THE SEA HAG(12)

Except perhaps for a human being.

Only the face was man-like—and that in a wizened, sneeringly-angry way. Its muzzle was broad and flat. Muzzle, lips, and the palms of the creature's hands were bare black skin. The remainder of the little body—it could have weighed no more than a few pounds in life—was covered with coarse hair that seemed either red or blond depending on how the light struck it.

It was unique and uniquely unpleasant—though Dennis couldn't have explained why it bothered him more than, say, one of the long-fanged lizards he knew to be poisonous. He turned away, his face wrinkling into a grimace like the creature's own, and said, "Chester, what are we looking for?"

"It is in the next room that we must look, Dennis," the little robot said nonchalantly as he led the way through an open doorway decorated with crystal arabesques.

The walls and ceiling were swathed in black velvet so that even now, at mid-morning, the sun penetrated only through the door. A further drape, pinned back at the moment, could be swung to close that opening as well.

The circumference of the room was filled with machines—things of metal and glass and dull ceramic. Dennis couldn't imagine a use for any of them.

The velvet was solid black, as nighttime in Emath never was. The darkness pressed in on Dennis and added to the discomfort he'd felt since pushing open the black pearl doorpanel.

The air within the wizard's quarters was as musty as the atmosphere of a deep cave. It wasn't poisonous or even actively unpleasant; it just hadn't moved very much in all the time Emath existed. The anteroom smelled of hot oil; around the glass bubbles hung a chlorine tang vaguely reminiscent of the sea.

In this third room, the odor of velvet slowly decaying struggled against a sharpness that was less a smell than a rasp at the back of Dennis' throat.

It reminded him of the night lightning had struck a dozen times on the highest towers of Emath. After the last stroke, a hissing orange globe had floated down a corridor and into the center of the throne room before exploding. The ball of lightning left behind a miasma like the one which emanated from the wizard's machines.

"Chester," Dennis said.

He took a deep breath and looked around with a haughty expression that protected him from the fear that would otherwise make him shiver. "Well, get on with it. Are we going to stay here until Parol gets back?"

Chester leaned his egg-shaped body back at an angle and said, "The man whose good character makes him gentle, creates his own fate, Dennis."

The boy's nostrils flared in anger—and he caught himself. "Little friend," he said, smiling and reaching for the tentacle which the robot raised to meet the offered hand. "I don't like it here. Forgive me my irritability."

"One does not know a friend's heart until one sees him anxious," Chester said with approval. Even as he gripped Dennis' hand, three more of his limbs were playing over the case of the nearest machine.

The device had a broad, flat surface like that of a draftsman's easel. For the moment it was tilted up at 45 degrees, but the slender arms supporting the easel seemed to be as capable of movement as Chester's own limbs.

When they'd entered the room, the pedestal and easel were of the same dull black material. At the robot's touch, faint colors—too angry to be called pastels; the shades that metal takes as it heats and cools in a forge—began to streak what had seemed the pedestal's solid interior.

The room began to quiver at a frequency too low for sound. There was a fresh whiff of lightning-born harshness.

"What is it that you wish to know, Dennis?" the robot asked.

"I—" the boy said. "I—Chester, ask it what it was that my father did in the storm the night—the storm Ramos told us about."

Instead of speaking, Chester shifted the delicate tips of three tentacles. Colors richened and merged with one another. Dennis leaned over the flat surface, wondering if he would see letters form there. The blackness of the easel was a palpable thing that sucked in the dim light. It had no reflection.

The illumination within the chamber increased and changed quality with a suddenness that made Dennis whirl. He expected to see the drapes sliding back and someone—Parol, rationally; but momentary terror filled his mind with a vision of the corpse of Serdic—standing in the door that was the only way to escape from this complex of rooms.

Instead, he didn't see the room at all.

Where the velvet and squatting machines had been, the sea tossed under a sky of terrifying gray-green translucence. Lightning spat from point to point on the wall of encircling clouds; waves shot straight upward from the sea's surface, although there was no wind.

Dennis had never been permitted to board a ship, but he was looking from the deck of one now: an open fishing boat, single-masted and tiny against the lowering circle of clouds. Chester had vanished. Dennis' own body had vanished.