CHAPTER 6
The entrance to what had been Serdic's wing of the palace was off a small rotunda at the base of this staircase. The rotunda was empty except for litter and a vague smell. There was regular traffic to the wizard's quarters, meal-trays being brought and removed—but the adjacent part of the palace didn't get cleaned.
Despite that, the circular room had a striking beauty at this hour. Sunlight wicked through twisted prisms in the high ceiling and framed the western half of the circumference with columns of pure colors.
In the center of the insubstantial colonnade was a tall door of black pearl. It was ajar.
"Why isn't it closed, Chester?" Dennis asked as he walked closer. "Isn't Parol down at the other end of town with the dragons?"
"Parol is with the dragons, Dennis," said the robot. "And he has wedged the door open so that he can enter again when he returns this evening."
Dennis stared at the door. Over the threshold had been shoved a heavy foot-bath. It was of malachite. The stone's hideous green color clashed with the pure columns of light—and would have looked equally ugly in almost any other setting as well. Dennis could imagine why Parol used the piece as a doorstop.
But he couldn't imagine why a doorstop was needed.
"Can't he open the door to his own rooms?" he asked wonderingly.
"He cannot open the door to the Wizard Serdic's suite from the outside, Dennis," Chester explained. "There is a spell on the panel that Serdic placed, and it is not within Parol's power to work or change it."
Dennis' face set at the reminder of Serdic—and that Serdic's death did not necessarily end the wizard's power. "All right," he said. "Let's go in and, and do what we must do."
He pushed the panel open against the natural tendency to close which all the doors in the palace shared. The black pearl was vaguely warm and had a waxy slickness.
Dennis was frightened to enter the wizard's suite, but it was a fear he could face and accept. The feeling that his father's anger struck into him was fear also—but it was a child's fear of ultimate power.
Even though Dennis knew that Hale's shouting rage could not itself hurt him—that physically the two of them were at least a near match by now, father and son—Dennis reacted to his father's moods as unreasoningly as he had done when he was an infant.
The wizard's apartments were unfamiliar, and they might be dangerous; but Dennis could face them as the man he was growing to be.
There was nothing in the anteroom of the suite except an oil lamp burning on a cast-bronze pedestal. The open flame was backed and doubled by a round silver mirror, but even so its gutterings as the door swung open were almost invisible in the flood of light through the crystal walls and ceiling.
Dennis frowned at the lamp. "Does he expect to come back after dark then, Chester?" he asked.
"He may or may not, Dennis," said the robot. Chester curved a tentacle almost to touching the stand. While the lamp was very plain, the pedestal on which it stood was a delicate tracery of cast insects clinging to one another. "The lamp, though, is only the watchman Serdic left to tell him what happened in his suite while he was gone."
"What?" said Dennis, the word a way to gain time while his mind worked on the implications of what he'd just been told. "Will the lamp talk to Parol when he comes back?"
Two of Chester's limbs moved in a shrug. "That I do not know, Dennis," he admitted.
"Anyway," said Dennis, "it doesn't matter because we're here now."
He nodded curtly to the quivering flame and strode further into the apartments, his thumbs hooked arrogantly in his belt.
The design of the palace had no fixed floor-plan. This wing consisted of rooms opening directly off one another instead of lying along a corridor.
Only the oil flame furnished the anteroom. The following chamber was larger with a ceiling vaulted into five sections. The pentacle formed by the crystal groins might have had something to do with why Serdic appropriated this set of rooms, but the room formed a museum of sorts instead of a magical workroom.
Along the crystal walls stood bubbles of human-blown glass. In any background but that of the palace, they would have been amazing for their size and the skill of their manufacture.
From the largest bubble glared the lifelike mummy of one of the lizardfolk: his gray scales bore a healthy luster, and there was a glint in his yellow eyes. Dennis couldn't imagine how anyone could have blown a bottle so large and nearly perfect... but swatches of the glass had a milky sheen, and variations in thickness distorted the lines of the specimen within.
