“She’s all wet!” Anya complained, laughing.
“And sound asleep,” I said.
For many minutes we sat facing each other, Anya with the little dinosaur sighing rhythmically in her lap.
“You were right,” she whispered. “You can control it.”
“It’s only a baby,” I said. “Controlling something bigger will be much more difficult.”
“But you can do it,” Anya said. “I know you can.”
I replied, “You were right, too. Our little friend is a female.”
“I knew it!”
Looking toward the darkened woods, I let my awareness sift in through the trees and mammoth ferns, swaying and whispering in the night wind. There were tyrannosaurs out there, all right. Several of them. They were asleep now, lightly. Perhaps we could make our way past them. It was worth a try.
“Are their masters with them?” Anya asked when I suggested we try to get away.
“I don’t sense them,” I said. “That doesn’t mean they aren’t there.”
We waited while I sensed the tyrannosaurs drifting deeper into sleep. Crickets chirped in the woods, the slim crescent moon rose higher, followed by the baleful red star.
“When can we start?” Anya asked, absently stroking the baby dinosaur on her lap.
I rose slowly to my feet. “Soon. In a few—”
That eerie hooting echoed through the night. Turning toward the lake, I saw the long snaky neck of the enormous aquatic dinosaur silhouetted against the stars and the filmy white haze that would one day be the constellation of Orion. From far away came an answering call floating through the darkness.
A cool breeze wafted in from the lake. It seemed to clear my mind like a wind blows away a fog.
I helped Anya to her feet. The baby duckbill hardly stirred in her arms.
“Do you think,” I asked her, “that Set could influence my mind the way his people control the dinosaurs?”
“He probed your mind there in his castle,” she said.
“Could that have caused me to feel so”—I hesitated to use the word—”so depressed?”
She nodded solemnly. “He uses despair like a weapon, to undermine your strength, to lead you to destruction.”
I began to understand the whole of it. “And once you realized it, you counteracted it.”
Anya replied, “No, Orion, you counteracted it. You did it yourself.”
Did I? Anya was kind to say so, perhaps. But I wondered how large a role she played in my mental revival.
With the blink of an eye I dismissed the matter. I did not care who did what. I felt strong again, and that terrible despair had lifted from me.
“The tyrannosaurs are sleeping soundly,” I told Anya. “We can get past them if we’re careful.”
As I put a hand to her shoulder I heard a frothing, bubbling, surging sound from out in the lake. Turning, I expected to see one or more of the huge dinosaurs splashing out there.
Instead, the waters seemed to be parting far out in the lake, splitting asunder to make way for something dark and massive and so enormous that even the big dinosaurs were dwarfed by it.
A building, a structure, an edifice that rose and rose, dripping, from the depths of the lake. Towers and turrets and overhanging tiers so wide and massive that they blotted out the sky. Balconies and high-flung walkways spanning between slim minarets. Tiny red lights winked on as we watched level upon level still rising up out of the water, mammoth and awesome.
Anya and I gaped dumbfounded at the titanic structure rising from the lake like the palace of some sea god, grotesque yet beautiful, dreadful yet majestic. The water surged into knee-high waves that spread across the lake and broke at our feet, then raced back as if eager to gather themselves at the base of the looming silent castle of darkness.
I saw that one tower rose higher than all the others, pointing straight upward into the night sky. And directly above it, like a beacon or lodestone, rode the blood red star at zenith.
“What fools we’ve been!” Anya whispered in the shadows.
I glanced at her. Her eyes were wide and eager.
“We thought that Set’s main base was back in the Neolithic, beside the Nile. That was merely one of his camps!”