Slave in the City of Dragons (Dinosaurs and Gladiators Book 1)

by Angela Angelwolf

  He selected an object and walked back outside. Pashera followed. He went to the gate that was stuck and pointed the stick-like object at it. There was a buzzing noise, then the greenery that had engulfed the gate exploded in flames.

  Pashera cried out in fear. This was powerful magic indeed.

  The warrior walked outside and touched the rod to greenery on that side of the gate as well. Smoke curled skyward, then flames.

  “Burn the whole thing,” Pashera urged him. “Burn the whole jungle.”

  Then the warrior collected wood and piled it up inside the enclosure. Pashera remembered his bidding and did the same. When he had a good collection of fuel, he built a stack of wood. And when he’d done that, he used his magic tool again, and the wood combusted immediately.

  Then he turned to Pashera. He reached into his sash and took out a knife. HER knife. He must have taken it from the clearing where the three-horned beast battled the dagger-toothed cat. The warrior handed the knife to her, pointed to the pig, and pantomimed that she should butcher it. Pashera nodded in agreement. He walked back into the building, leaving her to her own devices.

  Part of her wanted to run into the forest and make for freedom. But those wolves were out there. Darkness was falling fast, the last tendrils of the sun’s light quickly loosening their grasp on the weird tower and the jungle.

  As if to emphasize her plight, something huge roared out in the swamp … and not too far away, either. The warrior ran back outside and made for the gate. With the greenery burned away, he was able to close it now. He heaved, and Pashera added her own strength. The gates clanked – a metallic sound Pashera was unused to – as he slid the bolt home.

  Large, heavy footsteps thudded outside the gate. Pashera slumped close to the wall. There was another roar. Then the footsteps moved away.

  Pashera remembered to butcher the boar. Most of it she did by firelight. It wasn’t easy, but she had skill. When next the warrior emerged from the tower, she had slabs of meat ready for him to cook. He smiled at her – and Pashera shivered as she realized how strange his teeth looked in the firelight. He had double incisors on the top of his mouth, far too sharp for a human. Then he put two slabs of meat on his spear and put them over the fire.

  After they ate, the warrior led Pashera back into the tower. She panicked again, so he ended up carrying her.

  Inside, past the front room by the door, was decay and clutter, though Pashera didn’t recognize it as such. But she could certainly smell that the old place was unused and dusty. The warrior carried her up stairs to a room high in the tower. She could see the night sky through the clear material, which looked to her like solidified water. This was terrifying in its own way.

  The old storytellers of her tribe told tales about the place where water became solid. It was supposed to be on the road to hell.

  In the high room, the thrumming sound was louder, intensifying Pashera’s panic. The warrior put Pashera down. He indicated that she sit in a chair. Pashera tried to bolt out the door. The warrior sighed, dragged her back, put her bodily in the chair, then attached straps on her arms, wrists, chest, legs and ankles.

  Pashera struggled, but the warrior’s grip was like iron.

  “Oh, Devouring God, do not abandon me!” she wailed. “Oh Great Mother, take pity on your daughter! Save me! Save me!”

  The warrior ignored her screeching. Once she was secured, he put a mesh helmet on her head. He arranged globes on the table – globes that gleamed with a strange, inner light. He arranged the last globe, spun it, and looked at her as if sizing her up.

  A universe exploded inside Pashera’s skull.

  There was a rush of memories, all of them alien. Glowing towers rising in the night. Reptilian eyes looking out at the dawn, and behind those eyes, the will to reshape the world. A parade of objects named in a babble of voices, both familiar and strange. A stream of knowledge that filled her like pure sunshine radiating from within her own skull. It got brighter and brighter, so intense that Pashera screamed.

  Then her head cleared, like blue sky after a storm.

  The warrior looked at her again.

  “What’s my name?” he asked. She understood him clearly.

  “Your name is Tol’zen,” she said, realizing that she wasn’t speaking the language of her tribe.

  “That’s right,” he said.

  “You are a warrior of an ancient race,” she said. “You are a saurian, not a human.”

