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

by Angela Angelwolf

  Tol’zen led her along a goat trail up the mountain. Pashera’s hand ached where the Megalith had burned it, but the pain was already fading. Tol’zen searched along the path, then found a gap in the rock. It was only waist-high and narrow “This was so much easier when I was young,” he said. He wriggled through and Pashera followed.

  The crevice was inky-dark, claustrophobic, and went on for a length longer than her body. But finally she could see dim light ahead. Tol’zen’s strong hand reached down and pulled her up.

  She found herself on sharply sloping ramp that coiled at either end. It was cramped. She would bump her head on the rocks overhead if she wasn’t careful; Tol’zen had to crouch over. “This is a natural lava tube,” Tol’zen said. He indicated where artificial lights – probably ones he’d placed on earlier visits – provided light in the gloom. “Follow me.”

  The tube coiled up and up, and finally emerged in an enormous hollow chamber. The chamber, which seemed roughly hewn, was open to clear blue sky.

  “This is the old crater of the volcano,” Tol’zen said. He brought her forward and she could see they were standing on a natural ledge. Far below them, the floor of the crater had been reshaped into a temple. At the focal point of the temple, in the central point, was a large, dragonesque head. The face was fierce and terrible to behold. The large eyes were black, perhaps some dusky jewel, but flickers of orange light danced in the back of the eyes. The mouth was closed. But this fearsome face was everything Pashera would expect a Devouring God to look like. She shuddered at the very sight of it.

  So this is what it was like to be in the presence of a god.

  “When our ancestors – my ancestors – made the Great Leap Forward, their journey was powered by a volcano,” Tol’zen said. “This volcano. But when they arrived, after 64 million years, the mouth of the volcano had moved on. Oh, its fiery heart still sleeps beneath the earth, it occasionally sends coils of deadly breath up through the soil, and it still shakes our city with its restless slumber. But the lava pours forth from a new volcano a great distance yonder, far beyond our valley.

  “So, the first thing our scientists did after the Great Leap Forward was create a new power source. They settled on a Total Matter Converter. Converting atoms is a source of tremendous energy. It’s excellent technology, as long as it works well. If it stopped working well, it could devour the world itself.”

  “Are you telling me…” Pashera started.

  “Our ancestors, being wise, tried to figure out how to make sure the Converter was cared for, and not abandoned or neglected. But they shouldn’t have worried. Such an incredible source of power is a magnet for the weak-willed and simple-minded. Within a hundred years, an entire religion sprang up around the Converter.

  “And when the first humans … feeble-minded, feral and incredibly violent … crept up to our gates, we made sure they came to know the power we controlled. Because as servants of that all-consuming power, we became objects of their fear and adoration. Aye, the Converter became the basis of a very useful religion.

  “And we gave it a name … a name to strike awe into the souls of the apes. We called it ‘The Devouring God.’ ” He pointed at the dragon’s head.

  Pashera reeled. The foundations of her faith were under assault. “I don’t believe you,” she said. “The Devouring God is bigger than some stone idol you built.”

  “Let’s watch and see,” Tol’zen said.

  Below them, a ceremony was starting. Celebrants, some clad in black, some in blood-red, marched out of a tunnel in one of the walls, and took their places around the dragon head. It was too far away to hear individual words, but the chanting sounded awfully familiar. It sounded like the holy words spoken at funerals and weddings and war blessings, and all other holy occasions. It was the rhythmic chanting of her girlhood, the sound that kept the monsters in the dark at bay.

  Platters of silver and gold were brought forward; on these were heaped foodstuffs of all kinds.

  “Anything will power the converter, it has no taste buds, it’s a machine,” Tol’zen said. “But for religious reasons, they like to make sure it’s fed only the good stuff.”

  The eyes of the dragon head flashed, then shone like beacons. The great jaws worked, and the mouth opened, wide, wider. Pashera gasped. The mouth extended down to a throat. The throat seemed to be a ring or circle of fire, pulsing like a living thing. The flames reached back toward a dark, black center, a thing so black it hurt her eyes to look at it directly.

