THE SEA HAG(60)

The metal didn't quiver. It was as if Dennis were squeezing a solid steel bar.

He let out his breath again, slowly.

The suit of armor stood on its own legs without external support. The slotted visor was raised. A glance within assured Dennis that there was no framework inside either.

Nor were there bones. If the suit's owner had been wearing the armor when he died, that had been long enough ago to permit even a human skull to vanish utterly.

Dennis shifted an arm of the suit up and down, as though he were shaking hands with the dead owner. The hinged plates of the wrist and elbow whispered across one another, almost frictionless in their movement.

"Chester, this is beautiful," Dennis said. "Should I—"

He thought as he sheathed his sword, freeing both hands. "Ah, Chester? Is this something that I need?"

"It is not now that you need it, Dennis," the robot replied in a flat, uncompromising tone.

"Oh," the youth said. Well, he didn't need it. Would he wear it, tramping through the pasture under a sun that would heat black metal like an oven? "Well. I guess it can stay here."

He poked his foot morosely into a pile of debris; but that's all it was, debris. Garbage, really, picked too clean to smell. "Let's go out and see what else there is in this... place."

The sunlight felt good, though Dennis found himself twitching together his fingers to recapture the ghostly smoothness of the armor. It had been so beautiful...

Chester offered him a cluster of magenta berries. The kernal within each berry was large, but the layer of flesh around it was sweet and tart in trembling alteration.

The berries were delicious—and everything the food of Rakastava was not. But Rakastava had surely saved Dennis' life the day before...

The cattle were avoiding the area in the center of the pasture, where Malduanan lay in the grass like a gray hillock. The air above the corpse glittered as gorged insects spun in the sunlight.

Dennis touched his sword hilt. Sucking on the last of the berries, he began to walk across the field toward Malbawn's hut. He would look in the mirror again. He wanted to see what was happening in Emath.

And he wanted to see Aria.

Malbawn's legs had fallen in tattered segments to the grass. The great plates of the creature's torso were beginning to separate as well. Dennis wondered if the chitinous armor would resist the elements as effectively as it had the edge of his sword. The pieces might lie there forever, empty reminders of a monster the folk of Rakastava had thought must be bribed because it could not be slain.

He shivered. They'd nearly been right.

Chester touched his companion's shoulder and said, "He who perseveres in a crisis makes his own fate, Dennis."

"If he's lucky," the youth grunted. "And if he has friends."

But he was swaggering as he stepped up to the mirror and demanded, "Show me Emath. Show me my father."

As obedient and certain as the law of gravity, the gleaming surface grayed, then brightened on the turrets of Emath Palace for a moment before it swooped dizzyingly down through the crystal walls.

King Hale sat in the drawing room of the royal suite. Selda lay on a divan across from him, her face pressed against the bolster. She seemed to be crying. No servants were present.

"That's funny," Dennis muttered. He peered out the hut's door to make sure that his time sense hadn't been distorted by his injuries and whatever process the city had used to heal them.

The sun was just short of mid-sky—the time Hale always spent in the throne room, hearing deputations and discussing the business of the village with his advisors.

"Show me the throne room," Dennis directed. His voice was neutral, but his face glowered like a thundercloud.

The mirror's image shifted queasily, a seeming motion like that of a diver executing a fast back-flip. The throne room filled the surface when it came to rest, though at first Dennis thought the mirror had made a mistake. The bright, sparkling chamber of his recollection couldn't have been transformed into this nest of shadowed gloom.

But it had been. The walls and ceiling were draped with black cloth: not velvet, like those of the Wizard Serdic's apartments, but sailcloth painted black and hung to cover crystal that paint wouldn't stick to directly.

Parol—pudgy, pock-marked Parol, with his smirk and his cringing agreement with anyone willing to face him—sat on the throne.





CHAPTER 40




Takseler, one of Emath's leading citizens—a merchant whose shop covered a block of the waterfront and who owned three trading vessels himself—faced Parol with a shocked expression and very little clothing. He'd entered the audience hall wearing robes and a chain of office. Now he stood in his undergarments with his valuables in the hands of guards in orange livery.