I should have felt happy, but there was nothing inside me except the pain of realizing that Ava would go with Dal, that she had to, and that I would be left alone once again.
I turned to peer through the darkness at the flood surging below us. It frothed and lapped at me, as if angry that I had escaped and trying to reach higher to get at me.
“You’d better take the clans to higher ground,” I said, “until the flood goes down.”
“Up the mountain,” Dal agreed.
“But it’s shaking, burning,” Ava said.
“That won’t hurt us,” said Dal, sure of himself once again. “When the flood is over, we will find a new valley to live in.”
“Good,” I said. The rain was slackening, but I could still hear the flood waters boiling below us. “You’d better get going now, without delay.”
“But what about you?” Ava asked.
“I’ll stay here. You don’t need me any longer.”
“But…”
“Go,” I commanded.
Reluctantly, they left. They made a litter for Dal and said a brief little prayer for those who had been killed, and then the band moved off, many of them limping, toward higher ground.
I sat there, willing my scalded legs to heal, waiting for the inevitable. I looked out across the valley in the deepening darkness, lit now only by the surly glow of the volcano’s fiery grumbling. The flood waters hissed and growled below me. I could feel the steam wafting up from their surface. The whole valley had been turned into a boiling cauldron. Ahriman had done his work well — but not well enough.
“You think you’ve won.” It was his labored, rasping voice in the darkness.
Turning toward him, I said, “I know I’ve won.”
His ponderous bulk seemed to congeal out of the shadows to loom over me as I sat on the ground, my legs poking straight out awkwardly.
“Nothing will grow in that valley for a long, long time,” he said. “Your superstitious little band of hunters will be so afraid of returning to it that…”
“They won’t have to return,” I interrupted. “They’ve brought the seeds of their grains with them.”
His red eyes flashed. “What?”
“And they have the seed of a new idea in their heads,” I went on. “You’ve lost, Ahriman. Those hunters will survive. They’ll turn into farmers and flourish.”
He did not bother to argue or to deny the truth of what I had told him. He did not rant or shout with rage. He stood there in silence for a long time, thinking, calculating, planning.
“It’s checkmate. Dark One,” I said. “There’s no way you can stop them now. You’ve done your worst, and they’ve stood up to it.”
“Because of you,” he rumbled.
“I helped them, yes.”
“For the last time, Orion.” He strode swiftly to me and picked me right up off the ground, his powerful hands squeezing my ribs like a pair of steel vises. He held me up in the air, my legs dangling uselessly.
“For the last time!” Ahriman shouted, and he threw me over the edge of the cliff, down into the boiling water below.
But in that last instant I grabbed him around his bull neck and held on with all my strength. For half an instant we hung there on the edge of the cliff, the two of us teetering there in the darkness, and then we toppled together downward into the raging water.
The boiling water was a shock of agony as we plunged into its depths. We’ve beaten you again, I exulted silently as the water hissed and bubbled all around me. And maybe this time is the final encounter; maybe this time I’ve finished you once and for all.
The water surged over me, dragging me down into its hot depths, boiling me, flaying the flesh from my bones. I gave way to pain and death, my last hope being that this would truly be the end of it all.
INTERLUDE
The gray-eyed goddess who called herself Anya took on her human form and stood at the crest of an ice cliff, her body encapsulated in an invisible bubble of energy that protected it from the frigid cold of this frozen world.
Far below her she could see an army of humans and their robots working furiously, scurrying like ants across the iron-hard plain, as they built the fragile towers that soared high into the inky sky.
Turning, she saw the mammoth bulk of Saturn hanging overhead, resplendent in its gaudy colors and impossibly beautiful rings. The sky was as clear as the pristine vacuum of space itself, and she could see three of Saturn’s smaller moons etched boldly against the star-strewn blackness of the heavens.
She felt the Golden One’s presence before his human form materialized beside her. She held her seething anger in check until he completed the transformation and stood on the ice cliff’s edge in solid flesh, clad in a radiant golden robe decorated with starbursts that shimmered with all the colors of the spectrum when the robe moved.
“You kept me separated from him,” Anya said, unable to hold back her temper any longer.
The Golden One did not look at her. Instead, he watched the work of the builders far below them.
“My creatures have learned how to build creatures of their own,” he murmured, almost as if talking to himself. “But how limited their robots are. How clumsy.”
Anya knew that she could not touch him, but she stepped in front of the Golden One, confronting him. “You forced me to stay apart from him. I lived a whole lifespan with those savages…”
“Did you enjoy it?”
She spat an exasperated sigh into the frigid night.
The Golden One smiled. “You said you loved those creatures. You were willing to live hundreds of lifespans among them.”
“With him! With Orion.”
“No,” said the Golden One. “You were becoming too attached to him. And he to you. I told you that you were weakening him. I cannot allow that.”
“It was cruel of you,” she said, her voice sinking lower. “To be so close to him and yet unable to truly love him. It was very cruel to treat him that way.”
“He has a mission to accomplish. I created Orion for that goal. I can’t have him sidetracked by the hormones that pump through the body I gave him.”
Anya began to reply, but hesitated and then fell silent. The Golden One turned back to watch the work proceeding on the plain below them.
“They call this world Titan. They think of it as a frigid wasteland, dark and dangerous. If they didn’t wear those ludicrous suits and helmets, they would die instantly.”
“But you are the one who forced them to come here, to build those towers.”
“Yes, and when they’re finished with that, I’ll get them to alter the atmosphere enough to make it opaque to their space probe instruments. They must not discover these towers too soon.”
Anya stared at him, puzzled.
“The creatures down there are from a period much closer to The End,” the Golden One explained. “They are the distant ancestors of the humans who will discover these towers and puzzle over their meaning.”
“What are the towers for? Why are they being built?”
“Why, to please me, of course.”
She gave him an angry glare. “Your ego grows larger and larger. You really think you are a god, don’t you, O mighty Ormazd?”
His smile faded only slightly. “The machinery in those towers will make subtle alterations in the climate of Earth. The planet will experience what my creatures will call an Ice Age. It’s all part of my plan. The Dark One can manipulate rivers and volcanoes? I will manipulate the output of the Sun and the climate of Earth for hundreds of thousands of years!”
“And you will keep that knowledge from your own creatures?” she asked.
“Yes. They are not prepared to understand.”
“You have not prepared them.”
“Look,” he said, pointing. “The tide is beginning to come in.”
Anya knew he was deliberately changing the subject, cutting short any chance of argument. But, despite herself, she stared out, fascinated, as the ammonia sea rose like a living beast and hurled itself up along the broad frozen plain. Driven by the immense gravitational pull of Saturn, the ammonia sea slithered halfway around Titan with each spin of the satellite around the ringed planet. Now it was sliding up, frothing, rushing toward the site where the humans and their robots worked frantically to build the towers.