CHAPTER 1
Anya pulled off her glittering silvery robe and flung it to the grassy ground. Beneath it she wore a metallic suit of the kind I vaguely remembered from another time, long ages ago. It fit her skintight, from the tops of her silver boots to the high collar that circled her neck. She was a dazzling goddess with long dark hair that tumbled past her shoulders and fathomless gray eyes that held all of time in them.
I wore nothing but the leather kilt and vest from my previous existence in ancient Egypt. The wound that had killed me then had disappeared from my chest. Strapped to my right thigh, beneath the kilt, was the dagger that I had worn in that other time. A pair of rope sandals was my only other possession.
Anya said, "Come, Orion, we must hurry away from this place."
I loved her as eternally and completely as any man has ever worshiped a woman. I had died many deaths for her sake, and she had defied her fellow Creators to be with me time and again, in every era to which they had sent me. Death could not part us. Nor time nor space.
I took her hand in mine and we headed off along a wide avenue between the heavily laden trees.
For what seemed like hours, Anya and I walked through the garden, away from the bank of the ageless Nile flowing patiently through this land that would one day be called Egypt. The sun rose high but the day remained deliciously cool, the air clean and crisp as a temperate springtime afternoon. Cottony clumps of cumulus clouds dotted the deeply blue sky. A refreshing breeze blew toward us from what would one day be the pitiless oven of the Sahara.
Despite her denying it, the garden did remind me of the legends I had heard of Eden. On both sides of us row upon row of trees marched as far as the eye could see, yet no two were the same. Fruits of all kinds hung heavy on their boughs: figs, olives, plums, pomegranates, even apples. High above them all swayed stately palms, heavy with coconuts. Shrubs were set out in carefully planned beds between the trees, each of them flowering so profusely that the entire park was ablaze with color.
Yet not another soul was in sight. Between the trees and shrubbery the grass was clipped to such a uniformly precise height that it almost seemed artificial. No insects buzzed. No birds flitted among the greenery.
"Where are we going?" I asked Anya.
"Away from here," she replied, "as quickly as we can."
I reached toward a bush that bore luscious-looking mangoes. Anya grabbed at my hand.
"No!"
"But I'm hungry."
"It will be better to wait until we are clear of this park. Otherwise . . ." She glanced back over her shoulder.
"Otherwise an angel will appear with a flaming sword?" I teased.
Anya was totally serious. "Orion, this park is a botanical experimental station for the creature whose statue we saw in the temple."
"The one called Set?"
She nodded. "We are not ready to meet him. We are completely unarmed, unprepared."
"But what harm would it be to eat some of his fruit? We could still hurry along as we ate."
Almost smiling, Anya said, "He is very sensitive about his plants. Somehow he knows when someone touches them."
"And?"
"And he kills them."
"He doesn't drive them into the outer darkness, to earn their bread by the sweat of their brows?" I noticed that even though my tone was bantering, we were walking faster than before.
"No. He kills them. Finally and eternally."
I had died many times, yet the Creators had always revived me to serve them again in another time, another place. Still I feared death, the agony of it, the separation and loss that it brought. And a new tendril of fear flickered along my nerves: Anya was afraid. One of the Creators, a veritable goddess who could move through eons of time as easily as I was walking along this garden path—she was obviously afraid of the reptilian entity whose statue had adorned the temple by the bank of the Nile.
I closed my eyes briefly to picture that statue more clearly. At first I had thought it was a representation of a man wearing a totem mask: the body was human, the face almost like a crocodile's. But now as I scanned my memory of it I saw that this first impression had been overly simple.
The body was humanoid, true enough. It stood on two legs and had two arms. But the feet were claws with three toes ending in sharply hooked talons. The hands had two long scaly-looking fingers with an opposed thumb for the third digit, all of them clawed. The hips and shoulders connected in nonhuman ways.
And the face. It was the face of a reptile unlike anything I had seen before: a snout filled with serrated teeth for tearing flesh; eyes set forward in the skull for binocular vision; bony projections just above the eyes; a domed cranium that housed a brain large enough to be fully intelligent.
"Now you begin to realize what we are up against," Anya said, reading my thoughts.
"The Golden One sent us here to hunt down this thing called Set and destroy him?" I asked. "Alone? Just the two of us? Without weapons?"
"Not the Golden One, Orion. The entire council of the Creators. The whole assemblage of them."
The ones whom the ancient Greeks had called gods, who lived in their own Olympian world in the distant future of this time.
"The entire assemblage," I repeated. "That means you agreed to the task."
"To be with you," Anya said. "They were going to send you alone, but I insisted that I come with you."
"I am expendable," I said.
"Not to me." And I loved her all the more for it.
"You said this creature called Set—"
"He is not a creature of ours, Orion," Anya swiftly corrected. "The Creators did not bring him into being, as we did the human race. He comes from another world and he seeks to destroy the Creators."
"Destroy . . . even you?"
She smiled at me, and it was if another sun had risen. "Even me, my love."
"You said he can cause final death, without hope of revival."
Anya's smile disappeared. "He and his kind have vast powers. If they can alter the continuum deeply enough to destroy the Creators, then our deaths will be final and irrevocable."
Many times over the eons I had thought that the release of death would be preferable to the suffering toil of a life spent in pain and danger. But each time the thought of Anya, of this goddess whom I loved and who loved me, made me strive for life. Now we were together at last, but the threat of ultimate oblivion hung over us like a cloud blotting out the sun.
We walked on until the lines of trees abruptly ended. Standing in the shade of the last wide-branched chestnut, we looked out on a sea of grass. Wild uncut grass as far as the limestone cliffs that jutted into the bright summer sky, marking the edge of the Nile-cut valley. Windblown waves curled through the waving fronds of grass like green surges of surf rushing toward us.
Silhouetted against the distant cliffs I saw a few dark specks moving slowly. I pointed toward them and Anya followed my outstretched arm with her eyes.
"Humans," she muttered. "A crew of slaves."
"Slaves?"
"Yes. Look at what's guarding them."