"Hey, I'm just a waiter," Royd said, staring with suitable nervousness at the guns. He'd been holding the tray vertically in front of him, concealing the dart pistol clutched in his right hand; now he lifted the tray to a waist-high horizontal position, bringing the gun invisibly to bear on one of the guards. "I just came by to pick up any dishes that Dragonmaster Grail might need washed."
"Anyone send for you? No? Then scram."
"Yes, sir." Gently, Royd squeezed the trigger, turning the tray and gun slightly. The drug was supposed to act almost instantly to paralyze the nervous system—if the darts penetrated the guards' clothing, that is. He fired again. "I just thought—"
Without a word, the first man crumpled to the ground. The other wasted his last second gaping in bewilderment, then he too collapsed.
Royd dropped the tray and snatched up one of the rifles, shoving his dart gun back in his waistband. He tried the door; it was locked. Stepping back, he raised the rifle and gave the lock a full second on automatic. The wood and metal shattered, and a single kick sent it swinging inward. Royd charged in as the hall behind him filled up with the raucous clang of alarm bells.
The room he had entered was an anteroom of sorts, with three other doors heading inward from it. A saucer-eyed woman sat frozen at a desk by one of the doors, her fingers still poised over her scriber. Keeping his gun pointed toward the doors, Royd snapped, "Where is he?"
She might have been carved from stone. Cursing under his breath, Royd studied the doors. Barely visible under the leftmost was a thin line of light. He strode to it, wrenched it open, and stepped in, rifle at the ready.
Sitting at a desk in the center of a luxuriously furnished office, his eyebrows raised quizzically, was Dragonmaster Harun Grail. Royd raised his rifle. "Don't move, Grail."
The Dragonmaster's gaze never faltered. "You've got exactly one second to put that gun down before I call out my dragon," he said with icy calmness.
"Don't waste your breath on bluffs; I know better. Neither of your dragons is small enough to fit in a room this size. You're all alone now."
"All right." Grail's tone hadn't changed. "What do you want?"
"Your life."
"Why?"
He was stalling for time, Royd knew; waiting for reinforcements to arrive. "Ask the devil," he retorted.
"You can't escape," Grail pointed out. "Soldiers are on their way right now."
"That doesn't matter. What matters is that Rosette will be free again once you're dead."
"You're a fool if you believe that."
Royd opened his mouth to reply, but just then he heard the sound of running feet out in the hall. He aimed the rifle—
And with a miniature thunderclap of displaced air a five-meter-long black creature appeared, its serpentine neck arching high over Grail's desk, its wings spread in defense of its master. Fiery red eyes glared balefully at Royd; taloned paws rose against him. Reflexively, Royd pulled the trigger; for all their effect, the steel-jacketed slugs might have been confetti. At least two of the ricochets came close enough to hear.
"You see," Grail's voice came from behind the outstretched wings as the echoes died away, "I have three dragons, not two."
"Damn," Royd breathed—and just then a half-dozen soldiers stormed through the door behind him.
Wrenching his gaze from the dragon, he spun around, rifle ready. But these weren't Grail's professional bullies; they were just common soldiers, many of them draftees—the sort of people whom he was trying to free. Besides, killing them wouldn't buy him more than a few minutes at most. Taking his finger off the trigger, he lowered the weapon and prepared to die.
"Don't kill him!" Grail's voice snapped from behind him. Royd half-turned, a bitter curse ready for delivery... and then the soldiers were swarming over him. Something wet and aromatic hit his face and the world went black. —
He awoke slowly, by degrees, as if his head had gone on a long journey and had to be coaxed back. Something was pressing against his back; only slowly did he realize he was lying face-up on a cot of some sort. With a supreme act of will, he managed to force his eyes open.
"How do you feel?" a gruff voice behind him asked.
"All—all right." Gritting his teeth, Royd sat up, fighting paroxysms of dizziness and nausea. Carefully, he turned around.
Dragonmaster Grail was sitting on a chair, watching him.
Royd gazed back, wondering briefly if this was a dream. "What are you doing here?" he croaked, his throat strangely dry.
"I want to talk with you."
Frowning, Royd looked around him. The room he was in, though small and plain, was clean and airy. The two chairs looked comfortable; the cot he was sitting on was soft and had clean sheets and blankets. Whatever this was, it was no ordinary cell.
Grail interpreted Royd's inspection correctly. "No, you're not in my dungeon. This is a sort of guest room I've had set up for you."
"Why bother? You're going to shoot me anyway. Or do you want me in good shape for the torture?"
"There will be no torture, and perhaps no shooting either. Tell me, why did you try to kill me?"
"That again? What difference does it make?"
"It matters a great deal to me." Grail's voice was low, but strangely intense.
Royd looked at him, seeing for perhaps the first time the wrinkles in the dictator's face, the slight stiffness in his movements. How old was Grail, anyway? Royd suddenly realized he didn't know. "I wanted to kill you because you've turned Rosette into a repressive, regimented society where individuals have no rights and no purpose except to serve you. You've had hundreds of your opponents jailed or murdered and started at least three wars with Easterland since you took over."
"You sound like the Rosette Freedom Party's recruiting speech," Grail said dryly, "but I can see you really believe it. Oh, don't worry, you won't have to answer any questions about your friends—I already know everything worth knowing about them. "You're right, of course; I've done most everything you mentioned. But have you taken note of the good things I've done for Rosette? When the Great War started and all the Imperial troops and technicians were pulled out, Rosette went right to the brink of total collapse. Most of your food and machinery had been imported from offworld, you know, and those supplies were diverted pretty damn quick to more vital fronts.
"Now Rosette's own food production is way up; in the last four years we've actually had crop surpluses. We're now making our own machinery and vehicles, and have two new power plants well into the design stage. And those 'wars' you mentioned were attempts by the Easterlings to invade Rosette. We successfully fought them off—"
"Fought them off!" Royd spat. "Slaughtered them, you mean, with your machine guns, artillery, and those damn dragons—"
Abruptly, Grail stood up. "Look, you young idiot," he snapped, "without the dragons all of Rosette would have been overrun by hordes of Easterlings and trampled into the dust."
"Damn it, all they wanted was food. There are people starving over there!"
"You want to starve with them?" Without warning, Grail was seized by a coughing fit. He sat back down, and Royd briefly considered jumping him. But the older man's eyes were alert... and the room was large enough to hold the dragon he had seen earlier. Royd stayed where he was.
Grail finished coughing and took a couple of deep breaths. "Look, Varian," he said quietly, using Royd's name for the first time. "There are twenty million people in Rosette and just over a billion in Easterland. Even at the current rate of food production here we can't possibly relieve their annual crop shortfalls. In five or ten years we may be able to do it, but until then there's just no way. Their only hope is to leave us alone and to let us put our full energy into developing our economy and our land—Rosette's got the richest soil on the planet, though a lot of it's still tied up uselessly in the old Imperial estates. It's a long-term hope, sure, but it's the best we can offer them."