The Eyes of the Dragon (33 page)

By Saturday noon, he had a letter he was pretty well satisfied with (which was good, since he had worked his way down to the final two sheets of notepaper). He looked at it with some admiration. It covered both sides of the paper, and was by far the longest thing he had ever written. He folded it to the size of a medicine tablet, and then peeked out the sitting-room window, waiting impatiently for it to be dark enough to leave. Peter saw the gathering clouds from his own poor sitting room atop the Needle, Dennis from the sitting room of this deserted house; but both had been taught by their fathers—one a King and the other a butter to that King—to read the sky, and Dennis also thought there would be snow tomorrow.

By four, the long, blue shadow of the house had begun to creep out from the foundations, and Dennis no longer felt so eager to go. It was danger ahead . . . deadly danger. He was to go where Flagg was perhaps even now brooding long over his infernal magics, perhaps even now checking upon a certain sick butler. But how he felt did not really matter, and he knew it—the time had come to do his duty, and as every butler in his family line had done for centuries and centuries, Dennis would do his best.

He left the house in the bleak sunset hour, donned the snowshoes, and struck off across the field on a direct line toward the castle keep. The idea of wolves occurred to his uneasy mind, and he could only hope there would be none, and if there were, that they would leave him alone. He hadn't the slightest idea that Peter had decided to make his dangerous escape attempt the following night, but like Peyna—and Peter himself—he felt a need to hurry; it seemed to him that there were mackerel-scale clouds laid across his heart as well as the sky.

As he trudged through the snow-desolate fields, Dennis's thoughts turned to how he might enter the castle without being seen and challenged. He thought he knew how it could be done . . . if, that was, Flagg did not smell him.

He had no more than thought the magician's name when a wolf howled somewhere out in the still white wastes. In a dark room below the castle, Flagg's own sitting room, the magician sat bolt upright suddenly in his chair, where he had fallen asleep with a book of arcane lore open on his stomach.

“Who speaks the name of Flagg?” the magician whispered, and the two-headed parrot shrieked.

Standing in the center of a long and desolate field of white, Dennis heard that voice, as dry and scabrous as a spider's scuttle, in his own head. He paused, his breath indrawn and held. When he finally let it go, it plumed frosty from his mouth. He was cold all over, but hot drops of sweat stood out on his forehead.

From his feet he heard dry snapping noises—
Pouck! Pouck! Pouck!
—as several of the snowshoes' rotted cross-lacings let go.

The wolf howled in the silence. It was a hungry, heartless sound.

“No one,” Flagg muttered in the sitting room of his dark apartments. He was rarely sick—could remember being sick only three or four times in all of his long life—but he had caught a bad cold in the north, sleeping on the frozen ground, and although he was improving, he was still not well.

“No one. A dream. That's all.”

He took the book from his lap, closed it, and set it on a side table—the surface of this table had been handsomely dressed in human skin—and settled back in his chair. Soon he slept again.

In the snowy fields west of the castle, Dennis slowly relaxed. A single drop of stinging sweat ran into his eye and he wiped it away absently. He had thought of Flagg . . . and somehow Flagg had
heard
him. But now the dark shadow of the magician's thought had passed over him, as the shadow of a hawk may pass over a crouching rabbit. Dennis let out a long, shaky sigh. His legs felt weak. He would try—oh, with all his heart he would try—to think of the magician no more. But as the night came on and the moon with its ghostly fairy-ring rose in the sky, that was a thing easier resolved upon than done.

A
t eight of the clock, Dennis left the fields and entered the King's Preserves. He knew them well enough. He had been a squireen for Brandon when his da' buttled the old King in the fields of the hunt, and Roland had come here often, even in his old age. Thomas came less often, but on the few occasions when the boy King did come, Dennis had, of course, been required to come with him. Soon he struck on a trail he knew, and just before midnight he reached the verge of this toy forest.

He stood behind a tree, looking out at the castle wall. It was half a mile away over open, snow-covered ground. The moon was still shining, and Dennis was all too aware of the sentries who walked the castle parapet. He would have to wait until Prince Ailon had driven his silvery chariot over the edge of the world before crossing that open space. Even then he would be horribly exposed. He had known from the first that this would be the riskiest part of the whole adventure. Parting from Peyna and Arlen, with the good sun shining down, the risk had seemed acceptable. Now it seemed utterly mad.

Go back,
a cowardly voice inside him begged, but Dennis knew he couldn't. His father had laid a charge on him, and if the gods meant him to die trying to fulfill it, then he would die.

Faint and yet clear, like a voice heard in a dream, came the call of the Crier, drifting out to him from the castle's central tower:
“Twelve o'clock and all's well. . . .”

Nothing's well
, Dennis thought miserably.
Not one single thing.
He drew his thin coat more tightly around him and began the long job of waiting down the moon.

Eventually it left the sky, and Dennis knew he had to move. Time had grown short. He stood, said a brief prayer to his gods, and began to walk across the open space as rapidly as he could, expecting a hail of
Who goes there?
from the castle walls at every moment. The hail did not come. The clouds had thickened across the night sky. All below the castle wall was one dark shadow. In less than ten minutes, Dennis had reached the edge of the moat. He sat on its low bank, the snow crunching under his bottom, and took the snowshoes off. He slid down onto the moat itself, which was frozen and covered with more snow.

Dennis's thundering heart slowed down. He was in the shadow of the bulking castle wall now, and would not be seen unless a sentry happened to look straight down, and most probably not even then.

