THE SEA HAG by David Drake

Weeks of familiarity had taught Dennis that the road was indestructible; but here the pavement ended in gobbets burned from pink through all the colors of the spectrum—indistinguishable from the soil fused to glass beyond.

The air was hot. The unhindered sun blazed down and in reflection from the sides of the bowl. Dennis felt as cold as he had when thinking of the Wizard Serdic.

“What happened here, Chester?” he asked. His voice sounded in his own ears like that of a little boy.

“This planet is not so old as the universe, Dennis,” the robot said quietly. “And the thing that happened here to the road and the city beyond the road, that was not so old as the planet.

“But they are all three very old, the universe and the planet and the thing. We must not be troubled by them now, you and I.”

Dennis squinted across the bowl, his eyes struggling with the haze and heat waves. He could see no hint of the pink road continuing; and even if it did, he was no longer sure he wished to walk it.

“All right,” he said decisively. “We haven’t seen any of the lizardmen’s trails crossing the road in… Two days? No, three. We’ll go back to where we last saw a trail and take that to where it leads us.”

His hand reached instinctively for the pommel of his sword and lifted the blade and inch or two, making sure that it ran free in its scabbard. They hadn’t met any lizardfolk on the way, save the three in his dream of the corpse. Dennis didn’t know—no one in Emath had known—how the scaly denizens of the jungle would react when humans entered their villages instead of the other way around.

“The wise man takes counsel patiently before he acts,” Chester said. Though Dennis knew the robot could move or see in any direction, the normal ‘front’ of his carapace now looked off into the jungle as if he were ignoring his companion.

“Well, all right,” Dennis said in the exasperation he always felt at his companion’s unwillingness—or perhaps inability—to volunteer anything but quoted wisdom. “What would you do?”

“I will do whatever my master wishes me to do, Dennis,” Chester said primly. “But—there is a city not so far away from here, though it be through the jungle with no trail save the trail that we make for ourselves.”

The youth shaded his eyes with his hand as he looked back at the road they had followed so far. “A village of the lizard people, Chester?” he asked.

“It is a village of men, Dennis,” Chester replied. “Though it was not made by men or by lizardfolk either. It is called Rakastava.”

Dennis thought for a moment. “It doesn’t mean crossing—that, does it?” he asked. His thumb gestured over his shoulder without looking at the bowl which death itself had excavated.

“It does not,” the robot said, and a light-silvered tentacle pointed the way to their right. A clump of sword-edged leaves with black, spear-shaped tips rimmed the road there for several yards. “But there is no trail.”

Dennis drew the Founder’s Sword and slashed a broad gap through the immediate vegetation. “We can handle the jungle,” he said.

CHAPTER 25

A day and a half later, he knew enough to be less positive if the question came up again. The difficulties weren’t particularly from the undergrowth—away from the tunnel of light which the road let fall to the ground, lesser vegetation was stunted and easy to avoid.

The footing was worse than terrible. Streams; bogs that might be ankle-deep or over his head; fallen timber that Dennis might have to circle for a hundred yards because it was too soft with rot to climb; and the rare outcrop of quartz or other faceted stone that would slash through even the calluses his bare feet had formed tramping the hard, smooth roadway.

Dennis didn’t see Rakastava until he hacked through an unexpected tangle of briars. Beyond them, he noticed that his feet were on grass and his face in sunlight.

“This is Rakastava, Dennis,” Chester said needlessly.

Dennis let his breath out slowly.

No one could have doubted that the crystal spires of Emath Palace were artificial, built by the men of old with tools more wondrous than those they had bequeathed to their progeny. No one could have doubted—save Hale and later his son, the only men who had seen the palace rise by itself, an organic part of the headland on which it stood.

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