Part 9 (1/2)

The masters were were vulnerable. At least to a small degree. After all, we had killed some of their most fearsome dragons with the most primitive of weapons. We had been rousing the human tribes to fight back. vulnerable. At least to a small degree. After all, we had killed some of their most fearsome dragons with the most primitive of weapons. We had been rousing the human tribes to fight back.

But a voice in my head kept asking, What is he doing to Anya? What is he doing to Anya?

Probably everything we had accomplished had been wiped away by Set's masterful use of terror. The old hostage maneuver: do as I say or I will kill those you love. Kraal had given in to it, with Reeva's urging. Set would never have stooped to bargaining with humans, even if the bargain was nothing more than threatening hostages, if he had not felt that we were starting to cause damage to him.

But what was he doing to Anya?

Set's hostage ploy has worked to perfection, my inner voice admitted. He has Anya in his grasp, and soon enough he will have you. And all you've accomplished with Kraal is to teach him how to round up fresh slaves for the diabolical masters.

And what is Set doing to Anya?

It was in this turmoil of conflicting fears and regrets that I rode on the back of the galloping dragon all that long, miserable, rainy day. Wet, cold, and dispirited, I lay my head on the beast's hide and tried to sleep. If the rain bothered the reptilians, they gave no indication of it. The water spattered off the scales of their hides; the chill dankness of the air seemed to have no effect on them at all.

I closed my eyes and willed my body to hang on to the dragon's wet, slippery back. I wanted to sleep, to be as rested as possible for the coming confrontation with Set. I also hoped, desperately, that in sleep the Creators might contact me as they had so often in other lives, other times.

My last waking thought was of Anya. Was she still alive? Was she suffering the tortures that Set told me he would inflict upon her?

I made myself sleep. Without dreams, without messages. Any other time I would have been happy for a few hours of restful oblivion. But when I awoke, I felt disappointed, abandoned, hopeless.

Blinking the sleep away, I saw that it was nearly nightfall again. We had broken clear of the forest and were riding now across the broad sea of gra.s.s toward the garden by the Nile. The moon was just rising above the flat horizon and with it that blood red star shone down on me, the same color as the baleful eyes of Set.

Chapter 12.

The sun was high in a sky so blue it almost hurt my eyes to look at it. We were riding through the garden by the Nile now, the two dragons pacing less urgently down a long wide avenue of trees. The ground beneath us was gra.s.sless bare pebbles, raked smooth by unseen hands.

No slaves were in sight. No other dragons or masters. The garden seemed totally empty except for us.

Then up ahead I saw a structure, a building, or rather a high smooth curved wall. In the shadowless glare of the high sun it seemed the color of eggsh.e.l.l, almost white, and as smooth as the sh.e.l.l of an egg. It slanted inward, sloping a discernable few degrees toward the top. No battlements, no crenellations, no windows. Only a smoothly curving, sloping wall of featureless material that was neither stone nor wood.

Our dragons slowed their pace even further as we approached the wall, then began to trot around its base. It was more than three stories high, I judged, and so wide in extent that it must have covered more ground than Troy and Jericho combined.

We rode around the wall's vast curving base for several minutes before I saw a section slide open to reveal a high, wide door. The dragons trotted through it.

Now the beasts slowed to a walk as we went down a long, broad tunnel. Their clawed feet crunched on bare pebbles. Their heads almost grazed the ceiling, which was made of the same smooth plastic material as the outer wall. Finally we stepped out into suns.h.i.+ne again.

We were in a huge circular courtyard, busy with reptilians of all descriptions and scampering, sweating half-naked human slaves. The inner wall towered above me, slanting inward, utterly smooth and impossible to climb.

There was a corral of sorts built on the far side of the courtyard, where the four-footed herbivorous dragons that served as slave guards were penned in. Some of them were eating, their long necks bent down to troughs piled high with greens. Others stood placidly, tails swinging slowly, eyes calmly surveying the courtyard, heads bobbing up and down. At their full height they reached more than halfway up the enclosing circular wall.

Exactly opposite the corral were st.u.r.dier pens where several of the fiercer meat-eating dragons paced nervously, hissing and snapping, their enormous teeth flas.h.i.+ng like sabers in the sunlight.

A terrace jutted out from one section of the curving wall, more than fifteen feet above the ground. Dozens of pterosaurs squatted there as if sleeping, their big leathery wings folded, their long beaks hanging down, eyes closed. I saw no droppings on the beams that supported the terrace or the ground below. Either the flying lizards were well trained or the slaves cleaned up after them.

I counted eight of the humanoid masters in that wide courtyard, striding across the yard or sitting on benches or bent over some piece of work. None of them conversed with another. They remained far separated, aloof, as if they had no use for their own kind.

