The Sea Hag

by David Drake

  Chester was raised to his full height on four limbs, spinning the others above him to weave a false silvery bulk that kept back the other guard-beast.

  "They are not so great as Malbawn and Malduanan, Dennis," the robot said, advancing through dust that was ankle-deep on the humans. The three companions were within the dragons' perimeter by now. "Nor yet so great as Rakastava... but they are the beasts that have guarded Emath for all your life."

  The dragon which had cut itself on Dennis' sword made another lunge at him. Dennis shifted his arm slightly. The beast blatted and scrambled back, pricked between the nostrils by the star-metal point.

  In sudden determination, the injured guard-beast rushed its fellow from the side and knocked it down. The pair of dragons began to bellow and claw and one another, rolling across the perimeter in a huge cloud of the dust they had pulverized during their years of pacing.

  Dennis and his companions began to step with care and reasonable quickness across the remainder of the trackway. It struck the youth that you could be very brave and very well-armed—and still be crushed to death by a couple of dragons battling in frustrated fury.

  "Fortune goes as fate commands," Chester called, over the dragons' roars; but the beasts were flopping and snarling in the opposite direction, and the three of them could sprint the last yards into Emath Village if they had to...

  Dennis looked toward Emath, taking his eyes off the dragons for the first time since he'd slashed his way into the perimeter they patrolled. The streets, roofs and windows were full of people who stared back at him.

  Somebody shouted, "It's Dennis! It's the prince!"

  Thugs in orange tried to struggle through the crowd to get to the speaker.

  At the head of the central street which led from the palace to the perimeter was a line of men in Parol's orange livery. They were supported by a pair of demons whose hair of smoke and flame billowed as high as the nearest eaves.

  Rifkin stood in the middle of them; even fatter than Dennis remembered him, and carrying a polished black staff as tall as he was.

  "Go away!" shouted the ex-butler.

  "Rifkin, who are you to tell me to do anything?" Dennis replied. Only ten feet separated them, but those within Emath were treating the perimeter as a physical barrier.

  "Get away from here!" Rifkin shouted back. "Whoever you are, you're not wanted in Emath!"

  He gestured with his staff of office. The two demons bent toward Dennis. Their rippling bodies breathed with the soft, sucking sound of flames.

  "Chester," Dennis said quietly. He was well aware that his boots were still sunken in the dust of the perimeter, and that the dragons might rush back at any moment. "How may we kill these demons?"

  "The demons cannot be killed, Dennis," the robot explained, "because they are but images, as empty as the features of those with whom the sea hag greeted you on the island."

  "That'll do," Dennis muttered.

  Before he could act, Aria stepped closer to one of the demons and waved her mantilla in its insubstantial face. "Begone!" she cried. "Out of the prince's way!"

  The huge figure quivered like a picture projected on smoke when the breeze blows. Then it was gone. Rifkin jumped back, and Aria began to laugh like mocking silver bells.

  Dennis strode forward. There were twenty liveried guards, all of them armed, and Aria's scrap of lace wouldn't stop a sword-cut. The remaining demon floated toward him, hot and dry and blurring the youth's vision of Rifkin as if through a fiery screen.

  If Dennis could take out the leader of Parol's men with his first stroke, perhaps the rest would—

  "All hail Prince Dennis!" boomed a voice from the crowd. The same voice, Ramos' voice—and Hale's old friend raised high both of the guards who had gone to silence him.

  Ramos' great calloused hands were locked on each guard's right wrist. One of the men still waggled his sword vainly.

  It acted as a banner to rally the people of Emath Village against their orange-clad oppressors.

  A roofing tile struck down a guard, but the rush by hundreds of citizens was too sudden and overwhelming for further missiles to be necessary. The second demon vanished, an empty phantasm which left behind no trace of its passage.

  Rifkin dropped his staff. He jumped backward, away from the mob—and bumped into Dennis, who scarcely had time to turn his sword and avoid cutting the ex-butler apart by accident. Rifkin saw what he'd done and screamed, plunging back the way he'd fled. He was starting to tear off his orange tunic, as though that could save him.

