But something even stronger drove me on, overriding his mental command. I yanked Anya through the doorway and into the small outer chamber, then out into the corridor as Set barked out commands telepathically.
The corridor did not truly end where we had stopped.
That much I had seen in Set’s mind. A section of its wall slid away smoothly and Anya and I plunged into this new branch of the long spiraling tunnel.
Heading down.
“Orion—he captured you, too?”
“Reeva and Kraal made a deal with him: his price was both of us.”
We were pounding along the dim tunnel as it sloped sharply downward, our bare feet slapping against the smooth flooring. It felt hot. The feeble light emanating from the narrow walls cast no shadows.
“Are you all right?” I asked, her wrist still firmly in my grasp.
She gasped as we ran, “The pain… it was in my mind.”
“You’re all right?”
“Physically… but… I remember… Orion, he’s a heartless fiend.”
“I’ll kill him.”
“Where are we heading? Why are we descending?”
“Energy,” I said. “His energy source is below, down deep in the earth.”
What I had seen in Set’s mind had been a confused tangle of impressions. He could manipulate spacetime as the Creators did, and the source of the titanic energies he needed for that was deeply buried beneath us.
“We can’t get away,” Anya said as we raced breathlessly down the tunnel, “by going down.”
“We can’t get away by heading up. Set’s cohorts are there. Dozens of dragons up at the surface, and I don’t know how many so-called masters he has with him.”
“They’ll be coming after us.”
I nodded grimly.
Set had been seeking in my mind a knowledge that the Creators apparently had and he did not. Something about a nexus in the spacetime continuum, a crisis that had occurred millions of years earlier that he was trying to change, undo, reverse.
Suddenly I saw his face in my mind, seething fury. “You cannot escape my wrath, pathetic ape. Excruciating pain and utter despair are all that you can look forward to.”
Anya saw him, too. Her eyes widened momentarily. Then she snapped, “He’s afraid, Orion. You’ve made him fear us.”
“FEAR ME!” Set’s voice boomed in our minds.
I said nothing and we plunged onward, down the spiraling dim tunnel, heading away from the sun and freedom. I knew that dozens of Set’s humanoid underlings were racing down the tunnel after us, cutting off any hope of returning to the surface and the world of warmth and light.
Not that it was cold in the tunnel as we sped down its steeply sloped spiral. The floor was now blistering hot, the walls glowed red. It was if we were heading for the entrance to hell.
I realized that I still grasped the statue of Set in my left hand, my fingers wrapped tightly around its neck. It was the only thing even close to a weapon that we possessed and I hung on to it, despite its hefty weight. It had served me well once and I was certain I would be wielding it again before long.
The tunnel finally widened into a broad circular chamber filled with more instruments and equipment of Set’s alien technology. This womb of rock was lit more brightly than the tunnel, though its ceiling was low, claustrophobic. In its center was a circular railing. We went to it and peered down a long featureless tube so deep that its end was lost from sight. Pulses of heat surged up through it, and I thought I could hear a rumbling low throbbing sound, like the slow pulsing of a gigantic heart at the core of an incalculably immense beast.
“A core tap,” Anya said, peering down that endless shaft.
“Core tap?”
“The energy source for Set’s attempt to warp the continuum. It must extend down to the molten core of the earth itself.”
I knew she was correct but the realization still made me blink with astonishment. Set was tapping the seething energies of the earth’s molten core. For the purpose of altering spacetime. But why? To what end? That I did not know.
This chamber was the end of the corridor. There was no exit except the way we had just come, and I sensed that dozens, scores of Set’s humanoid reptilians were racing down the corridor toward us.
Anya was totally absorbed in scanning the banks of instruments and display panels lining the chamber’s circular wall. We had only a few minutes before every reptilian master in Set’s domain came clawing at us, but she concentrated entirely on the hardware surrounding us. She was focused so completely on the machinery that the pain of Set’s torture was forgotten, her nudity ignored.
Not by me. She was the most beautiful woman in the world, slim and tall and lithe as a warrior goddess should be, lustrous black hair tumbling past her bare shoulders, luminous gray eyes intently studying the alien technology before her.
“The spacetime warp is building up at the bottom of the shaft, on the edge of the core. The energies down there are enough to distort the continuum completely, if focused properly.”
From the way she muttered the words it seemed that she was speaking more to herself than to me.
Then she turned. “Orion, we’ve got to destroy these instruments. Smash them! Quickly.”
“With pleasure,” I said, raising the wooden statue.
You are only increasing the agonies that I will inflict upon you, Set warned inside my head.
“Ignore him,” said Anya.
I swung the statue at the nearest bank of instruments. It crashed through the light plastic casing easily. Sparks showered, cold blue and white. A thin hiss of smoke seeped out of its battered face.
Methodically I went from one console to the next, smashing, breaking, destroying. I pictured Set’s face in place of the lifeless instruments. I enjoyed crushing it in.
I was only a quarter of the way around the wide circle when Anya warned, “They’re coming!”
I dashed to the circular chamber’s only entrance and heard the clatter of dozens of clawed feet scraping down the sloping ramp toward us.
“Hold them off for as long as you can,” Anya commanded.
I had only a brief instant to glance at her. She attacked the next set of consoles with her bare hands, ripping off the lightweight paneling and tearing at their innards, her fingers bloodied, the flash of electrical sparks throwing blue-white glare across the utterly determined features of her beautiful face.
Then the reptilians were on me. The doorway was not as narrow as I would have liked. More than one of the humanoid masters could confront me, sometimes as many as three at once. I used the statue of their lord and ruler as a weapon, striking at them with all the accumulated fury and hatred that had been building in me for these many months.
I killed them. By the pairs, by the threesomes, by the dozens and scores. I stood in that doorway and smashed and swung and clubbed with a might and bloodlust that I had never known before. The wooden statue became an instrument of death, crushing bones, smashing skulls, spurting the blood of these inhuman enemies until the doorway was clogged with their scaly bodies, the floor slick with gore.
They had no weapons except those that nature had given them. They slashed with their wicked claws, ripping my flesh again and again. My own blood flowed with theirs, but it did not matter to me. I was a killing machine, as mindless as a flame or an avalanche.
Then Anya was beside me, a long sharp strip of metal torn from the consoles in her hand, wielding it like a sword of vengeance. She shrieked a primal battle cry, I roared with rage born of desperation, the reptiles hissed and clawed at us both.
Slowly, inexorably, we were driven back from the doorway, back into the big circular chamber. They tried to get around us, surround us, swarm us under. We stood back-to-back, swinging, cutting, smashing at them with all the fury that human blood and sinew could generate.