Part 7 (1/2)

”I'd rather be sticking a spear into a lizard's ribs,” she said.

I laughed. ”There'll be plenty of chances for that, my love. I have the feeling that Set knows exactly what we're doing and he's merely biding his time to strike us when and where he chooses.”

Anya reached up to touch my cheek. ”Be very careful, Orion. If you are killed by Set... it will be the end. Forever.”

There had been times when I longed for eternal death, for the final release from the agony of living. But not now. Now with Anya here in Paradise with me.

I kissed her, long and deep and hard. And then we parted.

Young Chron had become something of an acolyte to me, at my elbow practically every moment of the day. Naturally he volunteered for this first scouting mission. I had to admit that he possessed exactly the qualities we needed in a scout: courage tempered by good sense, keen eyes, and young legs.

There were five of us, and we spent more than a week moving northward through the forest. We headed for the bowl of rock where we had first camped, months earlier. From there, we knew, it was little more than a day's trek to the edge of the gra.s.sland.

”Will the G.o.d speak to us, Orion?” Chron asked as we tramped through the woods. I had spread our group out in tactical formation: two up ahead, s.p.a.ced apart the distance that a shout would carry, then the two of us, and finally a one-man rear guard trailing behind us.

”I don't think so,” I replied absently. ”We won't stay long enough for that.”

My attention was on the birds and insects that called and chirped and hummed all around us. As long as they made their usual noises we were probably safe. Silence meant danger in this forest.

A pair of blackbirds seemed to be following us, flapping from tree to tree, cawing noisily from high above us. Looking past them, I saw that the sky was darkening. There would be rain soon.

The clouds burst near sundown and we made a miserable, drenched camp without fire that night. The rain poured down so hard it seemed like solid sheets of water pelting us. We sat beneath a spreading oak, huddled together and hunched over like a quintet of pathetic apes while the rain sluiced over us and chilled us to the bone. We dined on crickets that we found in the gra.s.s, silent and inert in the cold. They crunched in my mouth and tasted oddly sweet.

Finally the downpour stopped and the forest came alive once more with the droning of insects and the drip, drip, dripping of rainwater from countless thousands of leaves. A fog rose up, gray and cold, wrapping its ghostly tendrils around us, making our soaked, chilled bodies even more wretched.

My brave scouts were obviously frightened. ”The mist,” Chron said, shuddering, ”it's like the breath of a ghost.” The others nodded and muttered, hunched over, wide-eyed, trembling.

I smiled at them. Knowing that reptiles became torpid in the cold, I said, ”This mist is a gift from the G.o.ds. No snakes or lizards can move through such a mist. The mist protects us.”

The morning sun burned away the mist and we marched northward again. Until we came to the end of the lake where Kraal's village had stood.

The birds circling overhead should have been a warning to us. At first we thought they were pterosaurs, so we stayed in the protective shadows of the trees as we approached the village. The birds wheeled and circled in deathly silence.

No more than a handful of Kraal's people had decided to accompany him on his G.o.d-inspired journeying. The others had remained where they were, in their huts of boughs and mud by the southern sh.o.r.e of the lake.

The dragons had paid them a visit.

Our noses told us something was wrong long before we reached the remains of the village. The putrid stench of decay was so strong that we were gagging and almost retching by the time we pushed aside the last th.o.r.n.y bushes and stepped out onto the sandy clearing where the village had been built.

The ground was black with ashes. Every hut had been burned to the ground. Tall stakes had been driven into the ground at the water's edge and a dozen men and women had been impaled on them; their rotting remains were what we had smelled. A kind of gibbet had also been built from st.u.r.dy logs. Two bodies hung from it by their heels, the flesh ripped so completely from their bones that we could not tell if they had been men or women.

One of my scouts had come from this village. He stared, goggle-eyed, unable to speak, until at last his legs gave way and he collapsed in a blubbering, sobbing heap onto the burned sand.

The others, including Chron, were stunned at first. But gradually, as we slowly walked through the charred remains of huts and human bones, Chron's face went red with rage, even though the others remained pale with shock.

