“We’re here for our own reasons,” said Dennis curtly. “Not wizard reasons.”
He had to spit the words out harshly to convince himself that what he was saying was true… as it was almost true, if you viewed what he and Chester had done in the right way. They weren’t wizards, so they couldn’t have wizard reasons—
Except when they were using magic to watch the past.
“Yes, yes, of course, your highness,” said Parol, his voice as false as the hatred in his hidden, winking glances was real. But—
Parol was something that could have been found under a rock; but this was his rock, and he had a right to be angry when somebody moved it and prodded at him needlessly.
Parol was moving backward, into the room of glass-cased exhibits. Dennis thought the apprentice was trying to speed their departure—and there may have been something in that, but there was a ring of truth in Parol’s voice as he explained, “Whatever your highness wishes, of course, but—I don’t spend much time here myself. I, my sleeping room is through there and the, the library, but this—these devices. I don’t—”
He stopped and looked Dennis directly in the eyes for the first time since he’d confronted the intruders. “There are dangers in these devices,” Parol said, speaking as closely to blunt honesty as it was in his character to manage.
He winced away into his normal cringing slyness. “Even for those of us who’ve been carefully trained in their use,” he added, the implied lie an obvious one.
“Yes, well,” said Dennis. “Well, I won’t trouble you further, Parol. Sorry for the inconvenience.”
He stepped forward, brushing back the velvet hangings—glad to be back in the normal diffracted brightness of daytime in the palace, but shocked again by the creatures displayed in glass bubbles.
Dennis’ skin crawled, feeling the pressure of hundreds—thousands—of dead eyes glaring at him. Chester laid a tentacle on Dennis’ hip bone, a firm, familiar pressure to remind him that even here he had a friend.
As they strode past the apprentice wizard, Dennis controlled the impulse to twitch his shirt close to his body lest its hem touch the fabric of Parol’s robe.
“Ah, your highness?” Parol said from behind the two companions as they reached the anteroom.
Dennis turned his head. “Yes?”
“If your highness wouldn’t mind perhaps telling me what it was that he visited these chambers for,” Parol said with a swarmy smile, “then perhaps I could hel—”
The apprentice’s words trailed off. He scuttled back out of sight, looking as fearful as he had when he tried to speak Serdic’s name.
Dennis didn’t understand the reaction until he caught sight of his own face in the reflector of the lamp beside him in the anteroom. Parol couldn’t know that Dennis’ expression came not from being asked an impertinent question but rather from being reminded of the sea hag.
And her bargain.
Chester swung open the black pearl door. The draft of air drawn from the rotunda was as enticing as summer flowers after peculiar miasma of the wizard’s suite.
“Ah, Chester?” the youth said when they had climbed stairs to the second floor and were no longer in sight of even the black door. “The little—furry animal in a case back there?”
“The tarsier, Dennis?”
Dennis shrugged. “If that’s what it’s called. When I looked back, I thought—” He sucked in his lips and chewed on them for a moment. “I thought I saw its head turn.”
Chester said nothing.
“But I guess that’s crazy.”
They strode down the disused hallway together. The whicker of the youth’s trouser legs brushing together merged with the swish-click! of the robot’s limbs on the crystal.
“Parol does not wish you well, Dennis,” said Chester unexpectedly. “It would be wise for you to watch yourself with him.”
Dennis shuddered despite himself. “But it isn’t going to matter very long, is it?” he said bitterly. “Not after tomorrow, when I’m sixteen and my father has to keep his bargain.”
He spoke quietly, but for minutes afterward he could hear his words echo in the emptiness of his mind.
CHAPTER 8
The notes of a Pan pipe rose in utter purity from one of the palace courtyards. Air trembled in each wax-stopped tube of the set, achieving a resonance and precision of harmony possible only to genius with an open-ended flute.