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.