  Even from her far perch, Pashera could see incense smoke from thuribles at either side of the mouth sucked into the throat. A strange wind stirred in the crater, as the black gullet of the Devouring God drained the very atmosphere from the chamber, and a wind howled down through the volcano mouth to replace it.

  The platters were emptied into baskets, then two burly acolytes picked up the baskets and marched down steps in the mouth of the dragon head. Each acolyte wore a harness with a stout chain attached to the back; this chain was played out and reeled back every time they made the trip down the mouth. At the entrance to the throat, the acolytes touched the baskets to the black spot in the center of the circle of flame. The baskets were sucked in, spinning and swirling around before vanishing into the blackness. Pashera rubbed her eyes. The offerings seemed to compress and squeeze into an impossibly small space before vanishing.

  With each offering, the eyes of the Devouring God flared and blazed brighter.

  “Are they? Oh, that’s sad,” Tol’zen said. “I’ve tried to put a stop to this. But it’s not my turn to make the rules, not yet.”

  Pashera turned to see what he was talking about. Two old human slaves, a man and a woman, both wearing shimmery white robes, were brought forward. The old man walked under his own power, the old woman had to be dragged. The old man tried to stop and comfort her, but his handlers pushed him back on the path.

  Down the stairs on the tongue they marched. At the gullet, the handlers waved the old man to stop, and they went and pushed the woman head-first into the blackness. She still managed a scream before it was choked off. Her body spun frantically, and blood would have sprayed forth, but every drop was sucked down into the ring of fire.

  The old man looked at his captors and said something. Pashera wished she could hear what it was. Then he went forward and stuck his head into the gullet of the Devouring God.

  She suspected the brave fool tried not to scream. But it was impossible. He couldn’t get his head inside fast enough to stop a wail from ripping out of his lungs and echoing through the chamber. His body spun like the other, compressed, and then disappeared.

  “Five times a day this happens,” Tol’zen said to her. He put his hands on her shoulders. She tried not to tremble but failed. “They don’t need to put that much into it. Sure, there’s energy storage, down deep in the belly of the mountain. But it’s just a machine. It can run on a lot less. Their religion, though dictates that they feed it five times a day. So they do. And it’s just a machine.”

  He was quiet for a minute.

  “Do you still believe in your Devouring God?” he asked.

  “I don’t know what I believe in any more.”

  He rubbed her shoulder tenderly. She fell into his arms and he hugged her. “I’m sorry to shatter your illusions,” he said.

  “In a city this cruel, I shouldn’t have any,” she replied.

  He looked at her. “Guadalquivir CAN be cruel. And thanks to Kro’tos and his ilk, it is. But it needn’t be. Big changes are coming. You wait and see.”

  “Do YOU believe in any god?” she asked.

  Tol’zen sighed and looked up, as if giving it hard consideration. “I believe in something,” he said finally. “We haven’t found it yet. But there are all the clues.”

  “What clues.”

  “Well, for example, billions of years ago, another planet smashed into our world; we know this from the geological record,” he said. “The debris from that collision formed the moon. The
moon, due to its position and the effect its gravity has on our world, makes life here possible. Could that be a coincidence?

  “And I’ll tell you another thing,” he said. “The moon is just the right size to eclipse the sun, if you observe the process from our world. As if someone wanted us to be scientists. That’s pretty interesting, too.

  “And then there’s the little matter of atmosphere. The original atmosphere of this world was poisonous. Again, it’s a matter of geologic record. But it changed into something we can breathe. Without that change, life as we know it couldn’t exist here.”

  “Billions of years ago?” Pashera’s mind boggled again. That length of time was just too big for her to comprehend.

  “It does seem like an awfully long time -- for us,” Tol’zen said. “But maybe not for a god. On the other hand, a god that requires us to feed him off a silver platter and repeat empty gestures five times a day? Ha!”

  He turned and led her back to the lava tube. “Now that I’ve shown you something horrible, let me show you something wonderful.”

