He looked into the darkness while his hand stroked Dennis’ knee with the affection of an old man for something he’s known and loved for years. “We thought he was mad, Dennis; but we went with him because we loved him, both of us. And he sailed us up the coast to here, to Emath, and it was as you see it—harbor and palace, all perfect, and nothing but rock and danger three days before when we fished the same coast together.”
Ramos’ hand curved up and gripped Dennis, as gently as could be without the least doubt that he meant the boy to meet his eyes for what he said next: “I will not lie to you, lad. If all the gods stood here before me, I would tell them the same thing. There was nothing—and when your father came back, there was Emath. And he was king of it.”
The ledge on which Dennis sat was as solid as all portions of the palace—beyond wear and apparently beyond destruction. He felt as if he were sitting instead on a scrap of timber in a maelstrom, whirling downward toward an end as horrifying as the ride.
“Chester?” Dennis said, turning to his robot companion. “Is this so?”
In his need for the information, he ignored the insult he was offering the man beside him; but Ramos only nodded in haughty assurance.
“It may be so, Dennis,” said Chester.
“The people?”
It wasn’t clear—even to Dennis—who the boy expected to answer. Chester rested silently on his eight limbs, the tips slightly raised so that not they but the metallic curves beneath the tips took the robot’s weight.
“Not the people, lad,” Ramos said. “The people came after, when I took out word that the harbor was here. I sailed The Partners up-coast and down.”
Talk of that past prodded the older man into motion again. He stood up, rising slowly to his full height instead of the stoop in which he had shuffled across the room initially. He said, “I went to every little settlement: where they dragged their boats up a creek-mouth and where they scraped their keels on a shingle shore. I told them—”
Ramos was sixteen years and a lifetime younger now. His voice boomed in the open room and out across the water.
“—there was harborage that would keep them safe in the worst of storms! Fishing boats and great high-decked traders, it was all one. They could shelter beneath the crystal walls of a palace like none they ever dreamed of, beneath the protection of King Hale.”
Ramos sagged as though his hamstrings had been cut. The collapse was utterly unexpected. Dennis jumped up, but far too late to have kept the older man from falling—
Except that Chester had already caught Ramos and was supporting him with four flexible limbs, because Dennis had told him to help Ramos, and the robot never forgot an instruction.
“No, no, I’m all right,” said Ramos softly; and perhaps he was, but Chester didn’t let go until he’d lowered his charge to the ledge again. Dennis settled back, afraid to appear too concerned about the older man’s sudden collapse.
Ramos met his eyes. With a firmness that was a matter of present will rather than past memory, Ramos said, “I told them they would be under the protection of King Hale and Queen Selda.”
His pause was only to prove that he was in control of his words and his emotions. “And so they have been, all who came then at my urging or later as the word spread of its own accord.”
Dennis swallowed. He couldn’t absorb all he had been told, much less accept it. But in this moment—when the world was shifting around him, and the ageless crystal palace in which he’d been born was suddenly a construct younger than many of the fishing boats in the harbor—Dennis couldn’t doubt the story either.
But while Emath might have been built recently, it had not been built by men.
“Where did the palace come from, Uncle Ramos?” Dennis asked.
The older man shook his head sadly. “A god, a sea demon. There are plenty of demons out on the water, lad. Besides the ones we men bring with us.”