Orion in the Dying Time (14 page)

CHAPTER 18

There was no thought of running away. Set was in that brooding, dripping castle. So was the core tap that reached down to the earth's molten heart to provide the energy for Set and all his works. We needed that energy if we were to accomplish anything, even if it was merely to escape from this time of dinosaurs.

More than mere escape was on my mind, though. I wanted to meet Set again, confront him, hunt him down and kill him the way he had tried to hunt us down and kill us. He had enslaved my fellow humans, tortured the woman I love, drained me of the will to fight, to live. Now I burned with a yearning to wrap my fingers around his scaled neck and choke the life out of him.

I was Orion the Hunter once again, strong and unafraid.

In the back of my mind a voice questioned my newfound courage. Was I being manipulated by Anya? Or was I merely reacting the way I had been created to react? The Golden One had often boasted to me that he had built these instincts for violence and revenge into me and my kind. Certainly the human race has suffered over the millennia for having such drives. We were made for murder, and the fine facade of civilization that we have learned to erect is merely a lacquered veneer covering the violence that simmers behind the mask.

What of it? I challenged the voice in my mind. Despite it all the human race has survived, has endured all that the gods of the continuum have forced upon us. Now I must face the devil incarnate, and those human instincts will be my only protection. Once more I must use the skills of the hunter: cunning, strength, stealth, and above all, patience.

"We've got to get inside," Anya said, still staring wide-eyed at the castle of darkness.

I agreed with a nod. "First, though, we've got to find out what Set is trying to do here, and why."

Which meant that we must hide and observe: see without being seen. Anya recognized the sense of that, although she was impatient with such a strategy. She wanted to plunge boldly into that fortress, just the two of us. She knew that was a hopeless fantasy and agreed that we must bide our time. Yet her agreement was reluctant.

I took the baby duckbill from her arms and led us back into the trees, keeping wide of the tyrannosaurs sleeping there in well-separated locations. The little dinosaur seemed heavier than it had been earlier. Either I was tired or it was gaining weight very rapidly.

We pushed our way through the thick underbrush as quietly as possible. The duckbill remained asleep—as did the tyrannosaurs lurking nearby.

"This baby of yours is going to be a problem," I whispered to Anya, following behind me as I pushed leafy branches and ferns aside with my free hand.

"Not at all," she whispered back. "If you show me how to control her, she can be a scout for us. What is more natural in this world than a baby dinosaur poking around in the brush?"

I had to admit that she was at least partially right. I wondered, though, if the duckbills were ever seen alone. They seemed to be herd animals, like so many other herbivores that found safety in numbers.

We stopped at a spot where a heavy palm tree had toppled over and fallen onto a boulder as tall as my shoulders. Thick bushes grew behind the fallen bole and heavy tussocks of reeds in front of it. With our spears Anya and I scratched a shallow dugout into the sand, just long enough for us to stretch out flat on the ground. With the heavy log above us, the boulder to one side, and the bushes screening our rear, it was almost cozy. We could peer through the reeds and tufts of ferns to see the beach and the lake beyond it.

"No fire as long as we're camped here," I said.

Anya smiled contentedly. "We'll eat raw fish and try the berries and fruits from the different bushes."

Thus we began what became many weeks of watching the castle in the lake. Each morning it submerged, the entire titanic structure sinking slowly into the frothing water as if afraid of being seen by the rising sun. Each night it rose up again, dripping and dark like a brooding, malevolent giant.

We hunted and fished while the castle was submerged. We avoided the tyrannosaurs prowling through the woods and the more open flat land beyond. In all truth they did not seem to be particularly searching for us. Just the opposite. We were being ignored.

I began to teach Anya how to control our duckbill, which was rapidly growing out of its babyhood. She had named the little beast Juno, and when I asked her why, she laughed mysteriously.

"A joke, Orion, that only the Creators would appreciate."

I knew that the Creators sometimes assumed the names of ancient gods. The Golden One referred to himself as Ormazd sometimes, at other times he had called himself Apollo, or Yahweh. Anya herself was worshiped as Athena by the Achaians and Trojans alike. Apparently there was a Juno among the Creators, and it amused Anya to name our heavy-footed round-backed duckbill after her.

After many days I began to realize that the castle was rising out of the water a bit later each night and lingering a few minutes longer into the dawn each morning. This puzzled me at first, but I was more interested in the comings and goings from the castle than its risings and submergings. In the dawn's early light we could see more clearly what was happening, and why.

Each time the castle rose out of the water a long narrow ramp slid out from a gate set into its wall like a snake's probing tongue and reached to the shore of the lake, almost a quarter of the way around its roughly circular circumference from the beach where Anya and I lay watching. Invariably, a dozen or so of the humanoid servants of Set, red-scaled and naked as they had been in the Neolithic, marched down that narrow ramp, across the sandy beach, and into the trees.