I pointed to immense tracks of three-clawed feet in the ashes and sand. Dragons.

Chron shook his spear in the air. ”Let's find them and kill them!”

One of the others looked at him as if he were insane. ”We could never kill such as these!”

Glaring at him, Chron said, ”Then let's throw ourselves into the lake and be finished with life! Either we avenge these murders or we're not worth the air we breathe!”

I stilled him with a hand on his shoulder. ”We will kill the dragons,” I said calmly, softly. ”But we won't go cras.h.i.+ng through the forest following their trail. That is exactly what they want us to do.”

As if in confirmation of my suspicion, a pterosaur came gliding into view high above the placid lake. It soared for several moments, wings outstretched, then folded its leathery wings and dove into the lake with barely a splash. An instant later it came up with a fish wriggling in its long beak.

”It's fis.h.i.+ng, not searching for us,” said Chron.

I lifted an eyebrow. ”Even a scout needs to eat.”

The pterosaur spread its great wings again and took off, flapping hard and running on the water's surface with its webbed feet, then wobbled into the air and headed away from us, to the north.

”Come on,” I said. ”The dragons were here two or three days ago. If we're clever enough, maybe we can trap them while they're waiting to trap us.”

Chapter 10.

The dragons had left a clearly visible trail through the forest, trampling down bushes and even young trees as hey headed back toward the savannah to the north. I saw that their immense three-clawed footprints headed only only in the northerly direction. They had come down to the village more stealthily, along the riverbank or perhaps wading in the stream itself. in the northerly direction. They had come down to the village more stealthily, along the riverbank or perhaps wading in the stream itself.

Yes, they were making it easy for us to follow them. I knew that they were waiting up ahead somewhere, waiting to spring their trap on us.

I made my tiny band of scouts stay well away from their trail. We moved through the deep forest as silently as wraiths, slipping through the dense foliage and thickly cl.u.s.tered trees, barely leaving a footprint.

We struck for the high ground, the rocky hills that paralleled the river's course. We clambered up the bare rocks, and once at the top we could easily see the broad trail that the dragons had pounded out down among the trees.

Keeping down below the skyline on the far slope of the ridge, we soon found ourselves above the bowl of rock where we had made our camp months earlier.

And the dragons were there, an even dozen of them, eating.

The five of us flattened ourselves on the rim of the rock bowl and looked down at the giant lizards that had wiped out Kraal's village.

These monsters were considerably different from the beast I had slain so many months earlier. They were slightly bigger, bulkier, more than twenty feet from snout to tail. They walked on their two hind legs only, so that their fearsome heads could rise as much as fifteen feet above the ground. The forelegs were short and relatively slim, used for grasping. Their necks were short and thick, supporting ma.s.sive heads that seemed to be almost entirely made of teeth the size and shape-and sharpness-of steak knives. Their tails were also shorter and much thicker than I had seen before.

Their colors varied from light dun brown to a mottled green, almost like camouflage. Then, as I watched them I realized that their coloration was was camouflage; it changed like the coloring of a chameleon as the giant beasts moved slowly from one place on the canyon floor to another. camouflage; it changed like the coloring of a chameleon as the giant beasts moved slowly from one place on the canyon floor to another.

I recognized the stench wafting toward us; it was from the food they were eating. It took several moments for Chron and the others to understand. I felt his body go rigid beside me. I clamped my hand over his mouth, tightly. The others stirred but did not speak.

The dragons were eating dead human bodies. They must have carried the corpses with them from the village. As we watched in horrified silence I saw that they used the vicious claws on their forelegs to hold their prey and tore off huge chunks of meat with those serrated butcher's knives they had for teeth.

Despite their bulk I thought that they could run quite fast, faster than a human. Those short, thick tails might be useful for clubbing a victim at close quarters, and with those grasping talons and ripping teeth they were fearsomely armed.

At my signal we slithered backward down below the ridge line and crawled, then walked in utter silence for nearly half an hour before any of us said a word. Our copper-edged spears and knives seemed pitifully puny compared to the dragons' teeth and claws.

Even Chron seemed cowed. ”How can the five of us kill those monsters?”