satisfaction to see flecks of red appear on Antony’s face. He tried to smile but wasn’t sure if the muscles of his face obeyed his mind’s command.

“Bah!” Antony said, releasing his grip. The assassin’s world unfocused, shook, then came back into clarity. He saw that Antony was standing now, surveying the room. “How’d you get to the window so quickly, Pullo?”

“Broke through the room next door, sir.” The battered legionnaire flicked his eyes to Cleopatra in her shift, and he bowed slightly. “Apologies, my lady.”

Cleopatra, looking up from stroking her boy’s head, seemed to have gathered control of herself. “No apologies, legionnaire,” she replied. “I owe you thanks.”

Valerius was aware of their voices receding, as if they were moving farther and farther away. It occurred to him that he was dying, a sudden, strange, and fearful thought. He felt his mind bucking and straining against the realization, clamoring to fight on, but his body did little more than tremble in an awkward breath. Even as that part of his mind screamed, another part of him observed his life passing with disinterest. He’d seen this kind of death before, where the blade cut the spine. Less common than the quivering horrors. Strange to experience it now.

“This is the second time I find myself in your debt, Titus Pullo,” Cleopatra was saying. Her eyes moved to take in the smaller legionnaire, on whose shoulder the big man now leaned. “And you, Lucius Vorenus.”

Through a growing fog of shadow the assassin watched as Antony looked to the two men for explanation. Pullo seemed to blush, and Vorenus in turn gave a shy smile before he spoke: “We brought the lady back to Alexandria before the siege, sir. Before she met Caesar. Was nothing.”

“I see,” Antony said gruffly. The room was almost gone now, and the general’s words were only a distant whisper as he advised the queen to return to Alexandria.

But Valerius was no longer listening. He was thinking instead of the faces of the dead, of the many shades that would greet him upon the other side. He thought of their anger, of their unslakable thirst for vengeance.

And then the voices in the room faded at last into a still silence, and Valerius saw light—clean, white light—before his eyes. He heard a gentle wind, the sound of water upon a sand-lined shore. The sun shone. Children sang. All times became one time. Valerius reached for his mother’s hand. He sat crying in an empty room. He lived. He died. He stood before the throne. And then darkness, an impenetrable and unquenchable black, rose up like a wave and overwhelmed all.

 

1

A WEAPON OF MANY GODS

NUMIDIA, 32 BCE

Standing at the craggy edge of a ridge that stabbed out into the stormy Mediterranean like a finger pointing north out of Africa—toward Europe, toward Rome—Juba frowned. The last thing the sixteen-year-old wanted to do was to resort to torture.

Sure, he’d read enough about the dark arts of physical pain to be reasonably certain how to go about them. One privilege of being an adopted son of Julius Caesar, after all, had been the possibility of an education bounded only by his own thirsty mind. By the time he’d left Rome a year ago, a tutor had proudly proclaimed him one of the most widely read men in the city—and that was before the old scrolls and tomes Juba had encountered during these many months across the sea in Africa.

Still, the idea of using violence to attain what he wanted didn’t appeal to him. He doubted that information wrought from torture could really be of much use. It would be too conflicted. And even more than that, it didn’t seem right. It didn’t seem, well, Roman.

A hard wind kicked up the cliff-side, bringing with it the smell of brine from the churning waters far below. Gazing down at his arms after the stinging mist had passed over him, Juba noted the little pale droplets clinging to his dark skin. The irony of it further clouded his brooding mind. I’m no Roman, he thought. I’m a Numidian.

Juba heard the sound of someone moving hesitantly down along the narrow, broken path behind him. Even without turning, he could tell it was Quintus. The slave disliked heights. Always had. And now that the years had brought gray to his temples and long lines to his face, loyal Quintus truly hated them. “Yes?” Juba asked.

“It’s Laenas, sir. I think he’s … well, growing impatient with the priest. I fear something rash.”

Juba nodded. He’d expected as much when he’d left them alone in the old temple. Scar-faced Laenas had proven, time and time again during this past year, that he could be counted on for only two things: to desire coin and to despise those who stood in the way of his getting it. Since Juba had promised him thirty silver denarii if they got the information they were seeking from the Numidian priest, he was bound to be impatient.

Juba turned back from the salty, whipping wind, saw that Quintus was huddled as close to a nearby boulder as he could manage. Despite his own gloomy thoughts, Juba couldn’t help but smile at the old slave. Assigned to care for him when he was still just a child living in Caesar’s villa, Quintus had grown to be more a father to him than Julius had ever been.

“Very well,” Juba said, stepping forward to help his slave back up the path toward the temple. “Let’s hope he’s willing to talk now.”

 

Cut back into the earth, the old temple dedicated to the pagan goddess Astarte appeared from the outside to be little more than a weather-beaten cluster of stones clinging to the cliffs just below the crest of the bare ridgeline. Quiet. Isolated. Just the sort of place to hide the secrets of ancient gods.

Juba ducked through the clanking wooden door, grateful to be out of the wind and into the relative warmth of the dark, windowless interior. Quintus was quick to follow, the release of his breath signaling his additional relief at being off the precipices outside. “They’re still in the back,” the slave whispered.

Juba moved quickly through the small, bare antechamber and then through a thick drape into the lamp-lit altar room beyond, its air filled with the heavy scents of spiced incense and moist loam. At its head sat a low stone firepit filled with ash and bones. Behind it, atop a rough-hewn wooden pillar blackened by the fire, sat a small clay statue of a woman, only a little taller than his forearm, perched on a throne and holding a bowl beneath her more than ample breasts. Juba had read of such figurines in his books. It was said that the power of the fertility goddess—and her associated priest, of course—could be seen in the miraculous leaking of milk from the statue, flowing down from her breasts into the bowl.

Juba had studied this particular statue carefully earlier in the day, while they waited for the priest to return from the well in the village. He’d had no trouble finding the small holes bored through the clay nipples into the hollow of her body. He’d even found some flecks of the soft wax plugs that the priest had used to keep her breasts from leaking until the sacrifice burning in the altar below her had melted them.

So much for this god, he’d thought.

Juba walked past her now, up the three worn steps of the altar’s stone dais, and then down another set of steeper, more roughly hewn steps that led to a low doorway against the back wall. Pushing through the drape there, he entered the last chamber.

The old priest of Astarte, still bound to his simple stool, had fallen over to the damp earthen floor. His nose was running with blood that glistened wetly in the flickering lamplight, and the short but stout Laenas was straddling him, hunched over at the waist, his fist raised for another strike.

“That’s enough,” Juba said, trying to sound strong, and glad to hear that his voice didn’t crack.

Laenas grunted his assent and stood. Juba noticed now that his other hand had been holding a knife, which he quickly slipped back into the folds of his clothing. Its edge did not yet appear wet. “We was just talking,” Laenas said over his shoulder.

The priest coughed loudly, a half-retching sound from his gut, and then spat into the dark dirt. Juba had always found it difficult to judge the age of those men older than him, a problem compounded here by the leather-tanned skin of a native Numidian: though it was, Juba could never forget, the tone of his own flesh, it nevertheless appeared foreign to his sight. Still, from the man’s wrinkled face, his sparse, white hair, and his thick beard, Juba had guessed him to be in perhaps his seventies, even if his ability to withstand threat—and to manage the long hike to the village for water and supplies—spoke of a younger man, at least in spirit. Looking at him, Juba felt a pang of pity, but not remorse. “Help him up,” he said.

Laenas grunted again—the typical depth of his speech—and then stepped around to lift the priest and his stool back into position. It seemed no more difficult for the stout little man than hoisting a sack of wheat. As the old man was lifted upright, Juba saw again the strange symbol on the pendant hanging around his neck: a triangle inscribed, point down, upon a perfect circle. He had seen similar pendants around the necks of some of the men whose information had led him here.

“I’m sorry for that,” Juba said, measuring out his words, concentrating on keeping his back straight, his chin high. “We’re all just very anxious to hear what you have to say. Laenas here most of all.”

The priest sputtered, his mouth moving, but he said nothing.

Juba sighed and walked over to one of the priest’s rickety tables. It had been unceremoniously swept clean, the plates and parchment tumbled to the floor. In their place sat a bundle of bound canvas—substantially bigger, Juba noted with some amusement, than the statue of Astarte in the hall. Juba walked to it and raised his hand to touch the rough cloth, feeling the outline of the broken wooden staff beneath. Where the staff met the wider metal head, the cloth felt warm, and he snatched his fingers away with a start. He swallowed hard, glad his back was turned to the other men in the little room. “Let’s start simple,” he said, trying to calm his heartbeat. “This staff. This … trident. How did it come to be here? The priests who pointed me here say it’s the Trident of Neptune—or Poseidon, if you prefer. Is that true?”

When the priest said nothing, Juba turned around and saw that he was shaking his head weakly. Standing behind him, Laenas’ face appeared to flush, the wide scar across his right cheek a darkening purple in the gloom.

“It’s strange, you know,” Juba continued, looking back toward the bundle and resisting the urge to touch it this time. “An artifact of the old Greek and Roman gods, here in this place, in the possession of a priest of Astarte. I wonder … is there something to the idea that Astarte is the same goddess as the Greek Aphrodite, the Roman Venus?”

“I’ll not help Rome,” the old man croaked.

Juba heard only the briefest rush of movement before the priest gasped, a sound that reminded the young man of a cook tenderizing meat. Juba spun around and saw the old man slumped sideways, grimacing. “Laenas!” he cried out, his voice cracking with the sudden start.

The rugged Roman straightened, his fist coming back from the priest’s side and something like a smirk momentarily passing over his face. “Wasn’t having him spitting about Rome,” he said.

As if in reply, the priest did, in fact, cough and spit. The blood ran dark streaks into his matted beard.

Whatever else Juba might have expected the priest to utter then—that the Trident wasn’t real, that the gods weren’t real, maybe that he had money hidden away under a rock somewhere—it wasn’t what the old man finally managed to say. “You’ve your father’s eyes.”

Juba stared at him, unblinking, his mind and heart racing. The old man held his gaze for a long moment before shutting his own eyes in a grimace of pain. Juba still stared at him, feeling the attention of Quintus and Laenas upon him even as he dared not look at them.

“Lord Juba—” Quintus started.

“Leave us,” Juba commanded, cutting off the slave. He flicked his gaze at Laenas just long enough to note the familiar look of disdain on the rough man’s face, the same twist of jealousy and disgust he’d seen so often while growing up in Rome as the foreign-born adopted son of Caesar. “Both of you.”

“My lord, I—” Quintus said.

Juba silenced him with a wave of his hand. “I said go. Now.”

“Very well,” Quintus said, bowing deep as he backed toward the doorway. Laenas followed with a predictably dissatisfied grunt.

In seconds, Juba stood alone in the little room with the sagging priest. He took long, deep breaths to steady himself. “You speak the language of Rome well for a Numidian,” he said when the sounds of Laenas and Quintus had grown faint.

The old priest licked his lips and swallowed before responding. “I was a slave to Rome, too, once.”

“What’s your name?”

“Syphax,” the old priest said.

“So you knew my father.”

Syphax nodded slowly. “I knew the king, yes.”

The king, Juba thought. Could it truly be that the old priest, hidden away out here on this lonesome spit of land, was a loyalist to the royal family of Numidia? The lineage of which he alone remained?

“I saw him die,” Syphax said.

“What?”

The old priest coughed twice painfully before he regained his composure. “Saw him die on the blade of my master, Marcus Petreius.”

Juba staggered backward into the ragged table behind him as if physically struck by the sheer weight of memory and history that flooded into his mind. He’d read the books, sought out every shred of detail he could find on his real father’s inglorious end. After Caesar had defeated the Numidian army at Thapsus, Juba’s father had fled with the general Petreius, only to be trapped. The histories spoke of how the two men dueled to the death, opting for an honorable end rather than the wrath of Caesar and the horrible, dishonorable Triumph that he would have put them through back in Rome—the Triumph that had thus fallen to his infant son, Prince Juba, first seized and then later adopted by the very man who’d driven his royal father to such a doom.

