David Drake - The Sea Hag

The Sea Hag

Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 36

CHAPTER 37

CHAPTER 38

CHAPTER 39

CHAPTER 40

CHAPTER 41

CHAPTER 42

CHAPTER 43

CHAPTER 44

CHAPTER 45

CHAPTER 46

CHAPTER 47

CHAPTER 48

CHAPTER 49

CHAPTER 50

CHAPTER 51

CHAPTER 52

CHAPTER 53

CHAPTER 54

CHAPTER 55

CHAPTER 56

CHAPTER 57

CHAPTER 58

CHAPTER 59

CHAPTER 60

CHAPTER 61

CHAPTER 62

CHAPTER 63

CHAPTER 64

CHAPTER 65

CHAPTER 66

CHAPTER 67

THE SEA HAG

by David Drake

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any

resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN: 0-671-65424-1

First printing, August 1988

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH

Printed in the United States of America

CHAPTER 1

The tower quivered when the dragons roared at the village perimeter, where they guarded the

community of Emath from the jungle beyond and the things in it.

The noise startled Dennis. He didn't much like heights, and he was holding onto the railing of the highest

of the palace's crystalline spires. He'd thought maybe he could see his father's boat from up here.

He'd been wrong. There was no sign of King Hale or the net-tending skiff which the king had rowed to

sea alone this morning and every other morning for the past week. Far out on the horizon, the glittering

needle of Banned Island pinned the dense gray-green sea to the blue-white sky... but there were no sails,

and no little rowboat either.

"The heart which worries," said Chester, "makes its owner ill."

"Do you have to keep saying things like that, Chester?" Dennis snapped to his companion.

"Indeed I must say them, Dennis," Chester replied smugly. "It is to speak such wisdom that I was

fashioned."

The lilting voice came from somewhere in the featureless forty-pound metal egg that served Chester as

head and body combined. Dennis knew his companion well enough to read Chester's tones as clearly as

the facial expressions of a human speaking... but Chester had a right to be smug; and anyway, it didn't do

any good to get angry with him.

"Well, talk then if it satisfies you," Dennis replied, half resigned and half sulky. "But I don't see that it's

ever done me any good, your wisdom."

He turned from the sea to watch the dragons. It was market day, so the Wizard Parol was opening a

path for visitors through the concourse which the great beasts prowled—ready to tear and devour

anyone who tried to enter Emath unbidden from the jungle.

Dennis craned his neck, but even so he could barely peer past the new houses of stone, wood, and tile

built right up to the perimeter's inner edge. Emath was growing, had been growing fast for as long as

Dennis was old enough to notice. He could remember when the village was only a straggle of shanties

against the walls of his father's great crystalline palace...

Or he thought he could remember that; but memory was a funny thing. The present bustling community

didn't have much to do with that dim past, when he'd walked clutching the hands of his parents and

looking up in wonder at a new world.

Emath had changed. Her fishing boats were richly successful. The magnificent harbor—the only good

one on a coast wracked by storms—made her the center of exchange between human traders and the

tribes of lizardfolk from the jungle of the interior.

And Dennis had changed even more. At sixteen—in three days more—he was as big as a grown man;

as strong as most; and quicker than anyone else in Emath.

He was Prince Dennis, who wished his father didn't row out to sea alone—and that Hale didn't when he

was home snarl as savagely as the dragons on guard.

"The man who sold me to your father on the day of your birth, Dennis," Chester said, "had intended to

keep me for himself forever; saying that I was a great marvel."

"And indeed you are a very great marvel, Chester," the boy agreed, reaching down to stroke the smooth

metal of the little creature's case.

He was suddenly glad to have a friend who stayed a friend: who didn't glare at him with unexplained

anger, like Hale; or cling and cry like Queen Selda, and neither of them able to say what was wrong.

Or even admit that something was badly wrong. It was the uncertainty...

