by David Drake
Malduanan's armored back arched; then the creature's belly slammed the ground again and its tail lifted, spinnerets spewing out gobs of silk that fell over it and the landscape promiscuously.
The creature's whole huge body shuddered and grew still.
The doubled images in Dennis' eyes drew back together. The scene shrank down to a pool of white light.
He barely felt the ground's impact as he collapsed.
CHAPTER 37
There was something damp and cool over Dennis' eyes. All the rest of his skin prickled as though burning needles were being driven into the surface of his body.
"Is the sword all right, Chester?" he whispered.
His lips were cold and stiff until he moved them. Veins of fire razored through them like lava rising in the crevices of a glacier.
"The sword is with us, Dennis," the little robot said. "It was used hard in the struggle, as you were used hard; but both of you will be well, that is so."
A sponge mopped Dennis' breastbone, then moved cautiously across the torn left side of his chest. He shuddered. He was cold to the core.
He knew he was dying.
"Chester," he said, "you're all right, aren't you?"
"Indeed I am well, Dennis," the robot replied. "And you have slain Malduanan."
"We killed him, my friend," Dennis said.
When he smiled, he felt a little better. The empty cold of his body mixed with his burning skin. He wondered where he was lying. He didn't feel the grass heads tickling him as he expected.
His smile faded. "You'll tell my parents, won't you, Chester?"
"When next we see your parents, I will tell them that you are a hero and have slain Malduanan, Dennis."
"And—and Aria?"
"What is it that your friend can tell me that I don't see for myself, Dennis?"
Dennis lurched upright. The cloth fell from his eyes, but for a moment dizziness blinded him to all but the light.
"Oh!" he gasped. Arms enfolded him to keep him from falling—the resilient metal of Chester's tentacles and Aria's soft, warm flesh. She'd dropped the sponge she was using to clean and cool his torso—
Pain—genuine, all-embracing pain—shot through Dennis like a thunderbolt striking him in the side of the ribs. He gasped and fainted and revived so suddenly that the hot buzzing and disorientation were like those from a blow on the head.
But he was alive again, not cold and consigned by his own mind to death.
"Oh," Dennis repeated.
His brain was staggering back to the fight with Malduanan because he wasn't able to understand his present surroundings just yet. He looked down at his bare knees, because if he looked up he'd see Aria; and he said, "I made a mistake, Chester, rushing in like that. I could've... I thought I'd been..."
"The youth who learns from punishment," Chester quoted proudly, "need not be punished again."
Aria held a cup to Dennis' lips. "It's milk," she said. "From the cows."
They were in Rakastava. Dennis lay in a brown room, on a slab that was perhaps not so bare as it seemed because there were hair-fine pricklings when his skin pulled away from the surface. He looked down at it doubtfully, but the two of them, Chester and Aria, wouldn't have brought him here if it weren't for his benefit.
Dennis drank the warm, sweet milk with care.
The cut in his side was a bad one, and even the slightest shift sent shards of pain quivering away from his ribs. Chester's touch steadied him, though Aria had moved back a trifle. He thought he could still feel the warmth of her.
He met Aria's eyes and smiled. "The herd's all right, too, then?" he asked.
He thought he was blushing. They'd draped a blue cloth over his midsection after they stripped him, but the sight of his own bare legs reminded Dennis of watching the girl undress in the mirror.
Watching the woman undress. Her pendant, a relic from the age before men landed on Earth, spun to draw his eyes and memories.
She looked away; embarrassment hardened her tone unexpectedly. "You didn't have to do that. None of us knew about the—other one. Nobody had..."
She met his eyes and pursed her lips in a grimace, but still she couldn't finish the thought aloud: none of the visitors we sent out had ever lived that long before.
"I didn't mean that," Dennis protested. "I just—"
He couldn't finish his sentence either, because the thought was so clearly I just wanted to talk about something harmless, so that I didn't tell you how beautiful your breasts are when the pendant plays its soft light over their inner curves...
"I told you that whatever you did out there was your own choice," she said hotly. "I didn't send you out to, to be hurt!"
And she hadn't, but the look in her eyes showed that she thought she had. Dennis knew he'd tramped out to the pasture the second time from only his own stiff-necked pride.
He finished the milk, letting the cup hide his face and give him time to think of what to say. "Can I get up, now?" he asked quietly, studying the faintly iridescent film which the fluid left in the bottom of the cup.
"Clothing!" Aria directed the wall brusquely. A suit of silver-patterned red fell in obedience to the slab beside the youth.
Aria turned her back courteously, though Dennis knew she wasn't modest in the mincing, fearful sense. She was as firm and willing to do whatever was necessary as the women of Emath Village, fishermen's wives and tradesfolk who took jostling and occasional disaster as mere incidents of life.
The only problem was that here in Rakastava, life proceeded without incident.
Or it had, until Dennis arrived.
"Aria," he said as he pulled on the fresh garments. The movement still brought flashes of giddiness, but he was in much better shape than he'd expected from the amount of blood he'd lost. "Princess, I went outside the, the city here because it—I wouldn't like to be here all the time. But..."
She turned to him, sidelong, when his voice trailed off.
