Orion in the Dying Time

Chapter 14

Down and down and down we plunged.

Lit by the sullen red glower from deep below us, Anya and I were weightless, in free-fall, like parachutists or astronauts in zero gravity. We seemed to be hanging in mid-air, floating eerily on nothingness, slowly roasting in the blistering heat welling up from below. A fiery wind like the blast from a bellowing rocket engine howled past us. We could not breathe, could not speak.

I willed my body to draw oxygen from the vacuoles within its cells: a temporary expedient, but it was better than drawing in a breath of burning air that would sear my lungs. I hoped Anya could do the same.

The brief glimpse into Set’s mind that I had obtained told me that this seemingly endless tube we were falling through reached down toward the earth’s core, where the raging heat powered a warping device that might fling us into another space time.

That was our only chance to escape Set and the slow death he had planned for us. That, or death itself in the searing embrace of molten iron that was rushing up toward us.

I gripped Anya tightly to me and she wrapped her arms around my neck. There were no words. Our embrace said everything we needed to say. I thought that Set and his reptilian minions could never know this kind of closeness, this sharing of body contact, flesh to flesh, that is uniquely mammalian.

Squeezing my eyes shut, I tried to recall the sensations of previous passages through spacetime warps. With all my strength I tried to make contact with the Creators, to will the two of us into the safety of their domain in the far future. But it was useless. We continued to plummet toward the earth’s core, clinging to each other in our free-fall weightlessness as the heat boiling up from below began to cook our flesh.

Energy. It takes the titanic energy of a planet’s fiery core or the churning radiant surface of a star to distort the flow of spacetime and create a warp in the continuum. The closer we got to the molten iron at the bottom of Set’s core tap, the closer we got to the energy needed for the warp. Yet that same energy was killing us, driving the breath from our bodies, charring our flesh.

We had no choice. I forced my body to drain every drop of moisture it could generate to cover my body with sweat, desperately hoping that the thin film of moisture would absorb the heat blasting at me and save me from being broiled alive, at least for a few moments longer.

Anya’s face, so close to my own, began to shimmer in the burning heat. I thought my eyes were melting away, but then I felt her fading into nothingness in my arms. Her body seemed to waver and grow transparent.

Her lovely face was set in a bitterly tragic expression, half apology, half desperation. It rippled and flickered before my streaming eyes, blurring, dimming, waning into a transparent ghostly shadow.

There in my arms, Anya changed her form. She began to glow, her solid body dissolving away into nothingness, transforming herself into a radiant sphere of silvery light tinged ruddy by the glow from beneath us.

I realized that she truly was a goddess, as advanced beyond my human form as I am beyond the form of the algae. The human body that she had worn, that she had suffered in, was a sacrifice she made because she loved me. Now, faced with searing death, she reverted to her true form, a globe of pure energy that pulsated and dwindled even as I watched it.

“Farewell,” I heard in my mind. “Farewell, my darling.”

The silvery globe disappeared and I was left alone, abandoned, plunging toward hell itself.

My first thought was, At least she’ll be safe. She can escape, perhaps even get back to the other Creators, I told myself. But I could not hide the bitterness that surged through me, the black sorrowing anguish that filled every atom of my being. She had abandoned me, left me to face my fate alone. I knew she was right to do it, yet a gulf of endless grief swallowed me up, deeper and darker than the pit I was falling through.

I roared out a wordless, mindless scream of rage: fury at Set and his satanic power, at the Creators who had made me to do their bidding, at the goddess who had abandoned me.

Anya had abandoned me. There was a limit to how much a goddess would face for love of a mortal. I had been a fool even to dream it could be otherwise. Pain and death were only for the miserable creatures who served the Creators, not for the self-styled gods and goddesses themselves.

Then a wave of absolute cold swept through me, like the breath of the angel of death, like being plunged into the heart of an ancient glacier or the remotest depths of intergalactic space. Darkness and cold so complete that it seemed every molecule in me was instantly frozen.

I wanted to scream. But I had no body. There was no space, no dimension. I existed, but without form, without life, in a nullity where there was neither light nor warmth nor time itself.

In the nonmaterial essence that was my mind I saw a globe, a planet, a world spinning slowly before me. I knew it was Earth, yet it was an Earth such as I had never known before. It was a sea world, covered with a global ocean, blue and sparkling in the sun. Long parades of purest whitest clouds drifted across the azure sea. The world ocean was unblemished by any islands large enough for me to see, unbroken by any landmass. The poles were free of ice and covered with deep blue water just as the rest of the planet was.

The Earth turned slowly, majestically, and at last I saw land. A single continent, brown and green and immense: Asia and Africa, Europe and the Americas, Australia and Antarctica and Greenland, all linked together in one gigantic landmass. Even so, much of the land was covered with shallow inland seas, lakes the size of India, rivers longer than the eternal Nile, broader than the mighty Amazon.

As I watched, disembodied, floating in emptiness, the vast landmass began to break apart. In my mind I could hear the titanic groaning of continent-sized slabs of basalt and granite, see the shuddering of earthquakes, watch whole chains of mountains thrusting upward out of the tortured ground. A line of volcanoes glowered fiercely red and the land split apart, the ocean came rushing in, steaming, frothing, to fill the chasm created by the separating continents.

I felt myself falling once again, speeding toward that spinning globe even as its continents heaved and buckled and pulled apart from one another. I felt my senses returning, my body becoming substantial, real.

Then utter darkness.

My eyes focused on a flickering glow. A soft radiance that came and went, came and went, in a gentle relaxed rhythm. I was lying on my back, something spongy and yielding beneath me. I was alive and back in the world again.

With an effort I focused on this world around me. The glow was simply sunlight shining through the swaying fronds of gigantic ferns that bowed gracefully in the passing hot breeze. I started to pull myself up to a sitting position and found that I was too weak to accomplish it. Dehydrated, exhausted, even my blood pressure was dangerously low from sapping so much liquid to protect my skin from being roasted.

Above me I saw these immense ferns swaying. Beyond them a sky of pearl gray featureless clouds. The air felt hot and clammy, the ground soft and wet like the spongy moss of a swamp. I could hear insects droning loudly, but no other sounds.

I tried to at least lift my head and look around, but even that was too much for me.

Almost, I laughed. To save myself from the fiery pit of hell only to die of starvation because I no longer had the strength to get off my back—the situation had a certain pathetic irony to it.

Then Anya bent over me, smiling.

“You’re awake,” she said, her voice soft and warm as sunshine after a rain.

A flood of wonder and joy and fathomless inexpressible gratitude hit me so hard that I would have wept if there had been enough moisture in me to form tears. She had not abandoned me! She had not left me to die. Anya was here beside me, in human form, still with me.

She was clad in a softly draped thigh-length robe the color of pale sand, fastened on one shoulder by a silver clasp. Her hair was perfect, her skin unblemished by the roasting heat and slashing claws we had faced.

I tried to speak, but all that escaped my parched throat was a strangled rasping.

She leaned over me and kissed me gently on my cracked lips, then propped up my head and put a gourd full of water to my lips. It was green and crawling with swamp life, but it tasted as cool and refreshing as ambrosia to me.

“I had to metamorphose, my love,” she told me, almost apologetically. “It was the only way we could survive that terrible heat.”

I still could not speak. Which was just as well. I could not bear the idea of confessing to her that I had thought she had abandoned me.

“In my true—” She hesitated, started over again: “In that other form I could absorb energy coming from the core tap and use it to protect us.”

Finally finding my voice, I replied in a frog’s croak, “Then you didn’t… cause the jump…”

Anya shook her head slightly. “I didn’t direct the spacetime transition, no. Wherever and whenever we are now, it is the time and place that Set’s warping device was aimed at.”

Still flat on my back, with my head in her lap, I rasped, “The Cretaceous Period.”

Anya did not reply, but her perceptive gray eyes seemed to look far beyond this time and place.

I took another long draft of water from the gourd she held.

A few more swallows and I could speak almost normally. “The little I gleaned from Set’s mind when he was probing me included the fact that something is happening, or has happened, or maybe will happen here in this time—sixty to seventy million years in the past from the Neolithic.”

“The Time of Great Dying,” Anya murmured.

“When the dinosaurs were wiped out.”

“And thousands of other species along with them, plant as well as animal. An incredible disaster struck the earth.”

“What was it?” I asked.

She shrugged her lovely shoulders. “We don’t know. Not yet.”

I pushed myself up on one elbow and looked directly into her divinely beautiful gray eyes. “Do you mean that the Creators—the Golden One and all the others—don’t know what took place at one of the most critical points in the planet’s entire history?”

Anya smiled at me. “We have never had to consider it, my love. So take that accusative frown off your face. Our concern has been with the human race, your kind, Orion, the creatures we created…”

“The creatures who evolved into you,” I said.

She bobbed her head once in acknowledgment. “So, up until now we have had no need to investigate events of sixty-five million years previous to our own era.”

My strength was returning. My flesh was still seared red and slashed here and there by the claws of Set’s reptilians. But I felt almost strong enough to get to my feet.

“This point in time is crucial to Set,” I said. “We’ve got to find out why.”

Anya agreed. “Yes. But not just this moment. You lie there and let me find us something to eat.”

I saw that she was bare-handed, without tools or weapons of any kind.

She sensed my realization. “I was not able to return to the Creators’ domain, my love. Set has still blocked us off from any contact there. The best I could do was to ride along the preset vector of his warping device.” She glanced down at herself, then added with a modest smile, “And use some of its energy to clothe myself.”

“It’s better than roasting to death,” I replied. “And your costume is charming.”

More seriously, Anya said, “We’re alone here, cut off from any chance of help, and only Set knows where and when we are.”

“He’ll come looking for us.”

“Perhaps not,” Anya said. “Perhaps he feels we’re safely out of his way.”

Painfully I raised myself to a sitting position. “No. He will seek us out and try to destroy us completely. He’ll leave nothing to chance. Besides, this is a critical nexus in spacetime for him. He won’t want us free to tamper with his plans—whatever they are.”

Scrambling to her feet, Anya said, “First things first. Food, then shelter. And then—”

Her words were cut off by the sounds of splashing, close enough to startle us both.

For the first time I took detailed note of where we were. It looked like a swampy forest filled with enormous ferns and the gnarled thick trunks of mangrove trees. Heavy underbrush of grotesque-looking spiky cattails pressed in on us. The very air was sodden, oppressive, steaming hot. No more than ten yards away the spongy ground on which we rested gave way to muddy swamp water flowing sluggishly through stands of reeds and the tangled mangrove roots. The kind of place that harbored crocodiles. And snakes.

Anya was already on her feet, staring into the tangled foliage that choked the water and cut off our view a scant few feet before us. I forced myself up, tottering weakly, and gestured for Anya to climb up the nearest tree.

“What about you?” she whispered.

“I’ll try,” I breathed back.

Several of the tree trunks leaned steeply and were wrapped with parasitic vines that made it almost easy for me to climb up, even as weak as I was. Anya helped me and we crept out onto a broad branch and stretched ourselves flat on its warm, rough bark. I felt insects crawling over my skin and saw a blue-glinting fly or bee or something the size of a sparrow buzz past my eyes with an angry whizzing of wings.

The splashing sounds were coming closer. Set’s troops, already searching for us? I held my breath.

It looked as if a hillside had come loose from the ground and was plodding through the swamp. Mottled mud brown, olive green, and gray, a fifteen-foot-high mass of living scale-covered flesh pushed through the dense foliage and into the clear area of the swamp where the green-scummed water flowed sluggishly.

And I almost laughed. It had a broad flat shout, like a duck’s bill. The curvature of its mouth gave it a silly-looking grin permanently built into its face, like an idiotic cartoon character.

No matter the expression on its face, though, the dinosaur was cautiously looking around before it came further out into the open. It reared up on its hind legs, taller than the branch on which we hid, and looked around, sniffing like the huffing of a steam locomotive. Its feet were more like hooves than clawed fighting weapons. Its yellow-eyed gaze swept past the tree where Anya and I were clinging.

With a snort like the air brakes of a diesel bus, the duckbill dropped down to all fours and emerged fully into the lethargic stream. It was some thirty feet long from its snout to the tip of its tail. And it was not alone.

There was a whole procession of duckbilled dinosaurs, a parade of forty-two of them by my count. With massive dignity they plodded along the swampy stream, sinking knee deep in the muddy water with each ponderous step.

We watched, fascinated, as the dinosaurs marched down the stream and slowly disappeared into the tangled foliage of the swamp.

“Dinosaurs,” Anya said, once they were out of sight and the forest’s insects had resumed their chirruping. There was wonder in her voice, and not a little awe.

“We’re in the Cretaceous,” I told her. “Dinosaurs rule the world here.”

“Where do you think they were heading? It looked like a purposeful migration—”

Again she stopped short, held her breath. All the sounds of the forest had stopped once again.

I was still lying prone on the broad tree branch. Anya flattened out once again behind me. We could hear nothing; somehow that bothered me more than the splashing sounds the duckbills had made.

The foliage parted not more than thirty yards from where we were hiding and the most hideous creature I have ever seen emerged from the greenery. An enormous massive head, almost five feet long from snout to base, most of it a gaping mouth armed with teeth the size of sabers. Angry little eyes that somehow looked almost intelligent, like the eyes of a hunting tiger or a killer whale.

It pushed slowly, cautiously into the sluggish stream that the duckbills had used as a highway only a minute earlier.

