There was another quartet of guards at the door to the main hall, each of them aimed with spear and sword. Harkan and Batu were among them, I saw.
Harkan’s bearded face went red once he recognized who was approaching. Batu smiled as if he’d won a wager. The lieutenant in charge stared at my bloody sword.
“Orion,” he snapped, “what’s going on?”
“They’re going to kill the king unless we stop them.”
“Kill the king? Who?”
“Pausanias.”
“Are you crazy? Pausanias is captain of the—”
He never finished the sentence. Screams and roars of rage broke out from the other side of the door. Harkan threw the door open and we saw that the hall was in turmoil. Men were leaping across couches, servants and slaves were scattering in every direction, screaming in terror.
“The king! The king!”
I bolted past Harkan and the others, through the wildly scrambling crowd, toward the king. A dozen men clustered around him. I pulled them away, forced my way to Philip’s side. He lay back against his couch, wine goblet locked in one frozen hand, his other clutched against his middle, his gut ripped open, hot red blood soaking his robe and dripping onto the dirt floor. It was a painful way to die.
“I trusted you,” he muttered. “I trusted you.”
And I heard Hera’s bitter laughter in my mind. The vision from my old dream had come true. I stood before the dying Philip with a bloody sword in my hand and watched the light fade from his eye.
Harkan grabbed me by the shoulders. “This way,” he said in a low voice. “Pausanias fled toward the stables.”
As I ran back toward the door with him and Batu, I saw Alexandros standing on one of the tables, white-faced with shock, guarded by Antipatros and Antigonos and a dozen of his Companions. None of them had weapons on them, but if an assassin meant to reach Alexandros he would have to go through them first. Armed guards were pouring into the hall, though, through the doors at its far end.
“I swear by Almighty Zeus,” Alexandros was shouting, his voice nearly cracking with emotion, “that I will find the assassins and deal with them as they’ve dealt with my father.”
So now he’s your father again, I thought as we left the hall. And you are his son and heir to the throne. Hera and the Golden One will have their way; pity the Great King and his shaky empire.
The three of us raced across the courtyard to the stables. A half-dozen armed men barred the gate, but we cut them down without an instant’s hesitation.
Pausanias was already on horseback when we broke in. Two other men were with him. Batu nailed one with his spear and Harkan knocked the other one off his horse, then drove his spear through the screaming traitor’s chest.
Wild-eyed, Pausanias drove his mount straight at us. Dropping my sword, I stepped to one side as the horse thundered by and grabbed him around the middle. The two of us thudded to the dirt floor of the stable. I planted a knee on Pausanias’ chest and pulled his own sword from its scabbard.
He stared up at me, gasping for breath. But his eyes became calm.
“It’s done,” he said. “Now you can do what you must. I don’t care anymore.”
I hesitated. Should I turn him over to Alexandros or give him a quick and painless death here and now? I thought of how he had slashed Philip and scalding anger boiled through me.
Harkan and Batu were standing over us. Quite calmly Harkan drove the point of his spear through Pausanias’ throat. Blood fountained hot and red, splashing over me, as he jerked convulsively and gave a single gargling groan.
I looked up at Harkan.
He yanked the spear from Pausanias’ dead body and said grimly, “She instructed us that there were to be no witnesses left alive, Orion.”
I got to my feet. “That includes me, doesn’t it?”
“I’m afraid so.” He levelled his spear at my heart.
“Can you trust her?” I asked.
“My children are already safely at a farm up in the hills. That’s where I’m going when this is finished.”
“If she lets you live.”
He shrugged. “Even if she doesn’t, I’ll know that my children are free.”
I glanced at Batu. His dark face looked troubled, as if he could not decide which side he wanted to be on.
“Orion,” he said, “I am not part of this. I did not know until this moment—”
“Then don’t get involved now,” I told him. “This is between Harkan and me. And the queen.”
“She is a witch of great power,” said Batu.
“Yes.” I nodded.
“She can steal a man’s wits from him.”
“And his strength.” I turned back to Harkan. His spear had not wavered a millimeter from my heart. “Go ahead, my friend. Do it and get it over with.”
He hesitated.
“For your children,” I told him.
Harkan took a deep breath, then plunged the spear into my chest with all his might. I felt no pain at all. Just darkness engulfing me, welcome, blessed nothingness.
I died.
Epilogue
This time death was like being in the center of a whirlpool, inside the heart of a roaring tornado. The universe spun madly, time and space whirling into a dizzying blur, planets and stars and atoms and electrons racing in wild orbits with me in the middle of it all, falling, falling endlessly into a cryogenically cold oblivion.
Gradually all sensation left me. It might have taken moments or millennia; I had no way to gauge time, but all feeling of motion and cold seeped away from me, as if I were being numbed, frozen, turned into an immobile, insensate block of ice.
Still my mind continued to function. I knew I was being translated across spacetime, from one cusp of the continuum to another. Yet for all I could see or touch or hear, I was in total oblivion. For a measureless time I almost felt glad to be free of the wheel of life at last, beyond pain, beyond desire, beyond the agonizing duty that the Creators forced upon me.
Beyond love.
That stirred me. Somewhere in the vast reaches of spacetime Anya was struggling against forces that I could not even comprehend, in danger despite her godlike powers, facing enemies that frightened even the Golden One and the other Creators.
I reached out with my mind, seeking to penetrate the blank darkness that engulfed me. Nothing. It was if there were no universe, no continuum, neither time nor space. But I knew that somewhere, sometime, she existed. She had loved me as I had loved her. Nothing in all the universes of existence would keep us apart.
A glimmer of light. So faint and distant that at first I thought it might be merely my imagination obeying my desire. But yes, it truly was there. A faintest, faintest glow. Light. Warmth.
Whether I moved to it or it moved to me mattered not at all to me. The glow grew and brightened until I seemed to be hurtling toward it like a chip thrown into a furnace, like a meteor drawn to a star. The light blazed like the sun now and I threw my arms across my eyes to ease the pain, delighted that I had eyes and arms and could feel again.
“Orion,” came a voice from that blinding, overpowering radiance. “You have returned.”
It was Aten, of course, the Golden One. He resolved his presence into human form, a powerful godlike figure with thick golden mane, robed in shimmering gold, almost too bright for me to look upon.
He stood before me in an utterly barren landscape that stretched toward infinity in every direction: a featureless plain of billowing mist that played about our ankles, an empty bowl of sky above us the color of hammered copper.
“Where is Anya?” I asked.
“Far from here.”
“I must go to her. She is in great danger.”