My wrists were tightly bound behind me and more vines or ropes or whatever were wound around my arms and chest. I was lying facedown on the warm rocky ground, several pebbles and sharper small stones poking uncomfortably into me.
The only sound I heard was the snuffling half whistle of Juno. No voices, not even Anya’s. With my mind I probed the area around me. Anya was near, I could sense her presence. And half a dozen others whose minds were as cold and closed to me as a corpse frozen in ice.
“Let me see to him,” I heard Anya at last. “He might be dead—or dying.”
No response. Not a sound. In the distance I could hear the wind gusting, but no more screeching and hooting of the dinosaurs. The battle had ended.
There was no more than I could learn with my eyes shut, so I opened them and half rolled onto one side.
Anya was on her knees, her arms pulled tightly behind her and ropes of vines cinched around her torso below her breasts. Juno lay flat on her belly, silly duckbilled face between her front hooves, like a puppy.
Six red-scaled humanoids stood impassively staring down at me, their tails hanging to slightly below their knees. Their crotches were wrinkled but otherwise featureless; like most reptiles, their sexual organs were hidden.
They spoke no words. I doubted that they could make any sounds of speech even if they wanted to. Nor did they project any mental images. Either they were incapable of communicating with us mentally or they refused to do so. Obviously they communicated with one another and had the mental power to control the tyrannosaurs.
Two of them yanked me roughly to my feet. My head swam momentarily, but I swiftly adjusted the blood-pressure levels and the giddy feeling subsided. Another of the humanoids grabbed Anya by the hair and pulled her up from her knees. She screamed. I pulled away from the pair near me and karate-kicked the scaly demon under his pointed chin. His head snapped back so hard I heard vertebrae cracking. He fell over backward and lay still.
I turned to face the others, my hands tightly tied behind my back. Anya stood grim-faced, pale, with Juno trembling at her feet.
One of the humanoids went over to its felled companion, knelt over the body, and briefly examined it. Then it looked up at me. I had no way of reading what was going through the mind behind that expressionless lizard’s face. Its red eyes stared at me unblinking for a long moment, then it rose and pointed down the slope of the rocky ground in the general direction of the lake where the castle waited.
We began walking. Two of the humanoids took up the van, ahead of us; the other three followed behind. None of them touched either of us again.
“How do they communicate?” Anya wondered aloud.
“Some form of telepathy, obviously,” I replied. Then: “Do you think they can understand what we say?”
She tried to shrug despite her bonds. “I’m not certain that they can even hear us. I don’t think their senses are the same as ours.”
“They see deeper into the red end of the spectrum than we do,” I recalled from our time inside Set’s dimly lit fortress in the Neolithic.
“Some reptiles can’t hear anything at all.”
I glanced over my shoulder at the trio pacing along behind us. “I have the feeling that they understand us very well. They seemed to grasp the idea that I would fight to protect you from harm.”
“You made that quite clear!”
“Yes, I know, but the important thing is that they understood that I would not try to fight them if they did not hurt you.”
We marched along in silence for a while. Then I remembered to ask, “What happened in the valley after they knocked me out?”
“Most of the dinosaurs that were still alive got away,” Anya said, her lips sketching a bittersweet smile. “The humanoids had to give up their control of the tyrannosaurs to deal with you…”
I felt my face redden. “And I was easy prey for them, concentrating on the tyrannosaur I was controlling.”
“But all the other tyrannosaurs stopped attacking and started eating the instant they let up their controls.”
I thought about the overwhelming exhilaration I had felt while I controlled the tyrannosaur. I wasn’t merely directing the beast from afar, I was the tyrant lizard, powerful, terrifying, glorying in my strength and bloodlust. The seduction of the senses had been overpowering. If ever I had to take control of such a monster again, I would have to be on my guard: it was too easy to become the monster and forget everything else.
The humanoids marched us back the way we had come until night had fallen and the world was completely dark. Heavy clouds had been building up through the late afternoon and evening, and there were no stars to be seen. The dark wind was chill, and I could smell rain coming.
We stopped on the hummocky ground between two shallow ponds. The humanoids helped Anya and me to sitting positions, but did not loosen our bonds in the slightest. The five of them squatted in a semicircle facing us. Juno, who had been nibbling on just about anything green all day long, wormed her growing body between Anya and me and promptly went to sleep.
“We’re hungry,” I said to the blank-faced humanoids.
“And cold,” said Anya.
No reaction from them at all. They were not hungry, that was clear. No telling how long they could go without food. Either they never stopped to consider that we mammals needed meals more frequently, or—more likely—they didn’t care. Or—more likely still—they realized that hunger weakened us and reduced the chances of our trying to fight them or escape.
The rain held off until just after dawn. We slogged through ankle-deep mud, slipping and falling continuously, unable to stop our falls with our hands tied behind our backs. The humanoids always helped us to our feet, not gently, but not roughly either. Two of them always helped Anya while the other three stood between me and them.
It rained off and on all the time we trekked back to the castle in the lake. We finally arrived on a steaming afternoon, wet, hungry and exhausted.
The castle stood glistening in the afternoon sun, its massive walls and high-flung towers wetly gleaming. High overhead, so bright it was easily visible in the washed-blue sky, the bloodred star glowered down at us.
Chapter 21
We were led up the long narrow ramp toward the single gate in the castle’s wide high walls. The gate was barely wide enough for two of the slim humanoids to pass through side by side, but it was tall, at least twenty feet high. Sharp spikes ran all around its sides and arched top, like pointed teeth made of gleaming metal.
As we stepped out of the hot sunshine into the dimly lit shadows of the castle I felt the subtle vibrating hum of powerful machinery. The air inside the castle was even warmer than the steaming afternoon outside, an intense heat that flowed over me like a stifling wave, squeezing perspiration from every pore, drenching us with soul-draining fatigue.
Our quintet of captors turned us over to four other humanoids, slightly larger but otherwise so identical to the others that I could not tell them apart. They might have been cloned from the same original cell, they looked so much alike.
These new guards undid our bonds, and for the first time in days we could move our stiffened arms, flex our cramped fingers. Ordinary humans might have been permanently paralyzed, their arms atrophied, their hands gangrenous from lack of blood circulation. I had been able to force blood past the painfully tight ropes by consciously redirecting the flow to deeper arteries. Anya had done the same. Still, it would be a long time before the marks of our bonds left our flesh.
The first thing Anya did after flexing her numbed fingers was to pet little Juno, who hissed with pleasure at her attention. I almost felt jealous.