The Sea Hag Read online

  Dennis put his hand out to the knotted end of the spit. The bark wasn't as deeply ridged as that of the vines down which he'd just climbed. It felt as though he were stroking the scaled back of a lizard...

  The human chuckled. "Go on, boy," he said. "Turn it."

  "Don't let me singe, boy," said the grinning corpse. "It'll be the worse for you if you let me singe."

  Dennis twisted at the pole. It was hard work: the knot didn't give much leverage, and the corpse was a heavy weight to turn against the crude bearing surfaces of the forked sticks.

  "That's right, boy," said one of the lizardmen. "Turn and turn until he thaws. And don't let the fire go out."

  Laughing together in their varied voices, the four scarred outcasts walked back into the jungle the way they had come. The human had a limp.

  Dennis watched their backs, feeling relief at their going—until Serdic repeated, "Don't let me singe, boy!"

  Dennis began to turn the spit. The corpse's ankles were lashed to the pole nearest him; the cruel, glittering eyes stared past the mold-green feet as if they were a frame. Dennis turned his face toward the jungle and gave the spit another tug.

  The warmth of the brushwood fire thawed the ice-block that was Dennis' chest. He began to shudder.

  None of this could be happening... but the fire hissed a muted lullaby, and its dull heat dried Dennis' skin and reminded him of how tired he was. Watching the silent motion of shadows on the jungle growth, he could forget his circumstances, his fear—

  Fat popped as it dripped onto the flames.

  "You've burned me, boy!" snarled a voice as vicious and deadly as the expression on Serdic's face when Dennis jerked his eyes and attention back to his duties.

  "I'm sorry!" Dennis wheezed in terror as he turned the pole furiously. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry!"

  The wizard's wrists were tied to the middle of the pole. The hands should have flopped loosely as the spit turned, but they were held in the rigidity of death. Tiny mushrooms had sprouted from the knuckles of the right hand, but they were shriveling in the fire's heat.

  Dennis tried to meet the corpse's eyes as he struggled with the pole, but there was too much venom in Serdic's glare for him to manage that for long.

  At first Dennis ducked his head away to gather more brush for the fire. The vine-roots and saplings burned hot, but they collapsed to black ash without usable coals. Fresh wood flashed up quickly in a nimbus of blue flame from the gas driven out to burn a fingers-breadth above the stems.

  "Careful, boy..." the corpse whispered in a voice that mimicked the hiss of escaping gas.

  A few yards into the jungle was a plant whose leaves were broad as washtubs and streaked both yellow and green. Lesser vegetation cast quivering shadows on that backdrop. Dennis began to watch a playlet in which he and Chester walked the halls of Emath Palace, greeting his parents and talking with servants and village-folk come to the palace on business. He felt warm and safe for the first time in what seemed a lifetime, and—

  "Boy! You've burned me again!" blazed the corpse's thunder-crackle voice.

  Dennis' mouth dropped open and his eyes flared so wide that for a moment he couldn't take in what he saw. He'd stopped turning the pole when the Wizard Serdic was face-down. The corpse's toes were black and steaming as if they were about to burst into flames. When Dennis spun the protesting pole another half turn, smoke from the shriveled digits coiled away in an awful-smelling spiral.

  "Boy—"

  "I won't do it again!" Dennis cried with his eyes closed. "I won't—"

  "Boy," repeated Serdic in a tone of chilled steel that drove the length of the youth's spine and pithed him, leaving him no volition but the corpse's dark will. "If you burn me again, I will come off this stake; and it will be the worse for you."

  "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," Dennis whispered between lips salty with the taste of frightened tears. The bark had torn the palms of his hands with the effort of turning the pole. He reveled in the pain, because he could pretend that it was the only punishment he would receive for his lapse. "It won't happen again."

  "...worse for you..." whispered the wizard, his awful face turned toward the fire once more as Dennis rotated the spit as swiftly as if he were winching a bucket out of the well.

