THE SEA HAG(86)

The youth shivered in the sunlight.

"No," he said in a firm voice. "I'll carry it, Chester. It's part of my duty, I think."

The robot didn't respond directly, but Dennis thought he read approval in the expressionless features.





CHAPTER 60




When they reached Malbawn's hut, Dennis' sweat-sticky skin prickled all over from grass-cuts and nervousness. The shade of the sagging roof was comforting.

Chester wasn't unlatching the pieces of star-metal armor so that Dennis could put it on. The youth gestured toward the suit and said, "Ah, won't I...?"

"The armor will be of no use to you today, Dennis," Chester said. There was no compromise in his tone, though he added, "You may wear it if you wish, to shield your fear if not your body."

"No, I don't need that," Dennis said coldly. Chester's calculated insult had frozen away the nervous flutterings that nibbled Dennis' mind the way insects and itching had worked on his skin in the pasture.

Chester touched Dennis' wrist with a tentacle, then withdrew it. "He whose good character makes him gentle," the robot said, "is master of his own fate."

Dennis took his right hand from the pommel of his sword and rubbed the robot's carapace, the way he'd done for friendship and reassurance all his life.

"I'm frightened, Chester," he said quietly. "But I'll be all right. What do we do now?"

"It is now that we must go to the Banned Island, Dennis," the robot replied.

Dennis opened his mouth to give the order, but the mirror was already shifting and clearing on—

A sight as striking, and as clearly artificial, as the glitter of Emath Palace.

The Banned Island rose out of the sea like a poplar spiking upward from a close-mown lawn. There was a forest fringe at the island's base, and that in itself was a hint of unnatural power.

The jungle, as dense and green as that of the hinterland beyond Emath Village, grew down to the tide line. There was no raised corniche to protect the vegetation from waves tossed high by storms, yet some of the trees visible were centuries old.

Dennis licked his dry lips, remembering Hale the Fisherman, wrapped in storm and certain doom when he first met the creature to whom he bargained an unborn son.

The sea hag ruled the Banned Island; and she ruled also the tempests which would have devastated it.

Beyond the jungle was a spire of porous rock, reddish-brown and probably laterite like the stone of the Emath headlands. The spire was five or six hundred feet high, tall enough to dwarf the greatest of the forest giants at its feet.

Even in the mirror's shrunken and foreshortened view, Dennis could see that the rock's crumbling surface made the spire impossible to climb. It was little more than a vertical gravel pile, with no hand- or foothold that would take a human's weight.

A circular glass staircase was built along—or grew from—one side of the rock. Emath Palace was all facets and lines, while this staircase seemed to have dripped down like icicles. All its parts were smooth and rounded, but they spread in a baroque profusion of landings and balconies buttressed to the spire by shining cantilevers.

The top of the spire was covered with a dome of smooth crystal.

Dennis drew his sword, gripping the hilt firmly to prevent his hand from trembling. "Closer," he ordered, and the mirrored vision swooped down obediently.

Dennis still couldn't see through the glass dome. It reflected the sky and, he realized with a jolt of fear, showed him and Chester distorted in the curves of the surface. Memory of the sea hag's arms extending for him raised the youth's voice an octave as he shouted, "Back! Take me away from the dome!"

The companions' viewpoint flip-flopped in two sudden stages. The island was a thorn sticking out of the steel-gray sea, visible mostly for the ring of froth its margin scraped from the gentle surf.

Dennis took a deep breath. He had no reason to suppose the dome's reflection was as dangerous as his instinct had told him... but he was willing to trust instinct when it told him to fear anything connected with the sea hag.

"Chester," he said in a controlled voice, "is the sea hag beneath the dome?"

"The life of the sea hag is there, Dennis, that is so," Chester agreed.

"Then that's where we—" Dennis began, but Chester interrupted him by continuing, "But the mirror will not take us beneath the dome."

"Eh?"

"The mirror will carry us only within the dome's surface, where we will stay so long as the sea hag wishes, or for eternity; and eternity will end first, it is my belief."

"Then how are we to—" Dennis blazed; and caught himself, because he was venting anger instead of thinking or even asking for help. He didn't need Chester to tell him the answer, not if he thought for himself.