CHAPTER 40
Takseler, one of Emath's leading citizens—a merchant whose shop covered a block of the waterfront and who owned three trading vessels himself—faced Parol with a shocked expression and very little clothing. He'd entered the audience hall wearing robes and a chain of office. Now he stood in his undergarments with his valuables in the hands of guards in orange livery.
Those were the human guards. At either side of the throne shimmered a demon, orange also but clad in flames that vanished upward in curls of filthy smoke.
Parol cackled and pointed at the merchant. The guard holding the chain of office in his soft hands laughed in agreement. He stepped closer and slapped a loop of the heavy gold across Takseler's face, then kicked the merchant as he stumbled to his knees.
The guard was Rifkin. King Hale's butler now had new livery and new duties. He seemed comfortable in both of them.
Parol laughed. The human guards joined him.
The demons raised their snaky heads. Billows of fire surged from their throats, curling so high that they threatened to blister the painted sailcloth...
"No more!" Dennis shouted, to the mirror and to fate.
The mirror obeyed, showing the youth only a reflection of himself.
Fate—the doom which closed on King Hale and his subjects when he determined to cheat the sea hag of her bargain—would be harder to avoid.
Dennis' left hand was caressing Chester's carapace. The metal wasn't even scratched by the blow Malduanan had struck it the day before. It provided Dennis with the touch of something that had stayed unchanged since his earliest memories.
His parents had aged and shrunken from the wonderful, all-powerful creatures of his youth. Emath Palace was no longer the glittering wonderland in whose halls the boy Dennis had gamboled.
Chester said quietly, "Do not tie yourself to one who is so much greater that your life becomes a toy."
Dennis rubbed the robot affectionately.
He'd changed too, although—
He shrugged his shoulders, watching the play of his muscles in the mirror. A man's muscles, and a sword at his side that he'd used as a man—with the scars to prove it.
Change wasn't necessarily a bad thing.
"Mirror, show me the Princess Aria," he demanded. His chin was lifted and eyes turned resolutely away from Chester. The robot had no expression, but Dennis knew that he'd imagine a look of disapproval on the metal if he let himself see it.
He realized with a lurch of dismay that he'd hoped—dreamed, prayed—that Aria would be bathing again. But—
The mirror showed what was rather than what the viewer wished. Aria sat cross-legged on a stool, with a twelve-string lute nestled into her lap. The strings flashed light as her fingers played over them and her lovely mouth shaped sounds which Dennis couldn't hear.
Gannon could hear them. The King's Champion lounged on the floor, his right arm leaned across the end of a low divan.
There were twenty or more people watching Aria's performance, young men and women—all the women beautifully gowned and none of them as beautiful as the princess.
Gannon, with his black garb and dark good looks, was in the center of the group. His eyes were on Aria, and it seemed to Dennis that she looked back at the champion more than chance would require.
Gannon smiled.
"No!" Dennis cried, turning his head.
He'd come to the mirror for reassurance. The mirror instead gave him truth; two truths, and neither of them reassuring in the least.
"No," Dennis repeated as he looked again, his voice now a whisper. His tortured expression gazed back at him, looking for help that the youth didn't know the words to ask for.
His face hardened, and he shrugged loose the sword at his side. "Show me—" he ordered. "Show me any other huts that are, are beside this pasture."
Dennis was wondering how he could rephrase his question and make it clear to the mirror—to the demon or device which controlled the mirror—that he wanted to find another creature like Malbawn or Malduanan.
"Before they find me," Dennis muttered aloud.
Chester made a metallic snorting sound.
"All right!" the youth snapped as he looked down at his companion. "But it's something I can do something about. Not like Emath."
And not like the Princess Aria, who could look at anyone and sing to anyone she pleased. Whether Dennis, a vagabond and visitor to Rakastava, liked it or not.
Dennis was blushing as he turned back to the mirror. Chester knew him too well.
Chester had saved his life against Malduanan.
The mirror had understood his instructions. On it gloomed the image of Malduanan's hut, hunching in the woods where Dennis had left it less than an hour before. The vision had remarkable depth and detail: when a scarlet lizard scooted up the doorframe, its tail seemed to flick beyond the surface of the glass.
"That's good," Dennis said encouragingly, as though he were speaking to another person instead of a thing of glass and bronze. "But show me a different one. Is there a—"
The picture was shifting before Dennis could finish his question. As he blinked at the new scene, he thought the mirror had made a mistake after all: this was a real house, not a hovel of twigs and moldy leaves.
It was small, but no smaller than the old houses in Emath village which had been built before space in the bustling community became too valuable to waste on one-story dwellings. The house sat at—in—the margin of the jungle, the way Malbawn and Malduanan's huts did, but it had a proper, human-sized door with a window to either side. The walls seemed to be shingled, and the roof was probably covered with thatch.
It couldn't be hair, though that was what it looked like no matter how carefully Dennis squinted.
"Show me the inside," he ordered.