Human slaves scurried to fill the feeding troughs, toting big wicker baskets bulging with leafy vegetation. A quartet of slaves trudged out of a low doorway, leaning heavily into rope harnesses as they dragged a wooden pallet piled high with raw red meat for the carnosaurs. Others dashed here and there on tasks that were not apparent to me, but obviously important to someone from the way they were scampering. Two slaves ran up to us, standing with heads bowed as the masters slid off our mounts and beckoned me to do the same.

It was like a scene from a medieval castle or an oriental bazaar: the dragons in brilliant splashes of colors; the masters' scaly hides in pale coral red, almost pink; the looming walls; the outlandish pterosaurs; the scurrying slaves. Yet there were two things about it that seemed uncannily strange to me. There were no fires anywhere, no smoke, no cooking, no one warming themselves beside crackling flames. And there was virtually no noise.

All this was going on in almost total silence. Not a voice could be heard. Only the occasional hiss of a dragon or buzz of an insect broke the quiet. The slaves' unshod feet were inaudible on the dusty bare ground of the courtyard. The masters themselves made no sound, and their human slaves apparently dared not speak.

I slid to the ground and stared at the two slaves standing mutely before us. One was a young woman, bare to the waist like her male companion. Without a word they motioned to the dragons, which followed them to the pens on the opposite side of the courtyard from the herbivores' corral.

One of my captors touched my shoulder with a cold clawed hand and pointed in the direction of a narrow doorway set into the wall's curving face. I would have sworn the wall had been perfectly smooth a moment earlier.

With one master ahead of me and the second behind, I entered the cool shadows of a corridor that seemed to curve along the wall's inner circ.u.mference. We came to a ramp that led down and began a long, silent, spiraling descent. It was dark inside, especially after the brightness of the afternoon sun. The downward-ramped corridor had no lights at all; I could barely make out the back of the reptilian walking a few feet in front of me, his tail swinging slightly from side to side.

Finally we stopped at what seemed to be a blank wall. A portion of it slid aside. My escorts gestured me through.

I stepped into a dimly lit chamber and the door slid shut behind me. I knew I was not alone, however. I could sense the presence of another living ent.i.ty.

Even though my eyes can adjust to very low light levels almost immediately, the chamber remained shrouded in gloomy shadows. Almost complete inky blackness. Then a beam of dark red light, like the angry glower of the blood star in the night, bathed the part of the chamber in front of me.

Set reclined on a low, wide backless couch. A throne of blackest ebony, raised three feet above the floor on which I stood. On either side of him stood several statues, some of wood, some of stone, one of them seemed to be carved from ivory. No two were the same size; they had been apparently carved by many different hands. Some were outright crude. The ivory statue was truly a beautiful masterwork.

They were all of the same subject: the h.e.l.lish creature who was called Set.

His red slitted eyes radiated implacable hatred. His horned face, crimson-scaled body, long twitching tail were were the devil incarnate. Thousands of generations of human beings would fear his image. His was the face of nightmares, of terror beyond reason, of an eternal enmity that knew no bounds, no restraints, no mercy. the devil incarnate. Thousands of generations of human beings would fear his image. His was the face of nightmares, of terror beyond reason, of an eternal enmity that knew no bounds, no restraints, no mercy.

I felt that burning hatred in my soul. My knees went weak with the seething dread and horror of standing face-to-face with the remorseless enemy of humankind.

”You are Orion.” The words formed themselves in my mind.

Aloud I replied, ”You are Set.”

”Pitiful monkey. Are you the best your Creators could send against me?”

”Where is Anya?” I asked.

Set's mouth opened slightly. In a human face it might have been a cruel smile. Rows of pointed teeth, like a shark's, glittered in the sullen red light.

”The weakness of the mammal is that it is attached to other mammals. At first literally, physically. Then emotionally, all its life.”

”Where is Anya?” I repeated.

He raised a clawed hand and part of the wall to his right became a window, a display screen. I saw dozens of humans packed into a dank airless chamber. Some were sitting, some were grubbing colorless globs of food from a bin with their bare hands and stuffing it into their mouths. A man and a woman were coupling off in a corner, ignoring the others and ignored by them.

”Monkeys,” Set said in my mind.

I searched the scene but could not see Anya. Then I realized that this was the first example of real technology that I had seen from Set or any of the reptiles.

He raised one talon and I began to hear the hum and chatter of human speech, shouting, conversing, even laughing. A baby cried. An old man's cracked voice complained bitterly about someone who had called him a fool. A trio of women sat huddled together on the grimy floor, heads bent toward one another, whispering urgently among themselves.

”Chattering stupid monkeys,” Set repeated. ”Always talking. Always gibbering. What do they find to talk about?”