  “Very good,” he said. “Though my people call themselves The Remnant. You are taking to this quite well. Many don’t, you know.”

  He began unstrapping her.

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t survive … at least in a useful fashion.”

  All her bonds were loosened. Pashera felt liquid running down her face. She put a finger to her mouth and caught some of it. It was blood. Blood dripping out her nose.

  “That happens,” Tol’zen shrugged. “It’s nothing to worry about. If the treatment was going to kill you, we’d probably know by now.”

  “Good to know,” Pashera said ruefully. “This is a tower. I’m sitting in a chair.” The universe of words exploding in her skull made her dizzy.

  “Good, good,” Tol’zen said. He got busy taking the globes off the table and putting them away.

  Pashera’s head whirled as she looked around the room and suddenly knew what everything was called in a tongue that was not her own. Table. Cup. Tapestry. “So many words,” she pressed her fingers to her temple, trying to slow it down.

  “The rush of words will slow down. The device I used gives you a glossary. But you won’t know the words until you need them.”

  More information fell into place. She also knew – with certainty – that Tol’zen lived in a city, Guadalquivir. And that city was on a plateau halfway up the Holy Mountain. The Home of the Devouring God.

  And that information terrified her in a way that the tower never could. Because her tribe knew as a matter of faith that to go to the Holy Mountain was to go to certain doom.

  Pashera bolted from her chair again. She ran out the door, then down the series of stairs that she knew led outside. The door was open. She ran outside.

  There was a shadow overhead, and Tol’zen landed right in front of her, having jumped out of the second-story window. She didn’t know it was called a window until right that minute. She also knew the brightly colored “stones” scattered around on the ground were broken glass. Oh, her head swam with all the things she now knew.

  And yet while many things and names of things were popping into her mind, still others were out of reach, kept back by her own ignorance.

  The warrior, Tol’zen, grabbed Pashera’s arm tightly. He pointed up at the broken window.

  “I’m really tired of doing that,” he said. “And you will stop this, do you hear me?”

  “I must … I must go …” Pashera stammered.

  “You aren’t going anywhere,” Tol’zen said. “First of all, you wouldn’t get a hundred steps beyond those gates tonight before something ate you. The big ones – the really big one – come out at night.

  “Secondly,” he added, “You are my slave now. And I have gone through entirely too much trouble to see you run away.”

  “But … but …”

  “Oh, be quiet,” Tol’zen said crossly. “I’m not going to argue with a damned, dirty ape.”

  He took her by the wrist firmly and led her over to the stone-enclosed pool below the fountain. He put a hand under her bottom and picked her up. She squealed in panic. He dropped her into the pool. Then he poked and pushed her until she sat down in the water.

  “Start washing,” he said. He lifted his sash over his head and put it carefully aside. He took something out of one of the pockets. This was a cube of material that he dipped in the water, and then scrubbed into her hair.

  “Soap,” Pashera said. She hated baths. But she liked the new word.

  “Yes, you’ll get used to soap,” he said,
and he dunked her hair beneath the water flowing out of the fountain’s mouth.

  “Ahh,” she yelled. “Stop that!”

  “You stop it,” he said. “Stop yelling. Do you want to attract night flyers?”

  Tol’zen’s rough hands scrubbed her entire body. Pashera was pretty sure he removed her outer layer of skin. She hated the whole thing. Her tribe didn’t fear water. But they didn’t bathe. Not like this. Not with soap. It was unnatural.

  Finally, Tol’zen seemed satisfied with his work. He went away and stoked the fire while Pashera shivered in the small pool.

  Tol’zen came back. He stripped off his kilt, which he put carefully with the sash to the side. He removed his other ornaments as well.

  “Now, you wash me,” he told Pashera. They switched places, and she washed him with shaking hands. The clipped feathers on top of his head bristled at her touch. Otherwise, his body was hairless. His male member, or “faroos” as her tribe called it, was large, but looked otherwise human. She tried to wash it in a business-like fashion. But it grew at her touch. Tol’zen’s eyes tightened, and he gasped.

