We were put in a cell the size of a dormitory room, all three of us. It was absolutely bare, not even a bit of straw to cover the hard seamless floor. The entire castle seemed to be made of some sort of plastic, just as Set’s fortress in the Neolithic had been.
The walls looked absolutely seamless to me, yet a panel slid back abruptly to reveal a tray of food: meat steaming from the spit, cooked vegetables, flagons of water, and even a pile of greens for Juno.
We ate greedily, although I couldn’t help thinking of the last meal a condemned man is given.
“What do we do now?” I asked Anya, wiping scraps of roasted meat from my chin with the back of my hand.
She glanced around at our bleak prison cell. “Can you feel that energy vibrating?”
I nodded. “Set must power everything here with the core tap.”
“That’s what we must reach,” Anya said firmly. “And destroy.”
“Easier said than done.”
She regarded me with her grave, gray eyes. “It must be done, Orion. The existence of the human race, the whole continuum, depends on it being done.”
“Then the first step,” I said, with a sigh of resignation, “is to get out of this cell. Any ideas?”
As if in answer, the metal door slid back to reveal another pair of humanoid guards. Or perhaps two from the quartet that had ushered us into the cell in the first place, I could not tell.
They beckoned to us with taloned fingers and we went meekly out into the corridor, Juno clumping warily behind us.
The corridor was hot and dim, the overhead lights so deeply red that I felt certain most of their energy was emitted in the infrared, invisible to my eyes but apparently clear and bright to the reptiles. I closed my eyes and sought to make contact with Juno as we walked. Sure enough, through the duckbill’s vision the corridor was brilliantly lit, and the temperature was wonderfully comfortable.
The corridor slanted downward. Not steeply, but a definite downward slope. As I walked along, seeing our surroundings through Juno’s eyes, I realized that the walls were not blank at all. They were decorated with lively mosaics showing scenes of these graceful humanoid reptiles in beautiful glades and parks, in lovingly cultivated gardens, standing at the sea’s frothing edge or atop rugged mountains.
I studied the artworks as we marched down the corridor. There was never more than one humanoid in any picture, although many of the scenes showed other reptiles, some bipedal but most of them four-legged. None of the humanoids wore any kind of clothing or carried anything resembling a tool or a weapon. Not even a belt or a pouch of any sort.
Then, with a sudden startling chill, I realized that every picture showed a sun in the sky that was deep red, not yellow, and so big that it often covered a quarter of the sky. There were even a few scenes in which a second sun appeared, small and yellow and distant.
These were pictures of a world that was not Earth. The red star they showed was the darkly crimson star that I had seen night after night, the evil-looking blood red star that was so bright I could see it in broad daylight, the star that was hovering above the castle even at this very moment.
I was about to tell Anya, but our guards stopped us at an ornately carved door, so huge that a dozen men could have marched through it at once. I reached out to touch it. It looked like dark wood, ebony perhaps, but it felt like cold lifeless plastic. Strange, I thought, that it can feel cold in such an overheated atmosphere.
The door split in two and swung open silently, smoothly. Without being told or prodded, Anya and I automatically stepped into an immense high-vaulted chamber. Juno trotted between us.
Using my own vision once more, I could barely see the top of the ribbed, steeply arched ceiling. The lighting was dim, the air oppressively hot, like standing in front of an open oven on a midsummer’s afternoon.
Set reclined on a backless couch atop a platform raised three high steps above the floor. There were no statues of him here, no human slaves to worship him and try to placate him. Instead, rows of dully burning torches flanked Set’s throne on either side, their flames licking slowly against the gloom, seeming to shed darkness rather than light.
We walked slowly toward that jet black throne and the devilish figure sitting upon it. Anya’s face was grim, her lips pressed into a tight bloodless line, her fists clenched at her sides. The welts of the ropes that had bound her showed angry purple against her alabaster skin.
Once again I felt the fury and implacable hatred that cascaded from Set like molten lava pouring down the cone of an erupting volcano. And once again I felt the answering fury and hatred in my own soul, burning inside me, rising to a crescendo as we approached his throne. Here was evil incarnate, the eternal enemy, and my unalterable task was to strike him down and kill him.
And once again I felt Set take control of my body, force me to stop a half-dozen paces before his dais, paralyze my limbs so that I could not leap upon him and tear the heart from his chest.
Anya stood beside me as tensely as I. She felt Set’s smothering mental embrace, too, and was struggling to break through it. Perhaps the two of us, working in unison, could overcome his fiendish power. Perhaps I could distract him in some way. Even if only momentarily, a moment might be enough.
“You are more resourceful than I had thought,” his voice seethed in my mind.
“And more knowledgeable,” I snapped.
His slitted red eyes glittered at me. “More knowledgeable? How so?”
“I know that you are not of this Earth. You come from the world that circles the red star, the planet that Kraal called the Punisher.”
His pointed chin dropped a centimeter toward his massive scaled chest. It might have been a nod of acknowledgment, or merely an unconscious gesture as he thought over my words.
“The star is called Sheol,” he replied mentally. “And my world is its only planet, Shaydan.”
“In my original time,” I said, “there is only one sun in the sky, and your star does not exist.”
Now Set did nod. “I know, my apish enemy. But your original time, your entire continuum, will be destroyed soon enough. You and your kind will disappear. Sheol and Shaydan will be saved.”
Anya spoke. “They have already been destroyed. What you hope to achieve is beyond hope. You have been defeated, you simply don’t understand it yet.”
Set’s lipless mouth pulled back to reveal his pointed teeth. “Don’t try to play your games with me, Creatress. I know full well that the continuums are not linear. There is a nexus here at this point in spacetime. I am here to see that you and your kind are swept away.”
“Reptiles replacing human beings?” I challenged. “That can never be.”
His amusement turned to acid. “So certain of your superiority, are you? Babbling mammal, the continuum in which you reign supreme on this planet is so weak that your Creators must constantly struggle to preserve it. Mammals are not strong enough to dominate spacetime for long, they are always swept away by truly superior creatures.”
“Such as yourself?” I tried to say it with a sneer and only half succeeded.
“Such as myself,” Set replied. “Frenetic mammals, running in circles, chattering and babbling always, your hot blood is your undoing. You must eat so much that you destroy the beasts and fields that feed you. You breed so furiously that you infest the world with your kind, ruining not merely the land but the seas and the very air you breathe as well. You are vermin, and the world is well rid of you.”
“And you are better?”
“We have no need to keep our blood heated. We do not need to slaughter whole species of beasts for our stomachs. We do not overbreed. And we do not constantly make those noises that you call intelligent communication! That is why we are better, stronger, more fit to survive than you over-specialized jabbering apes. That is why we will survive and you will not.”