Orion in the Dying Time (9 page)

CHAPTER 11

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 grassless 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 eggshell, almost white, and as smooth as the shell 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 sunshine 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 sturdier pens where several of the fiercer meat-eating dragons paced nervously, hissing and snapping, their enormous teeth flashing 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 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."

"The earth's liquid core," I muttered.

"A sea of energy," Set continued, "heated by radioactivity and gravity, seething with electrical currents and magnetic fields, so hot that iron and all other metals are molten and flow like water."

He was describing hell. He drew his energy from hell.

Down and still further down we walked. I began to wonder why Set had not constructed an elevator. We walked on in silence, in the eerie dull red light, for what seemed like hours. It was like walking through an oven.

He's holding Anya down here, I told myself. What can he have down at this depth? Why so deep underground? Is he afraid of being seen? Does he have other enemies, in addition to the Creators? Perhaps some of his own kind are at odds with him?

My thoughts circled endlessly, but always came back to the same fearful question: What is he doing to Anya?

Gradually I became aware of a presence in my mind, another intelligence, probing so gently I could hardly feel it. At first I thought it might have been Anya. But this presence was alien, hostile. Then I realized why we were spending so much time walking toward Anya's prison. Set was probing my mind, interrogating me so subtly that I had not even realized it, searching my memories for—for what?

He sensed my awareness of his probe.

"You are just as stubborn as the woman. I shall have to use more forceful methods on you, just as I have had to do with her."

Hot fury driven by fear raged through me. I wanted to leap on his back and snap his neck. But I knew that he could overpower me. I could feel his evil amusement at my thoughts.

"She is in great pain, Orion. Her agony will become even greater before I allow her to die."

CHAPTER 12

The steep spiraling tunnel ended finally at another blank door. Set did nothing that I could see, but the door slid open to reveal what seemed, at first glance, to be an elaborate laboratory.

Anya was nowhere in sight. The chamber we stepped into hummed with electrical power. Row upon row of buzzing throbbing consoles stood along two of the four walls of the cramped little room. Behind us was a long table cluttered with strange objects and a backless chair, almost like an ornate bench, for a tailed two-legged creature to sit upon. The fourth wall was absolutely blank.

Set clicked the talons of his right hand and that featureless wall slid up, revealing a much larger room, also packed with arcane equipment. And Anya.

She was imprisoned in a glass cylinder standing atop a raised platform. Totally naked, she stood motionless, eyes closed, hands flat at her sides. Blue flickers of electricity played up and down every inch of her body.

"She appears quite serene," said Set's hissing voice in my mind.

She seemed to be in frozen stasis. Or dead. On the four corners of the raised platform, outside the glass cylinder holding Anya, stood four rudely carved statues of Set. The largest was as high as my chest and made of wood.

"Look here," he commanded.

I turned and followed his outstretched claw to see a row of display screens against the wall.

"They show her brain-wave patterns."

Jagged spikes, red with agony, jittering up and down in rhythm to the sparks of electricity crawling over her body.

With a wave of Set's hand the blue flickers intensified, became brighter, raced across Anya's skin. Her naked body seemed to cringe, shudder. Her eyelids squeezed shut tighter. Tears crawled out from behind them. From the corner of my eye I saw the spikes of the display screens turn sharper, steeper, racing across the screens like tongues of flame burning themselves into my brain.

This monster was torturing Anya. Torturing her as heartlessly and efficiently as a swarm of army ants stripping the flesh from any living thing that stood in its path.

"Stop it!" I screamed. "Stop it!"

"Open your mind to me, Orion. Let me see what I want to see."

"And then?"

"And then I will allow you both to die."

I stared into his glittering reptilian eyes. There was no triumph there, no joy, not even sadistic pleasure. Nothing but pure hate. Hatred for the human race, hatred for the Creators, for Anya, for me. Set was remorselessly doing what he had to do to reach his goal.

I, too, burned with hatred. But, powerless, I let my shoulders slump and my head droop.

"Stop her pain and you can do what you want with me," I said.

"I will ease her pain," Set replied. "It will not stop until I have learned what I must know from you. Then you can both die."

The blue flickers crawling across Anya's skin turned paler, moved more slowly. The display screens showed her pain lessened.

And Set's powerful, merciless mind drove into mine like a spike of red-hot iron, ruthlessly seeking the knowledge he wanted. I felt frozen, totally immobile, unable to twitch a finger as he ransacked my brain for its memory storage.