Chester reached up to Dennis with one of his eight ropy limbs, legs when he walked and hands when he

chose they should be. "He said to me, 'Can you not silence your silly wisdom, Chester?' And I told him,

'The fault of every character comes from not listening, master.' And he sold me to your father, saying that

I was just the thing for a child babbling nonsense."

"If you had fur, Chester, I would rumple it," Dennis said as his fingers scrabbled against the metal. "Since

you do not, I will only tell you that indeed I have gained from your wisdom—if that wisdom made you

become mine."

Chester's tentacle squeezed the boy's waist gently, then released him.

Again a dragon roared. The beast lurched up on its hind legs, lifting its great-toothed snout a full twenty

feet in the air. Its short forelegs were flailing at an invisible barrier, the passage that Parol's magic had

armored across the beasts' concourse.

Lizardmen waited at the edge of the jungle. Distance made their features impassive to Dennis, but their

heads darted from one side to the other to watch each of the pair of dragons. When Parol signaled, the

lizardfolk would sprint across the perimeter into Emath with their trade goods.

Not so long ago, the native traders would have crossed with stately pomp. Some of them would have

rolled clumsy great-wheeled carts laden with fruits and pelts and timbers, gems washed from the flanks of

distant mountains and items still more wonderful dug from the ruins of incredibly ancient cities. But that

was when the Wizard Serdic controlled the perimeter he had established when first he came to Emath—

And when Parol was only Serdic's most recent apprentice.

Parol was a plump, ill-favored youth, much like the others in previous years whom Serdic had hired—or

bought—from trading vessels. The apprentices helped with spells so complex they required two voices,

and they did the physical drudgery in the separate wing of the palace that formed the wizard's

quarters—sweeping the floors, cleaning the equipment, and carrying meals to Serdic's sanctum, which

ordinary servants of the palace were never permitted to enter.

Then, after each few years, Serdic brought in a new apprentice and disposed of the old one. Put the boy

on an outbound trader with a warning never to return, King Hale said; or darker things, as others

whispered, but they never spoke where Serdic might be listening—and where might not so great a wizard

find a way to listen if he wished to?

Serdic talked little of himself; talked little to anyone except when he had to, as when he tutored Dennis in

reading and mathematics and astronomy because the king had set that among his wizard's duties. Serdic

had been cold with Dennis and utterly disdainful of Hale—but he'd obeyed Hale, in that as in all things

which the king ordered.

Rumor—manufactured in the parlors and taverns of Emath, or brought in with traders like other exotic

cargoes—said that there was no wizard in the world more powerful than Serdic, and that Serdic was

three hundred years old. Everyone had been certain that in a few weeks or a month, Parol would go

whichever way the earlier apprentices had gone, before they learned enough to pose a danger to their

master—who was as cautious as he was terrifying.

But instead, the Wizard Serdic had died.

"It is a son's good and blessed portion," said Chester, "to receive instruction."

"I wish my dad would come back," said Dennis.

He twisted his head around abruptly as if he could trick fate into giving him a glimpse of what he wanted

to sea. A pair of fishing boats were headed in early. Either good fortune had filled their holds or bad luck

had left them in need of repairs. Facts were facts; what they meant was in the hands of time or the gods.

King Hale's skiff was not in sight.

"You can't see him, can you, Chester?" the boy asked in sudden hopefulness.

"From here I cannot see him, Dennis," Chester replied. The robot had no more eyes than mouth, so

Dennis had never been sure how he went about seeing. "If he were to row back over the horizon, I

would see him."

"Doesn't matter," the boy lied.

The dragons snarled and lunged from either side against the magical barrier which restrained them from

the scampering lizardmen. The lithe, gray-scaled traders from the interior carried their packs over their

flat heads as they crossed, partly as a feeble protection in case the guard beasts broke through the

barrier—and partly so that if the worst occurred, the victims would be blindfolded by their loads and

wouldn't see what had happened until the great teeth ended their fear.

