by David Drake
"No!" gasped Dennis.
"Hurrah!" cried the nearest citizens.
"Hurrah!" the shout went on in an arc expanding around the circle of tables. Someone threw a hat; the air began to spin with bright cloth.
Gannon took Aria's hand. She resisted his pull for a moment, then rose to her feet. Her face was turned aside and toward the floor.
"I request that our wedding be held at—"
The assembly hall was growing darker.
"—once!"
Rakastava's laughter boomed through the sudden hush.
"Humans, humans," called the monster's glowing image from the center of the hall. "You are not yet free of Rakastava."
Gannon tried to release the severed head. His fingers were wrapped in strands of the mane. His hand twitched with increasing violence, like that of a man who's touched something foul and sticky.
"In the morning," continued the image, "the Princess Aria must return to me... and with her must return my head."
Only the head on the creature's central neck was speaking. The stump hung limp, though at least in hologram there was no sign of the blood that had spurted from it earlier.
Dennis thrust his right hand into the sidepocket of his trousers as he watched Rakastava.
"And the champion who fights for the princess may come or may not come," said Rakastava in a voice as close to a caress as a roar could be. "It is all the same to me. But if he comes, he will stay."
"Ooh..." murmured the crowd as the lights brightened and the threatening image faded away. All eyes were on Gannon.
The King's Champion was shaking.
And in his pocket, Dennis fingered Aria's crystal ring.
CHAPTER 48
Chester's tentacles closed the two halves of the star-metal helmet over his master's head.
"Gannon sneers at me," the youth said. "He and I both know he's a coward, but he sneers at me."
"There is no remedy for the sting of a fool's tongue, Dennis," the robot quoted. A latch clicked as it locked together the helmet's hinged segments.
The mirror showed the cavern beneath Rakastava—beneath Rakastava's city. It seemed even darker than it had the morning before; but Dennis' eyes had adapted then, and they would adapt again today, he was sure.
It wasn't as though he had to see for any distance, after all.
Aria was waiting at the bottom of the stairs. The severed head lay on the stone beside her, but Gannon was nowhere to be seen.
Dennis shifted his stance, making sure that all the joints and fastenings of his armor were firm but flexible. He slid his sword, a ribbon of reflected gray dawnlight, from its battered sheath.
"Chester," he said without looking at his companion. "I wonder if you'd—you know, help me today if I need help."
"If you ask my help, Dennis, I will give it," Chester replied.
"I didn't think to do that yesterday," Dennis admitted, skirting the question of whether Chester would have come to his aid without being asked. "I—anyway, it won't be as bad today. He's—it's been wounded."
"Today's fight will be twice as fierce as yesterday's fight, Dennis," said Chester quietly. "If you struggled then, then you will strain indeed today."
"It's time," said the youth, gripping his sword as he stepped into the cavern washed by the waves of the monster's approach. Sound echoed crushingly about him.
Aria stepped forward when the youth in black armor splashed out of the darkness. Her lips moved as she called something, but the words were inaudible and unnecessary.
Dennis motioned her back with an imperious wave of his sword, toward the darkness that hid Gannon and would preserve Aria from the wild thrashings of the battle to come.
Rakastava's whole body glowed a deep red, like the surface of a banked fire in the early morning.
The stump had withered like a snake's cast skin. The creature slid forward with its two remaining heads raised high, a great one and a lesser one to the side. The tongues flickered, and the manes flowed with the dark sheen of cobalt glaze.
As before, the creature glided to a halt just short of the coping. "Did you bring my head, little human?" the central head asked Dennis.
"Your head is here, Rakastava," Dennis shouted through his visor.
"And I will put the others with it when I take them."
The mouth of the lesser head opened so wide that the lower jaw pointed to the water and the upper jaw to the cavern's distance-shrouded roof. Dennis braced himself.
Instead of striking directly at him, the open gullet spewed an arc of liquid against his chest.