Tyrannosaurus rex. No doubt of it. Tremendous size, dwarfing Set’s fighting carnosaurs that we had seen in Paradise. Withered vestigial forelegs hanging uselessly on its chest. It reared up to its full height, taller than all but the biggest trees, and seemed to peer in the direction that the duckbills had gone. Then it stepped out into the muddy stream on two powerful hind legs, its heavy tail held straight out as if to balance the enormous weight of that fearsome head.

I could feel the terrified tension in Anya’s body, pressing against mine. I myself was as rigid as a frightened mouse confronted by a lion. The tyrannosaur loomed over us, its scales striped jungle green and dark gray. Its feet bore claws bigger and sharper than reapers’ scythes.

Slowly, stealthily, it moved upstream in the tracks of the duckbills. Just when I was about to breathe again, a second tyrannosaur pushed through the foliage as silently and carefully as the first. And then a third.

Anya nudged me with an elbow and, turning my head slightly, I saw two more of the enormous brutes emerging from the tangled trees on the other side of us.

They were hunting in a team. Stalking the duckbills with the care and coordination of a pack of wolves.

They passed us by. If they saw us or sensed us in any way, they gave no indication of it. I had always pictured the tyrannosaurus as a brainless ravening killing machine, snapping at any piece of meat it came across, regardless of its size, regardless of whether the tyrant was hungry or not.

Obviously that was not the case. These brutes possessed some intelligence, enough to work cooperatively in tracking down the duckbills.

“Let’s follow them,” Anya said eagerly after the last of them had disappeared into the reeds and giant swaying ferns that closed off our view of the waterway.

I must have looked at her as if she were crazy.

“We can stay a good distance away,” she added, her lips curving slightly at the expression on my face.

“I have the impression,” I replied slowly, “that they can run a good deal faster than we can. And I don’t see a tree for us to climb that’s tall enough to get away from them.”

“But they’re after the duckbills, not us. They wouldn’t even recognize us as meat.”

I shook my head. Brave I may be, but not foolhardy. Anya was as eager as a huntress on the trail of her prey, avid to follow the tyrannosaurs as closely as possible. I feared those monstrous brutes, feared that they would swiftly make us the hunted instead of the hunters.

“We have no weapons, nothing to defend ourselves with,” I said. Then I added, “Besides, I’m still weak from…”

Her face went from smug superiority to regretful apology in the flash of instant. “I forgot! Oh, Orion, I’m such a fool… forgive me… I should have remembered…”

I stopped her babbling with a kiss. She smiled and, still looking shamefaced, told me to wait for her while she found something for us to eat. Then she scampered down the tree trunk and headed off across the mossy muddy swampland.

I lay on my back as the sun filtered down through the leaves. A tiny gray furred thing raced across a branch slightly above me, ran down the tree’s trunk to the branch where I lay, and stared at me for half a moment, beady eyes black and shining, long hairless tail twitching nervously. It made no sound at all.

I said to it, “Greetings, fellow mammal. For all I know, you are the grandfather to us all.”

It dashed back up the trunk and disappeared in the leafy branches above me.

Clasping my hands behind my head, I waited for Anya to return. She had escaped the core-tap pit by reverting to her true form of pure energy, absorbing the heat that had been roasting our flesh, using Set’s own warping device to fling us into this time and place. And reconstructing herself back into human form, unscratched and even newly clothed in the bargain.

An ancient aphorism came unbidden to my mind: Rank hath its privileges. A goddess, a highly advanced creature evolved from human stock but so far beyond humanity that she had no need of a physical body—that kind of creature could happily go thrashing through a Cretaceous landscape after a pack of tyrannosaurs. Death meant nothing to her.

It was different for me. I have died and been returned to life many times. But only when the Creators willed it. I am their creature, they created me. I am fully human, fully mortal. I have no way of knowing if my death will be final or not, no way of assuring myself that I will be rescued from permanent oblivion and brought to life once more.

The Buddhists would teach, millions of years ahead, that all living creatures are bound up on the great wheel of life, dying and being reincarnated over and over again. The only way out of this constant cycle of pain is to achieve nirvana, total oblivion, escape from the world as complete and final as falling into a black hole and disappearing from the universe forever.

I did not want nirvana. I had not given up all my desires. I loved a goddess and I desperately wanted her to love me. She said she did, but in those awful timeless moments when she left me falling down that endless burning pit, I realized all over again that she is not human, not the way I am, despite her outward appearance.

I feared that I would lose her. Or worse yet, that she would grow tired of my human limitations and leave me forever.

Chapter 15

For three days we remained in the steaming swamp while I recuperated and regained my strength. I felt certain that Anya and I were the only human beings on the whole earth in this time—although she was actually more than merely human.

The swamp was miserably hot and damp. The ground squelched when we walked; every step we took was a struggle through thick ferns and enormous broad leaves bigger than any elephant’s ear that clung wetly to our bodies when we tried to push through them. Vines looped everywhere, choking whole trees, spreading across the spongy ground to trip us.

And it stank. The stench of decay was all around us; the swamp smelled of death. The constant heat was oppressive, the drenching humidity sapped my strength.

I felt trapped, imprisoned, in a glistening world of sodden green. The jungle pressed in on us like a living entity, squeezing the breath from our lungs, hiding the world from our view. We could not see more than a few yards ahead in any direction unless we waded out into the oozing mud of midstream, and even then the jungle greenery closed off our view so quickly that a herd of brontosaurs could have been passing by without our seeing them.

There was little to eat. The plants were all strange to us; hardly any of them seemed to bear anything that looked edible. The only fish I could see in the dark water were tiny flitting glints of silver, too small and fast for us to catch. We subsisted on frogs and wriggling furry insect grubs, nauseating but nourishing enough. Barely.

It rained every evening, huge torrents of downpour from the gray towering clouds that built up during the sopping heat of the afternoons. My skin felt wet all the time, as if it were crawling, puckering, in the unremitting humidity. After three days and nights of being soaked and steamed, even Anya began to look bedraggled and unhappy.

The sky was gray almost all the time. The one night it cleared enough to see the stars, I wished it had not. Peering through the tangled foliage while Anya slept, I tried to find the familiar patterns of recognizable constellations. All that I saw was that dismal red star hanging high in the dark sky, as if spying down on us.

I searched for Orion, my namesake among the stars, and could not find the constellation. Then I saw the Big Bear, and my heart sank. It was different, changed from the Dipper I had known in other eras. Its big square “bowl” was slim and sharp-angled, more like a gravy pitcher than a ladle. Its curving handle was sharply bent.

We were so many millions of years removed from any period I had known that even the eternal stars had changed. I stared at the mutated Dipper, desolate, downcast, filled with a dreadful melancholy such as I had never known before.

Other than an occasional shrewlike gray furry creature that seemed to live high in the trees, we did not even see another mammal. Reptiles, though, were everywhere.

One morning Anya was filling a gourd at the edge of the muddy stream when suddenly a gigantic crocodile erupted from the water where it had been lurking, its massive green scaly body hidden perfectly among the reeds and cattails with nothing but its horn-topped eyes and nostrils showing above the surface. Anya had to run as fast as she could and clamber up the nearest tree to escape the crocodile’s rush; despite its spraddling short legs, it nearly caught her.

There were turtles in the swamp and long-tailed lizards the size of pigs and plenty of snakes gliding through the water and slithering up the trees.

This world of the Cretaceous, however, was truly ruled by dinosaurs. Not all of them were giants. The second day Anya, using a thick broken branch for a club, tried to kill a two-legged dinosaur that was only as big as an overgrown chicken. It scampered away from her, whistling like a teakettle. Accustomed to dodging its larger cousins, it easily escaped Anya’s attempts to catch it.

From our tree perch I saw one afternoon a waddling reptile plated with bony armor like an armadillo, although it was almost the size of a pony. It dragged a short tail armed with evil-looking spikes.

Insects buzzed and crawled around us all the time but, oddly, none seemed to bother us. I thought this strange at first, until I realized that there were so few mammals in this landscape that hardly any insects had developed an interest in sucking warm blood.

The third night I told Anya that I felt strong enough to travel.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. It’s time we left this soggy hellhole.”

“And go where?” she asked.

I shrugged. The evening cloudburst had just ended. We sat huddled on a high branch beneath a rude makeshift shelter of giant leaves that I had put together. It had not been much help; the torrents of rain had wormed through the leaves and wet us anyway. The last remnants of the rain dripped from a thousand leaves and turned our green world into a glittering, dewy symphony of pattering little splashes. Anya’s once-sparkling robe was sodden and gray. My leather vest and kilt clung to me like clammy, smelly rags.

“Anywhere would be better than this,” I replied.

She agreed with a nod.

“And probably as far away from this location as we can get,” I added.

“You’re worried about Set?”

“Aren’t you?”

“I suppose I should be. I can’t help thinking, though, that he won’t bother with us. We’re trapped here, why spend the effort to seek us out and kill us? We’re going to die here, my love, in this forsaken miserable time, and no one will save us.”

In the shadows of dusk her lovely face seemed somber, her voice low with dejection. I had been content to live a normal human lifetime with Anya in the Neolithic, but the cool forest of Paradise was very different from this rotting fetid jungle. Even though the people there had turned traitor against us, there were human beings in Paradise. Here we were totally alone, with no human companionship except each other.

“We’re not dead yet,” I said. “And I don’t intend to give Set any help in killing us.”

“Why would he bother?”

“Because this is a crucial nexus for him,” I told her. “He knows where his spacetime warp was set, he knows we’re here. As soon as he has the device operating again he’ll come looking for us, to make certain that we don’t upset whatever it is he’s planning for this point in the continuum.”

Anya saw the logic of it, but still she seemed reluctant to take action.

“We’ll be better off out of this damned swamp,” I added, “This is no place to be. Let’s start out tomorrow morning, first light. We’ll head upland, to where it’s cooler and dryer.”

In the deepening shadows I saw her eyes sparkle with sudden delight. “We can follow the path that the duckbills took. They were heading toward higher ground, I’m certain.”

“With the tyrannosaurs after them,” I muttered.

“Yes,” Anya said, some of her old enthusiasm back in her voice. “I’m curious to see if they caught up with the duckbills.”

“There are times,” I said, “when you seem absolutely bloodthirsty.”

“Violence is part of human makeup, Orion. I am still human enough to feel the excitement of the hunt. Aren’t you?”

“Only when I’m the hunter, not the hunted.”

“You are my hunter,” she said.

“And I’ve found what I was searching for.” I pulled her to me.

“Being the prey isn’t all that terrible,” Anya whispered in my ear. “Sometimes.”

Chapter 16

The next morning we started our trek out of the swamplands and up toward the cooler, cleaner hills. Subconsciously I expected to find a more familiar world, a landscape of flowering plants and grass, of dogs and rabbits and wild boars. I knew there would be no other humans, but my mind was seeking familiar life-forms nonetheless.

Instead we found ourselves in a world of dinosaurs and very little else. Giant winged pterosaurs glided effortlessly through the cloudy skies. Tiny four-legged dinosaurs scurried through the brush. Their larger cousins loomed here and there like small mountains, gently cropping the ferns and soft-leafed bushes that abounded everywhere.

There were no flowers anywhere in that Cretaceous landscape, at least none that I could recognize. Some of the barrel-shaped bushes bore clumps of colored leaves beneath the feathery fronds at their tops. Otherwise the plants we saw looked nasty, repulsive, armed with spikes and suckers, soft and pulpy and altogether alien.

Not even the trees were familiar to me, except for occasional stands of tall straight cypresses and the mangroves that clustered by the edge of every pond and stream, their gnarled tangled roots gripping the soggy earth like hundreds of sturdy wooden fingers. And palm trees, some of them huge, their trunks bare and scaly, their feathery leaves catching the moist warm breezes high above us. There was neither grass nor grains to be seen, only wavering fronds of reeds and ugly cattails that sometimes covered ponds and watercourses so thickly they looked like solid ground. Until we stepped into it and squelched through to water up to the knees or deeper.

We climbed trees for the nights, although as far as I could tell the dinosaurs slept the dark hours away just as we did. Still, unarmed against the ferocious likes of tyrannosaurs, we had no alternatives except running and hiding.

We saw no more of the tyrannosaurs during our first few days’ march, although their deep three-toed footprints were plentiful. Anya insisted that we follow their tracks, which moved right along with the even deeper hoofprints of the duckbilled dinosaurs. There were places where the tyrants’ claws had stepped precisely into the duckbills’ prints.

There were other meat-eaters about, however. Swift two-legged predators taller than I who ran with their tails straight out and their forearms clutching avidly at smaller dinosaurs, who bleated and whistled like a steamboat in distress when the carnosaurs’ claws and teeth ripped into their flesh.

Anya and I went to ground whenever a meat-eater was in sight. Armed with nothing but our senses and our wits, we flattened ourselves on the mossy ground and lay un-moving the instant we saw one of the hunters. None of them bothered with us. Whether that was because they did not see us or because they did not recognize us as meat, I could not say. Nor did I want to find out, particularly.

Once we saw a half-dozen triceratops drinking warily at a stream’s edge, each of them bigger than a quartet of rhino, with three long spikes projecting from their heads and a heavy shield of bone at the base of the skull. Their flanks were spotted with rosettes of color: shades of red and yellow and brown. They looked awkward and ungainly and extremely nervous. Sure enough, a pair of two-legged carnosaurs splashed into the stream from the other side; not tyrannosaurs, but big and toothy and mean looking.

