The scene behind him finally came into view, and Caesarion pulled Hannah behind him. His eyes took the horror in all at once. Didymus was crumpled and unmoving against the stone wall inside the canal. Pullo was collapsing like a timbered tree against the big pots of oil, the lamp dropped from his hand rocking on the stones and flashing light on and off of the red spraying from the back of his legs. And closer, right behind the Ark itself, Jacob stared down, eyes glazed and face frozen in an expression caught between amusement and disbelief. The point of the blade protruding from his stomach was shockingly bright. A trickle of blood bubbled from his mouth, and then he was falling away, lifeless. Behind him, eyes shining as if lit from within, stood one of the adopted sons of Julius Caesar. His clothes were ripped and stained, his face smeared with red. The shafts of broken arrows still angled from behind the thick golden breastplate on his chest. The black stone at its center seemed to glow like cold dark liquid fire.
Juba smiled—at him or at something else, Caesarion couldn’t tell—and then the Numidian reached forward, his hands glazed with gore, and grabbed hold of the two angels atop the Ark of the Covenant. In response, a surge of power expanded from the Shard within its casing, flattening everyone else on the platform and leaving Juba standing alone.
Like Shushu, Juba trembled and shook when his hands tensed upon the metal. But where the hapless Egyptian had been racked with pain, the Numidian appeared to stand taller, his smile widening.
Hannah had fallen to her back with the others, Caesarion draped protectively over her body. “Shoot him!” she shouted.
The four archers had already regained firing positions on their knees, and four arrows were loosed, point-blank, to join their old mates in the Numidian’s body.
The arrows never made it. One instant they were flying from their bows, hard and fast, and the next instant they were floating peacefully, improbably, in the air.
Juba looked down upon them, and his eyes were aglow with an inner fire. The air around the Ark grew cold and shimmered with blue, like spinning, thin wisps of flame. At once the arrow points crumpled in on themselves, the iron snapping and cracking as if wadded up by unseen hands. The little rough balls of material that were left fell limp to the ground.
“Oh, God,” one of the archers said. “I didn’t—” Juba’s fiery gaze turned to the man, and his words were cut off as he arched his back and screamed in a horrible gurgle of anguish, blood geysering from his body behind a cracking sound not unlike the grinding of stones.
Juba’s head turned, eyes finding the next archer. Even as the first one fell, the second began to scream, too.
It had only been a matter of heartbeats since Juba’s attack. Hannah was trying to push herself off her back, to get to her feet, and Caesarion was doing the same, trying to keep himself between her and the Ark. They were no longer holding hands. She was only a few feet away, but he had to shout to be heard over the horrible screams of the dying archers. “Jump!”
Even as he said it, he knew she’d never go. Her family had been entrusted with the Ark. For generations they’d kept it safe. At what cost of life, he didn’t know, but he was certain that she would face the addition of her own without a second thought. Even the other archers didn’t flee. While their comrades were ripped apart from within, one was notching another arrow while the other was unsheathing his sword. As Caesarion watched, Juba’s eyes began to turn—slowly and patiently—to the two of them. The screaming on the platform increased, and the sword and last arrow dropped unused to the ground.
It seemed then to Caesarion that the whole world was screaming: the four archers around him wailed in agony, and Caesarion could see behind the Ark that Pullo was roiling on his back beside the oil pots in contorted terror, his hands gripping the backs of his legs as if he might pull his rolled-up hamstrings back down to his knees.
Hannah is next, Caesarion thought. God, he’ll take Hannah next.
Caesarion, the man who once might have inherited the world, made a decision. He scrambled to his feet, turning his back on the girl whom he might one day have loved, and lunged forward through the cold blue twists of wind to place his hands, too, upon the Ark.
* * *
Caesarion had dreamed once that he was riding the Nile through the mighty cataracts, helpless while the boat beneath him forever fell away along the torrent beneath him even as it threw him roughly side to side and threatened, at every turn, to cast him out into the crags and froth and all-encompassing roar.
In the instant that Caesarion placed his hands upon the two statues atop the Ark, the same sensations overtook him. He was tumbling and sliding downward, unable to control the river of power that pulled him out of the world of light, of metal beneath his hands and stone beneath his feet, toward a world of deeper and deeper darkness.
Without thinking, he tried to throw out his arms as if he might scrabble for a hold on the fast-fading reality, but there was nothing to grab, and he had nothing to grab it with. His arms and his hands were things he’d left behind. He imagined them back behind him, shaking more and more violently as his fingers pressed into metal that wouldn’t give way.
Pressure built around him as he descended and the shadows grew stronger. Had Shushu felt this just before he’d died?
Or was Caesarion already dead?
Am I?
Hannah. God, Hannah. The children. Helios. Philadelphus. Selene.
The images came to him in a rush of emotion, hanging in front of his mind’s eye only for a moment before they, too, threatened to fade away.
He screamed into the black, trying to bring them back, but the more he fought against it, the more they fell into shadow. As the increasing pressure threatened to crush him at last, the final glimmers of their faces disappearing, Caesarion’s mind screamed against the power of a God whose existence he doubted more than ever. How could it be so cruel?
It couldn’t, his heart replied. God isn’t cruel. And God isn’t dead.
Caesarion ceased fighting the dark. He ceased trying to hold on to the world and instead let go of it all, opening himself up to the power sweeping around and—he now knew—through him. Like a man at last coming up for air, the pressure that had been building released like a burst bubble. He opened eyes he didn’t know he’d closed.
He stood beside the Ark, his hands beside Juba’s on the golden angels. The Numidian’s eyes still burned with the power that was coursing through him—Caesarion didn’t doubt that his own were alight, too—but there was another flame there now: jealousy, rage, and fear. Despite the power that Juba had unleashed, there was something fighting against the other man. Like a ship dragging an anchor, the Numidian was being held back from unleashing the full potential within the Shard. Caesarion felt it through the Ark, like a tremor in the wind, a rock breaking the pulse of waves. What it was, where it came from, Caesarion didn’t know. But it gave him the opening he needed.
Reaching down into the darkness within himself, that inner place that the world couldn’t touch—that river of coursing power that he knew had been there all along, needing only the bridge of a Shard to be reached and only the faith of his spirit to be controlled—Caesarion pulled up currents of the energy and unleashed them at Juba.
The Numidian recoiled as if he’d been slapped, and he staggered backward, his grip on the Ark breaking.
I’ve got to keep him back, Caesarion thought. I’ve got to keep him from the Ark.
Debris twirled between them in a green glow. Dust, small rocks. Caesarion remembered Juba crushing the iron points on the arrows. The Shard of the Ark controls earth, he remembered. Earth.
He focused in on the stones between them, the stones all around him. He felt them, sensing weak cracks, stronger veins. He recognized metals and, like a magnet, began to pull them toward him, particle by particle.