A sphinx carved from black basalt rested in the middle of the square’s smooth marble pavement, its shoulders slightly higher than my head, its female face hauntingly, disturbingly familiar. Yet I could not place it. It was not the face of any of the women among the twenty Creators who gathered around me.
I stood with my back to the sphinx, penned inside a cylinder of cool blue-flickering energy. The Golden One was taking no chances with me, he thought. He suspected that I had been sent here by an enemy. The energy screen was to keep me safely confined.
Set was amused by his precaution. “Foolish ape,” he said within me. “How he overestimates his own powers.”
The Creators were curious about why they had been summoned here, and not entirely pleased. They clustered in little groups of two and three, talking to each other in low tones, apparently waiting for others to appear. They are like monkeys, I realized. Chattering constantly, huddling together for emotional support. Even in their apotheosis they remained true to their simian origins.
Then a gleaming globe of pure white drifted over the roof of the Parthenon and settled slowly as the assembled Creators edged back to make room for it. When it touched the marble pavement of the square, it shimmered briefly and seemed to contract in on itself to produce the grave, dignified, bearded figure of the one I called Zeus.
The other Creators grouped themselves around him as he faced the Golden One and Anya. Clearly, Zeus was their spokesman, if not their leader.
“Why have you called us here, Aten?”
“And demanded that we assume human form?” red-haired Ares grumbled.
Aten, the Golden One, replied, “Most of you know my creature Orion. He has apparently been sent here by someone to deliver a message to all of us.”
Zeus turned to me. “What is your message, Orion?”
Every instinct in me screamed at me to warn them, to tell them to flee because I had been sent here to destroy them and all their works. Yet I wanted to break free of the force field that surrounded me and smash in their faces, tear their flesh, rend them limb from limb. Agonized, my mind filling with horror, I stood there mutely as the battle raged inside me between my inbuilt reflex to serve the Creators and the burning hatred for them that was as much my own as Set’s.
“Orion!” commanded the Golden One sharply. “Tell us what you have to say. Now!”
He himself had built the instinct to obey him into my mind, burned that obligatory response through my synapses, hard-wired my brain for obedience. Yet I felt Set’s overpowering presence counterbalancing that instinct, driving me toward murder. My body was a battlefield where they raged and fought for control, leaving me unable to choose between them, unable to move, unable even to speak.
Zeus made a sardonic smile. “Your toy is out of order, Aten. You’ve called us here for nothing.”
They all laughed. The sneering, self-important, callous, heartless, overbearing would-be gods and goddesses laughed, completely unaware that death was inches away from them, totally uncaring and insensitive to the agony I was going through. I was suffering the pains of hell. For what? For them!
Annoyed, the Golden One grumbled, “There’s always been something wrong with this one. I suppose I’ll have to dispose of it and make a better one.”
Anya looked dismayed but said nothing. The Creators began to turn their backs on me and walk away, many of them still laughing. I hated them all.
“I bring you a message,” I said, with Set’s powerful booming voice.
They stopped and turned back to stare at me.
“I bring you a message of death.”
The sky began to darken. No clouds; the open sky overhead swiftly changed from summer blue to deep violet and finally to impermeable black. I realized that Set had tapped into the generators that powered the dome shield over the city and perverted all the energy that fed it into turning the dome opaque. At a stroke he had trapped the Creators in their own city and cut them off from the energy they required to change their form from human back into glowing spheres of pure energy.
The square was bathed in an eerie red glow; the absolute blackness of the dome seemed to be tightening, drawing closer like the net of a snare or a hangman’s noose.
“You are trapped here,” Set’s voice bellowed from my lips. “Meet your death!”
The flickering blue force field around me winked off, the energy drawn into my own body. It felt like hot knives carving me for an instant, but then I was stronger than ever. And I was free—free to slaughter them all.
I stepped out from the spot where I had been imprisoned, stepped directly toward the Golden One, my hands twitching like the claws of a predatory reptile. He seemed totally unafraid of me, one brow cocked slightly in that smug, sneering manner of his.
“Stop, Orion. I command you to stop.”
As if I had been plunged into a smothering, suffocating pool of quicksand, my steps slowed, faltered. It was like trying to move through wet concrete. Then I felt a new surge of strength boil up within me like the hot wind of hell rising from the depths of the earth. I lunged through the invisible barrier grinning as I saw the Golden One’s face go from smug superiority to sudden astonished fright.
Everything slowed down around me as my senses shifted into hyperdrive. I saw beads of sweat breaking out on the broad smooth brow of the Golden One, saw Zeus’s eyes wide and round with unaccustomed fear, powerful Ares stumbling backward away from me, Aphrodite and Hera turning to run away from me, their beautiful robes billowing, the other Creators gaping, desperate, unable to change shape and escape me.
My hands reached out, clawlike, for the Golden One’s throat.
“Orion, no!” Anya shouted. In the slow-motion world of my hyperdrive state her voice sounded like the long reverberating peal of a distant bell.
I turned toward her as the Golden One backed away from me.
“Please, Orion!” Anya begged. “Please!”
I stopped, staring at her lovely tormented face. In those fathomless silver-gray eyes I saw no fear of me at all. I knew I had to kill her, kill them all. I loved her still, yet the memory of her betrayal burned my soul like a branding iron. Had that love been built into me, too, like my other instincts? Was it her way to control me?
I stood in the middle of a triangle, pulled three different ways at once. The Golden One first; death to my creator, the one who made me to endure pain and sorrow that he would not face himself. My hands stretched again for his throat, even while he backpedaled in dreamlike slow motion. The other Creators were scattering, although the square was completely blocked now by the energy screen that Set had turned into a black impassable barrier.
Anya was reaching toward me, her simple words enough to freeze me in my tracks. Yet within me Set was urging me on with all the whips and scourges at his power.
Love. Hate. Obedience. Revenge. I was being torn apart by the forces that they wielded over me. Time hung suspended. The Golden One, his face a rictus of fury and fear, had focused his mind on me like a powerful laser beam, exerting every joule of energy he could command to bend me to his will The more his mighty power blazed at me, the more Set poured his ferocious energy into me, draining the generators that powered the city, driving me to overcome the Golden One’s conditioning, pushing me to grasp his throat in my hands and crush it.
Between them they were tearing me apart. It was like being riddled in a crossfire between two maddened armies, like being stretched into a bloody ribbon of flayed flesh on a sadistic torturer’s rack.
Anya stood to one side of me, her eyes pleading, her lips open in a cry that I could no longer hear.