THE SEA HAG(19)

He winced away into his normal cringing slyness. "Even for those of us who've been carefully trained in their use," he added, the implied lie an obvious one.

"Yes, well," said Dennis. "Well, I won't trouble you further, Parol. Sorry for the inconvenience."

He stepped forward, brushing back the velvet hangings—glad to be back in the normal diffracted brightness of daytime in the palace, but shocked again by the creatures displayed in glass bubbles.

Dennis' skin crawled, feeling the pressure of hundreds—thousands—of dead eyes glaring at him. Chester laid a tentacle on Dennis' hip bone, a firm, familiar pressure to remind him that even here he had a friend.

As they strode past the apprentice wizard, Dennis controlled the impulse to twitch his shirt close to his body lest its hem touch the fabric of Parol's robe.

"Ah, your highness?" Parol said from behind the two companions as they reached the anteroom.

Dennis turned his head. "Yes?"

"If your highness wouldn't mind perhaps telling me what it was that he visited these chambers for," Parol said with a swarmy smile, "then perhaps I could hel—"

The apprentice's words trailed off. He scuttled back out of sight, looking as fearful as he had when he tried to speak Serdic's name.

Dennis didn't understand the reaction until he caught sight of his own face in the reflector of the lamp beside him in the anteroom. Parol couldn't know that Dennis' expression came not from being asked an impertinent question but rather from being reminded of the sea hag.

And her bargain.

Chester swung open the black pearl door. The draft of air drawn from the rotunda was as enticing as summer flowers after peculiar miasma of the wizard's suite.

"Ah, Chester?" the youth said when they had climbed stairs to the second floor and were no longer in sight of even the black door. "The little—furry animal in a case back there?"

"The tarsier, Dennis?"

Dennis shrugged. "If that's what it's called. When I looked back, I thought—" He sucked in his lips and chewed on them for a moment. "I thought I saw its head turn."

Chester said nothing.

"But I guess that's crazy."

They strode down the disused hallway together. The whicker of the youth's trouser legs brushing together merged with the swish-click! of the robot's limbs on the crystal.

"Parol does not wish you well, Dennis," said Chester unexpectedly. "It would be wise for you to watch yourself with him."

Dennis shuddered despite himself. "But it isn't going to matter very long, is it?" he said bitterly. "Not after tomorrow, when I'm sixteen and my father has to keep his bargain."

He spoke quietly, but for minutes afterward he could hear his words echo in the emptiness of his mind.





CHAPTER 8




The notes of a Pan pipe rose in utter purity from one of the palace courtyards. Air trembled in each wax-stopped tube of the set, achieving a resonance and precision of harmony possible only to genius with an open-ended flute.

Pan pipes were a little too sweet and insistent for Dennis' taste; but the servants liked them, and somebody was always ready to play in the evening after chores were done, while a few danced and others listened and relaxed.

In the evening. But—

"Chester, how long were we in Parol's quarters?" Dennis demanded. Because of the shrouded gloom of the chamber holding the machines, he hadn't noticed earlier that the light shifting through the crystal palace wasn't the bright noon he expected but rather twilight.

"Seven hours, forty-nine minutes and a half, Dennis," said the little robot.

"But—" Dennis said.

Well, of course they'd spent that long. The light said it was evening; the servants' music said it was evening; and Dennis' muscles all ached with the effort of holding him upright for eight hours without a break. So the question was—

"Where did the time go, Chester? Was it a trap of, of one of the wizards—to hold us there?"

"It was not a trap, Dennis. You wished to see certain things, and to show you those things required time. The time to see them, and the longer time to journey to where they were to be seen."

Dennis remembered the way his companion had urged him to leave the room of the machines—and how Dennis had masterfully insisted on watching Hale's third meeting with the sea hag. "I didn't know that," he said.

"You did not ask that, Dennis," Chester said primly.

One of the walls of the corridor where they were pausing was a true window, a plate of perfect clarity with neither facets nor filaments to diffuse the view beyond it. That view was of the open sky to seaward, sulphurous now as the sun set with no clouds to turn the event into a spectacular.