Tyrannosaurs waited for them there, gathered to this lake by forces unknown to us. In the dark of night or the glimmering gray of dawn, the humanoids selected a dozen or so of the monstrous brutes and headed off, away from the lake.

It did not take us long to realize that each reptilian humanoid controlled a single tyrannosaur. Each team of humanoids created a pack of tyrannosaurs and took them off on some mission. After many days a team would return with its pack. The humanoids would go back into the waiting castle; the tyrannosaurs would inevitably head for the swamplands that seemed to be their natural environment.

"They're calling the tyrannosaurs here and then using them for some purpose," Anya concluded one bright morning after the castle had sunk beneath the lake's surface once again.

We were making our way back from the beach to our dugout, each of us carrying our spears, the duckbill—almost as tall as my hips now—sniffing and whistling beside us. I had a string of three fish thrown over one shoulder: our breakfast.

"There can only be one purpose for using the tyrannosaurs," I said to Anya, recalling the slaughter at the duckbills' nesting ground. "But it doesn't make any sense."

Anya had the same thought, the same question.

At least I had settled the question of why the castle's emergence from the lake was taking place a few minutes later each day. It surfaced only when the red star was high in the sky. And it submerged when the red star sank toward the horizon.

When I told Anya, she looked at me questioningly. "Are you sure?"

"The star is so bright that it will be visible in midday," I replied. "Then the castle will emerge in daylight. I'm certain of it."

"So Set is not trying to hide from anyone," she mused.

"Who is there for him to hide from? Us?"

"Then why does the castle sink back into the water? Why not have it out in the open all the time?"

"I don't know," I said. "But there's a bigger question for us to answer: Why does it rise only when that bloody star is in sight?"

Anya's mouth dropped open. She stopped where she stood, in the heavy foliage near our nest. Turning, she peered out between the leaves toward the western horizon.

The red star was almost touching the flat line of the lake, tracing a shimmering narrow red line across the water, aimed like a stiletto blade toward us.

For two more nights we watched and saw that the castle rose up from the water only once the red star was riding high in the sky, near zenith. It stayed above the water well into daylight now, and only sank back again once the star began to dip close to the horizon.

"You're right," Anya said. "It seeks that star."

"Why?" I wanted to know.

"Set must come from the world that circles that star," Anya realized. "That must be his home."

Our other big question, what the humanoid-tyrannosaur teams were doing, could only be answered by following one of the packs and watching them. I could not decide whether we should both go together to observe a tyrannosaur pack, or if I should go alone and leave Anya at the lake to continue watching the castle.

She was all for coming with me, and in the end I agreed that it would be best if she did. I feared leaving her alone, for there was no way for us to communicate with one another once we were separated. If either of us needed help, the other would never know it.

So, one bright hot morning, we took our spears in our hands and headed out after a team of nine humanoids who walked a discreet distance behind nine huge grotesque tyrannosaurs. We let them get over the horizon before leaving the shelter of the woods. I did not want them to see us following them. There was no fear of them eluding us; even a myopic infant could follow the monstrous tracks of the tyrants in the soft claylike ground.

Across the Cretaceous landscape we trekked for three days. It rained half the time, gray cold rain from a grayer sky covered by clouds so low I thought I could put a hand up and touch them. The ground turned to mud; the world shrank to the distance we could see through the driving rain. The wind sliced through us.

Little Juno seemed totally unperturbed by the foul weather. She munched on shrubs battered nearly flat by the rain and wind, then trotted on after us, a dark brown mound of rapidly growing dinosaur with a permanent silly grin built into its heavy-boned duck's bill and a thickening flattish tail dragging behind it.

Our progress slowed almost to a crawl through the rainstorm, and stopped altogether when it became too dark to move further. We made a miserable soaked camp on a little rocky hummock that projected a few feet above the sea of mud. Once the sun came out again, the land literally steamed with moisture boiled up out of the drenched ground. We saw that the tyrannosaurs had continued to slough along through the mud almost as fast as they had gone before. They apparently stopped to sleep each night, as we did—shivering cold and wet, without fire, hungry.

The tyrannosaurs should have been hungry, too, I thought. It must take a constant input of food to keep twenty tons of dinosaur moving as fast as they were going. But we saw no signs that they had slackened their pace, no bones or scavenging pterosaurs in the air to mark the site of a kill.

"How long can they go without eating?" Anya asked as the hot sun baked away the moisture from the rain. The earth was steaming in chill mist rising up from the ground. I was glad of it; the fog hid us from any eyes that might be watching.

"They're reptiles," I mused aloud. "They don't need to keep their bodies at a constant internal temperature the way we do. They can probably go a good deal longer without food than a mammal the same size."

"Obviously," said Anya. She looked tired. And hungry.

