Orion in the Dying Time Read Free

else. The slaves were terrified. And instead of being grateful, they were angry.
    "You have slain one of the guardians!" said a scrawny bearded man, his eyes wide with terror.
    "The masters will blame us!" one of the women wailed.
    "We will be punished!"
    I felt something close to contempt for them. They had the mentality of true slaves. Instead of thanking me for helping them, they were fearful of their master's wrath. Without a word I went to the dead beast and pulled my dagger from the back of its neck.
    Anya said to them, "We could not stand idly and watch the monster kill the baby."
    The baby, I saw, was alive. The mother was sitting silently on the grass, holding the child to her emaciated breast, her huge brown eyes staring at me blankly. If she was grateful for what I had done, she was hiding it well. Two long red weals scarred her ribs and back. The baby also had a livid welt across its naked flesh.
    But the scrawny man was tugging at his tangled gray beard and moaning, "The masters will descend upon us and kill us all with great pain. They will put us in the fire that never dies. All of us!"
    "It would have been better to let the baby die," said another man, equally gaunt, his hair and beard also filthy and matted. "Better that one dies than all of us are tortured to death. We can always make more babies."
    "If your masters do not find you, they cannot punish you," I said. "If the two of us can kill one of these overgrown lizards, then all of us can work together to protect ourselves against them."
    "Impossible!"
    "Where could we hide that they will not find us?"
    "They have eyes that see in the night."
    "They can fly through the air and even cross the great river."
    "Their claws are sharp. And they have the eternal fire. "As they spoke they clustered around Anya and me, as if seeking protection. And they constantly looked up into the sky and scanned the horizon, as if seeking the first sign of avenging dragons. Or worse.
    Anya asked them in a gentle voice, "What will happen to you if the two of us go away and leave you alone?"
    "The masters will see what has happened here and punish us," said the beard tugger. He seemed to be their leader, perhaps merely by the fact that he was their eldest.
    "How will they punish you?" I asked.
    He shrugged his bony shoulders. "That is for them to decide."
    "They will flay the skin from our bodies," said one of the teenagers, "and then cast us into the eternal fire."
    The others shuddered. Their eyes were wide and pleading.
    "Suppose we stayed here with you until your masters find us," I asked. "Will they punish you if we tell them that we killed the beast and you had nothing to do with it?"
    They gaped at us as if we were stupid children. "Of course they will punish us! They will punish every one of us. That is the law."
    I turned to Anya. "Then we've got to get away."
    "And bring them with us," she agreed.
    I scanned the area where we stood. The Nile had cut a broad, deep valley through the limestone cliffs that rose like jagged walls on either side of the river. Atop the cliffs, according to Anya, was a wide grassy plain. If this region would truly become the Sahara one day, then it must stretch for hundreds of miles southward, thousands of miles to the west. A flat open savannah, with only an occasional hill or river-carved valley to break the plain's flat monotony. Not good country to hide in, especially from creatures that can fly through the air and see in the dark. But better than being penned between the river and the cliffs.
    I had no doubt that the slaves were telling the truth about their reptilian masters. The beast Anya and I had just slain was a dinosaur, that seemed certain. Why not winged pterosaurs, then, or other reptiles that can sense heat the way a pit viper does?
    "Are there trees nearby?" Anya was asking them. "Not like the garden, but wild trees, a natural forest."
    "Oh," said the scrawny elder. "You mean Paradise."
    Far to the south, he told us, there were