by David Drake
"Turn now," her voice whispered through the fog of exhaustion and steaming water. "Turn..."
There were flaps of loose skin on his shoulders where he had deliberately accepted punishment from the creature's armored limbs. Aria kneaded the ointment into the wounds, then forced the skin back over Dennis' bare flesh while he rested his chin on the sloped rim of the tub. The sudden pain made him suck in his breath... but after the first rush, he could feel the injured surfaces starting to knit together.
"I'm beginning to think I survived after all," Dennis whispered. He wasn't sure whether he was speaking aloud or only in a pink-misted, lemony dream.
"I am glad that you survived, Prince Dennis," murmured the woman's voice from the mist. "Now it is time for you to get out of the water and to sleep."
The tub was draining into itself. Hands and tentacles as gentle as hands were helping Dennis, drying his body with towels and clothing it again in loose, light garments before lifting him to the bed.
Dennis could see the crystal spheres spinning, so close that if he blinked his eyelashes might brush them.
"I am glad that you survived," the voice said. "And I am very glad that you have returned as well. Now, sleep..."
His mind obeyed that instruction, as Dennis had obeyed every instruction Princess Aria had given him this night.
CHAPTER 34
Dennis saw faces in the nightmare world of the following hours. Aria came to him—and Conall; Selda sponged his forehead while King Hale talked earnestly about kingship and necessity...
Serdic's fungoid sneer gibbered behind them.
Then the fever broke and Dennis awakened to reality. Chester was half supporting his torso so that another tentacle could hold a cup of soup to Dennis' mouth.
"Oh!" the youth said. His eyes were prepared for the brightness, but his conscious brain had been existing in a dim netherworld for...
He swallowed soup, then asked, "How long have I slept? Is it morning?"
"It is morning, Dennis," the robot said. "And it is two nights and a day that you have slept."
"Oh!" Dennis repeated.
"The wise and goodly man may come close to death and yet survive," Chester quoted, "because of his goodness."
"I can't claim that," the youth muttered. He rotated his legs over the edge of the bed and stood up. The fever which purged his body had left deep aches in all his muscles.
He balanced for a moment, weak and light-headed from the pain. But it was an overpowering thrill to be able to move after hours that were lifetimes in his dreams...
In dreams he had no control, neither over himself nor over the other inhabitants of nightmare. Reality had real pain, but he could move; and—
The Founder's Sword leaned against the wall beside the bed.
Dennis slipped it out of its sheath. The weight and balance of the weapon brought memories of Malbawn. The stress, instead of doubling Dennis over with cramped muscles, returned him to strength and suppleness as the hormones of battle leaked back into his system.
In the waking world, Dennis could affect those around him—no matter how terrifying their form.
He was wearing a nightgown of slick fabric, but there were other clothes ready in the cabinet. He'd finished dressing—slacks and a tunic of blue, slashed diagonally with orange—and the sword belted around his waist, when the wall opened into a door.
"Oh!" said King Conall. "You're, ah, recovered."
His daughter stood behind him, looking cool in a dress of the same yellow-white as her hair. There was no emotion in her eyes as they looked at Dennis.
He'd been delirious with fever. The fever had brought fanciful imaginings...
"I am recovered enough to go out with your cattle, your highness," Dennis croaked. His vocal cords were as stiff as all his other muscles.
Conall blinked. Aria looked as though Dennis had slapped her.
"Ah, that isn't really necessary..." the king muttered.
"But it is necessary to me, King Conall," Dennis said in a tone that even to him seemed to be rising toward madness. "For I undertook as my duty that I should be your cattle-guard and on my honor, King Conall, I will do that thing. You would have none in Rakastava but honorable men, surely?"
"Yes, yes, of course," Conall muttered, turning his face down and away. "Well, in that case—"
"Since you are recovered and able to make your own decisions, Prince Dennis," said Aria sharply, "then you are welcome to the hospitality of Rakastava—and we are pleased to have your company."