“No,” Juba managed to say. It had only been two months since Juba had knelt, at last, beside the unmarked grave of the true father Caesar had never let him know. His hands gripped the rough wood of the table at his back. “You cannot have.”

“I watched them fight at the end,” Syphax said. There was no pride in his voice. No power. Only old sorrow. “Petreius was still alive when it was done. As my duty, I ran a blade into his heart.”

Juba closed his eyes, tried to imagine the scene as he had so many times in his young life. As ever, his father’s face was a blur. Only the darkness of his skin was familiar. But he could picture a younger Syphax there, too, waiting, with a shined and sharpened sword, for either of them to fall. “Yet here you live,” Juba said, opening his eyelids to glare fiercely at the priest. “A slave … you killed your master but didn’t follow him.”

The priest’s jaw quivered, his eyes red and sunk deep into tired sockets. “You’re right. I didn’t. I promised to fall upon my own sword after it was done. Promised them both. But I didn’t.”

Juba was just Roman enough to know the depth of Syphax’s dishonor on principle. He was just Numidian enough to think the offense against his true father’s memory worthy of death. And he was just young enough to act on the impulse of rage that washed over him.

He opened his mouth to call for Laenas.

“But for good reason, Juba!” Syphax cried out in a ragged voice. “I couldn’t let them get it. I couldn’t!”

The old priest’s eyes had a trance-like glaze now, riveted on the bundle of cloth on the table. Juba, despite his rage, decided not to call Laenas just yet. “Tell me of it,” he said. “Tell me everything.”

 

Juba stepped around the altar to Astarte, canvas bundle under his arm, and found Quintus and Laenas in the temple’s main room, sitting on one of the primitive stone benches. The old slave looked anxious. Laenas just looked sullen. Juba ignored them both for now, walking past them and through the antechamber out into the wind and the smells of the sea, his head too full of thoughts to speak just yet.

Syphax had indeed told him all that he knew. Juba was certain of that. The old man’s despair was too great to hold back to the son and heir of Numidia, especially once he knew the secret Juba had kept from everyone but Quintus: that he hated Rome, that he hated his adopted father. He hated them for his real father’s death. For the disgrace of the Triumph that was his earliest memory. For everything that Rome had done to his country.

Syphax had told him everything then. He’d told him far more than he could ever have imagined.

The Trident in his hands was indeed the weapon of gods. Poseidon. Neptune. But more than that, it was a weapon of the Jews, whose strange religion Juba knew little about—a fact he intended to remedy as soon as possible with the help of every book he could get his hands on.

And still more: there was an even greater weapon of the gods out there to be found, a weapon of the Jews that might give him the power to accomplish the revenge he’d long hoped to achieve. An ark.

The wooden door to the temple squeaked open and shut. Quintus tentatively shuffled up behind him. “Juba?”

The sixteen-year-old focused his eyes on the distant horizon, where the darkening sea met the darkening sky. Lightning flashed there, silent but threatening.

Syphax didn’t have all the answers, but the old priest knew who did. “Thoth knows,” he’d said, again and again. The source of the Trident’s power, the nature of its strange black stone, the whereabouts of the wondrous ark … Thoth knows.

At first, Juba had thought it was no answer at all. Thoth was an Egyptian god, like the Roman Mercury, a figure that moved between the world of gods and the world of men. A deity of so many faces he seemed to be everything and nothing all at once: god of magic and medicine, god of the dead, god of the moon, god of writing and wisdom, even the founder of civilization itself.

Thoth would naturally know the answers to questions. Yet Syphax had spoken with a pragmatic earnestness, as if Juba could easily get information from Thoth.

“So where is Thoth?” Juba had asked the priest of Astarte.

And, after some final persuasion, Syphax had answered: “Thoth was in Sais.”

Sais, Juba knew, was the cult center for the goddess Neith, the Egyptian counterpart of Astarte, which explained the priest’s knowledge. Perhaps it even explained how he’d come to have the Trident. Then he’d caught the nuance in the priest’s words. “Was?”

The old priest had smiled grimly, his pale teeth smeared with red. “The Scrolls are in Alexandria.”

The truth at last. It wasn’t Thoth himself who had the answers, but the legendary Scrolls of Thoth, in which all knowledge, it was said, could be found. And the Scrolls were in Egypt, in the Great Library. Find them and he’d have the power, and the vengeance, that he sought.

“Juba?”

The lightning pulsed again, and beyond the wind and the breaking of waves Juba heard a quiet rumble. Was it from the earlier flashes? Or was it the deep of the sea, calling out for its master? Juba swallowed hard, resisting the temptation to touch the metal head of the Trident in its canvas bundle, to see if it was warmer now. Instead he took a deep breath to clear his mind, to focus on the tasks immediately at hand. He needed to do more research. More than that, he needed money. Getting the Scrolls of Thoth from the Great Library and destroying Rome wasn’t going to come cheap, after all, with or without a weapon of the gods. And there was surely no better time to strike than now, with war between Rome and Alexandria threatening to turn the world to chaos.

“We’re returning to Rome,” he said over his shoulder. “As soon as possible. There are things I need to do there.”

“Of course,” Quintus said, his voice uncertain. “Laenas wants to know, sir, what about the priest?”

Juba blinked away the beads of salty water that were starting to cling to his eyelashes. What to do about the priest? He was a loyal Numidian, after all, one of the very people Juba was going to save from Rome. Yet he’d abandoned the promise made to Juba’s father, no matter his reasons. And, truth be told, he knew far too many things that were best kept secret, even if Juba didn’t yet know the fullness of his course. Viewed through the lens of logic, the decision was easy, even if saying it was hard. Juba wondered if his Numidian father had ever felt the same. No doubt his adopted Roman one never had. “Tell Laenas to kill him,” he finally managed to say. As the words escaped his lips Juba knew for certain that he would not sleep well this night. He wondered how he would ever sleep soundly again. “Tell him he’ll get his thirty coins if he does it quickly.”

Quintus hesitated for a moment, a slight stammer his only response. Then Juba heard the sound of the temple door opening and closing again, leaving him alone.

Well, perhaps not alone, Juba corrected himself, watching the approaching storm and wondering whether the gods were real.

Copyright © 2015 by Michael Livingston

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The Temples of the Ark by Michael Livingston

Presenting The Temples of the Ark, a brand new story from Michael Livingston, set in the world of his series, The Shards of Heaven. Michael’s latest novel, The Gates of Hell, will be available November 15th.

I do not know whether there are gods, but there ought to be.
 Diogenes of Sinope

IT’S STILL DARK when I awake in the arms of the conqueror. The loose curls of his tawny hair have grown longer in Egypt, and they entangle with mine in a soft mat beneath my cheek, a few stray strands gently waving with my breath. The little oil lamp in the corner of the tent sets a faint glow against the shadows, and I smile at the truth of that feeble light. For all his rage upon the field, for all that he has walked the earth from Greece to Persia as a mighty king and killer of men, my strong-shouldered lover is afraid of the dark.

He stirs in his sleep, the corded muscles of his arm around me flexing and beginning to lift. I know the motion. I’ve felt it enough over the years. His mind and body at peace, he is turning away now, rolling to his side to face the outer wall of the tent. To look away from me.

That turned back bothered me when I was younger. I thought that perhaps it meant he was disappointed in me, ashamed of us.

Only later did I come to realize how it was his secret challenge to the world. In his sleep, in this weakest of times, he would expose his broad, naked back to the door, an invitation, a ready target to any who might wish the conqueror harm. And every night he wasn’t killed in his sleep would mean another night with the full trust of the men who’d sworn to follow him to the ends of the earth.

Which meant, of course, that he trusted me most of all.

I lift my weight off of him, giving him space as he sighs over to his side. His back shines in the dim light, and it casts the thick scar upon his shoulder into sharp relief. Only a few months since he took the spear-wound at Gazza and already it’s fully healed, as if it is years old.

One more sign of his divine birth, many think. One more proof.

None of them know, as I do, the truth. He’s as human as any other man. Divinity isn’t how the few blows that ever reach him heal with seemingly inhuman speed. Ichor doesn’t run through his veins, doesn’t explain why nothing can slow the onslaught when he dons his armor and the battle-rage boils over him, why he can press ever forward, scything men like dry wheat.

He doesn’t move as I slip free of the sheets and pull my simple linen tunic over my head. From a stool nearby I grab the wool cloak that’s traveled with me since I lost mine in Persia. Though the desert will be miserably hot in a few hours, it is cold before the dawn. I sit on the stool to bind my sandals, take one last look at the beautiful back of the sleeping king, and then I step quietly out of the tent and into a night filled with stars.

“Lord Hephaestion,” says the guard at the side of the flap, coming to attention.

For a few moments I can’t see him in the changed light, but I know the voice, just as I know the men assigned to keep Alexander safe. “Eustathios,” I say, acknowledging the big, reliable man who drew the duty this night.

“Couldn’t sleep, sir?”

“Not really. Don’t think I’ve slept well in Egypt yet.” I yawn, smiling as my body speaks its own truth. The clear desert air is indeed chilly, but the crispness of it feels good in my lungs, like cold water on sore limbs. It tastes of slowing fires.

“Me, neither,” Eustathios agrees. “It’s the sticking sand that does it. I’ve got Egypt between my toes. And by the gods it’s forever itching in my crotch.”

I grin as I shake my head mournfully, then stretch. I look up, tracing constellations in the great dome of sky. I did manage a few hours of rest, I can see. A good respite, but nothing like we need, nothing like what we’d get back home. “Can’t get out of this desert fast enough,” I say.

There’s silence for a few seconds. I’m still gazing at the wide stretch of stars, but I can feel him looking at me.

“You want to ask me something, Eustathios.”

He chews on his thought for a bit longer before answering. “Did the Oracle really say that he’s the son of God?”

The Oracle. The past few days since we left the oasis it’s been on everyone’s mind. Alexander and I have both known it. But what to say?

I shrug into the expanse. “Oracles never really say anything, Eustathios. It’s all riddles and maybes and whatever you want to make of it.”

“The men are saying it’s true, though. The Oracle confirmed it. And after Gazza, well . . .”

Gazza. The spear. That scar. It would have killed me — would have killed any other man — but Alexander had only switched hands on his blade and fought on, like a lion in the midst of the chaos. All the men had marveled at it.

Months before, counsellors had advised against the king leading such charges personally, but Alexander had always understood his men. They fought more bravely with him by their sides. And when they died — which so many did — they died more honorably.

“And what danger?” Alexander had once laughed. “No blow from a man can kill the son of a god.”

It had been a joke back then. We’d all laughed about it. By the stars, we’d grown up with Alexander. We’d seen him shit. He wasn’t a god, but he did have a god’s own luck. It was easy enough to joke that no mortal could kill him.

Now, after Gazza, after this Oracle, so many were like Eustathios, wondering if the joke had been truth after all.

I want to tell them all how preposterous it is. I want to tell them that I know the truth of who Alexander is, how he has become what he has become. No matter what some drugged desert hermit says, a man isn’t a god. Gazza didn’t change that. The Oracle didn’t change that.

But I know, too, the sacrifice that so many are willing to make for Alexander the man, how much he’s managed to achieve. What more could be done with Alexander the god? Could he conquer the world, bring peace after war?

“Alexander is of hearty stock,” I finally say to Eustathios. “You remember his father. Is that not enough to explain Gazza?”

“I saw the blow, Lord Hephaestion. I could not have survived it.”

“Nor could I.”

“So do you believe it?”

The stars, I keep thinking. They may put my friend there in the end. “Maybe the gods are what we make of ourselves,” I wonder aloud. “Maybe the question isn’t whether Alexander is a god, but whether the gods are men like Alexander.”

I look back to him, genuinely interested in the big man’s reply, but the sound of a horse pounding the earth turns us both away. Down the line of tents, we see the rider coming, his face flashing red as he passes the night fires.

“Hippolytos,” Eustathios whispers as the rider gets near enough to recognize. “One of the scouts.”

We walk forward from the tent to meet him, silently agreeing to move the noise of the horse and rider farther from the sleeping conqueror.

