CHAPTER 41 

The grass at this end of the field was uncropped. The long stems were bent in graceful curves by the weight of their bristly seed heads. Thistles shot up like dark green pagodas, eight feet high and crowned with splendid purple flowers. Insects buzzed and quivered within their miniature landscape. 

Ten yards from the front of the house, Dennis set his hand on his swordhilt and hesitated while he decided whether or not to unsheathe the weapon. The door opened. 

The Founder's Sword trilled like a mating frog as Dennis swept it from its scabbard. 

"Oh, heaven save me, noble prince!" gasped the old woman, throwing her hands to her cheeks to amplify the amazed circle of her mouth. "Oh! You mustn't be so frightening to an old body as me—begging your pardon, that is, for speaking so when it's not my place." 

"Who are you?" Dennis demanded. 

He lowered the point of his sword. Had it been smaller, he might have shielded it behind his body; but it was too long for that, and sheathing the blade again would have been as embarrassing a production as drawing it in the first place. 

"Me, noble prince?" the old woman said, pulling out her drab skirts as she curtsied. "Oh, I'm no call for such as one as yourself to notice. Mother Grimes, they call me—" 

She looked up. "Used to call me, I might better say. When there were folk here, and not all traipsing off to the fine city and leaving poor Mother Grimes to her loneliness." 

"Off to Rakastava?" Dennis said, frowning as he tried to understand the situation. "But then why didn't you go too?"
Mother Grimes curtsied again. "Ah, noble prince, but there's the question. It's my sons, you see, headstrong lads that they are. They left me years ago to find their own way in the world, but it's home they'll return some day, for I'm sure of it. And what will become of them if I'm not here to greet them, tell me that?" 

Dennis shook his head, as if to clear cobwebs from his brain. He could understand what the old woman was saying, but... Rakastava had existed for—from before men settled on Earth. And what about Malbawn and— 

"But noble prince," Mother Grimes was saying. "Forgive me my presumption, for I know my hut is unworthy of your highness' feet, but—will you not come inside and talk with me for only a moment? It will remind me so of my boys, fine young lads that they were when they left me to seek their fortune." 

Dennis opened his mouth to refuse. The old woman held out her work-worn hands. The youth thought of his own mother, weeping for her son and for herself now in Emath. 

"I have cider, noble prince," Mother Grimes wheedled. "Fresh squeezed and cool in my root cellar." 

Dennis wiped his brow with the back of his left hand. He looked down at Chester and said, "Well, she seems glad to see us...?" 

"She is that, Dennis." 

"All right," Dennis said. "A mug of cider would be very good, mistress." 

"After you, then, noble prince," Mother Grimes said, gesturing toward the door. Her beaming expression was enough to beautify even a face as ugly as hers. 

Dennis shook his head as natural caution reasserted itself. "No," he said brusquely. "You go first." 

"It's not for me to take precedence over such as you," said the old woman with a shake of her head. "But if the noble prince insists..." 

Bowing to him, she stepped back through the doorway. 

Dennis followed her, looking around sharply. It was just as the mirror had shown it, except that the lines of things—the stove, the cracks in the floorboards and walls—didn't seem quite as crisp as they ought to. 

"She is very glad to see you," Chester said. "She is glad to devour you and revenge her sons, Malbawn and Malduanan." 

Mother Grimes turned. Her face was full of hideous glee. 

Dennis chopped through her neck with a back-handed stroke. The head bounced on the floor and began to giggle. 

Mother Grimes bent over—he thought she was falling—and picked up the head. She lowered it onto her dripping neck-stump. 

Mother Grimes' bodice of dumpy gray homespun split apart. Two clawed, chitinous arms thrust through the torn fabric. The pincers of the left arm held a short baton, black on one end and white on the other. 

Dennis raised his sword. His face wore a set expression; he was beyond fear. 

While Mother Grimes' human arms held the head in place, a pincered limb rubbed the white end of the baton across the wound. The puckering edges healed, leaving no sign of injury except the stain of blood that had already leaked out. 

Something tugged at Dennis' sword. 

He touched his left hand to the pommel for a hand-and-a-half grip and swung the weapon with all his strength. The sword pulled out of his grasp anyway and clanged flat against the ceiling. It began to glow red. 