The triceratops looked across the stream and then pulled themselves together in a rough shoulder-to-shoulder formation, heads lowered and those long spikes pointing at the meat-eaters like a line of pikes or a gigantic hedgehog. The carnosaurs huffed and snorted, jinked up and down on their hind legs, looked the situation over. Then they turned and dashed away.

I almost felt disappointed. Not that I especially wanted to watch the violence and gore of a dinosaur battle. I simply felt that no matter who won the fight, there would most likely be plenty of meat for us to scavenge. We had been eating little else but the small dinosaurs and furry shrewlike mammals we could catch with our crude nets and clubs. A thick slab of meat would have been welcome.

The second night of our trek I awoke in pitch blackness to a sense of danger. Anya and I were half sitting in the crotch of a tree, as high above the ground as we could find branches to support us.

We were not alone. I felt the menacing presence of someone—something—else. I could see nothing in the utter darkness. The night was quiet except for the background drone of insects. There were no wolves howling in this Cretaceous time, no lions roaring. Only the forefathers of field mice and tree squirrels were awake and active in the darkness, and they made as little sound as possible.

The clouds parted overhead. The moon was down, but the ruddy star that I had first seen in the Neolithic glowered down at me. In its blood red light I caught the glint of a pair of evil eyes watching me, unblinking.

Without consciously willing it, my body went into hyperdrive. Just in time, as the huge snake struck at me, jaws extended, poisonous fangs ready to sink into my flesh.

I saw the snake coiled around our tree branch, saw its mouth gaping wide and the fangs already dripping venom, saw its head rear back and then lunge forward at me. All as if in slow motion. Those lidless slitted eyes glared hatefully at me.

My right hand darted out and caught the snake in midstrike. It was so big that my fingers could barely reach around half its width to clutch it. The momentum of its long muscular body nearly knocked me off the branch into a long fall to the shadows far below. But I gripped the branch with my legs and free hand as my back slammed against the tree trunk with a force that made me grunt.

Pressing my thumb against the snake’s lower jaw, I held its head at arm’s length away from me. It writhed and coiled and tried to shake loose. Anya awoke, took in the situation immediately, and reached for her club.

I struggled to one knee, fearful of being knocked off the branch by the snake’s bucking and writhing.

“Lie down flat!” I commanded Anya.

As she did I let my hand slide partway down the snake’s body and swung it as mightily as I could against the tree trunk. Its head hit the wood with a loud, satisfying thunk. Again I bashed it against the tree, and again. It stopped writhing, stopped moving at all. The head hung limp in my grasp. I threw the serpent away, heard it crash among the lower branches and finally hit the ground.

Anya raised her head. “From Set?” she asked, her voice little more than a whisper.

I made a shrug that she could not see in the shadows.

“Who knows? There are plenty of snakes here. They probably prey on the little nocturnal mammals that live in these trees. We may simply have picked the wrong tree.”

Anya moved close to me. I could feel her shuddering. From that night onward we always slept in shifts.

And I realized why all human beings have acquired three instinctive fears: fear of the dark, fear of heights, and fear of snakes.

Chapter 17

Gradually, as we walked the rising land, Anya and I began to fashion a few primitive tools. I could not find flint anywhere, but I did pick up a stone that fit nicely into the palm of my hand and worked each night scraping one side of it against other stones to make a reasonably sharp edge. Anya looked for fairly straight branches among the windfalls from the trees we passed and used our nightly fire to harden their ends into effective spear points.

I worried about making a fire each night. We needed it to cook what little food we could find, of course. In another age I would have wanted it to help ward off predators while we slept. But here in this world of dinosaurs and snakes, this world ruled by reptiles instead of mammals, I wondered if a fire might not attract heat-seeking predators instead of frightening them away.

Besides, there was still Set to consider. Certainly no one except Anya and I would light a fire each night in this Cretaceous landscape. It would stand out like a beacon to anyone with the technology to scan wide areas of the globe.

Yet we needed a nightly fire, not merely for cooking or safety but for the psychological comfort that it provided. Night after night we huddled close together and stared into the warm dancing flames, knowing that it would be more than sixty million years before any other humans would create a campfire.

The skies were clearer in the uplands, away from the deep swamp. But the stars were still unfamiliar to me. Night after night I searched for Orion, in vain.

I began to show Anya my prowess as a hunter. Using the spears she made, I started to bag bird-sized dinosaurs and, occasionally, even bigger game such as four-legged grazers the size of sheep.

One night I asked Anya a question that had been nagging at me ever since we had come to this time of dinosaurs. “When you changed your form… metamorphosed into a sphere of energy”—the idea of that being her true self still bothered me—“where did you go? What did you do?”

The firelight cast flickering shadows across her face, almost the way she had shimmered and glittered when she had left my arms as we fell down the well of Set’s core tap.

“I tried to return to the other Creators,” she said, her voice low, almost sad. “But the way was blocked. I tried to move us both to a different time and place, anywhere in the continuum except where we were. But Set’s device was preset for this spacetime and it had too much energy driving it for me to break through and direct us elsewhere.”

“You’re conscious and aware of what you’re doing when you—change form?”

“Yes.”

“Could you do it now?”

“No,” she admitted somberly. Gesturing toward our little campfire and the scraps of dinosaur bones on the ground, she said, “There isn’t enough energy available. We barely have energy input to keep our human forms going.”

Her voice smiled when she said that, but there was an underlying sadness to it. Perhaps even fear.

“Then you’re trapped in this human form,” I said.

“I chose this human form, Orion. So that I could be with you.”

She meant it as a sign of love. But it made me feel awful to know that because of me she was just as trapped and vulnerable as I was.

Within a week we were up in the hilly country where the air was at least drier, if not much cooler, than it had been in the swamps below.

Night after night I found myself searching the skies, seeking my namesake constellation and trying to avoid the feeling that the baleful red star was watching me like the eye of some angry god—or devil.

Anya always woke near midnight to take the watch and’ let me sleep. One night she asked, “What do you expect to see in the stars, my love?”

I felt almost embarrassed. “I was looking for myself.”

She pointed. “There.”

It was not Orion. Not the familiar constellation of the Hunter that I had known. Rigel did not yet exist. Brilliant red Betelgeuse was nowhere to be seen. Instead of the three stars of the belt and the sword hanging from it, I saw only a faint, misty glow.

My blood ran cold. Not even Orion existed in this lonely place and time. We had no business being here, so far from everything that we had known. We were aliens here, outcasts, abandoned by the gods, hunted by forces that we could not even begin to fight against, doomed to be extinguished forever.

An intense brooding misery filled my soul. I felt completely helpless, useless. I knew that it was merely a matter of time until Set tracked us down and made an end of us.

No matter how hard I tried, I could not shake this depression. I had never felt such anguish before, such despair. I tried to hide it from Anya, but I saw from the anxious glances she gave me that she knew full well how empty and lifeless I felt.

And then we came across the duckbills’ nesting ground.

It was the broad, fairly flat top of a gently sloped hill. There were so many duckbill tracks marching up the hillside that their heavy hooves had worn an actual trail into the bare dusty ground.

“The creatures must come up here every year,” Anya said as we climbed the trail toward the top of the hill.

I did not reply. I could not work up the enthusiastic curiosity that was apparently driving Anya. I was still locked in gloom.

We should have been warned by the noisy whistling and hissing of dozens of pterosaurs flapping their leathery wings up above the summit of the hill, swooping in for landings. As Anya and I climbed up the easy slope of the hill we heard their long bony bills clacking as if they were fighting among themselves.

A faint half memory tugged at me. The way the pterosaurs were behaving reminded me of something, but I could not recall what it was. It became clear to me the instant we reached the crest of the hill.

It was a boneyard.

Up on the bare ground of the hilltop there were hundreds of nests where the duckbills had been laying their eggs for uncounted generations.

But the tyrannosaurs had been there.

A gust of breeze brought the stench of rotting flesh to our nostrils. The pterosaurs flapped and hissed at us, tiny claws on the front edges of their wings quite conspicuous. I realized that they were behaving like vultures, picking the bones of the dead. I swatted at the nearest of the winged lizards with the spear I carried and they all flapped off, hissing angrily, hovering above us on their wide leathery wings as if waiting for us to leave so they could resume their feast.

I thought Anya would break into tears. Nothing but bones and scraps of rotting flesh, the rib cages of the massive animals standing like the bleached timbers of wrecked ships, taller than my head. Leg bones my own body length. Massive flat skulls, thick with bone.

“Look!” Anya cried. “Eggs!”

The nests were shallow pits pawed into the ground where oblong eggs the length of my arm lay in circular patterns. Most of them had been smashed in.

“Well,” I said, pointing to a pair of unbroken eggs that lay side by side on the bare ground, “here’s dinner, at least.”

“You couldn’t!” Anya seemed shocked.

I cast an eye at the pterosaurs still flapping and gliding above us.

“It’s either our dinner or theirs.”

She still looked distressed.

“These eggs will never hatch now,” I told her. “And even if they did, the baby duckbills would be easy prey to anything that comes along without their mothers to protect them.”

Reluctantly Anya agreed. I went down the hill to gather brushwood for a fire while she stayed at the nests to protect our dinner against the pterosaurs.

It struck me, as I picked dead branches from the ground and pulled twigs from bushes, that the tyrannosaurs had been unusually efficient in their assault on the duckbills. As far as I could see they had killed every one of the herbivores. That did not seem natural to me. Predators usually kill what they can eat and allow the rest of their prey to go their way. Were the tyrannosaurs nothing but killing machines after all? Or were they being directed by someone—such as Set or his like?

Had they followed the migrating herd we had seen so that they could find the duckbills’ nesting ground and kill all the dinosaurs nesting there? Obviously the hilltop was being used by more than the forty-some duckbills we had seen in the swamp. There were more than a hundred nests up there. But they had all been slaughtered by the tyrannosaurs.

When I returned to the hilltop with an armload of firewood, Anya showed me the answer to my question.

“Look here,” she said, pointing to the edge of one of the nests.

I dropped the tinder near the nest where our prospective dinner waited and went to where she stood.

Footprints. Three-clawed toes, but much too small to be a tyrannosaur’s. Human-sized. Or humanoid, rather.

“One of Set’s troops?”

“There are more,” Anya said, gesturing toward the other nests. “I think they deliberately smashed the eggs that weren’t broken when the tyrannosaurs attacked.”

“That means Set—or someone like him—is here, in this time and place.”

“Attacking the duckbills? Why?”

“More important,” I said, “whoever it is, he’s probably searching for us.”

Anya raised her eyes and scanned the horizon, as if she could see Set or his people heading toward us. I looked, too. The land was flat and depressingly green, nothing but the same tone of green as far as the eye could see. Not a flower, not a sign of color. Even the streams meandering through the area looked a sickly, weed-choked green. Mangroves lined the waterways and giant ferns clustered thickly, waving in the warm wind. Whole armies could be hidden in that monotonous flat bayou country and we could not have seen them.

It struck me all over again how helpless we were, how useless in the Creators’ struggle to overthrow Set and his kind. Two people alone in a world of dinosaurs. I shook my head as if to clear it of cobwebs but I could not shake this feeling of depression.

Anya showed no signs of dismay, however. “We’ve got to find their camp or headquarters,” she said. “We’ve got to find out what they are doing in this era, what their goals are.”

I heaved a big hungry sigh. “First,” I countered, “we’ve got to have dinner.”

Returning to the two unbroken eggs, I started to build a small fire, knowing now that there were eyes out there in the distance that could detect it and locate us. Yet we had to eat, and neither of us was ready to face raw eggs or uncooked meat. Using a duckbill’s pointed scapula, I scraped out a pit in the soft dirt so that the meager flames could not be seen above the crest of the hill by anyone watching from below. Yet I knew that even primitive heat detectors could probably spot our fire from its thermal signature against the cooler air of the late afternoon.

“Orion! Quickly!”

I turned from my blossoming fire, grabbing for the nearest bone to use as a weapon, and saw Anya staring tensely at our eggs. One of them was cracked. No, cracking. As we watched, it split apart and a miniature duckbilled dinosaur no more than two feet long crawled out of the shell on four stubby legs.

Anya dropped to her knees in front of it.

The baby dinosaur gave a weak piping whistle, like the toot a child might make on a tin flute.

“Look, it has an egg tooth,” Anya said.

“It’s probably hungry,” I thought aloud.

Anya dashed over to my tiny fire and pulled out a couple of twigs that still had some pulpy leaves on them.

Stripping the leaves off, she hand-fed them to the little duckbill, which munched on them without hesitation.

“She’s eating them!” Anya seemed overjoyed.

I was less thrilled. “How do you know it’s a female?”

She ignored my question. Eating the other egg was out of the question now, even though it never opened that evening and was still not open the following morning. Our dinner consisted of a single rat-sized reptile that I managed to run down before darkness fell, and a clutch of melons that I picked from a bush, the first recognizable fruit I had seen.

In the morning Anya made it clear that she had no intention of leaving our baby duckbill behind.

“We’ll have to feed it,” I complained.

“It eats plants,” she countered. “It’s not like a mammal that needs its mother’s milk.”

