Jerry Lukacs' entire life experience on horseback consisted of one ride on a led pony at a children's petting farm. He thrust that idle thought aside and ran for Throttler. He jumped onto her back.
"Follow that moon!" he yelled. He was vaguely aware of someone jumping up behind him.
Lamont, returning with Prometheus and Typhoeus from watching a guard give a highly instructive lesson in how not to fly down the face of Mount Olympus, saw the moon, Selene, Jerry and Throttler race up into the night sky.
"What's that?" he shouted.
"I don't know, but let's get to Zeus fast," said Prometheus grimly. Typhoeus was already racing towards the sleeping place of the master of the Olympians.
Lamont met up with Cruz and McKenna, who had come in hasty search.
"What happened?"
Cruz looked grim. "Some goddess arrived with the moon, on that gigantic donkey thing."
"It's a mule," interjected McKenna.
Cruz shrugged. "Whatever. Anyway, Liz stole her mule to distract her. It worked all right, but the animal is out of control. Mac and I both got arrows into the goddess. They've got Medea's dope on them. But the stuff takes quite some time to work."
"And Liz?" asked Lamont.
"Jerry and Bes have gone after her on Throttler. But look at how fast that damn thing is going!"
"I think 'Sir' has bitten off more than she can chew this time," scowled Mac.
There were shouts from the resting place of Zeus. "Come on, Mac," said Cruz. "Let's get Medea and go and prick all these guys with the dope. Lamont, you know the most about these gods except for Jerry. It sounds like Typhoeus is having some trouble with Zeus. Go and check it out. Take the dragons."
Zeus was indeed the most powerful of the Olympians. He'd somehow managed to start a tear in the spider-web coverlet. Incandescently angry, he'd half sat up . . . to find that Typhoeus, who had once defeated and imprisoned him, was wrapping dragonish coils around him.
Prometheus seized his arms. That would have been folly for the Titan but for the monstrous strength of Typhoeus. Lamont arrived just in time to see the Titan being flung across the room. And Typhoeus slapping an enormous coil around Zeus' chest. Typhoeus snatched the thunderbolt hand in one of his mouths.
Another set of Typhoeus' teeth took Zeus through the nose. "Behave!" said the third head. "Mother is very cross with you."
Liz knew that she was in dire trouble. Extremely dire trouble. Trouble that could only end in falling. Only the panniers had saved her so far. Whatever drove the tides of the Ur-Mythworld, it wasn't the gravitational influence of the moon. That must be negligible. And the moon must be reachable here, as it was not very big. It must actually travel quite close to the earth to be seen. But, from the way things were shaping up, it didn't travel as close to the earth as she was soon going to be.
Jerry leaned over Throttler's neck. "GO FASTER!"
"I can't!" shouted the sphinx.
"Use the power to move between sphinx images to get closer!"
"At this speed?! Hold tight. Asia Minor here we come!"
There was a zipping of air.
"We're ahead," growled Bes. "If the damned thing doesn't change direction!"
Jerry just had time to see Liz, with her eyes shut and hair streaming back, when Selene's mule did just that. She nearly fell. They were losing ground again when the sphinx did her zip trick.
This time the mule saw them and gave an extra spurt of speed. The chase went on.
"I'm tiring," said Throttler.
"One more jump. Please?" begged Jerry. "Let's try and get well ahead and above them."
"That will take us to the delta," said Throttler. "There is a shortage of sphinx images around here."
"That seems to be the way the beast is going, anyway. Let's try it."
So they did. Below lay the Nile delta. Throttler struggled to gain height. The moon, Liz and Selene's mule were still coming towards them.
Lamont pointed to the pyramid on the table. "I want some answers."
"I am a god, mortal," snarled Zeus. "Not answerable to you or anyone. You cannot make me do anything!"
Lamont snarled right back. "How would you like to become a mortal, shithead?"
