Orion in the Dying Time

Chapter 32

Set lived.

That single thought burned through my consciousness like a hot branding iron searing my flesh. He had survived the destruction of his race, of his planet, of his star. He still lived. On Earth.

I had destroyed Sheol and Shaydan, wiped out most of the life-forms on Earth. In vain. I had failed to kill Set.

“I will find you,” I said silently. Bodiless, with nothing but my essential awareness, I threw out the challenge to my deadly enemy. “I will find you and destroy you for all time.”

“Come and try,” came Set’s immediate answer. “I look forward to meeting you for the final time.”

His consciousness shone like a beacon against the black void of spacetime. I knew where and when he was. Concentrating every bit of willpower I possessed, I focused on Set. I willed myself through the tangled skein of the continuum to the place and time where he existed.

A flash of absolute cold, a moment of utter darkness and cryogenic chill, then I opened my eyes and took in a deep breath of life.

I was lying on my back, my naked body resting on warm soft earth. Tall trees rose all around me and the soft breeze brought scents of flowers and pine. I heard the melodious trill of a bird. My hands clutched at the ground and I pulled sweet-smelling grass to my face.

Yes. Paradise once again.

I sat up and looked around. The ground sloped gently before me. A brown bear shambled in the distance, trailed by two balls of fur that were her cubs. She stopped and raised her head, sniffing the air. If my scent alarmed her, she gave no notice. She just resumed her slow pace away from me, the cubs trotting along behind.

I am Orion the Hunter, reborn. Naked and alone, my mission is to find the monster Set and kill him. Kill him as he intends to kill me. Destroy him and his kind forever as he intends to destroy my kind, the human race, forever.

Smiling grimly to myself, I got to my feet and started walking slowly down the gentle slope, through the tall straight trees that dappled the afternoon sunshine with their swaying leafy branches. If this truly was part of the forest of Paradise, then Set would be at his fortress by the Nile.

The sun was too high in the sky to judge directions, so I merely followed the first stream I came to, figuring that it would eventually lead to the Nile. I knew I had a long walk ahead of me, but I had learned from Set that time means little to one who can catapult himself through the continuum at will. Patience, I counseled myself. Patience.

For days on end I walked alone, seeing neither another human being nor any of Set’s reptilians. This was a sparsely populated time, I recalled. There were probably fewer than a million humans living in the early Neolithic; their first great population explosion would not take place until they developed agriculture. How many of his own kind had Set been able to bring from Shaydan, I asked myself? Hundreds? Thousands?

I knew he had transported dinosaurs from the Mesozoic Age to this time and place: the giant lizards and fighting dragons I had met earlier were sauropods and carnosaurs from the Cretaceous.

The forest of Paradise was far from empty, however. The woods teemed with life, from tiny burrowing mice to growling, roaring lions. Using nothing but stones and wood, I quickly fashioned myself a serviceable spear and hand ax. By the second day I had a raw pelt of deerskin to wear as a loincloth. By the second week I had added a vest and leg wrappings tied with beef gut.

I felt completely alone, of course. Yet I did not mind the solitude. It was a relief, a welcome respite from the turmoil I had been through and the dangers I knew lay ahead of me. I did not try to contact the Creators, remembering that such mental signals served as beacons that allowed Set to pinpoint my location. I wanted to remain hidden from him as much as I could. For the time being.

He knew I was here. Day after day I saw long-winged pterosaurs gliding high in the bright blue skies. As long as I remained in the forest I was safe from their prying eyes, I reasoned. They could not see me through the leafy canopy of the trees.

I wondered where the Creators were, if they knew what I was up to. Or were they scattering across the galaxy in this spacetime, still fleeing Set after Anya’s capitulation to him?

I thought of Anya, of how she had betrayed me at one point in time yet swore she loved me at another. Was she watching over me now or running for her life? I had no way of knowing and in truth I did not care. All that would be settled later, after I had dealt with Set. If I survived, if I succeeded in killing him once and for all, then I could confront Anya and the other Creators. Until then I was on my own, and that’s the way I wanted it.

Try as I might, I could not understand how the Creators could be running for their lives in one era and yet living peacefully in their mausoleum of a city in the distant future. Nor how Set’s home world could be utterly destroyed and yet he alive and burning for revenge against me here in the Neolithic.

“How could you understand?” I once again heard the mocking voice of the Golden One in my memory. “I never built such understanding into you. Don’t even try, Orion. You were created to be my hunter, my warrior, not a spacetime philosopher.”

Limited. Maimed from the instant of my conception. Yet I ached for understanding. I recalled the Golden One telling me that the spacetime continuum is filled with currents and tides that shift constantly and can even be manipulated by conscious effort.

I gazed down the stream I had been following for many weeks. It was a fair-sized river now, flowing smoothly and silently toward some distant rendezvous with the Nile. To me, time was like a river, with the past upstream and the future downstream. A river that flowed in one direction, so that cause always came before effect.

Yet I knew from what the Creators had told me that time was actually more like an ocean connecting all points of the spacetime continuum. You could sail across that wide ocean in any direction, subject to its own inherent tides and currents. Cause did not necessarily precede effect always, although to a time-bound creature such as myself who senses time linearly, it always seems that way.

Each night I scanned the heavens. Sheol was still in the sky, but it looked sickly, dull. Except one night when it flared so brightly it cast bold shadows on the ground. It still shone bright enough to be seen at high noon the following day. Then it faded again.

The Sun’s companion star was still exploding, blowing off whole layers of plasma, peeling itself like an onion until there would be nothing remaining except a central core of gases too cool to produce the fusion reactions that make a star shine. The Creators were still directing its destruction from the safety of the far future.

The land around me began to look familiar. I had walked this ground before. For much of a morning I followed the riverbank, recognizing a sturdy old beech tree that slanted out over the placid stream. I spotted a boulder half overgrown with tall fronds of grass and berry bushes. The charred remains of a campfire blackened the ground in front of it. Anya and I had camped here.

Stretching to my fullest height, I felt the breeze, inhaled the scent of flowers and pine trees. The soft blue sky was marred by a thin gray cloud wafting on the wind. I smelled the faint, distant charred odor of fire. Kraal’s village was no more than a couple of days from here, I realized.

I turned my steps away from the river, aiming for the village of Kraal and Reeva, the two who had betrayed me.

My usual procedure was to hunt down some game along toward sunset, when the animals came to the river to drink. Although the river was far behind me by the time the day’s shadows were lengthening, I found a pond, a natural water hole, and hunkered down in a clump of bushes next to a tough old hickory to wait for my dinner to appear. The wind was in my face, so not even the most sensitive doe could scent me. I remained quite still, an immobile part of the landscape, and waited.

Hundreds of birds were singing and calling in the branches above me in the final moments of the day as the first animals cautiously approached the water hole. Several squirrels appeared, their tails twitching nervously. Then they were joined by other little furry things, woodchucks or something of that kind.

Eventually deer came for their evening drink, stepping delicately, stopping to sniff the air and search the purpling shadows with their big liquid eyes. I tightened my grip on my spear but remained hidden and unmoving, not so much out of compassion for them as because they were on the opposite side of the pond and too fleet afoot for me to reach them.

I heard a grunting sound behind me, almost a growl. Turning only my head, I saw the bushes shaking. Then a heavy-sided brown boar waddled toward me, tusks the size of carving knives. He took no notice of me whatsoever except to grunt and grumble as he passed by and shambled to the water’s edge.

He was not afraid of humans. Probably he had never seen one before. He would never see another.

The boar bent his head and began noisily slurping at the water. In one fluid motion I rose to my feet and raised my spear high above my head. Using both hands, I rammed its fire-hardened point into the boar’s back just behind his shoulder blade. I felt it penetrate his tough hide and slide wetly through lung and heart.

The boar collapsed without a sound. The deer on the far side of the pond, startled by my sudden movement, leaped away a few yards but then soon returned to the water’s edge.

I congratulated myself on an easy kill as I started the grisly business of skinning the boar and slicing off the best meat with my stone tools.

I congratulated myself too soon.

The first sign of danger was when the deer suddenly looked up, then bounded off into the woods. I took no notice of it. I was kneeling over my kill, too busy hacking away at the boar’s carcass in anticipation of a pork dinner.

Then I heard a coughing growl behind me that could only come from the deep chest of a lion. Turning slowly, I saw a shaggy-maned saber-toothed cat staring at me with glowing golden eyes, saliva drooling from one corner of a mouth armed with twin curving gleaming daggers.

He wanted my kill. Like a latter-day mafioso he had let me do the work, and now he intended to help himself to the profits.

I glanced into the shadowy bushes, trying to determine if this male was alone or if there were females lying in wait to spring at me. He seemed alone. Looking more sharply at him, I saw that his ribs poked through his tawny pelt. He took a limping step toward me.

He was either sick or hurt or too old to hunt for himself. This lion had been reduced to scavenging kills made by others, bluffing them away.

Sick though he may be, however, he still had the claws and teeth that could kill. My senses went into hyperdrive as I realized that my spear rested on the ground slightly more than an arm’s reach away.

If I got up and walked away, chances were the saber-tooth would take the boar’s carcass and leave me alone. But if he decided to attack me, turning my back to him was a foolish thing to do. Perhaps it would invite his attack.

The beast took another step toward me and growled again. The limp was noticeable; his left rear leg was hurt.

I had no intention of letting this rogue take my meal away from me. If he could bluff, so could I. Slowly, as we faced each other with unblinking eyes, I reached for my spear. As my outstretched fingers touched the smoothed wood, the saber-tooth decided that he would have to do more than growl.

He sprang at me. I grabbed the spear as I flattened myself on the ground and rolled away from him. Hurt though he may have been, the lion landed on all fours atop the boar’s carcass and instantly whirled around to pounce on me.

I butted the spear against the ground and aimed its point at its throat. His own leap spitted him on the spear point, his own weight forced him down onto its shaft. Blood spurted and the saber-tooth gave a strangled gurgling roar, clawing at me with his forepaws. One swipe raked my chest before I could drop the spear and back away.

The beast screamed and thrashed, trying to dislodge the spear from its throat. I scuttled away, no weapons except my bare hands, unable to do anything but watch the saber-tooth rolling on the ground, pawing at the spear’s wooden shaft while his life’s blood gushed onto the ground.

It was an awful way to die. Insanely, I sprang to my feet and ran to the struggling beast. I pulled at the spear with all my might, yanking it out of the bubbling wound in his throat. We both roared with a combination of blood fury and savage love as I plunged the spear into his heart.

I watched the light in his tawny eyes glimmer and die, leaning on the spear, half-ashamed of myself, half-exultant. I had ended the lion’s life. I had ended his suffering.