  The jungle was no longer the haunt of darkness and hidden violence it had been when Dennis first stumbled into its trees and clutching thorns. No one could live in a world in which there was no peace or safety... and for Dennis, peace was now just beyond the firelight, in the shadows that told him of home and family.

  The fire muttered reassuring phrases to the back of his drowsy mind...

  CHAPTER 17

  The cry that woke Dennis the third time was wordless and terrible.

  He leaped to his feet. The Wizard Serdic lay face-up on the pole. The fire had fallen to ash and a shimmer everywhere but beneath the corpse's hips—where fat had bubbled out to burn with yellow flames and a soapy odor.

  "Now you've done it, boy," said the corpse. It freed its wrists by twisting them against the withie which bound them to the pole, then hunched its knees forward and untied its ankles.

  "I'm coming for you, boy," said the Wizard Serdic, dead a month and wrapped in a miasma of decay and smoldering flesh. He crabbed his legs sideways and stood up, still impaled on the spit.

  Dennis screamed and ran into the night.

  The jungle had tricked him, enticed him from his duties and lulled him to sleep. Now it was all clawing thorns and saw-edged leaves again.

  Dennis would have thrown himself willingly into a hedge of spears if it were the only way to escape from the corpse. His last view of Serdic was a memory of white terror: the wizard with his arms lifted, pulling out the pole that impaled him, hand over hand.

  Trees battered the youth as he clubbed himself on their trunks and fallen branches. His forearms stung from cuts and scratches, but the pounding the rest of his body took during his wild careen through the night was a red, dull ache with no end and no location.

  That red pulse became the whole universe for him, replacing hope and the memory of Serdic. It was so omnipresent that when Dennis' eyes told him that there was a glow which silhouetted the dark thickets, the information merged with pain and was lost until his feet tripped on the threshold.

  Then he stumbled into the cabin he had fled a lifetime before.

  Dennis would have gotten up and run further, but his body failed him at last. His hands and feet scrabbled briefly on the floor of smooth hardwood puncheons, but they could raise his torso only for a moment before he flopped down again.

  He wasn't crying; he had no tears left.

  For minutes, Dennis lay on the floor with his breath sobbing in and out while his muscles recovered themselves enough to hurt individually.

  The fireplace held a bed of glowing coals. Their light seemed brighter than it had earlier, when the cabinet opened and Dennis ran from Serdic the first time... but time lacked the reality it had when this terrible night began.

  The cabinet still stood in the corner, open and empty. The cabin's front door stirred vaguely in a breeze that made Dennis shiver.

  The youth got up, moving like a man who'd lived with pain for decades. A cramp suddenly knotted the big muscles of his right thigh. The flesh contorted, taking away Dennis' breath with the fresh agony and almost throwing him to the floor again.

  Almost. With his eyes slitted, he hopped on his good leg until he caught the edge of the door and supported half his weight on it until the fiery throbbing subsided. He slammed the heavy door; barred it; and, as an afterthought, tweaked in the latchstring that still hung out through the hole above the lintel.

  The feathery pelt was gone. He'd probably lost it in the jungle when he bolted out the door.

  That didn't matter. Dennis had slept with frogs in a pool of rainwater. The warm puncheons were a more attractive choice now than the bed that in the shadows across the room.

  Dennis curled up in front of the fire, cradling his head
on his crossed arms. He could feel the aches draining from him. His muscles relaxed, giving up the tautness which had doubled the pain of his injuries. He was logy with fatigue, drifting into a slumber as deep as the realm of the sea hag...

  "What will you give me for your lodging, boy?" demanded the Wizard Serdic from outside the cabin.

  Dennis roused. He felt as though his skin were covered with needles which pricked him every time he moved. His ears buzzed so loudly that for a moment he thought he must be dreaming, because he couldn't hear any real sound over the roar of blood and exhaustion.

  "What will you give me, boy?" the voice demanded.

  Dennis stepped to the door. He didn't feel his scrapes and bruises, but pulses of heat rose until they expanded away from the top of his head as he moved.

  He lifted the bar and pulled the door open. The corpse stared at him with eyes lighted orange by reflected firelight.