Dennis bowed stiffly.
"There is no further agreement between us, Prince Dennis," the princess continued. She was on the verge of tears. The hard set of her face was the crust above a pool of flaming lava. "None! If you choose to go to the forest, then only your own will sends you there!"
Dennis bowed again. "If your highness—" he said to Conall, who was gaping at his daughter, "—and you, milady, will forgive me, I'm already behind the herd by some hours. Come along, Chester."
"The fool who is in the right, Dennis," Chester murmured as he followed his master, "is more annoying than the one who has wronged him."
CHAPTER 35
The hot, humid air of the jungle's margin drew away Dennis' strength and left him sleepy again. The cows had watched him approach with greater aplomb than they had shown the day before.
Two days before. He'd lost a day.
Insects still buzzed around the corpse of Malbawn. Two of the creature's limbs rose at twisted angles. The breeze whistled across their hollow interiors.
Dennis flexed his aching muscles. More had been at risk than a day of fever dreams.
He looked at the cows, nestled for the most part into bowers their bodies had flattened out of the jungle's edge. Their jaws moved in quiet contentment, chewing cuds of the grass they'd cropped in the cooler hours of morning.
"You know, Chester...?" the youth said. "If I'd brought a pail, I bet I could get some fresh milk. I don't like depending on the—you know, food in Rakastava."
"I have brought a pail, Dennis," the robot said. He reached into the battered shopping bag from Emath and came out with a large bowl of the same smooth, brown material as Rakastava's surface.
Dennis smiled at his friend. "We will gather some fruit, Chester," he said. "And some nuts, may be. And then we will try to find out whether to milk a cow is the same as a goat, and whether I remember to do even that."
He paused. "But first," he said, looking at the gloomy, cave-like entrance of Malbawn's hut, "we will look in the mirror and I will see my father."
When Dennis entered the hut immediately after his battle, he'd been keyed up by the fighting and nervously ready to react to any new horror.
The second time he saw the interior, it was dingy and depressing; nothing more. He couldn't imagine anything willingly living in such squalor, not even a creature as foul as Malbawn.
But he couldn't imagine people willingly living in Rakastava, either; and he was willing to live there himself for a time, with its food that had no flavor and its air that had no life.
Dennis thought of Aria and said, "Mirror, show me my father."
The surface blurred and cleared into the remembered brilliance of Emath Palace.
Hale was on his throne in the audience hall. He'd aged more than the few weeks since Dennis saw him last.
A deputation of villagers, leading citizens in their robes and heavy golden chains, stood before the throne. They were angry and, though no sound came through the mirror's glint, it was obvious that several were shouting at once while they shook their fists at the king.
Nothing like that had ever happened in Emath.
"What...?" Dennis said, more to himself than to Chester.
The robot responded anyway. "When a fool refuses the service he owes," Chester quoted, "he will lose his goods to another."
Parol stood at the foot of the throne, facing the delegation with a set smile. A merchant whose cheeks were as ruddy as his thick velvet robe turned from
Hale and pointed toward the apprentice wizard.
Of course. The villagers were demanding that the perimeter be expanded—and that meant replacing Parol with a competent wizard.
Parol's face didn't change. He gestured, and a phantom formed in the air. It had smokey bones and the head of a pig, also in shadowed outline. It stepped toward the delegation.
Villagers backed, stumbling on their unfamiliar formal garments. Then they turned and ran. Parol's expression was the unchanged. Behind him, Hale covered his face with his hands.
"I don't want to see this!" Dennis shouted. His words were still ringing in the air when Emath Palace became the gray reflection of a hut and a young man staring back from the glass with an anguished look on his face.
"I don't understand why that's happening," Dennis whispered.
"Your father was a king because the sea hag made him a king, Dennis," his companion said. "Now he must be a king on his own—or no king at all..."
Chester's tentacle squeezed Dennis' hand.