But as I looked down on his once-noble carcass I knew that jackals and other scavengers would soon be tearing at his rotting flesh. There is no dignity in death, I told myself grimly. Only the living can have dignity.

Chapter 33

So it was that I wore a saber-tooth’s pelt over my head and shoulders when I approached the village of Kraal.

I followed the smoke cloud that stained the otherwise pristine sky, thinking at first that the village must have grown much larger than it had been when I had last seen it. By the second day I began to realize that the drifting gray cloud was too big, too persistent, to be from cooking fires. I began to fear the worst.

By noon I could smell death in the air: the greasy, charred odor of burned flesh. I saw birds circling high in the distance. Not pterosaurs; vultures.

It was midafternoon when I pushed through the thorny underbrush and saw Kraal’s village. It had been burned quite thoroughly, every hut reduced to smoldering ashes, the ground blackened, a heap of charred bodies in the middle of the village burned beyond recognition. The vultures circled above. They had their own kind of patience. They were waiting for the ground to cool and the dead to stop smoking before they landed to begin their feast.

Kneeling, I examined the three-clawed prints of dinosaurs and Shaydanians that were all around the village. They had left a clear trail heading off in the northeasterly direction of Set’s fortress by the Nile. There were human footprints among them. Not everyone in the village had been slaughtered.

I straightened up and turned toward the northeast. So this was the reward Kraal and Reeva had earned for their collaboration with Set. The monster had razed their village and killed most of the inhabitants. Those that had not been slaughtered had been marched off into slavery.

I found myself hoping that Kraal and Reeva were still among the living. I wanted to find them, wanted them to see me. I wanted to see how much they enjoyed dealing with the devil.

As I trekked toward Set’s fortress I wondered what had befallen Chron and Vorn and the other slaves that I had freed. Were they dead or back in slavery?

For the rest of that day and most of the next I followed the broad trail that the dinosaurs had trampled through the underbrush. At first I thought that I might catch up with them and their human captives, but I soon put that idea out of my mind. What good would it do to try to free them? It would merely alert Set to my presence, confirm to him that I had arrived here. I wanted as much surprise on my side as possible; it was just about the only weapon I would have when I finally went against him.

Toward sundown on the second day after the village I noticed a set of human footprints that diverged from the main trail. The dinosaurs had been leading their prisoners directly northeast, toward Set’s fortress; their trail through the forest as straight as a Roman road or the flight of an arrow.

But at least two humans had run off into the underbrush, trying to escape them. I turned off the dinosaur trail and started after them. Less than ten minutes later I saw that a single dinosaur’s tracks joined theirs; whoever was directing the raiders had sent one fighting dragon after the escapees.

The sun was setting behind a range of low hills when I saw them. In a clearing among the trees a man cowered on his knees while a woman holding an infant in her arms trembled behind him. One of Set’s clones stood before them, not much taller than the woman, his scales the salmon pink of a barely adult Shaydanian. Off to the edge of the clearing hunched a two-legged dragon, his fierce head nearly as tall as the young trees, his eyes glittering with hunger.

I saw that the Shaydanian was about to kill the man. He grasped him by the throat, drawing blood with his claws.

I shouted, “Leave him alone!” And raised my spear over my head.

The Shaydanian turned, hissing surprise, as I hurled the spear with all my strength. It struck him in the chest, knocking him over backward. He fell practically on top of the startled little family of humans.

The dragon turned toward me also. I focused on it and for a dizzying instant saw the scene through its slitted eyes: the human male still on his knees, gaping at the dead reptilian; the female looking shocked, clutching the baby to her breast; and the tall broad-shouldered Orion standing a dozen yards away, hands empty, weaponless.

I willed the dragon to go off and rejoin the others. I gave it the mental picture of chasing down goats and cows and even bears. It hissed like a teakettle and raised itself to its full height on its two powerful legs. Its head bobbed back and forth between the little family and me, as if uncertain of what to do. We certainly made an easy meal for it. I concentrated as hard as I could on directing it away from us. Finally it pranced off through the trees.

I let loose a breath I had been holding for what seemed like hours. The man climbed painfully to his feet. I saw that his back was crisscrossed with claw slashes oozing blood. I started toward the trio of humans and the dead Shaydanian to retrieve my spear.

I recognized Kraal and Reeva the same instant they realized who I was.

“Orion!” he gasped, dropping back to his knees.

Reeva’s eyes widened and she clasped the baby even closer to her. I saw that she was pregnant again.

I said nothing as I walked up to the dead reptilian and yanked my spear from its scaled hide.

“Spare her, Orion,” Kraal begged, still kneeling. “Take your revenge on me, but spare Reeva and the boy.”

“Where is my knife?” There was much that I wanted to say to this weak, sniveling traitor. Those were the only words that came out, though.

He fumbled under the filthy pelt that covered his middle and handed me the knife, its sheath and strap, with shaking hands.

“You must be a god,” Kraal said, lowering his face to the ground at my feet. “Only a god could kill those monsters. Only a god could wear the skin of a lion.”

“God or man, you betrayed me.”

“And what have you done for us?” Reeva snapped, her eyes flashing fire. “Since we have known you we’ve had nothing but death and destruction.”

“You were a slave when I first saw you. I made you free.”

“Free to be hunted by Set and his devils! Free to be killed and tortured and see our villages burned to the ground!”

“You decided to serve Set. That is your reward. You betrayed not merely me, you betrayed all of your own people. And Set betrayed you. That is justice.”

“What will you do with us?” Kraal asked, still groveling.

I reached down and yanked him to his feet. “I will do battle with Set. I will try to kill him and all his kind so that you can inherit this land and live in freedom.”

His jaw dropped open. Reeva, suspicious, asked, “Why would you do that for us?”

I made a small smile for her. “I don’t want that little boy to grow up in slavery. I don’t want any human being to be the slave of that inhuman monster.”

I camped with them that night. It was clear that they were afraid of me, thoroughly mystified about my motives in allowing them to live and trying to battle against the seemingly all-powerful Set. The baby’s name, they told me eventually, was Kaan.

As I had feared, Set was methodically, determinedly wiping out every tribe of humans he could find. Shamefaced, stammering, Kraal told me that at first Set’s minions treated them well as he and Reeva helped the demons to round up entire villages of people and march them off into slavery. Chiron, Vora, and all the others I had known had been taken away in that manner.

“But when the red star began to flash and shake in the sky, Set became very angry. His demons started to slaughter whole villages and burn them to the ground. At last they surrounded our village with dragons and killed almost everyone. Then they burned the village and took us away with them into slavery.”

I nodded in the evening shadows. “And you tried to escape.”

“Reeva ran away from them and I followed her,” Kraal told me. “We ran as fast as we could but still one of the devils found us with his dragon. And then you appeared, like a god, to save us.”

Through all this Reeva said nothing, though I could feel her eyes on me.

“Set is evil,” I said to Kraal. “He intends to kill every one of us. Some he will use as slaves, but death is the final reward he has waiting for us all.”

“You intend to fight him?” Kraal asked.

“Yes.”

“Alone?” asked Reeva. The tone of her question made me realize that she feared I would force them to help me.

“Alone,” I replied.

“And the priestess? Anya? Where is she? Will she not help you?”

“No, she can’t help me,” I said. “I must face Set by myself.”

“Then he will kill you,” Reeva said, matter-of-factly. “He will kill us all.”

“Perhaps,” I admitted. “But not without a battle.”

In the morning I wished them well, told them to live as best as they could.

“Someday,” I said, “when young Kaan is big enough to walk and speak, when the new baby you are carrying is weaned, you will meet other people like yourselves and know that Set has been destroyed. Then you will at last be free.”

“What if Set kills you, instead?” Reeva asked.

“Then one day much sooner his demons and dragons will find you and kill you.”

I left them with that fearful thought and started off again toward the northeast.

Day after day I walked alone through the forest of Paradise toward my rendezvous with Set. I passed the hollowed rock cliff where I had invented the god who speaks. I passed two other villages, as burned and dead as Kraal’s. I saw no other human being anywhere in Paradise.

Set’s demons had visited all the villages, burning and killing, carrying off a few people to serve as slaves, slaughtering all the rest. He was wiping this world clean of humanity, except for a few slaves. He was making the Earth the home of his own reptilian kind.

I reached the edge of the forest at last and looked out from between the trees to the broad undulating plain of grass that stood between me and Set’s fortress.

Pterosaurs glided through the sunny sky high above. On the horizon I saw the lumpy dark shape of a sauropod. Set had his scouts out looking for me. He knew I was coming after him and he was waiting for me, alert and ready.

I sat myself on the ground, my back against the rough bark of a massive maple, thinking hard about my next move.

It was lunacy to try to reach Set’s fortress by myself, armed with nothing more than a wooden spear and a few stone implements. I had to have help. That meant that I had to return to the Creators.

For hours I resisted the idea. I had no desire to go back to them. I wanted to be free of them for all time. Or at the least, I wanted to meet them as an equal, a man who had defeated their most dangerous enemy with his own strength and wits, not a maimed toy that did not work correctly and was in constant need of help.

But there was no alternative. I could not face Set alone and unarmed. I needed their help.

Yet I knew that once I tried to make contact with the Creators, Set would home in on my mental beacon like a serpent gliding through the darkness is guided by its prey’s body heat. If I tried to make contact with the Creators and failed, Set’s demons would be upon me within hours.

That meant I could not merely seek out contact with the Creators and hope that they would bring me across spacetime to them. I had to make the leap myself, with my own power.

Night was falling. Crickets chirruped and winged insects whined through the shadows. I climbed up the maple’s trunk and flattened myself prone on one of its sturdy branches. Somehow I felt safer up in the tree than on the ground.

My monkey heritage, Set would have called it. Yet I truly did feel safer.

Closing my eyes, I tried to recall all the times I had been shifted through the continuum from one point in spacetime to another. I recalled the pain of death, repeated over and over. Concentrating, forcing myself to see through that pain, beyond it, I sought the memory of translating myself across the continuum.

I had done it before, although I was not certain that one of the Creators had not helped me without my being aware of it. Now I wanted to do it completely on my own. Could I?

The secret was to tap enough energy to create a warp in spacetime. Energy is subject to the control of a conscious mind just as matter is. And the universe teems with energy. Stars radiate their energy throughout spacetime, drenching the continuum with their bounty. Even as I lay sprawled on this tree branch in the dark of night, countless trillions of neutrinos and cosmic particles were flowing through my body, filling the night, swarming through the world around me.