  Through lava tubes, old, forgotten corridors, and up and down countless stairs and slippery paths, Tol’zen led her on a circuitous path. Once, he stopped by what seemed like an abandoned closet and found a green smock with clippers and a trowel still in the pockets. “This is a gardener’s coverall, put it on,” he said. ‘If anyone asks, you’re on your way to the rose garden.”

  “Which rose garden?”

  “Any rose garden.”

  They tip-toed past a room where slaves seemed to be loafing and avoiding duties. Beyond that, Tol’zen found a cart filled with black robes. “This one’s clean enough,” he said. “Is there a hat? Oh yes, that will do.” So, now that he was disguised as an acolyte and she as a gardener, they walked more boldly to get to his mysterious destination.

  “You there,” a commanding voice called. Tol’zen would have walked on, but Pashera stopped. Too late, she realized her mistake. They waited, Pashera looking at the ground, Tol’zen looking around with a miffed air.

  “I need a slave for some work,” said the tall, fat, gruff-looking saurian who stumped up to Tol’zen.

  “She has an assignment in the rose garden,” Tol’zen said. “Get another.”

  “Assignment. What assignment? Do you know who I am? And who are you, anyway?”

  Tol’zen made a sign in the air, the other saurian seemed to shrink back. “This has been willed where what is willed must be,” Tol’zen said loftily.

  The other saurian looked shocked. “You don’t say. Err ...”

  “No more delays,” Tol’zen said, and taking Pashera’s elbow, he marched her off.

  When they had gone around the corner, Tol’zen exhaled. “That was close.”

  “What did you …”

  “I told him we were on assignment from the Sacred See,” he said, “the high priest. What’s more, I implied it was a religious compulsion, not just a task.

  “Luckily,” Tol’zen said. “It appears the priests of the Devouring God are as gullible as any of their true believers.”

  They traveled through dusty corridors again. “No guards,” Tol’zen said. “That’s pretty slack. Still, it makes it easier.”

  Around one more corner, and they came upon a cavern hewn in the wall. This seemed to have a glass front on it. Pashera looked through the glass.

  She could not comprehend what she was seeing. And then she could. And the knowledge of what lay beyond the glass sent a shiver up her spine.

  “Is that …” she said, and stopped.

  “A dragon, yes,” Tol’zen said. “The last dragon.”

  The brownish creature lay curled up, sleeping like a cat. Its leathery wings were tucked around it, but the giant head, wedge-shaped, covered in shiny scales and with a mouth that ran most of the length of its face, made its identity obvious. The mouth was big enough to swallow several men at once. A barbed tail wrapped around the dragon, completing the cat-like picture.

  The giant nostrils flickered, moisture from its breath appeared briefly on the glass before disappearing.

  “It sleeps,” Pashera said. “It’s not dead.”

  “No, though it’s a close thing,” Tol’zen said.

  He explained that the dragons, the sacred symbols of Guadalquivir, were never numerous. They were hard to breed – they seemed to prefer fighting to mating.

  Most of the remaining dragons had died in the calamity of the last Great Cycle. A few had lived on, but finally only this one remained.

  “Now it sleeps forever,” Tol’zen said. “It’s the same technique our ancestors used when they went to the stars. The heartbeat is greatly slowed down, and the life is extended for a very long time.

  “There is a prophecy that when this last dragon wakes, that will signal the final doom for Guadalquivir. There’s a poem about it. It goes something like …

  “Hark, what beats in the distance

  War drums, no! They would be welcome

  This is the beat of dragon’s wings

  This is the beat of our doom.

  Oh Guadalquivir, cry for your children

  What terrible hour comes round at last.”

  He paused, as if planning to continue, then smiled.

  “There’s a lot more to it, but that’s all I remember,” Tol’zen said.

  They looked at in silence. “Dragons don’t breathe fire,” he said. “But I think flying is enough of a feat for something so big.

  “They DO, however expel gasses that are flammable,” he continued. “Methane, mostly. It’s the methane that makes them so buoyant. Methane is lighter than air.

  “But you should really see them fly. The next time you use the Sumsentia, look it up. I remember seeing a recording of them flying, when I was a child.”

