Ramses the Damned Page 28

“I’m sure your children who died today believed the same.”

  “Don’t seek to goad me, Cleopatra. I’m immune to these tricks.”

  “But you are not immune to this poison, whatever it may be. And neither are you immune to those who wish to dispense it.”

  “I am immune to her tricks and her lies and her deceit, as I always have been,” he sneered, and then realized, too late, what he had just revealed.

  “Of whom do you speak now, Saqnos?”

  “You have had your volley. It’s my turn now. Ramses the Great. Lover or enemy?”

  “They are so often the same. Why force me to choose?”

  “You have already chosen. The choice lies within whatever reason you had for attending the party today.”

  “Why would it help you to know?”

  “I will know this when I know.”

  An alliance. Was he truly suggesting an alliance after the way he had treated her?

  “Two thousand years ago he was my lover,” she said. “Today he is my rival.”

  “I see,” he said, “and so you attended his party to do him harm. Or to use his fiancée against him, just as we had planned to do.”

  “It is my turn to request information now.”

  He toasted her with his goblet to indicate his consent.

  “The poisoner. Who is she?”

  He chewed a bite of food.

  “Lover? Rival?”

  Again, he did not answer.

  “I see,” she finally said.

  “What? What do you see?”

  “She was your queen,” Cleopatra whispered. “She is still your queen, which is why you cower here at your estate even after she slaughtered so many of your children.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “It’s the absolute truth. You occupy yourself torturing me because you are powerless before her. You are not immune. You are impotent!”

  “She would not dare.” His voice was a low rumble.

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “Because I am all that remains of our kingdom. She’s nourished no grand design for her immortal life other than petty, dithering historian. She envies me, and she feels a bond with me that is tangled and confused, and so be it. For I’m nothing she believes me to be and I never have been.”

  A brittle silence.

  “You told us she slept.”

  The voice next to her was timid and weak, but the newness of it caused Cleopatra to jump. One of the immortals had said this, the one standing to her left, holding one of the chains to the collar around Cleopatra’s neck. A pale-faced woman with huge, expressive eyes and a glittering, fragile dress much like the one they’d given Cleopatra. She was countering Saqnos’s glare with one of her own, but this took all her strength, for the hands in which she held Cleopatra’s chain now shook. Her jaw quivered. There were tears standing in her eyes.

  “You told us we had nothing to fear from her because she slept.”

  Saqnos leapt to his feet and slammed both his fists down upon the table with such force it looked as if a wave had coursed through the tablecloth itself, jostling every tray of food along the way. She relished the sight. Knew instantly it would deliver information of value, to see him so undone by two simple remarks from one of his children.

  “Weeks,” he growled. “All of you. You have only weeks, days. If that. And it was you who woke me, believing this Ramses, this king, would be your great hope. The plan was not my own. You assembled it before I arrived. Now you seek to lay this slaughter at my feet solely because I took her centuries of silence to mean she slept. This is an outrage! I have been shown more respect by our prisoner.”

  “She won’t kill you because you are the other half of her kingdom,” Cleopatra said quietly, “but clearly she does not feel the same way about your children.”

  “You know nothing of this!” he declared.

  “I know more than you would like. Now. Perhaps you should send your ungrateful children away before they reveal even more. Of course, they would first have to release my chains.”

  “We have lost sight of our exchange,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “We have simply welcomed a new member. A new member who has only weeks of life left, despite bearing the marks of one who has consumed the elixir. If there is only one pure elixir, that is.”

  “It is my turn to request information.”

  “Then why not ask me what you truly wish to know?” Must sustain this upset that had just taken place, must open the wound further, sending her captors further off balance. “Ask me the question that’s burned in you since you first saw the blueness of my eyes.”

  “You believe I have only one question for you? You degrade my capacity for inquiry and complex thought.”

  “I believe you have a need, a want, that outweighs all others, for which you are willing to endanger your own children.”

  “And what is this need?”

  “You need the elixir. You were given it, but you were not given the knowledge of its ingredients or how it is made. And you’ve concocted some bastard version that does not last. And it’s all traceable back to your queen, isn’t it? The queen of Shaktanu. The one you served as prime minister.”

  “I served her as many things. As prime minister. As lover. As friend. And when she made the greatest discovery of humankind, she kept it secret. From me. From her subjects. This was a betrayal of our kingdom and all who served her.”

  “And yet you somehow managed to consume this secret?”

  “I stole it. It was my right. The hours she spent in her workshop were a luxury wrought by my loyal service.”

  “I see. So it was a golden age. Free of war. All thanks to one man. You.”

  “It was a time unlike any you have ever known.”

  “I know what it takes to rule. And I know that no king and no queen ever rules with one man at their back. Yet most of their time is spent fighting off challenges from those in their own houses who claim the true source of power and success. I knew this before my resurrection. I know it now. You were a traitor, is what you were, Saqnos. You speak as one who served only for the promise of personal reward.”

  A silence fell over the room. He turned his back to her. He was gathering strength. Gathering focus. Her outbursts had not pushed him further into anger as she had hoped. They had quieted him instead. Paralyzed him in some way. She didn’t seek his paralysis. She sought his outrage. She sought a chaos she might seize as a chance to escape.