I used that energy. Focusing it with my mind the way a lens focuses light, I bent that energy to my will. Once again I felt that moment of cryogenic cold, that instant of nothingness that marked the transition across the awful gulfs of the continuum.

I opened my eyes.

The city of the Creators stood all around me, magnificent temples and monuments from all the ages of humankind. Empty and silent, abandoned.

The energy dome shimmered above, tingeing the clear blue sky with a slight golden cast. Elsewhere on this tranquil Earth human beings very much like me lived their normal lives of joy and sorrow, work and love. But the Creators had fled.

For hours I walked through their city, their monument to themselves. Marble and bronze, gold and stainless steel, glass and glossy wood. To what avail? This world of theirs went along without them, but for how long? How long would the continuum maintain its stability with Set still alive and the Creators scattered among the stars? For how long could the human race exist with its implacable enemy still working to destroy all humanity?

I found myself in the main square once again, facing the Parthenon and its heroic statue of Athena. My Anya’s face looked down at me, a Greek battle helmet tilted back on her head, a great spear gripped in one slender hand.

I lifted my arms to the thirty-foot-tall statue rising before me.

“How can I win, all alone?” I asked the unfeeling marble. “What can I do, by myself?”

The statue stirred. Its marble seemed to glow from within and take on the tones of living flesh. Its painted eyes became live, grave gray eyes that looked down on me solemnly. Its lips moved and the melodious voice I knew so well spoke to me.

“You are not alone, my love.”

“Anya!”

“I am with you always, even if I cannot help you directly.”

The memory of her abandonment welled up in me. “You deserted me once.”

The living statue’s face almost seemed to cry. “I am ashamed of what I did, Orion.”

I heard myself reply, “You had no alternative. I know that. I understand it. My life was unimportant compared to the survival of the Creators. Still, it hurts worse than Set’s fires.”

Anya answered, “No such noble motives moved me. I was filled with the terror of death. Like any mortal human, I fled with my life and left the man I love most in all the universes to the mercies of the cruelest of the cruel.”

“I would have done the same,” I said.

She smiled sadly. “No, Orion. You would have died protecting me. You have given your life many times, but even faced with final extinction you would have tried to shield me with your own life.”

I had no response to that.

“I took on human form as a whim, at first,” Anya confessed. “I found it exciting to share a life with you, to feel the blood thundering through my body, to love and laugh and fight—even to bleed. But always I knew that I could escape if it became necessary. I never faced the ultimate test, true death. When Set held me in his power, when I knew that I would die forever, that I would cease to be, I felt real fear for the first time. I panicked and ran. I abandoned you to save myself.”

“I thought I hated you for that,” I told her. “And yet I love you still.”

“I am not worthy of your love, Orion.”

Smiling, I replied, “Yet you have my love, Anya. Now and forever. Throughout all time, all space, all the universes of the continuum, I love you.”

It was true. I loved her and forgave her completely. I did this of my own will; no one was manipulating me. This was not a response that the Golden One had built into my conditioning. I truly loved Anya, despite what she had done. Perhaps, in a strange way, I loved her in part because she had experienced the ultimate fear that all humans must face. None of the other Creators had shown the courage even to try.

“And I love you, my darling,” she said, her voice growing faint.

“But where are you?”

“The Creators have fled. When they saw that Set could attack them here, in our own sanctuary, they abandoned the Earth altogether and fled for their lives.”

“Will you return to me?” I asked.

“The other Creators fear Set so much! They thought that destroying Sheol would put an end to him, but now they realize he is firmly entrenched on Earth. Only you can stop him, Orion. The Creators are depending entirely on you.”

“But I can’t do it alone!” I called to her diminishing voice. I could feel her presence fading, dwindling, the statue losing its living warmth, returning to pure marble.

“You must use your own resources, Orion,” Anya’s voice whispered to me. “The Creators are too afraid to face him themselves.”

“Will you return to me?” I repeated.

“I will try.” Fainter still.

“I need you!”

“When you need me most, I will be there for you, Orion.” Her voice was softer than the sighing of an owl’s wing. “When you need me most, my love.”

Chapter 34

I was alone in the empty main square again, staring at the cold marble statue of Athena.

Alone. The Creators expected me to face Set and his minions without them, without even their help.

Feeling drained, exhausted, I went to the marble steps of the Parthenon and sat down, my head sunk in my hands. From across the square the giant golden Buddha smiled placidly at me.

For the first time in all my lives I was facing a situation where my strength by itself was of practically no value. I had to use my mind, the powers of thought, to find a way to defeat Set. He overpowered me physically, that I knew from painful experience. He had an army of Shaydanians at his clawed fingertips and legions of dinosaurs under his control.

I had my body and my wits. Nothing more.

The Buddha statue seemed to be watching me, its smile friendly and benign.

“It’s all well and good for you to preach desirelessness,” I grumbled aloud to the gold-leafed wood. “But I have desires. I have needs. And what I need most is an army—”

My voice stopped in midsentence.

I knew where there was an army. A victorious army that had swept from the Gobi Desert to the banks of the Danube River. The army of Subotai, greatest of the Mongol generals who conquered most of the world for Genghis Khan.

Rising to my feet, I mentally gathered the energy to project myself into the thirteenth century of the Christian era, to the time when the Mongol Empire stretched from the coast of China to the plain of Hungary. I had been there before. I had assassinated their high khan, Ogotai, the son of Genghis Khan. A man who had befriended me.

The city of the Creators disappeared as I passed through the cryogenic cold of a transition through spacetime. For an instant I was bodiless in the utterly black void of the continuum. Then I was standing on a cold windswept prairie, heavy gray storm clouds thickening overhead. There was not a tree in sight, but in the distance I could make out the ragged silhouette of a walled city against the darkening clouds.

I headed for the city. It began to rain, a cold driving rain mixed with wet sleet. I pulled my lion pelt around my torso and shut down the peripheral circulation in my capillaries as much as I dared to keep my body heat inside me. Head down, shoulders forward, I bulled my way through the icy rain as the ground beneath my feet turned to slick gooey mud.

The city was not burning, which meant either that Subotai’s army was besieging it or had already captured it. I thought the latter because I saw no signs of a camp, no great horse corrals or mounted warriors on picket patrols.

It was fully dark by the time I reached the city gate. The wall was nothing more than a rough palisade of pointed logs dug into what was fast becoming a sea of mud. The gate was a crude affair of planks with spaces between them for shooting arrows through.

It was open. A good sign. No fighting was going on or expected.

A half-dozen Mongol warriors stood in the shelter of the gate’s overhanging parapet, a small fire crackling fitfully beneath a makeshift board that only partially protected it from the pelting rain.

The Mongols were wiry, battle-scarred veterans. Yet without their ponies they looked small, almost as small as children. Deadly children, though. Each of them wore a chain-mail vest and a conical steel helmet. They carried curved sabers and daggers at their belts. I saw their inevitable bows and quivers full of arrows resting against the planks of the half-open gate.

One of them stepped out to challenge me.

“Halt!” he commanded. “Who are you and what’s your business here?”

“I am Orion, a friend of the lord Subotai. I have come from Karakorum with a message from the High Khan.”

The tough warrior’s eyes narrowed. “The nobles have elected a new High Khan to replace Ogotai?”

I shook my head. “Not yet. Kubilai and the others are gathering at Karakorum to make their choice. My message concerns other matters.”

He eyed my dripping lion’s pelt and I realized he had never seen a saber-tooth before. But he showed no other sign of curiosity as he demanded, “What proof have you of your words?”

I made myself smile. “Send a messenger to Subotai and tell him that Orion is here to see him. Describe me to him and he will be glad to see me.”

He looked me up and down. Among the Mongols my size was little short of phenomenal. And Subotai knew of my abilities as a fighter. I hoped that no word had reached him from Karakorum that I had murdered the High Khan Ogotai.

The warrior dispatched one of his men to carry my message to Subotai, then grudgingly allowed me to share the meager warmth of their fire, out of the cold rain.

“That’s a fine pelt you are wearing,” said one of the other guards.

“I killed the beast a long time ago,” I replied.

They told me that this city was the capital of the Muscovites. I remembered that Subotai had been eager to learn all that I could tell him about the black-earth region of the Ukraine, and the steppes of Russia that led into the plains of Poland and, beyond the Carpathian mountains, into Hungary and the heartland of Europe.

By the time the messenger returned, my back felt as if it were coated with ice even though my face and hands were reasonably warm. A pair of other warriors came with the messenger, decked in shining armor cuirasses and polished helmets, jewels in their sword hilts. With hardly a word they took me through the mud streets of the city of the Muscovites to the quarters of Subotai.

He was not much different from the man I had met in an earlier lifetime. As small and wiry as any of his warriors, Subotai’s hair and beard were iron gray, his eyes jet black. Those eyes were lively, intelligent, curious about this great world that stretched so far in every direction.

He had taken a church for his personal quarters, probably because the wooden structure was the largest building in the city and afforded the grandest room for audiences and nightly drinking bouts. I walked the length of the nave toward Subotai; the floor of the church had been cleared of pews, if any had ever been there. Stiffly pious pictures of Byzantine saints gazed down morosely at the pile of pillows where the altar had once been. Subotai reclined there with a few trusted companions and a dozen or so slim young local women who served food and wine.

Behind him the church’s apse was rich with gold bas reliefs gleaming in the candlelight. Some of the gold had already been stripped from the wall; I knew the Mongols would soon melt down the rest. Set into the arch high above was a mosaic of mournful Christ, his wounded hands raised in blessing. It startled me to see that its face was almost an exact portrait of the Creator I called Zeus.

Armed warriors lazed along the side walls of the converted church, drinking and talking among themselves. I was not fooled by their seeming indolence. In an instant they would cut off the head of any man who made the slightest threatening gesture. Or any woman. At a word from Subotai they would gleefully reward a liar or anyone else who displeased their general by pouring molten silver into his ears and eyes.

Yet these Mongols knew the virtues of loyalty and honesty better than most so-called civilized peoples. And there was no question about their bravery. If ordered to, they would storm the strongest fortification in human-wave attacks that would either carry through to victory or leave every one of them dead.

Subotai was drinking from a golden chalice encrusted with gemstones. The lieutenants reclining beside him held cups of silver and alabaster. It never ceased to amaze me: no matter how poor or rude a tribe might be, their priests always had gold and silver, their churches were always the best prizes for looters.

“Orion!” Subotai shouted, leaping to his feet. “Man of the west!”

He seemed genuinely glad to see me. Despite his gray hair he was as agile and eager as a youth.