  It did give the people a useful idea, though. As Dennis and his companions stepped into Emath, the mob began to wave flags of orange fabric as they shouted, "Hail Prince Dennis!"

  Ramos had gotten rid of his two captives. He swept his arms around Dennis—still bigger than the youth and far too careless of the drawn sword. One of Chester's tentacles whisked the blade aside to avoid disaster.

  "I never thought you'd return, lad," the old man blurted. "I thought that little swine Parol had made away with you."

  "None of his doing," Dennis said, hugging Ramos hard with his left arm. "Are—are my parents...?"

  "He's got them in the palace," Ramos said. Even though their heads were close together, they both had to raise their voices to be heard over the mob.

  "To the palace!" somebody cried, taking up the words.

  "King Dennis to the palace!" hundreds of throats replied in a building chant. The crowd surged back down the street, parting to let Dennis and his companions through to its head.

  "King Dennis!" the people roared.

  CHAPTER 66

  Chester walked in front of them, his glittering tentacles providing a breathing space for the others without threatening the members of the friendly mob.

  "How many more guards are there, Ramos?" Dennis asked. The old man strode at his right side as Aria did at his left.

  "No more," Ramos replied. "Parol must have sent them all out when he realized that it was you coming."

  Dennis looked around in amazement. "Twenty men couldn't force their rule on Emath," he protested.

  "Fear can force its rule on any number of men, Dennis," said Chester before Ramos could respond.

  Some of the ex-guards, disarmed and stripped to underwear or less, were skulking along at the edges of the crowd. Those who met Dennis' eyes looked away in fear... but they were more afraid not to be a part of the event.

  Part of the triumphal return of Prince Dennis to the palace in which he'd been born and raised.

  Dennis sheathed his sword. It had won him a princess for wife, but now he realized that he might never need the star-metal blade again. There were accounts yet to settle with Parol—

  But Parol wouldn't fight him with swords. Of that he could be certain.

  The palace was a garden of pure light refracted in sprays of color. It didn't look large to Dennis, now that he'd stood at the glowering foot of Rakastava.

  But it was just as beautiful as he remembered it being; and it was his home.

  The doors of the main entrance hung ajar. The arch in front of them was covered with what looked like cobwebs—except that the strands were each as thick as a man's little finger.

  Dennis looked up the palace facade. Other openings—windows, doors onto balconies; everything large enough to pass an adult—were similarly blocked.

  "Chester, is there some sort of trick?" Dennis asked in puzzlement. "Will—lightning strike me when I cut the cords or something like that?"

  The tip of one of Chester's tentacles hovered close to the webbing, looking for all the world like a male spider gingerly approaching the lair of a possible mate.

  "There is no trick, Dennis," he said. "It may be that Parol thinks you will not be able to cut the web; and it may be that Parol has no better way to prevent you, however long he thinks this obstacle will delay you."

  "Not very long," Dennis murmured, drawing his sword again after all.

  The mob had stopped, whispering at the web's uncan
niness. The glitter of the weapon threw them back fractionally, each row shifting a body's breadth toward the rear—bumping into the row behind it and shifting again.

  Dennis swept the blade down. The edge that had taken off Rakastava's heads found the web no hindrance, though the strands parted like heavy wire.

  Dennis stepped into Emath Palace. He felt as though he'd been gone a lifetime.

  The pillared hall to the throne room smelled sour. Aria's nose wrinkled instinctively, though she quickly blanked her face and glanced over to see whether Dennis had noticed her expression.

  He had, but he couldn't blame her. The palace had the odor of a snake den.

  The mob stopped outside. A glance behind him showed Dennis a block of doubtful faces staring through the doors, past the remnants of webbing.

  He forced a smile at them. They couldn't help. And he couldn't blame them for being afraid.

  "The first thing we'll do..." Dennis said quietly to his companions. His boots and Ramos' thudded on the crystal, while Chester's many limbs clicked a subtle counterpoint. Aria walked in silence, a cloud of warmth at Dennis' side and in his mind.