  “Perhaps, then,” he said quietly, turning to face her again, “you should lecture me more on your history as queen. Surely it will benefit me to know which aspects of your known story are truth, and which are fantasy created by an empire that despised you and cheered your fall.”

  He closed the distance between them. His children had backed up several feet, but they still held the chains in their hands.

  “Your victories were many, were they not? You were banished from Alexandria by your father and yet you managed to make it back into the city as Caesar held it in his grip.”

  No, she thought. Not this. Not this interrogation. Not this descent into a past that was blackness. Hadn’t she managed to avoid this? To skip past it?

  “Tell me what is true of this tale, Queen Cleopatra VII. Last queen of Egypt. The tale in which you smuggled yourself into Caesar’s quarters inside a basket full of serpents. Is this true? Or fantasy?”

  “No,” she whispered. “Lies. It’s all lies. That is not how I outwitted my father’s army.”

  A greater silence now, deeper, and, within it, a kind of tense energy gathering itself, a new energy that seemed to unite everyone in the room.

  What had she done? Had she made some error? Revealed her true, tortured nature?

  Slowly, Saqnos took one end of the chain from the hand of the woman who’d spoken against him. He began to wrap its length around his wrist, tightening it, pulling her forward in her chair until she was rising awkwardly to her feet.

  “It was not your father
’s army,” he whispered. “It was your brother’s army. He was the one who banished you from Alexandria before Caesar’s landing.” He yanked her away from the chair. They stood within inches of each other. There was no avoiding his blazing stare. “And it was not a basket of serpents. It was a rolled-up rug. And you do not know these things because you cannot remember them. And you can’t remember them because yours was not an awakening, it was a resurrection, as you just carelessly revealed.

  “Because you, Queen Cleopatra VII, are not a queen at all. You are a foul thing raised from death, losing your memories to one who contains your true reborn spirit. You are nochtin. That is the name I made for the vile creature you are. I have raised many like you only to watch their visions of those who contain their true reincarnated souls drive them to madness, leaving me with only one choice. To wall them away in darkness for all time. And this is what I will do for you, pretender to a throne who calls me a traitor to mine. Cast you into darkness before eternal madness will claim you.”

  The scream that tore from her was a piercing, primal thing that sounded more animal than human. She slashed at him across his face with her fingernails, using such force he almost released her. But he kept his balance and withdrew by only a half step. The chains at her neck were pulled taut once more. But they couldn’t restrain her cry.

  “I am Cleopatra!” she roared.

  There was a crack like the sound of a whip. A windowpane behind him was suddenly spiderwebbed with cracks. Had her own screams broken the glass?

  A mercy, the fear that swept the room. It distracted her from her despair, from the terrifying implications of her captor’s words. A rock. That was it. Someone had thrown a rock at the window small enough that it didn’t crash through the glass, but with enough concentrated force to crack it from frame to frame. Only an immortal would have the strength to do this.

  The three men who’d stood against the wall drew oily black handguns from their jackets and hurried to the terrace door.

  The other two captors, the male and the female, remained at her side.

  In one powerful hand, Saqnos gripped the front of the hard cold collar around her neck. But he’d turned his head to one side to watch the hasty exit of his men.

  There was a moment of silence, which was quickly filled by a strange, rhythmic clicking. A blink of an eye later, the three gun-wielding men were backing silently through the doorway, guns raised, heads bowed.

  They were followed by the hounds, who stepped through the open door one after the other, perfectly silent, perfectly poised, their gazes directed at the men who pointed their pistols uselessly in their direction. For a moment, it was impossible to believe they were the same animals to which she’d almost been fed. For they were utterly silent now and moved in perfect unison. They were mastiffs, their heads the size of a man’s. The round blue eyes seeming more thoughtful now that their mouths were not contorted into snarls. In the twinkling light from the chandelier, she could see their shining coats ranged in color from black to dark brown.

  Dumbfounded, the men stumbled backwards. One of them stabbed the air with his gun as if he thought this might stop their advance. It did nothing of the kind. She could count them now. Ten, twelve. Fifteen in all. And on most of their dark faces, faint traces of bright orange powder.

  Some powerful enchantment had caused a miraculous change in them. It seemed as if they were now governed by a single consciousness.

  “Burnham,” Saqnos said in a growl.

  Torn between holding on to one of the chains attached to her neck and responding to his master’s request, the man called Burnham cleared his throat and let out a piercing whistle.

  The dogs ignored it.

  Burnham went pale. He tried again. The dogs once more ignored him. It seemed as if the lot of them, all fifteen, were gazing directly at the three men holding guns, and now, Cleopatra realized, these men were essentially cornered. They’d been backed all the way to the wall.

  “Burnham!” Saqnos bellowed.

  “They are not responding, Master. It’s as if they’ve been spellbound.”

  To this statement, Saqnos had no response.

  And then the dogs began to growl.

