There were two rows of pillars—the inner circuit offset from the outer one, equal in number but slimmer; so delicate, in fact, that they looked scarcely able to stand, much less support part of the roof’s weight.
The columns were porcelain, not marble; colored and patterned, but glass like the dome and staircase up to it.
The center of the pavilion was sunken. Dennis took the steps down to a surface three feet below the floor on which the pillars rested. Within that, a shaft thirty feet in diameter that seemed to drop to Hell or the center of the Earth, whichever was farther.
Machinery was built into the waist-high wall: dials and gauges, buttons and levers; plates that were nothing until someone touched them in the correct way so that they became—anything at all.
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.