The Sea Hag

by David Drake

  The apparatus didn't frighten Dennis now, the way he'd been frightened by similar artifacts when he saw them for the first time in the Wizard Serdic's laboratory; but he didn't understand them, and the machines weren't anything he particularly wanted to understand.

  In an alcove set across the shaft from Dennis, a crystal egg spun in the air.

  He thought at first glimpse that it was Aria's pendant—fear made his heart leap—but Chester said, "That is the sea hag's life, Dennis. Take it and she will bargain with you."

  The circular walkway was broad enough for the youth to walk counter-clockwise around it without need to fear the shaft gaping to his left—but it made him uneasy nonetheless. Chester walked behind him—and the three manikins, non-hand in non-hand, followed, the thing of metal in the center.

  Dennis swallowed; but they could do him no harm. Chester had said so...

  Dennis reached for the globe spinning unsupported in the alcove. The shaft gave a great sigh that ruffled the youth's garments and echoed throughout the dome.

  Crisply, as though he had practiced the action and his heart was not hammering in his breast, Dennis dropped the baton on the floor and seized the crystal in both hands. It fought him for a moment, but his grip tightened—

  And mastered it.

  He stepped to the edge of the shaft and looked down.

  The shaft was no longer bottomless. Water winked in it, no farther down than the sea was beneath the dome; and in the water was a blob of color that could only be the sea hag.

  CHAPTER 63

  "I have your life!" Dennis shouted, cringing inside himself for the deep, thundering echoes of his own voice.

  The water and the thing within it rose higher, driving the air ahead of it with another pistoning sigh.

  "I will bargain for my life, King Dennis," said the gape that was the sea hag's throat—glimpsed from above, and hinting at a depth equal to that of the shaft before the creature entered it. "I will make you King of Emath, and all in Emath will obey you as they did your father under our bargain."

  "Return Aria to me unharmed," Dennis said, suddenly exultant to realize that he had won, that he controlled the sea hag as surely as her storm and threats had ruled Hale the Fisherman on that day before Dennis was conceived. "Leave us alone and I'll return your life to you."

  The sea hag laughed. It was rising closer, so that for the moment when the real mouth closed, the face and torso of a human female smiled and waved at Dennis.

  "Dennis, son of Hale," said the creature in a voice of mocking thunder. "Dennis, liar's son! You will bargain and try to cheat me, boy."

  "I will keep my word, sea hag," Dennis said.

  He raised his left fist over his head. "And this too, I promise: if you do not return my Aria at once, I will shatter what I hold as if it were an egg."

  The sea hag rose higher yet, almost to the level of the walkway. Its mouth opened.

  Aria slid up to her husband's side on the translucent membrane that had freed Dennis in the cavern.

  Dennis reached out his free hand. "D-darling?" he said. Aria's eyes were blank.

  Her arm felt cool, but it was human flesh—and it warmed to Dennis' touch.

  "Return my life, Dennis!" said the sea hag.

  The water in the shaft was receding, leaving a salt tang behind. The creature's voice deepened with echoes as the sea hag plunged as swiftly as it had risen.

  "Dennis?" Aria murmured. She moved her head and took a cautious step to prove that her legs still worked. "Dennis? Is it really you?"

  Return my life... echoed in the dome and in Dennis' memory.

  He squeezed Aria's shoulder to indicate that he wasn't leaving her; and he stepped toward the alcove from which he had wrenched the crystal.

  "Do not trust your enemy, lest you die cursing!" said Chester.

  "Dennis," said Aria in concern for which she didn't know enough to have a reason. "Are you going to...?"

  "Return my life!" thundered the deep organ-note of the sea hag's voice.

  "What the sea hag does is her business!" Dennis shouted over his shoulder to his companions, through the reverberating echoes. "I'll keep my word!"

  He turned. The three manikins stood between him and the alcove. Each extended its right arm toward him.

  "What...?" Dennis said. His head twitched as he started to glance back at Chester—and caught himself, unwilling to look away from the manikins.

