As obedient and certain as the law of gravity, the gleaming surface grayed, then brightened on the turrets of Emath Palace for a moment before it swooped dizzyingly down through the crystal walls.
King Hale sat in the drawing room of the royal suite. Selda lay on a divan across from him, her face pressed against the bolster. She seemed to be crying. No servants were present.
“That’s funny,” Dennis muttered. He peered out the hut’s door to make sure that his time sense hadn’t been distorted by his injuries and whatever process the city had used to heal them.
The sun was just short of mid-sky—the time Hale always spent in the throne room, hearing deputations and discussing the business of the village with his advisors.
“Show me the throne room,” Dennis directed. His voice was neutral, but his face glowered like a thundercloud.
The mirror’s image shifted queasily, a seeming motion like that of a diver executing a fast back-flip. The throne room filled the surface when it came to rest, though at first Dennis thought the mirror had made a mistake. The bright, sparkling chamber of his recollection couldn’t have been transformed into this nest of shadowed gloom.
But it had been. The walls and ceiling were draped with black cloth: not velvet, like those of the Wizard Serdic’s apartments, but sailcloth painted black and hung to cover crystal that paint wouldn’t stick to directly.
Parol—pudgy, pock-marked Parol, with his smirk and his cringing agreement with anyone willing to face him—sat on the throne.
CHAPTER 40
Takseler, one of Emath’s leading citizens—a merchant whose shop covered a block of the waterfront and who owned three trading vessels himself—faced Parol with a shocked expression and very little clothing. He’d entered the audience hall wearing robes and a chain of office. Now he stood in his undergarments with his valuables in the hands of guards in orange livery.
Those were the human guards. At either side of the throne shimmered a demon, orange also but clad in flames that vanished upward in curls of filthy smoke.
Parol cackled and pointed at the merchant. The guard holding the chain of office in his soft hands laughed in agreement. He stepped closer and slapped a loop of the heavy gold across Takseler’s face, then kicked the merchant as he stumbled to his knees.
The guard was Rifkin. King Hale’s butler now had new livery and new duties. He seemed comfortable in both of them.
Parol laughed. The human guards joined him.
The demons raised their snaky heads. Billows of fire surged from their throats, curling so high that they threatened to blister the painted sailcloth…
“No more!” Dennis shouted, to the mirror and to fate.
The mirror obeyed, showing the youth only a reflection of himself.
Fate—the doom which closed on King Hale and his subjects when he determined to cheat the sea hag of her bargain—would be harder to avoid.
Dennis’ left hand was caressing Chester’s carapace. The metal wasn’t even scratched by the blow Malduanan had struck it the day before. It provided Dennis with the touch of something that had stayed unchanged since his earliest memories.
His parents had aged and shrunken from the wonderful, all-powerful creatures of his youth. Emath Palace was no longer the glittering wonderland in whose halls the boy Dennis had gamboled.
Chester said quietly, “Do not tie yourself to one who is so much greater that your life becomes a toy.”
Dennis rubbed the robot affectionately.
He’d changed too, although—
He shrugged his shoulders, watching the play of his muscles in the mirror. A man’s muscles, and a sword at his side that he’d used as a man—with the scars to prove it.
Change wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
“Mirror, show me the Princess Aria,” he demanded. His chin was lifted and eyes turned resolutely away from Chester. The robot had no expression, but Dennis knew that he’d imagine a look of disapproval on the metal if he let himself see it.
He realized with a lurch of dismay that he’d hoped—dreamed, prayed—that Aria would be bathing again. But—
The mirror showed what was rather than what the viewer wished. Aria sat cross-legged on a stool, with a twelve-string lute nestled into her lap. The strings flashed light as her fingers played over them and her lovely mouth shaped sounds which Dennis couldn’t hear.