Her hand flew to her mouth. She paled and stepped backward. Her eyes were enormous.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
She tried to say something, but the only sound that came from her throat was more of a little cry than an understandable word. He frowned sharply.
“What is it?” he demanded. “What’s wrong?”
“You didn’t tell me…” The words came out of her, finally, in a sort of wail. “You didn’t tell me you were going to kill him!”
She choked, whirled about, and disappeared. He stood staring at the space where she had been. Behind him a woman’s voice spoke unexpectedly.
“Yes,” it said. It was the voice of Princess Afuan, and he himself turned sharply, to find her standing there looking at him. “It seems that even a Wolfling like you can make mistakes. I’d have thought you’d have learned by this time that Ro has a soft spot in her for all animals.”
He looked at her coldly.
“You’re right,” he said flatly, “I should’ve remembered that.”
“Unless,” she said, then paused, watching him with her lemon-yellow eyes, “that is, you had some reason for deliberately wanting to upset her. You’ve made quite a marked impression for a Wolfling, in such a short time. You not only made a friend of little Ro, but you made an enemy of Mekon, and interested not only Slothiel, but Galyan himself.”
She considered him for a second with a close gaze that seemed to have something hidden in it.
“Do you see me?”
“Of course,” he said. And then he stiffened internally, although he was careful to keep his face and body noncommittal.
For, before his eyes Afuan suddenly changed. It was a strange changing, because no single thing about her that he could see altered in any way. Even the expression on her face was the same. But suddenly she was entirely different.
Suddenly, tall, onyx-skinned, yellow-eyed, white-haired as she was, she became attractive. No—not merely attractive—voluptuous to an almost overwhelming degree. It was more than merely a sensual attraction she projected. Her demand upon his capability of desire was almost hypnotic.
Only the long, solitary years of internal isolation and growth allowed him to resist the fascination Afuan was now exerting upon him. Only the fact that he realized the lust she was trying to awaken in him meant an abandonment of all that he had searched for and won by lonely journeys of the mind and soul, where the mind and soul of man had never searched before—only this allowed him to stand still, relaxed and calm, unresponsive.
Abruptly, again without any physical sign of change, Afuan was back as she had always been. Cold and remote in appearance, striking, but not necessarily attractive by the human standards of Earth.
“Amazing,” she said a little softly, gazing at him through eyes which—though they were not slitted—gave the impression of being slitted. “Totally amazing, particularly for a Wolfling. But I think I understand you now, wild man. Something in you, at some time, has made you ambitious with an ambition larger than the universe.”
After a second Jim performed the mental exercise that transferred him to the arena.
When he appeared there, the stands were already full of the white-clothed High-born. Not only that, but within the red-bordered area that was plainly the Imperial box was a party of six men and four women. The music had already begun, and Jim formed up with his cuadrilla for the walk across the white sand toward the Imperial box. As he got close, he saw that Afuan was one of the people in the box, seated to the left of someone who seemed to be Galyan, who was occupying the center seat, with an unusually broad-bodied, older-looking High-born man to his right, who had slightly yellowed eyebrows.
When Jim got close to the box, however, he saw that the man who resembled Galyan was not Galyan. Still, the resemblance was striking, and Jim suddenly remembered Galyan’s comment about the Emperor being his first cousin. This, plainly, was the Emperor.
If anything, he was taller than Galyan himself. He lounged in his seat more casually than the other High-born seated around him, and there was something—for a High-born—unusually frank and open and intelligent about his gaze. He smiled down at Jim as he gave permission for the bullfight to commence. Afuan’s eyes looked coldly down at Jim meanwhile.
Jim had eliminated the procedure of dedicating the bull to someone in the audience, and he did not revive the practice now. He returned with his cuadrilla across the ring and went directly into the bullfight. His men did well with the different behavior of the bull, which Afuan or someone else among the High-born had apparently chosen to revive at random from among the six in cryogenic storage. Luckily, each bull was a little different, and Jim recognized the differences, so that he was able to adjust himself to the bull’s pattern of behavior the minute he saw it come charging into the ring.
Still, he had his hands full with it, as he had had his hands full in the arena on Alpha Centauri III. Moreover, what little space for thought he had was taken up with Afuan’s comment about his ambition. Clearly the Princess possessed a sense of perception that was very nearly deadly.
The bullfight continued, and drew eventually to its closing moments. This bull, unlike the one on Alpha Centauri III, remained strong right up to the predicted point in its programming. Jim finally went in over the horns with his sword for the kill, almost directly in front of the Imperial box. Then, withdrawing his sword, he turned and took a few steps to confront the Emperor—as much from his own sense of interest in how the Emperor would respond to the spectacle as for the reason that on the ship Ro had told him that approaching the Emperor afterward would be expected of him. He walked up to the barrier itself and looked upward at a slant into the face of the Emperor, less than a dozen feet away. The Emperor smiled down. His eyes seemed to shine with an unusual brightness—although suddenly Jim noticed there was something almost unfocused about them.
The Emperor’s smile broadened. A small trickle of saliva ran down from one corner of his mouth. He opened his lips and spoke to Jim.
“Waw,” he said, smiling all the while and staring directly through Jim. “Waw…”
Chapter 5
Jim stood still. There was nothing to give him a clue as to how he should react. The rest of the High-born in the Imperial box—in fact, all the High-born within view—seemed deliberately to be paying no attention at all to whatever fit or stroke had suddenly taken the Emperor. Plainly, Jim judged that he would be expected to ignore it also. Afuan and all the others in the royal box merely sat as if the Emperor was in fact engaged in a private conversation with Jim. In fact, so persuasive and so massive was the reaction, which was no reaction, that it had something of the same hypnotic compulsion that Afuan had used earlier, except that in this case it seemed determined to convince not only Jim but also themselves that what was happening to the Emperor was not happening.
Then, suddenly, it was all over.
The saliva vanished from the Emperor’s jaw as if an invisible hand had wiped it away. His smile firmed, his eyes focused.
“…Moreover, we are exceedingly interested to know more about you,” the Emperor was suddenly saying, as if continuing a conversation that had been going on for some time. “You are the first Wolfling we have seen in many years here at our court. After you have rested, you must come to see us, and we’ll have a talk.”
The Emperor’s smile was open, frank, and charming. His voice was friendly, his eyes intelligent.
“Thank you, Oran,” replied Jim. He had been instructed by Ro that the Emperor was always referred to as “the Emperor” in every way except direct address; when one was speaking to him directly, one always called him simply by his first name—Oran.