Under his cynosure, the thing turned its head, swinging it on a sinuous neck, and brought a steely eye to bear on Flint. No figure of speech; the surface of the eyeball shone like polished metal.
Tame? Flint was reminded of the time he had looked the trapped dinosaur, Old Snort, in the eye. This dragon-creature held him in contempt. Flint’s gut level reaction was to view this as a challenge.
Flint stepped up close and extended one hand. “Don’t touch it!” the Ambassador cried with the same alarmed tone of his warning about the snuffbox—again, too late. Flint placed his right hand on the massive snout, firmly. The dragon swelled up. visibly at this indignity. A kind of furnace-roaring emanated from its belly. Its nose became burning hot. A puff of steam jetted from its nostrils, heating Flint’s slippered toes. But Flint stood firm, staring the beast down, and after a moment the dragon broke the contact.
The Ambassador gaped. “That was very chancy,” he said, wiping perspiration—or perhaps it was condensed steam—from his brow. “They’re tame—but not pets. They tolerate the harness because they like to run, but only a given dragon’s master may touch it about the head. If the master dies, the dragon usually has to be destroyed, lest it run wild. You must have the eye of a charioteer. The locally fabled gaze of command. It’s rare.”
Flint shrugged. He knew it had not been his gaze but his touch that had daunted the dragon. He was familiar with this type of creature, so had respect without fear—but more than that, he had the Kirlian aura with special intensity. And so did the dragon. Animals, like men, possessed it, usually of indifferent intensity but highly variable. And a high-intensity creature responded to Flint’s aura in much the way Flint himself had responded to the aura of Pnotl of Sphere Knyfh. There was now a mutual respect between man and dragon.
Flint mounted the chariot and took the reins. A tiny twitch put the dragon in motion. “Don’t let it go too fast,” a voice said.
Flint glanced about, but there was no one. “Where are you?” He believed in dragons, but not in ghosts.
“Here. It’s the Ambassador. I’m using the radio.”
The voice was in his own skull. “I’ll keep it in mind. The dragon’s not going to wreck himself.”
The countryside was hardly visible at night, just a varied mat of vegetation, as on Outworld, the way a planet should be. Flint looked at the sky again, feeling nostalgic. He saw the tenuous cloud of the Milky Way, and the large faint patch of Galaxy Andromeda to the side, just as they were in the sky of Outworld. He pondered the notion that all his adventures stemmed from the malign influence of that distant cluster of stars.
He looked across to Etamin again, halfway around the sky. Home, so far away! What was Honeybloom doing now? Was the Shaman looking this way?
The dragon did know the way. It found its dragon-path and put on speed, spreading its vestigial wings for additional stability when banking around turns. The white steam jetting out from its nostrils puffed into the sky and drifted back, bathing Flint in its warm aroma. He knew that steam was invisible; this was merely the condensation of water droplets as the breath cooled. Small matter; it was pleasant being a dragonmaster, and he urged the creature on. This was an attitude it appreciated, for it responded with a burst of speed that had the chariot wheels bouncing over the irregularities of the trail. Now it was a high-velocity ride, but Flint gave the animal free play. The chariot shook so hard it seemed ready to fly apart, and Flint reveled in the sensation. Was this what it was like to be a god, coursing through the sky?
Yet he wondered. Why had the Queen provided an unchaperoned dragon for the visitor? A soft, civilized man like the Ambassador could have been injured or even killed. Was she testing him? He grinned in the dark as the waves of vapor blew out his hair. If the Queen were curious about the mettle of Outworld, she would learnt.
In due course they steamed into the palace demesne. There were a cluster of buildings and appurtenances, ornate affairs with columns and turrets and arches and flying buttresses—probably a mishmash of Earthly medieval architecture. What sort of buildings had resulted when the pleasantly primitive Goths become Gothic architects? This was the physical manifestation of cultural regression toward the fringe of the civilized Sphere. It was the same for all Spheres, whatever sapient species controlled them, for there was a built-in limitation—the lack of energy. With unlimited energy, all the Spheres could have been maintained at the highest level of civilization. Maybe it was really a blessing, for galactic conquest would become possible, and there were many creatures more advanced than humans. But as it was, many Spheres could flourish and their outer reaches had to fade. In no case was history reenacted; the technical approximation was echoed by culture. Where rapiers were the most advanced weapons, etiquette honored the proficient swordsman. The guidance of Earth history helped set the patterns, but this was a very general thing, with anomalies the rule. So there was no firm guide to the authenticity of the palace. The palace was what it was, and that was by local definition correct.
“Rogue dragon!” someone screamed as they slammed into the terminal. Men scurried about, spreading out a huge net with which to snare the rampant beast. But Flint smiled, and drew in on the reins gently. The dragon screeched to a stop precisely on target, its giant claws chiseling furrows out of the packed dirt. Flint dismounted in a cloud of steam and dust, gave the dragon a comradely pat on the nose, and marched regally into the main gate.
A shaken flunky took his name and planet, and another led away the dragon, who gave Flint another brief but meaningful glance. The rapport of Kirlians operated independently of species or intellect. Right now Flint had other things to do, but he would come to see the dragon again. He preferred its company to that of ordinary human beings.
And where there was one high-Kirlian animal, there might be others. Were all dragons like this here, or just this one? Probably no animals had been measured for this quality; few natives understood the nature of the regular Imperial surveys. Flint had been ignorant as a child and young warrior. Now he understood the secret of much of his success as a hunter on Outworld, and perhaps as a flintsmith too. Some animals and even some objects possessed auras, and he had unconsciously related to these.
“Ooooh, there’s a handsome one,” a female voice remarked as he entered the gate.
Flint picked out the owner of that voice. It was a girl—like none he had seen before. Her face was pretty, and her breasts were astonishingly uplifted and full, seeming about to burst out of harness, but the rest of her was grotesque. Her arms were grossly bloated to the wrists, and her hips jutted out at right angles into a posterior like an overgrown swamp hummock, a massive mound dropping vertically to the floor. Two pegs protruded from that voluminous skirt, and Flint realized these were her slippered feet. And her face and hands and the alarming cleavage of her bosom were light blue.
“Haven’t you seen a woman before?” she inquired.
“Don’t stare,” the voice in his skull said. It was the Ambassador, on the job. “I can’t look through your eyes, but I’m assuming from the voice that you’ve just met one of the palace escorts, a handmaiden to the Queen. She—”
“Shut up,” Flint mumbled, not pleased to have had this encounter intercepted.
The blue girl gave him an arch glance. “Well!”
“Not you,” Flint said quickly. “I was addressing my beating heart. I have not before observed such beauty.” The Shaman would not have approved of such a lie, but it seemed necessary.