The crystal room was perfect and in its perfection denied any possibility that Emath Palace had been built by men.
There were scores of other containers—perhaps hundreds, because most of them were tiny and contained six- and eight- and many-limbed creatures. Dennis glanced around, curious and suddenly aware that he didn't know what precisely he and Chester were looking for.
He recognized most of the larger exhibits—birds and the lizards of various shapes that skittered into Emath across the perimeter, unhindered by the dragons on guard. There was one creature, though, that was so unfamiliar that Dennis didn't remember ever having seen anything like it.
Except perhaps for a human being.
Only the face was man-like—and that in a wizened, sneeringly-angry way. Its muzzle was broad and flat. Muzzle, lips, and the palms of the creature's hands were bare black skin. The remainder of the little body—it could have weighed no more than a few pounds in life—was covered with coarse hair that seemed either red or blond depending on how the light struck it.
It was unique and uniquely unpleasant—though Dennis couldn't have explained why it bothered him more than, say, one of the long-fanged lizards he knew to be poisonous. He turned away, his face wrinkling into a grimace like the creature's own, and said, "Chester, what are we looking for?"
"It is in the next room that we must look, Dennis," the little robot said nonchalantly as he led the way through an open doorway decorated with crystal arabesques.
The walls and ceiling were swathed in black velvet so that even now, at mid-morning, the sun penetrated only through the door. A further drape, pinned back at the moment, could be swung to close that opening as well.
The circumference of the room was filled with machines—things of metal and glass and dull ceramic. Dennis couldn't imagine a use for any of them.
The velvet was solid black, as nighttime in Emath never was. The darkness pressed in on Dennis and added to the discomfort he'd felt since pushing open the black pearl doorpanel.
The air within the wizard's quarters was as musty as the atmosphere of a deep cave. It wasn't poisonous or even actively unpleasant; it just hadn't moved very much in all the time Emath existed. The anteroom smelled of hot oil; around the glass bubbles hung a chlorine tang vaguely reminiscent of the sea.
In this third room, the odor of velvet slowly decaying struggled against a sharpness that was less a smell than a rasp at the back of Dennis' throat.
It reminded him of the night lightning had struck a dozen times on the highest towers of Emath. After the last stroke, a hissing orange globe had floated down a corridor and into the center of the throne room before exploding. The ball of lightning left behind a miasma like the one which emanated from the wizard's machines.
"Chester," Dennis said.
He took a deep breath and looked around with a haughty expression that protected him from the fear that would otherwise make him shiver. "Well, get on with it. Are we going to stay here until Parol gets back?"
Chester leaned his egg-shaped body back at an angle and said, "The man whose good character makes him gentle, creates his own fate, Dennis."
The boy's nostrils flared in anger—and he caught himself. "Little friend," he said, smiling and reaching for the tentacle which the robot raised to meet the offered hand. "I don't like it here. Forgive me my irritability."
"One does not know a friend's heart until one sees him anxious," Chester said with approval. Even as he gripped Dennis' hand, three more of his limbs were playing over the case of the nearest machine.
The device had a broad, flat surface like that of a draftsman's easel. For the moment it was tilted up at 45 degrees, but the slender arms supporting the easel seemed to be as capable of movement as Chester's own limbs.
When they'd entered the room, the pedestal and easel were of the same dull black material. At the robot's touch, faint colors—too angry to be called pastels; the shades that metal takes as it heats and cools in a forge—began to streak what had seemed the pedestal's solid interior.
The room began to quiver at a frequency too low for sound. There was a fresh whiff of lightning-born harshness.
"What is it that you wish to know, Dennis?" the robot asked.
"I—" the boy said. "I—Chester, ask it what it was that my father did in the storm the night—the storm Ramos told us about."
Instead of speaking, Chester shifted the delicate tips of three tentacles. Colors richened and merged with one another. Dennis leaned over the flat surface, wondering if he would see letters form there. The blackness of the easel was a palpable thing that sucked in the dim light. It had no reflection.
