THE SEA HAG(92)

The sea hag laughed. It was rising closer, so that for the moment when the real mouth closed, the face and torso of a human female smiled and waved at Dennis.

"Dennis, son of Hale," said the creature in a voice of mocking thunder. "Dennis, liar's son! You will bargain and try to cheat me, boy."

"I will keep my word, sea hag," Dennis said.

He raised his left fist over his head. "And this too, I promise: if you do not return my Aria at once, I will shatter what I hold as if it were an egg."

The sea hag rose higher yet, almost to the level of the walkway. Its mouth opened.

Aria slid up to her husband's side on the translucent membrane that had freed Dennis in the cavern.

Dennis reached out his free hand. "D-darling?" he said. Aria's eyes were blank.

Her arm felt cool, but it was human flesh—and it warmed to Dennis' touch.

"Return my life, Dennis!" said the sea hag.

The water in the shaft was receding, leaving a salt tang behind. The creature's voice deepened with echoes as the sea hag plunged as swiftly as it had risen.

"Dennis?" Aria murmured. She moved her head and took a cautious step to prove that her legs still worked. "Dennis? Is it really you?"

Return my life... echoed in the dome and in Dennis' memory.

He squeezed Aria's shoulder to indicate that he wasn't leaving her; and he stepped toward the alcove from which he had wrenched the crystal.

"Do not trust your enemy, lest you die cursing!" said Chester.

"Dennis," said Aria in concern for which she didn't know enough to have a reason. "Are you going to...?"

"Return my life!" thundered the deep organ-note of the sea hag's voice.

"What the sea hag does is her business!" Dennis shouted over his shoulder to his companions, through the reverberating echoes. "I'll keep my word!"

He turned. The three manikins stood between him and the alcove. Each extended its right arm toward him.

"What...?" Dennis said. His head twitched as he started to glance back at Chester—and caught himself, unwilling to look away from the manikins.

"They are of the sea hag, Dennis," said the robot behind him. "Give them the crystal."

Return my life... said the echoes.

"We control them now, you and I," Chester said. "I have asked them to return the life to their maker."

Dennis stretched out his left hand, with the crystal which glowed and quivered and sometimes seemed to whisper to his bones.

The manikins didn't have hands, but the lumps which illusion had clothed with the semblance of hands now reached out together and took the fragile crystal. They moved with a delicacy which belied their appearance, touching neither Dennis nor one another as they gripped the object with balanced pressure.

The hairs on the back of Dennis' arm prickled as the sparkling wires brushed close—but the youth didn't move until the crystal was firmly in the joined grip of the manikins.

Dennis looked at the featureless voids; and for just an instant, he thought he saw Aria smiling at him again from the blank metal that had mimicked her.

But that was illusion, and it was gone before Dennis could be sure it had existed at all. He stepped away.

The manikins moved forward in jerky unison.

"Watch out!" Dennis said, reaching to block Aria behind him; but she slipped into the crook of his elbow and encircled his waist with her own soft arm.

The manikins ignored them. Holding the crystal before them, they stepped; and stepped; and—

"Return my life!"

—stepped again, into the shaft together.

"The sea hag has what it demanded, Dennis," said Chester in a metallic shout through the echoes. "Now we must go, and quickly."

"What's going to hap—" Aria said as she and Dennis, arm in arm, followed the robot up the steps to the main floor.

Water splashed, far below.

"—pen?"

Blue lightning flashed and sparkled up the shaft.

"Run faster," Chester said. One of his tentacles snaked out to support Dennis as the youth's foot slipped on smooth glass. "The acid will mix smoothly with water, but when it touches the sea hag—"

Dennis paused, passing Aria ahead of him into the narrow stairwell. The shaft belched yellow-green vapor—

And the dazzling white glare of magnesium burning in the shaft made the interior of the dome blaze as though the sun had come down from the heavens. The pavilion's porcelain columns shattered from the reflected heat.

Dennis plunged down the staircase. Aria was well ahead of him. Barefoot: she'd kicked off her slippers and was bouncing down, hitting only each third or fourth of the wedge-shaped steps. Dennis gripped the central rail and followed, knowing that the worst which could happen if he fell was that he'd be bruised or break some bones.