"Parol isn't very good, is he?" Dennis said. His mind could spin for only so long on uncertainties before it

settled back to practical problems. "We're going to have to get a real wizard to replace him."

Serdic's death—Serdic no longer a lowering, sneering presence in the palace—had exhilarated Dennis

as surely as the clear, cool sky that follows a storm.

If Serdic really was dead. No one had believed it at first.

The wizard had been speaking to Hale in the throne room of the palace in front of a score of

people—including Dennis. "But raising the port duties from one percent to two won't cut trade, Your

Majesty," the wizard said. "Majesty" when Serdic's tongue wrapped around it rubbed Dennis like a

handful of nettles. "They have no other port that—"

Serdic stopped. Everyone watched him, waiting for some particularly waspish concluding statement.

The wizard fell forward. His forehead clunked hollowly against a crystal floor so hard that years of use

had not even dulled its polish.

"It is true, Dennis, that Parol can barely bridge the barrier for the traders to come and go," Chester was

saying. "He will not be able to expand the perimeter again, as surely it must be expanded lest the folk of

Emath all be stacked upon one another."

It took Dennis an instant of shock to remember they were talking about Parol, not the Wizard Serdic

who was terrible even in memory.

Any thought that the apprentice might know more than an innocent man should about his master's death

was put to rest when they summoned Parol to the audience hall immediately—and Parol fell on his knees

in horror and disbelief.

For three days, King Hale kept the wizard's body on a bier in the audience hall, dressed in its richest

robes. Parol insisted that the Wizard Serdic couldn't have died, not truly. Everyone else believed that this

was some sort of sardonic trick with dire implications for those who acted as if Serdic were really gone.

Then the body began to decay, and they had to bury it—with honor, near the Founder's Tomb on the

spit of land across the harbor entrance.

It was still hard to believe Serdic was dead, but watching Parol bumble through a simple task cast a

pinch of dust over his master's memory.

"Of course," Chester went on, "it may be that Parol will learn if he applies himself. He who is thoughtful

and persevering, that man is chosen among the people."

"How can Parol learn?" Dennis said. "Serdic isn't around to teach him any more."

He frowned. "Is he?"

"Serdic is not here to teach him, Dennis," Chester replied. "But Serdic's books and the equipment Serdic

brought here to your father's palace, those are here for Parol to use. Only..."

The robot paused thoughtfully. Dennis looked down at him and raised an eyebrow.

"Only," Chester said, "the teaching that comes to the fool, Dennis, is as weightless as the wind."

In the same tone, so that it was a moment before the boy understood the words, the robot added, "Your

father is returning now."

The skiff was a dot on the horizon, scarcely distinguishable to Dennis' eyes from the mast tips of the

dozen or so trawlers sailing in for the evening also. Dennis blinked back tears.

"Well," he said, "let's go down and meet him. Maybe he'll be in a... better mood than he's been for a

time."

And maybe Hale would even tell his son what was wrong; but the boy didn't believe either of those

things would happen.

CHAPTER 2

Chester could probably see in the darkness, but nobody else could; there was nobody else around this

angle of the palace roof anyway; and anyway, Dennis wasn't going to break out in a gush of tears again.

"Does he want me to hit him?" the boy whispered to his hands, flat on the backs of his thighs. "I'm bigger

than he is, now."

Chester murmured, "It does not kill a son to be punished by his father."

"He shouldn't say things like that! He told me I could never go out in a boat and that's crazy enough, isn't

it, with him spending all day in a skiff if it's so dangerous? But he never told me not to come down to the

dock to, to welcome him!"

Hale's face had been black with sun and fury as he hunched his way up the wooden ladder to the quay.

Dennis bigger than his father? Probably, but... Hale had shoulders like a troll, and watching him climb had

exaggerated the strength of the older man's back and arms besides.

Dennis had a right to be frightened by someone as powerful as Hale in a boiling rage; but that wasn't

why the tears had started to bubble up when he ran from his father.

Chester stroked Dennis' shoulder with a tentacle.

