The Shards of Heaven Read Online Free Page B

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.
    â€œBut 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 who 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