“Otherwise an angel will appear with a flaming sword?” I teased.

Anya was totally serious. “Orion, this park is a botanical experimental station for the creature whose statue we saw in the temple.”

“The one called Set?”

She nodded. “We are not ready to meet him. We are completely unarmed, unprepared.”

“But what harm would it be to eat some of his fruit? We could still hurry along as we ate.”

Almost smiling, Anya said, “He is very sensitive about his plants. Somehow he knows when someone touches them.”

“And?”

“And he kills them.”

“He doesn’t drive them into the outer darkness, to earn their bread by the sweat of their brows?” I noticed that even though my tone was bantering, we were walking faster than before.

“No. He kills them. Finally and eternally.”

I had died many times, yet the Creators had always revived me to serve them again in another time, another place. Still I feared death, the agony of it, the separation and loss that it brought. And a new tendril of fear flickered along my nerves: Anya was afraid. One of the Creators, a veritable goddess who could move through eons of time as easily as I was walking along this garden path—she was obviously afraid of the reptilian entity whose statue had adorned the temple by the bank of the Nile.

I closed my eyes briefly to picture that statue more clearly. At first I had thought it was a representation of a man wearing a totem mask: the body was human, the face almost like a crocodile’s. But now as I scanned my memory of it I saw that this first impression had been overly simple.

The body was humanoid, true enough. It stood on two legs and had two arms. But the feet were claws with three toes ending in sharply hooked talons. The hands had two long scaly-looking fingers with an opposed thumb for the third digit, all of them clawed. The hips and shoulders connected in nonhuman ways.