I butted the spear against the ground and aimed its point at its throat. His own leap spitted him on the spear point, his own weight forced him down onto its shaft. Blood spurted and the saber-tooth gave a strangled gurgling roar, clawing at me with his forepaws. One swipe raked my chest before I could drop the spear and back away.
The beast screamed and thrashed, trying to dislodge the spear from its throat. I scuttled away, no weapons except my bare hands, unable to do anything but watch the saber-tooth rolling on the ground, pawing at the spear’s wooden shaft while his life’s blood gushed onto the ground.
It was an awful way to die. Insanely, I sprang to my feet and ran to the struggling beast. I pulled at the spear with all my might, yanking it out of the bubbling wound in his throat. We both roared with a combination of blood fury and savage love as I plunged the spear into his heart.
I watched the light in his tawny eyes glimmer and die, leaning on the spear, half-ashamed of myself, half-exultant. I had ended the lion’s life. I had ended his suffering.
But as I looked down on his once-noble carcass I knew that jackals and other scavengers would soon be tearing at his rotting flesh. There is no dignity in death, I told myself grimly. Only the living can have dignity.
CHAPTER 33
So it was that I wore a saber-tooth’s pelt over my head and shoulders when I approached the village of Kraal.
I followed the smoke cloud that stained the otherwise pristine sky, thinking at first that the village must have grown much larger than it had been when I had last seen it. By the second day I began to realize that the drifting gray cloud was too big, too persistent, to be from cooking fires. I began to fear the worst.
By noon I could smell death in the air: the greasy, charred odor of burned flesh. I saw birds circling high in the distance. Not pterosaurs; vultures.
It was midafternoon when I pushed through the thorny underbrush and saw Kraal’s village. It had been burned quite thoroughly, every hut reduced to smoldering ashes, the ground blackened, a heap of charred bodies in the middle of the village burned beyond recognition. The vultures circled above. They had their own kind of patience. They were waiting for the ground to cool and the dead to stop smoking before they landed to begin their feast.
Kneeling, I examined the three-clawed prints of dinosaurs and Shaydanians that were all around the village. They had left a clear trail heading off in the northeasterly direction of Set’s fortress by the Nile. There were human footprints among them. Not everyone in the village had been slaughtered.
I straightened up and turned toward the northeast. So this was the reward Kraal and Reeva had earned for their collaboration with Set. The monster had razed their village and killed most of the inhabitants. Those that had not been slaughtered had been marched off into slavery.
I found myself hoping that Kraal and Reeva were still among the living. I wanted to find them, wanted them to see me. I wanted to see how much they enjoyed dealing with the devil.
As I trekked toward Set’s fortress I wondered what had befallen Chron and Vorn and the other slaves that I had freed. Were they dead or back in slavery?
For the rest of that day and most of the next I followed the broad trail that the dinosaurs had trampled through the underbrush. At first I thought that I might catch up with them and their human captives, but I soon put that idea out of my mind. What good would it do to try to free them? It would merely alert Set to my presence, confirm to him that I had arrived here. I wanted as much surprise on my side as possible; it was just about the only weapon I would have when I finally went against him.
Toward sundown on the second day after the village I noticed a set of human footprints that diverged from the main trail. The dinosaurs had been leading their prisoners directly northeast, toward Set’s fortress; their trail through the forest as straight as a Roman road or the flight of an arrow.