I was anxious to get away from this hilltop massacre site and leave it to the scavenging pterosaurs. Our best defense against whoever had directed the attack on the duckbills was to keep moving. Anya agreed, but our pace that morning was terribly slow because the little duckbill could not trot along with any real speed. It seemed to show no curiosity about the world around it, as a puppy would. It merely followed Anya the way ducklings fixate on the first moving object they see, believing it to be their mother.

Anya seemed quite content with motherhood. She picked soft pulpy leaves for her baby and even chewed some of them herself before feeding the little beast.

I had brought something quite different from the duckbill boneyard: a forearm bone that fit my hand nicely and had the proper size and heft to be an effective club. We had to make tools and weapons if we were to survive.

Why we had to survive, what our goal might be beyond mere physical survival, was a total blank to me. Oh, I knew we were supposed to be battling against Set and whatever plans he had for this period in time. But how the two of us, alone and practically defenseless, were supposed to overcome Set and his people—that was beyond my reckoning.

Despite my misgivings, Anya set us out on the tracks of the tyrannosaurs.

“The humanoids went with them,” she said, pointing at the smaller tracks set in between the giant prints of the tyrants.

“Some distance behind them,” I guessed.

“I suppose so. We must find those humanoids, Orion, and learn from them what Set is doing.”

“That won’t be easy.”

She smiled at me. “If it were easy, it would have already been done. You and I are not meant for easy tasks, Orion.”

I could not make myself smile back at her. “If they can truly control the tyrannosaurs, we haven’t a chance in hell.”

Anya’s smile wilted.

We quickly saw that the tyrannosaur tracks led back toward the swamps we had quit only a few days earlier. I felt miserably disheartened to be returning to that fetid, humid, steaming gloom. I wanted to run as far away from there as possible. For the first time in my lives I was feeling real fear, a terror that was dangerously close to panic.

Anya overlooked my brooding silence. “It makes sense that Set’s headquarters here would be very close to the place where we entered this spacetime. Maybe we can use his warping device in reverse and return to the Neolithic when we’re finished here.”

“Return to his fortress?”

She ignored my question. “Orion, do you realize that the tyrannosaurs left their usual habitat there in the lowlands, marched up to the duckbills’ nesting area to slaughter them, and then returned immediately back to the swamps? They must have been under Set’s control.”

I agreed that it did not seem likely that the giant carnivores would trek all the way to the nesting site and back without some form of outside stimulus.

We camped that evening by a large, placid lake, on a long curving beach of clean white sand so fine it almost felt like powder beneath our feet. The beach was some twenty to thirty yards wide, then gave way to a line of gnarled, twisted cypresses festooned with hanging moss and, behind them, tall coconut palms and feathery fringe-leafed ferns that rose like gigantic swaying fans.

The sand was far from smooth, though. It was crisscrossed with the prints of innumerable dinosaurs: blunt deep hooves of massive sauropods, birdlike claws of smaller reptiles, and the powerful talons of carnosaurs. They all came to this shore to drink—and, some of them, to kill.

As the sun dropped toward the horizon, turning sky and water both into lovely pastel pinks and blue greens, I saw a streak of brilliant red and orange drop out of the sky and plunge into the lake. In half a moment it popped to the surface with a fish flapping in its toothy jaws.

The thing looked more like a lizard than a bird, with its long, toothed snout and longer tail. But it was feathered, and its forelimbs were definitely wings. Instead of taking off again, though, it paddled to the water’s edge and waddled up onto the shore, then turned to face the setting sun and spread its wings wide, as if in worship.

“It can’t fly again until it dries its wings,” Anya surmised.

“I wonder how it tastes,” I muttered back to her.

If the lizard-bird heard our voices or felt threatened by them, it gave no indication. It simply stood there on the shore of the gently lapping wavelets, drying its feathers and digesting its fish dinner.

Suddenly I realized that we could do the same. “How would you like to eat fish tonight?” I asked Anya.

She was sitting by a clump of bushes, feeding the little duckbill again. It seemed to eat all day long.

Without waiting for her to reply, I waded out into the shallow calm water, turning hot pink in the last rays of the dying sun. The lizard-bird clacked its beak at me and waddled a few paces away. It took only a few minutes for me to spear two fish. I felt happy with the change in our diet.

Anya had spent the time gathering more shrubs for our baby duckbill to nibble. And a handful of berries. The dinosaur ate them with seeming relish.

“If they don’t hurt him, perhaps we can eat them, too,” she said as I started the fire.

“Maybe,” I acknowledged. “I’ll sample one and see how it affects—”

The duckbill suddenly emitted a high-pitched whistle and scooted to Anya’s side. I scrambled to my feet and stared into the gathering darkness of the woods that lined the lakeshore. Sure enough, I heard a crashing, crunching sound.

“Something heading our way,” I whispered urgently to Anya. “Something big.”

There was no time to douse the fire. We were too far from the edge of the trees to get to them safely. Besides, that was where the danger seemed to be coming from.

“Into the water,” I said, starting for the lake.

Anya stopped to pick up the duckbill. It was as motionless as a statue, yet still a heavy armful. I grabbed it from her and, tucking its inert body under one arm, led Anya out splashing into the lake.

We dove into the water as soon as we could, me holding the duckbill up so it could breathe. It wiggled slightly, but apparently had no fear of the water. Or perhaps it was more terrified of whatever was heading our way from the woods. The lake water was tepid, too warm to be refreshing, almost like swimming in lukewarm bouillon.

We went out deep enough so that only our heads showed above the surface. The duckbill crawled onto my shoulder with only a little coaxing and I held him there with one arm, treading water with Anya beside me, close enough to grasp if I had to.

The woods were deeply shadowed now. The trees seemed to part like a curtain and a towering, terrifying tyrannosaur stepped out, his scaly hide a lurid red in the waning sunset.

The tyrant took a few ponderous steps toward our campfire, seemed to look around, then gazed out onto the water of the lake. I realized with a sinking heart that if it saw us and wanted to reach us, it had merely to wade out and grab us in those monstrous serrated teeth. The water that was deep enough for us to swim in would hardly come up to its hocks.

Sure enough, the tyrannosaur marched straight to the water’s edge. Then it hesitated, looking ridiculously like a wrinkled old lady afraid of getting her feet wet.

I held my breath. The tyrannosaur seemed to look straight at me. The trembling package of frightened duckbill on my shoulder made no sound. The world seemed to stand still for an eternally long moment. Not even the lapping waves seemed to make a noise.

Then the tyrannosaur gave an enormous huffing sigh, like a blast from a blacksmith’s forge, and turned away from the lake. It stamped back into the woods and disappeared.

Almost overcome with relief, we swam shoreward and then staggered out of the water and threw ourselves onto the sandy ground.

Only to hear an eerie hooting whistle coming out of the twilight on the lake.

Looking around, I saw the enormous snaky neck of an aquatic dinosaur rising, rising up from the depths of the lake, higher and higher like an enormous escalator of living flesh silhouetted against the glowing pastel sunset. Our duckbill wriggled free of my arms and ran to worm his body as close to Anya as he could.

“The Loch Ness Monster,” I whispered.

“What?”

Suddenly it all became clear to me. The damned tyrannosaur would have waded into the lake after us, except that the lake was inhabited by even bigger dinosaurs who had made it their territory. As far as the tyrannosaur was concerned, anything in the water was meat for the beastie who lived in the lake. That was why it had left us alone.

The lake dinosaur hooted again, then ducked its long neck back beneath the waves.

I rolled onto my back and laughed uncontrollably, like a madman or a soldier who becomes hysterical after facing certain unavoidable death and living through it. We had literally been between the devil and the deep blue sea without even knowing it.

Chapter 18

My laughter subsided quickly enough. We were truly trapped and I knew it.

“I don’t see anything funny,” Anya said in the purpling shadows of the twilight.

“It isn’t funny,” I agreed. “But what else can we do except laugh? One or more tyrannosaurs are patrolling through the woods, one or more even bigger monsters prowling through the lake, and we’re caught in between. It’s beyond funny. It’s cosmic. If the Creators could see us now, they’d be splitting their sides laughing at the stupid blind ridiculousness of it all.”

“We can get past the tyrannosaur,” she said, a hint of cold disapproval, almost anger, in her voice. I noticed that she assumed there was only the one monster lurking in the woods, waiting for us.

“You think so?” I felt bitterly cynical.

“Once it’s fully night we can slip through the woods—”

“And go where? All we’ll be accomplishing is to make Set’s game a little more interesting.”

“Do you have a better idea?”

“Yes,” I said. “Transform yourself into your true form and leave me here alone.”

She gasped as if I had slapped her. “Orion—you… you’re angry with me?”

I said nothing. My blood seethed with frustration and fury. I raged silently at the Creators for putting us here. I railed inwardly at myself for being so helpless.

Anya was saying, “You know that I can’t metamorphose unless there’s sufficient energy for the transformation. And I won’t leave you no matter what happens.”

“There is a way for you to escape,” I said, my anger cooling. “I’ll go into the woods first and lead the tyrannosaurs away from you. Then you can get through safely. We can meet back at the duckbill nests—”

“No.” She said it flatly, with finality. Even in the gathering darkness I could sense the toss of her ebony hair as she shook her head.

“We can’t—”

“Whatever we do,” Anya said firmly, “we do together.”

“Don’t you understand?” I begged her. “We’re trapped here. It’s hopeless. Get away while you can.”

Anya stepped close to me and touched my cheek with her cool, soft hand. Her gray eyes looked deeply into mine. I felt the tension that had been cramping my neck and back muscles easing, dissolving.

“This is unlike you, Orion. You’ve never given up before, no matter what we faced.”

“We’ve never been in a situation like this.” But even as I said it, I felt calmer, less depressed.

“As you said a few days ago, my love, we still live. And while we live we must fight against Set and his monstrous designs, whatever they are.”

She was right and I knew it. I also knew that there was no way for me to resist her. She was one of the Creators, and I was one of her creatures.

“And whatever we do, my unhappy love,” Anya said, her voice dropping lower, “we will do together. To the death, if necessary.”

My voice choked with a tangle of emotions. She was a goddess, yet she would never abandon me. Never.

We stood facing each other for a few moments more, then decided to start walking around the edge of the lake, for lack of any better plan. The duckbill trotted after us, silently following Anya.

How can two human beings fight a thirty-ton tyrannosaur with little more than their bare hands? I knew the answer: They can’t. Something deep in my mind recalled that I had killed Set’s carnosaurs in the Neolithic with not much more than bare hands. Yet somehow the tyrannosaurs seemed far beyond that challenge. I felt hopeless, powerless; not afraid, I was so depressed I was beyond fear.

So we walked through the deepening night, the glistening froth of the gently breaking waves on our right, the sighing trees of the woods on our left. The moon rose, a crescent slim as a scimitar, and later that blood red star raised its eerie eye above the lake’s flat horizon.

Anya was thinking out loud, in a half whisper: “If we can find one of Set’s people, capture him and learn from him where Set’s camp is and what he’s trying to achieve here, then we could form a plan of action.”

I made a grunting noise rather than saying out loud how naive I thought she was being.

“They must have tools, weapons. Perhaps we could capture some. Then we’d be better prepared…”

It was on the tip of my tongue to tell her what I really thought of her daydreaming.

“I haven’t seen any weapons or tools of any kind on them,” I muttered.

“Set has a technology as powerful as our own,” she said. I knew that by “our own” she meant the Creators.

“Yes, but his troops go empty-handed—except for their claws.” Then I realized: “And the reptiles they control.”

Anya stopped in her tracks. “The tyrannosaurs.”

“And the dragons, back in Paradise.”

“They use the animals the way we use tools,” she said.

Our baby duckbill snuffled slightly, just to let us know that it was there in the darkness, I think. Anya dropped to one knee and picked it up.

My mind was racing. I recalled another kind of intelligent creature who controlled animals with their minds. The Neanderthals and their leader, Ahriman. My memory filled with half-forgotten images of the suicidal duel he and I had fought over a span of fifty thousand years. I squeezed my eyes shut and stood stock still, straining every cell of my brain to recall, remember.

“I think,” I said shakily, “I might be able to control an animal the same way that the humanoids do.”

Anya stepped closer to me. “No, Orion. That ability was never built into you. Not even the Golden One knows how to accomplish that.”

“I’ve looked deeply into the mind of Ahriman,” I told her. “Many times. I lived with the Neanderthals. I think I can do it.”

“If only you could!”

“Let me try—on your little friend here.”

We both sat cross-legged on the sand, Anya with the sleepy duckbill in her lap. It curled up immediately, tail wrapping over its snout, and closed its eyes.

I closed mine.

It was a simple mind, yet not so primitive that it did not have a sense of self-preservation. In the cool of the evening it sought Anya’s body warmth and the sleep it needed to prepare itself for the coming day. I saw nothing, but a symphony of olfactory stimuli flooded through me: the warm musky scent of Anya’s body, the tang of the lake’s sun-heated water, the drifting odor of leaves and bark. My own mind felt surprise that there were no flowers to add their fragrances to the night air, but then I realized that true flowering plants did not yet exist here.

I opened the duckbill baby’s eyes and saw its world, murky and indistinct, blurred with the need to sleep. An overwhelming reluctance to get up and leave the protection of Anya’s mothering body welled through me, but I rose shakily to all fours and slithered off Anya’s warm lap. I half trotted to the lapping edge of the water, sniffed at it and found no danger in it, then waded in until my tiny hooves barely touched the muddy bottom. Then I turned around and made my way gladly back to the motherly lap.

