by David Drake
He was like all the rest of you, Dennis thought but did not say. Only more so.
"Put him in the jungle. He'll survive, if he wants to. And maybe it'll even make a man of him."
As it did me.
King Conall looked Dennis, then at Gannon. He nodded toward the guards. "Yes," he said. "Do so."
The guards hustled Gannon toward an archway, the corridor by which Dennis had first been led into the assembly hall. Gannon began to kick, but they lifted him off the ground with many hands. Then he began to scream, but the sound was drunk by the vast hall and the loud joy of all those around him.
Dennis sheathed his sword so that he could put both arms around Aria. Citizens were crowding the couple on three sides—but not the fourth, where Chester perched high on his limbs.
"Are you smiling, my friend?" Dennis said to the robot's featureless carapace.
"There is no blame in using the portion of happiness fate gives you, Dennis," quoted Chester approvingly.
And the crowd cheered its enthusiastic approval of the royal wedding.
CHAPTER 52
Gannon was in shadow.
Something called out in the jungle. The sun was still high, but it was behind the massive pile of Rakastava.
Gannon looked over his shoulder. There was no help in dark vegetation and vines with spikes like spearpoints. He battered his fists at the slick surface of the city in which he had been born and raised, the city that had been his whole life.
He pounded while he had the strength in his arms, and he screamed as long as his voice lasted. The shadows lengthened. The sky grew black.
And the jungle behind Gannon began to whisper with more than the sound of wind rustling the leaves.
CHAPTER 53
The walls of the bedchamber counterfeited morning light. Dennis stretched luxuriously as Aria nuzzled his chest.
As his wife nuzzled him.
"I'd like to go see the, the pasture, this morning," he said.
Aria lifted her head and pouted, mostly as a joke. "Two days and tired of me already?" she said.
Dennis touched the white line on her upper lip, the only remaining sign of the cut she had received there. "Never, my love," he said. "Never."
She didn't understand the significance of his touching her lip, but no one could doubt the sincerity in Dennis' voice.
"Anyway," Dennis went on, "I thought you might come with me. There are some things I'd like to show you."
"Outside..." Aria said in a tone that Dennis couldn't read.
"It, ah..." Dennis said. "I suppose it could be dangerous. It could be dangerous."
"More dangerous than beneath the city, with Rakastava?"
"No, not—" he started to reply, but she smothered his seriousness with laughter and a kiss.
After a time, they both got dressed.
CHAPTER 54
One of the cows mooed in approval as Dennis led Aria and Chester into the clearing. The princess gasped and shaded her face with her hands.
"Are you all right?" Dennis asked quickly.
"Yes, I'm..." she said. "It's just that I never saw this before. The sun, directly."
Then she added, "Dennis? Could you be happy, living in Rakastava?"
"Do not let your tongue differ from your heart when you are asked for counsel, Dennis," Chester said.
Dennis laughed without humor.
"Love," he said, "I can be adequately happy wherever you are. But if that means Rakastava, I will be happy despite the city."
"Then perhaps we should go back to where you came from, Dennis," Aria said coolly. She put her arm around him. "Would that be better?"
"I don't know," he admitted. "Let's—look at something in Malbawn's hut. I came here to do that anyway."
Scavengers and decay had scoured Malbawn's corpse into a heap of chitinous plates, yellowish and translucent. Aria paused by the hut's opening and stared at them.
"That was...?" she said.
"Yes."
She took a deep breath. "I'm sorry," she said without emotion.
"Love, that was the first. There were two more that were no one's choice but my own." Dennis kissed her and held her soft body in his arms.
"I left Emath thinking that only a great hero would dare the jungle—and I was wrong. But don't be sorry because—your community gave me the chance to be what I left home saying I wanted."
Aria gasped when she saw the armor standing articulated, to the left of the sagging doorway. "Oh!" she said. "He's the one who—"
Chester tapped the armor with a tentacle so that the hollow metal rang.
"Oh," the princess repeated, but with understanding. "It's empty."
"It's the armor I wore—when you saw me," Dennis explained.
"But how did you...?" Aria began, pausing at her husband's broad smile.
"You wanted to see where I came from," Dennis said. He was proud that what he could now demonstrate would amaze even a princess familiar with Rakastava's sophistication. "Mirror, show us Emath."
The glass clouded and cleared, above the sun-struck crystal beauty of Emath Palace. The pendant on Aria's breast spun more swiftly, as if it were trying to match the dazzling scene in the mirror.
"Oh..." the princess breathed. From the way she looked aside to him, Dennis knew that in her heart she'd doubted until now his tales of the palace in which he'd been raised.
"Closer," Dennis ordered. "Show us the village."
The mirror's point of view shifted down, toward the shingled roofs and half-timbered houses that had grown up around the palace and the prosperity of community Hale ruled. A twelve-foot demon of smoke and orange flames turned to face them.
Aria started but did not cry out. Dennis had his sword drawn a hand's breadth before intellect overruled reflex. The demon was not here...
Two men in orange livery were entering a shop. The demon followed them as far as the door, bending to stare within as it gripped the jamb with either hand. No one else was visible on the street, though faces peered furtively through upper-floor shutters.