“My lord Subotai.” I stopped a few paces before him and made an appropriately low bow. I was glad to see him, too. When I had known him earlier, he had vibrated with a restless energy that had carried him and his armies to the ends of the earth. I was happy to see that such energy still animated him. He would need it if he agreed to do what I was going to ask of him.

He extended his hand to me and I grasped his wrist as he grasped mine.

“It is good to see you again, man of the west.”

Looking down at him, I said solemnly, “I bring you a gift, my lord.”

I took the soggy pelt of the saber-tooth from my shoulders and held it out to him. The head had been thrown back so that he could not see the lion’s gleaming fangs until that moment. He goggled at it.

“Where did you find a beast such as this?”

I could not help grinning. “I know of places where many strange and wonderful beasts exist.”

He grinned back at me and led me to the piles of pillows where he had been reclining. “Tell me the news from Karakorum.”

As he gestured for me to sit on the pillows at his right hand I inwardly breathed a sigh of relief. Subotai would have never clasped my arm if he intended to kill me. He was incapable of treachery against a friend. Neither he nor anyone else knew, apparently, that I had assassinated his High Khan, Ogotai, a man who had been my friend in a different life.

While a beautiful young blonde handed me a cup of gold and an equally lovely girl poured spiced wine into it, I told him simply that Ogotai had died in his sleep and that I had seen him that very night.

“He seemed content and pleased that the Mongol Empire ruled almost all the known world in peace. I think he was happy that no enemies stood against the Mongols.”

Subotai nodded, but his face turned grave. “Soon, Orion, the unthinkable may happen. Mongol may turn against Mongol. The old tribal wars of the Gobi may erupt again, but this time huge armies will battle one another from one end of the world to the other.”

“How can that be?” I asked, truly shocked. “The Yassa forbids such bloodletting among Mongols.”

“I know,” replied Subotai sadly. “But not even the law of the Yassa can stop the strife that is to come, I fear.”

As we reclined there on the silken pillows beneath the sorrowful eyes of Byzantine saints looking down upon us from their gilded unchanging heaven, Subotai explained to me what was happening among the Mongol generals.

Simply put, they had virtually run out of lands to conquer. Genghis Khan, the leader they revered so highly that no Mongol would speak his name, had set the tribes of the Gobi on the path to world conquest. With all of China, all of Asia to battle, the warriors of the Gobi stopped their incessant tribal conflicts and set out to conquer the world. Now that world had been conquered, except for dreary dank outlands such as Europe and the subcontinent of India where the heat killed men and horses alike.

“The election of the new High Khan will bring divisions among the Mongols,” Subotai predicted gloomily. “It will be an excuse to go back to the old ways of fighting among ourselves.”

I understood. The empire of Alexander the Great had broken up in the same manner, general battling general to hold the territory already possessed or to steal territory from a former comrade in arms.

“What will you do, my lord Subotai?” I asked.

He drained his chalice and put it down beside him. Immediately one of the slaves filled it to the brim.

“I will not break the laws of the Yassa,” he said. “I will not spill the blood of other Mongols.”

“Not willingly,” said one of the men sitting around us.

Subotai nodded, his mouth set in a tight grim line. “I will lead my warriors westward, Orion, past the river they call Danube. It is a difficult land, cold and filled with dismal forests. But it is better than fighting amongst ourselves.”

If Subotai intended to march into Europe, he would devastate the civilization there that was just beginning to throw off the shackles of ignorance and barbarism that had followed the collapse of the Roman Empire. In another few centuries the Renaissance would begin, with all that it would eventually mean for human knowledge and freedom. But not if the Mongols laid waste to all of Europe, from Muscovy to the English Channel.

“My lord Subotai,” I said slowly, “once you asked me to tell you all I knew of this land where you now camp, and of the lands further west.”

Some of his old vigor returned to his eyes. “Yes! And now that you have returned to me, I am more eager than ever to learn about the Germans and Franks and the other powers of the lands to the west.”

“I will tell you all I know, but as you already understand, their lands are cold and heavily forested, not good territory for a Mongol warrior.”

He made a deep sigh. “But what other lands are there for my men?”

His question brought a smile to my lips. “I know a place, my lord, where open grassland stretches for as far as a man can ride in a whole year. A place of great cats with sabers for teeth and other beasts, even more ferocious.”

Subotai’s eyes widened and the warriors around him stirred.

“There are few people in this land, so few that you could ride for weeks without seeing anyone.”

“We would not have to fight?”

“You will have to fight,” I said. “The land is ruled not by men, but by monsters such as no man has ever seen before.”

“Monsters?” blurted one of the warriors. “What kind of monsters?”

“Have you seen them yourself?”

“Are you spinning tales to try to frighten us, man of the west?”

Subotai hushed them with an impatient gesture.

I replied, “I have been there, my lords, and seen this land and the monsters who rule it. They are fierce and powerful and hideous.”

I spent the next hour describing Set and his Shaydanian clones, and the dinosaurs that he had brought from the Mesozoic.

“What you speak of,” said Subotai at last, “sounds much like the djinn of the Persians or the tsan goblins that the people of the high mountains fear.”

“They are to be feared, that is true enough,” I said. “And they have great powers. But they are neither ghosts nor goblins. They are as mortal as you or I. I myself have killed them with little more than a spear or a knife.”

Subotai sank back on his silken cushions, deep in thought. The others drank and held out their goblets for more wine. I drank, too. And waited.

Finally Subotai asked me, “Can you lead us to this land?”

“Yes, my lord Subotai.”

“I would see these monsters for myself.”

“I can take you there.”

“How soon? How long a journey is it?”

Suddenly I realized that I was talking myself into a double-edged trap. To bring Subotai or any of the Mongols back to the Neolithic, I would have to reveal to them powers that would convince them that I was a sorcerer. The Mongols did not deal kindly with sorcerers: usually they put them to the sword, or killed them more slowly.

And once in the Neolithic they might very well take one look at Set’s reptilians and decide that they were supernatural creatures. Although the Mongols feared no human, the sight of the Shaydanians might terrify them.

“My lord Subotai,” I answered carefully, “the land I speak of cannot be reached on horseback. I can take you there tomorrow morning, if you desire it, but the journey will seem very strange to you.”

He cast me a sidelong glance. “Speak more plainly, Orion.”

The others hunched forward, more curiosity on their faces than fear.

“You know that I come from a far land,” I said.

“From beyond the sea that stretches to the sky,” Subotai said, recalling what I had told him years before.

“Yes,” I agreed. “In my land people travel in very strange ways. They do not need horses. They can go across far mountains and seas in the blink of an eye.”

“Witchcraft!” snapped one of the warriors.

“No,” I said. “Merely a swifter way to travel.”

“Like the magic carpets that the storytellers of Baghdad speak of?” asked Subotai.

I grabbed at that idea. “Indeed, my lord, very much like that.”

His brows rose a centimeter. “I had always thought such tales to be nothing more than children’s nonsense.”

Bowing my head slightly to show some humility, I replied, “Children’s nonsense sometimes becomes reality, my lord. You yourself have accomplished deeds that would have seemed impossible to your grandfathers.”

He made that sighing noise again, almost a snort. The others remained silent.

“Very well,” said Subotai. “Tomorrow morning you will take me to this strange land you describe. Me, and my personal guard.”

“How many men will that be?” I asked.

Subotai smiled. “A thousand. With their horses and weapons.”

The warrior sitting next to Subotai on his left said without humor, “You will need a large carpet, Orion.”

The others burst into laughter. Subotai grinned, then looking at the surprise on my face, began to roar. The joke was on me. The others lolled back on the cushions and howled until tears ran down their cheeks. I laughed, too. Mongols do not laugh at sorcerers and witchcraft. As long as they were guffawing they were not afraid of me. As long as they did not fear me they would not try to knife me in my back.

Chapter 35

One of Subotai’s tough, battle-scarred veterans led me to a stall in the loft of the church where a few blankets and pillows had been put together to make a serviceable bed. I slept soundly, without dreams.

The sun shone weakly through tattered scudding gray clouds the next morning. The rain had stopped but the streets of Kiev were rivers of gooey gray-brown mud.

Subotai’s quartermaster had apparently spent the night hunting up equipment taken as spoils from the Muscovites big enough for me to wear. Obviously nothing made for the Mongols themselves would fit me.

I came down to the nave of the converted church decked in a chain-mail shirt, leather trousers, and boots that felt a little too snug but warm. A curved scimitar of Damascus steel hung at my side, its hilt sparkling with precious gems. The faithful old iron dagger that Odysseus had given me was now tucked into my belt.

A red-haired slave led me out into the watery sunlight, where a pair of Mongol warriors waited on their ponies. They held a third horse, slightly bigger than the other two, for me. Without a word we rode through the muddy streets and past the gate that I had entered the night before.

Out beyond the city wall waited Subotai’s personal guard, a thousand hardened warriors who had beaten every army hurled against them from the Great Wall of China to the shores of the Danube River. Mounted on tough little ponies, grouped in precise military formations of tens and hundreds, each warrior was accompanied by two or three more horses and all the equipment he would need for battle.

At the head of the formation Subotai’s magnificent white stallion pranced as impatiently as the great general himself must have felt.

“Orion!” he called as I approached. “We are ready to move.”

It was a command and a challenge. I knew I had to translate the entire mass of them through spacetime, but I feared to attempt doing it as abruptly as I myself moved through the continuum.

So, playacting a bit, I squinted up at the weak sun, turned slightly in my creaking saddle, and pointed roughly northward.

“That is the way, my lord Subotai.”

He gave a guttural order to the warrior riding next to him and the entire formation wheeled around and followed us at a slow pace.

I led them into the dismal dark woods that began a bare half mile from the city’s walls. Concentrating with an intensity I had never known before, I uttered a silent plea for help to Anya as I tried to focus all the energy I could tap for the translation through spacetime.

The woods grew misty. A soft gray billowing fog rose from the ground and wrapped us in its chill tendrils. Our mounts trotted ahead slowly, Subotai at my side, his bodyguards behind me, close enough to slice me to ribbons at the slightest provocation. The fog grew thicker, blanketing sound as well as sight. I could hear the muffled tread of the horse’s hooves in the muddy ground, an occasional snort, the jangle of a sword hilt against a steel buckle.

I ignored all distractions. I even ignored Subotai himself as I gathered my mental strength and forced the entire group of us across the continuum. I felt the familiar moment of utter cold, but it was over almost before it began.

I realized that I had squeezed my eyes shut. Opening them, I saw that we were still in a forest. But the mist was dissolving, evaporating. The ground beneath us was firm and dry. The sunlight filtering through the tall leafy trees was strong and bright.