The illumination within the chamber increased and changed quality with a suddenness that made Dennis whirl. He expected to see the drapes sliding back and someone—Parol, rationally; but momentary terror filled his mind with a vision of the corpse of Serdic—standing in the door that was the only way to escape from this complex of rooms.
Instead, he didn't see the room at all.
Where the velvet and squatting machines had been, the sea tossed under a sky of terrifying gray-green translucence. Lightning spat from point to point on the wall of encircling clouds; waves shot straight upward from the sea's surface, although there was no wind.
Dennis had never been permitted to board a ship, but he was looking from the deck of one now: an open fishing boat, single-masted and tiny against the lowering circle of clouds. Chester had vanished. Dennis' own body had vanished.
His father clung with corded muscles, the tiller in one hand and a mast stay in the other. Rags of sailcloth snapped from the spar every time the open boat pitched.
Hale's hair was black and his face younger than that of the father Dennis knew in life. His mouth was open, but he was no longer trying to shout against the tumult.
The sea became as still as the dead air within the eye of the storm. The water began to change color beside the boat's starboard rail. Streaks of brown, waving in sinuous ripples; coalescing, spreading wider and sharpening into burnished purple...
The ripples of color formed a circle forty feet across. A living thing rose in the center of the tendrils that were the fringe of its body.
"A sea hag..." Dennis whispered to Chester; but the boy had no companion to hear him in this place of storm.
The sea hag had the face of a beautiful woman floating in the swirl of her lustrous hair, but the skin was gray and the expression was as still as marble. Beneath the face and seeming hair was a greasy hugeness over which the ocean shimmered like the surface of a wading pool. The fishing boat steadied.
Nothing moved but the sea hag's hair and the wall of storm beyond.
"What is it that you want?" Hale shouted at the creature which gripped the keel of his boat. His voice was clear and strong; fear had raised it an octave above its normal pitch.
Dennis had heard of the sea hag as he had heard of a score of other bogeys from his nurse's imagination or the ancient past of Earth before men came here from the stars. Imagination surely, but—
The thing floating in the water opened a mouth that split the woman-face and crossed the "hair" floating a yard to either side. The creature's gullet was arched with bone and otherwise as red as heart's blood. From corner to corner, the mouth was wider than Dennis was tall.
The sea hag said in a cavernous voice, "King Hale, I would bargain with you."
The huge lips closed and their edges merged. The female features reformed as if they had never been split and distorted across the head of a monster as great as the boat beside which it floated. The ridges of brown and purple scales that counterfeited hair trembled again to complete the illusion.
"Let me go!" Hale cried. "You have the wrong man. I'm no king!"
"Would you be a king, Fisherman Hale?" rumbled the sea hag, smearing its human countenance again.
Dennis would have closed his eyes, but he had no eyes in this time, and no sound came when he tried to scream.
"Or would you be a drowned corpse that my sea casts up when the fish are done with it?"
The white-red throat growled like the storm. The lightning-shot circle squeezed closer to the motionless boat.
"What will you bargain, sea hag?" Hale demanded with shrill courage that calmed his son to hear. Hale was frightened, facing death and a monster more shocking than death; but he was facing them as best he could.
Dennis, safe behind a veil of time and magic, had his father as a model of how a man should act in the final crisis. Hale's son could do no less than control his feelings now, when he was only a phantom of sense and feelings.
"I will make you king of this shore, fisherman," the sea hag said. "King of Emath."
"Dead man on dead rocks, is that what you mean?" Hale cried. "Begone, sea-bitch—the storm will bargain me that."
"I will make you king in a crystal palace if you bargain with me, fisherman," said the sea hag. "I will raise a harbor safe in any storm, and all who use the harbor will be yours to command under our bargain. All this... or the rocks and the fish and the birds to peck your bones."
"You're toying with me," Hale said, no longer shouting or angry. He let go of the tiller and stay; the boat was as firm as if were dragged its length onto shore. "Why do you talk of bargains, sea hag? I haven't anything but my clothes and this boat—and only a half share in the boat."