"It's just so frustrating," the boy said. "I must be doing something wrong, but he won't tell me what. I

don't know what to do, and nobody will tell me."

He wasn't angry any more, just mentally tired from spinning between anger and emptiness.

The air was so clear that the stars glittered in reflection on the palace roof. Dennis looked at the sky and

wished that he could draw himself up into it, to cover himself in a fluffy stellar mist like a feather quilt and

hide from all the uncertainties on Earth.

Men came from the stars. At least all the books said they did, though not even the Wizard Serdic could

explain how they had come here to Earth. The founder of Dennis' family had come from the stars in times

so ancient that even his name was lost. He was buried on the headland opposite the palace and his sword

of star-metal was carried from his hulking rock tomb in the Founder's Day parade every year.

It wasn't Earth that Dennis wanted to leave; just the business of living on it just now.

"A time in misfortune, Dennis, does not make a good man give up," Chester said quietly.

"Maybe there's nobody who could tell me what's wrong," Dennis said. He was still morose, but he was

thinking about the problem again instead of dreaming it would be nice not to have problems. "I'm not sure

Dad even knows. It's just that he's afraid of something bad."

In sudden suspicion, the boy said, "You don't know what's wrong, do you, Chester? You aren't just

waiting for me to ask, the way you do?"

"I do not know, Dennis," the robot said. "But it may be that old friends of your father know."

"Ramos!" Dennis blurted as he jumped to his feet. "Why didn't I think of that?"

"Why indeed did you not, Dennis?" Chester replied primly. His limbs tick-whished as he followed the

boy's swift strides toward the window they'd climbed out to hide here.

CHAPTER 3

The palace walls carried light the way a wick carried lamp-oil: along their crystal courses, with only the

least seepage along the surface. Dennis was so used to the effect that he walked the long corridors at a

normal pace, though they were outlined only in the blue shimmer of starlight which the clear night

transmitted.

The palace was huge, far larger than the needs of King Hale and his household. Most of the

monocrystalline building was empty. Though the village of Emath was crowded—more so every day with

immigrants and the birthrate normal to a peaceful, prosperous environment—there were no squatters

lurking in the glittering back-corridors. Only those who'd been welcomed into the palace felt... welcome.

Nothing unpleasant happened to interlopers, mostly newcomers to Emath who slipped in through a

window or an unguarded entrance with their bindles and ragged offspring. They just didn't feel

comfortable in their new surroundings, and they soon left.

Ramos belonged in the palace, but...

From the bottom of the stairs leading to Ramos' tower room, Dennis could hear the old man singing in a

hoarse voice. At first the boy thought the song was a chantey of some sort with a refrain. As he and

Chester climbed the tight, dizzying spiral Dennis began to make out the words.

Ramos was singing, "Many the ships that sail right in..." Over and over, the same words each time,

trailing off into a repetition as unmusical as the one before.

Unmusical and angry. There could be no doubt of the anger in the cracked, hopeless voice.

The doors of the palace varied. The panel standing ajar at the top of the staircase was layered in pastels

and creamy richness like the interior of a shell—but the material formed a flat sheet broad enough to

cover the portal without join marks.

Dennis knocked diffidently on the jamb.

"Many the ships that sail right in—"

He knocked louder, on the door itself. The lustrous panel quivered a little farther open.

"—and they never sail out a'tall!"

"Uncle Ramos?" Dennis called. "May I come in? It's Dennis."

"What's stopping you?" the voice demanded. Glass shattered within the room, then tinkled as the larger

pieces fell to the floor and broke further.

Dennis opened the door wide with his arm before he stepped through it.

Chester said, "It is the great glory of the wise man to be controlled in the manner of his life."

The windows of the tower room looked out over the harbor and sea in three-quarters of a circle. The

water glowed with tiny life. Froth lifted by the breezes traced ghostly arcs above the surface.

The purity and vibrant motion of the water beyond was in shocking contrast to the squalor of Ramos'

room.