We caught a couple of dog-sized dinosaurs. They were basking in the morning sun, sluggish until the heat could sink into them. They seemed completely unafraid of humans, never having seen any before. They would never see any again.

Even though we tried to light a small fire, the shrubs and scrubby growth was so wet from the previous day's rain that we finally ate the meat raw. It took a lot of chewing, but at least there was plenty of water to wash it down with from the ponds and puddles that laced through the area.

We used Juno as a taster, as far as vegetable matter was concerned. If the duckbill nibbled at a plant and then spat it out, we stayed away from it. If she chomped on it happily, we tried it ourselves. As far as we knew, we created the first salads on Earth—out of pulpy, soft-leafed plants that would be wiped out and become as extinct as the dinosaurs that fed on them when the Cretaceous ended.

The ground we traveled was rising, becoming browner, drier than the marshy flatlands we had traversed. Still the deep tracks of the tyrannosaurs led us on, but now we began to see the tracks and hoofprints of other dinosaurs pounded into the hard bare ground by countless numbers of animals.

"This must be a migration trail," Anya said, mounting excitement in her voice.

I had my eyes on the hills rising before us. "We don't want to go too fast here. We might blunder into a pack of meat-eaters."

At my insistence we kept well to one side of the broad worn trail that marked the dinosaurs' migration route. Still we saw the clawed tracks of carnosaurs, most of them considerably smaller than tyrants, although there were plenty of tyrannosaur tracks as well.

Apparently the duckbills and other herbivores trekked this way each year as the seasons slowly changed. I had detected no noticeable change in the weather, although the rainstorm we had suffered through had lasted longer than anything previous to it, and the mornings did seem slightly chillier than before.

It was the pterosaurs again that showed us where to look. Vast clouds of them were wheeling high in the sky, circling somewhere beyond the ridge line of the hills we were approaching. With reckless anticipation Anya began loping toward the ridge, impatient to see what was happening there. I ran after her and left little Juno gallumphing behind.

We heard bleating, whistling, hooting shrieks and knew that they could not be coming from the winged lizards hovering so high above. These were the sounds of terror and death.

Anya reached the crest of the ridge and stopped, aghast. I pulled up beside her and looked down at the long narrow valley below us.

It was a battle.

CHAPTER 19

Thousands of herbivores were under attack by hundreds of tyrannosaurs. The battle stretched over miles of dry bare rocky ground, already red and slick with blood.

A running battle in the long narrow valley below us, with the duckbills and triceratops and smaller four-footed herbivores desperately trying to get through the rocky neck of the gorge and into the more open territory beyond while the tyrannosaurs ravaged through them like destroying monsters, crunching backbones in those terrible teeth, tearing bodies apart with their slashing scimitar claws.

It was like a naval battle in the days of sail, with powerful deadly dreadnoughts ripping through the line of clumsy galleons. Like fierce speedy brigades of mounted warriors slicing apart a fat caravan.

The screams and hoots of the dying herbivores echoed weirdly off the rocky walls of the valley. Our own Juno bleated pitifully and trembled at Anya's side. There were no humanoids to be seen. None of Set's troops were visible. But I knew they were there, hidden in the rocks or watching from the valley crests as we were, directing their tyrannosaurs to slaughter the migrating herds.

The battle was not entirely one-sided. Here a trio of triceratops charged a tyrant, knocked it to the ground, and gored it again and again with their long sharp horns. There a small dinosaur, covered with armor plate like an armadillo, waddled out of the dust and blood and escaped into the open country beyond the end of the valley.

But the tyrannosaurs killed and killed and killed again. Duckbills and horned triceratops and countless others were slashed apart by those ferocious claws and teeth.

Anya said, quite clinically, "The humanoids must have brought the tyrannosaurs here to wait in ambush for the migration."

I felt anger, hot rage at the senseless slaughter taking place below us.

"Let's find some of those humanoids," I said, stalking off along the ridge line, my spear gripped tightly in my right hand.

Anya trotted along behind me, with Juno following her but clearly not liking the direction in which we were heading. The baby dinosaur made sounds remarkably like whining.

"Orion, what are you thinking of . . . ?"

Grimly I replied, "One thing I've learned in the lives I've led—hurt your enemy whenever and however you can. Set wants to kill these dinosaurs? Then I'm going to do my best to stop the slaughter."

She followed me in silence as we climbed higher along the rocky crest line, but Juno kept whimpering.

"Stay here with her," I told Anya. "She's terrified, and her mewling will warn the humanoids."

"We'll follow you from below the ridge line," Anya said. "If she can't see the slaughter, perhaps she'll settle down."

She and the duckbill scrambled down the rocky slope a hundred yards or so. I could see them paralleling my path as I made my way toward the area where I thought the humanoids would be. I hunched over so deeply that my left hand was knuckling the ground like a gorilla.

