The Sea Hag

by David Drake

  Ramos met his eyes. With a firmness that was a matter of present will rather than past memory, Ramos said, "I told them they would be under the protection of King Hale and Queen Selda."

  His pause was only to prove that he was in control of his words and his emotions. "And so they have been, all who came then at my urging or later as the word spread of its own accord."

  Dennis swallowed. He couldn't absorb all he had been told, much less accept it. But in this moment—when the world was shifting around him, and the ageless crystal palace in which he'd been born was suddenly a construct younger than many of the fishing boats in the harbor—Dennis couldn't doubt the story either.

  But while Emath might have been built recently, it had not been built by men.

  "Where did the palace come from, Uncle Ramos?" Dennis asked.

  The older man shook his head sadly. "A god, a sea demon. There are plenty of demons out on the water, lad. Besides the ones we men bring with us."

  His hand played with the window frame as if it were the the shroud of a sailing vessel... and slipped away because it was not, because it was only slick stone with no life or meaning to him. "Nobody doubted, Dennis. People we'd known all our lives came to Emath—boys we'd played with, girls we'd met at night beneath the shelter of the sail spread as a tarpaulin. And it was all King Hale this and Queen Selda that..."

  "But surely somebody would have remembered," Dennis said, letting the doubt he wanted to feel enter his voice.

  Ramos smiled. "I think at first they all remembered," he said. "But they didn't want to, because they wouldn't be able to understand it. I didn't want to remember, lad. But I built the tomb with these hands—"

  He raised them. They no longer shook.

  "—and nothing can change that."

  Ramos glared at the floor and the filth in which he had been living these weeks, these months; longer. "Not even the liquor!"

  Dennis made his decision as he stood up. He didn't know what his new knowledge meant, but he was certain of what he owed Ramos—for himself and for his father—in the immediate present.

  "You can't stay here," he said briskly, now the prince that he'd been raised to be. "Come on, Uncle Ramos. We'll help you to my room for now. You can bathe and sleep there tonight while I have the servants clean—" he caught the disgust that had almost broken out into words "—clean up."

  Ramos stood obediently. He looked tired, but he was in no need of the help Chester and the boy were ready to give. The drink had burned out of him; and so had the emotion that had staggered Ramos with memories of the woman he'd loved—and had lost when his world shifted, as he'd now shifted the world of the boy who called him 'Uncle'.

  "I think..." said Dennis wonderingly. He put his arm around the older man's in affection, not for need as they shuffled together through the debris to the door. "I think that you can wear some of my clothes, Uncle Ramos. Until we see what kind of shape yours are in."

  As Chester opened the door ahead of them unbidden, Dennis realized that—whatever might be the full truth—the world was no longer the place it had been when he entered Ramos' room.

  And in many ways, it was better.

  CHAPTER 4

  Dennis stretched luxuriantly in the sunlight that flooded the spare bedroom of his suite—and leaped up, shouting, "Oh!" when he realized that it was three hours later in the morning than he had intended to rise.

  Hale had rowed out to sea before Dennis could demand an explanation—or a denial—of Ramos' story.

  "Chester," the boy said angrily. "You knew I wanted to talk to Dad. Why didn't you wake me up when you saw I was sleeping late?"

  "Gentleness in all behavior gains the praise of a wise man, Dennis," said the robot.

  "But why didn't you—" Dennis started to repeat... and caught sight of his multiple images, reflected in the prismatic walls of the unfamiliar room... and laughed instead. He had to laugh to see dozens of himself, wearing pajamas and furiously waggling fingers against an equal number of impassive Chesters.

  "All right, Chester," he said ruefully, patting his companion's smooth carapace. "You didn't wake me because I didn't tell you to wake me. That was my fault."

  "You did not tell me to wake you," Chester said. "And you were sleeping soundly, Dennis, as you have not slept in some weeks past. I am glad that you have slept."

  Dennis had snatched an armload of clothes from the wardrobe when he turned over his usual room to Ramos the night before. He'd gotten several blouses, but the only trousers were a pair that had grown too tight for comfort in the past six months.

  It would've been simpler to keep his usual room, the larger one of the suite, and give his guest the spare; but—Dennis didn't need Chester spouting a tag like "Do not take precedence over an older man," to know that he owed honor as well as help to Ramos.

  Dennis had been raised to be a prince.

  Whether or not his parents were really a king and queen.

  The dragons were bellowing again. Parol must have decided to start earlier today. Lizardfolk weren't permitted to stay overnight within the perimeter of Emath. Almost no daylight had been available for trading yesterday, by the time the guard beasts were finally contained.

  The apprentice wizard would gain skills quickly—or he'd have to be replaced. Unless the perimeter were expanded within a matter of months, people would have to start building on the headland opposite the palace, displacing the graves there. Even another Serdic looked preferable to that.

  King Hale would probably have acted already... except that he'd spent the past three weeks with the sea and his own grim thoughts for company, instead of taking care of the business of his kingdom.

  Dennis pulled his trousers on, then paused. "I still want to talk to him," he said harshly to Chester, glaring at the argument he expected to hear from the little robot.

  "Do not be so impatient when you ask," Chester said, "that you then become angry when you listen."

  "I..." Dennis began.

