Burke snatched up a second oil-jar; hurled its contents.
The oil slapped over the creature in a wave. Fire leaped from the flaming tapestry to meet it.
The next instant the alien itself was a threshing, blazing ball.
Then a ceiling timber crashed down on it in a shower of sparks.
She wasn't there. Even when he ran back through her rooms, calling her name aloud, she wasn't there.
Numbly, Burke stumbled forth again, out onto the long ascending ramp that led to the central court.
Over on the far side, at the Shrine of Oracles, orange-yellow flames leaped high into the black night sky. Whipped by the buffeting south wind, they jumped to another building while Burke watched; then on to still another. Silhouetted figures ran this way and that--gesturing, shouting.
Eleven fifty-five now. Only five brief minutes till the moment all Knossos was to be destroyed, according to the time inverter's scanner screen.
Still Burke hesitated, straining his eyes against the night as he strove for some glimpse of Ariadne. In taut concentration, he listened for the distant echo of her voice.
Then, while he yet lingered, a man called out to him hoarsely. He wheeled just as one of Minos' huge Sudani guards came hurrying in his direction.
It was a stimulus Burke couldn't ignore. Another moment and the man might recognize him. Whirling, he sprinted up the nearest stairway, then across the flat roof of the back of the building.
A quick drop to the ground again. A daredevil slide down the steep East Bastion. A stumbling, headlong run along the bank of the river called Kairatos to the cover of a clump of cypress trees.
But now that he had started running, it seemed the best idea not to stop. On he fled, and on, clambering over boulders, careening into ditches.
Then, at last, he found himself in a crown of brush atop a little knoll, a good half-mile or better from the palace. Panting, unable to go further, Burke flung himself down in the blackest of the shadows and lay there, staring back at the strange, stark majesty that was Knossos.
The flames of the fire he'd started in the Labyrinth still were spreading. Sparks swirled in the wind, carried high by blaze-stoked updrafts; then dispersed, floating farther and farther from the central core of heat, till at last they fell again, to ignite new buildings.