“She’s all wet!” Anya complained, laughing.

“And sound asleep,” I said.

For many minutes we sat facing each other, Anya with the little dinosaur sighing rhythmically in her lap.

“You were right,” she whispered. “You can control it.”

“It’s only a baby,” I said. “Controlling something bigger will be much more difficult.”

“But you can do it,” Anya said. “I know you can.”

I replied, “You were right, too. Our little friend is a female.”

“I knew it!”

Looking toward the darkened woods, I let my awareness sift in through the trees and mammoth ferns, swaying and whispering in the night wind. There were tyrannosaurs out there, all right. Several of them. They were asleep now, lightly. Perhaps we could make our way past them. It was worth a try.

“Are their masters with them?” Anya asked when I suggested we try to get away.

“I don’t sense them,” I said. “That doesn’t mean they aren’t there.”

We waited while I sensed the tyrannosaurs drifting deeper into sleep. Crickets chirped in the woods, the slim crescent moon rose higher, followed by the baleful red star.

“When can we start?” Anya asked, absently stroking the baby dinosaur on her lap.

I rose slowly to my feet. “Soon. In a few—”

That eerie hooting echoed through the night. Turning toward the lake, I saw the long snaky neck of the enormous aquatic dinosaur silhouetted against the stars and the filmy white haze that would one day be the constellation of Orion. From far away came an answering call floating through the darkness.

A cool breeze wafted in from the lake. It seemed to clear my mind like a wind blows away a fog.

I helped Anya to her feet. The baby duckbill hardly stirred in her arms.

“Do you think,” I asked her, “that Set could influence my mind the way his people control the dinosaurs?”

“He probed your mind there in his castle,” she said.

“Could that have caused me to feel so”—I hesitated to use the word—“so depressed?”

She nodded solemnly. “He uses despair like a weapon, to undermine your strength, to lead you to destruction.”

I began to understand the whole of it. “And once you realized it, you counteracted it.”

Anya replied, “No, Orion, you counteracted it. You did it yourself.”

Did I? Anya was kind to say so, perhaps. But I wondered how large a role she played in my mental revival.

With the blink of an eye I dismissed the matter. I did not care who did what. I felt strong again, and that terrible despair had lifted from me.

“The tyrannosaurs are sleeping soundly,” I told Anya. “We can get past them if we’re careful.”

As I put a hand to her shoulder I heard a frothing, bubbling, surging sound from out in the lake. Turning, I expected to see one or more of the huge dinosaurs splashing out there.

Instead, the waters seemed to be parting far out in the lake, splitting asunder to make way for something dark and massive and so enormous that even the big dinosaurs were dwarfed by it.

A building, a structure, an edifice that rose and rose, dripping, from the depths of the lake. Towers and turrets and overhanging tiers so wide and massive that they blotted out the sky. Balconies and high-flung walkways spanning between slim minarets. Tiny red lights winked on as we watched level upon level still rising up out of the water, mammoth and awesome.

Anya and I gaped dumbfounded at the titanic structure rising from the lake like the palace of some sea god, grotesque yet beautiful, dreadful yet majestic. The water surged into knee-high waves that spread across the lake and broke at our feet, then raced back as if eager to gather themselves at the base of the looming silent castle of darkness.

I saw that one tower rose higher than all the others, pointing straight upward into the night sky. And directly above it, like a beacon or lodestone, rode the blood red star at zenith.

“What fools we’ve been!” Anya whispered in the shadows.

I glanced at her. Her eyes were wide and eager.

“We thought that Set’s main base was back in the Neolithic, beside the Nile. That was merely one of his camps!”

I understood.

“This is his headquarters,” I said. “Here, in this era. He’s inside that huge fortress waiting for us.”

Chapter 19

There was no thought of running away. Set was in that brooding, dripping castle. So was the core tap that reached down to the earth’s molten heart to provide the energy for Set and all his works. We needed that energy if we were to accomplish anything, even if it was merely to escape from this time of dinosaurs.

More than mere escape was on my mind, though. I wanted to meet Set again, confront him, hunt him down and kill him the way he had tried to hunt us down and kill us. He had enslaved my fellow humans, tortured the woman I love, drained me of the will to fight, to live. Now I burned with a yearning to wrap my fingers around his scaled neck and choke the life out of him.

I was Orion the Hunter once again, strong and unafraid.

In the back of my mind a voice questioned my newfound courage. Was I being manipulated by Anya? Or was I merely reacting the way I had been created to react?

The Golden One had often boasted to me that he had built these instincts for violence and revenge into me and my kind. Certainly the human race has suffered over the millennia for having such drives. We were made for murder, and the fine facade of civilization that we have learned to erect is merely a lacquered veneer covering the violence that simmers behind the mask.

What of it? I challenged the voice in my mind. Despite it all the human race has survived, has endured all that the gods of the continuum have forced upon us. Now I must face the devil incarnate, and those human instincts will be my only protection. Once more I must use the skills of the hunter: cunning, strength, stealth, and above all, patience.

“We’ve got to get inside,” Anya said, still staring wide-eyed at the castle of darkness.

I agreed with a nod. “First, though, we’ve got to find out what Set is trying to do here, and why.”

Which meant that we must hide and observe: see without being seen. Anya recognized the sense of that, although she was impatient with such a strategy. She wanted to plunge boldly into that fortress, just the two of us. She knew that was a hopeless fantasy and agreed that we must bide our time. Yet her agreement was reluctant.

I took the baby duckbill from her arms and led us back into the trees, keeping wide of the tyrannosaurs sleeping there in well-separated locations. The little dinosaur seemed heavier than it had been earlier. Either I was tired or it was gaining weight very rapidly.

We pushed our way through the thick underbrush as quietly as possible. The duckbill remained asleep—as did the tyrannosaurs lurking nearby.

“This baby of yours is going to be a problem,” I whispered to Anya, following behind me as I pushed leafy branches and ferns aside with my free hand.

“Not at all,” she whispered back. “If you show me how to control her, she can be a scout for us. What is more natural in this world than a baby dinosaur poking around in the brush?”

I had to admit that she was at least partially right. I wondered, though, if the duckbills were ever seen alone. They seemed to be herd animals, like so many other herbivores that found safety in numbers.

We stopped at a spot where a heavy palm tree had toppled over and fallen onto a boulder as tall as my shoulders. Thick bushes grew behind the fallen bole and heavy tussocks of reeds in front of it. With our spears Anya and I scratched a shallow dugout into the sand, just long enough for us to stretch out flat on the ground. With the heavy log above us, the boulder to one side, and the bushes screening our rear, it was almost cozy. We could peer through the reeds and tufts of ferns to see the beach and the lake beyond it.

“No fire as long as we’re camped here,” I said.

Anya smiled contentedly. “We’ll eat raw fish and try the berries and fruits from the different bushes.”

Thus we began what became many weeks of watching the castle in the lake. Each morning it submerged, the entire titanic structure sinking slowly into the frothing water as if afraid of being seen by the rising sun. Each night it rose up again, dripping and dark like a brooding, malevolent giant.

We hunted and fished while the castle was submerged. We avoided the tyrannosaurs prowling through the woods and the more open flat land beyond. In all truth they did not seem to be particularly searching for us. Just the opposite. We were being ignored.

I began to teach Anya how to control our duckbill, which was rapidly growing out of its babyhood. She had named the little beast Juno, and when I asked her why, she laughed mysteriously.

“A joke, Orion, that only the Creators would appreciate.”

I knew that the Creators sometimes assumed the names of ancient gods. The Golden One referred to himself as Ormazd sometimes, at other times he had called himself Apollo, or Yawveh. Anya herself was worshiped as Athena by the Achaians and Trojans alike. Apparently there was a Juno among the Creators, and it amused Anya to name our heavy-footed round-backed duckbill after her.

After many days I began to realize that the castle was rising out of the water a bit later each night and lingering a few minutes longer into the dawn each morning. This puzzled me at first, but I was more interested in the comings and goings from the castle than its risings and submergings. In the dawn’s early light we could see more clearly what was happening, and why.

Each time the castle rose out of the water a long narrow ramp slid out from a gate set into its wall like a snake’s probing tongue and reached to the shore of the lake, almost a quarter of the way around its roughly circular circumference from the beach where Anya and I lay watching. Invariably, a dozen or so of the humanoid servants of Set, red-scaled and naked as they had been in the Neolithic, marched down that narrow ramp, across the sandy beach, and into the trees.

Tyrannosaurs waited for them there, gathered to this lake by forces unknown to us. In the dark of night or the glimmering gray of dawn, the humanoids selected a dozen or so of the monstrous brutes and headed off, away from the lake.

It did not take us long to realize that each reptilian humanoid controlled a single tyrannosaur. Each team of humanoids created a pack of tyrannosaurs and took them off on some mission. After many days a team would return with its pack. The humanoids would go back into the waiting castle; the tyrannosaurs would inevitably head for the swamplands that seemed to be their natural environment.

“They’re calling the tyrannosaurs here and then using them for some purpose,” Anya concluded one bright morning after the castle had sunk beneath the lake’s surface once again.

We were making our way back from the beach to our dugout, each of us carrying our spears, the duckbill—almost as tall as my hips now—sniffing and whistling beside us. I had a string of three fish thrown over one shoulder: our breakfast.

“There can only be one purpose for using the tyrannosaurs,” I said to Anya, recalling the slaughter at the duckbills’ nesting ground. “But it doesn’t make any sense.”

Anya had the same thought, the same question.

At least I had settled the question of why the castle’s emergence from the lake was taking place a few minutes later each day. It surfaced only when the red star was high in the sky. And it submerged when the red star sank toward the horizon.

When I told Anya, she looked at me questioningly. “Are you sure?”

“The star is so bright that it will be visible in midday,” I replied. “Then the castle will emerge in daylight. I’m certain of it.”

“So Set is not trying to hide from anyone,” she mused.

“Who is there for him to hide from? Us?”

“Then why does the castle sink back into the water? Why not have it out in the open all the time?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But there’s a bigger question for us to answer Why does it rise only when that bloody star is in sight?”

Anya’s mouth dropped open. She stopped where she stood, in the heavy foliage near our nest. Turning, she peered out between the leaves toward the western horizon.

The red star was almost touching the flat line of the lake, tracing a shimmering narrow red line across the water, aimed like a stiletto blade toward us.

For two more nights we watched and saw that the castle rose up from the water only once the red star was riding high in the sky, near zenith. It stayed above the water well into daylight now, and only sank back again once the star began to dip close to the horizon.

“You’re right,” Anya said. “It seeks that star.”

“Why?” I wanted to know.

“Set must come from the world that circles that star,” Anya realized. “That must be his home.”

Our other big question, what the humanoid-tyrannosaur teams were doing, could only be answered by following one of the packs and watching them. I could not decide whether we should both go together to observe a tyrannosaur pack, or if I should go alone and leave Anya at the lake to continue watching the castle.

She was all for coming with me, and in the end I agreed that it would be best if she did. I feared leaving her alone, for there was no way for us to communicate with one another once we were separated. If either of us needed help, the other would never know it.

So, one bright hot morning, we took our spears in our hands and headed out after a team of nine humanoids who walked a discreet distance behind nine huge grotesque tyrannosaurs. We let them get over the horizon before leaving the shelter of the woods. I did not want them to see us following them. There was no fear of them eluding us; even a myopic infant could follow the monstrous tracks of the tyrants in the soft claylike ground.

Across the Cretaceous landscape we trekked for three days. It rained half the time, gray cold rain from a grayer sky covered by clouds so low I thought I could put a hand up and touch them. The ground turned to mud; the world shrank to the distance we could see through the driving rain. The wind sliced through us.

Little Juno seemed totally unperturbed by the foul weather. She munched on shrubs battered nearly flat by the rain and wind, then trotted on after us, a dark brown mound of rapidly growing dinosaur with a permanent silly grin built into its heavy-boned duck’s bill and a thickening flattish tail dragging behind it.

Our progress slowed almost to a crawl through the rainstorm, and stopped altogether when it became too dark to move further. We made a miserable soaked camp on a little rocky hummock that projected a few feet above the sea of mud. Once the sun came out again, the land literally steamed with moisture boiled up out of the drenched ground. We saw that the tyrannosaurs had continued to slough along through the mud almost as fast as they had gone before. They apparently stopped to sleep each night, as we did—shivering cold and wet, without fire, hungry.

The tyrannosaurs should have been hungry, too, I thought. It must take a constant input of food to keep twenty tons of dinosaur moving as fast as they were going. But we saw no signs that they had slackened their pace, no bones or scavenging pterosaurs in the air to mark the site of a kill.

“How long can they go without eating?” Anya asked as the hot sun baked away the moisture from the rain. The earth was steaming in chill mist rising up from the ground. I was glad of it; the fog hid us from any eyes that might be watching.

“They’re reptiles,” I mused aloud. “They don’t need to keep their bodies at a constant internal temperature the way we do. They can probably go a good deal longer without food than a mammal the same size.”

“Obviously,” said Anya. She looked tired. And hungry—

We caught a couple of dog-sized dinosaurs. They were basking in the morning sun, sluggish until the heat could sink into them. They seemed completely unafraid of humans, never having seen any before. They would never see any again.

Even though we tried to light a small fire, the shrubs and scrubby growth was so wet from the previous day’s rain that we finally ate the meat raw. It took a lot of chewing, but at least there was plenty of water to wash it down with from the ponds and puddles that laced through the area.