We were now in the forest of Paradise, I realized, riding north by east toward the edge of the woods. The time was the early Neolithic. This was the place and the time where Set had determined to make his stand: to wipe out the human race while it was still small and weak, to wreak vengeance upon me and the Creators for destroying his home world, to seize the planet Earth and make it his own forever.

I glanced at Subotai. He rode his pony quietly, his face impassive. But his eyes were darting everywhere. He knew we were no longer in the chill, dank land of the Muscovites. The sun was warm, even under the magnificent trees. He was noting every tree, every rock, every tiny animal that darted through the underbrush. He was building up a map inside his head as we rode through this land that was completely new to him.

At last he asked me, “You say there are no other men here?”

“There are a few scattered tribes, my lord. But they are small and weak. They possess no weapons except crude wooden spears and bows that have not the range of the Mongol bow.”

“And few women, also?”

“Very few, I fear.”

He grunted. “And the monsters? How are they armed?”

“They use giant lizards to do their fighting for them—dragons bigger than ten horses, with sharp claws and ferocious teeth.”

“Animals,” Subotai muttered.

I corrected, “Animals that are controlled by the minds of their masters, so that they fight with intelligence and courage.”

He fell silent at that.

For most of the day we rode through the forest, the Mongol warriors behind us filtering through the trees as silently as wraiths. There was no pause for a meal, we chewed dried meat and drank water from our canteens while in the saddle.

It was nearly sundown when we reached the edge of the forest and saw the endless expanse of grass stretching out beyond the horizon.

Subotai actually grinned. He nosed his pony out from under the trees and rode a hundred yards or so onto the grassy plain.

“How far does this land extend?” he called back to me.

Making a quick mental calculation, I shouted back, “About the same as the distance between Baghdad and Karakorum!”

He gave a wild shout and spurred his mount into a gallop. His bodyguards, startled, went yowling and charging after him, leaving me sitting in my saddle, staring at the unusual sight of Mongols whooping like boys wild with joyful exhilaration.

Then I saw a pterosaur gliding against the bright blue sky, high above.

“I welcome your return, Orion.” Set’s cold voice rang inside my head. “You have brought more noisy monkeys to annoy me, I see. Good. Slaughtering them will please me very much.”

I clamped down on my thoughts. The less Set knew about who these men were, the better. I had to fight him in the time and place of his choosing, but whatever element of surprise I could hold on to was vital to me.

Subotai returned at a trot after nearly half an hour of hard joyriding, his normally doughty face split by a wide grin.

“You have done well, Orion. This land is like the Gobi in springtime.”

“It is like this all year round,” I said. In a few thousand years it would become the most arid desert on Earth, as the ice sheets covering Europe in this era retreated and the nourishing rains moved north with them. But for now, for as long as Subotai and his sons and his sons’ sons lived, the grass would be green and abundant.

“We must bring the rest of the army here, and our families with their yurts and herds,” Subotai said enthusiastically. “Then we can deal with these demons and dragons of yours.”

I was about to agree when I spotted the lumpy brown shape of a four-legged sauropod on the horizon.

Pointing, I said, “There is one of the beasts. It is not a fighting dragon, but it can be dangerous.”

Subotai immediately spurred his horse into a charge toward the sauropod. A dozen of his guard charged out after him. I urged my mount into a gallop, too, and we all dashed for the hump-backed brown and dun dinosaur as it plodded slowly away from us. I felt the wind in my face and the straining muscles of my pony beneath me; it was exhilarating.

As we neared the sauropod, its head turned on its long, snaky neck to look at us. I realized that Set was using the beast as a scout, examining us through the reptile’s eyes. I could sense him hissing with his equivalent of amused laughter.

The animal lumbered off toward a small rise in the land, little more than a grassy knoll where some thick berry bushes grew.

“Be careful!” I shouted to Subotai over the pounding of our horses’ hooves. “There may be others.”

He was already unlimbering the compact double-curved bow that had been slung across his back, his horse’s reins clamped in his grinning teeth. The other Mongols were also fitting arrows to their bows without slowing their charge in the slightest.

I got the strong mental impression of Shaydanians hiding in those bushes and behind the knoll. Mounted on dragons. I kicked my horse into a harder gallop and tried to catch up with the impetuous Subotai.

The sauropod reached the rise of the knoll and, instead of climbing it or going around it, turned to face us. It made a screeching, whistling hoot and raised itself up on its hind legs, its head rearing more than forty feet above us, the talons of its forefeet glinting viciously in the sunlight.

Subotai let loose an arrow that struck the beast squarely in its exposed chest. It screamed and lunged toward him. Subotai’s horse panicked and reared up. A lesser man would have been thrown from his saddle, but Subotai, practically born on horseback, held his seat.

A dozen more arrows flew at the monster, striking its chest, belly, neck. I was close enough to hear the solid chunking thud each missile made as it penetrated the reptile’s scales. My sword was in my hand and I drove my horse to Subotai’s side, ready to protect him as he regained control of his mount.

Then the trap was sprung. From both sides of the knoll half a dozen fighting dragons sprang, with Shaydanians mounted on their backs, guiding them. All the horses panicked at the sight of these fierce, terrifying carnosaurs dashing toward them. Several of the men were thrown. My own horse bucked and reared, wanting desperately to get away from the sharp teeth and claws of these ferocious monsters.

I controlled my mount mentally, blocking out the vision of the dreadful devils as I drove it headlong into the nearest of the carnosaurs. My one thought was to protect Subotai. Already dragons were crunching some of the downed men in their voracious jaws, their screams rising over the dragons’ hissing snarls.

From behind me I heard an enormous deep roar, like a giant enraged lion, and the ground-shaking thunder of thousands of horses’ hooves. Subotai’s entire guard was charging out of the woods toward the beasts that threatened their lord.

My senses went into hyperdrive as I charged my poor terrified pony straight toward the claws of the nearest carnosaur. I saw bubbles of saliva between its saber-sharp teeth, saw its slitted reptilian eyes turn away from Subotai toward me, saw the Shaydanian mounted on its back focusing his attention on me also.

The carnosaur swung one mighty clawed hand at me. I slid off my saddle and dropped to the ground, sword firmly in my hand. The carnosaur’s claws lifted my pony entirely off the ground, gouging huge spurting furrows along its flank, and threw it screaming through the air.

I saw all this happen in slow motion, as if watching a dream. Before the dinosaur finished its clawing kill of my pony I ducked low and leaped between its hind legs, ramming my scimitar into its groin with every bit of strength in me.

Then I saw the Shaydanian topple from the screeching carnosaur’s back, an arrow in his chest. Before he hit the ground I glanced over my shoulder to see Subotai already nocking another arrow, reins still in his teeth, lips pulled back in what might have been a grin or a grimace.

The carnosaur started to topple upon me and I had to skip quickly away as it floundered to the ground with a bone-shaking thump. My sword was still buried in its groin, so I dashed to the crushed bloody remains of one of the Mongols and picked up the bow he had dropped in the final instant of his life.

By now the rest of Subotai’s thousand were in arrow’s range and all the carnosaurs were under relentless attack. The Mongols are brave, but not foolhardy. Their first goal was to rescue their leader, Subotai. Once they saw that he was out of trouble they hung back away from the enemy and attacked with arrows.

Quickly, methodically they picked off the Shaydanians mounted atop the dragons. The carnosaurs themselves were another matter. Too big to be more than annoyed by the Mongols’ arrows, they dashed at their tormentors, who galloped off a safe distance before returning to the attack. It was like a bullfight, with the huge monsters being bled until their strength and courage lay pooling on the grass.

As they fired at the milling, screeching carnosaurs I jumped atop one of the riderless horses and followed Subotai as he rejoined his men. He had never let go his grip on his bow, and he was firing at the beasts even as he rode away from them, turning in his saddle to let an arrow fly while his pony galloped toward the rest of the warriors.

The poor outnumbered beasts tried to escape but the Mongols showed no more mercy than fear. They pursued the carnosaurs, pumping more arrows into them until the animals slowed, gasping and hissing, and turned to face their tormentors.

Then came the coup de grace: Mongol lancers charged the weakened, slowed carnosaurs on their sinewy little ponies, a dozen scarred dark-skinned St. Georges spitting a dozen very real hissing, writhing dragons on their spears.

I rode back to retrieve my sword as Subotai trotted back to the carcasses by the knoll and got off his pony to examine the bodies of the slain Shaydanians.

“They do look like the tsan goblins that the men of the high mountains speak of,” he said.

I looked down at the dead body of one of Set’s clones. Its reptile’s eyes were open, staring coldly. Its reddish scales were smeared with blood where three arrows protruded from its flesh. Its clawed hands and feet were stilled forever, yet they still looked dangerous, frightening.

“They are not human,” I said, “but they are mortal. They die just as a man does, and their blood is as red as ours.”

Subotai looked at me; then past me to where his men were laying out the bodies of the slain Mongols side by side.

“Five killed,” he muttered. “How many of these dragons does the enemy possess?”

“Hundreds, at least,” I said, watching the Mongol warriors as they tore branches from the bushes around the knoll and began to build a makeshift funeral pyre.

Thinking of Set’s core tap that gave him the energy to leap backward in time, I added, “He can probably get more to make up his losses in battle.”

Subotai nodded. “And his city is fortified.”

“Yes. The walls are higher than five men standing on each other’s shoulders.”

“This skirmish,” said Subotai, “was merely the enemy commander’s attempt to determine how many men we have, and what kind of fighters we are. When none of his scouts return home, he will know the second, but not the first.”

I bowed my head. He had military wisdom, but he could not realize that Set had witnessed this fight, seeing us through the eyes of his clones.

“You must go back and bring the rest of the army here,” Subotai decided. “And do it quickly, Orion, before the enemy realizes that we are only a thousand men—minus five.”

“I will do it this night, my lord Subotai.”

“Good,” he grunted.

I was about to turn away when he reached up and clasped me on the shoulder. “I saw you charge into that beast when my mount was bucking. You protected me when I was most vulnerable. That took courage, friend Orion.”

“It seemed the wisest thing to do, my lord.”

He smiled. This gray-bearded Mongol general, his hair braided, his face still shining with the sweat of battle, this man who had conquered cities and slain thousands, smiled up at me as a father might.

“Such wisdom—and courage—deserve a reward. What would you have of me, man of the west?”

“You have already rewarded me, my lord.”

His dark eyes widened slightly. “Already? How so?”

“You have called me friend. That is reward enough for me.”

He chuckled softly, nodded, and took me to the tent his men had pitched for him. As the sun went down we shared a meal of dried meat and fermented mare’s milk, then stood side by side as the funeral pyre was lit and the bodies of the slain Mongols properly sent on their way to heaven.

