CHAPTER 56
"Oh," murmured Dalquin. The pleasant, middle-aged man had become King's Champion by default when Gannon vacated the position. He adjusted the lens of his lantern to concentrate the beam and throw it farther.
Even so, the lantern could scarcely hint at the size of Rakastava's half-submerged corpse. "Oh..." Dalquin repeated.
"Aria, I wish you wouldn't insist on coming down here," said King Conall. He could feel the size of the cavern, but though he craned his neck in an attempt to see the ceiling, darkness hid all the boundaries.
Aria remembered the morning Rakastava blazed like incandescent steel and the light of the creature's body glared from dripping stone. Dennis had stood before her then, his sword drawn and his armor in harsh silhouette against the monster which would have her life if it could...
"Father, I didn't ask you to come here with me," Aria said. Her voice was as cold and hard as the sword which saved her that morning. "Go back, and I'll join you when I'm finished."
Conall looked doubtfully at the cloak which he and Dalquin had arranged on the coping under Aria's direction. Lowering his voice a trifle (though Dalquin was politely distant and the huge room drank voices anyway), the king said, "Is it because you and, ah, Dennis are having a problem? Believe me, dearest, you mustn't be concerned about a little awkwardness early in a mar—"
"Father!" Aria snapped. "I appreciate your helping me, but it's time now for you to go."
"I... well, whatever you want, dearest... But I do wish—" Conall looked at his daughter directly for the first time since they'd entered the cavern beneath the city he ruled "—that you'd at least keep the lantern."
"Thank you, father," Aria said, "but I'll do this as I've planned."
Clutching her lute, she watched the backs of the men who retreated to the bright upper world of the city. Just before they disappeared up the stairs, Aria heard Dalquin say, "Just where is Prince Dennis, anyway? I haven't seen him..."
Blinking back tears, Aria seated herself cross-legged on the coping beside the half-folded cloak and tuned her lute with practiced fingers. With the lantern gone, the glow of her spinning pendant was enough to cast faint shadows onto the mother-of-pearl and exotic woods inlaying the sound chamber.
But the sea was beginning to hint at gray light also.
Aria began to sing, her fingers plucking the strings with perfect, plangent timing in her own accompaniment. The words were ancient, older than the settlement of Earth by men:
The dead are gone and with them we cannot speak;
The living are here and ought to have our love.
Leaving the city gate I look ahead
And see before me only mounds and tombs...
The sea's stirring was so faint that at first it could have been driven onto the water by the lute-strings themselves. But it brightened; and, with a motion so gentle that the water didn't rush over the coping, the sea hag surfaced.
The woman-face looked at the princess. Aria sat transfixed. For a moment, she felt that she was looking at herself reflected in a frost-etched mirror.
"Sing," said the sea hag; and when the creature spoke, all semblance to humanity was lost forever.
Aria struck a chord:
In the white aspens, sad winds sing
Their long murmuring kills my heart with grief.
"Why have you come to me, Princess of Rakastava's City?" the sea hag asked. Its voice was as hollow as the cavern in which it and Aria were the only living things.
"Give me my lover, sea hag," Aria said. "Return my Dennis to me." Her fingers drew a melodious arpeggio from the lute strings. Her heart was filled with terror and blue ice.
The sea hag laughed, its great mouth gaping to pour out notes that filled the cavern as the roars of Rakastava had filled it—before Dennis and his sword ended the roaring forever.
"You will not have your lover, woman," the sea hag said. "He is mine by a bargain older than his soul."
Aria lifted the chain from her neck. The pendant followed the metal links as though there were a physical connection between them and the carven crystals, each nested at the heart of the next larger.
"I will bargain with you, then," Aria said. "Give me a sight of my husband, my lover, and I will give you this."
The sea hag sighed like the wind driving through a mountain gorge. "Give it to me, then," the creature said. "Throw it to me..."
The bauble was an heirloom from the days of Earth's first human settlement. It had been as much a part of her life as Chester was to Dennis.
Aria obeyed without hesitation.
The sea hag caught the chain in one "human" hand. For a moment, the crystal dangled in the air.
The creature's real mouth opened; the face and the hand smeared into the scaly visage of the monster that they only decorated; and the pendant dropped into the bone-ribbed gape.
Dennis rose out of the sea hag's mouth.
Aria couldn't see how he was being lifted. Dennis wore the same clothes that he had when the creature snatched him from her side, and his sword still hung in its sheath... but there was no expression on his face, and no light in his eyes.
"Sea hag!" Aria cried. She flipped back the top of the cloak folded beside her. All her jewelry lay there, gold and crystal and pieces of ancient work with fiery hearts as bright as stars. "All that you see here is yours—if you let my Dennis go."
The creature sighed again. Dennis began to move forward—slide forward, motionless himself but resting on a translucent membrane like the stomach of a starfish belched out to digest what the creature could not swallow whole.
Dennis was as rigid as a statue until he reached the stone coping. Then, like a man moving in his sleep, he took one hesitant step—and another—to stand on solid ground. He blinked, raising a hand to rub his eyes.
Aria would have embraced him, but she couldn't move—couldn't speak.
"I accept your bargain, Princess Aria," said the sea hag.
The flattened membrane spread, extending still further. It covered the jewelry, the gold and things far more precious... covered the cloak...
Flowed over the Princess Aria and drew her back into the open maw—with her lute, and with all the things she had meant to offer in trade to the sea hag.
Dennis turned. His eyes were trying to focus on a reality he had left utterly from the moment in which the sea hag engulfed him. He could hear Chester's tentacles clicking on the stone stairs, coming to greet his master's return, but there was something moving on the phosphorescent sea, and Dennis was sure that it must be important.
"Who is it?" he called. "Who are you?"
But the sea hag and her treasures had submerged so softly that not even the slap of waves on the stone answered Dennis' cries.