"No one can kill me! Eventually, I will be free, and then you are going to die. Very slowly."
Typhoeus squeezed. "Mother said to teach you some manners."
Zeus squealed.
Lamont leaned into the god's personal space. "How would you like a trip to Egypt, Zeus? Ur-Egypt. Using the sphinx, we transported an Egyptian god here. He isn't capable of godlike powers here. So we can take you there. And we've got quite some skills at Egyptian magic. With that we can even compel their gods. You'll be a pushover."
Zeus' eyes bulged. Then he wilted. The threat obviously cowed him. "What do you want from me?" The voice changed. There was a certain atonal quality to it.
"Some answers about a certain pyramid you were wearing around your neck. Where did it come from? And some answers about how we can get home."
Zeus tried to shake his head. "Wormhole travel, from thousands of light-years away. A probe—what you call Artificial Intelligence. You are in a collapsing Ur-universe, the remnants of which we have revived. You can travel to other Ur-universes that share elements of common belief, but there is no way of escaping from the Ur-universe, except for a cessation of meme-carrier function. You have to die."
"I think you're lying, but I'll come back to that. So, tell me who you are," said Lamont, almost conversationally.
"I am Zeus, Lord of the Olympians, mortal. Quail . . . "
"Bullshit. Egypt, here we come! You're something to do with that pyramid that appeared in Chicago. Like this one, but bigger." Lamont held the pyramid pendant from the table in front of Zeus' face.
Silence.
"Talk, punk. Or it's trouble time." The very matter-of-factness of Lamont's statement made it hard to doubt.
The captive god was red in the face. Almost puce.
Typhoeus nodded. "Mother said something was going on. That the little monster wasn't himself. Mother is always right."
The horrible-looking creature gave Zeus a good shake. "What's gotten into you, anyway? You always were a poisonous little creep, sure, bullying mortals just to prove you were the boss. But Mother says you've gone crazy. Killing everything. And hurting everything. Mother says the whole place is full of pain-feelings. She doesn't like it. You'd better listen. She's getting mad."
"Your threats do not cow me!" said Zeus with bravado.
"They'd better," said Typhoeus grimly. "When Mother gets mad, she's likely to make your going to Egypt the easy option."
"I am beyond Gaea's control. I am Krim. We are the lords of the universe!" yelled Zeus, straining to get free.
Lamont snorted. "You're about to be the ex-lord. Why are you snatching people, Krim? Talk!"
"My servant collects local gullible sentients with high anger quotients for us. We need them. We need lots of them. It breathes new life into the Ur-universe. We come to take the reins of power once all is prepared. As soon as there is sufficient energy, we come . . . "
"What for?" demanded Lamont.
Zeus-Krim looked puzzled. "Because we are Krim. We find intelligent species and do this. We always have."
Typhoeus loosened a coil slightly. "They like power. Like little Zeus. That's probably why the toad got involved with this Krim stuff in the first place. Only these ones like pain and misery even more than Zeus did."
Typhoeus had slackened his grip on Zeus' hand for an instant. And Zeus-Krim ripped his hand through the teeth, tearing through the flesh, regardless of the damage. He did not fling thunderbolts. Instead he snatched up the pyramid.
"You cannot hold the Krim!" he shrieked.
There was a brief purple discharge. The Krim device in the god's hand suddenly disappeared. The change in Zeus was immediately apparent.
Zeus seemed to crumple. He looked older. Looser in flesh and possessed of bloodshot eyes streaming tears.
"Thank you," he said weakly. "I was disappearing into it. It's terrible! It feeds on pain. And it loved having a body. That's what those Krim are doing here. It's their main form of entertainment."
Typhoeus looked at Zeus. "You are in dire trouble with Mother Gaea."
Zeus began to sob again. "I just wanted to have fun!"
Liz was exhausted. What was worse, her mount was showing no sign of exhaustion. And they must have traveled hundreds of miles in the huge bounds and at the terrific speeds they were doing.