I saw, I heard, I felt things from my pasts. The insane Golden One sneering at me, telling me that he will destroy all the other Creators and be worshiped by the human race as its one true god. The barbaric splendor of Karakorum and Ogatai, the Mongols' high khan, my friend, the man I assassinated. The piercing wet cold of Cornwall on that darkest day of the Dark Age, when Arthur's knights slaughtered each other by the score.

Set was rampaging through my mind, touching on memories, thoughts, lifetimes that had been erased from my consciousness, seeking, seeking, greedily ripping across the eons I have lived to find what he sought.

Yet while he tore through my defenseless mind he exposed his own to me. The link between us, agonizing as it was, went in both directions. I could not see much of his thoughts, nor could I create an active probe to seek out his memory bank as he was doing to me. But Set could not ravage my mind without exposing at least some of his thoughts to me.

I was in the laboratory where the Golden One created me. I was on a becalmed sea beneath a brazen sky of hammered copper, dying of thirst. I was on a world that circled the star Sirius. I died with Anya in my arms as a great starship exploded.

At last I was standing in this alien fiendish torture chamber with Anya suffering within her glass prison and Set's hateful red eyes glowering at me.

"Pah! This is pointless. You know less about it than I do." For the first time his words, burning in my mind, seemed edged with frustration and anger.

My body came alive again. I felt it tingle as Set's control over me relaxed.

He turned his reptilian gaze toward Anya once more. "She knows. I will have to tear it out of her."

"No!" I bellowed as he raised his hand toward the instruments on the wall.

He turned to the wall of instruments once again, ignoring me for just a fraction of a second. Enough.

I grabbed the nearest of the four carved wooden statues and smashed him across his ridged back with it. Down he went, smashing into the dials and display screens lining the wall. Raising the carving over my head, I swung it with all my might at the tube of glass enclosing Anya. It shattered into a spray of fragments and the electrical flames that slithered over her naked flesh winked out.

I reached for her wrist and pulled her down off that pedestal of pain.

"Wh—what . . . ?" Her eyes opened, bloodshot from pain.

"This way!" I snapped, pulling her along with me.

Set was on one knee, pulling himself to his feet. "Stop!" his voice roared in my head. And something within me wanted to obey him.

But something even stronger drove me on, overriding his mental command. I yanked Anya through the doorway and into the small outer chamber, then out into the corridor as Set barked out commands telepathically.

The corridor did not truly end where we had stopped.

That much I had seen in Set's mind. A section of its wall slid away smoothly and Anya and I plunged into this new branch of the long spiraling tunnel.

Heading down.

"Orion—he captured you, too?"

"Reeva and Kraal made a deal with him: his price was both of us."

We were pounding along the dim tunnel as it sloped sharply downward, our bare feet slapping against the smooth flooring. It felt hot. The feeble light emanating from the narrow walls cast no shadows.

"Are you all right?" I asked, her wrist still firmly in my grasp.

She gasped as we ran, "The pain . . . it was in my mind."

"You're all right?"

"Physically . . . but . . . I remember . . . Orion, he's a heartless fiend."

"I'll kill him."

"Where are we heading? Why are we descending?"

"Energy," I said. "His energy source is below, down deep in the earth."

What I had seen in Set's mind had been a confused tangle of impressions. He could manipulate spacetime as the Creators did, and the source of the titanic energies he needed for that was deeply buried beneath us.

"We can't get away," Anya said as we raced breathlessly down the tunnel, "by going down."

"We can't get away by heading up. Set's cohorts are there. Dozens of dragons up at the surface, and I don't know how many so-called masters he has with him."

"They'll be coming after us."

I nodded grimly.

Set had been seeking in my mind a knowledge that the Creators apparently had and he did not. Something about a nexus in the spacetime continuum, a crisis that had occurred millions of years earlier that he was trying to change, undo, reverse.

Suddenly I saw his face in my mind, seething fury. "You cannot escape my wrath, pathetic ape. Excruciating pain and utter despair are all that you can look forward to."

Anya saw him, too. Her eyes widened momentarily. Then she snapped, "He's afraid, Orion. You've made him fear us."

"FEAR ME!" Set's voice boomed in our minds.

I said nothing and we plunged onward, down the spiraling dim tunnel, heading away from the sun and freedom. I knew that dozens of Set's humanoid underlings were racing down the tunnel after us, cutting off any hope of returning to the surface and the world of warmth and light.

Not that it was cold in the tunnel as we sped down its steeply sloped spiral. The floor was now blistering hot, the walls glowed red. It was if we were heading for the entrance to hell.

I realized that I still grasped the statue of Set in my left hand, my fingers wrapped tightly around its neck. It was the only thing even close to a weapon that we possessed and I hung on to it, despite its hefty weight. It had served me well once and I was certain I would be wielding it again before long.