  "They are of the sea hag, Dennis," said the robot behind him. "Give them the crystal."

  Return my life... said the echoes.

  "We control them now, you and I," Chester said. "I have asked them to return the life to their maker."

  Dennis stretched out his left hand, with the crystal which glowed and quivered and sometimes seemed to whisper to his bones.

  The manikins didn't have hands, but the lumps which illusion had clothed with the semblance of hands now reached out together and took the fragile crystal. They moved with a delicacy which belied their appearance, touching neither Dennis nor one another as they gripped the object with balanced pressure.

  The hairs on the back of Dennis' arm prickled as the sparkling wires brushed close—but the youth didn't move until the crystal was firmly in the joined grip of the manikins.

  Dennis looked at the featureless voids; and for just an instant, he thought he saw Aria smiling at him again from the blank metal that had mimicked her.

  But that was illusion, and it was gone before Dennis could be sure it had existed at all. He stepped away.

  The manikins moved forward in jerky unison.

  "Watch out!" Dennis said, reaching to block Aria behind him; but she slipped into the crook of his elbow and encircled his waist with her own soft arm.

  The manikins ignored them. Holding the crystal before them, they stepped; and stepped; and—

  "Return my life!"

  —stepped again, into the shaft together.

  "The sea hag has what it demanded, Dennis," said Chester in a metallic shout through the echoes. "Now we must go, and quickly."

  "What's going to hap—" Aria said as she and Dennis, arm in arm, followed the robot up the steps to the main floor.

  Water splashed, far below.

  "—pen?"

  Blue lightning flashed and sparkled up the shaft.

  "Run faster," Chester said. One of his tentacles snaked out to support Dennis as the youth's foot slipped on smooth glass. "The acid will mix smoothly with water, but when it touches the sea hag—"

  Dennis paused, passing Aria ahead of him into the narrow stairwell. The shaft belched yellow-green vapor—

  And the dazzling white glare of magnesium burning in the shaft made the interior of the dome blaze as though the sun had come down from the heavens. The pavilion's porcelain columns shattered from the reflected heat.

  Dennis plunged down the staircase. Aria was well ahead of him. Barefoot: she'd kicked off her slippers and was bouncing down, hitting only each third or fourth of the wedge-shaped steps. Dennis gripped the central rail and followed, knowing that the worst which could happen if he fell was that he'd be bruised or break some bones.

  Gobbets of molten glass were rained past the arched openings like the first breath of a volcanic eruption. If Dennis and his companions didn't get off the Banned Island soon, he was pretty sure that they would melt; or burn; or smother.

  Dennis thought of the creature which told him it was Aria and which demanded that he enter its embrace. At least death would have been quick when the arms encircling him blazed sun-bright.

  The rock spire shook. Bits of laterite flaked off the stairwell's inner face, pattering down the steps beside the fleeing companions. The air filled with a roar too great to be called a sound. Dennis wasn't sure whether it came from the fire, the sea hag—

  Or the core of the planet.

  Dennis spun around the balcony where he'd found the manikin which looked like his father. A loud crack! broke the omnipresent thunder. He didn't look back.

 
; He didn't have to. Two lines split their way down the outer surface of the stairwell—ribbons of irregular thickness, dancing with the light they spilled out in an iridescent variety of wavelengths.

  Then the stairwell's multi-arched exterior slipped in an increasing rush: crumbling, chanting glassy hymns to the wind, and painting all the world nearby in a dazzling rainbow coruscance.

  Faster, Dennis' mind whispered.

  There was no reason to speak the word aloud. Aria already took ten steps to his nine, and Chester deliberately slowed his pace to keep from getting too far ahead of his human companions.

  They were down among the trees, now. The trunks of the nearest were waving, their leaves and branches stripped away by the tons of glass which had cascaded through them moments before.

  Birds spun and squawked in the air in colorful confusion. An occasional lizard clung to an island of bark on a stripped trunk, its eyes wide and its throat-pouch fluttering.

  Something thumped from the top of the spire. Again Dennis refused to look behind him, but the sun dimmed as it tried to shine through the cloud of gas and debris which puffed out of the shaft.

