“IN ALL MY JOURNEYS ACROSS THESE DESERTS, I HAVE SEEN NOTHING to compare with it,” Dornvald said. “It is as unknown as the dragons that have appeared in the sky. What advice have you to offer, Riddle-Seeker, for no experience of mine can guide us now?”
“Nor any of mine,” Thirg replied. “But it would seem possible that the dragons and this latest conundrum are related one to another, for have they not chosen to announce themselves in quick succession? And do we not see again the radiance that comes with heat hotter than the heat that melts ice? We have seen the dragons, and now, methinks, we have found the dragons’ lair.”
The column had halted among rock and ice boulders on the edge of a low scarp, below which the ground fell for a distance into a wide depression and then climbed again toward a shallow saddle-shaped rise flanked on either side by steeper, broken slopes and crags. The obvious way ahead lay over the rise, but a strange violet radiance, similar to the slender cones thrown by the flying creatures earlier but less sharply defined, lit the skyline above and seemed to come from something just out of sight. The welders and laser cutters in the forest produced the same kind of light at their working points, as did some of the forms ejected by furnaces and other beings that lived at great heat.
“What manner of greeting would dragons reserve for strangers venturing upon their land?” Dornvald asked. “Do they show their light as a beacon of welcome to weary travelers or as a warning of trespass? Are we therefore to ignore their hospitality with disdain or ignore their warning with contempt, for we know not which course risks giving the lesser offense?”
Thirg stared at the strange glow for a while. “My recollections of Xerxeon are that we feared more for our lives from those of our own kind than from any dragons,” he said. “And it seems to me that any dragon with power to command the light that melts steel could have rid itself of us all long before now if its inclinations so directed. But words will not suffice to resolve this. I would propose therefore, with your approval, Wisher-Not-to-Offend-Dragons, that I ride on ahead to conduct the examination which alone will set the matter finally to rest.”
“Ahah!” Dornvald exclaimed. “So does your compulsion to seek answers drive you irresistibly even now, when dismantling at the hands of enraged dragons might well be the price if your judgment is mistaken?”
“I would know simply which path we are to take,” Thirg replied. “Might we not all face dismantling anyway as a consequence of choosing blindly? The risk is none the greater and more likely less, for what dragon of any self-respect would deign prey upon one lone rider when it spurns to molest a whole company as unbecoming of its dignity?”
“Hmm.” Dornvald thought the proposition over. “Such is not any duty that you owe, Dignifier-of-Dragons, for was it not I who brought you to this place? Any self-respecting leader of outlaws has his dignity too. I will go.”
“You would be more needed here than I, if my judgment should indeed prove mistaken,” Thirg pointed out. “For what is of more worth to the robeings behind us—the leader they have followed faithfully, or a dabbler-in-riddles who knows not even the direction that would lead them out of the Meracasine? I say I will go.”
“A plague of oxidization on the both of you!” Geynor said as he drew up alongside them. “The one is needed to answer riddles, and the other is needed to lead. I will go.”
Before they could argue further, the pounding of hooves sounded from behind. Seconds later Fenyig, who had been riding well back from the main body as lookout, came into view and galloped by the waiting riders to come to a halt at the head of the column. “King’s soldiers!” he announced. “Flying the pennant of Horazzorgio—two dozen or more, with chariots.”
“How far?” Dornvald snapped.
“A mile or less, and closing rapidly. They must have stayed on the move all through dark.”
“How are they armed?”
“Heavily—three fireball-throwers at least.”
“The villagers of Xerxeon are determined to have their sacrifice, it seems,” Dornvald said. “They must have told of our direction.” He looked quickly once more over the terrain ahead. There would be no escape on the flat, open area stretching away to right and left since the wheeled tractors that pulled the chariots and fireball-throwers would outrun mounted robeings, and there was ample space for the King’s soldiery to maneuver their superior force freely. The only chance was to make the rugged, broken country beyond the rise, where the going would be slow for vehicles and where riders venturing ahead could be picked off from ambush. “Our choices have become Horazzorgio on the one hand, or dragons on the other,” Dornvald declared. “One demon I have met and know well; the other I know not. On what I know, I would have us cast our lot with the latter.”
“Methinks we would be well advised,” Geynor agreed.
“Then our dispute is resolved,” Dornvald said, looking from Geynor to Thirg. “We all shall go.” And louder, to the rear, “Forward to yonder rise, and at speed! He who fears light in the sky has no place behind me, but among the groveling farmers of Xerxeon. If dragons would contest our way then so be it, but let it not be us who show their weapons first. Forward!”
“All units standing by, ready to fire,” a British subaltern’s voice reported to Colonel Wallis on the radio. “A.P. missiles locked and tracking.”
“Status of remote-controlled gunships?” Wallis inquired crisply.