I saw one of Set's minions within a few minutes, lying belly down on the sun-warmed rocks, watching intently the screaming, screeching battle going on below. I gave him no warning, drove my spear into his back so hard that it splintered on the rock underneath him. He made a hissing sound and thrashed for a moment like a fish. Then he went still.

I felt for a pulse and found none. Brownish red blood seeped from under him. I flattened out on the rock beside his corpse and peered down into the valley. It was difficult to make out details now because of the billows of dust wafting up, but I saw one tyrannosaur standing upright, blinking its hideous red eyes. It had stopped killing. As I watched, it bent over the gory body of a triceratops and began feeding, tearing great chunks of meat from its heavy body.

The other tyrants were still ravaging through the herbivores, still under mental control of Set's troops. I got to my feet and moved onward.

My spear was blunted and split. Anya clambered up to me and gave me hers. I hesitated, then took it. She kept mine. She could use it as a club if she had to.

Two more humanoids were sitting in a cleft between boulders, their attention focused on the carnage below. It must take all their concentration to control the tyrannosaurs in the midst of such frenzy, I realized. They were virtually deaf and blind to the world around them.

Still I approached them cautiously, coming up from behind. I dashed the last few yards and rammed my spear straight through one of them. He shrieked like a steam whistle as he died. The other leaped to his feet and turned to meet me, but far too slowly as my senses went into hyperdrive.

I saw him turning, saw his red slitted eyes glittering, his mouth opening in what might have been anger or surprise or sudden fear. His clawed hands were empty, weaponless. With all my weight and strength I planted a kick on his chest that crushed bones. He went over backward, tumbling down the steep rocky wall and landing almost at the feet of a suddenly befuddled tyrannosaur.

The great beast, released from its mental control, snatched at its former master and tore the humanoid's body in two with one crunch of its deadly teeth.

I squatted on my haunches and looked for the tyrant that the other humanoid had been controlling. That one, there, blinking with confusion at the mayhem surrounding it. I closed my eyes briefly. When I opened them, I was standing more than thirty feet above the blood-soaked valley floor, blinking at the dust swirling around me. Bloodlust blazed through me, overpowering the dull ache of hunger that gnawed at my innards.

I was Tyrannosaurus rex, king of the tyrant lizards, the most ferocious carnivorous animal ever to stride the earth. I gloried in the strength and power I felt surging through me.

Hooting a piercing whistling screech, I plunged into the maelstrom of violence whirling all around me. I did not seek out the weakling unarmed duckbills nor even the dangerous triceratops. I strode through the carnage toward the other tyrannosaurs, the ones still under the murderous control of Set's humanoids.

They were killing but not eating. Rip open the throat of a duckbill and let it fall to the dust, all that rich hot blood steaming and wasting, all that meat dying without sinking your teeth into it. Kill and then go on to another to kill again.

I pushed myself through a mound of dead and dying herbivores to reach one of my fellow tyrants. It paid me no attention, snapping after a bleating, screeching duckbill desperately trying to find a path through the blood to safety.

Just as the tyrannosaur was about to bite at the duckbill's soft neck I crunched its own spine between my mighty teeth and felt blood and bone and warm flesh in my mouth. The tyrant screeched once, then its heavy head collapsed onto the vestigial forearms against its chest, its powerful jaws closed forever.

I dropped the dead beast and charged toward another. It took no notice of me, and I ripped its throat out with a single quick bite. Now I saw two other tyrants; they had stopped their pursuit of the herbivores and turned their glittering eyes on me.

Without hesitation I ran straight at them, slashing and clawing. The three of us tumbled to the ground hard enough to make the earth shake.

Very far away I heard a tiny voice warning, "Orion, look out!"

But I was fighting the battle of my life against the two tyrannosaurs. And winning! Already one of them was staggering, half its flank ripped open and gushing rich red blood. I was bleeding, too, but I felt no pain, only the exultant joy of battle. I backed away slightly, saw my other opponent stalking toward me, jaws agape, tiny useless forearms twitching.

Behind it other tyrannosaurs were gathering, all focused on me. I backed up until my tail brushed against the rock of the valley wall.

"Orion!" I heard it again. This time a scream, more urgent, more demanding.

And then everything went black.

Somehow I realized that I had been knocked unconscious. I was in darkness, cut off from all sensory input, but , this was not the disembodied utter cold of the void between spacetimes. I had not left the continuum. Someone had come up behind me while I was directing the tyrannosaur and knocked me senseless. Despite Anya's warnings.

I had been a fool. Now I would pay the price.

Once I realized what had happened I quickly made my body recover. Shut off the pain signals from my aching head and send an enriched flow of blood to the bruise on my scalp. Open all the sensory channels. But I kept my eyes shut and did not stir. I wanted to learn what the situation was without letting anyone know I was conscious once more.

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.