  They were among the creepers, now, very close to the ground. Dennis saw bright, fresh blood on a step. His heart jumped. Aria's foot, spiked by a thorn—but she continued to bound forward in a wave of blond hair, ignoring her hurt and the chance of hurting herself again.

  Dennis would have drawn his sword when he hit the ground, but there was already a flurry of vegetation in the direction of the shore. Chester stalked ahead on four limbs, spinning the tips of the other four like cutting blades. Foliage and small stems disintegrated.

  Dennis lifted Aria in both arms and ran after the robot. He was saving her bare feet from further harm; and he was holding her close, because he loved her, would always love her, from the Cariad's magic or Aria's own, and they might not have very long to live.

  The top of the laterite spire pulverized itself in a staggering blast. A second explosion took a bite off what remained, pelting the leaf canopy with pebbles and whipping the sea to momentary foam as the companions reached the shore.

  Aria squirmed out of Dennis' grasp and set her shoulder against the boat's gunwale to push if off even before he did. Chester pushed as well, but the narrow curves of his tentacles ground deep in the shingle as the robot put strain on them.

  It was Dennis' boots and the flexing of his powerful calf muscles that broke the keel's grip on the land and kept it jouncing and sliding down to the water.

  Chester and Aria slipped over the weathered gunwale. Dennis continued to stride forward, knee-deep in the water, as he pushed the fishing boat ahead of him.

  Another explosion spattered bits of rock. The chunks were too light to hurt seriously, but they flew hard enough to sting.

  "It is time that come aboard with us, Dennis," Chester said.

  "No, I want to get—" Dennis insisted, and the last of the sentence drowned in the sea when he stepped off the island's underwater edge—as abrupt as had been the spire pointing up into heaven.

  Chester's tentacle, prepared for the event, looped under the youth's armpits and lifted him aboard spluttering. "Small advice, if heeded, can prevent great harm, Dennis," the robot chided.

  A deeper explosion shook the Banned Island. Nothing more flew from the truncated spire, but the sea lifted in a swell that flattened the chop as it expanded from the shore. The boat rocked.

  Dennis settled onto the center thwart and took the oars. He looked over his shoulder and his destination, then began stroking. He tried to remember the motions he had watched his father make so many times.

  In the stern sat Aria, her hands demurely in her lap. She seemed none the worse for being swallowed down by the sea hag. The nested pendant spun merrily between her breasts.

  Aria combed a hand through her loose hair, lifting out a bit of twig. "Where are we going, darling?" she asked. A faint tremor in her voice warned Dennis that reaction was beginning to catch up with the princess now that she'd time to rest.

  "We're going to Emath, my love," Dennis said. He glanced over his shoulder again. "We're going to my home."

  In a softer voice he added, "Maybe it's still my home."

  CHAPTER 64

  The sea was calm, and there was very little current along this stretch of coast... but there was some, and that was enough to throw off an oarsman as totally inexperienced as Dennis was. He realized before he'd pulled half way that the boat was drifting north of the the north headland.

  Unless they got help from a passing vessel, they were going to land at the foot of the jungle instead of rowing into Emath Harbor directly.

  "There ought to be other boats out, Chester," the youth said doubtfully as he rested his oars for a moment. "At least ordinary traffic, even if nobody put out to see what was happening to the Banned Island."

  His palms were calloused, but the oar-looms stressed the skin in a pattern different from that of a swordhilt or any other work he had done with his hands. He was going to have some bad blisters soon...

  "It may be," said Chester, "that Parol does not permit citizens to leave Emath, for fear that none would return to be ruled by him."

  Dennis had shifted his sword so that it didn't interfere with his clumsy attempts to row. He touched the pommel and said, "It may be that I will have questions to discuss with Parol—before I put him out of Emath for good and all."

  Their boat grounded at the base of the corniche, the ten-foot cliff which waves had sliced from the side of the continent. The rock was porous—an easy climb up to the level of the jungle, even without the help Chester gave Dennis' boots and Aria's bare feet.

