“Parol!” he shouted, hands braced on his hips again. “What do you mean talking to your prince that way?”
The vaguely-humanoid cloud quivered, turning a dull gray with only a hint of color. Then it shrank in on itself like a pricked bladder, drooling momentarily along the crystal floor before it vanished completely. Parol, his mouth open in surprise, stood in the doorway.
“W-what are you doing here?” blurted the apprentice wizard.
Parol had black hair, a pasty complexion, and eyes of different colors—blue-green on the left, muddy brown on the right. He was almost as tall as Dennis, but the shapeless black robe he invariably wore made his soft body blur into the background while his face hung in the air like the full moon at dusk.
All the Wizard Serdic’s apprentices had the look and personality of creatures that entered Emath hidden in baskets of jungle fruit or dredged from the deep sea. Parol was no better than his predecessors—perhaps even a little slimier, a trifle more weakly vicious, than the others whom Dennis had been old enough to remember as persons.
Recollection of how frightened he had been of Serdic added cruel pleasure to confronting the dead wizard’s flunky this way. “How dare you question me? Get down on your knees, you little toad!”
“Luck leaves the harsh man because of his brutality!” Chester said sharply.
Dennis, keyed up from the present confrontation on top of days of strain, whirled with his hand lifting to slap. His mouth dropped open in horror when his mind realized what his body was doing. “Oh,” he said. “Oh Chester.”
Parol had dropped to his knees at the haughty order. He was bowing his forehead to the crystal floor. “Pardon me, Prince,” he babbled. “Oh, pardon my surprise, only my surprise—never disrespect to you, most noble prince.”
Dennis felt awful. He’d invaded Parol’s privacy—sneaked in, knowing the owner was gone and hoping to leave before Parol returned. And then, because he was caught… and frightened; and disturbed… Dennis had covered his wrongdoing with the sort of angry arrogance that bothered him so much when he saw his father do the same thing.
Worst of all, Parol was fawningly willing to accept that awful behavior.
“Ah, Wizard Parol…?” Dennis said.
“Pardon, Prince,” mumbled the other man—the other youth; he was a few years older than Dennis, but the only sign of color on his face were acne pocks. He was speaking to the floor.
“For pity’s sake, get up,” Dennis said.
He was disgusted with his own behavior a moment before, but Parol’s behavior would have been disgusting at any time. The last thing Dennis wanted to do was to let his feelings about the pasty apprentice explode into fresh anger again—but if Parol didn’t stop acting like a whining worm, it would be very hard not to treat him as one.
Parol didn’t react for a moment, but his eyes scanned the reflection of Dennis’ face in the crystal. He cautiously lifted himself, pausing for a moment on all fours while he watched the prince directly—looking like a dog ready to scuttle backward from a stranger who may kick.
“Wizard Parol,” Dennis repeated formally as the apprentice at last stood like a man again. “I want to apologize for troubling you this way. Chester and I had some business here that didn’t affect you, but we should have told you we were coming as, as a courtesy.”
“Oh, your highness needn’t speak to me,” Parol said, bobbing his head. Either it was just the way he was standing or his left shoulder was higher than the right one. “Only—”
Parol had a disconcerting way of holding his head so that Dennis could see only one of his eyes at a time; now it was the brown orb, and both anger and fear glinted on its muddy surface “—some of the, ah, the devices… can be dangerous. But perhaps—”
Parol’s head snapped around like that of a bird. “Your highness of course studied at length with th-th-th…”
His face lost everything but a glaze of stark terror. “My predecessor taught you, your highness,” Parol continued with his eyes both focused on an empty upper corner of the draperies. “No doubt he taught your highness the proper use of his devices?”