  A mood-spoiler came in the form of something thudding in the darkness beyond the enclosure. A long roar ripped the night air. Something equally ferocious bellowed back.

  “Maybe it’s time to go inside,” Tol’zen said. “Some of the bigger beasts can put their heads right over the wall.”

  He led her back to the tower. He paused long enough to pull a tarp out of a closet and place it over the remains of the pig. “That should keep the night birds off of it,” he said.

  Once they were both inside, Tol’zen worked a mechanism and the door sealed. It wasn’t magic at all. Pashera knew that now. Lights turned on.

  Tol’zen led Pashera upstairs to the third floor, to a room with unbroken glass in its window. Up here, the walls weren’t dirty brown, but white. Now that she wasn’t terrified, she noticed that above the second floor with its broken window, the tower was comfortably cool. The tower’s thrumming magic had some way of keeping out the jungle’s oppressive heat.

  Tol’zen led her into a room. She started naming the objects. “Bed. Table. Lamp.” Tol’zen chuckled, a dry noise that was not quite human.

  Tol’zen stripped off his clothes and led her to the bed. He climbed on it with her, and then began stroking her body in a familiar way … familiar now that Magwalra had taught her.

  “We aren’t the same,” Pashera tried to object. “You aren’t human.”

  “All our important parts match up, you’ll see,” Tol’zen said.

  “I am a virgin,” she objected, trying to push his hand away.

  “Ah, and that matters for your tribe, yes?” Tol’zen asked. Pashera nodded vigorously.

  “Keep your maidenhood,” he said. “You can service me in other ways. With your mouth.”

  Pashera looked at him agog. “I don’t know how to do that,” she lied. In a tribal setting, with communal sleeping, children observed adults making baby brothers and sisters quite a lot. They also observed oral sex, and any other way that humans cared to pleasure each other.

  But Pashera had never done it.

  “I’ll show you,” he said.

  She didn’t want to, but she didn’t think that Tol’zen was asking. His voice and his hands were firm as he instructed her. And she was a child of her culture; women did as men bid.

  He stood up and had her get on her knees in front of him. He guided her to start massaging his faroos with her hand, and it got long and hard.

  “The most important thing to remember is ‘no teeth,’ he said. “Now just put the tip in your mouth.”

  Pashera did so. It tasted fine. She was surprised by how soft it felt – it looked harder.

  “Use your tongue,” Tol’zen told her. “Work my faroos with your tongue.”

  Pashera did so. His faroos went deeper into her mouth.

  He continued instructing her. His instructions became more breathy and guttural as they went along.

  Pashera felt a tingling in her groin. Her juices began flowing freely. She enjoyed this. She wondered: What other things could she do with a warrior?

  Still, her jaw started to ache. She wanted it to end. His moans indicated that he was near a climax.

  Suddenly, he jerked in her mouth and filled it with salty fluid. Three strong squirts hit the back of her throat, causing her to gag and cough. The fluid tasted strange, not good, and Pashera let it drip out of her mouth onto the floor.

  Tol’zen sat back on the bed. After resting for a second, he brought Pashera to a smaller room off the main sleeping quarters and showed her where she could clean up.

  The words for “sink” and “faucet” leaped into Pashera’s mind. But while she knew them, she didn’t know how to use them until Tol’zen showed her how.

  Likewise, the hole in the floor in one corner of the room, where she would squat to deposit body waste, was called a “cesou” in Tol’zen’s tongue. She knew that – but didn’t know how to activate the waste removal until he showed her that, too.

  Afterward, in bed, she cuddled up to his chest.

  “You can run away tonight if you want to,” he told her. “But there won’t be much left of you for me to find in the morning.”

  “I won’t run away,” she said. “Did you like what I did?”

  “You have a natural talent for that,” Tol’zen told her tiredly. “We’ll do more of that.”

  And then they both fell into deep sleep.

  Outside, in the night, unseen titans clashed and shrieked in the jungle. The noise woke Pashera out of her slumber more than once, as she startled awake. The thrum-thrum-thrum of the ancient tower kept her awake for some time, and she listened to the monsters battle in the dark. But Tol’zen never stirred. Fitfully, Pashera’s night passed.

