A man-sized cloud of light, mauve and blue and angry orange, danced through the opening in the velvet-shrouded room. "Prepare to meet your doom, interlopers!" it cried.
The cloud's voice was understandable but not right. Its words were speeded up a trifle beyond human speech, turning them into bird-like chirps.
Under normal circumstances the situation would have been startling—even fearful, despite the way the threat was twittered instead of being boomed. But the doom Dennis had seen in the lightning-lit depths of the sea had wrung him too thoroughly for anything with the apprentice magician behind it to arouse fear.
"Parol!" he shouted, hands braced on his hips again. "What do you mean talking to your prince that way?"
The vaguely-humanoid cloud quivered, turning a dull gray with only a hint of color. Then it shrank in on itself like a pricked bladder, drooling momentarily along the crystal floor before it vanished completely. Parol, his mouth open in surprise, stood in the doorway.
"W-what are you doing here?" blurted the apprentice wizard.
Parol had black hair, a pasty complexion, and eyes of different colors—blue-green on the left, muddy brown on the right. He was almost as tall as Dennis, but the shapeless black robe he invariably wore made his soft body blur into the background while his face hung in the air like the full moon at dusk.
All the Wizard Serdic's apprentices had the look and personality of creatures that entered Emath hidden in baskets of jungle fruit or dredged from the deep sea. Parol was no better than his predecessors—perhaps even a little slimier, a trifle more weakly vicious, than the others whom Dennis had been old enough to remember as persons.
Recollection of how frightened he had been of Serdic added cruel pleasure to confronting the dead wizard's flunky this way. "How dare you question me? Get down on your knees, you little toad!"
"Luck leaves the harsh man because of his brutality!" Chester said sharply.
Dennis, keyed up from the present confrontation on top of days of strain, whirled with his hand lifting to slap. His mouth dropped open in horror when his mind realized what his body was doing. "Oh," he said. "Oh Chester."
Parol had dropped to his knees at the haughty order. He was bowing his forehead to the crystal floor. "Pardon me, Prince," he babbled. "Oh, pardon my surprise, only my surprise—never disrespect to you, most noble prince."
Dennis felt awful. He'd invaded Parol's privacy—sneaked in, knowing the owner was gone and hoping to leave before Parol returned. And then, because he was caught... and frightened; and disturbed... Dennis had covered his wrongdoing with the sort of angry arrogance that bothered him so much when he saw his father do the same thing.
Worst of all, Parol was fawningly willing to accept that awful behavior.
"Ah, Wizard Parol...?" Dennis said.
"Pardon, Prince," mumbled the other man—the other youth; he was a few years older than Dennis, but the only sign of color on his face were acne pocks. He was speaking to the floor.
"For pity's sake, get up," Dennis said.
He was disgusted with his own behavior a moment before, but Parol's behavior would have been disgusting at any time. The last thing Dennis wanted to do was to let his feelings about the pasty apprentice explode into fresh anger again—but if Parol didn't stop acting like a whining worm, it would be very hard not to treat him as one.
Parol didn't react for a moment, but his eyes scanned the reflection of Dennis' face in the crystal. He cautiously lifted himself, pausing for a moment on all fours while he watched the prince directly—looking like a dog ready to scuttle backward from a stranger who may kick.
"Wizard Parol," Dennis repeated formally as the apprentice at last stood like a man again. "I want to apologize for troubling you this way. Chester and I had some business here that didn't affect you, but we should have told you we were coming as, as a courtesy."
"Oh, your highness needn't speak to me," Parol said, bobbing his head. Either it was just the way he was standing or his left shoulder was higher than the right one. "Only—"
Parol had a disconcerting way of holding his head so that Dennis could see only one of his eyes at a time; now it was the brown orb, and both anger and fear glinted on its muddy surface "—some of the, ah, the devices... can be dangerous. But perhaps—"
Parol's head snapped around like that of a bird. "Your highness of course studied at length with th-th-th..."
His face lost everything but a glaze of stark terror. "My predecessor taught you, your highness," Parol continued with his eyes both focused on an empty upper corner of the draperies. "No doubt he taught your highness the proper use of his devices?"
"We're here for our own reasons," said Dennis curtly. "Not wizard reasons."
He had to spit the words out harshly to convince himself that what he was saying was true... as it was almost true, if you viewed what he and Chester had done in the right way. They weren't wizards, so they couldn't have wizard reasons—
Except when they were using magic to watch the past.
"Yes, yes, of course, your highness," said Parol, his voice as false as the hatred in his hidden, winking glances was real. But—
Parol was something that could have been found under a rock; but this was his rock, and he had a right to be angry when somebody moved it and prodded at him needlessly.
Parol was moving backward, into the room of glass-cased exhibits. Dennis thought the apprentice was trying to speed their departure—and there may have been something in that, but there was a ring of truth in Parol's voice as he explained, "Whatever your highness wishes, of course, but—I don't spend much time here myself. I, my sleeping room is through there and the, the library, but this—these devices. I don't—"
He stopped and looked Dennis directly in the eyes for the first time since he'd confronted the intruders. "There are dangers in these devices," Parol said, speaking as closely to blunt honesty as it was in his character to manage.
He winced away into his normal cringing slyness. "Even for those of us who've been carefully trained in their use," he added, the implied lie an obvious one.
"Yes, well," said Dennis. "Well, I won't trouble you further, Parol. Sorry for the inconvenience."
He stepped forward, brushing back the velvet hangings—glad to be back in the normal diffracted brightness of daytime in the palace, but shocked again by the creatures displayed in glass bubbles.
Dennis' skin crawled, feeling the pressure of hundreds—thousands—of dead eyes glaring at him. Chester laid a tentacle on Dennis' hip bone, a firm, familiar pressure to remind him that even here he had a friend.
As they strode past the apprentice wizard, Dennis controlled the impulse to twitch his shirt close to his body lest its hem touch the fabric of Parol's robe.
"Ah, your highness?" Parol said from behind the two companions as they reached the anteroom.
Dennis turned his head. "Yes?"
"If your highness wouldn't mind perhaps telling me what it was that he visited these chambers for," Parol said with a swarmy smile, "then perhaps I could hel—"
The apprentice's words trailed off. He scuttled back out of sight, looking as fearful as he had when he tried to speak Serdic's name.
Dennis didn't understand the reaction until he caught sight of his own face in the reflector of the lamp beside him in the anteroom. Parol couldn't know that Dennis' expression came not from being asked an impertinent question but rather from being reminded of the sea hag.
And her bargain.
Chester swung open the black pearl door. The draft of air drawn from the rotunda was as enticing as summer flowers after peculiar miasma of the wizard's suite.
"Ah, Chester?" the youth said when they had climbed stairs to the second floor and were no longer in sight of even the black door. "The little—furry animal in a case back there?"
"The tarsier, Dennis?"
Dennis shrugged. "If that's what it's called. When I looked back, I thought—" He sucked in his lips and chewed on them for a moment. "I thought I saw its head turn."
Chester said nothing.
"But I guess that's crazy."
They strode down the disused hallway together. The whicker of the youth's trouser legs brushing together merged with the swish-click! of the robot's limbs on the crystal.
"Parol does not wish you well, Dennis," said Chester unexpectedly. "It would be wise for you to watch yourself with him."
Dennis shuddered despite himself. "But it isn't going to matter very long, is it?" he said bitterly. "Not after tomorrow, when I'm sixteen and my father has to keep his bargain."
He spoke quietly, but for minutes afterward he could hear his words echo in the emptiness of his mind.