“Standing by for launch, sir,” another voice confirmed.
“Defenses ready,” Wallis advised Giraud, who was now outside and standing at the center of the waiting reception party.
A moment of silence dragged by. Then the captain’s voice came from inside the ship. “Ship One to Surface One. It doesn’t seem to be an attack. In fact I’m not convinced they even know we’re here at all. They started off fast just after their tail-end-Charlie arrived up front. It looks more like they’re trying to lose that other bunch behind them.”
“Surface Two to forward observation post. Do you see evidence of weapons or hostile intent?”
“Negative, sir.”
“We’ll sit tight and see,” Giraud’s voice said. “Hold it for now.”
“All units, hold your fire,” Wallis instructed.
On the screen of his wristset, Zambendorf followed the progress of the Taloids coming up the far side of the rise. It was unbelievable—clothed robots sitting astride four-legged, galloping machines, now only a few hundred yards away.
“Do you see them?” Thirg called as Dornvald glanced back. Thirg was having enough trouble clinging to the madly heaving mount beneath him as it tackled the steepening rise, without daring to turn his own head.
“Just coming out onto the flat,” Dornvald shouted back. “At least we’re on” the open ground. We should gain more distance now.”
“There are heat lights shining from places above us on both sides,” Geynor called from Dornvald’s other side.
“I see them.”
“What manner of thing shines thus in the desert?”
“Who knows what guards the lair of dragons?”
Dornvald, Thirg, and Geynor reached the top of the rise together with Rex whirring excitedly a few yards behind, and plunged on over its rounded crest. An instant later they had crashed to a stunned halt, their mounts rearing and bucking. The remaining outlaws stopped in confusion behind as they appeared in ones and twos over the hill.
Before them, towering proudly inside a halo of almost brilliant dragon light, was the King of Dragons, attended by servants lined up before it in humble reverence. It was smooth and elongated, and had tapered limbs—much like the dragon that had appeared over Xerxeon, but far larger. Its eyes shone like fires of violet, but it made no move as it stood, watching silently. Thirg could do nothing but stare, dumbfounded, while Dornvald and Geynor gazed at the Dragon King in wonder. Rex was backing away slowly, and behind them several of the outlaws had dismounted and fallen to their knees.
Then Thirg realized that one of the dragon’s servants was beckoning with both arms in slow, deliberate movements that seemed to be trying to convey reassurance. The servants were not robeings as he had first thought, he saw now; they were of roughly similar shape, but constructed not of metal but some soft, bendable casing more like artificial organics from artisans’ plantations...like children’s dolls. What manner, then, of artificial beings were these? Had the Dragon King manufactured them to attend its needs? If so, what awesome, unimaginable powers did it command?
The servant beckoned again. For a few seconds longer, Thirg hesitated. Then he realized the futility of even thinking to disobey; who could hope to defy the wishes of one with such powers? Without quite realizing what he was doing, Thirg urged his mount forward once more at a slow walk and entered the circle of violet radiance. Nothing terrible happened, and after exchanging apprehensive glances, Dornvald and Geynor followed him. The others watched from farther back, and one by one found the courage to move forward. Those on the ground rose slowly. Then Fenyig, who was standing with the rearguard on the top of the rise behind and looking back anxiously called, “Pray to the dragon to protect us, Dornvald. The soldiers are below already, and almost upon us.”
No sooner had he shouted his warning when the first missile from a fireball-thrower sailed over the ridge and splattered itself across an ice boulder. The second hit one of the pack steeds squarely, and the animal fell screeching with its midbody engulfed in violet flames. On the rise, Fenyig and his companions scattered amid a hail of projectiles hurled from below, one of them slumping forward with a corrosive dart protruding from his shoulder. More balls fell, and one of them ignited something metallic halfway up one of the overlooking slopes.
“Number two searchlight emplacement hit!” a voice shouted over the radio. “No casualties.”
“Near miss on Yellow Sector. We’ve got equipment burning from splashes of incendiary.”
Another ball landed just in front of the assembled reception party, which broke ranks and fell back toward the lander in alarm. “That one almost got the ship!” a voice yelled.
“Colonel Wallis, engage with maximum force in the approach zone,” Giraud ordered.
“All forward units, fire for effect! Launch gunships and engage enemy below point three-seven hundred!”
Thirg whirled to look behind as a thundering roar erupted suddenly from below the rise, mixed with a hail of chattering, loud swishing sounds, and deafening concussions. More roars came from overhead. He looked up. Two of the small dragons were climbing; then violet-flaming darts streaked down and out of view, and an instant later more concussions from beyond the rise jarred his ears. He had never in his life experienced anything like this. His senses reeled. He sat frozen, his body and his mind paralyzed by terror.
