THE SEA HAG by David Drake

The little robot stretched his own limbs, raising his body on four of them while the other four reached higher yet. Droplets cascaded down the silvery tentacles, leaving no more sign than if Chester also were made of fluid.

“Dennis,” he said, “there is no cabin that I remember.”

The tentacles groping through the sun’s dapplings lowered to the ground; the other four rose and shook themselves free of water in silky iridescence.

“Then what…?” said Dennis. His hand completed its motion, loosing the clasp and swinging the cloak away from his body. He leaned the sword against the tree bole and began to wring out his garment thoroughly.

He didn’t finish his sentence, because he had no idea what the rest of the question ought to be.

The air was muggy, saturated with vapor transpiring from the leaves as sunlight touched them. It was hard to remember how miserable and chilly it had been a few hours before.

“Didn’t you see the—” Dennis began; and before his tongue formed the rest of the words, he recalled the fungus-knotted smile of the Wizard Serdic saying shall we play a game, boy? in a nightmare voice.

“I was dreaming,” Dennis muttered to himself aloud. “I dreamed it all, Chester. And it was awful.”

Chester coiled a tentacle around the youth’s waist. “Happiness comes out of the hardship men undergo, Dennis,” he said.

Dennis belted on the sword again. The skin over his hipbone was still chafed from wearing the weapon the night before, but maybe he’d get calluses or something. It wasn’t a problem he remembered hearing about in tales of past heroes.

“Well…” he said, looking around them.

His heart leaped. They were off the trail—that much of what he remembered from the night before was true.

But there was no cabin, and no room in the heavy vegetation for a cabin ever to have been there.

“Chester,” he said, “can you find the trail from here?” He was amazed at his own calm. The night he had spent in his dreams with a dead man had burned all the fear out of him.

“I can find the trail, Dennis,” Chester replied. “And I can find a road, if you would travel a road instead.”

Dennis looked at his companion, wondering what the robot’s expression would be now if he had a face. “Then let us take the road, Chester,” he said. “And—” the grinning fungus in his memory momentarily wiped the smile from his own expression “—if it leads away from here, it leads us well.”

He followed the robot through the glittering leaves which showered them again with the night’s raindrops.

CHAPTER 19

Dennis didn’t have a clear idea of what his companion might mean by ‘road’. A wider track beaten into the jungle by scaly feet, perhaps; or, just possibly, a herringbone surface of stone pavers like those King Hale had ordered a few years before to clothe the streets of Emath.

The road to which Chester led him, only twenty yards from where the pair of them had weathered the night, was amazingly more durable than either of those.

The road was soft pink and a little more than ten feet wide. The surface was pebble-grained for the sake of traction, but it was so dense that the last night’s rain beaded on it with no hint of sinking in.

And it was old. The root of a great tree knobbed on one side of the roadway and sprang to the surface again on the other, bracing the trunk and sucking nutriment from the thin jungle soil. The enormous hydraulic pressure swelling the root had been unable to crack the pink surface—and the tree it fed was at least a century old.

Chester’s limbs clicked on the roadway, just as they had in the halls of Emath Palace. Dennis followed him gingerly. The road was slick despite the grain of its finish… but the youth’s concern was for other things than merely his footing.

“Did the first heroes build this road when men came here to Earth, Chester?” he asked.

“The road is older than men on this planet, Dennis,” the robot replied. In the same neutral tone, he added, “The road is older than Man.”