The tunnel finally widened into a broad circular chamber filled with more instruments and equipment of Set's alien technology. This womb of rock was lit more brightly than the tunnel, though its ceiling was low, claustrophobic. In its center was a circular railing. We went to it and peered down a long featureless tube so deep that its end was lost from sight. Pulses of heat surged up through it, and I thought I could hear a rumbling low throbbing sound, like the slow pulsing of a gigantic heart at the core of an incalculably immense beast.

"A core tap," Anya said, peering down that endless shaft.

"Core tap?"

"The energy source for Set's attempt to warp the continuum. It must extend down to the molten core of the earth itself."

I knew she was correct but the realization still made me blink with astonishment. Set was tapping the seething energies of the earth's molten core. For the purpose of altering spacetime. But why? To what end? That I did not know.

This chamber was the end of the corridor. There was no exit except the way we had just come, and I sensed that dozens, scores of Set's humanoid reptilians were racing down the corridor toward us.

Anya was totally absorbed in scanning the banks of instruments and display panels lining the chamber's circular wall. We had only a few minutes before every reptilian master in Set's domain came clawing at us, but she concentrated entirely on the hardware surrounding us. She was focused so completely on the machinery that the pain of Set's torture was forgotten, her nudity ignored.

Not by me. She was the most beautiful woman in the world, slim and tall and lithe as a warrior goddess should be, lustrous black hair tumbling past her bare shoulders, luminous gray eyes intently studying the alien technology before her.

"The spacetime warp is building up at the bottom of the shaft, on the edge of the core. The energies down there are enough to distort the continuum completely, if focused properly."

From the way she muttered the words it seemed that she was speaking more to herself than to me.

Then she turned. "Orion, we've got to destroy these instruments. Smash them! Quickly."

"With pleasure," I said, raising the wooden statue.

You are only increasing the agonies that I will inflict upon you
, Set warned inside my head.

"Ignore him," said Anya.

I swung the statue at the nearest bank of instruments. It crashed through the light plastic casing easily. Sparks showered, cold blue and white. A thin hiss of smoke seeped out of its battered face.

Methodically I went from one console to the next, smashing, breaking, destroying. I pictured Set's face in place of the lifeless instruments. I enjoyed crushing it in.

I was only a quarter of the way around the wide circle when Anya warned, "They're coming!"

I dashed to the circular chamber's only entrance and heard the clatter of dozens of clawed feet scraping down the sloping ramp toward us.

"Hold them off for as long as you can," Anya commanded.

I had only a brief instant to glance at her. She attacked the next set of consoles with her bare hands, ripping off the lightweight paneling and tearing at their innards, her fingers bloodied, the flash of electrical sparks throwing blue-white glare across the utterly determined features of her beautiful face.

Then the reptilians were on me. The doorway was not as narrow as I would have liked. More than one of the humanoid masters could confront me, sometimes as many as three at once. I used the statue of their lord and ruler as a weapon, striking at them with all the accumulated fury and hatred that had been building in me for these many months.

I killed them. By the pairs, by the threesomes, by the dozens and scores. I stood in that doorway and smashed and swung and clubbed with a might and bloodlust that I had never known before. The wooden statue became an instrument of death, crushing bones, smashing skulls, spurting the blood of these inhuman enemies until the doorway was clogged with their scaly bodies, the floor slick with gore.

They had no weapons except those that nature had given them. They slashed with their wicked claws, ripping my flesh again and again. My own blood flowed with theirs, but it did not matter to me. I was a killing machine, as mindless as a flame or an avalanche.

Then Anya was beside me, a long sharp strip of metal torn from the consoles in her hand, wielding it like a sword of vengeance. She shrieked a primal battle cry, I roared with rage born of desperation, the reptiles hissed and clawed at us both.

Slowly, inexorably, we were driven back from the doorway, back into the big circular chamber. They tried to get around us, surround us, swarm us under. We stood back-to-back, swinging, cutting, smashing at them with all the fury that human blood and sinew could generate.

Not enough. For every reptilian that fell another took its place. Two more. Ten more.

Without a word passing between us, Anya and I cut a swath through the monsters and made it to the railing around the core shaft. We used it to protect our backs as we fought on, all hope gone, just fought for the sake of killing as many of them as we could before they inevitably wore us down.

One of the humanoids clambered over the railing behind us, across the wide gap of the core shaft, and tried to leap across it to land on our backs. He could not span the width of the shaft and fell screeching wildly into its yawning abyss.