  Dennis had been frightened too badly and for too long to have any fear remaining.

  "Come in, wizard," he said, moving his arm in a welcoming gesture. He would have bowed if he'd been sure that he wouldn't fall over if he tried.

  Serdic stepped forward stiffly, not from pain but as if he were pieced together out of wood rather than flesh. The fire had tangled his long fingernails into a mass like knotted hair, giving his hands the appearance of deformed hoofs.

  The hole in Serdic's right shoulder—where one end of the spit had been inserted—was puckered and bloodless.

  "You owe me for your lodging, boy," said the corpse. "What is it that you will give me?"

  Dennis stepped back and let the door swing closed behind Serdic. A greenish fungus traced patterns like tattoos on the right side of the corpse's face.

  Dennis smiled. "I'll give you a story, wizard," he said. The syllables drifted through his consciousness like bubbles glimmering on dark water for the moment before they burst.

  "I'll tell you about a boy—a man... A man who enters a cabin open in the night and who finds a dead man there. Does this interest you, wizard? It's fair pay, isn't it, a story?"

  Serdic said nothing. Either Dennis' body or his consciousness swayed. He wasn't sure he was still standing up, but his voice continued, "And the man runs, but the corpse follows him, carried by four rogues, bloody rogues. The man has to watch the corpse warming on a fire, but he doesn't mind it well and the corpse chases him down again to ask for pay."

  The pattern on Serdic's cheek writhed, but Dennis couldn't tell whether it was the flesh or the fungus or his own reeling mind that caused the movement.

  "And the man has nothing to pay with," he went on, almost shouting now. "He's naked and friendless and the night may never end. And so he offers a story, a wonderful story—and that's fair pay, isn't it, for it's all he has?"

  The corpse didn't move.

  "Isn't it, Serdic?" Dennis cried, leaning forward so that his face was only inches from the dead face of the dead wizard. "And if it isn't—then to Hell with you, where you belong. And to Hell with me as well, if it must be."

  The corpse smiled, an expression made more horrible by the fact that decay had already begun to shrivel the gums away from the yellow teeth they held. Serdic reached out with one stiff hand, stopping just short of contact with Dennis' cheek.

  "Shall we play a game, boy?" he asked in a voice like the paw of a cat dabbing at its prey.

  Dennis lifted his chin in a brusque nod. He was suddenly afraid to speak.

  "We will play this game, then," said the wizard. "I will leave you now. But when next my name is spoken, boy—then I will come. Understand me, boy?"

  "I understand," Dennis whispered.

  He could feel himself slipping away, but he wasn't sure that it was his body falling. The Wizard Serdic was dissolving, but everything was dissolving into the night. At the last, nothing remained but the pattern of fungus glowing green and hideous though the cheek on which it grew had disappeared.

  And then even the pattern was gone, except in Dennis' nightmare.

  CHAPTER 18

  "Good sleep is the greatest of gifts to a man in the time of his feebleness, Dennis," said Chester as sunlight through the leaf canopy made his master's eyelids quiver.

  All of Dennis' muscles flashed taut. His body thrashed as if lightning-struck by the sudden surprise. "Ch-chester!" he gasped. Where have you—where are—"

  Dennis looked around. He and the little robot lay beneath a tree whose buttress roots spread broadly out through the lesser growths of the jungle. The bark was smooth, and the contours of the roots made a comfortable cup to support the youth while he was sleeping.

  Nothing in the jungle could stay dry. Dennis' hips lay in a pool of water, and the cloak that he'd pulled over himself and Chester was as sodden as the surface of a pond. He tweaked the garment back—it clung because of its weight and the surface tension of the water—and stroked the smooth, slick carapace of his friend and companion.

  "Where did you find my clothes, Chester?" he asked.

  "And this?" he added, noticing that the Founder's Sword was with them beneath the cloak also, belt wrapped around the hilt and scabbard.

