“I’m alive.”

She helped me to my feet. I saw that only a few moments had passed. The big lizard was now nothing more than a huge mound of brightly colored scales stretched out across the grass.

The crew of slaves, however, was something 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.”