I held my face immobile, knowing that the abode of the gods was nothing more than a beautiful dead city in the far future, a city that the gods had abandoned in fear for their lives. There were no gods to protect or defend us, I knew. We had no one to rely on except ourselves.

“Now,” Subotai said to me as the last embers of the pyre glowed against the night’s darkness, “bring me the rest of my army.”

I bowed and walked off a way from the camp. Moving the entire army and all their families and camp followers would not be easy. Perhaps I could not do it without aid from Anya or the other Creators. But I would try.

I closed my eyes and willed myself back to the bleak city of wooden huts and mud hovels. Nothing happened.

I concentrated harder. Still no result.

Throwing my head back, I stared up at the stars. Sheol glimmered weakly, a poor dulled reflection of its former strength. And I realized that Set had blocked my way through the continuum, just as he blocked Anya when we had first come to this time and place.

He had trapped me here, with Subotai and barely a thousand warriors.

I heard his hissing laughter in my mind. I had led Subotai into a trap. Set intended to keep us here and slaughter us down to the last man.

Chapter 36

I could not face Subotai. He had followed me on faith, believing that I would lead him to a land where he and his people could live in peace once they had conquered the aliens who controlled the area. He had trusted me and called me friend. How could I tell him that I had led him into a deadly trap?

This was my doing, my fault. I could not look upon the battle-hardened face of my Mongol general again until I had corrected the situation. Or died trying.

I had learned one thing of supreme importance from Set. Energy is the key to all powers. Cut off the source of his energy and your enemy becomes helpless. Set’s source of energy was the core tap that reached down to the molten heart of Earth. I had to reach it and somehow destroy it.

The tap was deep inside Set’s fortress, which lay more than a day’s march from where Subotai’s troops had camped for the night. I had to get there, and quickly, before Set unleashed an attack upon Subotai that would slaughter all the Mongols.

But I was cut off from my energy source. Set had put a barrier between me and the heavens that prevented me from utilizing the energy streaming in from the sun and stars. Was this shield merely a bubble that covered the immediate region around me, or had he wrapped the entire planet in a shimmering curtain that blocked the energy streaming earthward from the stars?

It made no difference. The fact was that I was cut off from the energies that would allow me to fight Set. There was only one thing to do: reach his own core tap and either destroy it or use it against him.

There was no way that I could accomplish anything in this one night. I took a horse from the Mongols’ makeshift corral and rode toward the northeast and Set’s fortress. I only hoped that I could reach it before the devil launched an annihilating attack upon Subotai.

The sun rose dim and hazy, a weak pale phantom of its usual glory. Set’s shield was incredibly strong, I realized. Pterosaurs were already crisscrossing the watery gray sky. They could not miss seeing me riding alone across the wide plain of grass.

I wondered what Subotai was thinking of me. Probably he was not alarmed yet, thinking that I had returned to Muscovy and was making preparations for bringing the rest of his army to him. I hated to think that he would believe I had betrayed him. I did not fear his anger or punishment, but I felt miserable at the thought that he might feel I had broken his trust.

Despite the wan appearance of the sun, the day became quite hot. Set’s shield was selective, allowing the longer wavelengths of sunlight to reach the ground and heat it. I knew that if I had the proper instruments with me, they would show that none of the higher-energy wavelengths were penetrating the shield. Nor were any energetic cosmic particles getting through, I was certain.

Late in the afternoon a trio of Shaydanians mounted on fighting dragons appeared out of the shimmering heat haze, heading directly for me. The pterosaurs had done their job. I was to be killed or captured and brought before Set once again.

For the first time since I had known them, these Shaydanians bore weapons. They each carried oddly convoluted lengths of bright metal strapped across their backs. Once they spotted me they unslung the devices and, clutching them in both hands like rifles, urged their two-legged carnosaurs into a trotting pace.

I slid off my mount and shooed it away from me. I had already sacrificed one pony to the carnosaurs. That was enough. Idly I thought that I must be acquiring some of the Mongols’ reverence for horses.

As the carnosaur-mounted devils approached me I focused my consciousness on the nearest of the three, reaching into his mind for a brief moment. The rifles, with their bulbous metallic blisters and needle-slim muzzles, projected streams of fire, like a small flamethrower. Set realized that he could no longer rely on fangs and claws to deal with the Mongols; he needed weapons. What more terrifying weapon than a flamethrower, especially coming from a reptilian that already had the Mongols worried that they were facing supernatural demons?

I saw something else in the Shaydanian’s mind during that fleeting instant: they were not under orders to take me alive. Set had no intention of taking further chances with me. These three clones of his were going to kill me, here and now.

My senses shifted into hyperdrive immediately and the scene slowed as if time were stretching like a piece of warm taffy. The three Shaydanians lifted their rifles to their shoulders, aiming at me through diamond-shaped crystal sights. I saw their taloned fingers tightening on the curved triggers.

As they aimed at me their attention was shifted momentarily from guiding their mounts. The fierce two-legged carnosaurs, directed mentally by their riders, continued to trot toward me. But their tiny brains were not under the firm control of the Shaydanians, for one fleeting moment.

Desperately I sent a lance of red-hot mental energy into those three dinosaurs’ brains. They screeched and reared to their full height, throwing two of the Shaydanians to the ground and forcing the third to drop his rifle and clutch at his mount’s hide with both clawed hands.

All this I saw in slow motion. Even as the two thrown Shaydanians were falling toward the ground, I ran and dove full-length for the rifle that was spiraling through midair. I grabbed it before it touched the grass. As my fingers tightened around it I heard the thumps of the two riders hitting the ground hard.

The dinosaurs were still hissing, the two freed of their riders galloping off away from us. The third, though, was under his rider’s control once again and heading straight for me.

I rolled away from a stamping clawed foot that would have crushed me under the carnosaur’s weight and fired from the hip at its rider. The stream of flame sliced him in two across midtorso. As his severed body slipped bloodily from the dinosaur’s back, the beast wheeled and came at me, massive head bent low, cavernous mouth gaping, lined with saw-edged teeth the size of my scimitar.

I pulled the rifle’s trigger as hard as I could while dodging sideways. The stream poured flame down its gullet and slashed down the length of its thick neck. It hit the ground with a tremendous thud, literally shaking the earth, bellowing like a runaway steam locomotive to the very last.

I looked up. The two other Shaydanians were scrambling for the rifles they had dropped. I fired at the nearer of them and he toppled over dead. But when I turned to the third of them, my rifle did not respond. It was empty, its fuel depleted.

The Shaydanian had reached his own rifle and was picking it up from the grass. I threw my useless weapon at him and charged after it, drawing my scimitar from its scabbard. The rifle hit him like a club, knocking him down again on his rump. Before he could train his own rifle on me I was close enough to kick it out of his hands.

He glowered at me through his red slitted reptilian eyes and scrambled to his feet. Hissing, he advanced on me, clawed hands reaching out. I slashed at him with the scimitar once. He raised an arm to block the blow, but I swung the blade under and then lunged at him. The point penetrated the scales of his chest and went completely through him. With a final hiss of death agony he collapsed and, sliding off my blade, fell to the bloodstained ground.

Immediately I projected a mental image at Set. I sent him a scene that showed two of his clones lying dead on the bloody grass but the third standing over my own burned corpse. With every ounce of cunning in me, I presented myself mentally as one of Set’s clones, and the body at my feet as my own.

“You have done well, my son,” came Set’s mental voice. “Return now with the corpse so that I may examine it.”

I mentally called one of the carnosaurs back to me and mounted it for the trip back to the fortress by the Nile. Had Set truly believed the false message I had sent him? Or was he merely drawing me to his fortress so he could dispose of me more easily?

There was only one way to find out. I headed the dinosaur toward the fortress, concentrating every moment on my phony image so that even the pterosaurs scouting high overhead would “see” what I wanted them to, and report it back to Set.

It was nightfall by the time I reached the garden by the Nile. The fortress was a short ride away. I would reach it in darkness, which suited me well. I knew there was no chance of my keeping up my deception once inside Set’s walls—if Set had been deceived at all.

The sky was utterly black and starless, as dark as the deepest pit of hell as I rode the carnosaur up to the curving fortress wall. The faint phosphorescent glow of the wall itself was the only hint of light in that night made frighteningly black by Set’s energy shield. Not an insect buzzed, not a frog peeped or an owl hooted. The murky shadows were as silent as Set’s reptilians themselves. The night was eerily, unnaturally still, as if Set was mentally controlling even the wind and the flow of the Nile.

Climbing from the back of my mount to the top of its thickly boned head, I reached as high as I could along the wall. My hands fell short of its top, but the surface of the wall was not perfectly smooth. Like the shell of an egg, there was a slight, almost microscopic roughness to it. Not much, but perhaps enough to climb with. And the wall curved inward. Yanking off my Muscovite boots, I clambered barefoot along the slippery curved surface while directing the dinosaur to go on the gate alone.

Several times my precarious footing on the egg-smooth wall faltered and I almost slid back down to the ground. I had to consciously prevent my hands and feet from sweating and becoming slippery. At last, after what seemed like an hour of painfully slow climbing, I reached the top of the wall and slid myself flat on my belly across its edge.

I could feel the energy humming from deep within the fortress. It made the wall vibrate. The eggshell-like material was warm, not from the day’s sunshine but from the energy pulsating from below. Now my task was to reach the source of that energy, the core tap at the heart of this fortress.

I quickly realized I was not alone on the wall’s narrow top. Peering into the darkness, I saw nothing ahead of me. Turning around to look behind, my guts twisted in sudden fear. One of those enormous dead-white snakes was slithering toward me, its beady eyes glowering red hatred, its jaws already open, its fangs already dripping venom.

“Did you think you could trick me, foolish ape?” Set’s voice in my head sent a shiver through me. “Did you really believe that your monkey’s mind could be superior to mine? Welcome to my fortress, Orion. For the final time!”

If ever my body went into hyperdrive, it was at that instant. I rolled over on my back and kicked my legs over my feet like an acrobat to end up standing on the balls of my feet even as the huge snake sprang at me.

Its first strike fell short because I was no longer where it had expected me to be. But it immediately drew itself together, coiling for another strike as I drew my scimitar from its scabbard. The snake’s immense body was thicker than my arm and at least twenty feet long. It hissed and reared back in slow motion, then struck at me again.

This time I was ready. With a two-handed swing I slashed its head from its body and saw it go sailing off slowly into the darkness below. Its decapitated body hit me in the chest, smearing blood on me and staggering me backward several steps. For long moments the headless serpent writhed and twitched while my senses returned to normal and my breathing slowed down.