  Dennis stood up, lifting the sword with one hand. He ached all over, and both his clothes and skin were ripped by thorns—but there was no sign of the battering he'd taken when he ran through the jungle naked, pursued by the corpse of his father's wizard.

  "Chester?" he repeated in concern, because the robot still hadn't responded.

  "Dennis, your clothes and your sword have been with you through this night and dawn," Chester said. Concern honed the precision of his words.

  "But the cabin," Dennis said. The chain closure of his cloak cut into his neck with the weight of water in the garment. He reached up to release it with his free hand, but wonder stayed the motion. "Chester, you remember the cabin, don't you?"

  The little robot stretched his own limbs, raising his body on four of them while the other four reached higher yet. Droplets cascaded down the silvery tentacles, leaving no more sign than if Chester also were made of fluid.

  "Dennis," he said, "there is no cabin that I remember."

  The tentacles groping through the sun's dapplings lowered to the ground; the other four rose and shook themselves free of water in silky iridescence.

  "Then what...?" said Dennis. His hand completed its motion, loosing the clasp and swinging the cloak away from his body. He leaned the sword against the tree bole and began to wring out his garment thoroughly.

  He didn't finish his sentence, because he had no idea what the rest of the question ought to be.

  The air was muggy, saturated with vapor transpiring from the leaves as sunlight touched them. It was hard to remember how miserable and chilly it had been a few hours before.

  "Didn't you see the—" Dennis began; and before his tongue formed the rest of the words, he recalled the fungus-knotted smile of the Wizard Serdic saying shall we play a game, boy? in a nightmare voice.

  "I was dreaming," Dennis muttered to himself aloud. "I dreamed it all, Chester. And it was awful."

  Chester coiled a tentacle around the youth's waist. "Happiness comes out of the hardship men undergo, Dennis," he said.

  Dennis belted on the sword again. The skin over his hipbone was still chafed from wearing the weapon the night before, but maybe he'd get calluses or something. It wasn't a problem he remembered hearing about in tales of past heroes.

  "Well..." he said, looking around them.

  His heart leaped. They were off the trail—that much of what he remembered from the night before was true.

  But there was no cabin, and no room in the heavy vegetation for a cabin ever to have been there.

  "Chester," he said, "can you find the trail from here?" He was amazed at his own calm. The night he had spent in his dreams with a dead man had burned all the fear out of him.

  "I can find the trail, Dennis," Chester replied. "And I can find a road, if you would travel a road instead."

  Dennis looked at his c
ompanion, wondering what the robot's expression would be now if he had a face. "Then let us take the road, Chester," he said. "And—" the grinning fungus in his memory momentarily wiped the smile from his own expression "—if it leads away from here, it leads us well."

  He followed the robot through the glittering leaves which showered them again with the night's raindrops.

  CHAPTER 19

  Dennis didn't have a clear idea of what his companion might mean by 'road'. A wider track beaten into the jungle by scaly feet, perhaps; or, just possibly, a herringbone surface of stone pavers like those King Hale had ordered a few years before to clothe the streets of Emath.

  The road to which Chester led him, only twenty yards from where the pair of them had weathered the night, was amazingly more durable than either of those.

  The road was soft pink and a little more than ten feet wide. The surface was pebble-grained for the sake of traction, but it was so dense that the last night's rain beaded on it with no hint of sinking in.

  And it was old. The root of a great tree knobbed on one side of the roadway and sprang to the surface again on the other, bracing the trunk and sucking nutriment from the thin jungle soil. The enormous hydraulic pressure swelling the root had been unable to crack the pink surface—and the tree it fed was at least a century old.

  Chester's limbs clicked on the roadway, just as they had in the halls of Emath Palace. Dennis followed him gingerly. The road was slick despite the grain of its finish... but the youth's concern was for other things than merely his footing.

  "Did the first heroes build this road when men came here to Earth, Chester?" he asked.

  "The road is older than men on this planet, Dennis," the robot replied. In the same neutral tone, he added, "The road is older than Man."

  "Then—" Dennis began; but if the road was that old, he wasn't sure he wanted to know who had built it. He didn't finish his question.