And then all was quiet. He looked around fearfully. Dornvald and Geynor were sitting petrified where they had been before the thunder. Farther back, Fenyig and the rearguard were motionless, staring back down the rise. They seemed bewildered. Thirg looked at Dornvald. Dornvald shook his head uncomprehendingly, and after a few more seconds called back, “What terrifies you so, Fenyig? What has happened?”
At first Thirg thought Fenyig hadn’t heard. Then Fenyig turned his head slowly, raised an arm to point back the way they had come, and answered in an unsteady voice, “The King’s soldiers have been destroyed, Dornvald...Every one of the soldiers is destroyed—torn to pieces and smitten by dragon fire...in a moment.”
“A storm of lightning bolts!” another, just before Fenyig, choked hoarsely. “We saw it. The whole of the King’s army would have fared no better, nor even twelve-twelves of armies.” He looked at Thirg. “What league have you entered into, Sorcerer?”
The servants who had retreated to the dragon for protection were advancing again, and the stunned outlaws were slowly returning to life. More servants were appearing from concealment on the slopes above—there were more of them than Thirg had realized. Although still shaken, he was beginning to feel that the worst was over, as if they had passed a kind of test. For he had seen the awesome anger of the dragon, and the dragon had spared them. Perhaps, then, only those foolish enough to provoke its anger had reason to fear it, Thirg thought. He looked at it again. Still it stood watching calmly, as if nothing had happened. Had disposing of a whole company of King’s soldiers really been so effortless and insignificant as that?
The other outlaws seemed to be arriving at similar conclusions. Dornvald had dismounted and was cautiously leading his mount toward the central group of servants, and Geynor was following suit a few yards behind. The servants seemed to be encouraging them with arm motions and gestures. Thirg noticed a movement just to one side and turned his head with a start to find a servant standing close below, with another watching from nearby. A feeling of revulsion swept over him as he glimpsed the grotesque features glowing softly behind the window-face of the head that was not a head—a deformed parody of a face, molded into a formless mass that writhed and quivered like the jelly in a craftsman’s culture vat. Luminous jelly held together by flexible casing! Had the Dragon King made its servants thus as a punishment? Thirg hoped that his thoughts and feelings didn’t show.
Zambendorf gazed up incredulously at the silver-gray colossus staring down at him from its incongruous seat. It had two oval matrixes that suggested compound eyes shaded by complicated delicate, extendable metal vanes, a pair of protruding concave surfaces that were probably soundwave collectors, and more openings and louvers about its lower face, possibly inlet/outlet ducts for coolant gas. It had nothing comparable to a mouth, but the region below its head, which was supported by a neck of multiple, sliding, overlapping joints, was recessed and contained an array of flaps and covers. The robot was wearing a brown tunic of coarse material woven from what appeared to be wire, a heavy belt of black metallic braid, boots of what looked like rubberized canvas, and a voluminous dull red riding cloak made up of thousands of interlocked, rigid platelets. Its hands consisted of three fingers and an opposing thumb, all formed from multisegmented concave claws connected by ball joints at the finger-bases and wrists. A smaller machine, suggesting in every way a ridiculous mechanical dog, stayed well back, keeping the steed between itself and the humans.
What kind of brain the creature contained, Zambendorf didn’t know, but he felt it had to be something beyond any technology even remotely imaginable on Earth. And yet, paradoxically, the culture of the Taloids showed every appearance of being backward by Earth standards—medieval, in fact. And everything that Zambendorf saw now confirmed that conclusion. So what would a medieval mind have made of the army’s recent performance? He examined the robot’s face for a hint of bemusement or terror, but saw nothing he could interpret. The face seemed incapable of expression.
“I still don’t believe this, Karl,” Abaquaan’s voice whispered in his helmet, for once sounding genuinely stupefied. “What kind of machines are they? Where could they have come from?”
Still awestruck, Zambendorf moved a pace forward. “It seems to want to say something,” he murmured distantly without taking his eyes off the robot. “But it makes no move. Does it fear us. Otto?”
“Wouldn’t you, after what just happened to that other bunch?” Abaquaan said, beginning to sound more normal.
To one side, in an attempt to convey reassurance, Charles Giraud and Konrad Seltzman, a linguist, were gesticulating at two robots who had dismounted, but without much apparent success. Maybe the robots hadn’t realized that they were safe from their pursuers—some of them kept looking back, as if they still thought they were likely to be attacked. Zambendorf thought he could do something about that. He operated the channel selector on his wristset to display the view from over the rise being picked up by an image-intensifying camera in the army’s forward observation post, and raised his arm so that the robot could see the screen. The robot looked at his arm for a second or two, moved its head to glance at his face, and then studied his arm again. Zambendorf pointed to the wristset with his other hand.