Dennis hadn't looked at himself since he awakened. The ointment had done a wonderful job of healing his wounds. Pink welts marked the tan of his skin, but he'd expected deep scars at the least...
Dennis' left hand rose and tugged at his ear as he watched the mirror. He'd been sure that Malbawn had torn it off with his first blow, but the ear was fine, just twinges of pain in it as in almost every muscle of his body.
"Show me the Princess Aria," he said softly, and the mirror shimmered in response...
She had set the bracelets and jeweled combs from her hair on the table beside her bed, but she still wore the crystal pendant. As Dennis watched, she took off the dress she'd been wearing when she and Conall visited his room.
When Dennis had insulted them both; and they'd deserved it, Dennis knew they'd deserved it... but they'd been coming to check his condition, and their faces from his delirium were surely memories of earlier visits.
She tossed the dress toward the cabinet into which it vanished like fog melting before the sun.
Aria wore nothing beneath the dress. The fine hairs on her body gleamed like liquid gold as she stepped into the tub. Steam rose as her slim legs stirred the surface.
She settled. The crystals between her breasts spun dancing light over the room and the water as it bobbed, now beneath the fluid and now above it...
"I don't—" Dennis said. He couldn't finish the command until he turned his face toward the doorway. He was gasping for breath.
"Don't show me this either," he said in a husky voice. "Let me—"
He bent at the waist and the rush of blood to his head restored his balance. "Chester," he said, "let's go—"
A cow blatted from across the field.
Dennis straightened, looking at his companion.
"Do not undertake a duty unless you have the power to enforce it," Chester said.
"I've got the power," Dennis grunted, lifting the sword a finger's breadth in its scabbard to prove that it would slide freely. He stepped out into the sunlight.
Malbawn was dead. The odor of his decay permeated the air around him.
Therefore it wasn't Malbawn who stalked toward Dennis from the other side of the pasture.
CHAPTER 36
The cows were in restless motion. Their sidling movement away from the creature, always with their black-and-white heads twisted back to watch for surprises—was punctuated as a half dozen of the beasts suddenly decided to bolt a hundred yards in a snorting gallop.
Their eyes rolled when they saw Dennis. They bolted from him as well.
Dennis drew his sword. The grass the cows had cropped short brushed his ankles as he strode toward the yellow-gray creature. He saw Chester in the corner of his left eye, following on liquid-rippling tentacles a pace behind and a pace to the side.
The creature was advancing on all six legs. Fifty yards from Dennis it lifted itself and waved the saw-edged front and middle pairs.
"You have come to Malduanan, fool!" it croaked through its cruel beak. "Malduanan will drink your blood!"
Dennis ran the index finger of his left hand across the flat of his blade as he advanced, reminding himself of the sword's hard reality and the battle it had fought for him.
"Your brother's a stinking corpse!" he shouted. "I'll kill you too!"
His body fluttered with anticipation and fear of failure, but all the aches and reminders of his previous fight were gone.
This was what he needed. This was what would make him forget his anger at the folk of Rakastava who had sent him to die.
This is what would make him forget the touch of Aria on his body and the way he felt as he watched her take off her clothing in the mirror.
"I'll kill you!" Dennis shouted as he lunged.
Then he nearly died.
Malduanan was bigger than Malbawn. Standing on its hind legs, it was easily twice as tall as the youth. As Dennis thrust, the creature toppled forward, letting gravity move its mass faster than Dennis expected muscle power to do.
Dennis shifted back expertly, a swordsman again and not a boy randy with the thought of a naked woman more lovely than he had ever dreamed flesh could look. He blocked Malduanan's right foreleg with his sword near the guard where the metal was thickest—and still the blade notched like a furrow before the plowshare.
Malduanan's left foreleg struck from the other side. Its pincers closed over the youth's ribs hard enough to slice flesh to the bone as they gripped.
Dennis screamed and cut over his own back. Luck aided skill. The sword cracked the horny integument at the joint which permitted the pincers to move in their plates of armor.