Hippolytos pulls up short in a rush of sand and dismounts with speed, saluting at almost the same moment he touches the sandy earth. “Lord Hephaestion,” he pants.

“Is it the Persians?” Eustathios speaks before I can, but it’s the very question that’s on my mind. The Persian governor of Egypt submitted to Alexander almost the moment that he crossed the border, but Masistes, one of the Persian generals, had raised a small force from the farther reaches of the Nile, and they were refusing to bow to Greek authority. Our scouts were sure Masistes was tracking us as we crossed into the desert, but we’d never managed to confirm the location or the size of his army.

The young man shakes his head as he catches his breath. “Nubians,” he says. “Tens of thousands strong.”

 

TALL ATOP HIS HORSE, Alexander shines in the brightness of the desert sun, his bronze breastplate glimmering in the waves of heat that shimmer up from the sands like phantom snakes. He smiles as I ride up from the right wing of our army. “All is well, Heph?”

I nod, reining into position beside him. We crossed into Egypt with 30,000 men. Some we left in the cities of the Nile, but far more were today working upon the edge of the sea, laying the foundations for a new city that would bear Alexander’s name. Looking out at the stretching expanse of exotic men that is arrayed against us — a sea of color and noise that undulates in its lines like pent-up waves ready to surge free — I find myself wishing we had those far away comrades with us again.

For a fifth time this morning, I count banners. I multiply them, and I know that even still we would be outnumbered.

But at least the odds might be improved.

“I don’t like the heat,” Alexander says in an off-hand voice, as if this is just another day, just another duty to be performed. “Though I must say I’ve never slept better.”

Eustathios, whose horse is just behind mine, chuckles, and several other men follow suit.

“I’m counting it four to one,” says one of the generals to Alexander’s other side. “Maybe five.”

It isn’t a tremor of fear, merely a statement of fact. We’ve fought at short odds before, and it has mattered little. The Thracians, the Syrians, the Persians . . . no matter their numbers, none had stood against the power of our Macedonian arms. So many had never seen anything like our core phalanx and our agile sweeps of cavalry.

Tactics, as Alexander once said, make up for many numbers.

But, it occurs to me, we’ve never seen anything like the Nubians before. What tactics would they have?

“They look like an army of lions,” another man says.

It’s true. Many of them wear leather armor over their dark-skin — little different, it appears, from what so many of our own men are wearing — but over this they have sashes of color, bands of fur. Here and there are men who seem to wear nearly whole skins of wild beasts.  I wonder if they are officers.

“It is their leaders who matter,” Alexander muses. “I’d rather face an army of lions led by sheep than an army of sheep led by lions.”

The fact that he is wearing a golden helm in the form of a lion’s head — like Hercules wearing the skin of the Nemean Lion — goes unspoken. No man among us doubts that ours is an army of lions led by a lion who might well be a god.

I purposely keep from looking at that gleaming breastplate he also wears, though I’m presently aware of what it means for our enemies that he is wearing it. I’ve seen the rage it burns through him. I’ve seen the power and the possibility.

“Riders coming out,” Eustathios says.

Beyond the plain of sand between our armies, I see it, too: a small contingent has broken away from the Nubian lines. Four people are moving forward on resplendent camels, metal flashing golden from their flanks. They are moving at a slow pace, with four men surrounding them on foot, each holding aloft a long pole. A dark silken cloth is held taut between them, allowing the riders to remain in shaded comfort.

“Why don’t we have that?” Eustathios asks.

“You know why,” Alexander replies.

Eustathios stammers for a moment, clearly at a loss, and the conqueror looks to me with a smile.

“Because they couldn’t keep up,” I say.

Alexander lets out a light laugh. “Hephaestion,” he says, “my second self. Shall we?”

Without waiting for a reply, the king kicks his horse forward to meet the Nubian emissaries, and I’m left to follow, to chase him through the hot Egyptian sands.

 

I’VE KNOWN HIM since we were children. I’ve laughed with him. I’ve loved with him. I’ve fought with him and I’ve shed blood with him. And it occurs to me, as we come up to where the Nubian emissaries on camelback await us in their artificial shade, that I have never seen him so relaxed as he has been these past few days.

“One soul in two bodies,” Aristotle once said, chiding us for one of the many conjoined tricks we played upon our tutor. True enough in its way, I suppose. He and I are of one mind and one purpose. I am his right hand, acting his will without the awareness of his thought. I am, as he so often says, his second self.

But there is this difference between us: I hate this country.

In part it’s the damnable sand, of course. The winds raise it up like dust, push it in great billowing clouds that scratch like insects at our eyes, blinding us as they blot out the sun and erase our tracks. It’s a monstrous beast, this desert, and it wants to consume us.

Even when it’s not raised in storm, the sand simply clings to everything. It grinds in the teeth, grates in the sheets, and I simply cannot imagine how anyone can sleep at peace with it.

But more than that I feel an uneasiness in the air here. A tension in the foreign, hostile landscape. It is as if the whole of it is waiting, and I do not want to know what for.

Yet Alexander has welcomed it into his heart. He has founded what will be his greatest city here: his Alexandria, drawn up from the earth on the edge of the sea. And he has taken us a thousand miles across this desert to visit its Oracle, to learn that he is the son of god.  He says he loves this land. And he wasn’t kidding when he said he hasn’t slept better. I should know.

His second self I may be, but I cannot understand these things. And I cannot help but wonder if this day is the day my foreboding comes to pass.

The four emissaries waiting for us could not be more different from what I might have expected at a distance. For one thing, only three of them are dark-skinned Nubians. The two of these at the center of the four, judging from their bejeweled and gilded regal clothes and high bearing, are surely the king and the queen of their country up the Nile. They are a young couple, but they do not seem troubled by inexperience or worry. Alexander and I have seen enough kings to know fear on sight, and this king and queen have nothing of it. They are as relaxed as Alexander himself, which is an accomplishment that immediately earns my respect.

A third rider, also Nubian, is on the left of the king. He wears fine cloth, and he holds a kind of scepter that I assume conveys rank of some kind, but he is clearly of much lesser status than the royalty in the party. An interpreter, I imagine. Or some kind of holy man.

As strange as they all are to my foreign eyes, the fourth rider is strange for his familiarity. A much older man, he has the paler skin of the people of the Levant. And he is wearing only the simplest of hooded desert robes. His nervousness only emphasizes how entirely out of place he is in the gathering.

Alexander and I stop our horses just outside the square of their shade. His steed shakes its mane against the heat, the metal of its harness shaking loudly in the stillness. He steadies it with a pat along its neck, then he reaches up to unclasp his golden lion helm, shaking out his hair. I follow suit, and we stare at the emissaries.

The Nubian king leans over to the woman and whispers something. She smiles in reply, her teeth a shocking white contrast to her dark skin. Then she nods.

The man nods, too, and the third Nubian speaks. “Do you speak Persian?” he asks.

Even before our defeat of Darius, both Alexander and I had tried to learn something of the language of those whom we intended to conquer and rule, but war had made our lessons scattered and ineffective. Some of our comrades, like Peucestas, had made remarkable headway, but we ourselves knew the language no better than children. Perhaps worse. “We know some,” I answer brokenly. “Do you speak Greek?”

“Better than your Persian apparently,” the king of Nubia says in rough Greek.

The interpreter looks from his king to the conqueror to me with wide eyes, clearly worried that there has been a breach in etiquette. But Alexander is smiling, and I shrug and smile, too. “So it seems indeed.”

“Ah … yes.” The interpreter stammers for a moment, but he begins to settle into a common Greek. He lifts his scepter in a gesture that clearly has import within their culture. “The qore of Kush, Nastasen, and the kandake, Sakhmakh, greet you, Alexander, conqueror of many.”

I watch as Alexander gives the king and queen the slightest of bows in turn. “I am Alexander of Macedon, king of Greece and king of all Asia,” he says, speaking relatively slowly so that the interpreter can translate his words into the Nubian tongue for the others. “I have taken this land of Egypt by arms and assent, and I have been rightfully declared by its Oracle to be its king. This is my land, and I will defend it.”

“Their majesties do not desire war,” the interpreter says after they reply in their tongue.

Alexander cracks his neck. “War there will be if you stay.”

The qore, Nastasen, laughs lightly, and he says something to his wife in Nubian that makes her smile, too, before he addresses the interpreter. “Numbers are on our side,” the man translates.

“And I am Alexander.”

“So you are,” Nastasen says in his own Greek.

For a full half-minute the two men simply stare at one another. The kandake — the queen — is staring at Alexander, too, but her eyes move more in a look of judgment, like a merchant appraising goods. It is . . . fascinating, I think, that she might think herself in a position to judge such a man as my friend.

Not wanting to stare at her myself, I find myself turning to look at the fourth man, the lighter skinned man. Alone among the many tens of thousands on the plain — alone except for me — he is not looking at Alexander. Not at the man, anyway. As I watch him I can see that he’s looking at the conqueror’s armor, at the gleaming bronze of the breastplate that Alexander alone is allowed to handle. And he is staring most especially, I realize with mounting horror, at the blacker-than-black stone that is locked into its center. He is staring at the thing that has made my friend a god, and he is smiling.

“As their majesties have said,” the interpreter is saying, “there is no desire for war here.”

“Your army speaks otherwise,” Alexander replies, casually leaning in his saddle to look past them at the great masses. The Nubian warriors are chanting and rocking in a frenetic anxiety. “And it seems to think otherwise.”

“The army will stay or go as the qore wishes,” the interpreter says. “He felt it was necessary for their protection.”

“From what?”

“From you, Alexander king.”

“I have no wish to conquer the land of Kush or the Nubian people. I came for Egypt. I will return to Persia from here.”

“It is not your armies we fear.”

“Then what?”

This time it is not one of the Nubians who replies. It is the fourth man, who has at last stopped staring at Alexander’s armor. “Your rage, god among men.”

Alexander turns to him, his eyes narrowing. “My what?”

“Your rage,” the man repeats, and he nods toward the breastplate. “It sits on you even now as a flame ready to alight.”

No one but myself knows the secret of what we found in the sanctuary of Athena at Delphi. No one else could be trusted. So when Alexander turns his eyes in my direction, I have nothing to give him but my own wide-eyed bewilderment.

“We know something of what you carry,” Sakhmakh says through the interpreter.

“What do you think you know?”

“We know little,” she continues. “But our friend here knows much. And he has told us enough to understand.”

“What do you want?” I ask.

Nastasen nods at me, a subtle gesture of respect. “What we want, Lord Hephaestion, is a favor from the great king, Alexander.”

“A favor?” Alexander asks.

“We want to give you a gift,” Sakhmakh says. “A gift that must never be used. A treasure that must always be protected, that perhaps only you can protect.”

Alexander and I exchange another glance, and then I spread my arm across the sand before us.

“No,” Sakhmakh continues. “We cannot give it to you here. We dared not bring it. But we will take you to it.”

“Take us?” Alexander asks.

“Just you,” the kandake says. “And your companion, if you will. In good faith only myself and Terach will accompany you. Our armies will withdraw by other ways.”

The pale-skinned man smiles, and I assume he must be Terach. “Where?” I ask.

“Not far from here is the Way of Forty Days,” Sakhmakh replies. “It is a path long-traveled between our country and the sea. It will speed our journey south, across the sands to the southern oasis. There is good water there, and good shade. From there you can travel north on the Way, or you can travel take a boat down the great river — however you wish. You can meet your army in Thebes, if that is your destination.”

I almost want to laugh, but I can see the serious look on Alexander’s face. He’s considering it.

“You wish for us to go with you,” I say, “among your people, surrounded by your thousands, back toward the heart of Kush? More of your army could be waiting for us.”

The Nubians listen and nod as the interpreter translates the words. “Our thousands,” Nastasen finally says, talking not to me but to the conqueror. “And you are Alexander. If we are right, if you have what we believe you have, do you think such numbers really matter?”

“The Aegis of Zeus protected Troy from all Greece,” Terach abruptly says, and he is once more looking at my friend’s breastplate. “I’m certain it will protect you from us, great son of Macedon.”