Mother Grimes chuckled and minced toward the youth, holding out her baton. 

Dennis' scabbard twisted as the same power that drew the blade to the ceiling gripped the sheath's steel tip. 

Dennis screamed in horror. His hands wrenched at his belt, but his whole weight hung from it and his fingers couldn't release the brass buckle. He watched like a cricket in a spider's web as Mother Grimes approached. 

Reason overcame horror at last. "Chester! Hold her!" Dennis shouted. 

The Founder's Sword and the scabbard tip exploded in white fire. Showers of sparks danced promiscuously across the room. They burned holes in Mother Grimes' garments as well as blistering Dennis' skin and melting knots in his hair with an awful stench. 

Chester gripped Mother Grimes in a shimmer of metal, wrapping her slight form in four of the tentacles which had proved strong enough to hold Malduanan. Her grinning face turned; her chitin-armored pincer twisted; and the black end of the baton brushed the robot's carapace. 

Chester slumped away. His tentacles fell slack and threatened to separate as if their segments were the beads of a necklace which had come unstrung. The robot's carapace had retained its smooth sheen for all the youth's lifetime—and the life of every man on Earth since the Settlement. Now a greenish corrosion grew across the surface like mold on fruit, etching deep pits in the metal. 

Mother Grimes laughed deep in her throat. 

The scabbard tip burned away, freeing Dennis to move. He dodged as the baton thrust at him... but that was a playful gesture anyway, not a real attack. He was to provide entertainment— 

Before he was eaten. 

The walls of the room were losing definition. Individual floor boards and stove bricks were blurring into one another. Pale slime oozed through all the surfaces; some of it dripped from the ceiling and burned Dennis as badly as the blazing sparks had done a moment before. 

He wouldn't have been able to tell where the doorway had been, except that the ancient sword still hung on the wall. 

Dennis spun away from Mother Grimes and snatched at the sword. 

He didn't expect to be able to move the weapon, but it came away easily into his hand. Only gravity held the blade onto the pegs, not the fierce magnetic flux which had stripped the Founder's Sword from Dennis and devoured it. 

Mother Grimes moved closer. Her foot brushed Chester's carapace. The metal rang hollowly. 

Dennis shouted and swung his new sword in a glittering arc. The blade was lighter than steel, sharper than thought. It razored through Mother Grimes' torso from shoulder to breastbone, whickering in and out as though nothing but empty air impeded the stroke. Blood misted the air. 

This sword really was forged from star-metal. 

Mother Grimes giggled and sealed the gaping wound with the white end of the baton. 

Dennis backed—bumped the wall. Shifted sideways as the baton twitched toward him like an adder's black tongue—bumped what had looked like a stove when he entered the room and was now a fungoid lump. The slime beading its surface burned as it began to devour Dennis' skin. 

He thrust for Mother Grimes' mouth. The sharp point flicked her grin into half a smile that continued up the side of her skull and tore her bonnet away in a flutter of cloth. The black end of the baton missed Dennis' hand by so little that he thought the breeze ruffling the hairs of his wrist was the touch that had slain him. 

Giggling maniacally, Mother Grimes began to heal the horrible cut before coming after Dennis again. The walls and ceiling of the room were clearly drawing in. 

The realization wasn't clear in Dennis' mind before instinct guided the next quick cut. The star-metal blade sliced chitin as easily as it had the human-looking flesh of Mother Grimes' neck and torso. 

One of the creature's middle limbs spun to the floor with the baton still locked in its pincers. 

Mother Grimes screamed. The sound became a whistling sigh when the youth's keen blade slashed across her cheek and throat again in a blood-spray. She stumbled back, her foot slipping on the greenish ruin of one of Chester's tentacles. 

"He was my friend!" Dennis shouted as he swung overhand. The swordtip slit a line through the ceiling as the blade cut over and down. 

Mother Grimes' body fell in two halves. 

On the floor, the elbow of the arm holding the baton straightened and bent; straightened and bent. Dennis stabbed at the pincers joint. The sections flew apart, letting the baton roll clear. The sword drove six inches deep in the flooring, but a quick tug cleared it easily. 

