THE SEA HAG(4)

The palace was huge, far larger than the needs of King Hale and his household. Most of the monocrystalline building was empty. Though the village of Emath was crowded—more so every day with immigrants and the birthrate normal to a peaceful, prosperous environment—there were no squatters lurking in the glittering back-corridors. Only those who'd been welcomed into the palace felt... welcome.

Nothing unpleasant happened to interlopers, mostly newcomers to Emath who slipped in through a window or an unguarded entrance with their bindles and ragged offspring. They just didn't feel comfortable in their new surroundings, and they soon left.

Ramos belonged in the palace, but...

From the bottom of the stairs leading to Ramos' tower room, Dennis could hear the old man singing in a hoarse voice. At first the boy thought the song was a chantey of some sort with a refrain. As he and Chester climbed the tight, dizzying spiral Dennis began to make out the words.

Ramos was singing, "Many the ships that sail right in..." Over and over, the same words each time, trailing off into a repetition as unmusical as the one before.

Unmusical and angry. There could be no doubt of the anger in the cracked, hopeless voice.

The doors of the palace varied. The panel standing ajar at the top of the staircase was layered in pastels and creamy richness like the interior of a shell—but the material formed a flat sheet broad enough to cover the portal without join marks.

Dennis knocked diffidently on the jamb.

"Many the ships that sail right in—"

He knocked louder, on the door itself. The lustrous panel quivered a little farther open.

"—and they never sail out a'tall!"

"Uncle Ramos?" Dennis called. "May I come in? It's Dennis."

"What's stopping you?" the voice demanded. Glass shattered within the room, then tinkled as the larger pieces fell to the floor and broke further.

Dennis opened the door wide with his arm before he stepped through it.

Chester said, "It is the great glory of the wise man to be controlled in the manner of his life."

The windows of the tower room looked out over the harbor and sea in three-quarters of a circle. The water glowed with tiny life. Froth lifted by the breezes traced ghostly arcs above the surface.

The purity and vibrant motion of the water beyond was in shocking contrast to the squalor of Ramos' room.

A lamp hung from the bracket just inside the door. Its wick was turned low. The rush mats that softened the floor hadn't been changed in months, perhaps years. Scavenging insects, startled by the newcomers, sank within the woven rushes like oil being absorbed in filthy sand.

Plates—fine porcelain decorated with gilded rims and the palace crest—were scattered on the floor. On some of them, the food appeared not to have been touched.

"Uncle Ramos...?" whispered Dennis. The stench of the room made him jump as though he'd been slapped in the face.

"What's the matter, kid?" Ramos said with heavy irony. "You don't like my singing?"

He hawked and spat. "For many the ships—" he repeated, but his voice broke in a fit of coughing.

Ramos was a big man, tall where Dennis' father was broad. He was shockingly gaunt now, but even so his heavy bones made him look a giant as he sprawled on the bed. He was wearing his state robes, scarlet and cloth-of-gold; but they were as stained and foul as the floor mats.

There were plates on the bed; but mostly there were bottles, squat green quarts of fortified wine from Bredabrug far down the south coast. The mats beneath the open windows sparkled with bottles that had smashed on the casements instead of flying out of the room.

"Hob-nobbing with the common folk, are you, kid?" Ramos asked.

He'd turned his head to the door when Dennis entered, but now he let his eyes rock back to an empty window—or to nothing. Glass clinked as Ramos rummaged with one arm among the bottles beside him.

Dennis swallowed hard. "Uncle Ramos," he said as he walked toward the bed, pretending he didn't feel the way the rushes wriggled beneath his boots. "Are you sick? And why haven't the servants...? Why have they—"

Ramos had found a full bottle among the empties quivering as the bed moved. "Have a drink with nobody, your Royal Crown-Princeness, sir," he said, still lying flat on the bed.

He had a folding sailor's knife in his right hand. The knot-breaking marlinspike blade was open. He began worrying at the cork—without effect, because he was using the wrong end of the knife.

Dennis forgot his horror. When he was a child, Ramos had carried him perched on one shoulder like a pet lizard. He'd felt taller than the ships' masts then—and perfectly safe, because Ramos steadied him with a hand as solid as carven stone.