 

WE LEAVE THE NEXT DAY, after preparations are made for the journey, including the organization and direction of the army in our absence. Many of the men were shocked when Alexander announced that he and I would leave the army for a time and rejoin them in Thebes. More than a few, especially wary men like Eustathios, voiced concern for the king’s safety. But in the end none could stand up to Alexander’s fiery gaze.

As our final preparations were coming together, I learned that there was a rumor in the camp that he and I were journeying to yet another oracle. It had only been a matter of days since Alexander had walked alone into the presence of the Oracle at Siwa, and then, they said, he’d been declared a child of the gods. What more, the men whispered, would this new oracle bring?

I said nothing when I was asked about these rumors. I know too much.

As promised, only four of us have ridden into the desert together: myself and Alexander, the kandake of Kush, and Terach, who is, we have learned, from Jerusalem. We left an hour before dawn. No fanfare. Just a steady ride between the packing armies, headed west for the Way of Forty Days. Finding it, we turn south for the deeper desert.

Sakhmakh is unlike any queen I’ve ever met, and I can tell that Alexander feels likewise. She wears white linens, trimmed with gold, that drape over her shoulder and breast, bound about her waist with a beaded and jeweled sash. The gown is cut so loose that it moves in waves about her as she rides, and more than once I have found myself avoiding the hints it makes about the body beneath. Her skin, like her husband’s, is the color of rich cinnamon. It is dark against the brightness of the sands, yet in the light of the sun it seems to radiate an inner warmth. Without doubt she is beautiful in her way, but I have found that most queens are. No, it isn’t her beauty, exotic though it is, that makes her different.

She catches my eye — and Alexander’s too, no doubt — because of how free she seems. She sits as straight-backed as any Persian princess we have known, her head held high on her dark and slender neck, but there is an honest readiness to her smile, and an unbidden laughter in her dark eyes, that reminds me of someone entirely unbound by regal customs. She rides with a shocking comfort, seemingly as comfortable on her gilded camel as some of our Greek countrymen are on their steeds, I would dare to say. And perhaps strangest of all, she shows not the slightest concern for being alone in the desert with three men, one of whom is the conqueror of all Asia.

Sometimes, when I catch her looking at me and smiling, I wonder if she knows.

She also enjoys talking far more than I would have expected. Her Greek, we quickly learn, is far better than we had been led to believe in our initial meeting. She asks many questions about our travels, confirming and reconfirming the truth behind the stories that are told of the great Alexander. She is relentless in her pursuit of knowledge, I think, and Alexander seems glad to tell her all that she wishes to know. Her eyes are full of wonder when they talk, but it is not worship. I think he is glad for the difference.

Ahead of me, the kandake and Alexander are riding side by side on the Way of Forty Days. He is telling her of the siege of Tyre. The city was undefeatable, it had been said, because it was built upon an island, encircled by the sea. Siege engines could not be brought to bear upon its walls. My friend is smiling, telling her that he nevertheless broke them.

“How?” Sakhmakh asks. “Would you not need the engines?”

“Of course.”

“But you said the city was surrounded by water?”

“It was, yes. My men built a causeway to the city. It is no longer an island.”

I see her swallow hard, her eyes wide. Yes, I think, sending her my thoughts. Alexander bends even the earth to his will.

The Jew, Terach, has ridden toward a ridgeline of sand and rock ahead of us, and he calls out to the kandake to join him. She takes her leave of Alexander with a short bow, and then she drives her camel forward in the heated dust. As she leaves, Alexander pulls up rein until we can ride beside each other, he and I. Despite the heat, he is still wearing his bronze armor. He enjoys the company of the kandake, but not enough to trust her completely. He smiles over at me, and I realize it is the first time we’ve been alone since the coming of the Nubian army.

“Why are we going with them?” I ask.

“I think you know why, Heph. Because I need to know.”

“To know what it is they are offering?”

Alexander shrugs, a toss of his hair in the sun. “Or what it isn’t.”

I sigh. “You’ve more gold than Midas, more jewels than any man can dream of. What use is more treasure?”

He frowns for a moment, before a lightness strikes upon his face. “Do you remember when we were young and went to Corinth?” He smiles at his own memory. “Do you remember when we met Diogenes?

I lean back, smiling, too. “Of course I do. How could I forget? One of the most famous philosophers, living in his clay pot, as they used to call that little hovel. Aristotle warned us not to bother with Diogenes, but of course we took that as a challenge.”

Alexander laughs lightly. “So we did.”

“And there he was,” I say. “I remember you walked up and told him that you were the son of Philip of Macedon, the student of Aristotle, and that one day you would conquer all of Greece. You asked him if there was anything he would ask of you. Gods, I remember it as if it was yesterday morning. He blinked up at you, studying you, and then –“

Alexander’s voice cracks with feigned age. “‘Stand a little out of my sun.'”

I laugh, just as I laughed then. And I know that at some level, for all that has come upon us, he and I remain those two young men standing before old Diogenes.

Alexander laughs, too, but not for long. “When I say we’re going with them because I need to know, I guess it’s really because Diogenes was right. He saw the truth of me. He saw the truth of all of us. Glory fades, Heph. Life fades. We’re all mortal.”

I give him a sidelong look. “Maybe not all of us.”

Alexander the Great rolls his eyes. “Yes. Me, too, my friend. Whatever else this armor is, whatever else it does, it is no shield against time. Death will find me one way or another. Even Achilles had his heel.”

“Still doesn’t explain why we’re riding into the desert … riding, for all we know, into the waiting trap of an army. The Aegis of Zeus — if that’s what it is — may protect you, but it won’t protect me.”

Alexander reaches over to squeeze my shoulder. The grip is strong, and it lingers. “It is no trap. It’s a chance to know more, to understand more. About this armor, for certain, but also about us. About them.”

Ahead, Sakhmakh and Terach are conferring. The kandake looks from us to something below her on the ridge. She is smiling and laughing in the sun, and I can feel Alexander’s envy of her freedom.

“She is fascinating,” I say. “Did you see how easily she moved among her people as we prepared to depart? Like she was one of them.”

“A good leader must be,” Alexander says. He’s gazing at her, too.

I nod. It was the reason he fought in the lines, the reason for the Gazza spear that would have killed him if not for the power of the armor he wore. I think back to the conversation with Eustathios, and how the men thought of Alexander more and more as a god. “But surely a leader must be feared to be most obeyed,” I say.

“Obedience isn’t everything,” my friend replies. “I assure you I would far rather excel others in the knowledge of what is excellent than in the extent of my power and dominion.”

Sakhmakh is waving us up, but I feel Alexander’s eyes upon me. When I turn toward him I see that he is looking at me with a smile of genuine affection. I see, too, the wrinkles at his eyes, creases in flesh once smooth.

“So Diogenes was right?”

“I think he was,” Alexander says, “though there’s time enough to live still, you and I.”

“Life with a god-man has been good so far,” I say, “though I’d rather like to get out of Egypt, if you please.”

He laughs a little, then straightens himself on his saddle as he looks back toward the kandake and motions that we are coming. “Soon enough. And you know, Heph, perhaps I won’t always be Alexander,” he muses.

“If not Alexander, then who?”

“Well,” he says, “truly, I tell you, if I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes.”

My friend rides forward through the sand and sun. And I, as I always will, follow him.

 

THE TEMPLE OF THE ARK is a white block of stone rising from the lush greenery of palm and date trees that surrounds us. It has taken more than a day to reach this quiet place, but the sliver of green that Sakhmakh had pointed out from the ridge line, the tiniest hint of living color waving in the sandy heat, has resolved itself into a magnificent oasis in the middle of the desert. Occasional tents dot around the pools that we pass, or cling to the spots of cool shade beneath the larger trees. The people we see smile and wave. Some look Egyptian, others Nubian, and others might well be Persian. None seem concerned at our appearance. None seem at odds. It is as if the hostilities of the outside world have no place in this refuge in the desert.

As we have been approaching this place, the kandake has told us a story whose strangeness can only be matched by the strangeness of our company — a king, a queen, a Jew, and me — making our way beneath the sun. She tells us that two hundred years earlier a group of Jews had come to the lands of Kush, seeking asylum. They had with them a most powerful weapon: a box that contained a stone said to hold the power of their God. The qore and the kandake welcomed them, granted them sanctuary, and gave them the peace to continue their worship as they saw fit. The only price was that the Jews would promise to use the weapon to defend them if ever they were attacked. It had been this way for two centuries, Sakhmakh says. But the time had come for the Ark, as the Jews called it, to find a safer home. So they had moved it to this desert oasis, this new temple for the Ark, and here they hoped to give it to Alexander.

Alexander and I have listened quietly, and I can see he is forming the same questions in his mind that I am. We had the same teacher, after all.

“Why now?” he asks. “Why me?”

Sakhmakh smiles. “Because the one who leads the Jews asks that it be so.”

Alexander nods, and he turns to address Terach, the Jew who has ridden in silence beside the kandake as she has spoken. “You are descended from those who brought this Ark to Kush?”

For a moment Terach looks back and forth between the queen and the conqueror, seemingly confused. In reply she simply smiles and makes a gesture to him as if giving him leave to speak. He sighs. “I am,” he says. “Though I’m not the only one. From Jerusalem to Elephantine in the time of Manasseh, from Elephantine to Kush in the time of Nebuchadnezzar, from that time to this, my family has kept the Ark safe.” He reaches into his robes and pulls forth a thin chain that is clasped around his neck. Hanging from it is the symbol of a circle inscribed upon an inverted pyramid. “This is the mark held by those who protect the Ark. It is carried by all who watch over it.”

I don’t recognize the symbol, and I doubt my friend does, either. “This doesn’t answer Alexander’s question,” I say. “If it has been safe for so long, why move it?”

“It has been kept safe,” Terach says, “but often so at the cost of lives. It was only with God’s grace that we brought the Ark out of Jerusalem, and it was a further miracle still that it escaped Nebuchadnezzar’s reach.”

We are passing a small pool just outside the temple grounds, and the Jew nods over to a young Egyptian woman washing clothes in its waters. She smiles in return. As Terach turns back to us, he seems to shrug. “And Kush has been safe, it is true, but not without peril. The kingdom will surely not stand forever.”

I blink, and I see Alexander’s back stiffen in his own shock. The kandake, however, seems strangely unaffected. She is looking ahead at the square stone arch that marks the entrance to the walled temple complex we are approaching. Beyond the archway is a paved avenue, and I can see a line of sphinxes guarding its length, all the way up to the columned portico and the tall square shape of the temple itself, rising clearly above the white stone walls of the complex. There is a vague smile on her face, and I wonder if she even heard Terach so casually predict the end of her throne.

“Is there a threat?” Alexander manages to ask.

“Just one,” Terach says. He, too, is looking up toward the temple of the Ark now. A man has appeared there. He holds up a brown hand to shield his eyes as we approach. He is unarmed.

“Who?” Alexander asks.

Sakhmakh pulls her camel up beside the entrance, and the man on the ground reaches out to hold its reins. She says something to him in a language we cannot understand, and he nods deeply as he begins to gather the rest of our reins, too. The kandake stretches and then swings her leg to slip down to the ground. As she settles her feet onto the earth, she looks up at my king. “You, Alexander. Only you. Come. It awaits.”

We pass beneath the archway on foot, Terach and Sakhmakh in the lead. As we walk along the swept stones, I see that there are other people in the temple complex coming and going. Many are in hooded robes not unlike that worn by Terach. I cannot see their faces. A few seem to be pilgrims of one sort or another, standing before the little shrines that are scattered inside the walled grounds.

At first I think that no one has noticed us, but as we close in on the temple I become aware that many of the hoods are turning to follow our passing. And glancing furtively to either side, I see that there are at least two men on either side of us, carefully pacing our advance.

As we pass through the off-and-on shadows of the columned portico, I let my hand casually brush the grip of the blade at my hip, reassuring myself that it’s there. “Alexander,” I whisper.

“I see them, Heph.”

He is wearing his armor, I remind myself. Come what may, he has the Aegis.

