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questions. Yet Syphax had spoken with a pragmatic earnestness, as if Juba could easily get information from Thoth.
    â€œSo 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.
    â€œJuba?”
    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.
    â€œWe’re returning to Rome,” he said over his shoulder. “As soon as possible. There are things I need to do there.”
    â€œOf 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.

 
    2
    T HE L AST Q UIET M OMENTS

    ALEXANDRIA, 32 BCE
    Lucius Vorenus, feeling a familiar tiredness in his forty-five-year-old bones, leaned against the sun-bleached stonework atop the old palace wall and peered down into the cleared square of one of the inner courtyards, where Caesarion was practicing his sword work in the fading light of the day. Working against Vorenus’ old friend Titus Pullo, the fifteen-year-old co-regent of Egypt had stripped to his loincloth to reveal a body filled out with lean muscle that flexed beneath a sheen of thick sweat—a fact that Vorenus could see did not go unnoticed by the small gathering of the remaining servant girls in the shadows, who whispered between giggling smiles as they watched the young man training. A few months ago there