After a moment, the liverymen returned. Both were laughing as one dropped coins into the fat purse on his belt. They walked around the corner, the hulking demon behind them. Only when the trio was out of sight did other citizens appear cautiously from doorways.
"That's where you lived?" Aria asked, as careful as she could be to keep the distaste out of her voice.
"That isn't where I lived," Dennis said, his hand still playing with the pommel of his sword. "It's—what's become of the place in which I lived.
"Show me my father!" he added harshly.
The mirrored scene tilted dizzyingly through angles and the walls of the palace. It settled on King Hale, staring from a balcony out at the harbor. There was trash and litter on the floor with him. Beyond the double doors into the royal suite was a wrack of garbage and clothing left where it had been cast aside. Hale's cheeks were sunken; there were dark rings around his eyes.
As Dennis watched, his father took a drink from the squat green bottle in his right hand; but there was no life in his face, even at that.
"Enough!" Dennis shouted.
He didn't have to ask to see the throne room. He knew what—and who—he would find there.
Aria leaned softly against his arm. "Can you show me Rakastava, Dennis?" she asked, as though she were unaware of the tumbling fury in the mind of the man who loved her.
Dennis took a shuddering breath. "Mirror, show us King Conall," he directed, as willing as she to get his mind away from what was happening in Emath.
Conall was on his throne in the assembly hall, watching what seemed to be a dramatic performance by a score of costumed actors. A hundred or so other citizens watched with their king.
Pointless, but harmless; and a further reminder of Parol on Emath's throne.
"Do you want to see your own room?" Dennis said, forcing his mouth into a smile. The mirror responded to his intent before he stated it as an order—clearing and freezing again on th
e gold and white chamber in which he had watched Aria bathe.
As he'd intended, that sight and its memories rushed all grimmer thoughts from Dennis' mind.
Aria grinned. "You watched me—didn't you?" she said.
Dennis nodded, his eyes on the mirrored scene. A smile of embarrassment played with his lips.
Aria nestled closer to him. "You have a beautiful body, my husband," she whispered. "Perfectly beautiful."
"Ah," said Dennis. "Is there something else you'd like to see? Anything?"
"I'd seen nothing of the world before you came, Dennis," Aria replied honestly. "This—hut—is as wonderful and new as anything else could be. But..."
She looked over to the suit of armor. "I don't understand how you came to me beneath the city. Your armor was here—and there aren't any steps down to Rakastava's cavern except the staircase that was locked behind me and, and Gannon."
"Mirror, show us the cavern," Dennis directed with a smile. "Now, we may not be able to see anything there, because the light faded when I'd killed the—"
But there was light. The water flickered with a clinging, gray phosphorescence like the rich sea beyond Emath harbor. The long shape of Rakastava, headless and still, was a line of shadow... but beyond it, where the water was deeper—
"Closer!" Dennis ordered.
In the water, the woman that was not a woman waved her human arms.
"Have you come to me, Prince Dennis," said the sea hag, "to pay your father's debt?"
Dennis stared transfixed.
"Dennis?" said Aria in concern.
"Dennis!" cried Chester in fear.
The sea hag extended her arms through the mirror and grasped Dennis around the waist. At the last instant he tried to cling to the mirror's frame, but the creature's inexorable grip pulled him away from the bronze as easily as a starfish opens clams.
The great maw gaped. For a moment the youth dangled above it. Then the arms released him and he fell, into the gullet of bone and blood-red tissue.
The sea hag closed her mouth. The lovely girl-face smiled. An arm waved up to Aria and Chester.
And with the slow certainty of lava moving, the sea hag sank out of sight.
In Malbawn's hut, the mirror cleared and its surface turned to glass again. Only then did the princess begin to scream.
CHAPTER 55
"No!" Aria cried. She turned away from the mirrored image of her horrified face and kicked the nearest object—a cow's thighbone. It rolled; but the bone was past hurt, and the open toe of Aria's gilt sandal gave her foot no protection.
"No," Aria repeated, but the word was a gasp of pain.
"It is not good to be angry at a hard fate," Chester said.
"How can you say that?" the princess demanded. "Chester, I've only known him for a week, but you've been with him all his life. Wasn't he your friend? Don't you care about him?"
"Do not be heartsore over a matter when its course comes to a halt," the robot said, quoting again—but there was a tone of appraisal in his voice that Dennis would have recognized if he had heard it.
"I..." Aria said.
She started to wring her hands, but will and royal training restrained her. Instead she walked into the sunlight, stepping with measured precision and using the pain jabbing her right foot as a reminder to control herself.
"Chester," she said, facing the bright meadow. "Is there no way that we can get him back?"
Cows watched her, their jaws moving side to side. Their ears snapped audibly as they flicked at insects.
"There is a way you can get him back, Princess," the robot behind her said.
Aria spun onto him, beautiful and imperious. "Then what is it?" she demanded. "What can I do?"
"The sea hag likes pretty things," Chester said softly.
The tip of one tentacle touched or did not quite touch the pendant spinning unsupported between the princess' breasts. "It might be that if you went to the sea beneath Rakastava with all your jewelry... and with your lute to summon the sea hag, for your voice is a pretty thing as well, Princess... It might be that she would come, and—who can say what might happen then...?"
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 w
ill 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.