Dennis staggered. Where the heavy fluid spattered onto the sea, water fizzed and sputtered.
Where it struck the floor and coping, stone cracked and bubbled away in white foam.
The main head opened its jaws part-way. Dennis advanced, raising his sword for a stroke, not a thrust, at the knot of scale-armored muscle where the head met the neck.
Lightning bathed him; his ears rang with the shock of thunder.
Dennis' armor protected him from the worst effects of the thunderbolt as it had from the gout of acid, but his eyes were flash-stunned and his skin was momentarily too full of needle-prickling pain to have any feeling. He stabbed out blindly, knowing he was about to be swept beneath Rakastava's rush—
And amazed, an instant later when he could see, to find the monster in the slim, serpentine tentacles of Chester who was trying to clamp shut both fanged mouths at the same time.
Rakastava's forepaw gripped the robot's carapace and slammed Chester down in the shallow water. Dennis rocked forward, aiming his sword again for the blow the shock had forestalled.
The forked, suckered tongue from the lesser head caught Dennis' sword-wrist. The stroke chopped scales and drew blood from the main neck, but it didn't bite deeply enough to do fatal harm.
Lightning blasted Chester as the robot writhed in Rakastava's clawed grip.
A scallop of sea vaporized in the sizzling flash. Instead of a natural shore, Dennis could see a pavement of fitted stones extending outward at a steep slope.
The blast threw Chester into the air. The robot's limbs thrashed in mindless convulsions with blue sparks popping from their tips.
Dennis didn't let his conscious mind consider what the battle might already have cost him. His eyes gauged the distance and angle. Then, with all his strength and the pull of Rakastava's own tongue to aid, he struck a backhand blow at the neck of the head which held him.
The core of the stroke was his heart's memory of Chester flailing in blue fire.
The sword bit clean and deep. The tongue gripping Dennis jerked the youth to his knees in the instant before the retracting muscles went limp and the fire died from the two blazing eyes.
The newly-severed neck spasmed. Acid sprayed out as from a hose; Dennis covered the slots in his visor with his left forearm, hearing the droplets snap and burn as they runneled off the armor.
Rakastava's remaining head reared. Dennis braced himself against the lightning he expected when the mouth opened.
"Two are off, but one is on, human," the monster thundered. "The third day is my day."
The serpent body pulsed a brighter red with each syllable; the sea around Rakastava began to steam. As the monster sank into the deeps, Dennis could follow its glowing descent for hundreds of feet through the dark water.
Chester curled a tentacle around his master's armored ankle and pulled himself up onto the coping. The robot's carapace was unscarred, but the eight limbs trembled noticeably as Chester lifted himself.
"Water extinguishes the fire," he muttered. "But the water boils as well."
Dennis hugged him.
Echoes died; the sea settled back to turgid calm. The loudest sounds in the cavern were Dennis' dragging breaths. His sword trilled as he sheathed it.
Aria was walking toward them. Her slippers whispered on the wet stone, and the jewel between her breasts spun with a light as clean and yellow as the sun.
"Go back!" Den
nis called.
The cavern was very dark now. The princess was a blur without shape, dress and streaming blond hair merged in paleness.
"Are you all right?" she asked. She continued to approach.
The sea was not yet the mirror by which Dennis could make his escape. He lifted Rakastava's two heads and carried them toward the princess. He stepped slowly and his boots rang on the pavement, weighted by the trophies and the youth's exhaustion.
Aria's hand touched his armor, his visor.
"Go back," he repeated.
Dennis bent and began to knot together the manes. There was still a tinge of glowing color in the strands from the head he taken off minutes before, but the other mane was as lifeless as asbestos fibers growing from a cliff face.
"Please," Aria said. "Come back with me."
He shook his head violently. The slotted visor brushed her away.
"Go on," he said. "Take these and go."
He lifted her hand in one of his and transferred the weight of the joined trophies to her. The manes' hard strands pressed deep into her bare palm.