A lamp hung from the bracket just inside the door. Its wick was turned low. The rush mats that softened

the floor hadn't been changed in months, perhaps years. Scavenging insects, startled by the newcomers,

sank within the woven rushes like oil being absorbed in filthy sand.

Plates—fine porcelain decorated with gilded rims and the palace crest—were scattered on the floor. On

some of them, the food appeared not to have been touched.

"Uncle Ramos...?" whispered Dennis. The stench of the room made him jump as though he'd been

slapped in the face.

"What's the matter, kid?" Ramos said with heavy irony. "You don't like my singing?"

He hawked and spat. "For many the ships—" he repeated, but his voice broke in a fit of coughing.

Ramos was a big man, tall where Dennis' father was broad. He was shockingly gaunt now, but even so

his heavy bones made him look a giant as he sprawled on the bed. He was wearing his state robes,

scarlet and cloth-of-gold; but they were as stained and foul as the floor mats.

There were plates on the bed; but mostly there were bottles, squat green quarts of fortified wine from

Bredabrug far down the south coast. The mats beneath the open windows sparkled with bottles that had

smashed on the casements instead of flying out of the room.

"Hob-nobbing with the common folk, are you, kid?" Ramos asked.

He'd turned his head to the door when Dennis entered, but now he let his eyes rock back to an empty

window—or to nothing. Glass clinked as Ramos rummaged with one arm among the bottles beside him.

Dennis swallowed hard. "Uncle Ramos," he said as he walked toward the bed, pretending he didn't feel

the way the rushes wriggled beneath his boots. "Are you sick? And why haven't the servants...? Why

have they—"

Ramos had found a full bottle among the empties quivering as the bed moved. "Have a drink with

nobody, your Royal Crown-Princeness, sir," he said, still lying flat on the bed.

He had a folding sailor's knife in his right hand. The knot-breaking marlinspike blade was open. He

began worrying at the cork—without effect, because he was using the wrong end of the knife.

Dennis forgot his horror. When he was a child, Ramos had carried him perched on one shoulder like a

pet lizard. He'd felt taller than the ships' masts then—and perfectly safe, because Ramos steadied him

with a hand as solid as carven stone.

Dennis swept bottles away and sat down on the bed. The mattress squelched; more debris rolled down

the coverlet in response to his weight. Dennis took the bottle and knife from Ramos whose fingers didn't

resist.

"I'll get some servants up here at once," the boy said quietly.

"No guts, these servants, you know that?" Ramos said, glaring truculently for a moment before closing

his eyes and letting his body settle back onto the mattress. "No sporting instinct. They stick their heads in,

and if they don't have more wine, I throw empties at 'em. That's sporting enough, ain't it, Royal Crown

Princeling?"

"What's the matter, Uncle Ramos?" Dennis asked softly. The horn-scaled knife clicked against the bottle

when he switched both objects to his right hand. He twined the fingers of his free hand with those of

Ramos, marveling at how near to a size he was with the man he remembered as a giant.

Ramos opened his eyes again. "I'm not your uncle, boy," he said; but without the anger that had edged

every word he'd spoken thus far tonight.

"I've always called you that, Uncle Ramos," Dennis said.

Ramos made a mighty effort to sit up, but the mattress was too soft and Dennis didn't realize what the

older man was trying to do until it was too late to help.

Ramos let himself flop back. He smiled and said, with something between bitterness and affection, "I

didn't always call your father 'king', you know, boy."

"Is my father angry with you?" Dennis asked. "Is that why..." He started to gesture to complete the

question, then realized that he didn't need—or want—to call attention to the filth in which the old man

was living.

"Hale angry with me?" Ramos said. The bed rocked with laughter which became a paroxysm of

coughing without a perceptible transition. He pounded himself on the chest, then rolled onto his side.

With Dennis' help this time, Ramos levered himself into a sitting position. He crossed his long legs

David Drake - The Sea Hag

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