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