Corocotta growled something, and a moment later Selene heard the little crippled girl behind her translate it: “Corocotta says the obedience of the army is very impressive.”
“So it is,” Augustus said. “This is the point where the enemy usually runs away.”
A couple of the other officers suppressed chuckles as the slave girl translated, but Corocotta did not reply.
For a moment there was silence over the field. Then, to Selene’s surprise, the rear gate of Vellica opened and a column of Cantabrian warriors began to issue out, jogging down the curving earthen ramp against the wall of the hillfort. A great cheer went up from the other side of the valley.
The officers around her shifted a little on their feet, and as Selene turned from the valley to look around at them she could see that they, too, were surprised. Several of them were exchanging whispers. Whatever plans the Romans had designed, she decided, a pitched battle on the valley floor was not among them.
From the corner of her eye, Selene caught movement from behind her, and when she turned to look she saw that Corocotta’s crippled slave was staring at her. The little girl no longer had the crutch under her arm but had instead moved it forward, almost as if it were a walking stick. Out of instinct, Selene started to smile at her, but her smile froze when the girl silently mouthed a single word: Go. The girl’s eyes were wide and imploring. She had a look on her face that Selene recognized but could not place. Go, she mouthed again.
“Caesar,” Carisius said. “Orders?”
Confused, Selene instinctively turned toward the emperor of Rome.
For a moment Augustus appeared to be frowning, but he seemed to catch himself and he let out a lighthearted laugh. “Well, we don’t need to open the gate now,” he said. “Left legion, form a line. Archers, up a volley. Catapults, load and loose. For victory and Rome!”
As he spoke, Carisius relayed the orders down through the ranks and for a moment it seemed everyone around Selene was shouting at once. All three horns began to sound in complex notes. Below her on the hillside she heard shouts in the trees and an answering of trumpets signaling the readiness of the catapults, whose tops she could see now that she knew to look for them. A cry went up from the legionnaires as the Cantabrians streaming down out of the gate formed into their own lines at the base of the opposing hillside.
Her mother’s servants, Selene suddenly remembered. That was what the crippled girl’s look had reminded her of: the sorrow and fear and duty and despair that was etched on the faces of her mother’s servants after she’d brought them the asp whose venom would take Cleopatra’s life and their own.
Go.
High streaking whistles pierced the air: a volley of arrows streaming up from the Roman bows to rain down on the massing Cantabrians.
Heavy thrums and crashes as the taut catapults loosed their missiles up into the sky.
Corocotta roared something beside her, a sound like the doom of a god.
“Impetus!” Carisius shouted over the din, and across the valley the horns began resounding and resounding, sending the legions into the charge.
Go.
A trap. Somehow. Some way. To stay was to die.
In the same moment she realized it, over the chaos of the noise, Selene heard Juba shouting her name.
Selene’s body tensed to run in response, and the world seemed to slow down as she started to turn back toward the palisades of the Roman encampment. Corocotta’s arms, she saw, were no longer crossed. He was turning toward Augustus, reaching for him with hands like great mauling paws. The little slave girl was turning, too: she no longer leaned on her crutch but had pulled it up to brace it against her hip, point out. She was spinning to point it back the way they’d come, back toward the Roman encampment and the group of praetorian guards gathered there. The wrappings, Selene saw, had fallen from its top, revealing it to be a silver-tipped spear, seated in a wide socket. And at its base, gleaming like a liquid flame, was a black stone.
Still turning to run, Selene threw her momentum toward the ground, watching as the girl—crying, trembling—closed her small, fragile hand around the Shard.
The girl screamed, an inhuman, horrifying sound, and fire erupted from the point of the spear, ripping through the air in a white-hot line that lanced into the praetorians. For an instant she saw the clear face of one of the men who’d brought her to Caesar illuminated by the light of a second sun before him, but then that torrent of heat washed over him and melted him into a blinding glare.
Selene closed her eyes from the shocking light of the flame. She hit the ground, rolling flat onto her belly, and the world abruptly lurched into speed once more.
When it did, all she heard was screaming. And when she opened her eyes again, all she saw was fire.
Juba didn’t have the Lance of Olyndicus. Neither did Corocotta. A small voice in her head wanted to laugh at what their arrogance had wrought: no one had given thought to the little girl who might kill them all.
In seconds, the hillside around her had been engulfed in chaos and flames. The girl’s mouth was frozen open, as if she were still screaming, but no sound came from her throat now. Her body shook, quaking as the divine power of the Shard flowed through her and out through the spear point that she jerked from praetorian to praetorian, burning them alive with the fire of a hundred suns and at the same time running a barrier of flaming earth between the general staff and any help they might get from the encampment. Corocotta was behind her. He had wrestled the emperor of Rome from the saddle, and he had pulled Caesar’s own dagger in order to hold it at his captive’s throat to ward off any attacks. Most of the other officers were backing away in horror and fear. A few were running down the hillside, away from the fires, toward the line of catapults in the trees below.
Tiberius, Selene saw, was among them. Even from behind she recognized him running away.
As she stared after him, a part of her hoping that the little girl would turn the Lance to follow him, she heard again the sound of Juba’s voice, calling her name upon the wind that suddenly swept across her face.
Juba!
A wind!
Selene’s hands scrambled into the folds of her dress, searching.
She’d had it. The Palladium. She’d had it right here, standing right here—
As Selene rolled to her side to look back where she’d been—already reaching across the earth in desperation to find the Shard—a darkness passed over the hillside, as if a great canopy had been passed over the sun, sending all into shadow.
A deep, threatening rumble broke overhead.
Selene’s arm was outstretched before her, and with wide eyes she saw the fine hairs upon it stiffening and rising, stretching toward the sky. In twin terror and fascination, she rolled to her back and stared up at a sky that had been, moments earlier, bright with the blue of dawn.
No longer. Dark gray clouds were forming up out of the air, as if by some magic they’d been pulled out of the ether itself. They streamed together as they were born, coalescing and spinning, squeezing each other into a spinning, roiling mass that flashed and rumbled from the power within.
It had been a long time since Selene had believed in the gods. She’d been nine years old when she’d learned that the One God, if he’d ever existed, was dead.
But still in this moment she prayed for mercy from whatever god had come with such vengeance to behold.
Closer, she heard Carisius shouting above the din of fire and wind and the sounds of war still raging in the valley below. “Riders! The flank! To arms!”