Malduanan wheezed foul air over Dennis and jerked away, lifting the injured limb high. The single blade of the pincers sagged at an angle.
The youth staggered several paces backward. He was breathing in quick, shallow puffs because it hurt to expand his chest fully. He thought a rib must be cracked. He was bleeding all over that side of his tunic, though the tough fabric itself hadn't been cut.
Malduanan balanced his weight on the middle pair of legs, a maneuver that Malbawn had never attempted. Dennis panted, wondering whether or not he dared dart in again. He wouldn't know how much the pain handicapped him until a sudden stitch cost him his balance and he fell—
Malduanan's hind pair of legs flung a loop of silk at Dennis.
The youth started to parry it the way he would a swordstroke—but he saw the sun gleaming on beads of adhesive just in time and slashed his sword away.
The creature moved toward him on its four forward legs. Their jointed scissoring seemed leisurely, but the legs were so long that they covered the ground as fast as Dennis could back-pedal.
His heel turned. Another loop arched toward him on a glistening trailer from Malduanan's spinnerets.
"Help me, Chester!" Dennis shouted as he hunched, turning his misstep into a diving thrust. His whole body was in line with the three-foot blade of the Founder's Sword when its point sliced into the knee joint of Malduanan's right middle leg. One of Chester's curving tentacles caught the forelimb whose slashing blow would have gutted Dennis like a trout had it landed as the creature intended.
Malduanan tried to flatten itself, but the joint with the sword sticking into it was jammed partway open. The creature's body stuck at an angle to the ground, wedged by a limb that could neither fold nor help support the creature.
Dennis rolled sideways and jerked his point free. Malduanan's damaged leg flopped loose below the wound, but the upper limb pivoted in its ball-and-socket joint with the body, as though it still carried weight. The youth curled against a pincered kick or a stab from Malduanan's beak.
Nothing hit him. As he spun to his feet he heard the clang of the creature's forelimb batting Chester through the air like a shuttlecock, swaddled in ribbons of silk.
There was a gouge thumb-knuckle deep in the metal where Dennis had parried the creature's blow with his sword. The same limb had just struck Chester squarely.
Dennis' face was white as dead bone. He stabbed. If Chester had been killed or reduced to crippled impotence for the rest of eternity because his master was a boastful fool...
He hadn't thrust for a limb joint this time. Dennis didn't know how cold a murderous rage could be—not until he saw the creature smash down at Chester for a mistake that was Dennis' own, all his own. The point glided butter-smooth over the armored collar and into Malduanan's neck.
The creature snatched itself aside.
Dennis thought he'd missed, cut only air because his sharp blade hadn't even quivered with contact—
But there was slime on a hand's breadth of the swordpoint and there was a spurt of gray-green ichor hanging in the air behind Malduanan's head as the creature lunged forward again—and stumbled.
Chester clung to both undamaged limbs on the right side, and the legs didn't scissor apart as Malduanan expected them to.
"Got him!" Dennis cried in triumph at his friend's life; but it was a warrior's cry too, and a swordsman's. He thrust, ignoring the pain in his torn side as he'd ignored if ever since he realized that he had to function normally—even if his body didn't think it could.
Malduanan's eyes were pools of glittering blood. Its beak opened as the legs on its right side forced themselves apart against Chester's metallic grip.
The sword slid through Malduanan's beak. The point jarred to a halt on the inner surface of the creature's armored braincase.
The creature's six limbs flailed in a convulsive motion swifter than anything they'd managed under conscious control. Dennis jumped back, dropping the swordhilt of necessity. He stumbled, from weakness and not because his foot had caught on a tangle of dry grass.
The left side of his garments, trousers as well as tunic, was sticky with the blood that oozed from cuts over his ribs.
The ground shook as Malduanan fell. The creature's legs beat a drum-roll that scattered dirt and grass high enough to throw a long shadow.
Dennis sat up. He had to lean on his arms to stay upright. His vision was clear, but he saw double images of everything around him.