THE SEA HAG(97)

Dennis stepped into Emath Palace. He felt as though he'd been gone a lifetime.

The pillared hall to the throne room smelled sour. Aria's nose wrinkled instinctively, though she quickly blanked her face and glanced over to see whether Dennis had noticed her expression.

He had, but he couldn't blame her. The palace had the odor of a snake den.

The mob stopped outside. A glance behind him showed Dennis a block of doubtful faces staring through the doors, past the remnants of webbing.

He forced a smile at them. They couldn't help. And he couldn't blame them for being afraid.

"The first thing we'll do..." Dennis said quietly to his companions. His boots and Ramos' thudded on the crystal, while Chester's many limbs clicked a subtle counterpoint. Aria walked in silence, a cloud of warmth at Dennis' side and in his mind.

"...is to air the place out and get it back to normal."

"Come in, wanderer!" called a high, nervous voice from the throne room. "Come into my sanctum!"

The door-leaves were of mother-of-pearl. Usually there would have been an attendant here to control the flow of petitioners seeking King Hale.

But Hale was gone; the attendants were gone; and the doors were ajar. Dennis pushed the leaves fully open, using his left hand and right foot.

"Put up your sword!" the voice screamed from the dim interior.

"I don't need a sword for you, Parol," Dennis said, sheathing the weapon with a single smooth motion.

Usually the point caught on the scabbard lip, or the blade bound halfway down. Not this time.

Dennis had seen in the mirror the drapes of painted sailcloth with which Parol had covered the throne room. Until he entered the chamber, he hadn't appreciated how cramped and oppressive the place became with all its scintillant crystal hidden.

"Only Dennis may enter!" the voice cried. "I warn you!"

Ribbons of sooty flame rose to either side of the throne, barely illuminating the figure seated there to eyes adapted to the sun outdoors.

Dennis gripped the edge of one of the sailcloth hangings and pulled.

"What are you doing?" the voice demanded.

Something cracked above. A broad sheet of canvas billowed and rushed down with fragments of flimsy scaffolding. Rainbow light filled the back wall and the throne room.

Dennis' parents knelt at the foot of the throne. They were bound and gagged. The creature behind them was squat, black, and vaguely man-shaped, though even in the brighter light it had no more features than the sea hag's manikins.

The sword it held was long enough to lie across the throats of Hale and Selda together.





CHAPTER 67




Parol giggled from two mouths, his own and that of the great-eyed creature clinging to his shoulder.

"The tarsier," Dennis muttered under his breath, remembering the little beast whose ugliness had struck him the day he entered the wizard's apartments. It had been in a glass bubble, then, like all the other creatures he'd thought were dead...

"So..." said Parol. "We have an impasse, do we not. A situation not as either of us would wish it, Dennis."

The hood was flopped over much of Parol's face, but what wasn't covered had aged the way soft wood ages at the tide-line: gray and wrinkled so deeply that the skin seemed to be cracking down to the bone...

"I want nothing of yours, Parol," Dennis said steadily, looking past the imploring grimaces of his parents. "You can leave with everything of yours. Everything of, of your predecessor, too. But you have to leave."

The tarsier chittered something.

The black figure—its color was an absence of light, not a shade of its own—tugged at Selda's faded hair, raising her chin and baring her neck more obviously to his blade.

"Must I, boy?" Parol whispered. "I've learned things, you see. I'm very p-powerful..."

His glance darted around the room as he spoke, falling on the sunlit wall, on the eyes of the youth facing him. The lie stuck in Parol's throat and choked off his voice.

"Give it up—" Dennis said, but the tarsier was whispering into Parol's ear.

"No!" the wizard cried from the throne. "No," in a lower voice, nervous but seductive, "we'll game for it, Dennis, we'll game for Emath. That's fair, isn't it?"

His eyes flicked around, never lighting for long, never comfortable where they lighted.

"What sort of a game," Dennis asked quietly.

Chester was quoting some warning from the doorway, but this was between the two of them, boy-prince and boy-wizard as they had been when Dennis left Emath...

Parol stood up. The base of the throne raised him three steps above the crystal floor, but he still seemed to have shrunk within his robes since Dennis saw him last.

"You will ask me questions," Parol said in a sing-song voice as though he were repeating the words from rote. The tarsier's mouth was working, but if it was making sounds they were too soft to be heard at any distance from Parol's shoulder.