We used Juno as a taster, as far as vegetable matter was concerned. If the duckbill nibbled at a plant and then spat it out, we stayed away from it. If she chomped on it happily, we tried it ourselves. As far as we knew, we created the first salads on Earth—out of pulpy, soft-leafed plants that would be wiped out and become as extinct as the dinosaurs that fed on them when the Cretaceous ended.

The ground we traveled was rising, becoming browner, drier than the marshy flatlands we had traversed. Still the deep tracks of the tyrannosaurs led us on, but now we began to see the tracks and hoofprints of other dinosaurs pounded into the hard bare ground by countless numbers of animals.

“This must be a migration trail,” Anya said, mounting excitement in her voice.

I had my eyes on the hills rising before us. “We don’t want to go too fast here. We might blunder into a pack of meat-eaters.”

At my insistence we kept well to one side of the broad worn trail that marked the dinosaurs’ migration route. Still we saw the clawed tracks of carnosaurs, most of them considerably smaller than tyrants, although there were plenty of tyrannosaur tracks as well.

Apparently the duckbills and other herbivores trekked this way each year as the seasons slowly changed. I had detected no noticeable change in the weather, although the rainstorm we had suffered through had lasted longer than anything previous to it, and the mornings did seem slightly chillier than before.

It was the pterosaurs again that showed us where to look. Vast clouds of them were wheeling high in the sky, circling somewhere beyond the ridge line of the hills we were approaching. With reckless anticipation Anya began loping toward the ridge, impatient to see what was happening there. I ran after her and left little Juno galumphing behind.

We heard bleating, whistling, hooting shrieks and knew that they could not be coming from the winged lizards hovering so high above. These were the sounds of terror and death.

Anya reached the crest of the ridge and stopped, aghast. I pulled up beside her and looked down at the long narrow valley below us.

It was a battle.

Chapter 20

Thousands of herbivores were under attack by hundreds of tyrannosaurs. The battle stretched over miles of dry bare rocky ground, already red and slick with blood.

A running battle in the long narrow valley below us, with the duckbills and triceratops and smaller four-footed herbivores desperately trying to get through the rocky neck of the gorge and into the more open territory beyond while the tyrannosaurs ravaged through them like destroying monsters, crunching backbones in those terrible teeth, tearing bodies apart with their slashing scimitar claws.

It was like a naval battle in the days of sail, with powerful deadly dreadnoughts ripping through the line of clumsy galleons. Like fierce speedy brigades of mounted warriors slicing apart a fat caravan.

The screams and hoots of the dying herbivores echoed weirdly off the rocky walls of the valley. Our own Juno bleated pitifully and trembled at Anya’s side.

There were no humanoids to be seen. None of Set’s troops were visible. But I knew they were there, hidden in the rocks or watching from the valley crests as we were, directing their tyrannosaurs to slaughter the migrating herds.

The battle was not entirely one-sided. Here a trio of triceratops charged a tyrant, knocked it to the ground, and gored it again and again with their long sharp horns. There a small dinosaur, covered with armor plate like an armadillo, waddled out of the dust and blood and escaped into the open country beyond the end of the valley.

But the tyrannosaurs killed and killed and killed again. Duckbills and horned triceratops and countless others were slashed apart by those ferocious claws and teeth.

Anya said, quite clinically, “The humanoids must have brought the tyrannosaurs here to wait in ambush for the migration.”

I felt anger, hot rage at the senseless slaughter taking place below us.

“Let’s find some of those humanoids,” I said, stalking off along the ridge line, my spear gripped tightly in my right hand.

Anya trotted along behind me, with Juno following her but clearly not liking the direction in which we were heading. The baby dinosaur made sounds remarkably like whining.

“Orion, what are you thinking of…?”

Grimly I replied, “One thing I’ve learned in the lives I’ve led—hurt your enemy whenever and however you can. Set wants to kill these dinosaurs? Then I’m going to do my best to stop the slaughter.”

She followed me in silence as we climbed higher along the rocky crest line, but Juno kept whimpering.

“Stay here with her,” I told Anya. “She’s terrified, and her mewling will warn the humanoids.”

“We’ll follow you from below the ridge line,” Anya said. “If she can’t see the slaughter, perhaps she’ll settle down.”

She and the duckbill scrambled down the rocky slope a hundred yards or so. I could see them paralleling my path as I made my way toward the area where I thought the humanoids would be. I hunched over so deeply that my left hand was knuckling the ground like a gorilla.

I saw one of Set’s minions within a few minutes, lying belly down on the sun-warmed rocks, watching intently the screaming, screeching battle going on below. I gave him no warning, drove my spear into his back so hard that it splintered on the rock underneath him. He made a hissing sound and thrashed for a moment like a fish. Then he went still.

I felt for a pulse and found none. Brownish red blood seeped from under him. I flattened out on the rock beside his corpse and peered down into the valley. It was difficult to make out details now because of the billows of dust wafting up, but I saw one tyrannosaur standing upright, blinking its hideous red eyes. It had stopped killing. As I watched, it bent over the gory body of a triceratops and began feeding, tearing great chunks of meat from its heavy body.

The other tyrants were still ravaging through the herbivores, still under mental control of Set’s troops. I got to my feet and moved onward.

My spear was blunted and split. Anya clambered up to me and gave me hers. I hesitated, then took it. She kept mine. She could use it as a club if she had to.

Two more humanoids were sitting in a cleft between boulders, their attention focused on the carnage below. It must take all their concentration to control the tyrannosaurs in the midst of such frenzy, I realized. They were virtually deaf and blind to the world around them.

Still I approached them cautiously, coming up from behind. I dashed the last few yards and rammed my spear straight through one of them. He shrieked like a steam whistle as he died. The other leaped to his feet and turned to meet me, but far too slowly as my senses went into hyperdrive.

I saw him turning, saw his red slitted eyes glittering, his mouth opening in what might have been anger or surprise or sudden fear. His clawed hands were empty, weaponless. With all my weight and strength I planted a kick on his chest that crushed bones. He went over backward, tumbling down the steep rocky wall and landing almost at the feet of a suddenly befuddled tyrannosaur.

The great beast, released from its mental control, snatched at its former master and tore the humanoid’s body in two with one crunch of its deadly teeth.

I squatted on my haunches and looked for the tyrant that the other humanoid had been controlling. That one, there, blinking with confusion at the mayhem surrounding it. I closed my eyes briefly. When I opened them, I was standing more than thirty feet above the blood-soaked valley floor, blinking at the dust swirling around me. Bloodlust blazed through me, overpowering the dull ache of hunger that gnawed at my innards.

I was Tyrannosaurus rex, king of the tyrant lizards, the most ferocious carnivorous animal ever to stride the earth. I gloried in the strength and power I felt surging through me.

Hooting a piercing whistling screech, I plunged into the maelstrom of violence whirling all around me. I did not seek out the weakling unarmed duckbills nor even the dangerous triceratops. I strode through the carnage toward the other tyrannosaurs, the ones still under the murderous control of Set’s humanoids.

They were killing but not eating. Rip open the throat of a duckbill and let it fall to the dust, all that rich hot blood steaming and wasting, all that meat dying without sinking your teeth into it. Kill and then go on to another to kill again.

I pushed myself through a mound of dead and dying herbivores to reach one of my fellow tyrants. It paid me no attention, snapping after a bleating, screeching duckbill desperately trying to find a path through the blood to safety.

Just as the tyrannosaur was about to bite at the duckbill’s soft neck I crunched its own spine between my mighty teeth and felt blood and bone and warm flesh in my mouth. The tyrant screeched once, then its heavy head collapsed onto the vestigial forearms against its chest, its powerful jaws closed forever.

I dropped the dead beast and charged toward another. It took no notice of me, and I ripped its throat out with a single quick bite. Now I saw two other tyrants; they had stopped their pursuit of the herbivores and turned their glittering eyes on me.

Without hesitation I ran straight at them, slashing and clawing. The three of us tumbled to the ground hard enough to make the earth shake.

Very far away I heard a tiny voice warning, “Orion, look out!”

But I was fighting the battle of my life against the two tyrannosaurs. And winning! Already one of them was staggering, half its flank ripped open and gushing rich red blood. I was bleeding, too, but I felt no pain, only the exultant joy of battle. I backed away slightly, saw my other opponent stalking toward me, jaws agape, tiny useless forearms twitching.

Behind it other tyrannosaurs were gathering, all focused on me. I backed up until my tail brushed against the rock of the valley wall.

“Orion!” I heard it again. This time a scream, more urgent, more demanding.

And then everything went black.

Somehow I realized that I had been knocked unconscious. I was in darkness, cut off from all sensory input, but this was not the disembodied utter cold of the void between spacetimes. I had not left the continuum. Someone had come up behind me while I was directing the tyrannosaur and knocked me senseless. Despite Anya’s warnings.

I had been a fool. Now I would pay the price.

Once I realized what had happened I quickly made my body recover. Shut off the pain signals from my aching head and send an enriched flow of blood to the bruise on my scalp. Open all the sensory channels. But I kept my eyes shut and did not stir. I wanted to learn what the situation was without letting anyone know I was conscious once more.

My wrists were tightly bound behind me and more vines or ropes or whatever were wound around my arms and chest. I was lying facedown on the warm rocky ground, several pebbles and sharper small stones poking uncomfortably into me.

The only sound I heard was the snuffling half whistle of Juno. No voices, not even Anya’s. With my mind I probed the area around me. Anya was near, I could sense her presence. And half a dozen others whose minds were as cold and closed to me as a corpse frozen in ice.

“Let me see to him,” I heard Anya at last. “He might be dead—or dying.”

No response. Not a sound. In the distance I could hear the wind gusting, but no more screeching and hooting of the dinosaurs. The battle had ended.

There was no more than I could learn with my eyes shut, so I opened them and half rolled onto one side.

Anya was on her knees, her arms pulled tightly behind her and ropes of vines cinched around her torso below her breasts. Juno lay flat on her belly, silly duckbilled face between her front hooves, like a puppy.

Six red-scaled humanoids stood impassively staring down at me, their tails hanging to slightly below their knees. Their crotches were wrinkled but otherwise featureless; like most reptiles, their sexual organs were hidden.

They spoke no words. I doubted that they could make any sounds of speech even if they wanted to. Nor did they project any mental images. Either they were incapable of communicating with us mentally or they refused to do so. Obviously they communicated with one another and had the mental power to control the tyrannosaurs.

Two of them yanked me roughly to my feet. My head swam momentarily, but I swiftly adjusted the blood-pressure levels and the giddy feeling subsided. Another of the humanoids grabbed Anya by the hair and pulled her up from her knees. She screamed. I pulled away from the pair near me and karate-kicked the scaly demon under his pointed chin. His head snapped back so hard I heard vertebrae cracking. He fell over backward and lay still.

I turned to face the others, my hands tightly tied behind my back. Anya stood grim-faced, pale, with Juno trembling at her feet.

One of the humanoids went over to its felled companion, knelt over the body, and briefly examined it. Then it looked up at me. I had no way of reading what was going through the mind behind that expressionless lizard’s face. Its red eyes stared at me unblinking for a long moment, then it rose and pointed down the slope of the rocky ground in the general direction of the lake where the castle waited.

We began walking. Two of the humanoids took up the van, ahead of us; the other three followed behind. None of them touched either of us again.

“How do they communicate?” Anya wondered aloud.

“Some form of telepathy, obviously,” I replied. Then: “Do you think they can understand what we say?”

She tried to shrug despite her bonds. “I’m not certain that they can even hear us. I don’t think their senses are the same as ours.”

“They see deeper into the red end of the spectrum than we do,” I recalled from our time inside Set’s dimly lit fortress in the Neolithic.

“Some reptiles can’t hear anything at all.”

I glanced over my shoulder at the trio pacing along behind us. “I have the feeling that they understand us very well. They seemed to grasp the idea that I would fight to protect you from harm.”

“You made that quite clear!”

“Yes, I know, but the important thing is that they understood that I would not try to fight them if they did not hurt you.”

We marched along in silence for a while. Then I remembered to ask, “What happened in the valley after they knocked me out?”

“Most of the dinosaurs that were still alive got away,” Anya said, her lips sketching a bittersweet smile. “The humanoids had to give up their control of the tyrannosaurs to deal with you…”

I felt my face redden. “And I was easy prey for them, concentrating on the tyrannosaur I was controlling.”

“But all the other tyrannosaurs stopped attacking and started eating the instant they let up their controls.”

I thought about the overwhelming exhilaration I had felt while I controlled the tyrannosaur. I wasn’t merely directing the beast from afar, I was the tyrant lizard, powerful, terrifying, glorying in my strength and bloodlust. The seduction of the senses had been overpowering. If ever I had to take control of such a monster again, I would have to be on my guard: it was too easy to become the monster and forget everything else.

The humanoids marched us back the way we had come until night had fallen and the world was completely dark. Heavy clouds had been building up through the late afternoon and evening, and there were no stars to be seen. The dark wind was chill, and I could smell rain coming.

We stopped on the hummocky ground between two shallow ponds. The humanoids helped Anya and me to sitting positions, but did not loosen our bonds in the slightest. The five of them squatted in a semicircle facing us. Juno, who had been nibbling on just about anything green all day long, wormed her growing body between Anya and me and promptly went to sleep.