The doors of the temple are open, and Sakhmakh and Terach disappear into the darkness. Alexander and I step into the shadows behind them.

There are oil lamps burning atop bronze tripods just inside the doorway, but their flickering flames are feeble compared to the glare of the sun and stone outside. Only when the doors shut behind us do my eyes truly begin to adjust. I see that the inside walls of the temple are engraved with images of myth and legend, the shapes and symbols of gods and men etched into the surface of the stone. Layers of paint bring the figures into sharp vitality. The air is heavy with years of incense.

We are also, I see, no longer alone. Terach and Sakhmakh have been joined by two more hooded figures. They are talking quietly before one of several doorways that lead further into the building.

It is Terach who finally pulls away from them to turn to us. He bows to Alexander. “I hope you will forgive us,” he says, “but you cannot pass further wearing the Aegis of Zeus.”

Alexander’s shoulders, I see, tense up. I can see a tightness in his jaw, too, though he is quick to relax it. Even in the little light of the lamps the polished armor shines beautifully. All except the stone. It sits like a pit in the center of his chest. “You believe that is what this is?”

“I believe others believe it to be so,” Terach says. “As for what it is, what it truly is, that is a much longer tale indeed. What is important now is that it is of a kind with the Ark, though their powers are different. What the Aegis does for your life, the Ark does for the earth.”

Alexander half-cocks his head. “You fear me possessing both?”

Terach chews on this a moment. “I would say to the contrary, Alexander, we expect you to possess both. That is why you are here. But we want you to understand what they are. And we want you … unstressed, conqueror of kingdoms.”

“The rage.”

Terach nods. “Just so. It would be best to have a most level head in these matters. I assure you we mean you no harm at all.”

“Alexander,” I whisper.

My friend doesn’t look in my direction. He simply holds up his hand to end my speech. My mouth freezes, partly agape. “Very well,” he says to the Jew. “Heph, can you help me?”

He turns his back to me, and for a moment I’m back in that tent, our sweat upon me, watching his back turn toward sleep. The ultimate trust. I reach forward and begin to unbuckle the breastplate.

“I need to know,” he whispers to me. “It’ll be alright.”

I nod, for there is nothing I can say. As the last buckle is undone and Alexander pulls himself free of the armor, he lets out a long breath, a tired sigh. It is not the weight of the plate, I know. It is the power. It feeds on him somehow, even as it keeps him alive. We do not understand this, and I’ve no doubt that it is the answers to this that Alexander seeks more than anything else.

Terach watches my friend disencumber himself of the Aegis. When Alexander notices his observation, he smiles. “You know, you didn’t answer the rest of my question.”

“What is that?”

Alexander slips his forearm through the shoulders of the armor, holding it up. “Why me?”

“That’s best asked of the one who leads us.”

“That’s not you?”

“Hardly so,” Terach says. He turns toward Sakhmakh, who has at last finished her conversation with the other figures and has walked up to join us. “It’s her.”

Alexander stares, but I find the words for us both. “You’re in charge,” I say.

“I am.”

“But you’re the kandake of Kush,” I say.

When she smiles in return, a part of me feels as if I am a child. “A woman can do many things,” she says.

“You don’t look like a Jew.”

“But like my mother before me, I believe as one, little though it is known among our people.” She turns toward Alexander. “Are you also surprised that a woman could be in command of such a company? This does not seem the way of things among your people.”

Alexander’s smile is fast and genuine. “Oh, you’ve never met my mother.”

“Quite a woman, I imagine.”

“You’ve no idea,” I say, interrupting.

Sakhmakh raises an eyebrow, her eyes flashing with what appears to be mischief. “Very well,” she says. “Terach, carry the Aegis. Keep it close, but do not touch its stone. Now come, son of a great woman. It’s time for you to see the Ark.”

 

THE ARK OF THE COVENANT, as the Jews call it, sits in a small side room within the temple. The surrounding structure, we are told, is largely a Persian construction, built to honor the three gods of Thebes. I even recognize the figure of Darius carved into one of the walls just outside the doorway to the chamber housing the Ark. The Persian king is depicted holding forth an offering bowl to the gods, with the tall crown of the pharaohs upon his head.

That crown, I muse to myself, is no longer his. It belongs to my friend, who walks beside me into the chamber holding the Ark and, like me, stops to simply stare at it.

The Ark sits at the end of the chamber, its broad side facing us. It is wrought of a polished wood whose grains gleam in the torch light. Acacia, if I make my guess. The base is wider than the top, and long poles are mounted into metal rings at its sides, to ease its transportation. Thin filaments of metal weave around and about its surfaces like vines, and facing us directly, I can see, is the same symbol that Terach wore around his neck: an inverted pyramid within a circle, with a line cutting through its bottom third. All that would be remarkable enough, but far more striking is its gold-trimmed top, which is adorned with the statues of two winged beings who appear to be knelt in prayer toward one another: one fashioned of silver, the other of gold. Their wings sweep forward before them, the feathered tips almost appearing to touch each other. Beneath that, between them, I can catch a hint of deepest black, something flush with the surface of the top of the Ark.

“By the gods,” Alexander whispers.

“By the one God,” Terach corrects, and his voice is striking for its seriousness.

“Whether you believe in the God of the Jews or not doesn’t matter,” Sakhmakh says. She is in front of us, staring at the Ark with her own obvious sense of wonder. She takes a deep breath and at last turns to face us. “But you must believe in this: the Ark contains a part of the power of God, far more powerful than even the Aegis. Because it is a part of God, it is a part of creation. But it does not belong here. It must not be used.”

Alexander takes a step toward the Ark, then stops. I see him chew on the inside of his cheek, a habit I’ve long since given up trying to relieve. “Part of a god’s power. Even greater than my armor. I could do so much with it.”

I feel movement in the room, and I turn to see that there are four hooded figures behind us. They are close to my king’s back. I do not doubt that they are armed.

“You could,” the kandake admits. “That is the danger no matter who possesses the Ark. It is a danger even for anyone who is in reach of such power.”

Alexander still stares at the Ark. “So what is the answer to my question, Kandake Sakhmakh, keeper of the Ark?” Alexander at last turns to face her. “Why me?”

“Because you know enough not to use it,” she says.

His eyes narrow. “Because of the Aegis.”

Sakhmakh gives the slightest of nods, an acknowledgement of respect between sovereigns. “You’ve controlled it, but we both know it has been difficult. And the Ark is far greater. You know only too well that it would destroy you. As it would me.”

Alexander swallows hard. He does not like to admit weakness, my friend. But he knows the truth as well as I. “Agreed.”

“And you can protect it in ways we cannot,” Terach says.

Alexander turns to the voice, but he quickly shifts his focus back to the queen. “I cannot carry it with me,” he says to her. “I’m on a campaign, my lady. My army marches deeper into Persia, to find Darius and hunt him down like the wild dog that he is.”

Sakhmakh blinks, and I imagine she is surprised by this sudden turn toward bloodlust. But she shouldn’t be. Alexander is a conqueror. “No, I would not have you march west with it,” she frankly says.

“What then? How can I protect it?”

“By giving it a new home,” Terach says. “In a new city. A temple that is a tomb, buried beneath the ground, unknown to all but a chosen few.”

“A new city?” There is confusion on Alexander’s face.

I’m not confused, for I can see the perfection of what they hope to achieve, the fortuitousness of our timing. “Alexandria,” I say, turning the room’s attention in my direction. “They want you to hide the Ark in Alexandria.”

Sakhmakh smiles gratefully. “That is precisely what we wish to happen: for the Ark to be made safe and secure.”

Alexander nods, his eyes narrowing in thought as he turns back toward the Ark before us. I watch as the flickering of the lamp flame shifts the shadows of feathers on the winged creatures. It makes them seem to ripple with life, an expectation of movement, as if those kneeling figures are prepared to burst up from their knees, stretching themselves up and out as they let their strong wings beat a steady rise into the heavens.

“Very well,” Alexander finally says. His voice is quiet, almost reverent. “We will take it to Alexandria. We will build it a new temple there.”

 

THE ATTACK COMES just as the hooded figures — all of them, like Sakhmakh and Terach, members of the secret group of Jews sworn to protect their sacred treasure — have maneuvered the Ark out of the temple and into the shelter of the columned portico outside to await the cart that has been summoned. The brightness of midday has become the dusky shadows of evening, the sky a deep red as the sun sets far beyond the sands behind us.

There are shouts beyond the walls of the complex, a rushing of many feet, and the ring of steel.

Alexander and I are standing close beside each other to one side of the entrance, and we have fought in close quarters before. There is no thought, only instinct. In an instant our swords are drawn, our backs meeting. “Treachery,” I say, spitting the word at Sakhmakh. Standing at the other side of the entrance, the Ark between us, I see Terach, still holding the Aegis. His eyes are wide in shock.

The kandake of Kush stands in the doorway of the temple, backlit by the steady fires within. She shakes her head even as she begins to give commands in a language we don’t know. The hooded figures lower the Ark to the ground quickly but carefully, then they fan out in a rush, ducking behind stone pillars, retreating back into the temple, or running off into the night. Many of them, I see, are drawing swords from beneath their cloaks. And those who’ve hurried into the temple are back almost at once, carrying bows and sheaves of black arrows.

With a sinuous grace, Sakhmakh slides forward to stand in front of the Ark. She has in her hands two long daggers, their twin blades — each as long as her forearm — thin and sharpened to a wicked point. Where she hid them under her clothes, I do not know, but she holds them like an extension of herself. She rises up before us, before the Ark, swaying ever so slightly between the balls of her feet, like a cobra ready to strike.

Alexander and I exchange glances. If the Jews are not attacking us, then who?

A high whistle pierces the night. Then another and another. One again our instincts take over, and Alexander and I tuck ourselves behind a stone pillar just beside the entrance. Around us, it seems everyone else has done the same.

All but Sakhmakh. She does not move from the front of the Ark. It is as if she intends to protect it with her royal body.

We can only see the vaguest streaks of the arrows sailing in the dim air, but we see them clearly enough as they land, clattering off the pillars around us with a noise like hail.

When the volley stops for a moment, I take the chance to stoop down and retrieve one of the spent arrows from where it has come to rest by my feet.

“Greek?” Sakhmakh asks over her shoulder. She still hasn’t moved. It’s a miracle, I think, that none of the missiles has struck her.

Turning the arrow over in my fingers, I know at a glance that it isn’t Greek. And I doubt it is Nubian, either. I’ve seen its like more times than I can count. “Persian,” I say, holding it out to my friend

Alexander takes it, nods, then tosses it into the shadows. “Masistes,” he says.

At a shout from Sakhmakh, I hear the sound of defenders launching their own volleys in return. The whistles move away this time, but there are far fewer of them. “Persians?” she asks us in Greek.

“How many I don’t know,” Alexander says. “They were in the desert. Don’t know how they found us here.”

“Spies,” the kandake says before she barks more orders to her men. “You are a recognizable man, Alexander.”

Whistles sound another volley of arrows, and once more we tuck into the shelter of the tall columns. Screams echo over the courtyard before us. Arrows finding their marks.

When the wave is over, I am beginning to stand up and step around the pillar, to try to survey the situation we face, when Alexander is suddenly shouting from behind me. “Right flank, Heph! Down!”

My king throws himself into my back, and we tumble forward onto the stone pavement. I feel the screeching wind as the flanking volley of arrows that were meant to tear into us rip through space instead.

“Terach!”

At Sakhmakh’s shout, I push myself up from my stomach just far enough to see that the old man has fallen. He is gasping around the arrow that sticks out from his shoulder like a terrible barb. He is kicking himself across the ground in the panicked shock of a wounded animal. The Aegis has fallen from his hands, not three strides from us.

“Alexander,” I call out. “The armor!”

Even as I say it, I know it’s too late. Beyond the Aegis, beyond Terach’s kicking legs, I see the Persians coming. It is only a small squad of them — likely all they could get over the walls, with the primary force preparing to charge now through the main gate — but it may well be enough to destroy us. I see four or five hooded figures shifting their defense to protect our flank here, but there’s a dozen or more Persians coming at a full sprint. The setting sun casts a red light like fresh blood upon their swords.

