I saw something else in the Shaydanian’s mind during that fleeting instant: they were not under orders to take me alive. Set had no intention of taking further chances with me. These three clones of his were going to kill me, here and now.
My senses shifted into hyperdrive immediately and the scene slowed as if time were stretching like a piece of warm taffy. The three Shaydanians lifted their rifles to their shoulders, aiming at me through diamond-shaped crystal sights. I saw their taloned fingers tightening on the curved triggers.
As they aimed at me their attention was shifted momentarily from guiding their mounts. The fierce two-legged carnosaurs, directed mentally by their riders, continued to trot toward me. But their tiny brains were not under the firm control of the Shaydanians, for one fleeting moment.
Desperately I sent a lance of red-hot mental energy into those three dinosaurs’ brains. They screeched and reared to their full height, throwing two of the Shaydanians to the ground and forcing the third to drop his rifle and clutch at his mount’s hide with both clawed hands.
All this I saw in slow motion. Even as the two thrown Shaydanians were falling toward the ground, I ran and dove full-length for the rifle that was spiraling through midair. I grabbed it before it touched the grass. As my fingers tightened around it I heard the thumps of the two riders hitting the ground hard.
The dinosaurs were still hissing, the two freed of their riders galloping off away from us. The third, though, was under his rider’s control once again and heading straight for me.
I rolled away from a stamping clawed foot that would have crushed me under the carnosaur’s weight and fired from the hip at its rider. The stream of flame sliced him in two across midtorso. As his severed body slipped bloodily from the dinosaur’s back, the beast wheeled and came at me, massive head bent low, cavernous mouth gaping, lined with saw-edged teeth the size of my scimitar.
I pulled the rifle’s trigger as hard as I could while dodging sideways. The stream poured flame down its gullet and slashed down the length of its thick neck. It hit the ground with a tremendous thud, literally shaking the earth, bellowing like a runaway steam locomotive to the very last.
I looked up. The two other Shaydanians were scrambling for the rifles they had dropped. I fired at the nearer of them and he toppled over dead. But when I turned to the third of them, my rifle did not respond. It was empty, its fuel depleted.
The Shaydanian had reached his own rifle and was picking it up from the grass. I threw my useless weapon at him and charged after it, drawing my scimitar from its scabbard. The rifle hit him like a club, knocking him down again on his rump. Before he could train his own rifle on me I was close enough to kick it out of his hands.
He glowered at me through his red slitted reptilian eyes and scrambled to his feet. Hissing, he advanced on me, clawed hands reaching out. I slashed at him with the scimitar once. He raised an arm to block the blow, but I swung the blade under and then lunged at him. The point penetrated the scales of his chest and went completely through him. With a final hiss of death agony he collapsed and, sliding off my blade, fell to the bloodstained ground.
Immediately I projected a mental image at Set. I sent him a scene that showed two of his clones lying dead on the bloody grass but the third standing over my own burned corpse. With every ounce of cunning in me, I presented myself mentally as one of Set’s clones, and the body at my feet as my own.
“You have done well, my son,” came Set’s mental voice. “Return now with the corpse so that I may examine it.”
I mentally called one of the carnosaurs back to me and mounted it for the trip back to the fortress by the Nile. Had Set truly believed the false message I had sent him? Or was he merely drawing me to his fortress so he could dispose of me more easily?