“We’re hungry,” I said to the blank-faced humanoids.

“And cold,” said Anya.

No reaction from them at all. They were not hungry, that was clear. No telling how long they could go without food. Either they never stopped to consider that we mammals needed meals more frequently, or—more likely—they didn’t care. Or—more likely still—they realized that hunger weakened us and reduced the chances of our trying to fight them or escape.

The rain held off until just after dawn. We slogged through ankle-deep mud, slipping and falling continuously, unable to stop our falls with our hands tied behind our backs. The humanoids always helped us to our feet, not gently, but not roughly either. Two of them always helped Anya while the other three stood between me and them.

It rained off and on all the time we trekked back to the castle in the lake. We finally arrived on a steaming afternoon, wet, hungry and exhausted.

The castle stood glistening in the afternoon sun, its massive walls and high-flung towers wetly gleaming. High overhead, so bright it was easily visible in the washed-blue sky, the bloodred star glowered down at us.

Chapter 21

We were led up the long narrow ramp toward the single gate in the castle’s wide high walls. The gate was barely wide enough for two of the slim humanoids to pass through side by side, but it was tall, at least twenty feet high. Sharp spikes ran all around its sides and arched top, like pointed teeth made of gleaming metal.

As we stepped out of the hot sunshine into the dimly lit shadows of the castle I felt the subtle vibrating hum of powerful machinery. The air inside the castle was even warmer than the steaming afternoon outside, an intense heat that flowed over me like a stifling wave, squeezing perspiration from every pore, drenching us with soul-draining fatigue.

Our quintet of captors turned us over to four other humanoids, slightly larger but otherwise so identical to the others that I could not tell them apart. They might have been cloned from the same original cell, they looked so much alike.

These new guards undid our bonds, and for the first time in days we could move our stiffened arms, flex our cramped fingers. Ordinary humans might have been permanently paralyzed, their arms atrophied, their hands gangrenous from lack of blood circulation. I had been able to force blood past the painfully tight ropes by consciously redirecting the flow to deeper arteries. Anya had done the same. Still, it would be a long time before the marks of our bonds left our flesh.

The first thing Anya did after flexing her numbed fingers was to pet little Juno, who hissed with pleasure at her attention. I almost felt jealous.

We were put in a cell the size of a dormitory room, all three of us. It was absolutely bare, not even a bit of straw to cover the hard seamless floor. The entire castle seemed to be made of some sort of plastic, just as Set’s fortress in the Neolithic had been.

The walls looked absolutely seamless to me, yet a panel slid back abruptly to reveal a tray of food: meat steaming from the spit, cooked vegetables, flagons of water, and even a pile of greens for Juno.

We ate greedily, although I couldn’t help thinking of the last meal a condemned man is given.

“What do we do now?” I asked Anya, wiping scraps of roasted meat from my chin with the back of my hand.

She glanced around at our bleak prison cell. “Can you feel that energy vibrating?”

I nodded. “Set must power everything here with the core tap.”

“That’s what we must reach,” Anya said firmly. “And destroy.”

“Easier said than done.”

She regarded me with her grave, gray eyes. “It must be done, Orion. The existence of the human race, the whole continuum, depends on it being done.”

“Then the first step,” I said, with a sigh of resignation, “is to get out of this cell. Any ideas?”

As if in answer, the metal door slid back to reveal another pair of humanoid guards. Or perhaps two from the quartet that had ushered us into the cell in the first place, I could not tell.

They beckoned to us with taloned fingers and we went meekly out into the corridor, Juno clumping warily behind us.

The corridor was hot and dim, the overhead lights so deeply red that I felt certain most of their energy was emitted in the infrared, invisible to my eyes but apparently clear and bright to the reptiles. I closed my eyes and sought to make contact with Juno as we walked. Sure enough, through the duckbill’s vision the corridor was brilliantly lit, and the temperature was wonderfully comfortable.

The corridor slanted downward. Not steeply, but a definite downward slope. As I walked along, seeing our surroundings through Juno’s eyes, I realized that the walls were not blank at all. They were decorated with lively mosaics showing scenes of these graceful humanoid reptiles in beautiful glades and parks, in lovingly cultivated gardens, standing at the sea’s frothing edge or atop rugged mountains.

I studied the artworks as we marched down the corridor. There was never more than one humanoid in any picture, although many of the scenes showed other reptiles, some bipedal but most of them four-legged. None of the humanoids wore any kind of clothing or carried anything resembling a tool or a weapon. Not even a belt or a pouch of any sort.

Then, with a sudden startling chill, I realized that every picture showed a sun in the sky that was deep red, not yellow, and so big that it often covered a quarter of the sky. There were even a few scenes in which a second sun appeared, small and yellow and distant.

These were pictures of a world that was not Earth. The red star they showed was the darkly crimson star that I had seen night after night, the evil-looking blood red star that was so bright I could see it in broad daylight, the star that was hovering above the castle even at this very moment.

I was about to tell Anya, but our guards stopped us at an ornately carved door, so huge that a dozen men could have marched through it at once. I reached out to touch it. It looked like dark wood, ebony perhaps, but it felt like cold lifeless plastic. Strange, I thought, that it can feel cold in such an overheated atmosphere.

The door split in two and swung open silently, smoothly. Without being told or prodded, Anya and I automatically stepped into an immense high-vaulted chamber. Juno trotted between us.

Using my own vision once more, I could barely see the top of the ribbed, steeply arched ceiling. The lighting was dim, the air oppressively hot, like standing in front of an open oven on a midsummer’s afternoon.

Set reclined on a backless couch atop a platform raised three high steps above the floor. There were no statues of him here, no human slaves to worship him and try to placate him. Instead, rows of dully burning torches flanked Set’s throne on either side, their flames licking slowly against the gloom, seeming to shed darkness rather than light.

We walked slowly toward that jet black throne and the devilish figure sitting upon it. Anya’s face was grim, her lips pressed into a tight bloodless line, her fists clenched at her sides. The welts of the ropes that had bound her showed angry purple against her alabaster skin.

Once again I felt the fury and implacable hatred that cascaded from Set like molten lava pouring down the cone of an erupting volcano. And once again I felt the answering fury and hatred in my own soul, burning inside me, rising to a crescendo as we approached his throne. Here was evil incarnate, the eternal enemy, and my unalterable task was to strike him down and kill him.

And once again I felt Set take control of my body, force me to stop a half-dozen paces before his dais, paralyze my limbs so that I could not leap upon him and tear the heart from his chest.

Anya stood beside me as tensely as I. She felt Set’s smothering mental embrace, too, and was struggling to break through it. Perhaps the two of us, working in unison, could overcome his fiendish power. Perhaps I could distract him in some way. Even if only momentarily, a moment might be enough.

“You are more resourceful than I had thought,” his voice seethed in my mind.

“And more knowledgeable,” I snapped.

His slitted red eyes glittered at me. “More knowledgeable? How so?”

“I know that you are not of this Earth. You come from the world that circles the red star, the planet that Kraal called the Punisher.”

His pointed chin dropped a centimeter toward his massive scaled chest. It might have been a nod of acknowledgment, or merely an unconscious gesture as he thought over my words.

“The star is called Sheol,” he replied mentally. “And my world is its only planet, Shaydan.”

“In my original time,” I said, “there is only one sun in the sky, and your star does not exist.”

Now Set did nod. “I know, my apish enemy. But your original time, your entire continuum, will be destroyed soon enough. You and your kind will disappear. Sheol and Shaydan will be saved.”

Anya spoke. “They have already been destroyed. What you hope to achieve is beyond hope. You have been defeated, you simply don’t understand it yet.”

Set’s lipless mouth pulled back to reveal his pointed teeth. “Don’t try to play your games with me, Creatress. I know full well that the continuums are not linear. There is a nexus here at this point in spacetime. I am here to see that you and your kind are swept away.”

“Reptiles replacing human beings?” I challenged. “That can never be.”

His amusement turned to acid. “So certain of your superiority, are you? Babbling mammal, the continuum in which you reign supreme on this planet is so weak that your Creators must constantly struggle to preserve it. Mammals are not strong enough to dominate spacetime for long, they are always swept away by truly superior creatures.”

“Such as yourself?” I tried to say it with a sneer and only half succeeded.

“Such as myself,” Set replied. “Frenetic mammals, running in circles, chattering and babbling always, your hot blood is your undoing. You must eat so much that you destroy the beasts and fields that feed you. You breed so furiously that you infest the world with your kind, ruining not merely the land but the seas and the very air you breathe as well. You are vermin, and the world is well rid of you.”

“And you are better?”

“We have no need to keep our blood heated. We do not need to slaughter whole species of beasts for our stomachs. We do not overbreed. And we do not constantly make those noises that you call intelligent communication! That is why we are better, stronger, more fit to survive than you over-specialized jabbering apes. That is why we will survive and you will not.”

“You’ll survive by killing the dinosaurs and planting your own seed here?” I asked.

I sensed amusement from him. “So…” he answered slowly, “the hairless ape is not so knowledgeable after all.”

Sensing my confusion, Set went on: “The dinosaurs are mine to do with as I please. I created them. I brought my—seed, as you put it—to this planet nearly two hundred million of your years ago, when there was nothing on this land but a few toads and salamanders, fugitives from the seas.”

Set’s voice rose in my mind, took on a depth and power I had not experienced before. “I scrubbed this miserable planet clean to make room for my creations, the only kind of animal that could survive completely on dry land. I wiped out species by the thousands to prepare this world for my offspring.”

“You created the dinosaurs?” I heard an astonished voice pipe weakly. My own.

“They are the consequences of my work from two hundred million years before this time. The fruits of my genius.”

“But you went too far,” Anya said. “The dinosaurs have been too successful.”

He shifted his slitted gaze toward her. “They have done well. But now their time is at an end. This planet must be prepared for my true offspring.”

“The humanoids,” I said.

“The children of Shaydan. I have prepared this world for them.”

“Killer!” Anya spat. “Destroyer! Blunderer!”

I could feel his contempt for her. And a cold amusement at her words. “I kill to prepare the way for my own kind. I destroy life on a planetwide scale to make room for my own life. I do not blunder.”

“You do!” Anya accused. “You blundered two hundred million years ago. Now you must destroy your own creations because they have done too well. You blundered sixty-five million years from now, because the human race will rise up against you and your kind. You will be their symbol of unrelenting evil. They will be against you forever.”

“They will cease to exist,” Set replied calmly, “once my work here is finished. And you will cease to exist much sooner than that.”

All through this conversation, with Anya and I speaking and Set answering in silent mental projections, I strained to break through his control of my body. I knew Anya was doing the same. But no matter how hard we tried, we could not move our limbs. Even Juno, cowering by Anya’s feet, seemed unable to move.

“You’ll never be able to wipe out the dinosaurs,” I said. “We foiled your attempt to slaughter the duckbills and—”

He actually hissed at me. I sensed it was a form of laughter. “What did you accomplish, oversized monkey? On one particular day you helped a few hundred dinosaurs escape the death I had planned for them. They will meet that death on another day, perhaps next week, perhaps ten thousand years from now. I have all of time to work in, yammering ape. I created the dinosaurs and I will destroy them—at my leisure.”

With that, he beckoned to Juno. Our little duckbill seemed reluctant to go toward him, yet helpless to resist. Grudgingly, as if being pulled by an invisible leash, Juno plodded to the dais and lumbered up its three steps to the clawed feet of Set.

Anya flared: “Don’t!”

I strained with every atom of my being to break free of Set’s mental bonds. As I struggled I watched with horrified eyes as Set picked up Juno like a weightless toy. The baby duckbill squirmed, frightened, but could no more escape Set’s grasp than I could break free.

“Don’t!” Anya screamed again.

Set lifted Juno’s head up and sank his teeth into her soft unprotected throat. Blood gushed over him. The baby dinosaur gave a single piercing, whistling shriek that ended in a bubbling of blood. Its yellow eyes faded, its clumsy legs went limp.

I sensed Set’s smirking, smug feeling of triumph and power. He let Juno’s dead body, still twitching, fall to his feet and laughed mentally at Anya’s anguish.

And dropped his guard just a fraction. Enough for me to burst loose and hurl myself up the dais, my fingers reaching for Set’s red-scaled throat.

He swatted me with a backhand slap as easily as I might swat a fly. I was knocked sideways, tumbled down the dais, landing flat on my back, stunned and almost unconscious.

Chapter 22

Through a blood red haze I saw Set still on his throne. He had barely moved to deal with me.

“You think that I keep you paralyzed out of fear that you might attack me?” His voice in my buzzing brain was mocking. “Puny ape, I could crush your bones with ease. Fear me! For I am far mightier than you.”

Forcing the pain away, pumping extra blood to my head to drive away the wooziness, I pulled myself up to a sitting position, then got slowly, warily to my feet.

“You are not convinced?”

Anya was still locked into immobility, but the look on her face was awful: a mixture of loathing and helpless terror. Juno’s dead body lay sprawled clumsily at the foot of the dais in a welling pool of blood.

I could move. I took a step toward that throne and the monster sitting upon it.

Set rose to his full height and stepped down to the floor. He towered over me, several heads taller, a shoulder-span wider, his red scales glittering in the torchlight, his eyes burning with an amused contempt that overlay eternal hatred.