“How many can you fight, simian?” Set taunted me. “I have an unending source of creatures to do my bidding. How long will your strength last against my legions?”

For a second or two I stood there in the darkness, seeing nothing but the faint glow of the phosphorescent wall’s top curving off into the gloom like a softly lighted highway. More snakes were on their way, I knew. And squads of Shaydanians armed with flame rifles or more. All under Set’s mental control.

I searched my memory to ascertain exactly where along the wall I stood in relation to the gate. Then I dashed off in the other direction.

I heard bodies stirring in the circular courtyard below. Probably Set’s clones rousing themselves to come after me. He had fighting dragons penned down there, too. And sauropods. And human slaves.

All under his control. But could he control them all at the same time?

I reached the spot where I remembered the pterosaurs’ roost to be and leaped down into the darkness. Sure enough, I landed only a few feet below in the midst of the sleeping winged lizards. They hissed and squawked and flapped their huge clawed wings as I swung my sword wildly among them, driving them into the air.

With one hand I grabbed the clawed feet of a pterosaur as it launched itself off their roosting platform. I was far too heavy for it to support and we sank, the beast screaming and flapping madly, to the hard-packed earth below. I let go of my animate parachute once I saw the ground below me. I hit with a jarring thump and rolled over, the pterosaur disappeared into the shadows, flapping and wailing like a banshee.

Confusion. I had lost the element of surprise; indeed, I had never had it. But I could cause confusion there in the courtyard. Let’s see how firm Set’s control is over all his menagerie, I said to myself.

The carnosaurs and sauropods were stomping and hissing in their pens, as if angry at being awakened by the squawking of the pterosaurs. Good! In the dimness of the unlit courtyard I dashed for the carnosaur pens, throwing a mental projection of pain at them as I raced through the shadows.

Their answering screeches was music to my ears. A Shaydanian suddenly appeared out of the darkness before me, flamethrower in his hands. I swung my scimitar overhand, crunching through collarbone and ribs, slicing him open from neck to gut. With my left hand I grabbed his rifle as he fell.

Sheathing my bloody sword, I turned and fired a bolt of flame at the carnosaurs’ pens. That panicked them and they smashed through the railings, screeching wildly. A similar blast of flame turned the normally placid sauropods into a maddened herd of thundering brutes that likewise broke free of their enclosures and stampeded across the courtyard.

Total confusion swept the courtyard. Chaos reigned as the Shaydanians stopped trying to find me in their sudden rush to get out of the paths of the frightened dinosaurs that were dashing every which way.

I ran to the barred inner gate where the human slaves were kept and kicked it open. It was totally dark in there, and with the screeching and roaring from the courtyard I would not have been able to hear a brass band playing. I took a step inside and tottered on empty air, tried to recover, and found myself staggering ludicrously down a steep set of stairs into total darkness.

Chapter 37

I fell against a warm body that screamed in the pitch black and flinched away from me.

Human voices muttered in the darkness, some fearful, most groggy with sleep. The place smelled with the fetid stench of sweat and excrement. I nearly gagged, but pulled myself to my feet amid the jostling of other bodies pressed too close together.

“Come with me!” I commanded over the dimmed noise from the courtyard. “Follow me to freedom!”

Someone struck a spark and a tiny lamp flickered to life. I saw that I was in a vast room, far too large for the pitiful lamp to fully illuminate. Crowds of emaciated, grimy, frightened faces peered at me, their eyes red, cheeks hollow, bare skin mottled by the bites of lice and lashes of whips. Jammed together like dumb beasts in some inhuman charnel house, hundreds of men and women blinked unbelievingly at my words. I had no way to tell how many more stood in the dark shadows beyond the lamp’s feeble reach.

“Come on!” I shouted. “We’re going to get out of here!” And I tossed the flame rifle to the man nearest me. He staggered back a bit, then stared wonderingly at the weapon in his hands.

“Orion!” a young voice shouted. Someone pushed his way through the shadows, jostling the crowd as he struggled toward me. “Orion, it’s me! Chron!”

I barely recognized him. He had aged ten years. His body was emaciated, his skin pale and sickly, his eyes sunk deeply into a face that was far too old for his years.

“Chron,” I said.

There were tears in his red-rimmed eyes. “I knew you would come. I knew they couldn’t kill you.”

“It’s time to kill the devils!” I snarled. “Let’s go!”

I started up the steps, Chron right behind me. Some of them followed us. How many, I neither knew nor cared. Just as I reached the top of the stairs a Shaydanian appeared at the doorway. I thrust my sword through his belly before he had a chance to react. I handed his rifle to Chron. Now we had two.

We burst out into the courtyard where the dinosaurs were milling around, literally shaking the ground with the stamping of their heavy feet. One of the men behind me fired a burst of flame at a Shaydanian. Another bolt of flame seared past me and splashed against the wall. I broadcast mentally to the carnosaurs the image of devouring the Shaydanians, but they seemed more interested in the immense sauropods—their natural prey.

The Shaydanians did not seem to realize that their human slaves were making a break for freedom. Some of them, at least. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw that only a few dozen had followed up the stone steps. The rest must have stayed cowering in their dungeon.

Focusing all my mental energy on one carnosaur, I drew it to me, snorting as it trotted on its two powerful hind legs. I jumped onto its back and charged into the Shaydanians who were boiling out of a wide double door set into the curving wall.

They fired their rifles at my mount. Screaming with pain and fury, the carnosaur smashed into the grouped Shaydanians, clawing them with his hind feet, crushing the life from them with his terrifying jaws. I slid from the dinosaur’s back while it wreaked havoc among Set’s clones and picked up four fallen flame rifles.

Racing back to where the humans huddled close to the wall, gaping at the wild melee with round eyes, I handed out the rifles.

Shouting, “Head for the outer gate! Make your way to freedom!” I looked about for another carnosaur to commandeer.

The courtyard was in absolute chaos. Carnosaurs were clawing and snapping at the sauropods, which defended themselves with lashing tails and their own considerable claws. Here a sauropod reared up on its hind legs and ripped a carnosaur with both its forefeet, driven by nearly two tons of bone and sinew. There a carnosaur stood with one massive hind leg firmly clamped on a sauropod’s fallen neck, bending down to tear out huge chunks of living flesh with its saw-edged teeth. Screaming and howling tore the night apart, tremendous bodies ran thundering across the courtyard, slamming into its curving wall so hard I thought they would knock it down.

More Shaydanians were pouring out of several doorways now, firing their flame rifles at the enraged dinosaurs. The small band of humans had edged halfway around the wall and were almost at the gate before any of Set’s clones realized they were making a break for freedom.

I saw a squad of twenty Shaydanians slinking along the inner perimeter of the wall toward the gate from the opposite side. They could not cut across the courtyard without being trampled by the terrified sauropods or attacked by the ravening carnosaurs.

But I could. I dashed toward the gate, dodging between those mighty brutes, trusting to my speeded-up senses to take me safely through the mad melee. Scimitar in hand, I ran to help the humans I was trying to free.

“Foolish ape,” I heard Set snarling at me. “Even if I cannot control all my servants at once, I can control these few well enough to destroy you.”

The leader of the Shaydanians stopped his squad with an upraised hand and pointed toward me. As they leveled their rifles at me I desperately dodged behind the massive legs of a sauropod, feeling like a tiny mouse among a herd of madly charging elephants.

I tried to seize control of the sauropod’s mind, but Set was there before me. The great beast’s bony little head swung around on its long neck and it glowered at me with Set’s eyes.

“I will kill you,” he seethed in my mind. Somewhere deep inside this fortress Set directed his troops against me, remorseless, untiring. Perhaps he could not control each of his beasts and clones at the same time. But he could concentrate his control wherever he wanted to. Once he had killed me he could restore order to his domain.

The huge beast tried to stomp me beneath its ponderous feet and I had to jump back away from it. A bolt of flame sizzled past, close enough to singe the hair on my arm. I ducked back behind the enormous sauropod as it turned circling to find me and crush me to death. The Shaydanians were firing at me, tongues of flame lancing through the shadows.

They hit the dinosaur instead and it hooted madly with pain. Then I saw one of the humans fire his rifle into the Shaydanians. It was Chron, risking himself to protect me. I felt Set’s grip on the sauropod loosen momentarily as he turned his attention to his squad of clones. Ruthlessly I grabbed at the beast’s dim mind and forced it to charge into the squad even as it began firing back at Chron.

The massive dinosaur lunged at the source of its pain. I felt Set wrenching control of the animal away from me, but too late. Its enormous bulk was too much to turn or even slow down quickly enough. The clones saw nearly two tons of flesh hurtling at them and tried to scatter while they fired their blazing weapons at the beast.

It smashed into the wall in a final fury of pain, screaming like a newborn as half a dozen tongues of flame roasted it from both sides.

I dashed in right behind the sauropod and slashed the life from the first Shaydanian I could reach. The rebelling slaves cut down the part of the squad that had separated to their side of the fallen sauropod. I attacked the other half with my scimitar.

Even in hyperdrive I could not kill them all unscathed. My sword was a blurred gleaming scythe of death, but by the time all the Shaydanians were dead I had taken burn wounds on my legs and chest.

I slumped against the wall and slid down to a sitting position, my chest oozing blood like a rare steak, my legs charred and smoking. Automatically I clamped down on the messages of pain my nerves were screaming at my brain. I deliberately tightened all the blood vessels in the lower part of my body to prevent myself from going into shock.

Inside my head I heard Set’s hissing laughter and knew that it was only a matter of moments before he sent more of his clones to finish me off.

The dinosaurs were still shaking the courtyard with their thunderously wild thrashings. The ground shook perceptibly.

More than perceptibly, I realized. The ground was trembling, vibrating as if an earthquake had begun.

“This is the moment I have been waiting for, my love. Now I strike at the devil’s heart!”

It was Anya’s voice in my mind.

The earth was quaking, heaving. The circular wall of the courtyard was swaying sinuously like a sheet of cloth caught in a high wind. All the dinosaurs seemed to stop their fighting at once, as if on cue or someone’s direction, and made a furious charge for the main gate, the only gate that led out into the open.

I saw the human slaves stand aside near the gate, petrified with terror, as the dinosaurs surged to the gate and smashed it open like cracking an eggshell and poured out into the open countryside.

For an instant all was still. The courtyard was littered with the massive bodies of dead dinosaurs and the red corpses of Set’s clones. Then the humans started running through the smashed-open gate to freedom. Most of them. A few dashed back to the dungeon where the others still lay cowering. Within moments the rest of them began to come out of the darkness of their captivity and run, haltingly, for the world outside the wall.