  Little did she know what awaited them in the morning.

  Chapter 3. Escape!

  Pashera was wrapped in loving arms, the arms of her warrior. His wet kisses covered her face, her breasts, driving her mad with desire. His large faroos probed her sex eagerly, even urgently. Waves of heat built up in her crotch, pulsing, getting hotter and hotter …

  She awoke. Tol’zen stood beside her, shaking her shoulder. The other Tol’zen had just been a dream. Her fingers were sticky with her own juices. The real Tol’zen pretended not to notice.

  He was up with the sun, as was his routine. He dragged Pashera bodily out of bed and presented her with a gift: Sandals that he’d made for her that very morning.

  Pashera put them on, and immediately didn’t like them. “My feet want to be free,” she said.

  “We’re going into some rugged country today,” Tol’zen explained. “Even your tough feet won’t be able to handle it.”

  He’d made longer versions of the sandals for his own bird-like feet. He seemed to wear them without complaint, so Pashera decided to make the best of it. At least the sandals were very light.

  Then something else occurred to her. “May I have a skirt? I don’t want to be naked.”

  “Huh. That’s how I found you,” Tol’zen said. “I thought you didn’t wear clothing. Well, we’ll look around.”

  He led her into a storage area, filled with clutter, some of it useful. Tol’zen suggested cutting up some of the same kind of musty tarp he’d used to cover the hog. But Pashera found a coiled piece of fabric that she unrolled to show a scene that thrilled her imagination.

  It was a banner. All sorts of people – saurians like Tol’zen, not humans like Pashera – saluted and posed around a central figure. Some even appeared to be dancing. The central figure was also saurian, but unlike the others, he appeared quite old. Colorful representations of fruits, other foods, and animals spilled along the banner. Buildings and pillars of fire dotted the background. The images whirled into clever designs that ran along the edges.

  “Can I make a skirt out of this?” she asked Tol’zen eagerly.

  Tol’zen ran his fingers over the material. His fingers stopped
on things that Pashera knew were letters and words. She could read the words somewhat – the strange device had taught her to read as well as speak Tol’zen’s tongue. But she could not read the words on this banner clearly. It was like the words were slurred. “This is a banner celebrating the centennial of King Jopa’zen,” he said.

  “And who is that?”

  “He was a great king … the last great king. My ancestor,” Tol’zen spoke with pride. “He ruled a thousand ago. This banner is a thousand years old. And yet look, it could have been fabricated yesterday.”

  Tol’zen shook his head sadly. “They really knew how to make things in those days.”

  He sighed. “Well, no one reads anymore. This banner is wasted in this old tower anyway. How long a skirt would you like?”

  15 minutes later, they walked down into the great room on the first floor. Pashera twirled once in her new skirt. Tol’zen pretended to be exasperated, but her happiness lifted his mood. “Let’s get out of this depressing monument to better days,” he said, moving to the door. “We’ll see if the night birds left us any pig to eat.”

  Tol’zen worked the door mechanism. The door opened inward with its usual metallic protest. And yet, just outside, a low black wall that was nearly as tall as Pashera’s leg was long, blocked the entrance.

  “Where did that come from?” Pashera asked.

  The wall moved … rippled. It turned and twisted, and a giant snake head as wide around as old Klonak came up to bear down on them. Bright, beady snake eyes stared at them venomously. Jaws gaped – the beast reared.

  “By Darklu’s faroos, no!” Tol’zen roared. He pushed the mechanism on the wall, and the door started to shut. But the snake already pushed inside. The door creaked and groaned, but made no progress against the giant beast’s bulk.

  Tol’zen lashed out with his spear. It penetrated the creature’s nose, but not far – a testament to the snake’s tough, thick hide. Still, the snake hissed like a geyser and jerked angrily. It twisted its head, nearly ripping the spear out of Tol’zen’s hands. He held on as the snake lashed around. Its long body whipped out behind it. Finally, it retreated. Tol’zen almost lost his spear again as the snake pulled back through the door.