THE SEA HAG by David Drake

“Parol is with the dragons, Dennis,” said the robot. “And he has wedged the door open so that he can enter again when he returns this evening.”

Dennis stared at the door. Over the threshold had been shoved a heavy foot-bath. It was of malachite. The stone’s hideous green color clashed with the pure columns of light—and would have looked equally ugly in almost any other setting as well. Dennis could imagine why Parol used the piece as a doorstop.

But he couldn’t imagine why a doorstop was needed.

“Can’t he open the door to his own rooms?” he asked wonderingly.

“He cannot open the door to the Wizard Serdic’s suite from the outside, Dennis,” Chester explained. “There is a spell on the panel that Serdic placed, and it is not within Parol’s power to work or change it.”

Dennis’ face set at the reminder of Serdic—and that Serdic’s death did not necessarily end the wizard’s power. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go in and, and do what we must do.”

He pushed the panel open against the natural tendency to close which all the doors in the palace shared. The black pearl was vaguely warm and had a waxy slickness.

Dennis was frightened to enter the wizard’s suite, but it was a fear he could face and accept. The feeling that his father’s anger struck into him was fear also—but it was a child’s fear of ultimate power.

Even though Dennis knew that Hale’s shouting rage could not itself hurt him—that physically the two of them were at least a near match by now, father and son—Dennis reacted to his father’s moods as unreasoningly as he had done when he was an infant.

The wizard’s apartments were unfamiliar, and they might be dangerous; but Dennis could face them as the man he was growing to be.

There was nothing in the anteroom of the suite except an oil lamp burning on a cast-bronze pedestal. The open flame was backed and doubled by a round silver mirror, but even so its gutterings as the door swung open were almost invisible in the flood of light through the crystal walls and ceiling.

Dennis frowned at the lamp. “Does he expect to come back after dark then, Chester?” he asked.

“He may or may not, Dennis,” said the robot. Chester curved a tentacle almost to touching the stand. While the lamp was very plain, the pedestal on which it stood was a delicate tracery of cast insects clinging to one another. “The lamp, though, is only the watchman Serdic left to tell him what happened in his suite while he was gone.”

“What?” said Dennis, the word a way to gain time while his mind worked on the implications of what he’d just been told. “Will the lamp talk to Parol when he comes back?”

Two of Chester’s limbs moved in a shrug. “That I do not know, Dennis,” he admitted.

“Anyway,” said Dennis, “it doesn’t matter because we’re here now.”

He nodded curtly to the quivering flame and strode further into the apartments, his thumbs hooked arrogantly in his belt.

The design of the palace had no fixed floor-plan. This wing consisted of rooms opening directly off one another instead of lying along a corridor.

Only the oil flame furnished the anteroom. The following chamber was larger with a ceiling vaulted into five sections. The pentacle formed by the crystal groins might have had something to do with why Serdic appropriated this set of rooms, but the room formed a museum of sorts instead of a magical workroom.

Along the crystal walls stood bubbles of human-blown glass. In any background but that of the palace, they would have been amazing for their size and the skill of their manufacture.

From the largest bubble glared the lifelike mummy of one of the lizardfolk: his gray scales bore a healthy luster, and there was a glint in his yellow eyes. Dennis couldn’t imagine how anyone could have blown a bottle so large and nearly perfect… but swatches of the glass had a milky sheen, and variations in thickness distorted the lines of the specimen within.

The crystal room was perfect and in its perfection denied any possibility that Emath Palace had been built by men.

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