The sea hag closed its lips. Its woman-face smiled at Hale with the icy visage of a castle courtesan.
"Give me your firstborn son, King Hale," said the terrible real mouth.
"I haven't a wife, I haven't a son," said Hale, wringing his hands at the false hope. "I haven't a son!"
"Give me your firstborn son when he is a year of age, King Hale," said the sea hag. "And I will give you Emath and your life."
"You can't really do that," Hale said. "You can't make me king..."
His voice had fallen almost to a whisper. Dennis heard it, and the woman-face smiled again.
The wrack of storm clouds was clearing, blowing away in tatters in every direction. The sun was low in the west. Its light streamed in crimson fingers through the remnants of the storm.
"Bargain with me, King Hale," said the sea hag.
Hale closed his eyes. His hands gripped one another so harshly that the blunt nails drew blood.
"Have your bargain then!" he shouted to the creature.
"I have your word, King Hale," said the sea hag. "And when the time comes, I will have our bargain."
The creature began to sink. The boat trembled as a fresh breeze shook its mast and furled sail.
When the cloud curtain rose, it displayed the shore half a mile to leeward. The rocks of the corniche were dulled by the horizon's shadow, but sunlight still lit the jungle canopy and the rare bright flowers there.
Hale muttered a thankful curse. He slipped a loop of rope over the tiller preparatory to shaking out enough sail to tack clear of the cliffs.
It was as if neither storm nor sea hag had ever existed. Dennis was suddenly sure that he was a wraith in a time that had never existed: that his father would sail off into a future of fish and—
Water began to surge at the shoreline.
First a rumble, then a double spout that threw mist high into rainbow diffraction. The breeze that had followed the storm now failed, but the boat began to pitch with the violence of the sea roaring in the near distance.
Ropes of glowing rock lifted high enough above the sea that the steam of creation no longer hid the angry glare. The lava was fiercely orange at the moment it appeared, black the instant it cooled below liquescence. As the double headlands rose into a firm barrier against the might of any storm, their sea-washed roots took on the same dull red as the corniche from which they now extended.
A vagrant puff of air blew from the land. It felt hot and smelled of sulphur. Fish floated belly-up on the surface of the sea. Dennis' father held a shroud reeved through the three-fall block at the masthead, ready to raise the sail; but he hadn't moved since the shore began to boil into a harbor.
For a moment it looked as though steam and mineral-rich vapors were growing thicker over the south headland. Something like a vortex reached out of the clouded land, climbing higher—
And exploding into brilliant crystalline radiance as it rose into the plane of the sunset. Emath Palace was growing while Hale and his unseen son watched and wondered and thought about the bargain which the sea hag had sealed in crystal.
For a moment, the light on the sprouting towers was as dazzling as the heart of a ruby. Then the light faded; the world faded; and Dennis stood in a dim, musty room, looking at Chester and shivering.
Dennis started to speak and found he had to cough to clear his throat of dust from the velvet. "Did it really happen?" he asked quietly.
When Dennis entered the wizard's chamber, he'd thought he was a man whose father treated him like a boy. Now that he'd seen what it might mean to be a man, he was no longer sure what he was.
But he knew what he would try to be.
"The device shows only what has happened, Dennis," Chester said, waggling a tentacle over the machine that was again cold and dark. "It shows that or nothing."
"Then—" Dennis' mind struggled out of the memories that enmeshed it like tendrils of brown and purple hair gaping into red terror.
"Then," he repeated firmly, "did I have an elder brother who was traded for the kingship?"
"I do not know if you had an elder brother."
Dennis grimaced toward the doorway, steeling himself for what he must do next. He had to demand an explanation from his mother, despite the tears and waves of guilt with which she would flood him.
"But," the little robot volunteered unexpectedly, "you became my master at your birth, Dennis; and that was a year to the day from when the sea hag bargained with your father, as we saw."