  "...is to air the place out and get it back to normal."

  "Come in, wanderer!" called a high, nervous voice from the throne room. "Come into my sanctum!"

  The door-leaves were of mother-of-pearl. Usually there would have been an attendant here to control the flow of petitioners seeking King Hale.

  But Hale was gone; the attendants were gone; and the doors were ajar. Dennis pushed the leaves fully open, using his left hand and right foot.

  "Put up your sword!" the voice screamed from the dim interior.

  "I don't need a sword for you, Parol," Dennis said, sheathing the weapon with a single smooth motion.

  Usually the point caught on the scabbard lip, or the blade bound halfway down. Not this time.

  Dennis had seen in the mirror the drapes of painted sailcloth with which Parol had covered the throne room. Until he entered the chamber, he hadn't appreciated how cramped and oppressive the place became with all its scintillant crystal hidden.

  "Only Dennis may enter!" the voice cried. "I warn you!"

  Ribbons of sooty flame rose to either side of the throne, barely illuminating the figure seated there to eyes adapted to the sun outdoors.

  Dennis gripped the edge of one of the sailcloth hangings and pulled.

  "What are you doing?" the voice demanded.

  Something cracked above. A broad sheet of canvas billowed and rushed down with fragments of flimsy scaffolding. Rainbow light filled the back wall and the throne room.

  Dennis' parents knelt at the foot of the throne. They were bound and gagged. The creature behind them was squat, black, and vaguely man-shaped, though even in the brighter light it had no more features than the sea hag's manikins.

  The sword it held was long enough to lie across the throats of Hale and Selda together.

  CHAPTER 67

  Parol giggled from two mouths, his own and that of the great-eyed creature clinging to his shoulder.

  "The tarsier," Dennis muttered under his breath, remembering the little beast whose ugliness had struck him the day he entered the wizard's apartments. It had been in a glass bubble, then, like all the other creatures he'd thought were dead...

  "So..." said Parol. "We have an impasse, do we not. A situation not as either of us would wish it, Dennis."

  The hood was flopped over much of Parol's face, but what wasn't covered had aged the way soft wood ages at the tide-line: gray and wrinkled so deeply that the skin seemed to be cracking down to the bone...

  "I want nothing of yours, Parol," Dennis said steadily, looking past the imploring grimaces of his parents. "You can leave with everything of yours. Everything of, of your predecessor, too. But you have to leave."

  The tarsier chittered something.

  The black figure—its color was an absence of light, not a shade of its own—tugged at Selda's faded hair, raising her chin and baring her neck more obviously to his blade.

  "Must I, boy?" Parol whispered. "I've learned things, you see. I'm very p-powerful..."

  His glance darted around the room as he spoke, falling on the sunlit wall, on the eyes of the youth facing him. The lie stuck in Parol's throat and choked off his voice.

  "Give it up—" Dennis said, but the tarsier was whispering into Parol's ear.

  "No!" the wizard cried from the throne. "No," in a lower voice, nervous but seductive, "we'll game for it, Dennis, we'll game for Emath. That's fair, isn't it?"

  His eyes flicked around, never lighting for long, never comfortable where they lighted.

  "What sort of a game," Dennis asked quietly.

  Chester was quoting some warning from the doorway, but this was between the two of them, boy-prince and boy-wizard as they had been when Dennis left Emath...

  Parol stood up. The base of the throne raised him three steps above the crystal floor, but he still seemed to have shrunk within his robes since Dennis saw him last.

  "You will ask me questions," Parol said in a sing-song voice as though he were repeating the words from rote. The tarsier's mouth was working, but if it was making sounds they were too soft to be heard at any distance from Parol's shoulder.

  "You will ask me three questions, any questions you please... and if I fail to answer them, all three of them, then I will leave. And you will be Prince of Emath, Dennis the Wanderer."

  Parol began to giggle again. His cowl had fallen back and his face looked like a dead man's.

  "You will be prince," the wizard resumed, his voice still quivering with humor or hysteria. "But if I succeed, little Dennis—then I will have your life. That's a fair offer, isn't it?"

