THE SEA HAG(59)

"I'd rather eat with all of you," he said humbly. "If that would be all right?"

She smiled again and took his arm. "Of course it's all right, silly," she said. "It's a pleasure."





CHAPTER 38




When they reached the hall where the whole population was assembled as usual for the evening meal, Dennis found that Rakastava had left two places on the bench beside King Conall. The foresight no longer surprised him.





CHAPTER 39




Dennis went out with the herd the next morning.

He felt a little tired and all his muscles ached, but he was in amazingly good condition for someone who'd been near death from his wounds less than a day before. The room with its slab that pricked his skin had done much more than speed the healing of his surface injuries.

"Rakastava takes good care of its citizens, Chester," he commented.

"Rakastava takes good care of its herd, Dennis," the robot replied crisply. "But it was the purpose of the cows to feed Malbawn and Malduanan."

Dennis reached out to stroke the flank of the nearest of the cows plodding to fresh grass beyond the arc they had already cropped. She twitched aside at the touch. When the cow looked back and saw Dennis, she made a grumbling sound—brushed her tail against the youth—and resumed her course.

"They're getting to like me," Dennis said with quiet satisfaction. "I think—"

He paused. "—Aria may like me too."

"If a fool has no work," Chester snapped, "his groin thinks for him."

Dennis grimaced. "I want to see Malduanan's hut," he said. "He came from this side of the field, so it's—yeah, that must be it."

Another great lump stretched from the pasture edge back into the shadows of the jungle. It was perhaps larger than Malbawn's hovel, but they were both made of leaves gray with their coating of mildew and other fungus. The door, a curtain of twigs and woven bark, hung open as Malduanan had left it to meet the youth who'd slain Malbawn.

Dennis drew his sword, though he didn't think he'd need it.

"The best remedy is to prevent trouble by foresight," Chester quoted approvingly.

Dennis stepped inside with his blade chest-high.

The dirt floor was littered with bones—scrubbed clean of flesh and ligament. Malduanan's beak had punched the larger ones with thumbnail-sized holes through which the creature sucked marrow. Some bones were fresh, and some had rotted away into splinters; but all the bones were cattle bones.

Dennis realized he'd been holding his breath. He let it out in relief.

"I thought—" he said aloud. "I was..." He looked around the dim interior.

"Malduanan didn't kill people," Dennis said, finally managing to organize his thoughts clearly enough that he could wrap words around them. "I was afraid there'd be—"

Skulls to trip over, his mind said.

"—bodies here too," his mouth completed.

"But," he added as his irrational relief turned to gloom that didn't really make any sense either—what was done, was done: "There aren't any men here, because Malbawn killed them all before they could meet Malduanan."

"There was a man who met Malduanan, Dennis," Chester said softly. "It was so long ago that his bones are dust and the dust of dust; but this—" metal pinged softly as Chester's tentacle touched something in the shadows "—is not yet dust."

The sound was from behind him, beside the door. Dennis turned in curiosity. His blade shifted, point forward, as his heart jumped in surprise. A figure stood there, as tall as Dennis and as silent as Death.

Metal rang on metal again. "It is not a man but a man's armor, Dennis," Chester said. "Nothing in this place is alive, except the mold on the walls."

Dennis scuffled his way through the beef bones to see the armor. It was black and so highly polished that it gleamed even in this vague light.

Dennis ran his left index finger across the metal. It felt cool and water-smooth. There was no dust on his fingertip when he looked at it closely. The black surface was more than glassy: not even dust would cling to it, over these—

"How many years, Chester?" he murmured. "How long has this been here?"

"For fewer years than men have been settled on this planet, Dennis," the robot said. "But by only a generation of years fewer."

Dennis tapped the breastplate with a fingernail. It rang like a wind-chime, a high-pitched sound that resonated in the armor for a dozen heartbeats.

The youth could see, from where plates overlapped to let the wearer move his arms, that the metal was paper-thin. He shifted his sword to his left hand and squeezed the hollow wrist with the full strength of a grip that could crush the hand of anyone he'd ever met.