He reclined indolently on his throne, one muscular thigh draped across the armrest. He had removed most of his armor and his naked flesh gleamed in the torchlight, white and lustrous, like mother-of-pearl. That white flesh was beautifully inscribed with intricate patterns. If I wished I could call up the memories of his coming of age ceremony, the pain of the scarification ritual, skin cut away in thin strips and devoured by his tribesmen, the terrible infection that had followed and the visions he had had in his delirium. I possessed all of his mortal memories, passed to me through the Living Blood, just as he possessed all of mine.
His eyes were black and featureless, his fangs long and sharp as thorns. He smiled at me contemptuously as I entered the throne room, but he did not rise from his seat, only adjusted the fingers of his left hand, which rested upon the head of a stone scepter. He had an ugly blunt face, thick projecting brow, flat broken nose. The fingers of his hands were unnaturally long, and tipped with long, black, razor sharp nails.
"You found me," he said. "I was beginning to think you weren't coming."
"This is the end for you, Khronos," I replied. "Your army is defeated. Your kingdom has fallen. The world is waking from the nightmare of your rule."
The God King laughed, amused by my hyperbole. His featureless black eyes twitched in their sockets as he watched my confederates file into the throne room. His expression of weary amusement did not change. He seemed neither surprised nor alarmed by our number.
"I knew this day would come," he said. "I knew it the moment I tasted your blood, Gon of the River People.".
"All things pass," I said, easing further into the room. I probed the shadows of the massive chamber, looking for traps, hidden dangers. Vermin teemed in every dark alcove. I could hear the pattering of their tiny feet, their vile little squeaks and squeals. Bats fluttered their wings in the vaunted ceiling, disturbed by our intrusion. There were no other immortals in the room save the God King. He was quite alone, abandoned by all who had once sworn him fealty. "Everything has its season, then withers on the vine," I said. "It is the natural order of the world. Why fight it?"
"Because I must," Khronos said. "Battle is all that I know. It is all I have ever known, from the moment of my birth. That, too, is the natural order. We fight to improve the species. To winnow out the old and infirm. You are as much a slave to your nature as I am to mine. We are what we were made to be."
"I have not come to replace you," I said.
"You have not?"
"I've come to destroy you."
"You believe you can destroy me, heretic?" He gazed into my eyes, seemed faintly impressed. "I can see that you do. It looks as though you've found the way. The only way that we can die. That's why you've brought so many of your friends with you."
Yes, it could be done! I knew the secret of it now. Because of Sunni. The God King had confirmed it.
Every last drop must be drained from his flesh!
"I am the first of our kind," Khronos said. "It is my Blood that flows through your veins. Through all of you! How do you know you will not perish with me? The whole vine withers when you cut off the root."
"Then that is what will happen," I said, inching closer.
Khronos absorbed this, then turned his attention to Zenzele, who kept pace at my side. "And what say you, my beautiful, vicious daughter?" he said. "You, whom I set above all my eternal offspring, even my fierce and loyal Ghanima. And still I love you. Still, I would forgive you your treachery. Would you follow this usurper, even unto death?"
"Even unto death," Zenzele avowed.
He sighed.
"As you wish," he said.
With a venomous snarl, he yanked his scepter from the floor.
At first, I thought he meant to use it as a weapon, brandish it like a club and launch himself upon us. But that was not what the staff was for. He had removed the rod from a recess in the floor, a circular opening somewhat like a keyhole.
It was neither scepter nor weapon.
It was the trigger of a final, lethal trap!
There was a resounding thud, loud as a thunderclap, and powerful enough to make the entire room quake. A moment later, clouds of dust welled up from the chinks in the floor. The bats, frightened by the thunderclap, dropped from their roosts and went flapping in all directions, shrieking wildly. At the same time, dozens of cracks zigzagged up the walls, coughing stone shrapnel.
Khronos had arisen from his throne, was retreating toward a passage at the back of the chamber.
An escape route.
He had set off his deathtrap and now he was running away!
"Coward!" I roared.
Furious, I gave chase.
As I ran, I noted that the walls of the royal chamber appeared to be growing, rising vertically up out of the floor in defiance of gravity. It was like something out of a fever dream. And then I realized: the walls weren't growing. The floor beneath me was dropping!
The floor of the throne room was divided into hexagonal plates, like the cells of a honeycomb. I had always believed the tiles to be purely ornamental, or some strange natural formation of stone. Now I realized they were anything but natural, but an ingeniously fashioned falling floor trap!
I raced across the throne room, leaping from one descending plate to the next. They were not all falling at once, but collapsed from the center outwards, so that they formed a sort of sinking staircase. As the floor fell, the sides of the hexagonal pillars scraped against one another with an awful grinding sound, like fingernails down a chalkboard, only magnified to the nth degree. At the same time, great slabs of stone began to rain down from the ceiling, plunging into the widening pit.
Lulled into a false sense of security by our victories on the battlefield, I had allowed us to be lured into a vast and unimaginably sophisticated killing jar!
As I scrambled up the falling plates, I could see the others struggling to leap clear of the deepening pit. Again and again, I saw my comrades smashed beneath the stone slabs that came whistling down from overhead. Each time one of those massive slabs hit the ground, I thought my eardrums would rupture. I leapt to the right and very narrowly avoided being smashed to a pulp. I saw Vehnfear just behind me, paddling his limbs as he was pitched off one of the falling stone columns. Grabbing the wolf by the scruff of the neck, I heaved him up and out of the widening deathtrap.
There was no time to think. No time to help anyone else. I sprang forward and grabbed ahold of what I thought was the outermost edge of the pit, but then that plate started sinking too, and I had to scramble to the next one, and then the next.
I could hear the God King in my mind, laughing maniacally. He howled in triumph each time one of my comrades was crushed. I do not know how his Shared psyche had managed to conceal this trap from me. He was just an echo of the God King, an imprint passed to me through the Blood. I should have known all that he knew. But somehow the fiend had managed to conceal this final deadly snare from me.
I saw Hammon crushed. And then Neolas. Druas, the Uroboran Eternal, stumbled, and a slab of stone crashed down and severed his legs just above the knees. He was flung back into the pit, howling in agony, and a second falling boulder smashed him to paste.
But others had made it clear. Tapas had leapt free of the trap, both his wives—thank the ancestors!-- clasped safely in his arms. Zenzele had scrambled free, and Eris as well. Several of the new-blooded slaves had found a safe route on the far side of the chamber, where a series of plates had failed to collapse, and a handful of my allies had retreated back into the corridor. They were at the rear of the assembly when the God King triggered his trap.
I lunged up and out of the pit with a scream of determination, then rolled out of the way as a falling boulder sent stone shrapnel whistling in my direction.
I tried to shield my head with my arms but one of the spinning chunks struck me in the temple, sending me sprawling against the God King's throne. Had I been a mortal man, the blow would have killed me instantly. As it was, the stone staved a fist-sized crater in the side of my head, sending slivers of bone into my brain.
I didn't even feel it, just saw the rocks twirling in my direction… and then the lights went out.