Surprisingly, it was Slothiel who came to the defense of the paralyzed Mekon.
“Not perhaps in just such a case as this,” said Slothiel. “The Wolfling assaulted Mekon first. Certainly someone like Galyan would understand how a man could react to something like that.”
The eyes of the tall High-born addressed as Galyan went out to meet with Slothiel’s. They looked at each other with a mutual amusement that seemed to hang upon the very lip of animosity. Someday, those looks seemed to say, we will clash, but not now. The Princess Afuan noticed the exchange, and instantly her own manner changed to one of brisk reasonableness.
“Nonsense!” she said. “He’s only a Wolfling, after all! Do you enjoy looking disgusting, man?” This last phrase was addressed to Mekon. “Heal yourself!”
Mekon woke abruptly from his trance and looked down at his wounded arm. Jim looked at it also; and before his eyes he saw the long shallow cut slowly begin to close and firm over—without any of the ordinary signs of scabbing or healing. Within perhaps a second and a half the wound had disappeared, leaving only white-onyx skin that looked as if it had never been cut. The dried blood on the arm remained, but after a second Mekon passed his other hand along it, and this too vanished. He was left with an arm not only whole but clean. Jim put the knife back into its scabbard at his belt.
“That’s better,” said Afuan. She turned to the tall man beside her. “I’ll leave it to you now, Galyan. See that Mekon pays some kind of a fine.”
She vanished.
“You can go too, girl,” Galyan said, looking down at Ro. “I didn’t have a chance to watch this Wolfling putting on his act on the planet. After I deal with Mekon, I’d like to examine the wild man myself.”
Ro hesitated. Her face was unhappy.
“Go along,” said Galyan softly but sharply. “I’m not going to hurt your Wolfling! You’ll have him back in perfect shape before you know it.”
Ro hesitated a second longer, then vanished, in her turn, casting a strangely appealing glance at Jim just before she went, as if to caution him against any act that might lead to further trouble.
“Come with me, Wolfling,” said Galyan. He disappeared. After a second, he reappeared, smiling quizzically at Jim.
“So you don’t know how to move around in the ship, do you?” he said. “Very well, Wolfling. I’ll provide your motive power.”
At once Jim found himself in a large, oval, low-ceilinged room with yellow walls, which more resembled an office or a place of work than any of the rooms he had so far visited aboard the vessel. At hard-surfaced slabs of what looked like stone floating in midair and plainly in use as desktops, three men were at work—none of them High-born.
Two were brown, squat men—about the color of a white-skinned human from Earth with a good heavy suntan. They were no more than five and a half feet tall. The third, who was looking at what appeared to be a map, was possibly six inches taller and a hundred pounds heavier than the other two. His greater weight was not in body fat, but plainly in a very heavy, even massive skeleton and corresponding musculature. Unlike the two shorter men, who had long, straight brown hair hanging down their backs almost in the fashion in which the white hair of the High-born women was allowed to hang, the third man was completely bald. His round, hairless skull, with its grayish skin stretched tightly over the bone beneath, was the most prominent feature about him, so that it made his eyes, his nose, his mouth, and even his fairly good-sized ears seem small by comparison. This third man got up on seeing Galyan and Jim appear in the room.
“No, no. It’s all right, Reas,” said Galyan. “Back to your work.”
The powerful-looking man sat down again without a word and returned to his map study.
“Reas,” said Galyan, waving a hand at him, and looking down at Jim, “is what you might call my bodyguard. Although I don’t need a bodyguard—no more than any of the High-born do. Does that surprise you?”
“I don’t know enough about it to be either surprised or not surprised,” answered Jim.
Galyan nodded, surprisingly, as if in approval.
“No, of course you don’t,” he said. He sat down on a handy cushion and reached out a long arm.
“Let me see that tool of yours,” he said. “The one you used to hurt Mekon.”
Jim drew the knife and passed it over, hilt first. Galyan accepted it gingerly, holding it between a thumb and two opposing fingers. He held it up in the air before his eyes and tenderly touched its point and edges with the long forefinger of his left hand. Then he handed it back to Jim.
“I suppose you could kill an ordinary man with something like that,” he said.
“Yes,” said Jim.
“Very interesting,” said Galyan. He sat for a moment, as if caught up in his own thoughts. Then his eyes focused on Jim once more. “You realize, I suppose, that you aren’t allowed to go around damaging the High-born with tools like that?”
Jim said nothing. In the face of his silence, Galyan smiled, almost as he had smiled at Slothiel—a little enigmatically, a little cruelly.
“You’re very interesting, Wolfling,” he said slowly. “Very interesting indeed. You don’t seem to realize that you exist like an insect in the palm of any one of us who are High-born. Now, someone like Mekon would have closed his hand and crushed the life out of you long before this. In fact, that is just what he was about to do when Afuan and I stopped him. But I’m not the sort of High-born that Mekon is. In fact, I am like no other High-born you will meet—except the Emperor; and, since we’re first cousins, that’s not surprising. So I’m not going to close my hand on you, Wolfling. I’m going to reason with you—as if you were High-born yourself.”
“Thank you,” said Jim.
“You do not thank me, Wolfling,” said Galyan softly. “You do not thank me, or curse me, or plead with me, or praise me. You do nothing where I am concerned—but listen. And answer when you are questioned. Now, to begin with. How did you get into that room with Mekon, Trahey, and Slothiel?”
Jim told him briefly and emotionlessly.
“I see,” said Galyan. He clasped his long hands around one knee and leaned back a little on his cushion, looking at a slight slant up into Jim’s face. “So you trusted to the fact that the Princess intended to show you off to the Emperor, and that for that reason no one else would dare harm you. Even if such a faith were justified, Wolfling, you showed a rather remarkable control of your nerves to stand absolutely still while that beast jumped at your face.”
He paused, as if to give Jim a chance to say something. When Jim did not, he murmured, almost deprecatingly, “You have my leave to speak.”
“What would you like me to speak about?” asked Jim.
Galyan’s lemon-yellow eyes glowed almost like a cat’s eyes in the dark.
“Yes,” he murmured, drawing the s sound out slowly, “you are most unusual—even for a Wolfling. Though I haven’t actually met that many Wolflings, so that I don’t consider myself much of a judge. You’re fairly good-sized for someone not High-born. Tell me, the rest of your people aren’t as big as you, are they?”
“On the average, no,” said Jim.
“Then there’re bigger males among you?”
“Yes,” said Jim, without expanding on the subject.
“As large as the High-born?” asked Galyan. “Are there any as tall as myself?”
“Yes,” said Jim.
“But not many,” said Galyan, his eyes glowing. “In fact, they’re rare. Isn’t that so?”
“That’s right,” said Jim.
“In fact,” said Galyan, nursing his knee, “to be truthful about it, you might say that they are practically in the case of freaks—aren’t they?”