He was getting very used to the mirror. It didn't make him uncomfortable, the way he'd felt when using the Wizard Serdic's device.
That had put him into an unreal scene—unreal because it was part of the past and therefore dead. Malbawn's mirror was no more than a window through which Dennis could look. He could understand the mirror.
So long as he didn't think too closely about it.
The image in the mirror flip-flopped as though a painting were being spun—front-side, back-side, and both images executed in meticulous detail.
Inside the house, a plump old woman in bonnet and apron was sweeping the floor with a twig broom.
"Oh!" Dennis gasped.
He'd expected some horrific monster, though why...? This was a human dwelling. A man as tall as Dennis would have to duck to step through the doorway. A creature like Malbawn or Malbawn's brother—
Well, either of those monsters were nearly as big as this whole house.
The house had only one room. The woman stood her broom in the corner and checked a pot of something on the brick stove. Apparently satisfied, she opened the door and finished her sweeping with firm, quick strokes. Her face was old—lined and gray.
Dennis felt his nose wrinkle in distaste, then felt embarrassed. His nurse had been old and ugly too, with a perpetual scowl and a hair-sprouting wart on her chin. No one could have had a kinder heart—or have been dearer to him until her death when he was ten.
But what were the house and its occupant doing here?
The only thing Dennis saw that disturbed him was the sword resting above the doorway on wooden pegs. It seemed completely out of place in this homely dwelling. As out of place as the house itself was.
Dennis ran his finger along the mirror's bronze frame. It felt much cooler than the humid air.
"Enough," he said quietly, and at once he was facing his dim reflection in a sheet of glass. "Chester," he went on, still facing the mirror, "can we find that house, or is it too far away?"
"It is at the end of the field, Dennis," the robot said. "It is a mile from here, or somewhat less." Chester's voice was empty of inflection or implied advice.
When Dennis let his mind wander, it showed him Gannon smiling and Aria smiling back at the champion.
"All right, let's go then!" he said harshly.
He strode out of the hut, gripping his sword pommel crushingly. For a hundred yards he walked very fast, squinting against sunlight and the tears of frustration that were prickling their way out of the corners of his eyes.
Sun and exercise warmed the youth, slowed him; made him calmer. He glanced to the side and smiled to see Chester mincing along with his tentacles fully extended so that the high grass only brushed the bottom of his carapace.
Dennis reached toward the robot. Chester humphed! internally and ignored the gesture. He was making it clear to his master that Dennis' enthusiasm—for getting into trouble—was no more than a way to work off other frustrations.
Dennis understood. He smiled ruefully and waved his right palm to the robot. It was blotchy from its pressure on the swordhilt.
"The man who is violent like the wind will founder in the storm he raises, Dennis," the robot said grumpily, but a tentacle snaked up and curled into the offered hand.
"Still," Dennis said, "it's not a bad thing that we're doing..."
Though to be honest with himself, he wasn't sure what he was doing. Visiting a little old lady, very possibly. But it just didn't seem right that a perfectly normal house should be here, where nothing else was normal.
The pasture rolled and curved through the jungle. The cows were out of sight before Dennis got his first direct glimpse of the house nestled into the jungle side. The sun was near mid-sky, so the the overhanging thatch shadowed the front of the little building. Flowers grew in little boxes beneath the shuttered windows.
Something was very wrong.
Dennis paused and took a deep breath. "Well, it won't be anything we can't handle," he said. "We beat Malbawn and Malduanan, didn't we?"
"That is so, Dennis," Chester agreed unemotionally.
"And," Dennis went on, slipping the Founder's Sword up in its sheath and letting it ring as it slid down again, "I've got a star-metal blade, have I not, Chester?"
"That you have not, Dennis," Chester said in the same cool voice as before. "The Founder's Sword is steel and smith's work, forged for your father when he became King of Emath."
The youth's vision went gray, as if for a moment the whole world were Malbawn's mirror in a state of flux between reflection and distant images. All this time he'd been sustained by the thought that he had a weapon of magical potency, while in fact—
Dennis drew the long sword, fingering the fresh nicks and notches he'd tried to grind smooth with the whetstone. He remembered Conall tapping the blade with his nail and smiling...
"They knew it wasn't star-metal, didn't they?" he said. "Conall and the rest? They were laughing at me."
"There is much in Rakastava from the Age of Settlement, Dennis," the robot replied. "It may be that they knew the blade was not of star-metal."
Dennis winced in past embarrassment.
"But Dennis?" Chester continued. "They do not laugh at you now."
"By heaven, they'd better not!" the youth muttered. The sword trembled with the fierceness of his grip on it.
He shook himself and managed to chuckle, though the sound as well was shaky. What was done, was done.
"At any rate, Chester," he said, "it's good steel."
"It is that indeed, Dennis," the robot agreed. "And there is a good man to use it."
Dennis patted his companion in a rush of pride. "Let's go see what this house is doing here," he said.