"You will ask me three questions, any questions you please... and if I fail to answer them, all three of them, then I will leave. And you will be Prince of Emath, Dennis the Wanderer."
Parol began to giggle again. His cowl had fallen back and his face looked like a dead man's.
"You will be prince," the wizard resumed, his voice still quivering with humor or hysteria. "But if I succeed, little Dennis—then I will have your life. That's a fair offer, isn't it?"
Stark terror flashed from Parol's eyes. "Isn't it?"
"That's not a fair bargain," Dennis said as his mind raced, sure there was a catch somewhere in the offer. "Exile for exile: whoever loses, leaves Emath forever."
"You know I'll never be safe here while you live!" Parol blazed. "Look at them out there!"
His arm gestured toward the door and the hall beyond which the citizens of Emath watched. "Look at them!"
The tarsier chittered again, audible but not words.
Parol shivered and closed his eyes. His wrist had looked skeletal when it shot from beneath the sleeve of his robe.
"No, Dennis, no," the wizard said with his voice composed. He opened his eyes. "I offer you two lives for a life. That's fair, isn't it, don't you think that's fair?"
Selda whimpered through her gag.
Dennis walked to a covered portion of the wall and deliberately ripped down more of the canvas. Flecks of paint fluttered away from the hangings as they fell.
There wasn't a better choice. There wasn't another choice at all.
He turned again to the throne.
"All right, Parol," he said. The false flames still hung in the air, but the prismatic wash of sunlight through the walls had faded them to vague shimmers.
"Swear on your soul, Dennis!" the one-time apprentice demanded. "Swear that I may have your life if I succeed!"
"I swear that on my soul!" Dennis shouted back, unable to control his voice in the tension. "Now are you ready, or shall I tear your heart out with my hands, for all your false bogeys?"
But he knew there was nothing false about the black creature which delicately brushed its knife against the throats of Hale and Selda, as if it were stropping the blade.
"Ask," Parol said simply. His eyes were wide open.
It was easy to find a question whose answer Parol couldn't know. "Where is the sea hag?"
The tarsier whispered.
Parol cried, "Dead!" but when his ears took in the words his tongue had uttered, all the blood drained from his face and his hands began to tremble.
"Oh..." someone whispered, Aria or Ramos or Dennis himself.
"Who is it claimed the Princess Aria unless a champion should save her?"
As the tarsier whispered, Parol lurched down one of the three steps on which the throne stood.
"Rakastava," the wizard shouted, "and you slew Rakastava too, Dennis, but you won't escape me!"
Dennis couldn't think for terror. Fear for Aria and his parents, fear for the folk of Emath Village who were his folk and his responsibility since he led them in revolt. Fear of failure—
But not fear for himself, because all that had been burned out of him when he dreamed in the jungle.
And that was his question, the answer the tarsier couldn't know because it had never happened outside of Dennis' mind.
"To whom did I tell a story in my dreams the night I left Emath, Parol?"
Parol stepped to the crystal floor, shouting the words of his tarsier familiar, "Serdic! Serdic! And I have your—"
The apprentice's hand was stretched out to deliver the bolt of flame to which Dennis' oath had bound him. Something formed in the air behind him.
"—life!"
The arms of the Wizard Serdic closed about the pasty boy who had been his apprentice. Parol had spoken the name that closed the bargain Serdic offered Dennis in the rain-soaked jungle.
The flesh had slumped away from Serdic's hands and the right side of his face, but half his smile remained; and the scribbling of fungus across it.
The tarsier tried to leap clear, but one of the wizard's bony hands caught it in the air. The little beast screamed, louder even than Parol—
And they disappeared, wizard and apprentice and familiar, leaving only the fetid odor of decay where they had been.
The knife clanged to the floor. The black creature had vanished, as though it never was.
"All hail King Dennis!" Ramos shouted.
Dennis turned in shocked amazement. "What?" he said. "No!"
"All hail King Dennis!" Aria cried in her clear silver voice.
"All hail King Dennis!" roared the crowd, mob no longer, as it burst into the crystal corridors that were clear at last of magic and the horrors that magic spawned.
Dennis wanted to cut his parents free, but Ramos was doing that already with a blunt-tipped bait-cutting knife. Other hands were ripping down the last of the painted cloth with which Parol had tried to blot out the sun whose light he feared.