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 circumference. 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 entity.
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 hellish creature who was called Set.
His red slitted eyes radiated implacable hatred. His horned face, crimson-scaled body, long twitching tail 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.
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?”
The human voices sounded warm and reassuring to me.
Set’s words in my mind became sardonic. “Humans that see each other every hour of every day still make their mouth noises at each other constantly. This will be a better world when the last of them are eliminated.”
“Eliminated?”
“Ah, that roused your simian curiosity, did it not?”
“You expect to wipe out the entire human race?”
“I will erase you, all of you, from the face of this world.” Even though he projected the thought mentally, I seemed to hear a sibilant hissing in his words.
My mind was racing. He couldn’t wipe out the entire human race. I knew that the Creators existed in the far future, which meant that humanity survived.
Then I heard Set’s equivalent of laughter, an eerie blood-chilling high-pitched shrill, like the scrape of a claw against a chalkboard.
“The Creators will not exist once I have finished my task. I will bend the continuum to my will, Orion, and your pitiful band of self-styled gods will disappear like smoke from a candle that has been snuffed out.”
The display on the wall went dark.
“Anya…”
“You wish to see the woman. Come with me.” He got to his feet, looming over me like a fearsome dark shadow of death. “You will see her. And share her fate.”
We went through another hidden door and into a corridor so dimly lit I could barely see his powerful form in front of me. He and his kind must be able to see far into the infrared, I reasoned. Does that mean they cannot see the higher-energy parts of the spectrum, the blues and violets? I mentally filed that conjecture for future consideration.
The corridor became a spiraling ramp that led down, down, deeper into the earth. The walls glowed a feeble dull red, barely enough for me to guide my steps. Still we descended. Set was nearly a foot taller than I, so tall that the scales of his head nearly scraped the tunnel’s ceiling. He was powerfully built, yet his body did not bulge with muscle; it had a fluid grace to it, like the silent deadly litheness of a boa constrictor.
His skull was ridged, I saw, with two bony crests that ran down the back of his neck and merged with his spine. From the front those ridges looked like small horns just above his slitted snake’s eyes. From the rear I saw that his spine was knobby with vestigial spikes, projections that may have been plates of bony armor in eons past. There was a small knob at the end of his tail, also, that might once have been a defensive club.
The tunnel was getting narrower, steeper. And hotter. I was perspiring. The floor was uncomfortably warm against my bare feet.
“How far down are we going?” I asked, my voice echoing off the smooth walls.
His voice answered in my mind, “Your Creators draw their energy from their sun, the golden light of the bigger star. I draw mine from the depths of the planet, from the ocean of molten iron that surges halfway between this world’s outer crust and its absolute center.”