“To me, Heph!” Alexander is rolling to his feet, and I kick myself up onto my own.

Together, like the young and foolish warriors we once were, we run forward past the Ark, leaping Terach and leaving behind us the Aegis, and we meet them with a roar like mighty lions.

 

SLOWLY RETREATING over ground covered by the slain, out of the corner of my eye I see the second wave of Persians coming through the archway of the main gate, pouring into the temple complex like a screaming liquid of blood-thirsty men. I see them, and I know we are lost.

I trip over something, stumble, and I recognize that it is Alexander’s armor, littered upon the pavement with the blood and the detritus of battle. The Aegis of Zeus, which brought him life at Gazza, which turned aside the arrows at Issus, sits now unused and useless. It cannot help us now.

One of the Persians has pressed his advantage as I stumbled, and I only barely manage to get the blade in my right hand up in time to stop the blow. The ring of the metal rattles my bones, grinds my teeth. I taste blood in my mouth, and I don’t know whether I’ve bit open my tongue or my cheek or both.

I’m halfway to kneeling, and I push myself up against my enemy’s weight, reaching out with my left hand as I do so, catching the wrist of his sword-bearing hand. It exposes me, I know. If the man has a blade in his other hand, he will open up my gut. But he does not. Or he forgets that he does. And I’m able to push his sword off mine and, still holding his sword hand up, reach back my own and plunge it through the sweat of his arm pit and into his body.

He sprays gore as I kick him backward, and he falls to the ground to writhe out his end. One more obstacle for the remaining Persians, a few more precious seconds for me to postpone the end.

Alexander pulls back from his own latest victim, rolling around behind me to run to the side of Sakhmakh. There are many corpses in front of the Ark there — a few of her fellow Jews, far more of the Persians — and the knives of the kandake are dripping in the light that streams from the temple doorway. Ahead, surely a hundred Persians are bearing down upon them.

Alexander and Sakhmakh give the slightest nod to each other. They smile, and then they turn toward the onslaught, two against them all.

Like Leonidas at the Hot Gates, I think.

Another Persian comes forward, but he is tired, and I dispatch him quickly. Only a few are left on my side, and I wonder about abandoning it to go stand beside my lover, friend, and king. If I would die, it would be by his side.

I back toward them slowly, keeping a wary eye on the remaining Persians. There are streaks and pools of blood where wounded men have tried to drag themselves  away from death. I step carefully through it, sword between me and the enemy. They continue to hold back, seemingly content to let the coming horde finish me off with the king who once defeated them.

My heel strikes wood. It thumps like a hollow drum, deep and resonant.

The Ark.

I imagine its top surface, and in my mind’s eye I can see that between the two winged figures — the two angels still gleaming silver and gold, still freshly shined despite the horror of the gore that has splattered the pillars and the ground all around them — is the circle of a stone, blacker than black. I know in an instant how it will work. Alexander has often enough described how he uses the Aegis.

I look to the men before me, then I glance over to the screaming masses who will kill the kandake and my Alexander.

Without another thought, without hesitation, I throw down my sword, turn, and place both of my hands down upon the top of the Ark. I place them upon the stone.

The surge of power that erupts against my skin is so instant, so powerful, that I have to close my eyes and cry out. The power is hotter than fire. Inch by inch it envelops me, consumes me, as if I am leaning deeper and deeper into stone made molten in the forges of Hephaestus, my namesake god. Whether the world yawns up to me or I cave down upon it, I cannot tell. I’m uncoupled from the earth.

And then abruptly the heat turns to cold, into a deep void of swirling darkness that looms up and beckons me down. I feel myself falling, sliding, tumbling into the pitch night, and in my mind I scream down toward the hurtling abyss, though whether my throat has air enough to make a sound I don’t know.

Heartbeats have passed. Seconds. But if feels like years are being stripped away. I try to pull away, to swim up against the pull of the bottomless pit that wants to draw me on and on into oblivion.

Something jolts me as I fight against that rushing force, and somewhere in the distance I feel the bones of my arms threatening to snap, like twigs in the grasp of an angry beast. But the pain washes away. Everything is washing away. My body. The temple. The damnable sand. And Alexander.

Alexander!

The memory of him rolls over into my mind, like the form of him rolling over in our bed. The trust. The love. All stripped away. All passing into void, into nothing, into the darkness of death and eternal quiet.

No.

It’s a whisper in my mind, but it thrums louder.

No!

I fix my mind upon him. The memory. The imagination.

No!

The world stops. The swirling and sliding abruptly ends, and the power that has been surging over me is suddenly, I realize, surging within me.

I open my eyes. Alexander and Sakhmakh are there, dancing with death. The first wave of the Persians are upon them, and in a frozen instant I see the hatred and the rage upon those foreign faces. I see my king’s impending death. Only seconds remain.

Closer, I see how my fingers are curled and tensed, as if my fingertips intend to open wounds in the terrible, beautiful black stone. There is blood slashed across the darkness there, like red grooves, but the pain is something I cannot feel.

Unlike the fear. No, the fear is something I feel very deeply.

That, and the power.

So as I watch the wall of Persians coming, as I watch the wave breaking over and upon those two figures framed by the frozen spray of blood and spit and sand that hangs in the strangely calm light, I know what to do.

What the Aegis does for life, the Ark does for the earth.

The rock. The stone. I can feel the elements all around me. Under my feet. In the columns. Waiting. Ready.

I let the power of the Ark beneath me draw up through my palms and those flexed fingers. I let it wick up into my flesh, higher and higher, and then I reach out to the paving stones that mark the path between the long line of sphinxes. The feet of the mass of men that have been falling upon them are, for the moment, stilled.

The power has come into me like oil rising into cloth, and with the spark of a thought it ignites within me.

A moment later, the power explodes forth from me. Time returns. Feet fall once again. But the surge I have released is a roar, and behind it comes the scream of the earth.

Like a wave passing beneath their surface, my power lifts the wide paving stones. As it rolls forward the attackers are toppled and throne, scattered like cut stalks of wheat.

Then another thought, another spark of flame in my mind, in my soul. My hands scrape stone in a tortured agony I can sense but not feel as the fire of power burns and pours forth. In response, down the length of the shattered stone road, the sphinxes that line it rise up. With a thunderous crack of rock, they shake off the chains of their makers and hungrily look down upon their prey. As one, they slouch forward in birth and mindless destruction.

In my mind I see the carnage, but I don’t know what’s real and what is imagination. Already my vision fades to darkness.

As the black sheet falls, I wonder if the agony of dying is the last thing I will know of this world.

 

I REMAIN. The darkness has lifted. My eyes are open, though when I try to blink, they do not respond. The air is heavy with the sick-sweet scent of blood, but it does not fill my lungs. The sun is a fading memory, and I’m cold to my bones, cold to my soul. I do not think I will ever again be warm.

I am, I think, dead.

Dying, at least.

Someone is speaking, a voice that’s at once close and far, far away.

It’s Alexander, I realize. A voice I should know anywhere.

Abruptly I’m moving, the stars shake before my eyes.

Then it stops and my friend’s face is rising up over the stars. Tears have run clean rivers through the dirty soil upon his skin. “Hold on, Heph,” he’s saying. “Hold on.”

The shaking comes again, and the face and stars before me sweep wildly to left and right. Alexander is moving me, I think. He’s doing something.

Whatever it is, it must be too late. If I had air, I’d breathe my last whispering his name, but he knows. We’ve always known, he and I.

My vision stills again, and I see my friend lifting something up against the background of stars. He settles it toward my chest. I see what it is.

The stars dim. The Aegis descends.

It touches my flesh. And the darkness becomes a searing light that carries me away into sleep.

 

THE SUN DANCES UPON THE NILE. Sakhmakh is standing beside us on the riverbank as Terach and the others carefully load the crate containing the Ark onto a low-walled barge. I’d say that it is a miracle that Terach and I survived, but I know the power that preserves only too well. I know the darkness that has made us whole.

“It will be hidden where none will find it,” Alexander promises her. Whatever thoughts he might have entertained for using the Ark, he has told me, they disappeared when he saw what it did to me that night.

And what I did through it. Even now, days later, I am certain that the desert carrion are still glutted on the horror we left behind, the horror whose end I don’t even remember.

My inability to recall what happened, my paranoid suspicion that perhaps I was in some way only a vessel for the power of the Ark — as if its stone were a sentient being and I its puppet — does nothing to alleviate my guilt.

Somehow it makes it even worse.

“I know you will see that it is so,” the kandake says, and she kisses him on the cheek. Alexander, for all his conquests, seems embarrassed. Next she turns her smile to me. “And you, Lord Hephaestion, are owed much, too. We would not have survived if not for what you did.”

I smile, but I doubt it is convincing. In truth, even if I don’t know what happened later, I can still remember that initial surge of divine power coursing into my muscles, into my aching bones. A part of me wants to feel it again, even as another part of me simply wants to throw up. “I’m glad we survived,” I manage to say.

The kandake of Kush kisses me, too, in her gratitude.

Within minutes, the Ark is aboard the barge and all is ready to depart. Terach will travel with us, along with three other Jews. They will begin the construction of the new temple of the Ark. The surviving remainder of their secret company will return with Sakhmakh to Kush, there to make their final arrangements for their move to the new city that Alexander is building upon the sea, the new city with the greatest of treasures beneath its streets.

We set off onto the river. The man at the tiller uses a pole to push us closer and closer to the main flow of the mighty river, and then I feel its steady roll lift our weight and begin to carry as downstream. It is a great beast, this river, more powerful than any I have ever seen. But it is nothing like the power that flowed in me, that flowed through me. That power, I think, seemed as if it could have broken the world.

The banks rise and fall around us. I stand at the prow as the waves slip beneath the barge. Trees and fields appear and disappear. I see it all through a kind of blank stare, lost in my own thoughts.

“You’re quiet, Heph.”

Alexander. He’s walked up to stand beside me. He knows me too well for me to hide anything from him. “I was just wondering,” I say after a moment. “What next? Will you keep the Aegis?”

My friend chews on his lip — gods, what a terrible habit — and he watches a small farm pass by along the closer shoreline. “I’ve thought about that a lot,” he says. “I think I must. There may still be more for it to do. And my dream is still alive. They can bury it with me.”

I nod. It’s what I have suspected. I look up at the Egyptian sun. “And after the Ark is in Alexandria? What then?”

Alexander smiles. “Then we’ll leave this country,” he says. His eyes glint mischievously. “And maybe you’ll start sleeping through the night.”

“Out of Egypt,” I whisper. At once I think of green vineyards, of peace and home. And then, as if on cue, I’m aware of sandy grit in my hair and between my thighs. The thought of it makes me let out a tired sigh of a laugh. “Can’t happen fast enough.”

“By the gods, Heph, I’ve missed that sound.”

I smile. And beneath us, unaware of its burdens, the great river carries us on.

 

Author’s Note

As with the Shards of Heaven series of novels for which this story serves as a prequel, the tale here falls within the genre of Historical Fantasy. Even more particularly, it is what is often called a “Secret History,” since its characters and events are intended to fit within the bounds of known history to the highest degree possible.

For all his extraordinary impact and fame, there is much about the life of Alexander the Great that remains unknown. One of our questions — one that is more argued in our modern era than in his contemporary day — regards his potential bisexuality. The Macedonian king was thrice married, and it seems certain that he had multiple female lovers, but there is also some reason to think that he engaged in homosexual activity, as well. In particular, much interest focuses on Hephaestion (born ca 356 BC, died 324), who was Alexander’s closest friend, his fellow student under the tutelage of Aristotle, one of his finest field commanders, and quite possibly his lifelong lover. The two men could hardly have been more devoted to one another: by their own actions it seems clear that they perceived of their relationship as modeled upon that of the Homeric heroes Achilles and Patroclus, whose relationship has likewise been subject to speculation about its sexual nature. In addition, a letter to Alexander that is traditionally ascribed to Diogenes of Sinope, the philosopher briefly mentioned in this story, suggests that the Macedonian king was too devoted to “Hephaestion’s thighs,” an implicit recognition of a sexual relationship between the men based on the Greek eromenos model.