Mother Grimes' five remaining limbs were scrabbling weakly. Most of her head was still attached to the right side of the torso. Everything was covered in blood—Dennis, the walls, and the remains of Chester. 

With the dress slashed to rags, Dennis could see Mother Grimes had a jointed exoskeleton like that of Malbawn and Malduanan. A thin filament attached the creature's right heel to the floor. 

Dennis sliced through the filament. Mother Grimes thrashed momentarily. Then all the pieces, arm and body halves, became as still as meat in a locker. 

"My friend!" Dennis repeated. In a rush of loathing, he began to slash at the quiescent body, grunting with the effort of blows that sent his sword deep into the floor and walls. 

When he paused, he was gasping for breath. His body felt as if it were crawling. When he looked down, he found his clothing was in rags, dissolving in the juices that still dripped from the wall. Angry blotches rose wherever the slime had touched his skin. 

Mother Grimes' baton lay between his feet, not far from the hollow shell that had been Chester. 

Dennis gasped with the suddenness of the thought that struck him. For a moment he remained frozen in the slump to which exhaustion had reduced him. Then he straightened and cut an opening in the front wall with four long, deliberate strokes. What fell away looked like the rind of a gourd. 

He paused again, still panting. 

Light had seeped through the walls of the hut, but the opening brightened the interior considerably. For this, Dennis had to see what he was doing very clearly... 

He picked up the baton between his left thumb and forefinger. The surface was sticky with blood, but apart from that, the baton felt as though it were a piece of wood. 

Dennis gingerly moved the white end toward the robot's carapace. Just before the two touched, he looked away. He couldn't let himself watch the failure of a hope that meant so much to him. 

The baton went chank! on the hollow metal. 

"I want to die," the youth whispered through his tears. 

"Do not turn away from life because someone else has died, Dennis," said Chester in a cross voice. 

"Chester!" the youth shouted. He started to hug the robot, then remembered the baton he held. If the black end touched him or the robot— 

Grimacing with horror, Dennis flung the object through the opening he'd hacked in the wall. Then he clutched his life-long companion with his free hand and the elbow of his sword arm, holding the weapon point-up and safe during the embrace. 

"I thought I'd killed you," he babbled. "I thought I'd never see you again, Chester, and I wanted to die." 

There was a faint wash of verdigris on the robot's limbs and carapace, but the metal was whole again and the tentacles that encircled Dennis' shoulders were as smooth and supple as ever before. 

"Whether we stay here or go back is up to you, Dennis," Chester said quietly. 

The digestive juices were burning almost the whole of the youth's body by now, as though Mother Grimes had surrounded him with fire before he slew her. 

"Oh," Dennis said. "Of course." 

He reached his sword arm out through the opening, then cocked his body free like a contortionist avoiding further contact with the house. 

Avoiding contact with the creature that looked like a house with a little old lady inside. 

The new sword fit well into the scabbard made for the old one. The smith who'd hammered out the Founder's Sword for King Hale must have seen the real thing somewhere to copy the style and dimensions so accurately. 

Dennis sheathed the weapon, stripped off his ragged clothes, and rubbed his body with handfuls of dry grass. The stems and leaves prickled, but they scraped away the fluids that smeared him and seemed even to reduce the redness and swelling which the slime had already caused. 

The exterior of what had been Mother Grimes looked like a puffball, half-deflated and already rotting. Dennis couldn't imagine how he'd thought it was a house. 

"Let's go back to Rakastava, Chester," Dennis said. Now that things were calm, his body sagged with the effort it had delivered. 

He left his clothing where it lay. The garments were still crumbling, though the weight of direct sunlight seemed to be slowing the process. He carried the belt, the damaged scabbard, and the star-metal sword instead of wearing them against his bare, swollen skin. 

"Is it me or yourself that you would have carry the baton, Dennis?" the robot prompted. 

"There's nothing of men in that thing, Chester," the youth replied with a vehemence that surprised even him. "I'll take the sword, for it's a fine sword and I've lost the one I came with. But that other thing—" 

He spat. "I want it no more than I want Malduanan tramping at my side, Chester." 

"Do not slight a little thing, lest you suffer for its lack," Chester murmured. 

But one of his tentacles looped around the scabbard, taking the weight from his exhausted master as they trudged back to Rakastava.