Why did the servant wear a small vegetable on his arm, and why was he showing it? Thirg wondered. Perhaps it was an indication of rank or status. No, that wasn’t it; the servant wanted him to look at it. He looked. Shapes were visible in the square of violet light, faint and difficult to distinguish in the glare. Thirg adjusted his vision to the nearest he could manage to dragon light and stared for awhile before he realized what he was seeing. It was a view looking out over the open ground they had crossed back beyond the rise. Piles of debris were scattered here and there and lots of buckled and twisted machine parts spread over a wide area, with violet glows and obscuring patches of smoke hanging above...And then Thirg gasped as he realized what it meant. Now he understood what devastating powers Fenyig had been trying to describe. In those few brief seconds...and there was nothing left. Then it came to Thirg slowly that the servant was trying to show how the dragon had helped them.
But what form of magic vegetable was this, that could see through a hillside? Thirg looked at the servant, and then turned his head several times to look back at the rise, just to be sure he was not mistaken.
Zambendorf felt a surge of elation. Something that they both recognized as having meaning had passed between him and the robot. “It understands!” he said excitedly. “Rudimentary, but it’s communication! It’s a beginning, Otto!”
“Are you sure?”
“I showed it the scene from over the hill. It understood. It’s trying to ask me to confirm that it’s seeing what it thinks it’s seeing.”
Abaquaan motioned for the robot to climb down from its mount, and after a few seconds of hesitation it complied. Then it gestured at Zambendorf’s wristset some more, and held up a hand and began pointing at it repeatedly first from the front and then from the back, and in between pointing back at the rise. “It can’t make it out,” Abaquaan said. “It can’t figure how the picture could be coming through solid ground from behind the hill.”
The robot was mystified and curious. Suddenly much about it seemed less strange. Zambendorf could feel himself warming toward it already. “I’m sorry, but how could I even begin to explain the technology, my friend?” he said. “For now, I’m afraid, you’ll just have to accept it as magic.”
“Try getting the idea of a camera across,” Abaquaan suggested. “At least it would say we’re not actually looking through the hill from here.”
“Mmm...maybe.” Zambendorf switched the wristset to another channel, this time showing a view of the lander and its immediate surroundings from the drone hovering above the landing site.
It took Thirg a while to comprehend that he was looking down on the Dragon King now. Then it came to him with a jolt that the dots to one side of the dragon were the dragon-servants and robeings around him; in fact one of them was himself! He looked at the servant and pointed down at the ground, then up at the sky. The servant confirmed by mimicking him. Thirg tilted his head back to peer upward, and after searching for a few seconds made out a pinpoint of violet light hanging high overhead. Could the servant’s magic vegetable see through the eyes of the flying dragons? But that meant that a mere servant who possessed such a vegetable could send his eyes anywhere in the world and see all that happened without moving from one place. If the dragon bestowed such powers upon its servants, what unimaginable abilities did it possess itself?
Zambendorf could sense the robot’s awe as it finally made out what the screen was showing. He switched from the drone’s telescopic channel to a lower resolution, wide-angle view. The screen now displayed a much broader area of terrain, with the lander barely discernible as a speck in the center. After more pointing and gesticulating, the robot seemed to get the idea. Zambendorf switched to a high-altitude reconnaissance flyer circling just below the aerosol layer, whose cameras covered several hundred miles of the surrounding desert and a large tract of the mountainous region beyond its edge. Then the robot started making excited gestures, pointing upward again with its arm extended as far as it would stretch. “Higher! Higher!” It was important. The robot seemed to be going frantic.
Zambendorf frowned and turned his head inside his helmet to look at Abaquaan. Abaquaan returned a puzzled look and shrugged. Zambendorf stared at the robot, tilted himself back ponderously to follow its pointing finger upward for a few seconds, and then looked at its face again. Then, suddenly, he understood. “Of course!” he exclaimed, and changed bands to connect the wristset through to an image being picked up from orbit by the Orion and sent down in the trunk beam to the surface lander via a relay satellite.
Giraud and the others had noticed what was going on and were gathering round to watch curiously. “What’s happening with this guy?” one of the group asked.
“What lies beyond the clouds has always been a mystery to its race,” Zambendorf replied. “It’s asking me if that is where we come from, and whether we can tell it what’s out there and what kind of world it lives on. They’ve never even seen the sky, don’t forget, let alone been able to observe the motions of stars and planets.”
“You mean you could get all that from just a few gestures?” Konrad Seltzman sounded incredulous.
“Of course not,” Zambendorf replied airily. “I have no need of such crude methods.”
But beside them, Thirg had almost forgotten for the moment that the dragon-servants existed as he stood staring without moving. For he was seeing his world for the first time as it looked from beyond the sky.
It was a sphere.
And behind it, scattered across distances he had no way of estimating, were more shining worlds than he knew even how to count.