Not enough. For every reptilian that fell another took its place. Two more. Ten more.
Without a word passing between us, Anya and I cut a swath through the monsters and made it to the railing around the core shaft. We used it to protect our backs as we fought on, all hope gone, just fought for the sake of killing as many of them as we could before they inevitably wore us down.
One of the humanoids clambered over the railing behind us, across the wide gap of the core shaft, and tried to leap across it to land on our backs. He could not span the width of the shaft and fell screeching wildly into its yawning abyss.
I had long since clamped down on the nerve impulses signaling pain and fatigue to my brain, but my arm felt heavier with each stroke, slower. A reptilian’s claws raked my chest, another tore at my face. It was the end.
Almost.
In the midst of the blood and battle I finally realized that they were not trying to kill us. They were dying by the dozens to obey Set’s implacable command. He wanted us alive. Quick death was not his plan for us.
I would not let him get his vicious hands on Anya again. With the last painful gasp of my ebbing strength I grasped Anya around the waist and pushed the two of us over the top of the railing and into the yawning, gaping mouth of the red-hot pit that ended in the surging molten fury of the earth’s seething core.
Down and down we plummeted. Down toward the molten, surging heart of the earth.
And death.
BOOK II: PURGATORY
Chapter 14
Down and down and down we plunged.
Lit by the sullen red glower from deep below us, Anya and I were weightless, in free-fall, like parachutists or astronauts in zero gravity. We seemed to be hanging in mid-air, floating eerily on nothingness, slowly roasting in the blistering heat welling up from below. A fiery wind like the blast from a bellowing rocket engine howled past us. We could not breathe, could not speak.
I willed my body to draw oxygen from the vacuoles within its cells: a temporary expedient, but it was better than drawing in a breath of burning air that would sear my lungs. I hoped Anya could do the same.
The brief glimpse into Set’s mind that I had obtained told me that this seemingly endless tube we were falling through reached down toward the earth’s core, where the raging heat powered a warping device that might fling us into another space time.
That was our only chance to escape Set and the slow death he had planned for us. That, or death itself in the searing embrace of molten iron that was rushing up toward us.
I gripped Anya tightly to me and she wrapped her arms around my neck. There were no words. Our embrace said everything we needed to say. I thought that Set and his reptilian minions could never know this kind of closeness, this sharing of body contact, flesh to flesh, that is uniquely mammalian.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I tried to recall the sensations of previous passages through spacetime warps. With all my strength I tried to make contact with the Creators, to will the two of us into the safety of their domain in the far future. But it was useless. We continued to plummet toward the earth’s core, clinging to each other in our free-fall weightlessness as the heat boiling up from below began to cook our flesh.
Energy. It takes the titanic energy of a planet’s fiery core or the churning radiant surface of a star to distort the flow of spacetime and create a warp in the continuum. The closer we got to the molten iron at the bottom of Set’s core tap, the closer we got to the energy needed for the warp. Yet that same energy was killing us, driving the breath from our bodies, charring our flesh.
We had no choice. I forced my body to drain every drop of moisture it could generate to cover my body with sweat, desperately hoping that the thin film of moisture would absorb the heat blasting at me and save me from being broiled alive, at least for a few moments longer.
Anya’s face, so close to my own, began to shimmer in the burning heat. I thought my eyes were melting away, but then I felt her fading into nothingness in my arms. Her body seemed to waver and grow transparent.
Her lovely face was set in a bitterly tragic expression, half apology, half desperation. It rippled and flickered before my streaming eyes, blurring, dimming, waning into a transparent ghostly shadow.
There in my arms, Anya changed her form. She began to glow, her solid body dissolving away into nothingness, transforming herself into a radiant sphere of silvery light tinged ruddy by the glow from beneath us.
I realized that she truly was a goddess, as advanced beyond my human form as I am beyond the form of the algae. The human body that she had worn, that she had suffered in, was a sacrifice she made because she loved me. Now, faced with searing death, she reverted to her true form, a globe of pure energy that pulsated and dwindled even as I watched it.
“Farewell,” I heard in my mind. “Farewell, my darling.”
The silvery globe disappeared and I was left alone, abandoned, plunging toward hell itself.
My first thought was, At least she’ll be safe. She can escape, perhaps even get back to the other Creators, I told myself. But I could not hide the bitterness that surged through me, the black sorrowing anguish that filled every atom of my being. She had abandoned me, left me to face my fate alone. I knew she was right to do it, yet a gulf of endless grief swallowed me up, deeper and darker than the pit I was falling through.
I roared out a wordless, mindless scream of rage: fury at Set and his satanic power, at the Creators who had made me to do their bidding, at the goddess who had abandoned me.
Anya had abandoned me. There was a limit to how much a goddess would face for love of a mortal. I had been a fool even to dream it could be otherwise. Pain and death were only for the miserable creatures who served the Creators, not for the self-styled gods and goddesses themselves.
Then a wave of absolute cold swept through me, like the breath of the angel of death, like being plunged into the heart of an ancient glacier or the remotest depths of intergalactic space. Darkness and cold so complete that it seemed every molecule in me was instantly frozen.
I wanted to scream. But I had no body. There was no space, no dimension. I existed, but without form, without life, in a nullity where there was neither light nor warmth nor time itself.
In the nonmaterial essence that was my mind I saw a globe, a planet, a world spinning slowly before me. I knew it was Earth, yet it was an Earth such as I had never known before. It was a sea world, covered with a global ocean, blue and sparkling in the sun. Long parades of purest whitest clouds drifted across the azure sea. The world ocean was unblemished by any islands large enough for me to see, unbroken by any landmass. The poles were free of ice and covered with deep blue water just as the rest of the planet was.
The Earth turned slowly, majestically, and at last I saw land. A single continent, brown and green and immense: Asia and Africa, Europe and the Americas, Australia and Antarctica and Greenland, all linked together in one gigantic landmass. Even so, much of the land was covered with shallow inland seas, lakes the size of India, rivers longer than the eternal Nile, broader than the mighty Amazon.
As I watched, disembodied, floating in emptiness, the vast landmass began to break apart. In my mind I could hear the titanic groaning of continent-sized slabs of basalt and granite, see the shuddering of earthquakes, watch whole chains of mountains thrusting upward out of the tortured ground. A line of volcanoes glowered fiercely red and the land split apart, the ocean came rushing in, steaming, frothing, to fill the chasm created by the separating continents.