Dennis was fitting his feet into the new slippers and wondering how to say what he meant without... "But I'm glad to be here where you are, too. And the milk was very good."
Aria smiled like the sun on a calm sea. "Chester taught me to milk a cow," she said with coy pride. "He thought you might like that instead of—"
Her face lost its joy. "It isn't the food that makes us—what we are in Rakastava," she said harshly. "It's us. I knew that before you came."
"I—" Dennis said. "I think I could use a proper meal, Aria. There's nothing wrong with the food here, I know."
"You can eat alone in your room, if you like," she said. The tone of self-loathing in her voice hurt Dennis as much as if the dissatisfaction had been directed toward him.
"I'd rather eat with all of you," he said humbly. "If that would be all right?"
She smiled again and took his arm. "Of course it's all right, silly," she said. "It's a pleasure."
CHAPTER 38
When they reached the hall where the whole population was assembled as usual for the evening meal, Dennis found that Rakastava had left two places on the bench beside King Conall. The foresight no longer surprised him.
CHAPTER 39
Dennis went out with the herd the next morning.
He felt a little tired and all his muscles ached, but he was in amazingly good condition for someone who'd been near death from his wounds less than a day before. The room with its slab that pricked his skin had done much more than speed the healing of his surface injuries.
"Rakastava takes good care of its citizens, Chester," he commented.
"Rakastava takes good care of its herd, Dennis," the robot replied crisply. "But it was the purpose of the cows to feed Malbawn and Malduanan."
Dennis reached out to stroke the flank of the nearest of the cows plodding to fresh grass beyond the arc they had already cropped. She twitched aside at the touch. When the cow looked back and saw Dennis, she made a grumbling sound—brushed her tail against the youth—and resumed her course.
"Th
ey're getting to like me," Dennis said with quiet satisfaction. "I think—"
He paused. "—Aria may like me too."
"If a fool has no work," Chester snapped, "his groin thinks for him."
Dennis grimaced. "I want to see Malduanan's hut," he said. "He came from this side of the field, so it's—yeah, that must be it."
Another great lump stretched from the pasture edge back into the shadows of the jungle. It was perhaps larger than Malbawn's hovel, but they were both made of leaves gray with their coating of mildew and other fungus. The door, a curtain of twigs and woven bark, hung open as Malduanan had left it to meet the youth who'd slain Malbawn.
Dennis drew his sword, though he didn't think he'd need it.
"The best remedy is to prevent trouble by foresight," Chester quoted approvingly.
Dennis stepped inside with his blade chest-high.
The dirt floor was littered with bones—scrubbed clean of flesh and ligament. Malduanan's beak had punched the larger ones with thumbnail-sized holes through which the creature sucked marrow. Some bones were fresh, and some had rotted away into splinters; but all the bones were cattle bones.
Dennis realized he'd been holding his breath. He let it out in relief.
"I thought—" he said aloud. "I was..." He looked around the dim interior.
"Malduanan didn't kill people," Dennis said, finally managing to organize his thoughts clearly enough that he could wrap words around them. "I was afraid there'd be—"
Skulls to trip over, his mind said.
"—bodies here too," his mouth completed.
"But," he added as his irrational relief turned to gloom that didn't really make any sense either—what was done, was done: "There aren't any men here, because Malbawn killed them all before they could meet Malduanan."
"There was a man who met Malduanan, Dennis," Chester said softly. "It was so long ago that his bones are dust and the dust of dust; but this—" metal pinged softly as Chester's tentacle touched something in the shadows "—is not yet dust."
The sound was from behind him, beside the door. Dennis turned in curiosity. His blade shifted, point forward, as his heart jumped in surprise. A figure stood there, as tall as Dennis and as silent as Death.
Metal rang on metal again. "It is not a man but a man's armor, Dennis," Chester said. "Nothing in this place is alive, except the mold on the walls."
Dennis scuffled his way through the beef bones to see the armor. It was black and so highly polished that it gleamed even in this vague light.
Dennis ran his left index finger across the metal. It felt cool and water-smooth. There was no dust on his fingertip when he looked at it closely. The black surface was more than glassy: not even dust would cling to it, over these—
"How many years, Chester?" he murmured. "How long has this been here?"
"For fewer years than men have been settled on this planet, Dennis," the robot said. "But by only a generation of years fewer."
Dennis tapped the breastplate with a fingernail. It rang like a wind-chime, a high-pitched sound that resonated in the armor for a dozen heartbeats.
The youth could see, from where plates overlapped to let the wearer move his arms, that the metal was paper-thin. He shifted his sword to his left hand and squeezed the hollow wrist with the full strength of a grip that could crush the hand of anyone he'd ever met.
The metal didn't quiver. It was as if Dennis were squeezing a solid steel bar.
He let out his breath again, slowly.
The suit of armor stood on its own legs without external support. The slotted visor was raised. A glance within assured Dennis that there was no framework inside either.
Nor were there bones. If the suit's owner had been wearing the armor when he died, that had been long enough ago to permit even a human skull to vanish utterly.
Dennis shifted an arm of the suit up and down, as though he were shaking hands with the dead owner. The hinged plates of the wrist and elbow whispered across one another, almost frictionless in their movement.
