Cascade Point

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 a

"It's hard to be patient when you're starving," Royd muttered. Something was off-key here; Grail's speeches and official pronouncements had always painted Easterland as a deadly enemy whose destruction was vital to Rosette's security. What was this talk about supplying them with food?

Grail smiled faintly when Royd put the question to him. "The 'Easterland threat' campaign was put together by Clars Marwitz, my Civil Affairs Director, to try and unite Rosette behind me. Marwitz is shrewd—damn shrewd—but he's power-hungry and completely amoral. Bears close watching.... Anyway, I went along with the plan because I'd rather have all you dissidents working to help build up Rosette's potential than inciting riots and forcing me to put you in prison. Most of you are smart and educated, and Rosette needs all the help you can give her." A frown had been growing steadily across Royd's forehead, in direct proportion to his confusion. "What's going on? Why are you telling me all this?"

Grail's eyes bored into Royd's. "I want you to take over as head of state when I die."

For a long moment there was dead silence in the room. "What?" Royd whispered at last.

"You heard me. Rosette's developed about as far as it can under an absolute dictatorship. It needs to be nudged toward something more decentralized—a constitutional monarchy, perhaps, as a first step. But I can't do that."

"Why not? There's no one to stop you."

Grail sighed. "All right. Suppose I a

"Not likely," Royd admitted. "They'd think it was a trap."

"You see the problem, then. I'm known as a dictator, and there's no way I can easily change that image."

"But you could abdicate. Go into retirement."

"I could," Grail nodded. "Of course, there would probably be a bloody power struggle, possibly even a civil war. Rosette was on the brink of one when I arrived nineteen years ago, as a matter of fact, though you're too young to remember it. But assume for the moment I can find a way to block that. Who's going to defend Rosette from another Easterling attack?"

"Uh..." Royd hesitated; it sounded like a trick question. "I gather the army's not strong enough?"

"Not now. It could be, by drafting every single man from age seventeen on up. But then the economy would go straight to hell." Grail shook his head. "No, Easterland is held back mainly by fear—fear of the dragons. Rosette needs a Dragonmaster, at least for a few more years, and it's up to me to make sure the wrong man doesn't get that kind of power."

There were a lot of implications in Grail's statement, not the least of which the suggestion that the dragons could be transferred to a new owner. But for Royd one question overrode all the others. "Why me?"

Grail shrugged. "You care about the people of Rosette."

"How do you figure that? Just because I tried to kill you?"

"Because you were willing to spend many years of study and even give your life to gain freedom for them. And, maybe more important, because you didn't fire on the common soldiers who came to arrest you." Grail ran a gnarled hand through his graying hair.

"And besides, I haven't got enough time to go out searching for more likely candidates. The doctors tell me I've only got six to eight months left. All my instincts tell me you can handle the job of putting this country—and eventually the whole planet—back on its feet. If you're willing, the job's yours. I can start your Dragonmaster training tomorrow. What'll it be?"

Royd's head was spi