Free Rule of God (Book Three of the Dominium Dei Trilogy) by Thomas Greanias

everything he knows about the Dei.”

VIII
    September 18
    D omitian was rudely awakened in the dead of night by another nightmare of Minerva warning him that she could no longer protect him. He bolted upright in his bed, dagger clutched to his chest, which was covered in sweat. He felt a trickle down his cheek, gingerly touched it with his finger and saw blood. He jumped out of bed, ran to the brass mirror and in the candlelight saw the festering ulcer on his forehead that he had been scratching.
    “Minerva!” he cried out, pleading before the statue of the goddess. “Would this be all to befall today!”
    He stared at his fading reflection in the mirror. His prophesied hour of doom at 9 o’clock this day was all of nine hours away. How was he supposed to breathe in the meantime? If blood must be spilled on this day, the day that he had dreaded his whole life, Domitian concluded, then perhaps Jupiter would accept another sacrifice in his place. Perhaps an innocent prophet would do, as he had used up most of the vestal virgins.
    Yes, it was his only hope now.
    Domitian splashed water on his face, dabbed his forehead with a towel and then pulled a cord to summon his chamberlain. By the time he had picked up his dagger from the floor next to his bed and placed it safely back under his pillow, he heard a knock.
    “Enter,” Domitian said as Parthenius walked in.
    “Your Highness,” Parthenius said cheerfully, pretending as if this midnight rousing was common and that the day ahead would be like any other.
    “I need that astrologer we arrested,” Domitian told him. “Not the one from Germania. The other one.”
    “Which one, Your Highness? There are so many in custody.”
    “The Armenian, I think,” Domitian said, irritated. “I want him to stand trial so I can pass an impartial and just sentence this morning. Prepare an executioner for 9 o’clock.”
    “But, of course, Your Highness. I will have everyone assembled in the throne room.”
    “No, the basilica. I will have Jupiter and Minerva at my back as I dispense divine justice.” He then handed his wooden tablet with a list of names to Parthenius. “And I want every name here rounded up so they can all be executed at the same time.”
    He watched the door close behind Parthenius and then collapsed back on his bed, dagger clutched to his chest, lying very still until he could hear only his own uneven breath praying to Minerva.
    It was well past midnight when Athanasius left the ship at the port of Ostia, made his way across the piers and found a taxi on the Appian Way. There was lightning across the sky, and Athanasius had heard there had been quite a lot of it lately in Rome, and that it had spooked Domitian and therefore all of Rome with him.
    “The Apollo Inn,” he told the driver and settled back into his open-air carriage, trying to control his concern about Helena’s fate since he had been gone. The only message he received from Virtus in Ephesus was that everything was in motion here in Rome with regards to Domitian, and that was days old.
    Nothing about Helena.
    He wanted her out of Rome before everything went down and the decades-in-the-making business of September 18 would finally be over. She would be safely out of the picture so that Domitian or Ludlumus had no leverage over him before they were both killed.
    His path was fixed. God forgive him, if that were possible at this point.
    But he could not allow himself to consider life after Domitian, or contemplate the hope of his Christian allies of a Christian world—despite their savior’s own words that his kingdom was in heaven, not on this earth. Nor even his own hope of a life reunited with Helena, of the freedom to think his own thoughts, to write as he wished, to maybe settle down and have children in this seemingly God-forsaken world.
    No, he could not allow such hopes to occupy his mind, any more than he could allow the fears if he failed.
    He could only focus on the task at