CHAPTER 21
We were led up the long narrow ramp toward the single gate in the castle’s wide high walls. The gate was barely wide enough for two of the slim humanoids to pass through side by side, but it was tall, at least twenty feet high. Sharp spikes ran all around its sides and arched top, like pointed teeth made of gleaming metal.
As we stepped out of the hot sunshine into the dimly lit shadows of the castle I felt the subtle vibrating hum of powerful machinery. The air inside the castle was even warmer than the steaming afternoon outside, an intense heat that flowed over me like a stifling wave, squeezing perspiration from every pore, drenching us with soul-draining fatigue.
Our quintet of captors turned us over to four other humanoids, slightly larger but otherwise so identical to the others that I could not tell them apart. They might have been cloned from the same original cell, they looked so much alike.
These new guards undid our bonds, and for the first time in days we could move our stiffened arms, flex our cramped fingers. Ordinary humans might have been permanently paralyzed, their arms atrophied, their hands gangrenous from lack of blood circulation. I had been able to force blood past the painfully tight ropes by consciously redirecting the flow to deeper arteries. Anya had done the same. Still, it would be a long time before the marks of our bonds left our flesh.
The first thing Anya did after flexing her numbed fingers was to pet little Juno, who hissed with pleasure at her attention. I almost felt jealous.
We were put in a cell the size of a dormitory room, all three of us. It was absolutely bare, not even a bit of straw to cover the hard seamless floor. The entire castle seemed to be made of some sort of plastic, just as Set’s fortress in the Neolithic had been.
The walls looked absolutely seamless to me, yet a panel slid back abruptly to reveal a tray of food: meat steaming from the spit, cooked vegetables, flagons of water, and even a pile of greens for Juno.
We ate greedily, although I couldn’t help thinking of the last meal a condemned man is given.
“What do we do now?” I asked Anya, wiping scraps of roasted meat from my chin with the back of my hand.
She glanced around at our bleak prison cell. “Can you feel that energy vibrating?”
I nodded. “Set must power everything here with the core tap.”
“That’s what we must reach,” Anya said firmly. “And destroy.”
“Easier said than done.”
She regarded me with her grave, gray eyes. “It must be done, Orion. The existence of the human race, the whole continuum, depends on it being done.”
“Then the first step,” I said, with a sigh of resignation, “is to get out of this cell. Any ideas?”
As if in answer, the metal door slid back to reveal another pair of humanoid guards. Or perhaps two from the quartet that had ushered us into the cell in the first place, I could not tell.
They beckoned to us with taloned fingers and we went meekly out into the corridor, Juno clumping warily behind us.
The corridor was hot and dim, the overhead lights so deeply red that I felt certain most of their energy was emitted in the infrared, invisible to my eyes but apparently clear and bright to the reptiles. I closed my eyes and sought to make contact with Juno as we walked. Sure enough, through the duckbill’s vision the corridor was brilliantly lit, and the temperature was wonderfully comfortable.
The corridor slanted downward. Not steeply, but a definite downward slope. As I walked along, seeing our surroundings through Juno’s eyes, I realized that the walls were not blank at all. They were decorated with lively mosaics showing scenes of these graceful humanoid reptiles in beautiful glades and parks, in lovingly cultivated gardens, standing at the sea’s frothing edge or atop rugged mountains.
I studied the artworks as we marched down the corridor. There was never more than one humanoid in any picture, although many of the scenes showed other reptiles, some bipedal but most of them four-legged. None of the humanoids wore any kind of clothing or carried anything resembling a tool or a weapon. Not even a belt or a pouch of any sort.