THE SEA HAG(73)

"Ooh..." murmured the crowd as the lights brightened and the threatening image faded away. All eyes were on Gannon.

The King's Champion was shaking.

And in his pocket, Dennis fingered Aria's crystal ring.





CHAPTER 48




Chester's tentacles closed the two halves of the star-metal helmet over his master's head.

"Gannon sneers at me," the youth said. "He and I both know he's a coward, but he sneers at me."

"There is no remedy for the sting of a fool's tongue, Dennis," the robot quoted. A latch clicked as it locked together the helmet's hinged segments.

The mirror showed the cavern beneath Rakastava—beneath Rakastava's city. It seemed even darker than it had the morning before; but Dennis' eyes had adapted then, and they would adapt again today, he was sure.

It wasn't as though he had to see for any distance, after all.

Aria was waiting at the bottom of the stairs. The severed head lay on the stone beside her, but Gannon was nowhere to be seen.

Dennis shifted his stance, making sure that all the joints and fastenings of his armor were firm but flexible. He slid his sword, a ribbon of reflected gray dawnlight, from its battered sheath.

"Chester," he said without looking at his companion. "I wonder if you'd—you know, help me today if I need help."

"If you ask my help, Dennis, I will give it," Chester replied.

"I didn't think to do that yesterday," Dennis admitted, skirting the question of whether Chester would have come to his aid without being asked. "I—anyway, it won't be as bad today. He's—it's been wounded."

"Today's fight will be twice as fierce as yesterday's fight, Dennis," said Chester quietly. "If you struggled then, then you will strain indeed today."

"It's time," said the youth, gripping his sword as he stepped into the cavern washed by the waves of the monster's approach. Sound echoed crushingly about him.

Aria stepped forward when the youth in black armor splashed out of the darkness. Her lips moved as she called something, but the words were inaudible and unnecessary.

Dennis motioned her back with an imperious wave of his sword, toward the darkness that hid Gannon and would preserve Aria from the wild thrashings of the battle to come.

Rakastava's whole body glowed a deep red, like the surface of a banked fire in the early morning.

The stump had withered like a snake's cast skin. The creature slid forward with its two remaining heads raised high, a great one and a lesser one to the side. The tongues flickered, and the manes flowed with the dark sheen of cobalt glaze.

As before, the creature glided to a halt just short of the coping. "Did you bring my head, little human?" the central head asked Dennis.

"Your head is here, Rakastava," Dennis shouted through his visor.

"And I will put the others with it when I take them."

The mouth of the lesser head opened so wide that the lower jaw pointed to the water and the upper jaw to the cavern's distance-shrouded roof. Dennis braced himself.

Instead of striking directly at him, the open gullet spewed an arc of liquid against his chest.

Dennis staggered. Where the heavy fluid spattered onto the sea, water fizzed and sputtered.

Where it struck the floor and coping, stone cracked and bubbled away in white foam.

The main head opened its jaws part-way. Dennis advanced, raising his sword for a stroke, not a thrust, at the knot of scale-armored muscle where the head met the neck.

Lightning bathed him; his ears rang with the shock of thunder.

Dennis' armor protected him from the worst effects of the thunderbolt as it had from the gout of acid, but his eyes were flash-stunned and his skin was momentarily too full of needle-prickling pain to have any feeling. He stabbed out blindly, knowing he was about to be swept beneath Rakastava's rush—

And amazed, an instant later when he could see, to find the monster in the slim, serpentine tentacles of Chester who was trying to clamp shut both fanged mouths at the same time.

Rakastava's forepaw gripped the robot's carapace and slammed Chester down in the shallow water. Dennis rocked forward, aiming his sword again for the blow the shock had forestalled.

The forked, suckered tongue from the lesser head caught Dennis' sword-wrist. The stroke chopped scales and drew blood from the main neck, but it didn't bite deeply enough to do fatal harm.

Lightning blasted Chester as the robot writhed in Rakastava's clawed grip.

A scallop of sea vaporized in the sizzling flash. Instead of a natural shore, Dennis could see a pavement of fitted stones extending outward at a steep slope.

The blast threw Chester into the air. The robot's limbs thrashed in mindless convulsions with blue sparks popping from their tips.

Dennis didn't let his conscious mind consider what the battle might already have cost him. His eyes gauged the distance and angle. Then, with all his strength and the pull of Rakastava's own tongue to aid, he struck a backhand blow at the neck of the head which held him.