Dennis found that his hands were stiff because he'd been clenching them since... he wasn't sure how long he'd been doing that, trying to control his emotions by keeping a tight grip on all his muscles. He stretched deliberately, knowing that he couldn't relax but he could keep his tension from hurting him.
"Chester," he said, "you showed me how my father became king. Can you show me what happened wh-wh-when his son grew to a year old?"
"I will show you, Dennis," said the robot, his tentacles waking the pedestal to colored life again. Their motion paused.
"Dennis," he said, "the man who does not resent his fate has a good life."
"I..." said Dennis. "Please show me how Hale met his bargain, friend."
"I will show you, Dennis."
There were rooms beyond this one in the wizard's suite—a bedchamber; surely a library; and whatever else only gods or devils knew, and Dennis had no desire to learn. The youth rubbed his palms together to work off nervousness without clenching them again.
The room faded into a sky as thick as velvet and almost as black.
Dennis was on/in/over a vessel again on a stormy sea, but this time the boat was even smaller than The Partners. It was an open net-tending skiff like the one—perhaps the very one—in which Hale had rowed to sea these three weeks past.
Hale sat on the midships thwart, resting his oars on the gunwales and looking toward the horizon with a face as grim as the encircling storm.
Hale was not yet the man Dennis remembered as his father, but neither was he quite the fisherman standing transfixed by horror on the deck of The Partners. Instead of homespun linen, Hale wore a silk tunic next to his body and covered that with blue-black wool from the Islands of Hispalia.
Around Hale's neck was a triple chain of heavy gold. Though the chain's lower curve was hidden beneath the garments, Dennis knew that the royal seal of Emath hung there as it always did when his father was awake.
Hale's face was fleshier than it had been when he was a fisherman, but emotions pulled it into a rictus almost as inhuman as the visage of the little creature next door in a bubble of glass.
The storm was a brutal thing, as savage as any tempest that lashed the seas of Hell; but Hale rode in the eye of it, where the sky shone green and grim and the leaping water was disorienting but not dangerous.
No vessel could have survived the wall of wind and lightning which encircled the boat. Even the greatest of the trading ships which anchored in Emath Harbor during Dennis' present would have been torn to bits by the ravaging weather. Hale was alone except for his boat, his son's wraith, and the gelatinous shape of the sea hag, rising from the deep as the sea stilled.
The human head broke the calm surface, smiling and making enticing gestures with the arms that lay in the circle of hair. Hale stared at the creature fiercely without speaking.
The sea hag's real mouth gaped open. The arms deformed into barbels at either corner of the jaw. The smile smeared itself unrecognizably into scaly horror.
"Welcome, King Hale," said the sea hag. Dennis could hear the amusement in the booming voice. "Have you brought me the price of our bargain two years past?"
When the creature spoke, the air stank of fish and death.
"Make me another bargain," Hale blurted. His hands clenched together, releasing the oars. The blades slipped only an inch or two into the sea, where they rested on something beneath the surface. "I'll give you anything you want. Anything!"
"You're a rich man, King Hale," chuckled the sea hag. "You have everything that trade and power can bring a man... and everything you have is a thing that I have given you—except one. Pay me the price of our bargain, King Hale."
"Take my life, damn you!" shouted Dennis' father as he lurched upright in the boat. "Take me!"
"The storm had your life two years past, fisherman," said the creature. "As I saved you then, so I will have our bargain now. Bring me your firstborn."
"Oh god," said Hale as he sank back onto the thwart. It was prayer or curse or a despairing ejaculation, and perhaps all three at once in his voice. Though he sat down heavily, the boat barely shuddered.
"What would you have, King Hale?" said the sea hag in a voice that rumbled like the bellies of the dragons—but much louder.
"He's so..." Hale tried to say between the net of fingers with which he covered his face. By an effort of will, he jerked his hands down and looked at the monster which taunted him. Tears were dripping down his weathered cheeks.
Dennis reached out to put his arm around his father's shoulders. He touched nothing, because he had no body in this place.