  Never before had she heard a sound like it. Never before had she heard fifteen different hounds growling in perfect unison. The sound was like a cross between a swarm of angry bees and a boulder being rolled steadily up a hill. One of the men simply ran from the room without apology. Another followed, and then the third did as well. But first he inanely placed his pistol on the console table behind him as if it were an offering, a gesture that might placate this gathering of beasts.

  The dogs swung their heads in the direction of Saqnos.

  The woman who’d spoken against him earlier fled, dropping her chain to the floor with a thud. Burnham followed. And then the dogs began to bark. Deafening, this sound, and it came again and again. In perfect unison. Each bark so loud, the sounds so perfectly aligned, it shook her bones.

  Beneath this terrifying chorus, other sounds. Breaking glass. Footfalls. Scuffles. Fighting in the adjacent rooms. Were there more of these hounds? Or had someone stopped the escape of Saqnos’s children?

  Her captor either did not hear it or couldn’t bring himself to care, for the dogs were advancing on them now, moving once again in perfect unison.

  “You are doing this,” Saqnos whispered.

  A pleasure to see him so afraid, but was she not in the sights of these beasts as well?

  “I’m doing nothing of the kind. Let me go. So that we may both seek safety before it’s too late.”

  He turned to face her. His eyes blazed. His lips curled into a snarl.

  “You are doing this. This was your plan. You work with the queen.”

  “I have never met your queen!” she snarled.

  He bared his teeth. His mouth opened. And then he was torn from her.

  The dogs drove him to the floor. It seemed as if they had all taken to the air at once, piling upon him in a mad tumble.

  She fell over backwards, the chair toppling behind her. They paid her no attention at all, these beasts.

  Freed from immortal hands, she now had the strength to unfasten the collar at her neck. She tossed it aside and ran into the hallway.

  She could not resist a glance back. The dogs tore at Saqnos’s prone body, concealing it from view as they attempted to feast. More anger than anguish in the man’s wails.

  She spun round, then froze at the sight that greeted her in the passage. Steps from her bare feet was a pile of ash, in the empty dress of the woman who’d just held one of her chains.

  The poison had done this! There was no other explanation.

  Movement behind her. Again, she pivoted.

  Ramses. Advancing on her. He brought a finger to his lips even as he pulled a dagger from a sheath in his belt. A dagger? How could she reconcile these two gestures? One to give comfort, the other to strike?

  How dare he!

  She reached out, grabbed the edge of a massive cabinet, its shelves lined with vases of various styles. Then, when he was almost within reach, she brought it crashing down upon him, sending him to the floor in a cascade of shattering porcelain and glass and shelves that pinned him to the hardwood.

  37

  The shattering of glass and porcelain on all sides of him left Ramses stunned and struggling to shield his face with his hands. A slash across his eye would heal quickly, but even temporary blindness during this quick assault could be disastrous.

  He was sure he’d lost her. He threw off the massive weight of the cabinet and rose to his feet. There stood Cleopatra, yards away from him, gazing at something she held in one hand.

  His ring. The bronze ring Bektaten had given him for this mission, the one with the tiny chamber full of strangle lily powder. It had slipped from his finger during his scramble and fall, and now she held it in her hands.

  What a terrible strategic error they had made! Their most harmless poison, the sedative,
had been applied to their most fearsome weapon, their daggers. And their most fearsome to their least conspicuous, their rings, rings that did not fit them, rings too large or too small. If they’d been attempting subterfuge and assassination, this would have been an excellent plan. But with Cleopatra, that was not their plan.

  And if Cleopatra were to release the strangle lily, Bektaten would never believe that Ramses had not worked this deliberately.

  Cleopatra gazed at the ancient ring as if it were a flower she had picked. She could see what it was, see the threads beneath the jewel, a ring with a secret compartment. She unscrewed the red jewel, revealing the bronze pin underneath. She looked to him, saw the fear in his eyes, and unscrewed the casing that held the pin, revealing the yellow powder underneath.

  “No!” he cried. “You must not! You must not!”

  “And so this is the poison,” Cleopatra said to him, her eyes blazing. “The queen’s poison.”

  “I did not seek to use it on you. I sought to subdue you with another substance, a sedative on my dagger. I did not come to destroy you or even to harm you, Cleopatra. You must believe this!”

  “You seek to keep me alive?” She seemed dazed by the possibility.

  “Yes. Please. Put down the ring.”

  “Put the poison aside, you mean. This poison you received from a true queen. Unlike me, a shade of one risen from death by your hand.”

  “We will discover who and what you are together. All of us.”

  “Ah, you seek to comfort me now. Would it comfort you to know I never wished to see you again? That I did not cross an ocean for you out of love.”

  “You seek the elixir. You believe it will make you strong against your connection to Sibyl Parker.”

  “Sibyl Parker.” Her jaw trembled and tears came to her eyes. “Sibyl Parker, the vessel for my true spirit.”

  “I heard his explanation, his slurs. You must not yet accept them as fact.”

  “Give me the elixir, and then leave me to my own interpretations of my condition.”

  “I did not bring it.”

  “Of course you didn’t. Because you never planned to give it to me. Only to abduct me again. For the purposes of what? More torture? Some kind of test to make sense of this madness?”