"Wait," she said as Dennis backed from her. She reached up with her free hand, too proud to drop the heads first, and fussed within her hair.
"Here," she said. The earring she handed him chinked against the black armor of Dennis' palm.
The youth turned and strode for the reflection on the water. Chester waited for his master, much as he had the day before; but this time on the cavern-side of the mirror.
Together, hand and tentacle linked, they stepped into the water—
And stumbled out in the hut that had been Malbawn's.
Dennis raised his visor and rested, panting, while Chester clicked and tapped and spun the armor's fastenings. The earring was of crystal so brilliant that at some angles its core seemed to move the way the pendant nestled on Aria's breast did.
Chester lifted the helmet off.
"Tonight at the banquet," Dennis said. "Gannon'll brag again that he's slain the monster."
"The donkey is not praised for braying while it carries a load, Dennis," the robot said. He slipped off the left gauntlet, then paused with the right while the youth transferred the earring to his bare hand.
"He'll be praised," Dennis said grimly. "And she'll... Chester, when that lying coward sneers at me, I'd like to split him all the way open!"
"It is better to bless someone than to harm one who has insulted you, Dennis," said Chester as he snicked away the brassard, cubitiere, and vambrace from his master's left arm, leaving it bare from shoulder to wrist.
"Why does she lie for him, Chester?" Dennis said, closing his eyes because he was afraid he might begin to cry with frustration.
"Aria tells no lies, Dennis," Chester replied, stripping the youth's right arm with two tentacles while two others freed the gorget and epaulets from Dennis' neck and shoulders. "And if it is not the whole truth she tells—then the princess knows nothing for a certainty, and little enough even by conjecture."
Dennis sighed. "If I told them the truth, Chester," he said, "they'd call me a liar."
"Would the princess call you a liar, Dennis?" the robot asked softly. He unfastened the hinged plates that had covered Dennis' back and chest.
When Dennis' torso was free again to expand and twist without the armor's constriction, memory of the battle he'd fought began to blur away. It was as if he'd dreamed it, the acid and the vision of Chester flailing in the blue-white grip of a thunderbolt...
"What good would that do, Chester?" Dennis whispered. "Her knowing and me knowing... There's nothing we could do to change the others' minds."
"Lift your foot," said the robot, "that I may take off your boots, Dennis."
"We'll go back to the city," the youth said in a reverie. His mind was melding what had happened yesterday and today with what would happen tomorrow. "We'll see. And if Rakastava returns—"
"As Rakastava will return, Dennis; depend on it."
"—then they'll all see."
CHAPTER 49
Dennis sat at the end of a table adjacent to the one now reserved for Gannon, Conall—and Aria.
The trophies, their manes knotted together, rested on the board before the King's Champion. The jaws of the head severed the day before were open. The tongue had lolled out and was beginning to shrivel. A faint odor of decay permeated the air near Gannon.
"Say," said the middle-aged man next to Dennis on the bench. "You're the boy who herds the cows, aren't you?"
Dennis looked at him. "I herd the cows, yes," he said softly. "What is it that you do?"
The man's hair swept back like the waves of a calm, gray sea. His moustache and beard were full and perfectly kept. "Why," he said, tapping his breastplate, "I'm Dalquin. I'm a member of the King's Guard."
The breastplate was silver, delicately etched with scenes of hunting. Dennis couldn't recognize many of the animals being pursued through the stylized forest, nor were the shapes of the trees familiar to him.
The silver was soft and thin enough to pierce with a dinner fork. It flexed slightly where it attempted to confine Dalquin's paunch.
"Yes," Dennis said. "But what do you do?"
Before the non-plussed citizen could find an answer, Gannon stood up at the royal table. Rakastava's heads wobbled as Gannon lifted them as high as his arm could reach, buoyed by the cheering room.
Dennis looked from the champion to Aria, seated at Gannon's left side as though she were already his queen. She met Dennis' eyes briefly, then stared at her folded hands instead.