"I can't let you have Dennis," Hale said simply. "When his mother holds him, she looks... looks like an angel, sea hag. Are you woman enough to understand that? Take me. I can't give you my son."
No one could doubt the quiet determination behind the words. Hale's tears continued to stream down his face. He didn't bother to brush them away.
Dennis tried again to clasp him. If he'd had eyes, Dennis would have been crying also.
The sea hag laughed. "You think you love your son because he is still an infant," the creature said. "Shall I give you until his fourth birthday, King Hale? Would you find that merciful?"
Its laughter boomed and stank around the boat as Hale gaped at the creature's shuddering maw.
"Do you mean that?" he pleaded.
"I will keep my bargain, Hale," said the sea hag. Its mouth closed so that the woman-face smiled momentarily once again.
The sea hag seemed to be sinking. Hale relaxed, and Dennis looked out over the sea to note the storm breaking as the magical image of an earlier storm had broken minutes before.
But before the creature disappeared, it chuckled again and added, "I will keep my bargain, Hale. And you will keep your bargain too. In good time..."
And as the sea hag finally disappeared, the velvet drapes and the darkened palace closed Dennis in the embrace of reality.
Dennis flexed his arms, then offered a smile to his companion. "It's hard to do that," he said. "Hard to—to be there and not be able to, to really be there."
"Shall we go then, Dennis?" Chester replied, shifting his body doorward on the four of his limbs that now supported him.
"No, I—" He stopped and put on a calm expression, as if the robot's featureless case had eyes which a man could catch and hold. "Chester, will the machine show the future?"
"It will not show the future, Dennis," Chester said. Then, tartly, he added, "Fate does not look forward—and its blows do not fall wrongfully."
Dennis hugged his shoulders to remind himself that he had a body now... and to make sure that memory was fresh in a few moments, when he re-entered the past through magic.
"I want to see what happened next," he said. "When... wh-when I was four years old."
Chester's tentacles did not move on the pedestal at once. He twisted to face the door as if he heard someone coming.
"Parol!" Dennis shouted, resting his knuckles on his hips so that he stood arms akimbo. "Are you there?"
"He is not here yet, Dennis," Chester said, easing back on his limbs at his master's unexpected reaction to his hint.
"It doesn't matter where he is," Dennis said. "I want to know what happened on my fourth birthday—if this won't tell me what's going to happen on my sixteenth."
"The fool builds a fire and burns himself on it, Dennis."
"Chester, I am your master!" Dennis said, letting fear and uncertainty come out in his voice as anger. "I have the right to order you to do this thing!"
The little robot must have made allowances for the emotions that ruled Dennis at this moment. Instead of the silent insolence that Dennis expected even as the words left his mouth, Chester said, "I will do this thing, Dennis..."
His tentacles played on the controls, three of them touching the surface of what seemed metal until it lighted in its interior and the fourth poised, waiting for some stimulus that did not come before Dennis again sank into a dream of storm and darkness.
Hale's face was a younger version of the one Dennis had seen the evening before, ruddy with good living—and frightened gray beneath that patina of success. He was daubing at his palms as he waited within the circuit of the protective storm.
Hale's hands had grown soft and he'd lost his calluses in the three years since his son's image had watched him. The oar-looms had raised blisters and then torn them open as the king—no longer a fisherman—stroked his way out of Emath Harbor.
To bargain with the creature who had given that harbor to him—for a price.
When the sea hag rose, its mouth was already open. Water streamed back through hidden gills. There was no hint of humanity in the creature, and little enough of hope.
The fishing boat didn't pitch, because the sea hag's mass already gripped its keel and held it steady; but water thrown by the creature's upward rush slapped the wooden sides and filled the air with mist.
Hale very deliberately reached over the gunwales and skimmed his hands through the water, cleaning his blisters in its salty bitterness. "I have come, sea hag," he said formally.
"You have come alone, little man-thing," said the sea hag.
