Metal rang on metal again. “It is not a man but a man’s armor, Dennis,” Chester said. “Nothing in this place is alive, except the mold on the walls.”
Dennis scuffled his way through the beef bones to see the armor. It was black and so highly polished that it gleamed even in this vague light.
Dennis ran his left index finger across the metal. It felt cool and water-smooth. There was no dust on his fingertip when he looked at it closely. The black surface was more than glassy: not even dust would cling to it, over these—
“How many years, Chester?” he murmured. “How long has this been here?”
“For fewer years than men have been settled on this planet, Dennis,” the robot said. “But by only a generation of years fewer.”
Dennis tapped the breastplate with a fingernail. It rang like a wind-chime, a high-pitched sound that resonated in the armor for a dozen heartbeats.
The youth could see, from where plates overlapped to let the wearer move his arms, that the metal was paper-thin. He shifted his sword to his left hand and squeezed the hollow wrist with the full strength of a grip that could crush the hand of anyone he’d ever met.
The metal didn’t quiver. It was as if Dennis were squeezing a solid steel bar.
He let out his breath again, slowly.
The suit of armor stood on its own legs without external support. The slotted visor was raised. A glance within assured Dennis that there was no framework inside either.
Nor were there bones. If the suit’s owner had been wearing the armor when he died, that had been long enough ago to permit even a human skull to vanish utterly.
Dennis shifted an arm of the suit up and down, as though he were shaking hands with the dead owner. The hinged plates of the wrist and elbow whispered across one another, almost frictionless in their movement.
“Chester, this is beautiful,” Dennis said. “Should I—”
He thought as he sheathed his sword, freeing both hands. “Ah, Chester? Is this something that I need?”
“It is not now that you need it, Dennis,” the robot replied in a flat, uncompromising tone.
“Oh,” the youth said. Well, he didn’t need it. Would he wear it, tramping through the pasture under a sun that would heat black metal like an oven? “Well. I guess it can stay here.”
He poked his foot morosely into a pile of debris; but that’s all it was, debris. Garbage, really, picked too clean to smell. “Let’s go out and see what else there is in this… place.”
The sunlight felt good, though Dennis found himself twitching together his fingers to recapture the ghostly smoothness of the armor. It had been so beautiful…
Chester offered him a cluster of magenta berries. The kernal within each berry was large, but the layer of flesh around it was sweet and tart in trembling alteration.
The berries were delicious—and everything the food of Rakastava was not. But Rakastava had surely saved Dennis’ life the day before…
The cattle were avoiding the area in the center of the pasture, where Malduanan lay in the grass like a gray hillock. The air above the corpse glittered as gorged insects spun in the sunlight.
Dennis touched his sword hilt. Sucking on the last of the berries, he began to walk across the field toward Malbawn’s hut. He would look in the mirror again. He wanted to see what was happening in Emath.
And he wanted to see Aria.
Malbawn’s legs had fallen in tattered segments to the grass. The great plates of the creature’s torso were beginning to separate as well. Dennis wondered if the chitinous armor would resist the elements as effectively as it had the edge of his sword. The pieces might lie there forever, empty reminders of a monster the folk of Rakastava had thought must be bribed because it could not be slain.
He shivered. They’d nearly been right.
Chester touched his companion’s shoulder and said, “He who perseveres in a crisis makes his own fate, Dennis.”
“If he’s lucky,” the youth grunted. “And if he has friends.”
But he was swaggering as he stepped up to the mirror and demanded, “Show me Emath. Show me my father.”