CHAPTER 39 

Dennis went out with the herd the next morning. 

He felt a little tired and all his muscles ached, but he was in amazingly good condition for someone who'd been near death from his wounds less than a day before. The room with its slab that pricked his skin had done much more than speed the healing of his surface injuries. 

"Rakastava takes good care of its citizens, Chester," he commented. 

"Rakastava takes good care of its herd, Dennis," the robot replied crisply. "But it was the purpose of the cows to feed Malbawn and Malduanan." 

Dennis reached out to stroke the flank of the nearest of the cows plodding to fresh grass beyond the arc they had already cropped. She twitched aside at the touch. When the cow looked back and saw Dennis, she made a grumbling sound—brushed her tail against the youth—and resumed her course. 

"They're getting to like me," Dennis said with quiet satisfaction. "I think—" 

He paused. "—Aria may like me too." 

"If a fool has no work," Chester snapped, "his groin thinks for him." 

Dennis grimaced. "I want to see Malduanan's hut," he said. "He came from this side of the field, so it's—yeah, that must be it." 

Another great lump stretched from the pasture edge back into the shadows of the jungle. It was perhaps larger than Malbawn's hovel, but they were both made of leaves gray with their coating of mildew and other fungus. The door, a curtain of twigs and woven bark, hung open as Malduanan had left it to meet the youth who'd slain Malbawn. 

Dennis drew his sword, though he didn't think he'd need it. 

"The best remedy is to prevent trouble by foresight," Chester quoted approvingly. 

Dennis stepped inside with his blade chest-high. 

The dirt floor was littered with bones—scrubbed clean of flesh and ligament. Malduanan's beak had punched the larger ones with thumbnail-sized holes through which the creature sucked marrow. Some bones were fresh, and some had rotted away into splinters; but all the bones were cattle bones. 

Dennis realized he'd been holding his breath. He let it out in relief. 

"I thought—" he said aloud. "I was..." He looked around the dim interior. 

"Malduanan didn't kill people," Dennis said, finally managing to organize his thoughts clearly enough that he could wrap words around them. "I was afraid there'd be—" 

Skulls to trip over, his mind said. 

"—bodies here too," his mouth completed. 

"But," he added as his irrational relief turned to gloom that didn't really make any sense either—what was done, was done: "There aren't any men here, because Malbawn killed them all before they could meet Malduanan." 

"There was a man who met Malduanan, Dennis," Chester said softly. "It was so long ago that his bones are dust and the dust of dust; but this—" metal pinged softly as Chester's tentacle touched something in the shadows "—is not yet dust." 

The sound was from behind him, beside the door. Dennis turned in curiosity. His blade shifted, point forward, as his heart jumped in surprise. A figure stood there, as tall as Dennis and as silent as Death. 

Metal rang on metal again. "It is not a man but a man's armor, Dennis," Chester said. "Nothing in this place is alive, except the mold on the walls." 

Dennis scuffled his way through the beef bones to see the armor. It was black and so highly polished that it gleamed even in this vague light. 

Dennis ran his left index finger across the metal. It felt cool and water-smooth. There was no dust on his fingertip when he looked at it closely. The black surface was more than glassy: not even dust would cling to it, over these— 

"How many years, Chester?" he murmured. "How long has this been here?" 

"For fewer years than men have been settled on this planet, Dennis," the robot said. "But by only a generation of years fewer." 

Dennis tapped the breastplate with a fingernail. It rang like a wind-chime, a high-pitched sound that resonated in the armor for a dozen heartbeats. 

The youth could see, from where plates overlapped to let the wearer move his arms, that the metal was paper-thin. He shifted his sword to his left hand and squeezed the hollow wrist with the full strength of a grip that could crush the hand of anyone he'd ever met. 

The metal didn't quiver. It was as if Dennis were squeezing a solid steel bar. 

He let out his breath again, slowly. 

The suit of armor stood on its own legs without external support. The slotted visor was raised. A glance within assured Dennis that there was no framework inside either. 

Nor were there bones. If the suit's owner had been wearing the armor when he died, that had been long enough ago to permit even a human skull to vanish utterly. 

Dennis shifted an arm of the suit up and down, as though he were shaking hands with the dead owner. The hinged plates of the wrist and elbow whispered across one another, almost frictionless in their movement. 

"Chester, this is beautiful," Dennis said. "Should I—" 

He thought as he sheathed his sword, freeing both hands. "Ah, Chester? Is this something that I need?" 

"It is not now that you need it, Dennis," the robot replied in a flat, uncompromising tone. 

"Oh," the youth said. Well, he didn't need it. Would he wear it, tramping through the pasture under a sun that would heat black metal like an oven? "Well. I guess it can stay here." 

He poked his foot morosely into a pile of debris; but that's all it was, debris. Garbage, really, picked too clean to smell. "Let's go out and see what else there is in this... place." 

The sunlight felt good, though Dennis found himself twitching together his fingers to recapture the ghostly smoothness of the armor. It had been so beautiful... 

Chester offered him a cluster of magenta berries. The kernal within each berry was large, but the layer of flesh around it was sweet and tart in trembling alteration. 

The berries were delicious—and everything the food of Rakastava was not. But Rakastava had surely saved Dennis' life the day before... 

The cattle were avoiding the area in the center of the pasture, where Malduanan lay in the grass like a gray hillock. The air above the corpse glittered as gorged insects spun in the sunlight. 

Dennis touched his sword hilt. Sucking on the last of the berries, he began to walk across the field toward Malbawn's hut. He would look in the mirror again. He wanted to see what was happening in Emath. 

And he wanted to see Aria. 

Malbawn's legs had fallen in tattered segments to the grass. The great plates of the creature's torso were beginning to separate as well. Dennis wondered if the chitinous armor would resist the elements as effectively as it had the edge of his sword. The pieces might lie there forever, empty reminders of a monster the folk of Rakastava had thought must be bribed because it could not be slain. 

He shivered. They'd nearly been right. 

Chester touched his companion's shoulder and said, "He who perseveres in a crisis makes his own fate, Dennis." 

"If he's lucky," the youth grunted. "And if he has friends." 

But he was swaggering as he stepped up to the mirror and demanded, "Show me Emath. Show me my father." 

As obedient and certain as the law of gravity, the gleaming surface grayed, then brightened on the turrets of Emath Palace for a moment before it swooped dizzyingly down through the crystal walls. 

King Hale sat in the drawing room of the royal suite. Selda lay on a divan across from him, her face pressed against the bolster. She seemed to be crying. No servants were present. 

"That's funny," Dennis muttered. He peered out the hut's door to make sure that his time sense hadn't been distorted by his injuries and whatever process the city had used to heal them. 

The sun was just short of mid-sky—the time Hale always spent in the throne room, hearing deputations and discussing the business of the village with his advisors. 

"Show me the throne room," Dennis directed. His voice was neutral, but his face glowered like a thundercloud. 

The mirror's image shifted queasily, a seeming motion like that of a diver executing a fast back-flip. The throne room filled the surface when it came to rest, though at first Dennis thought the mirror had made a mistake. The bright, sparkling chamber of his recollection couldn't have been transformed into this nest of shadowed gloom. 

But it had been. The walls and ceiling were draped with black cloth: not velvet, like those of the Wizard Serdic's apartments, but sailcloth painted black and hung to cover crystal that paint wouldn't stick to directly. 

Parol—pudgy, pock-marked Parol, with his smirk and his cringing agreement with anyone willing to face him—sat on the throne.