The door swung outward against the protest of its hinges. Chester disengaged his tentacle.
When Dennis tried to open the door a few inches further, he found he had to put his shoulders into the effort of overcoming the friction of rust in the hinge pivots. The robot's delicacy and small size could give a false impression of the strength available in his silvery limbs.
The only light within was what came through the open door, and there was so little of it that Dennis couldn't see his own shadow.
"I should have brought a lamp," he muttered.
He remembered that the interior was almost filled by a limestone sarcophagus and that the sword lay across the chest of the reclining figure of the Founder on the stone lid; but he would have to feel his way—
The darkness rustled. Dennis' heart jumped as his face froze. The Founder's Sword slid toward him, held point-up in its scabbard by one of Chester's tentacles.
Dennis took the great weapon in his hands for the first time. King Hale always carried the sword himself through the crowds on a velvet cushion in the Founder's Day procession—from the tomb, around the arc of Emath's perimeter, and to the gate of the palace before returning.
The youth stepped backward into the starlight and slid the blade from its sheath.
It gleamed like a cold gray star itself.
Dennis had been trained in swordsmanship from his earliest childhood. It was part of the education of a prince, and his father had skimped on nothing that would further that ideal. The blade of the Founder's Sword was just under a yard long and heavy for its considerable length.
Dennis wasn't used to a sword of quite this size—but he could handle it. His muscles were trained, and his frame was filling out daily with the growth spurt of his late adolescence.
The sword was perfectly balanced. Despite that, the weapon had a crudeness that surprised Dennis until he thought about it.
The Founder's Sword had been forged out of star-metal, material ripped from the hulls of the ships that brought men here to Earth. Of course the blade wouldn't have the polished correctness of swords hammered out by modern weaponsmiths using mere steel.
This was the weapon of a hero of a bygone age. This was the weapon that Dennis would take into the jungle heart of the continent.
He shot the weapon home in its scabbard with a flourish. At last he was thrilled with his decision instead of just plodding onward, afraid to look at what he was doing.
Seeing his father face the sea hag had made Dennis a man. Buckling the Founder's Sword onto his belt made him a hero—at least in his own mind.
The guard beasts snarled again: at the night, at nothing, or at one another. Dennis' vision of himself at the head of a conquering host, waving his star-metal sword, shivered back down to present reality.
"All right, Chester," he said as though the robot's dallying were slowing him down. "Let's go."
"When worry arises," Chester murmured, "the heart thinks death itself is a release."
Dennis grimaced as he picked up the bag of provisions.
"But troubles end," the robot continued, "and death does not end, Dennis."
They didn't bother to close the tomb door as they set off, side by side, toward the perimeter and the dragons guarding it.
CHAPTER 12
The newest, largest and most solidly built structures in Emath village were those pressing up against the perimeter.
The Wizard Serdic had expanded the perimeter twice in Dennis' memory—having created it the day Emath's prince and heir was born. When houses filled the space available to them, Serdic moved the spell which enclosed the dragons farther into the jungle.
As Emath grew, so did the two beasts which paced the perimeter on ceaseless guard.
"Where are they now, Chester?" Dennis asked in a whisper.
"One of them is coming toward us, Dennis," the robot replied—quietly also, but with a clarity which the youth found disturbing. Chester's precise words seemed more likely to arouse the guard beasts' interest than a slurred whisper would.
The perimeter was a location, not a thing. Dennis and his companion stood at the back of a three-story apartment block. The walls were half-timbered; their whitewashed plaster triangles gleamed softly in the starlight. Just in front of Dennis was a line of coarse grass stretching to either side in a gentle curve parallel with the buildings.
The hundred meters between that grass and the jungle was clear. The earth there had been trampled into dust—churned to mud in the rain—by the claws of dragons.
As Chester had warned, one of the dragons was snuffling into sight. Dennis froze. He took his hand off the hilt of his new sword because he was afraid he might rattle the blade in its scabbard.
The dragon walked on two legs, but there was nothing about it even remotely like a man. The creature's body and tail formed the cross-bar of a T supported by the legs. Its head was held close to the ground, so that its hips—eight feet in the air—were the highest point on the body when the dragon was walking normally. The legs folded upward like complex shears, then jabbed out claws-first for each strutting, birdlike step.