Gannon let the heads drop with a thump. King Conall jumped a little. He wore a smile that became a little doubtful whenever his control slipped.
"I have defeated the monster again," Gannon cried, pausing for the enthusiastic response from citizens whose hearts turned cold at the very thought of following the steps down into the dank, deadly cavern beneath the city.
"When the monster realized that I was getting the better of him again," the champion continued with a meaningful glance at Aria, "he tried to slip past and take the princess instead of facing me. I forestalled him—but it was a near thing."
Aria's fingers were interlaced in her lap. The tips squeezed white dimples on the backs of the opposite hand. In all the great hall, only she and Gannon understood the threat—
And Dennis, watching them and toying with the pommel of his sword.
"If the monster dares return—" Gannon continued; but his voice broke and his face went sallow as the lights dimmed.
The champion sat down as suddenly as if he'd been hamstrung. Everyone watched the center of the hall.
Everyone except Aria and Dennis.
"Little men, little men," Rakastava thundered. "Do you think you've cause to cheer?"
Nothing but echoes answered the creature.
Dennis raised his eyes from Aria's perfect beauty. Both of Rakastava's injured necks had shriveled away to stubs that wobbled when the creature's body moved. The right forelimb extended slowly, shooting out its glittering claws as if for the citizens to admire them.
Rakastava's body was an orange blaze. The eyes in its remaining head were pits down to the red heart of anger.
"Mark the Princess Aria well tonight," said the glowing image. "For tomorrow morning she must come to me, and you will never see her again... or her champion."
The hot orange light beating from Rakastava's image was brighter than the normal lighting that returned as the creature faded back into the air.
Citizens got up from their benches and began to mill and stretch. Dalquin walked over to Gannon and clapped the champion on the shoulder, blustering words of congratulation and certainty.
At least Dalquin could be sure that he wouldn't be facing Rakastava alone in the morning.
Well, Gannon wouldn't be facing the monster alone either; but Gannon couldn't be sure of that or of anything except his own fear.
"Chester," the youth said to the robot curled at his feet, "I think it's time for us—"
"Prince Dennis," said Aria. "How are you finding your stay in our city?"
She was standing beside him. Dennis hadn't seen her get up from her seat. From the black look the King's Champion was giving the pair of them, Gannon hadn't noticed either—until Aria was already beyond his ability to stop her without a public scene.
"Comfortable, lady," the youth replied. He avoided a stutter by not looking up into Aria's eyes until he'd gotten the first syllables out. "Very comfortable."
"I'm glad to hear that," she said. "You're looking worn, you see. I wouldn't want it on my conscience—in the morning, you see—that we of this city had been remiss in the way we dealt with an honored guest."
Dennis felt his face color. He wanted to get up, but Aria was standing so close that he'd bump her if he tried. He slid a few inches down the bench, into the area Dalquin had vacated.
Golden combs caught Aria's hair and swept it across her right ear and shoulder, concealing the fact that she wore only one earring. She toyed with the thick, lustrous strands as she continued, "You know, it was rather odd. I thought I saw your little friend, there, battling Rakastava this morning."
Her open-toed sandal indicated but did not quite touch Chester's carapace.
"I'm sorry, lady," Dennis said, rising as he now had room to do. "You must be mistaken. Chester was with me this morning; and I was in the pasture as always, with the herd."
"No doubt," the princess agreed with icy unconcern. She tossed her head. "I must be getting back to Gannon. After all, he's saved my life twice already. It's a small thing, isn't it, that he have my body in exchange?"
Dennis' expression shrank into a bony grimace. "As you wish, milady," he managed to say.
When Aria did not move for a moment, he added, "Princess? I wish you well in the morning."
Her face softened. "Thank you, Dennis," she said. "And I wish you and your friend well."
She turned around very quickly; but Dennis thought, as he strode for the door and his room, that Aria had begun to cry.
CHAPTER 50