  He began doing up the buttons of his blouse so that he didn't have to look at his companion when he continued, "Look, Chester. Dad doesn't want to talk to me. He'd have talked already if he did. So he's going to get angry—"

  The boy raised his eyes to the robot, poised motionlessly on the curves of its eight limbs. "Chester, I'm going to make him tell me no matter what. Because I've got to know what happened before I was born. And from what Uncle Ramos says, there's no other way I can learn."

  Chester swayed slightly from side to side. Dennis' reflection in the robot's dull silver finish seemed to be shaking its head.

  "Is there another way I can learn?" the boy demanded.

  "There is another way you can learn, Dennis," Chester said with self-satisfied calm. The robot never exactly volunteered information, but there were times he was more forthcoming than others. When Dennis was pushy or hostile with his little companion, he could expect to be given time to consider his behavior.

  When Dennis calmed down, as he'd learned to do immediately by now, he knew that was for his own good too.

  "Please Chester," Dennis said with polite formality. "What is the way that I can learn how Emath came to be—without asking my father?" He bowed.

  "The Wizard Serdic had a device that could tell us, Dennis," Chester replied with equal formality. "The wizard is gone, but the device is not gone from the rooms in which he worked."

  "Oh," said Dennis, trying to process the information he'd just been given. "Oh. But will Parol help us, Chester?"

  The robot raised one tentacle in a delicate gesture that indicated to the boy his ill-temper had been forgiven. "Parol cannot help us, Dennis," he said, "for Serdic did not teach him the use of the apparatus."

  Chester paused. Instead of flaring up angrily again, Dennis smiled to show that he knew Chester was trying to trap him.

  "I know the use of the apparatus, Dennis," Chester said, the approving smile in his voice matching the boy's reflected expression.

  "Then let us see what the ap
paratus will tell us, my friend," Dennis said, squeezing the raised tentacle as he led the way to the door. "If Parol can't help us, we'll look into his rooms while he's occupied with the dragons."

  Dennis kept a cheerful lilt in his voice, while his quivering stomach was all too aware that 'Parol's rooms' had been the Wizard Serdic's rooms not long before.

  But the feeling of doom that lay over Emath frightened Dennis more than memory of Serdic could.

  CHAPTER 5

  Serdic had appropriated a ground-floor wing of the palace. It extended along the seacoast rather than the harbor which the suites of the royal family overlooked, so Dennis and Chester had most of the building's convoluted length to traverse.

  When they started out, the boy felt furtive: he was going to sneak into somebody else's private rooms. Then Dennis noticed that the servants he met jumped and bowed to him with more than their normal courtesy.

  There wasn't a great deal of work to do about the palace except on special occasions like the Founder's Day ceremonies. The servants he ran into in these sprawling corridors where neither he nor his family had much reason to walk—were here to avoid notice. They didn't expect to be bothered by their superiors while they ate, chatted, or diced in desultory games.

  Dennis didn't expect to find Rifkin, the butler, among the idlers, though.

  The butler's voice, loud and demanding in its timbre, came from what should have been and empty room. There was a woman speaking also, but her words were scarcely a breathless whisper beneath the butler's insistence.

  The boy paused and cocked an eyebrow at Chester.

  "Do not hesitate to do what is right, Dennis," the robot said tartly.

  Dennis rapped on the door with his knuckles.

  "Go away, fool, or I'll have you flayed!" Rifkin bellowed from within.

  "Rifkin!"

  There was a silence as palpable as an indrawn breath. The door flew open. The butler was tugging the ends of his sash together with one hand and holding the doorknob with the other. He was a big man but soft, a moon-shaped head above a pear-shaped body, and at the moment his pale fingers had the look of uncooked sausages.

  "Your highness!" he said in amazement. His voice had its usual rounded dignity, but the look in his eyes awaited the garrote.

  There was a rustle within the room. One of the maids—a young girl, younger than Dennis—pushed out between Rifkin and the doorframe with a gasp. She sprinted down the hall and around a corner, trailing sobs.

  Dennis stared at the butler. "Has Councilor Ramos' room been cleared yet, Rifkin?" he said without emotion.

  Rifkin made a little bow. "It will be seen to immediately," he said.

  "I woke you last night and asked you to take care of it at once!" Dennis said.

  Instead of thundering with command, Dennis' voice was getting high. His skin became prickly-hot all over. He was frustrated and angry—and those emotions threw him back to other moments of anger and frustration, the times he'd tried to talk as a man with his father and had been slapped verbally as a child.

  He was afraid he was going to cry.

  "Yes, of course, highness," Rifkin replied as his hands did up his sash and his face pretended it had never been untied. The first panic had passed, and the butler was in full control of the situation again. "And I'll see to it at once. Even in such a—if I may say—humiliating circumstance as that one, your highness' word is our law."

  "Why didn't you—"

  "Perhaps your highness might wish to consult his father now that your highness has had time to reflect on the matter?" Rifkin continued smoothly. He smiled.

  "Do as you're ordered!" Dennis shouted as he turned away. Shouting because at any lesser volume his voice might have choked, turning because he wasn't sure what his eyes were going to do.

  "Yes, of course, your highness," the butler murmured unctuously to Dennis' back as the boy stumbled toward a staircase to the ground floor.

  "Chester, why can't I...?" Dennis said with his teeth clenched against his own emotions. "Why won't anybody...?"

  Instead of spouting some scrap of the wisdom programmed into him in a far time on a distant planet, Chester wrapped a tentacle around Dennis' waist with a touch as delicate as that of a spiderweb.

  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?"