“If you had fur, Chester, I would rumple it,” Dennis said as his fingers scrabbled against the metal. “Since you do not, I will only tell you that indeed I have gained from your wisdom—if that wisdom made you become mine.”
Chester’s tentacle squeezed the boy’s waist gently, then released him.
Again a dragon roared. The beast lurched up on its hind legs, lifting its great-toothed snout a full twenty feet in the air. Its short forelegs were flailing at an invisible barrier, the passage that Parol’s magic had armored across the beasts’ concourse.
Lizardmen waited at the edge of the jungle. Distance made their features impassive to Dennis, but their heads darted from one side to the other to watch each of the pair of dragons. When Parol signaled, the lizardfolk would sprint across the perimeter into Emath with their trade goods.
Not so long ago, the native traders would have crossed with stately pomp. Some of them would have rolled clumsy great-wheeled carts laden with fruits and pelts and timbers, gems washed from the flanks of distant mountains and items still more wonderful dug from the ruins of incredibly ancient cities. But that was when the Wizard Serdic controlled the perimeter he had established when first he came to Emath—
And when Parol was only Serdic’s most recent apprentice.
Parol was a plump, ill-favored youth, much like the others in previous years whom Serdic had hired—or bought—from trading vessels. The apprentices helped with spells so complex they required two voices, and they did the physical drudgery in the separate wing of the palace that formed the wizard’s quarters—sweeping the floors, cleaning the equipment, and carrying meals to Serdic’s sanctum, which ordinary servants of the palace were never permitted to enter.
Then, after each few years, Serdic brought in a new apprentice and disposed of the old one. Put the boy on an outbound trader with a warning never to return, King Hale said; or darker things, as others whispered, but they never spoke where Serdic might be listening—and where might not so great a wizard find a way to listen if he wished to?
Serdic talked little of himself; talked little to anyone except when he had to, as when he tutored Dennis in reading and mathematics and astronomy because the king had set that among his wizard’s duties. Serdic had been cold with Dennis and utterly disdainful of Hale—but he’d obeyed Hale, in that as in all things which the king ordered.
Rumor—manufactured in the parlors and taverns of Emath, or brought in with traders like other exotic cargoes—said that there was no wizard in the world more powerful than Serdic, and that Serdic was three hundred years old. Everyone had been certain that in a few weeks or a month, Parol would go whichever way the earlier apprentices had gone, before they learned enough to pose a danger to their master—who was as cautious as he was terrifying.
But instead, the Wizard Serdic had died.
“It is a son’s good and blessed portion,” said Chester, “to receive instruction.”
“I wish my dad would come back,” said Dennis.
He twisted his head around abruptly as if he could trick fate into giving him a glimpse of what he wanted to sea. A pair of fishing boats were headed in early. Either good fortune had filled their holds or bad luck had left them in need of repairs. Facts were facts; what they meant was in the hands of time or the gods.
King Hale’s skiff was not in sight.
“You can’t see him, can you, Chester?” the boy asked in sudden hopefulness.
“From here I cannot see him, Dennis,” Chester replied. The robot had no more eyes than mouth, so Dennis had never been sure how he went about seeing. “If he were to row back over the horizon, I would see him.”
“Doesn’t matter,” the boy lied.
The dragons snarled and lunged from either side against the magical barrier which restrained them from the scampering lizardmen. The lithe, gray-scaled traders from the interior carried their packs over their flat heads as they crossed, partly as a feeble protection in case the guard beasts broke through the barrier—and partly so that if the worst occurred, the victims would be blindfolded by their loads and wouldn’t see what had happened until the great teeth ended their fear.