Another historical unknown is why in 331 — after Alexander had seized Egypt, after the king had visited the desert oracle at Siwa Oasis and apparently been declared the son of a god — his army turned back from marching up the Nile to defeat the prominent kingdom of Kush. It may be that Alexander simply saw little political, military, or economic benefit to conquering the African kingdom, but there has long been speculation that there was some other rationale for his actions. At least as far back as the so-called Romance of Alexander, a third-century text now ascribed to Pseudo-Callisthenes, there have been stories that Alexander’s armies were met in the desert by those of the kingdom of Kush. The kandake, or queen, of Kush appeared at their head, riding a great war elephant. Impressed, Alexander agreed to turn back from driving further south. Still later accounts suggest that the kandake and Alexander had a passionate romantic encounter. Very likely such stories are nothing but legend … though one must admit they make for an interesting background to a story.

The 332 siege at Gazza (modern Gaza) is a true event, as is the horrific shoulder wound that Alexander took there. Also true are the names of the kandake and the qore of Kush, the Greek leader who managed to learn Persian, and a host of other historical tidbits throughout this story.

The temple described here is also a real place: the Temple of Hibis, in the Kharga Oasis. Efforts are underway to restore its ruins, which include the magnificent carving of King Darius I of Persia described here. Also being restored is a line of battered stone sphinxes that line the road to the temple — not all of which are aligned as they should be.

Copyright © 2016 by Michael Livingston

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New Releases: 10/25/16

Here’s what went on sale today!

Faller by Will McIntosh

Faller by Will McIntoshDay One: No one can remember anything—who they are, family and friends, or even how to read. Reality has fragmented and Earth consists of an islands of rock floating in an endless sky. Food, water, electricity—gone, except for what people can find, and they can’t find much.

Faller’s pockets contain tantalizing clues: a photo of himself and a woman he can’t remember, a toy solider with a parachute, and a mysterious map drawn in blood. With only these materials as a guide, he makes a leap of faith from the edge of the world to find the woman and set things right.

Patterns of the Wheel by Robert Jordan; Illustrations by Amy Romanczuk

Patterns of the Wheel by Robert Jordan; Illustrations by Amy RomanczukSince its debut in 1990, The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan has captivated millions of readers around the globe with its scope, originality, and compelling characters. Over the course of fifteen books and millions of words, the world that Jordan created grew in depth and complexity.

Now for the very first time, fans of this astounding saga can color in the hues and vibrant shades of Robert Jordan’s most beloved fantasy world. Adorn the symbols of the Ajah and the patterns on Gleeman’s Cloak. Experience the peaks of Dragonmount, the depths of the Aryth Sea, and other parts of the realm. Fill in evocative mandalas, depictions of Old Tongue, and an array of the Wheel of Time’s most well-known symbols and magical items.

The Wishing World by Todd Fahnestock

The Wishing World by Todd FahnestockIn the Wishing World, dreams are real. You can transform into your own hero, find wild and whimsical friends, and wield power as great as your imagination. But Lorelei doesn’t know about any of that. All she knows is that a monster took her family.

It happened during a camping trip one year ago. Hiding inside the tent, she saw shadows, tentacles and a strange creature. By the time she got up the courage to crawl outside, the monster–and Lorelei’s mom, dad, and brother–were gone.

NEW FROM TOR.COM: 

A Taste of Honey by Kai Ashante Wilson

A Taste of Honey by Kai Ashante WilsonLong after the Towers left the world but before the dragons came to Daluça, the emperor brought his delegation of gods and diplomats to Olorum. As the royalty negotiates over trade routes and public services, the divinity seeks arcane assistance among the local gods.

Aqib bgm Sadiqi, fourth-cousin to the royal family and son of the Master of Beasts, has more mortal and pressing concerns. His heart has been captured for the first time by a handsome Daluçan soldier named Lucrio. in defiance of Saintly Canon, gossiping servants, and the furious disapproval of his father and brother, Aqib finds himself swept up in a whirlwind romance. But neither Aqib nor Lucrio know whether their love can survive all the hardships the world has to throw at them.

NOW IN PAPERBACK:

Dragon and Thief by Timothy Zahn

The Hanged Man by P. N. Elrod

The Shards of Heaven by Michael Livingston

NEW IN MANGA

A Certain Scientific Accelerator Vol. 4 Story by Kazuma Kamachi; Art by Yamaji Arata

Freezing Vol. 11-12 by Dall-Young Lim

Monster Girl Encyclopedia by Kenkou Cross

Witch Buster Vol. 17-18 Story & Art by Jung-Man Cho

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Sneak Peek: The Gates of Hell by Michael Livingston

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The Gates of Hell by Michael LivingstonAlexandria has fallen, and with it the great kingdom of Egypt. Cleopatra is dead. Her children are paraded through the streets in chains wrought of their mother’s golden treasures, and within a year all but one of them will be dead. Only her young daughter, Cleopatra Selene, survives to continue her quest for vengeance against Rome and its emperor, Augustus Caesar.

To show his strength, Augustus Caesar will go to war against the Cantabrians in northern Spain, and it isn’t long before he calls on Juba of Numidia, his adopted half-brother and the man whom Selene has been made to marry — but whom she has grown to love. The young couple journey to the Cantabrian frontier, where they learn that Caesar wants Juba so he can use the Trident of Poseidon to destroy his enemies. Perfidy and treachery abound. Juba’s love of Selene will cost him dearly in the epic fight, and the choices made may change the very fabric of the known world.

The Gates of Hell—available November 15th—is the follow up to Michael Livingston’s amazing Shards of Heaven, a historical fantasy that reveals the hidden magic behind the history we know, and commences a war greater than any mere mortal battle. Please enjoy this excerpt.

PROLOGUE

THE DARK OF THE MOON

ROME, 27 BCE

On the January night that the Republic finally came to an end, thirteen-year-old Cleopatra Selene fell asleep waiting for the emperor’s son.

Not for the first time she dreamed she was ten again, sitting on the cold stone bench of a Roman prison cell, her head against Alexander Helios’ shoulder as she pretended to sleep. The yellow light of an Italian dawn was just beginning to stream in through a barred window high on the outside wall, taunting them with unreachable warmth.

Helios shifted his shoulder beneath the weight of her head. “Wake up, Selene,” her twin whispered.

Selene didn’t move her head. “I am awake.”

“Did you sleep?”

She let the air out of her lungs, then yawned it back in again and regretted the instinct: the air was thick with the sickly humid reek of mold and mildew and human despair. She coughed and gagged.

“Me neither,” he said.

Through the window came the voices of the gathered crowds: jubilant cries of celebration at the festivities of the Roman Triumph, mixed with angry shouts for the death of the traitorous Egyptian royalty whom Octavian had brought back from Alexandria: the children of Antony and Cleopatra.

Selene felt their hatred run like cold fingers up her spine. Before she could shiver she lifted her head from her brother’s shoulder and stood, rubbing at her numb arms. The roiling mass of emotion outside had been building for more than two days, but today it would come to a final climax. Today was the end.

“Do you really think Caesarion is dead?” Helios asked.

Selene instinctively started to reassure him, to say that no, of course he was still alive, but she knew he would recognize the lie. “Maybe. Probably.” It was the truth, painful though it was to admit. Juba, the Numidian prince she had promised to marry in order to save the life of her old friend Lucius Vorenus, had told her that Caesarion was dead, that he’d been killed in Juba’s struggle to find the Ark of the Covenant and use it against their common enemy, Octavian. She believed the Numidian, of course—he had no reason to lie— but even so she could hardly imagine that their older half-brother— tall, handsome, strong Caesarion, so much the image of his father, Julius— could be dead. It just didn’t seem possible.

Helios, so slight, so sickly compared to Caesarion, coughed loudly, painfully, and Selene felt a pang of sorrow rise in her gut that she had to fight to keep at bay.

“Caesarion’s not here, anyway,” she said when he had control of himself again. “Octavian would march him, too, if he was alive. He wants to make a display of us all.”

She didn’t mention their younger brother, Philadelphus, but she didn’t have to. The child, even sicker than Helios when they last saw him, was never far from their thoughts. Was he dead, too?

“Maybe Caesarion’s alive, though,” Helios said. “Octavian could be lying about it because he’s scared. He’s using us to keep Caesarion from doing what he wants to do. Maybe that’s another reason why Octavian hasn’t…killed us yet. Like how he wanted to use us against Mother.”

Mother. Her brother’s voice cracked at the word, and then Selene’s dream spun wildly, sweeping her out of the cell, rushing her back through even more distant memories, back to the moment she stood before the vivid and all-too-real image of her mother’s agony-contorted face, staring at the world through dry, sightless eyes. The corpses of two loyal maidservants were slumped on the floor beside the throne, themselves twisted by the bite of the asp that Selene had managed to smuggle into the guarded chamber to fulfill her mother’s desire for death. The reed-woven basket of ripe-to-bursting fruits was overturned in front of them, and there was an apple in Cleopatra’s venom-clawed hand, squeezed to broken mash. The scepter of Egyptian authority was broken into two pieces at her feet, nothing more than the wooden stick that it was beneath the luminescent jewels and the fine gold casing.

Octavian was there, too. He’d made the children come to the chamber before anything was touched, before anything was moved, so that they could see with their own eyes what he’d taken from them, as if Cleopatra’s suicide was his victory, not hers.

Even the asp was there for the children to see, coiled in a corner where it had been trapped. Selene, for a moment, had wanted to run to the black thing, to grip its head and plunge its glistening mouth into the soft flesh of her own neck, to let it drink its fill of blood even as she drank of its terrible venom, but the desire for revenge had steeled her against such a surrender. As they watched, Octavian took from among his guard a spear. Then, with slow steps that echoed in that stony place, he walked to the corner and drove the sharpened point into the writhing, hissing creature.

Cleopatra Selene— daughter of Antony and Cleopatra, once heir to the great Ptolemaic empire of Egypt, now adopted daughter to the very man who’d brought her family to such ruin— awoke from her nightmares, gasping and reaching for the dead: her mother, her father, her brothers.

She found, instead, another young man, a year older than herself, who recoiled from her clutching fingers. As he shrank back, the flickering lamp- shadows around the bed swallowed his gentle features, but it took only a glance for Selene to recognize Tiberius, the boy she’d fallen asleep waiting for this night, the stepson to the man who, she reminded herself, was no longer to be called Octavian. Among every thing else that had happened this day, the man who had all but officially ended the Republic— who’d already been accorded the title of Emperor Caesar, son of God— had been declared by the Senate “Augustus”: the Illustrious One.

Augustus Caesar. Much though the thought of her adopted father made her ill, Selene had to admit that the name had a certain ring to it. Not unlike the name of Augustus’ adoptive father— Caesarion’s blood father, she couldn’t help noting to herself— Julius Caesar. The Romans had made Julius into a god. Would they do the same for Augustus?

“I didn’t mean to startle you,” Tiberius said, stirring Selene back out of her dark thoughts. “You looked like you were having another bad dream.”

Another. Selene concentrated on breathing deep, allowing her heartbeat to slow. In the two and a half years since her world had ended, hardly a night had passed without a dream of the horrors. Walking with the basket to see Mother. Staring into those unblinking eyes. Trembling in that Roman prison. The smiths coming to their cell with their gritty, blackened hands to fasten the golden fetters to their wrists and ankles, to their necks— collars and chains of their mother’s Egyptian gold melted down and made into the very signs of the subjugation of her children, her kingdom.

Selene rubbed at her wrists as if she could feel the weight of the metal on her skin even now. “It’s fine,” she said. “Just a dream. I must’ve fallen asleep waiting.”

Tiberius smiled in the shadows. “That’s all right. I was just glad you were, um, dressed.”