Dennis was careful not to go all the way across the moat—not yet—because the ice close to the castle wall would be rotted and thin. He knew why this was so; the reason for the thin ice and the unpleasant smell here and the mossy wetness on the huge stones of the outer wall was his hope of entering the castle secretly. He moved carefully to the left, ears listening for the noise of running water.

At last he heard it, and looked up. There, at eye height, was a round black hole in the solid castle wall. Fluid ran from it in listless streams. It was a sewer outflow pipe.

“Now for it,” Dennis muttered. He drew back five paces, ran, and leaped. As he did, he felt the ice, rotted by the constant outflow of warm waste from the pipe, give under his feet. Then he was clinging to the mossy lip of the pipe. It was slick, and he had to clutch hard to keep from falling. He pulled himself up, digging for purchase with his feet, and finally yanked himself inside. He paused for a moment, trying to get his breath back, then began to crawl along the pipe, which slanted steadily upward. He and several of his playmates had found these pipes when they were children, and had been quickly warned off by their parents, partly because they might become lost, mostly because of the sewer rats. Still, Dennis thought he knew where he would come out.

An hour later, in a deserted corridor of the castle's east wing, a sewer grating moved—was still—then moved again. It was shoved partway aside, and a few moments later a very dirty (and very smelly) butler named Dennis pulled himself out of a hole in the floor and lay panting on the cold cobbles. He could have used a longer rest, but someone might come along, even at this unearthly hour. So he replaced the grating and looked around.

He did not recognize the hallway at once, but this in no way upset him. He started down it toward the T-intersection at the far end. At least, he reflected, there had been no rats in the warren of sewer pipes below the castle. That had been a great relief. He had been prepared for them, not just because of the gruesome tales his da' had told him, but because there
had
been rats on a few occasions when he and his mates had ventured with fearful screeches of laughter down into the pipes as children—the rats had been part of the scary, dare-you adventure of it.

Probably there were just a few mice, and your memory's exaggerated them into rats,
Dennis thought now. This was not the truth, but Dennis would never know it. His memory of the rats in the sewers was a true one. The pipes had been infested with great, diseasebearing rodents since time out of mind. It had only been for the last five years that they had ceased to teem in the sewers. They had been wiped out by Flagg. The magician had rid himself of both a piece of stone and his own dagger by means of a sewer grating similar to the one from which Dennis had emerged on this early Sunday morning. He had rid himself of them, of course, because there were a few flecks of the deadly green Dragon Sand on each. The fumes from those few grains had killed the rats, burning many of them alive even as they paddled through the scummy water in the pipes, suffocating all the others before they could flee. Five years later, the rats had still not come back, although most of the poisonous fumes had dissipated. Most, but not all. If Dennis had entered one of the sewer pipes a bit closer to Flagg's apartments, he might well have died himself. Perhaps it was luck that saved him, or fate, or those gods he prayed to; I'll not take a stand on the matter. I tell tales, not tea leaves, and on the subject of Dennis's survival, I leave you to your own conclusions.

H
e reached the junction, peered around the corner, and saw a sleepy young Guard o' the Watch passing farther up the way. Dennis pulled back. His heart was thumping hard again, but he was satisfied—he knew where he was. When he looked back, the guard was gone.

Dennis moved quickly, up this corridor, down that flight of stairs, across t'other gallery. He moved with speedy sure-footedness, for he had spent his whole life in the castle. He knew it well enough, certainly, to find his way from the east wing, where he had come out of the sewers, to the lower west wing, where the napkins were stored.

But because he dared not be seen—not by anyone—Dennis went by the most obscure corridors he knew, and at the sound of every footfall (either real or imagined, and I do think quite a few of them were imagined), he withdrew into the nearest cranny or niche. In the end, it took him over an hour.

He thought he had never been so hungry in his life.

He was standing far back in a shadowy doorway. Faintly, he heard the Crier call four o'clock. He was about to move forward when slow, echoing footfalls came down the hallway . . . a clank of steel-and-scabbard—a creak of leather leggings.

Dennis pushed himself farther back into the shadows, sweating.

A Guard o' the Watch paused just in front of the thinly shadowed doorway where Dennis hid. The fellow stood for a moment rooting in his nose with his little finger, and then leaned over to blow a stream of snot between his knuckles. Dennis could have reached out and touched him, and felt certain that any moment the guard would turn . . . his eyes would widen . . . he would draw his shortsword . . . and that would be the end of Dennis, son of Brandon.

Please
, Dennis's frozen mind whispered.
Please
,
oh, please—

He could smell the guard, could smell the old wine and burned meat on his breath, and the sour sweat coming out of his skin.

The guard started to move on . . . Dennis began to relax . . . then the guard stopped and began rooting in his nose again. Dennis could have screamed.

“I have a girrul name of Marchy-Marchy-Melda,” the guard began to sing in a low-pitched, droning voice, rooting in his nose all the while. He produced a large green something, examined it thoughtfully, and flicked it onto the wall.
Splat
. “She's got a sister named Es-a-merelda. . . . I would sail the seven seas . . . Just to kiss her dimply knees! Tootie-sing-tay, sing-tiy, and pass me a bucket-da wine.”

Something exceedingly horrible was now happening to Dennis. His nose had begun to itch and tickle in a way which was unmistakable. Very soon he would sneeze.

Go!
he screamed in his mind.
Oh, why don't you go, you stupid fool?

But the guard seemed to have no intentions of going. He had apparently struck a rich lode up in the left nostril, and he meant to mine it.