THE SEA HAG by David Drake

The jungle might have denizens more fearful than the birds and lizards which had brightened its vegetation and his life as Dennis journeyed among them, but—

The Founder’s Sword quivered as Dennis’ grip tightened on it. The terrors of the jungle might find a terror of their own to face if they met him now.

The folk of Rakastava felt the same way about the newcomer. It was on the faces of all of them, children and woman and armed men, as they gazed at Dennis in his rags.

“Prince Dennis,” said Gannon in a voice that lost its tremulousness after the first syllable. “Please come with me to our king, who even now prepares to receive you.”

Gannon gestured. The children moved in a flutter of banners and loose clothing. They glanced back over their shoulders in quick nervousness toward the newcomers—then squealed and scattered forward when they saw that Chester moved also. The flautist took up her measured cadence and followed them.

Dennis waited for further direction. The King’s Champion gestured again, this time with a touch of irritation in his eyes.

Dennis sheathed his sword. It rustled against the scabbard sides, then chimed as it shot home to the cross-guards.

“As you will,” he said, striding on after the woman with the flute while Gannon and his fellows arranged themselves behind.

“Pride and arrogance are the ruin of their owner,” Chester murmured.

Dennis, with the look of the King’s Champion fresh in his memory, had no doubt at all for whom the robot meant that bit of wisdom.

CHAPTER 26

Dennis expected a cave. Instead, the interior of Rakastava was brighter than Emath Palace at midday. The air, while somehow lifeless, was fresh and moved in gentle currents even after the gate closed behind them.

The walls glowed. Light couldn’t come through them, the way it did in Emath Palace, so it must be generated by the material itself. Maybe the air did the same…

The corridor down which the children led Dennis was high-ceilinged and lined with people. More spectators appeared at every moment from side halls or doorways that vanished again when they closed, just as the gate had done.

The citizens blinked at Dennis and gaped at the robot beside him, but their whispered excitement stilled when the newcomers passed close to them. Gannon was the only inhabitant of Rakastava who’d actually spoken to Dennis.

The youth matched his pace to that of the flautist. He’d have preferred to let his legs take the full stride he’d found so natural on the road through the jungle. For a while he tried to meet the eyes of the people looking at him, but they ducked away. That made him uncomfortable—he wasn’t a freak, for goodness’ sake!—and he let his sight rove along the walls instead.

The corridor’s lines were softened by bands of color, primaries as well as pastels; but there was no visual art to give the passageway a human touch.

Nothing in Rakastava was human except the inhabitants.

The corridor opened into a chamber incomparably greater than anything Dennis had expected to find within a building. Even the mountainous bulk of Rakastava as he had first seen it, a slick, brown mass rising sheer from the jungle, seemed inadequate tho hold this—audience chamber, he supposed, because there were thrones and a carpeted path to them across the expanse of stony floor.

Trumpets sang, high and clear and echoing. Their well-blown notes sounded thin in the huge room.

Gannon strode past Dennis and Chester, marching toward the thrones with his head back and his armored chest thrust out. The woman with the flute had stepped to the side and vanished among the spectators.

There weren’t as many people as Dennis had at first assumed. There were at least a score of corridors like the one he and Chester had followed, and all of them were spilling gaily-dressed people into the audience chamber now. But the room could hold twenty Emath Villages; and the crowd now assembling totaled less than Dennis had seen at the Founder’s Day parades on any of the past five years.

In Emath, the crowds were alive—coarse, pushy; smelling of fish and spices and the sea—but alive and sure of their growing success. These folk of Rakastava were good-looking, almost without exception. They were dressed in clothes of a quality that in Emath only Hale and his family could afford—and they wore their garments with a stylishness that Dennis hadn’t imagined existed before he saw it here.

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