  Stark terror flashed from Parol's eyes. "Isn't it?"

  "That's not a fair bargain," Dennis said as his mind raced, sure there was a catch somewhere in the offer. "Exile for exile: whoever loses, leaves Emath forever."

  "You know I'll never be safe here while you live!" Parol blazed. "Look at them out there!"

  His arm gestured toward the door and the hall beyond which the citizens of Emath watched. "Look at them!"

  The tarsier chittered again, audible but not words.

  Parol shivered and closed his eyes. His wrist had looked skeletal when it shot from beneath the sleeve of his robe.

  "No, Dennis, no," the wizard said with his voice composed. He opened his eyes. "I offer you two lives for a life. That's fair, isn't it, don't you think that's fair?"

  Selda whimpered through her gag.

  Dennis walked to a covered portion of the wall and deliberately ripped down more of the canvas. Flecks of paint fluttered away from the hangings as they fell.

  There wasn't a better choice. There wasn't another choice at all.

  He turned again to the throne.

  "All right, Parol," he said. The false flames still hung in the air, but the prismatic wash of sunlight through the walls had faded them to vague shimmers.

  "Swear on your soul, Dennis!" the one-time apprentice demanded. "Swear that I may have your life if I succeed!"

  "I swear that on my soul!" Dennis shouted back, unable to control his voice in the tension. "Now are you ready, or shall I tear your heart out with my hands, for all your false bogeys?"

  But he knew there was nothing false about the black creature which delicately brushed its knife against the throats of Hale and Selda, as if it were stropping the blade.

  "Ask," Parol said simply. His eyes were wide open.

  It was easy to find a question whose answer Parol couldn't know. "Where is the sea hag?"

  The tarsier whispered.

  Parol cried, "Dead!" but when his ears took in the words his tongue had uttered, all the blood drained from his face and his hands began to tremble.

  "Oh..." someone whispered, Aria or Ramos or Dennis himself.

  "Who is it claimed the Princess Aria unless a champion should save her?"

  As the tarsier whispered, Parol lurched down one of th
e three steps on which the throne stood.

  "Rakastava," the wizard shouted, "and you slew Rakastava too, Dennis, but you won't escape me!"

  Dennis couldn't think for terror. Fear for Aria and his parents, fear for the folk of Emath Village who were his folk and his responsibility since he led them in revolt. Fear of failure—

  But not fear for himself, because all that had been burned out of him when he dreamed in the jungle.

  And that was his question, the answer the tarsier couldn't know because it had never happened outside of Dennis' mind.

  "To whom did I tell a story in my dreams the night I left Emath, Parol?"

  Parol stepped to the crystal floor, shouting the words of his tarsier familiar, "Serdic! Serdic! And I have your—"

  The apprentice's hand was stretched out to deliver the bolt of flame to which Dennis' oath had bound him. Something formed in the air behind him.

  "—life!"

  The arms of the Wizard Serdic closed about the pasty boy who had been his apprentice. Parol had spoken the name that closed the bargain Serdic offered Dennis in the rain-soaked jungle.

  The flesh had slumped away from Serdic's hands and the right side of his face, but half his smile remained; and the scribbling of fungus across it.

  The tarsier tried to leap clear, but one of the wizard's bony hands caught it in the air. The little beast screamed, louder even than Parol—

  And they disappeared, wizard and apprentice and familiar, leaving only the fetid odor of decay where they had been.

  The knife clanged to the floor. The black creature had vanished, as though it never was.

  "All hail King Dennis!" Ramos shouted.

  Dennis turned in shocked amazement. "What?" he said. "No!"

  "All hail King Dennis!" Aria cried in her clear silver voice.

  "All hail King Dennis!" roared the crowd, mob no longer, as it burst into the crystal corridors that were clear at last of magic and the horrors that magic spawned.

  Dennis wanted to cut his parents free, but Ramos was doing that already with a blunt-tipped bait-cutting knife. Other hands were ripping down the last of the painted cloth with which Parol had tried to blot out the sun whose light he feared.