A lightning bolt wove its instant sinuosities across the storm wheel. The blade of blue-white light threw the boat into harsh relief and momentarily illuminated the monster beneath the water's gray surface. Dennis, looking down from standing height, saw not one mouth but a score of mouths gaping and grinning from a globe even huger than his nightmares.
The sea hag was nothing that had been born on a world that bore men.
The thunderclap pounded the ship and Dennis' father. The shattering cascade of sound provided the scream that Dennis had no mouth to utter.
He was not present in this past; his body could not be harmed here. But memory of the blue-lit sea hag would never leave his dreams...
"I have not brought my Dennis," said Hale, forcing the truth as he knew it out in a voice that threatened to break.
"Goodlady—" Hale hadn't looked down into the water as his son did when the lightning illuminated it. No one who'd seen the sea hag's full reality could have used the polite human greeting, even now when the beautiful woman-face smiled out of the waves again.
"—I beg you, ask for something else. Anything I can give you. My—my ships, they bring cargoes from every port the sea bounds."
"Salt water is my kingdom," rumbled the creature in its great stinking voice. "Every shore the sea bounds is mine to travel more swiftly than you or your ships can dream, King Hale."
"Caravans from the interior bring me jewels and wonders that the seas have never known!" Hale said with desperate brightness. "Things from ancient times, marvelous things. Ask me for anything, goodlady, anything!"
He was rubbing his hands unconsciously. They jerked apart every time pain brought the open blisters to his attention—and then began washing one another again, because nothing in Hale's immediate physical reality could stay in his mind very long.
"Nothing..." said the sea hag—though Dennis thought there was for the first time a hesitation in the voice that had been all arrogant certainty before.
"Nothing, King Hale—" the hesitation was gone "—but the price of our bargain, your firstborn. Bring me the price agreed!"
"G-g-g—" Hale stuttered into the cavern of blood-rich tissues and bone. He covered his eyes with his hands. "Goodlady, I beg you—a delay, please. Not my son. Not now."
The sea hag's booming laughter shook the vessel almost as the thunder had done moments before. "Ah, shall I show you mercy again, King Hale? Is that what you think?"
"Please."
"Then I will give you twelve years more with your son," said the creature, "to see how much less you love him after you know him the longer. But Hale...?"
"Please. Please."
"I will have the price of my bargain the next time we meet. Depend on it."
As the creature sank, a further bolt of lightning raked the sky, making Hale's hair stand out and reopening to view depths that should have remained hidden.
The sight and echoing thunder left Dennis shivering when the velvet room closed in around him and he had a body again.
Dennis' skin was hot and his head buzzed. He felt as though he were about to faint, so he squatted down on the cold crystal floor and put his head between his knees.
Chester looped a limb over his master's shoulders and hugged gently.
"What can I do, Chester?" Dennis whispered. He didn't open his eyes, but his hand reached out to embrace Chester's smooth carapace. "I'll have to go t-to it."
"Your father will not give you up, Dennis," said the robot.
Dennis rose to his feet, bracing his hand on Chester's body and partly supported by another of the robot's tentacles. The moment of real collapse had passed, but he didn't trust the strength of his knees just yet.
"He has to give me up, Chester," he said quietly. "Everything we have—everything we are—comes from the sea hag. If she takes back... Emath, the harbor, the palace... there's nothing. Everyone here will starve. And we're responsible for them b-because we're the rulers."
He squeezed his lips tightly together to keep them from quivering. His eyes looked unblinkingly at his companion, but he could not prevent the tears from dribbling down because of what he had seen—and was sure he must go to join.
"Now I know why Dad wouldn't let me go out in the boats," Dennis said. "He beat me when I sneaked aboard one of the big trading ships when I was little."
"The man who spoils his son, spoils himself," commented the robot.
"But that didn't matter!" Dennis shouted in sudden anger at the memory. "He can't save me from the sea hag because he can't save Emath!"
"Parol is here, Dennis," said Chester without any sign of emotion in the words.