CHAPTER 30
Abruptly I was spinning, falling, flailing through empty space, stars whirling around me dizzyingly. The square, the city, the earth were gone. I was alone in the fierce cold of the void between worlds.
Not totally alone. I could feel Set’s furious hatred raging, even though he no longer controlled me from within.
I laughed soundlessly in the black vacuum. “You can punish my body,” I told Set mentally, “but you no longer control it. You can send me to your hell but you can’t make me do your work.”
I sensed him howling with wrath. The stars themselves seemed to shudder with the violence of his anger.
“Orion!” I heard Anya’s mind calling to me, like a silver bell in the wilderness, like a cool clear stream on a hot summer’s day.
I opened my mind to her. Everything that I had experienced, all my knowledge of Set and his plans, I transmitted to her in the flash of a microsecond. I felt her mind take in the new information, saw in my own inner eye the shocked expression on her face as she realized how narrowly she and the other Creators had escaped final death.
“You saved us!”
“Saved you,” I corrected. “I don’t care about the others.”
“Yet I… you thought that I had betrayed you.”
“You did betray me.”
“And still you saved me?”
“I love you,” I replied simply. It was the truth. I loved her completely and eternally. I knew now that it was my own heart’s choice, not some reflex built into me by the Golden One, not some control that Anya wielded over my mind. I was free of all of them and I knew that I loved her no matter what she had done.
“Orion, we’re trying to reach you, to bring you back.”
“Trying to save me?”
“Yes!”
I almost laughed there in the absolute cold of deep space. The stars were still pinwheeling around me, as if I were in the center of an immense kaleidoscope. But I saw now that one particular star was not spinning across the blackness of the void. It remained rock still, the exact center of my whirling universe. That blood red star called Sheol. It seethed and boiled and reached out for me.
Of course. Set’s hell. He was plunging me into the center of his dying star, destroying me so completely that not even the atoms of my body would remain intact.
Anya realized what he was doing as immediately as I did.
“We’re working to pull you back,” she told me, her voice frantic.
“No!” I commanded. “Send me straight into the star. Pour all the energy the Creators can command into me and let me plunge into Sheol’s rotting heart.”
In that awful endless moment, suspended in the infinite void between worlds while time itself hung suspended, I realized what I must do. I made my choice, freely, of my own will.
For my link with Anya was two-way. What she knew, I knew. I saw that she did love me as truly as a goddess can love a mortal. And more. I saw how I could destroy Set and his entire world, his very star, and end his threat to her and the other Creators. I didn’t care particularly about them, and I still loathed the self-styled Golden One. But I would end Set’s threat to Anya once and for all, no matter what it cost.
She saw what I wanted to do. “No! You’ll be destroyed! We won’t be able to recover you!”
“What difference does that make? Do it!”
Love and hate. The twin driving forces of our manic passionate hot-blooded species. I loved Anya. Despite her betrayal I loved her. I knew it was impossible, that despite the few snatches of happiness we had stolen there was no way that we could be together forever. Better to make an end of it, to give up this life of pain and suffering, to give her the gift of life with my final death.
And I hated Set. He had humiliated me, tortured my body and my mind, reduced me to a slavish automaton. As a man, as a human being, I hated him with all the roaring fury my kind is capable of. Through the eons, across the gulfs between our worlds and our species, for all of spacetime I hated him. My death would demolish his hopes forever, and in my blood-hot rage I knew that death was a small price to pay if it meant death to him and all his kind.