Though she was, as always, uncertain if there was some romantic interest behind his comment, Selene took it as mocking play and she rolled her eyes. After all, they both knew they were promised for others. Tiberius was arranged to be married to Agrippa’s eight- year- old daughter, Vipsania. And rumors were already swirling that Selene would be married to Juba the Numidian sooner rather than later. “I’m dressed enough,” she said, slipping out of bed and lacing up her best sandals. Then she stood and shrugged her shoulders as if to unencumber herself of the memory of her dead mother and the promises for revenge that she kept hidden even from Tiberius. “No one saw you, did they?”

Tiberius gave her a look of mock anger. “No. Of course not,” he said, trying to sound exasperated. “So why’d you want to sneak out to night, anyway? I think the whole city is drunk or passed out.” He yawned. “I could use more sleep myself.”

The festivities to celebrate Augustus Caesar and his acclamation by the Senate had, indeed, overtaken Rome. This night more than any other, the city would be quiet and still, and the usual fun of their nocturnal walks would be taken away. Selene looked over to the curtains that were pulled shut across the balcony. The rich cloth rocked to the moving air outside as if pushed by the touch of unseen hands.

“You’ll see,” she said. Tiberius was wearing a good traveling outfit that would keep him warm but still enable him to move easily: a necessity for climbing down from her balcony, among other things. She had already donned something similar, but she went over to her chest and quickly rifl ed through it to produce the shoulder bag she’d managed to make from the soft and gentle cloth of one of her old Egyptian dresses. Royal linen.

“What’s that for?” Tiberius asked.

“A Shard,” Selene whispered, feeling the small but heavy stone statue inside the bag and thinking how maybe after tonight she’d have no more nightmares. Maybe after to night she’d dream of Caesar in golden chains, Caesar in sackcloth, Caesar begging her for mercy. It would take time to master the Shard, but she was certain she could be patient. Once she’d learned that killing Octavian wouldn’t be enough to sate her thirst for vengeance, after all— once she’d learned, as Juba had before her, that true vengeance meant destroying Rome itself— she’d lived among his family in his house, never once making an attempt on his life. Yes, she could be patient. Even with the Shard, she could bide her time. Find it, take it, master it. Then strike.

“What did you say?” Tiberius asked. Selene turned back to look at her friend, smiling at possibilities he could never understand, possibilities he would surely think treasonous, even if he had his own reasons to hate Octavian. First things first, though: she had to get it. And if she was going to slip inside the Temple of the Vestal Virgins, the keepers of Rome’s eternal fire and its most sacred relics, she was going to need his help. “I told you,” she said, lifting the bag with its hidden statue to her shoulder. “You’ll see.”

From Augustus’ house on the crest of Palatine Hill they moved through the quiet, darkened streets, shadow to shadow, ever downward toward the ancient Forum. Tiberius was quiet, as he so often was, and Selene was glad for it. Her mind was on the Shard.

She still found it difficult to believe that one of the Shards of Heaven had been here, in Rome, all this time. How often had she walked past the House of the Vestals, past the ever-burning fire of their temple, not realizing that a piece of her vengeance was so close for the taking? Staggered at the thought of it, she’d had to ask Vergilius to repeat himself at a dinner with old Varro two months earlier, when he’d made an offhand comment that he was planning to mention the Palladium in the poem he was writing in honor of the man who’d restored the glory of Rome, the man soon to be Augustus. Yes, Vergilius had assured her. That Palladium. The statue of the goddess Pallas Athena that had such mysterious power that its presence alone had kept the Greeks at bay during their decades-long siege of Troy. Stolen from the city by Ulysses, the Palladium, the poet said, had eventually been brought to Rome by Aeneas— the Trojan exile and legendary founder of Rome who was the hero of Vergilius’ poem in progress— and the artifact now rested under the protection of the Vestals.

Conversation at the dinner had gone on as if the foreign-born girl had never interrupted, but to Selene it was as if the gods of old— gods she had become certain did not exist— had inexplicably handed her the key to her vengeance. Sitting in the Great Library of Alexandria so many years earlier— before the fall of their city, when her brothers were still alive, when she still thought herself, in the tradition of the pharaohs, a goddess on the earth— she’d listened to Caesarion, their tutor Didymus, and a now- dead Jew discuss the Shards of Heaven.

The Shards of Heaven. It was hard for her to imagine a time when she had never heard of the fragments of divine power that had been cast out across Creation when the angels— there’d been a time she’d not heard of them, either— tried to open a gate to the highest heaven by giving up the greatest gift of God, the gift He’d given of himself: their souls. Caesarion had died in the struggle over the Jewish Ark of the Covenant, one of the most powerful of the Shards. Her husband- to-be, Juba, had held two more: the Aegis of Zeus and the Trident of Poseidon— the latter now kept under the personal control of Augustus. And here, now, was the fourth and final Shard she’d learned about on that distant morning in the Great Library. The Palladium.

Her mother had defined herself by men: first by Julius Caesar, then, after his death, by Selene’s father, Mark Antony. Looking back, Selene could see how Cleopatra had never really had control of her own destiny.

“Not me,” Selene whispered to herself as she turned off the paved path, skirting through a shoulder- breadth alley between stone buildings. With the Shard, she’d have power her dead mother could never have imagined. With the Shard, she could be her husband’s equal. And if he joined his power to hers— if they gathered the Shards once more— their shared power would reshape the world. Destroy their Roman enemies. Achieve vengeance for them both. Juba had been meant to rule Numidia before Rome seized it, after all, before he, too, had been left an orphan in the house of his family’s conquerors.

The alley emptied out into the sacred grove that spread across the base of the Palatine Hill, its darkness thick and deep, impervious to the slight sliver of moon in the sky. Selene forged onward until she felt the stands of growth closing in all around her. When she stopped, Tiberius stumbled into her back.

“What are you stopping for?” he asked, voice quiet in the hushed wood. He moved around through the grassy, winter-dried underbrush between the trees to stand beside her. “And why are we going this way? Thought you wanted to go down to the Forum.”

Selene looked around and saw nothing but silent trees in front of her and the black expanses marking walls behind. The air was chilled, but not unbearably so, and it smelled of earth and dried leaves. It was as good a place as any to tell him what he had to know. “Not to the Forum in particular, no,” Selene said, crouching down to the ground and keeping her voice at a conspiratorial hush. Tiberius crouched down, too: close, but not too close.

“So? Where?”

“The Vestals.”

Even in the shadows of the wood she saw his eyes widen, and he seemed to lean back from her slightly. “Vestals?”

“That’s right,” she said, trying to keep her tone even, as if she wasn’t talking about potential treason. “I want to get into the Temple of the Vestals.”

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. What ever 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.

“Every one 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 every thing 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 fi re 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 trea sures of Rome: golden ea gles, 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 fi re, 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, vis i ble 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 through 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 every thing 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.

Copyright © 2016 by Michael Livingston

Buy The Gates of Hell here:

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On the Road: Tor/Forge Author Events in January

Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard by Lawrence M. SchoenTruthwitch by Susan DennardThe Shards of Heaven by Michael Livingston

Tor/Forge authors are on the road in January! Once a month, we’re collecting info about all of our upcoming author events. Check and see who will be coming to a city near you:

Susan Dennard, Truthwitch

Monday, January 11
Books of Wonder
Also with Alexandra Bracken. Moderated by Erin Bowman.
New York, NY
6:00 PM

Tuesday, January 12
Anderson’s Bookshop
Also with Alexandra Bracken.
Naperville, IL
7:00 PM

Wednesday, January 13
Red Balloon Bookshop
Also with Alexandra Bracken.
St. Paul, MN
6:30 PM

Friday, January 15
Kepler’s Books
Also with Alexandra Bracken.
Menlo Park, CA
7:00 PM

Saturday, January 16
Hicklebee’s
Also with Alexandra Bracken.
San Jose, CA
Time TBA

Monday, January 18
Books Inc.
Also with Alexandra Bracken.
San Francisco, CA
7:00 PM

Friday, January 22
ConFusion
The Woodlands, TX
Time TBA

Michael Livingston, The Shards of Heaven

Monday, January 4
Park Road Books
Charlotte, NC
7:00 PM

Tuesday, January 5
Flyleaf Books
Chapel Hill, NC
7:00 PM

Lawrence M. Schoen, Barsk: The Elephant’s Graveyard

Wednesday, January 20
Barnes & Noble
Philadelphia, PA
7:00 PM

Thursday, January 21
Schuler Books & Music
Lansing, MI
7:00 PM

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Building the Great Library of Alexandria

The Shards of Heaven by Michael Livingston
Written by Michael Livingston

My new novel, The Shards of Heaven, is a historical fantasy. Part Indiana Jones, part Game of Thrones, this adventure takes place within our historical past, incorporating fantasy elements like the Trident of Poseidon as seamlessly as possible into the known facts of history. Indeed, if I have done my work well, one might argue that the Trident really was there at the rise of the Roman Empire—we just haven’t heard about it before.

As you can imagine, this approach placed limits on what I could or could not do with the power of the Shards, and I confess this has always been a part of my fascination with the story. I wanted to do the mythological and historical interweaving of luminaries like Tolkien and Jordan (and now Martin), but I also wanted to take the extra step of making it a part of our “real” historical world.

Which meant research.

Lots and lots of research.

In a recent post on my website, I discussed how I had to construct a map of ancient Alexandria for my story, and here I’d like to share a little about researching a specific building in that city: the Great Library of Alexandria.

Though the ancient city of Alexandria is perhaps best known for the magnificent Pharos Lighthouse, which was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, it was the Great Library that was surely the more important cultural artifact. Constructed under the orders of Ptolemy I Soter (Alexander the Great’s general, who succeded him in ruling Egypt) and organized under the direction of Demetrius Phalereus (who had been a student of Aristotle), the Great Library was the single greatest repository of knowledge for some three centuries.

We have little idea now about where it stood or what it looked like.

This factual vacuum left me with a great deal of freedom in designing the building for my novel, though I was certainly constrained by the architectural and technological capabilities of the fourth century BCE. Within those limitations, I wanted the building to be impressive as a construction, beautiful in its aesthetics, and true to the spirit of the building’s purpose as a repository for knowledge. I also wanted it to have a formal centrality within the complex of the Museum, the sprawling Alexandrian complex dedicated to the Muses. In The Shards of Heaven I describe it thus:

“Built of white marble and stone, the Library sat in the middle of the Museum like the physical embodiment of the flowering within the complex: a six-sided, multi-tiered building crowned with a magnificent cupola that was itself mounted by a glimmering gold statue of a man holding aloft a scroll, opened to the heavens.”

Tolzmann, Don Heinrich, Alfred Hessel and Reuben Peiss. The Memory of Mankind. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2001
Because the Library was originally organized by a student of Aristotle, I imagined that its vast array of holdings would be initially organized according to Aristotle’s ten divisions of knowledge.

This, then, was part of the reason I chose a six-sided building: drawing walls between the outer hexagon and another at its center would give me six “halls” within the construction, all radiating out from a central hall that I pictured as being open all the way to the top of the dome, a reflecting pool at its center and staircases spiraling around its interior walls between the three floors of the building. One of these radiating halls would be a great entrance hall, lined with ten pillars and otherwise filled with scriptoria and administrative offices. The remaining five halls would each have two of Aristotle’s ten divisions, neatly and logically giving order to the hundreds of thousands of books and scrolls that would have been housed there.

There was another reason I chose a hexagon shape: in symbology the hexagon is emblematic of the natural honeycomb, representing both the sweetness of knowledge and the busy, cooperative “bees” of the librarians toiling within. More than that, a hexagon fit into the symbolism of the Shards of Heaven themselves, which is grounded in a symbolic revision and representation of the classical elements.

Plus, well, I thought a hexagon would just look pretty amazing.

Whether it was reimagining the Great Library or reconstructing the Pharos Lighthouse, one of the immeasurable joys of writing The Shards of Heaven (and its coming sequels!) has been my need to breathe new life into our past by rebuilding it—sometimes brick by brick—for a modern audience.

I can only hope that readers will love seeing the results of this work as much as I enjoyed building it behind the scenes.

Alexandria

Buy The Shards of Heaven today:
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Books-a-Million | iBooks | Indiebound

Follow Michael Livingston on Twitter at @medievalguy and on his website.

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