Dennis stopped in the tall grass. “I said I didn’t want anything to do with that.”
“Do not squander the little you have when there is no one else to support you,” Chester quoted sharply.
“Chester, I saw what that, that stick did to you,” the youth pleaded. “I don’t want to touch it. Look, my sword is good enough.”
He drew the long blade, as though sunlight dancing on the metal were an argument.
“Dennis,” the robot said gently, “on the island, the sea hag will try to stop you. She will send out things that are of her and not of life; and for those you might trust your sword, though it is my mind that the sword would fail you.”
Dennis swallowed. “But—” he began.
“But the sea hag has still greater powers,” Chester continued, ignoring his master’s interruption. “She will send things that have the semblance of persons… but it may be that she will send the persons themselves. If she does that, Dennis, and you trust your sword… you will wish it was on yourself instead that you had used your blade.”
Dennis closed his eyes for a moment, trying to shut out the vision he had just seen—Aria falling in two parts, a shocked look on her face as she died; and blood, so much blood…
“Right,” he said. “Let’s go find the baton.”
CHAPTER 59
Dennis expected Mother Grimes’ house to look more weathered, but essentially the way it had been when he glanced back at it after hacking his way clear.
“Oh…” he murmured in distaste and horror when he saw the reality. “Oh. I should have known.”
The “house” was Mother Grimes, a chitinous shell to draw in the unwary. Dead, Mother Grimes decayed as quickly as her sons had rotted where Dennis left their corpses sprawled in the grass.
The roof had fallen in; the upper portions of the walls were bare and white. The layer of flesh which had pretended to be wood and brick and stone was now slumped onto the ground as a pond of thick green fluid in which maggots swam and feasted.
Dennis stared at what he had seen and walked into, thinking it was a house. He nibbled at his lower lip, wondering what kind of deceptions he would face on the Banned Island.
“The baton is here, Dennis,” Chester said from a short distance away. One tentacle pointed to the ground, where the object had fallen when Dennis hurled it away from him. “Do you wish that I should carry it?”
The youth shivered in the sunlight.
“No,” he said in a firm voice. “I’ll carry it, Chester. It’s part of my duty, I think.”
The robot didn’t respond directly, but Dennis thought he read approval in the expressionless features.
CHAPTER 60
When they reached Malbawn’s hut, Dennis’ sweat-sticky skin prickled all over from grass-cuts and nervousness. The shade of the sagging roof was comforting.
Chester wasn’t unlatching the pieces of star-metal armor so that Dennis could put it on. The youth gestured toward the suit and said, “Ah, won’t I…?”
“The armor will be of no use to you today, Dennis,” Chester said. There was no compromise in his tone, though he added, “You may wear it if you wish, to shield your fear if not your body.”
“No, I don’t need that,” Dennis said coldly. Chester’s calculated insult had frozen away the nervous flutterings that nibbled Dennis’ mind the way insects and itching had worked on his skin in the pasture.
Chester touched Dennis’ wrist with a tentacle, then withdrew it. “He whose good character makes him gentle,” the robot said, “is master of his own fate.”
Dennis took his right hand from the pommel of his sword and rubbed the robot’s carapace, the way he’d done for friendship and reassurance all his life.
“I’m frightened, Chester,” he said quietly. “But I’ll be all right. What do we do now?”
“It is now that we must go to the Banned Island, Dennis,” the robot replied.
Dennis opened his mouth to give the order, but the mirror was already shifting and clearing on—
A sight as striking, and as clearly artificial, as the glitter of Emath Palace.