  Flowers bloomed with a saffron pungence. When a creature hooted from the far depths of the jungle, Dennis smiled as though he'd been greeted by a friend.

  "We—go through this?" Aria asked. Her glance indicated the profusion of flowers and broad leaves around them, filling the clifftop.

  "Oh!" Dennis said, startled out of his reverie. None of the immediate stems and creepers were thorny, and the ground would open out as soon as they got within the jungle's sunlit margin, but...

  "Here," he said, grasping his sword. "I'll cut—"

  "No need," Aria said, touching his arm with a smile. She pushed forward, into the mass of foliage which gave before her.

  "You really love this, don't you," she added without looking over her shoulder.

  "The, the jungle?" Dennis said. He put his arm around the princess's shoulders and hugged her, then stepped past. "Here, I'll lead."

  Dennis walked on, handing aside whippy twigs so that they didn't snap back at Aria. "It was the first time I was on my own—"

  He paused, smiled, and reached back for the tentacle he was correctly sure that Chester would be ready to curl into his hand.

  "On my own with Chester," he corrected himself. "And that brought me many things, most importantly you, my love."

  "It brought you to yourself, Dennis," the robot said. "Is not that also of importance?"

  "Important to me," Aria said with a smile in her voice, joining her hand briefly with Dennis and Chester before they all separated to get on with the business of moving through heavy cover.

  One of the dragons roared from the perimeter of Emath Village.

  "You know," Dennis said, "I think that was a bad idea to begin with. Cutting the village off from the, from everything but the sea, really."

  He loosened the sword in its scabbard, thinking of the way he had crept—and scuttled—across the perimeter only weeks before.

  "It'll be different from now on," Dennis muttered under his breath.

  CHAPTER 65

  The vegetation surrounding the magical perimeter formed a hostile wall.

  Nets of vine and brambles cloaked sword-shaped leaves whose tips would spike all the way to an unwary man's shin-bone. Ants with mandibles like wire-cutters patrolled paths through the foliage. The bees which frequented the blossoms rose when the companions approached. They buzzed a
nd hovered, flexing their abdomens under them to point their stings forward.

  Dennis paused. "I thought it was all a nightmare," he mused aloud. "What I remembered from the first night in the jungle. Along with the, with the ghost in my dream. But this is the way I remembered it."

  "Wizard's work?" Aria asked.

  "I don't think it's—" Dennis said.

  "Wizard's work imposed on the land, Princess," Chester said flatly. "And the land responding, as all things respond to hostility. 'He who loves his neighbor, finds a family around him.'"

  The dragons on guard had heard them talking. One of the beasts snuffled close to the invisible barrier and began to scratch with its foreclaws. Its body was a wall of black scales which blocked the rare openings through the leaves.

  The dragons' breath, redolent of the fish they were fed and not wholly unpleasant to Dennis after so many years in a fishing community, oozed heavily through the foliage.

  Dennis drew his sword. "All right," he said, eyeing the bees with the caution they deserved. "Let's go."

  He brought his star-metal blade up in a curve that sheared a mass of briars as though they were cobweb, then made the second cut which turned the slice into a pathway. Chester moved ahead of the youth, pushing aside the sliced vegetation whose thorns could do him no harm.

  It was as though they'd planned the maneuver; and perhaps they had, during the battles they'd fought together since leaving Emath. Chester waited; Dennis slashed the rest of the way through the barrier—

  And Aria's white mantilla snapped once, twice, overhead, startling back the insects which were preparing to buzz down in attack.

  Both dragons roared as the companions pushed toward them through the jungle wall. Dennis, in the lead again, was laughing in exultation.

  They'd shrunk. These guard-beasts weren't as large as the pair when Dennis fled Emath.

  He flicked his sword at the nearer dragon. It snatched at the blade—and snatched back its injured foreleg with a yelp.

  Dennis slapped the beast's snout with the flat of his weapon. "Chester!" the youth cried. "These aren't the same dragons. Has Parol replaced the old ones with these little fellows?"