My senses went into hyperdrive and everything around me slowed. I saw the veins in Set’s skull pulsing, saw transparent eyelids flicking back and forth across the red slits of his pupils. I could see the muscles in Anya’s arms and legs tensing, straining to break free of Set’s mental control. In vain.

I went into a defensive crouch, hands up in front of my face, backing away from Set. He advanced toward me in total confidence, arms by his sides, the talons of his feet clicking on the smooth bare floor like a metronome counting off time.

I dove at his knees in a rolling block. Knock him down and his size advantage is lessened, I thought. But fast as I was, his reflexes were even faster. He caught me in the ribs with a kick that sent me sailing. I hit the floor painfully hard. With an effort I climbed to my feet. He was still advancing on me, hissing softly in his reptilian equivalent to laughter.

I feinted left, then drove my right fist toward his groin with all the strength in me. He blocked the blow with one huge hand and grabbed me by the throat with the other. Lifting me off my feet, he raised my head to his own level. We were face-to-face, me with my feet dangling a yard or more off the floor, the breath slowly being squeezed out of me.

Set’s face was in front of me, so close that I could smell the rancid hot breath hissing from his sharp-toothed mouth, see the glistening blood of Juno drying on his pointed chin. He was choking me to death and enjoying it.

With the last of my strength I jabbed both my thumbs at his eyes. He blocked my right with his free hand but my left found its mark. Set screeched in unexpected pain and threw me against the wall like an angry child tossing away a toy that displeased him.

I blacked out. My last conscious thought was a satisfied thrill that I had hurt the monster. Small consolation, but better than none at all.

How long I was unconscious I have no way of reckoning. I lay in darkness, huddled on the floor of Set’s throne chamber. Dimly I felt the sensation of being lifted up and carried somewhere. But I could see nothing, hear nothing. Then I was dumped onto a hard floor again and left alone.

From far, far away I heard a sound. A faint voice, calling. It was so distant, so indistinct, that I knew it had nothing to do with me.

Yet it kept calling, time and again, as constant as waves rolling up onto a beach, as insistent as an automated beacon that will repeat itself endlessly until someone turns it off.

Somehow its call began to sound familiar. From repetition, a part of my mind suggested dreamily. Hear the same noise long enough and it will become familiar to it. Pay no attention. Rest. Ignore the sound and it will fade away.

Yet it did not fade. It got louder, clearer.

“Orion,” it called.

“Orion.”

I don’t know how many times I heard it before I realized that it was calling my name, calling for me.

“Orion.”

I was still unconscious, I knew that. Yet my mind was alert and functioning even though my body was inert, insensate, comatose.

“Who is calling me?” my mind asked.

“We have met before,” answered the voice. “You called me Zeus.”

I remembered. In another time, a different life. He was one of the Creators, like Anya, like the power-mad Golden One who let the ancient Greeks call him Apollo.

Zeus. I remembered him among the Creators. Like all of them his physical appearance was flawless, godlike. Perfect physique, perfect skin, grave dark eyes, and darker hair. His beard was neatly trimmed, slightly flecked with touches of gray. I realized that all that was an illusion, an appearance put on for my sake. I knew that if I saw Zeus in his true form, he would be a radiant sphere of energy, like Anya, like all the other Creators.

I thought of him as Zeus not because he was the leader of the Creators. They had no true leader, nor any of the common relationships that mortal humans experience. Yet to me he seemed wiser, more solemn, more circumspect in his views and his actions than the other Creators. Where they seemed swept by their private jealousies or passions for power, he seemed to be gravely striving to keep events under control, to protect the flow of the continuum, to prevent disasters that could erase all of humankind—and the Creators themselves. Of all the Creators, only he and Anya seemed to me to be worthy of my loyalty.

“Orion, can you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Set has shielded himself against us quite effectively. We can’t get through to you and Anya.”

“He is holding us prisoner…”

“I know. Everything you have experienced, I know.”

“We need help.”

Silence.

“We need help!” I repeated.

“There is no way we can get help to you, Orion. Even this feeble communications link is draining more energy than we can afford.”

“Set will kill her.”

“There is nothing we can do. We’ll be fortunate to escape with our own lives.”

I knew what he meant. I was expendable; there was no sense risking themselves for their creature. Anya was a regrettable loss. But she had brought it on herself, daring to assume human form to consort with a creature. She had always been an atavism, risking her own being instead of letting creatures such as Orion take the risks that they had been created to face.

The other Creators—including this so-called Zeus—were ready to flee. In their true forms, they could scatter through the universe and live on the radiated energy of the stars for uncountable eons.

“Yes,” Zeus admitted to me reluctantly, “that is our final option.”

“You’ll let her die?” I knew that my life counted little to them. But Anya was one of them. Had they no loyalty? No courage?

“You think in human terms, Orion. Survival is our goal, sacrifice is your lot. Anya is clever, perhaps she will surprise you and Set both.”

I sensed the blind link between us fading. His voice grew fainter.

“If there were something I could do to help you, Orion, truly I would do it.”

“But not at the risk of your own survival,” I snapped.

The thought surprised him, I could sense it. Risk the survival of a Creator over one of their creatures? Risk the survival of all the remaining Creators over the plight of one of their number? Never.

They were not cowards. Godlike beings that they were, they were beyond cowardice. They were supreme realists. If they could not defeat Set, they would run from his wrath. What did it matter to them that the entire human race would be expunged from the continuum forever?

“Orion,” called Zeus’s voice, even fainter. “We deal with forces beyond your understanding. Universes upon universes. We must face the ultimate crisis out there among the stars and whirling plasma clouds that pinwheel through the galaxy. Perhaps the human race has played its part in evolving us, and now has no further role to play.”

I snarled mentally, “Perhaps Set will seize such firm control of the continuum that he will track you down, each and every last one of you, no matter where you flee, no matter where you hide. Abandon the human race and you give Set the power to seek you through all of spacetime and destroy you utterly.”

“No,” came Zeus’s reply, so weak it was nothing more than a ghostly whisper. “That cannot be. It cannot…”

But there was doubt in his voice as it trailed off into nothingness. Doubt and fear.

My eyes opened. I was in a bare little cell, hardly bigger than a coffin stood on end, huddled into it like a folded, crumpled sack of grain. My head was resting on my knees, my arms hung limply at my sides, pressing against the cool smooth back wall of the cell on one side and the cool smooth door on the other.

The only light was from a dim dull red fluorescence emanating from the cell walls. The only sound was my own breathing.

Abandoned. The Creators were going to abandon Anya and me to final destruction. They were going to abandon the entire human race and flee to the depths of interstellar space.

And there was nothing I could do about it.

I almost wept, hunched over in that cramped claustrophobic cubicle. Orion the mighty hunter, created by the gods to track down their enemies and destroy them, defender of the continuum. How laughable! Instead of crying, I howled with maniacal glee. Orion, tool of the Creators, locked helpless and alone in a dungeon deep within the ultimate enemy’s castle while the goddess I love is probably being tortured to death for the amusement of that fiend.

I could hardly move, the cell was so narrow. Somehow I slithered to my feet. Almost. The cubicle was too low for me to stand erect. My head bowed, my shoulders, arms, back, and legs pressed against the cool smooth flat surfaces of the cell. It made my blood run cold. The walls and door felt, not slimy, but slick, like rubbery plastic. It made me shudder.

I pushed as hard as I could against the door. It did not even creak. I strained every gram of strength in me, yet the door did not budge at all.

Defeated, exhausted, I let myself slide back down to the floor, knees in my face, muscles aching from frustrated exertion.

A mocking voice surged up from my memory. “You were created to act, Orion, not think. I will do the thinking. You carry out my orders.”

The voice of the Golden One, the self-styled god who claimed to have created me.

“The intelligence I built into you is adequate for hunting and killing,” I heard him saying to me, in his mocking deprecating way. “Never delude yourself into thinking that you have the brains to do more than that.”

I had been furious with his sneering taunts. I had worked against him, challenged him, and finally driven him into a paroxysm of egomaniacal madness. The other Creators had to protect him against my anger and his own hysterical ravings.

I can think, I told myself. If I can’t use my physical strength, then all that’s left to me is my mental power.

“Set uses despair like a weapon.” I recalled Anya’s words.

He had tried to manipulate me, control me, through my emotions. Tried and failed. What was he trying to do to me now, penning me in this soul-punishing cell?

He comes from another world, the planet that circles the sun’s companion star, Sheol. Why has he come here? From what era did he originate? What is his grievance against the human race?

He claims that he created the dinosaurs some two hundred millions years earlier than this era. He claims that he will extinguish the dinosaurs to make room on Earth for his own kind.

A thrill of understanding raced through my blood as I recalled Set’s own words, heard again in my mind his sneering, hate-filled voice: You breed so furiously that you infest the world with your kind, ruining not merely the land but the seas and the very air you breathe as well. You are vermin, and the world is well rid of you.

And again: We do not overbreed.

Then why is he here on Earth? Why is he not content with his own world, Shaydan, where his kind live in harmony with their environment? I had seen the idyllic pictures of that world in the wall mosaics of this castle. Why leave that happy existence to seed the earth with reptilian life?

I could think of three possibilities:

First, Set had lied to me. The mosaics were idealizations. Shaydan was overcrowded and Set’s people needed more living room.

Alternatively, Set had been driven off Shaydan, exiled from his native world, for reasons that I had no way of knowing.

Or, even more harrowing, the planet Shaydan was threatened by some disaster so vast that it was imperative to transfer the population to a safer world.

Which could it be? Possibly a combination of such reasons, or others that I had not an inkling of.

How to find out? Probing Set’s mind was impossible, I knew. Even in the same room with him I could no more penetrate his formidable mental defenses than I could muscle my way out of this miserable dungeon.

Could Anya probe his mind?

I closed my eyes there in the dimness of my cell and reached mentally for Anya’s mind. I had no way of knowing where in the castle she was, or even if she was still in the castle at all. Or even if she still lived, I realized with a cold shudder.

But I called to her, mentally.

“Anya, my love. Can you hear me?”

No response.

I concentrated harder. I brought up a mental picture of Anya, her beautiful face, her expressive lips, her strong cheekbones and narrow straight nose, her midnight black hair, her large gray eyes shining and luminous, regarding me gravely with depths of love in them that no mortal had a right to hope for.

“Anya, my beloved,” I projected mentally. “Hear me. Answer my plea.”

I heard nothing, no reply whatever.

Maybe she’s already dead, I thought bleakly. Maybe Set has raked her flesh with his vicious talons, torn her apart with his hideous teeth.

Then I sensed the tiniest of flickers, a distant spark, a silver glint against the all-encompassing darkness of my soul. I focused every neuron of my mind on it, every synapse of my being.

It was Anya, I knew. That infinitesimal spark of silver led me like a guiding star.

I felt almost the way I had when I had entered Juno’s simple mind. But now I was projecting my consciousness into a mind infinitely more complex. It was like falling down an endlessly spiraling chute, like stepping from subterranean darkness into blinding sunlight, like entering an overpoweringly vast universe. I knew how Theseus felt in the palace of Knossus, trying to thread his way through a bewildering maze.

Anya said nothing to me, gave no indication even that she knew I had entered her mind. I thought I understood why. If she gave any hint at all that she recognized my presence, Set would immediately know that I was awake and active—at least mentally. The only way to keep me hidden was not to make any response to me at all.

Swiftly, wordlessly, I gave her the details of my contact with Zeus. No reaction from her, none at all. She was guarding her mind from Set with every defensive barrier she could maintain. I wondered if she really knew I was there, so completely did she ignore me.

Set was still lounging on his throne, horned face staring at Anya, tail twitching unconsciously behind him. Poor Juno’s body had been removed and the bloodstains cleaned away. I wondered how long it had been since he had smashed me into senselessness. Perhaps only minutes had passed. Perhaps days.

Anya was not in pain. Set was not torturing her or even threatening her. They were speaking together, almost as equals. Even the deadliest of foes have reasons to communicate peacefully, at times.

“You are prepared, then, to leave this planet forever?” I heard Set’s voice in Anya’s mind.

“If there is no alternative,” she replied, also without speaking.

“What guarantee do I have that you will keep the agreement?”

“Agreement?” I asked Anya, but still there was no response from her. It was as if I did not exist, as far as she was concerned.

“You have won. Your power is too great, too firmly entrenched here, for us to dislodge you. If you permit us to escape with our lives and agree not to pursue us further, the planet Earth is yours forever.”

“Yes, but how do I know I can trust you? In a thousand years or a thousand million, how can I be certain that you will not return to battle against my descendants?”

Anya shrugged mentally. “You will have destroyed the human race. We will have no means of fighting you then.”

“You could create more humans, just as you created the one called Orion.”

“No. That was an experiment that failed. Orion has been of no use to us against you.”

I burned with shame at Anya’s words. They were true, and it hurt me to admit it.

“Then you have no intention of trying to bring him with you when you leave the earth?”

“How could he accompany us?” Anya replied. “He is nothing more than a human. He cannot change his form. He cannot exist in the depths of interstellar space, where we will make our new homes.”

A shuddering horror filled me. Anya and all the Creators were indeed fleeing from Earth and abandoning the human race to extinction at Set’s hands. Abandoning the entire human race. Abandoning me.

“Then you leave this creature Orion to me?” Set’s words were half request, half demand.

“Of course,” Anya replied carelessly. “He is of no further value to us.”

Deep in my underground cell I screamed a shriek of agony like a wild animal howling with pain and fright and the utter furious agony of betrayal.