“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.”