“What is it that you wish to know, Dennis?” the robot asked.
“I—” the boy said. “I—Chester, ask it what it was that my father did in the storm the night—the storm Ramos told us about.”
Instead of speaking, Chester shifted the delicate tips of three tentacles. Colors richened and merged with one another. Dennis leaned over the flat surface, wondering if he would see letters form there. The blackness of the easel was a palpable thing that sucked in the dim light. It had no reflection.
The illumination within the chamber increased and changed quality with a suddenness that made Dennis whirl. He expected to see the drapes sliding back and someone—Parol, rationally; but momentary terror filled his mind with a vision of the corpse of Serdic—standing in the door that was the only way to escape from this complex of rooms.
Instead, he didn’t see the room at all.
Where the velvet and squatting machines had been, the sea tossed under a sky of terrifying gray-green translucence. Lightning spat from point to point on the wall of encircling clouds; waves shot straight upward from the sea’s surface, although there was no wind.
Dennis had never been permitted to board a ship, but he was looking from the deck of one now: an open fishing boat, single-masted and tiny against the lowering circle of clouds. Chester had vanished. Dennis’ own body had vanished.
His father clung with corded muscles, the tiller in one hand and a mast stay in the other. Rags of sailcloth snapped from the spar every time the open boat pitched.
Hale’s hair was black and his face younger than that of the father Dennis knew in life. His mouth was open, but he was no longer trying to shout against the tumult.
The sea became as still as the dead air within the eye of the storm. The water began to change color beside the boat’s starboard rail. Streaks of brown, waving in sinuous ripples; coalescing, spreading wider and sharpening into burnished purple…
The ripples of color formed a circle forty feet across. A living thing rose in the center of the tendrils that were the fringe of its body.
“A sea hag…” Dennis whispered to Chester; but the boy had no companion to hear him in this place of storm.
The sea hag had the face of a beautiful woman floating in the swirl of her lustrous hair, but the skin was gray and the expression was as still as marble. Beneath the face and seeming hair was a greasy hugeness over which the ocean shimmered like the surface of a wading pool. The fishing boat steadied.
Nothing moved but the sea hag’s hair and the wall of storm beyond.
“What is it that you want?” Hale shouted at the creature which gripped the keel of his boat. His voice was clear and strong; fear had raised it an octave above its normal pitch.
Dennis had heard of the sea hag as he had heard of a score of other bogeys from his nurse’s imagination or the ancient past of Earth before men came here from the stars. Imagination surely, but—
The thing floating in the water opened a mouth that split the woman-face and crossed the “hair” floating a yard to either side. The creature’s gullet was arched with bone and otherwise as red as heart’s blood. From corner to corner, the mouth was wider than Dennis was tall.
The sea hag said in a cavernous voice, “King Hale, I would bargain with you.”
The huge lips closed and their edges merged. The female features reformed as if they had never been split and distorted across the head of a monster as great as the boat beside which it floated. The ridges of brown and purple scales that counterfeited hair trembled again to complete the illusion.
“Let me go!” Hale cried. “You have the wrong man. I’m no king!”
“Would you be a king, Fisherman Hale?” rumbled the sea hag, smearing its human countenance again.
Dennis would have closed his eyes, but he had no eyes in this time, and no sound came when he tried to scream.
“Or would you be a drowned corpse that my sea casts up when the fish are done with it?”