"Chester, this is beautiful," Dennis said. "Should I—"
He thought as he sheathed his sword, freeing both hands. "Ah, Chester? Is this something that I need?"
"It is not now that you need it, Dennis," the robot replied in a flat, uncompromising tone.
"Oh," the youth said. Well, he didn't need it. Would he wear it, tramping through the pasture under a sun that would heat black metal like an oven? "Well. I guess it can stay here."
He poked his foot morosely into a pile of debris; but that's all it was, debris. Garbage, really, picked too clean to smell. "Let's go out and see what else there is in this... place."
The sunlight felt good, though Dennis found himself twitching together his fingers to recapture the ghostly smoothness of the armor. It had been so beautiful...
Chester offered him a cluster of magenta berries. The kernal within each berry was large, but the layer of flesh around it was sweet and tart in trembling alteration.
The berries were delicious—and everything the food of Rakastava was not. But Rakastava had surely saved Dennis' life the day before...
The cattle were avoiding the area in the center of the pasture, where Malduanan lay in the grass like a gray hillock. The air above the corpse glittered as gorged insects spun in the sunlight.
Dennis touched his sword hilt. Sucking on the last of the berries, he began to walk across the field toward Malbawn's hut. He would look in the mirror again. He wanted to see what was happening in Emath.
And he wanted to see Aria.
Malbawn's legs had fallen in tattered segments to the grass. The great plates of the creature's torso were beginning to separate as well. Dennis wondered if the chitinous armor would resist the elements as effectively as it had the edge of his sword. The pieces might lie there forever, empty reminders of a monster the folk of Rakastava had thought must be bribed because it could not be slain.
He shivered. They'd nearly been right.
Chester touched his companion's shoulder and said, "He who perseveres in a crisis makes his own fate, Dennis."
"If he's lucky," the youth grunted. "And if he has friends."
But he was swaggering as he stepped up to the mirror and demanded, "Show me Emath. Show me my father."
As obedient and certain as the law of gravity, the gleaming surface grayed, then brightened on the turrets of Emath Palace for a moment before it swooped dizzyingly down through the crystal walls.
King Hale sat in the drawing room of the royal suite. Selda lay on a divan across from him, her face pressed against the bolster. She seemed to be crying. No servants were present.
"That's funny," Dennis muttered. He peered out the hut's door to make sure that his time sense hadn't been distorted by his injuries and whatever process the city had used to heal them.
The sun was just short of mid-sky—the time Hale always spent in the throne room, hearing deputations and discussing the business of the village with his advisors.
"Show me the throne room," Dennis directed. His voice was neutral, but his face glowered like a thundercloud.
The mirror's image shifted queasily, a seeming motion like that of a diver executing a fast back-flip. The throne room filled the surface when it came to rest, though at first Dennis thought the mirror had made a mistake. The bright, sparkling chamber of his recollection couldn't have been transformed into this nest of shadowed gloom.
But it had been. The walls and ceiling were draped with black cloth: not velvet, like those of the Wizard Serdic's apartments, but sailcloth painted black and hung to cover crystal that paint wouldn't stick to directly.
Parol—pudgy, pock-marked Parol, with his smirk and his cringing agreement with anyone willing to face him—sat on the throne.
CHAPTER 40
Takseler, one of Emath's leading citizens—a merchant whose shop covered a block of the waterfront and who owned three trading vessels himself—faced Parol with a shocked expression and very little clothing. He'd enter
ed the audience hall wearing robes and a chain of office. Now he stood in his undergarments with his valuables in the hands of guards in orange livery.
Those were the human guards. At either side of the throne shimmered a demon, orange also but clad in flames that vanished upward in curls of filthy smoke.
Parol cackled and pointed at the merchant. The guard holding the chain of office in his soft hands laughed in agreement. He stepped closer and slapped a loop of the heavy gold across Takseler's face, then kicked the merchant as he stumbled to his knees.
The guard was Rifkin. King Hale's butler now had new livery and new duties. He seemed comfortable in both of them.
Parol laughed. The human guards joined him.
The demons raised their snaky heads. Billows of fire surged from their throats, curling so high that they threatened to blister the painted sailcloth...
"No more!" Dennis shouted, to the mirror and to fate.
The mirror obeyed, showing the youth only a reflection of himself.
Fate—the doom which closed on King Hale and his subjects when he determined to cheat the sea hag of her bargain—would be harder to avoid.
Dennis' left hand was caressing Chester's carapace. The metal wasn't even scratched by the blow Malduanan had struck it the day before. It provided Dennis with the touch of something that had stayed unchanged since his earliest memories.
His parents had aged and shrunken from the wonderful, all-powerful creatures of his youth. Emath Palace was no longer the glittering wonderland in whose halls the boy Dennis had gamboled.
Chester said quietly, "Do not tie yourself to one who is so much greater that your life becomes a toy."
Dennis rubbed the robot affectionately.
He'd changed too, although—
He shrugged his shoulders, watching the play of his muscles in the mirror. A man's muscles, and a sword at his side that he'd used as a man—with the scars to prove it.