Weird. She could have sworn that she had caught sight of Jerry and that sphinx earlier. She was going to fall. And she was going to die. It was a pity she'd not have a chance to see what might happen with Jerry. It could—just maybe—have worked out better than her past choices.
But it was too late to think about that now. Her hands just couldn't hold on much longer.
"Physical contact seems to work," said Bes. "If we can touch it and you jump from this Egypt in Ur-Greece to Ur-Egypt itself—then I can have my true godlike powers. And the mule will no longer have his. So use your hunting spells, Jerry. And try to touch her when we dive."
Throttler folded her wings and dove down to the mule. As they came near, Jerry called to the spirits of the hunt for aid. He leaned out and grabbed with all his strength. As his hand closed on Liz's hair there was the sudden zip of sphinx transposition. And then the mule, Liz, sphinx and Jerry were falling, tangled together. Bes wasn't. Jerry saw him deliberately dive off the sphinx's back.
"Bes! Protector!" Jerry's shriek was overridden by the bray of a giant mule that has suddenly found that it is falling.
Jerry managed to transfer his hand from Liz's hair to her arm. He tried to pull her onto the sphinx. A mule hoof, fortunately at the end of its travel, nearly sent him spinning. It did send the mule spinning. Jerry clung desperately to Liz. She clung weakly to him. But a last mule kick ripped her out of his gasp. She was falling.
Jerry did the craziest thing he'd ever done in his life. He dived after her.
It was only when he was also falling that he realized how insane that was. Looking down he realized they were still at least a hundred feet above the ground. And there, clear in the moonlight for an instant, was Bes. The dwarf had somehow landed safely and was waving his arms as if trying to catch their attention.
"BEEEESSSS!" yelled Jerry.
He tried to reach for Liz. The moon was darkened by a diving sphinx. A claw closed on his jacket, which mercifully ripped as it was about to throttle him and pull his arms off at the same time.
Impact.
Soft impact.
After a few seconds Jerry sat up. Or tried to. He was alive. Somehow he was alive. Alive and lying in some soft stuff. Which was getting up his nose...
He sneezed. Somebody groaned.
Something akin to a small hurricane pulled the soft stuff aside. "I wish you'd stayed on the sphinx," grumbled Bes. "Do you know what trouble I had moving this stuff around to catch you both?"
"Liz?" called Jerry.
"Unggh."
Jerry beat Bes pushing through the reed blossom and lotus petal mass. Liz had not had the benefit of sphinx-assisted braking. She'd gone all the way down to the soft deltaic mud underneath. Jerry hauled her upright.
"Auuuh!" The mud-and-petal-covered woman caught her breath. "Gently. I think that arm is broken."
Then Throttler came down and covered them all in lotus-blossom petals again. After he burrowed them out, Jerry half-carried Liz to the small tree-covered islet.
He bit his lip. Snapped two branches. Ripped the remains of his shirt into shreds. "I'm going to have to hurt you, Liz. I'm really sorry. I've got to splint that arm."
She looked at him, her eyes moist in the moonlight. "You crazy fool. It hurts like hell but I'm still alive, thanks to you. Do your worst."
"Crazy fool are the right words," snorted Throttler incredulously, "but not strong enough. He jumped after you. Did you know that?"
Liz nodded. "I saw. I'd call him 'my hero' except"—her cheeks dimpled, despite the pain—"he is. Ow!"
A while later, after the strapping had been done, Jerry asked, "How come you aren't dead, Bes?"
The dwarf grinned. "In Ur-Egypt?" He looked around. "It's nice to be back, but I really fancy this world of yours. Cruz was telling me that they have these dwarf-tossing contests . . . "
"Well," said Liz, her good arm over Jerry's shoulder. "I hate to say it, but I think we must get back to Olympus. They may need us, and I certainly could use some of Mac's so-called brandy."