  “I’ll look for it,” Pashera said. “I want to do more research into Guadalquivir’s past, anyway.”

  “Do not, however, look up the recording for ‘two females, one cup,’ Tol’zen said. “Trust me, there are some things you can’t unsee.”

  “I trust you,” Pashera said. And she did.

  “Can we touch it?” Pashera said. She felt a strange compulsion to be near the giant creature.

  “I know they go in and shine the scales; let’s see.”

  They looked around for a door, found one, but it was locked. Tol’zen rattled it. It didn’t budge. He rattled it louder.

  “TOL’ZEN!” Pashera hissed. She grabbed his arm and pointed.

  On the other side of the cage, the dragon had opened one enormous orange eye. It focused on them … but no, it closed again.

  Tol’zen expelled a great breath of air. “Maybe we’ll let the sleeping dragon lie,” he said.

  They left the chamber. “Do we have to walk all the way down the mountain?” Pashera asked. “Can we eat first?”

  “No, silly girl, we’ll take the tram. And they sell food on it, you’ll see.” He saw the look on her face. ‘Oh, for pity’s sake, have an apple.” He handed her one of the delicious golden fruit. She devoured it greedily. Energy flowed back into her body; so much so that her eyelids fluttered.

  “Tram” was one of those new words that popped into Pashera’s head; it meant a metal box that moved on rails. That was fine with her. They arrived back in the more populated areas of the temple. There seemed to be some hub-bub up ahead. “That’s the tram station,” Tol’zen said. They looked closer. They could see the large, fat, gruff-looking saurian they had crossed paths with earlier seemed to be ordering armed men around.

  Suddenly he saw them, too. “There they are!” the tall saurian said. “Seize them!”

  Quick as a wink, Tol’zen seized Pashera’s arm and dragged her back down the corridor. They flew through dusty passageways, along rusty metal walkways through giant, open spaces, and finally into caves that stretched away into darkness. Tol’zen ditched his robe and hat, and indicated that Pashera drop her outfit as well.

  Finally, they seemed to lose their pursuers. Another
corridor led them outside. They were among the sloped ruins of long-abandoned buildings.

  “Where are we now?” Pashera said.

  “I have no idea,” Tol’zen said. He looked around. “Uskquaevir, I expect.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Ruins that are directly below and adjacent to the Temple of the Devouring God,” he said. “It was abandoned in the Last Great Cycle. This is where the Star-Kin cult was making preparations for the ‘Reunion.’ The Star Temple itself was used only for ceremonial occasions; that’s why it’s still standing. When our people rose up, they marched up here to Uskquaevir and threw the Star priests out of windows and off of rooftops. They smashed everything. Absolutely everything.”

  And sure enough, the pathways between the buildings were a bumpy collection of hillocks and pits. Where dirt had washed away, Pashera saw rubble underneath.

  “Are there creatures here?” she asked. “Dangerous ones?”

  “Probably,” Tol’zen said. “Look, let’s just find the tram line – there it is. And we’ll follow it down.”

  Over one rolling hillock after another, past broken windows that gaped mysteriously, he led her to stone pylons that marched up the hillside. Rails ran on top of the pylons.

  “Let’s make haste while we still have light,” he said. “Next stop is the Time Fortress. We can find transport there.”

  As they walked quickly along, Pashera found a solid-looking stick and picked it up for a club. Tol’zen thought she was being paranoid and told her so. But the forest blood coursing through her veins told that eyes were on her back.

  A tram rumbled by overhead. They kept walking. The sun began to set, and the gloom of twilight deepened. Pashera’s stomach rumbled.

  “Hey!” someone shouted. It was very far away.

  Pashera looked around. She didn’t see anything.

  “Hey!”

  Tol’zen heard it too. He looked around and uttered an oath.

  “What’s wrong?” she said.

  “Doom callers!” Tol’zen said through gritted teeth. He looked at a nearby pylon. “Perhaps we can climb.”

  “Hey-hey-hey!” there were multiple voices, and louder. It seemed to be coming both from up the hill and to their left.