Young Chron ran toward me but I waved him away.

“Get out,” I shouted to him. “Get out to the open country where you’ll be safe.”

“But you—”

“Go! Now! I’ll be all right.”

He hesitated, then reluctantly turned toward the gate and followed the others out toward safety.

Through all this the ground trembled, then stopped, trembled again and stopped again. Finally the courtyard was empty of every living creature except me. The ground stopped shaking. Silence returned. And the stars shone down out of a cloudless sky.

“Anya,” I called aloud. “Are you here?”

“I will be soon, my love. Soon.”

I understood what she had done. While the other Creators had assumed their natural form as spheres of pure energy and scattered out among the stars, Anya had hidden herself deep within the earth, waiting.

I wondered if time passed at the same rate for a goddess as it did for a man. She had projected herself back to this point in spacetime to wait for Set’s command of his core tap to falter enough for her to seize control of it. My makeshift attack up here in the courtyard had given her the chance. While Set was concentrating on dealing with me, Anya took control of the energy bubbling up from the earth’s molten core.

Set himself had shown me how even the Creators could be destroyed once their source of energy was denied them. Anya had taken that lesson and turned it on the devil himself. She had taken over the core tap and was now in the process of dismantling it. His screen that blotted out starlight was already gone.

The ground shook again, harder than before. I could hear the rumbling deep beneath me, like the muttering of some titanic beast. The courtyard was undulating, solid earth surging up and down like the waves of the sea. The circular wall swayed drunkenly. A section of it broke apart and came crashing to the ground.

Still I sat there, trying not to bleed to death, unsure of whether or not I could get to my feet even if I tried. The ground beneath me shuddered even more. The wall at my back quivered and groaned.

And then the middle of the courtyard erupted in a fireball that blinded me, it was so bright. Squinting so hard that tears coursed down my cheeks, I blurrily made out a fountain of red-hot lava erupting from the bowels of the earth, pulsing out waves of heat that seared my face even though I was a good hundred yards away.

“The core tap is destroyed, my love,” said Anya’s voice. “I can join you now.”

“Not before I do,” came Set’s implacably hate-filled voice.

And out of that bubbling fountain of molten hot lava boiling up from the earth’s core stepped the huge red form of Set, looking like evil incarnate, a horned demon whose reptilian eyes glittered with fury and hatred for me.

I grasped the scimitar at my side and tried to push myself up to a standing position. No use. I was too weak to stand, I had lost too much blood.

Set’s taloned feet paced closer to me, closer, until he loomed above me, silhouetted against the darkness by the glowing red-hot lava of the molten fountain in the center of the courtyard.

“You have destroyed my world, Orion,” his words burned through my mind. “But you have not destroyed me. I will destroy you.”

He reached down and clenched his clawed fingers around my throat. Lifting me completely off my feet, he began to choke the life out of me. His claws cut into my flesh, my blood flowed over his hands and arms.

I slashed at him with the scimitar, but I was too weak to harm him. His mighty arms protected his chest against my feeble swipes, and his scaly armor was proof against my blade’s edge.

Turning with me dangling between his crushing hands, Set paced slowly back to the fountain of fire. My vision was blurring, I could not breathe. The world was going dark.

“You will roast in the flames of agony for all eternity, Orion. I still have enough control over the forces of spacetime to give you the most painful death of all. Burn in hell, Orion! Forever!”

He raised me high above the boiling fountain of lava. I could feel my flesh roasting, bubbling, the pain burning to the core of my mind.

I still held the curved sword in my right hand. Raising it with the last of my strength, I plunged its point into Set’s eye and rammed it deep into his brain as hard as I could. I felt the blade grating on the bone of his eye socket, heard him howl with agony and rage.

He tottered but did not ease his grip on my throat. The hot lava seethed against my skin, all I could see was red burning molten lava and Set’s even redder face, lips pulled back in a hate-filled snarl, the curved blade of the scimitar sticking out from his eye socket, blood streaming across the glittering red scales of his cheek.

And then a flash of silver blazed before my clouding eyes. Set screamed again and I felt myself whirling through the air. Suddenly the lava was no longer broiling my skin. A gleaming silver globe hovered in midair, a jagged blue-white lightning bolt crackling from its glowing spherical surface, writhing and hissing like an electrical snake clamped to the broad back of Set’s scaly body.

A golden globe appeared, and then a pure white one. And one of deepest ruby red, all of them firing twisting, sputtering shafts of electricity into Set’s body. He dropped me, screeching and hissing, his tail lashing wildly, his hands clutching at empty air. He staggered backward toward the fountain of lava, his body wrenching and thrashing as his screams pierced through me like hot knives.

More globes appeared, copper and emerald green, bronze and gleaming brass, each of them adding its lightning blast to Set’s tortured form, pushing him bodily into the seething fountain of fiery lava.

With a final shriek of agony and despair Set plunged into the bubbling molten metal, the red scales of his body disappearing in the blazing, searing fountain of hell that he himself had created.

Chapter 38

I lay on my burning back, more dead than alive.

The globes of energy hovered around me and took on human forms: Anya, Zeus, red-haired Ares, beautiful Aphrodite, dark-eyed Hera. And the Golden One, of course, looking as smug as ever.

He stepped forward, smiling, his golden mane glowing against the night, a long cloak of gold and white wrapped around his muscular body.

“We’ve done well,” he said cheerfully. “That devil will never bother us again.”

“Orion has done well,” Anya countered, kneeling beside me on the blood-soaked ground of the courtyard. I felt dizzy, weak. I was consciously suppressing the pain from my burns, yet I knew that my wounds were deep, perhaps fatal. But once she touched my grimy brow with her cool fingers I felt new strength flowing into me.

“Oh, he played his part. It all went according to my plan.”

Zeus cocked an eyebrow. “Come now, Aten, if it hadn’t been for Orion, we would never have been able to penetrate Set’s defenses.”

With some vehemence in her voice, Anya added, “Orion distracted the monster long enough for me to take control of his energy source and destroy it.”

I looked around the shattered courtyard. Dead carcasses of sauropods and carnosaurs lay like small hills. Bodies of slain Shaydanians sprawled among them. The curving fortress wall was half smashed down. The searing fountain of lava had disappeared.

“It was a time stasis,” Anya said to me softly. “Set intended to plunge you into that fountain of hell and leave you in it forever.”

“Instead…” My voice was a strangled dry croak.

“Instead we pushed him into his own hell,” she said. “While you distracted him, we were able to shut off his energy source and return from our hiding places to attack him.”

“He’s dead.”

“He is in stasis,” said Zeus. “Roasting for eternity.”

Alarmed, I propped myself up on one elbow. “Then he could be released?”

Aten made a sneering smile. “None of us will release him! Would you, Orion?”

I shook my woozy head, muttering. “It would have been better to kill him.”

“Not so easily done, my love. Be satisfied that we have won.”

“Lots of the dinosaurs got loose,” I remembered.

“Good hunting for your Mongol friends,” said Aten. He pulled his cloak tighter about him. It began to shimmer.

“Wait!” I called.

The Creators looked down at me, their faces curious or annoyed.

“What about Subotai? He is here with only his personal guard, less than a thousand men.”

“Quite enough, I should think,” said Zeus.

“I promised him that I would bring his entire army here. That means all his people, their women, their flocks and herds, their yurts and all their belongings.”

“Why bother?” asked Aten scornfully. “The barbarian general accomplished nothing. He’s useless to us.”

Struggling up to a sitting position, I answered, “He is my friend. I promised him.”

“Ridiculous.” Aten sneered.

“That’s not for you to decide alone,” Anya snapped.

“I’m afraid I agree with Aten,” said Zeus. “It would serve no useful purpose.”

“It’s difficult enough trying to keep the continuum from unraveling,” said sharp-featured Hermes. “Why make a change that we don’t have to make?”

“I’ll do it myself,” I said.

They all stared at me.

“You?” Aten laughed. “A toy that I created, acting like a god?”

“Which of you brought Subotai and his thousand men to this time and place?” I demanded.

They glanced around at one another, finally focusing all their glances on Anya.

She shook her head, smiling. “Not I. I was hiding deep underground, waiting for the moment to strike at Set’s core tap. The rest of you were scattered among the stars.”

“You can’t mean that Orion did it himself!” Aten almost shouted.

Anya nodded. “He must have. None of us did.”

“I did it myself,” I said.

Zeus smiled without humor. “Orion, you are learning the powers of a god.”

“There are no gods,” I replied grimly. “Only beings such as yourselves—and Set.”

They stirred uneasily.

“If Orion wants to bring Subotai’s people here, I say he has earned that right,” Anya said firmly.

No one contradicted her.

I closed my eyes, grateful for her in so many ways that I could not even begin to count them. In that one fleeting instant I saw history unreeling before me like a spool of film spinning at blurring speed.

I saw Subotai’s people settling across this broad grassy savannah that stretched from the Red Sea to the Atlantic.

I saw Mongol warriors spitting carnosaurs on their lances, brown-skinned men in stained leathers and steel helmets, riding tough little Gobi ponies, who would give rise in later generations to splendid tales of knights in shining armor slaying fire-breathing dragons to save enchanted princesses.

I saw those Mongols learning agriculture from the natives of Paradise, intermarrying with them generation after generation as the glaciers retreated northward from Europe, taking the rains with them and turning the broad grasslands into the parched desert called Sahara.

I saw the great-great-grandchildren of Subotai’s army moving to the Nile valley, leaving the withering savannah, inventing irrigation and civilization. That made me smile: the so-called barbarian Mongols fathering the earliest civilization on Earth.

And I saw tortured Sheol breathe its final burst of flame and collapse at last into a gaudy ovoid of a planet, spinning madly, striped in brilliant colors, still heated from within by the energy of its final collapse, circled by dozens of fragments of the shattered Shaydan. I knew Zeus would be pleased to have the planet named after him.

And I saw, with a sinking heart, that all the slaughter I had done, the destruction of Sheol and the planet Shaydan, the time of great dying that I had rained upon the earth, the extinction of the dinosaurs and countless other forms of life—all this had been part of the Golden One’s plan.

I heard his haughty laughter as I watched once again the reign of death that I had inflicted upon the earth.

“I am evolution, Orion,” he boasted. “I am the force of nature.”

“All that killing,” I heard myself sob.

“It was necessary. My plans span eons, Orion. The dinosaurs were just as great an obstacle to me as they were to Set. They had to be removed, or else I could never have brought the human race into being. You wiped them out, Orion. For me! You think you are almost a god, but you are still my creature, Orion, my toy. Mine to use as I see fit.”