And inside the man who had in his heart once condemned a boy because of that boy's tears, the stranger laughed and laughed and laughed.
88
The two old men parted from Dennis. They shook hands all around; then Dennis kissed the Judge's ring, which bore the Great Seal of Delain on its face. Peyna had given up his Judge-General's bench, but had not been able to part with the ring, which to him summed up all the goodness of the law. He knew he had made mistakes from time to time, but he had not allowed them to break his heart. Even over this last and greatest of mistakes, his heart did not break. He knew as well as we in our own world do that the road to hell is paved with good intentions--but he also knew that, for human beings, good intentions are sometimes all there are. Angels may be safe from damnation, but human beings are less fortunate things, and for them hell is always close.
He protested Dennis's act of kissing his ring, but Dennis insisted. Then Arlen shook Dennis's hand and wished him speed o' the gods. Smiling (but Peyna could still see the fear lurking in Dennis's eyes), Dennis wished them the same. Then the young butler turned east, toward the castle, and the two old men headed west, toward the farmstead of one Charles Reechul. Reechul, who raised Anduan huskies for a living, paid the grinding taxes the King had imposed without complaint, and was thus considered loyal . . . but Peyna knew that Reechul was sympathetic to the exiles encamped in the Far Forests, and had helped others reach them. Peyna had never expected to need Reechul's services himself, but the time had come.
The farmer's eldest daughter, Naomi, drove Peyna and Arlen north on a sled pulled by twelve of the dogger's strongest huskies. By Wednesday night, they reached the edge of the Far Forests.
"How long to the camp of the exiles?" Peyna asked Naomi that night.
Naomi cast the thin, evil-smelling cigar she had been smoking into the fire. "Two more days if the skies keep fair. Four more days if it snows. Maybe never, if it blizzards."
Peyna turned in. He drifted off to sleep almost at once. Logic or illogic, he was sleeping better than he had in years.
The weather kept clear the next day, and on Friday as well. At dusk of that day--the fourth since Peyna and Arlen had parted from Dennis--they reached the small huddle of tents and makeshift wooden huts for which Flagg had searched in vain.
"Ho! Who comes, and can you say the password?" a voice called. It was strong, sturdy, cheerful, and unafraid. Peyna recognized it.
"It's Naomi Reechul," the girl called, "and the password two weeks ago was 'tripos.' If it's not that now, Ben Staad, then put an arrow through me and I'll come back and haunt you!"
Ben appeared from behind a rock, laughing. "I'd not dare meet you as a ghost, Naomi--you're fearsome enough alive!"
Ignoring this, she turned to Peyna. "We've come," she said.
"Yes," Peyna said. "So I see."
And I believe it's well that we have . . . because something tells me that time has grown short . . . very short indeed.
89
Peter had the same feeling.
By Sunday, two days after Peyna and Arlen reached the camp of the exiles, his rope would still, by his calculations, finish up thirty feet short of the ground. This meant that when he dangled from the end of it with his arms fully extended, he would face a drop of at least twenty-one feet. He knew that he would be wiser by far to go on with his rope for another four months--even another two. If he dropped from the rope, fell badly, and broke both of his legs so that the Plaza guards found him groaning on the cobbles when they made their round-o'-the-clock, he would have wasted more than four years, simply because he did not have the patience to pursue his labor another four months.
This was logic Peyna could have appreciated, but Peter's feeling that he must now hurry was much stronger. Once Peyna would have snorted at the idea that feelings could be more trustworthy than logic . . . but now he might have been less sure.
Peter had been having a dream--for almost a week running now it had played over and over, gradually becoming more distinct. In it, he saw Flagg, bent over some bright and glowing object--it lit the magician's face a sickly greenish-yellow. In this dream, there always came a point when Flagg's eyes first widened, as if in surprise, and then narrowed to cruel slits. His brows pulled down; his forehead darkened; a grimace as bitter as a crescent moon twisted his mouth. In this expression, the dreaming Peter read one thing and one thing only: death. Flagg said only one word as he leaned forward and blew upon the brightly glowing object, which whiffed out like a candle when the magician's breath touched it. Only one word, but one was enough. The word from Flagg's mouth was Peter's own name, uttered in tones of angry discovery.
The night before, Saturday night, there had been a fairy-ring around the moon. The Lesser Warders thought it would soon snow. Examining the sky this afternoon, Peter knew they were right. It was his father who had taught Peter to read the weather, and standing at the window, Peter felt a pang of sadness . . . and a renewed spark of cold, quiet anger . . . the need to make things right again.
I'll make my try under cover of darkness and under cover of storm, he thought. There'll even be a bit of snow to cushion my fall. He had to grin at that idea--three inches of light, powdery snow between him and the cobbles would do precious little one way or the other. Either his perilously thin rope would hold . . . or it would break. Assuming it held, he would take the drop. And his legs would either take the impact . . . or they wouldn't.
And if they do take it, where will you go on them? a little voice whispered. Any who might have shielded you or helped you . . . Ben Staad, for instance--have long since been driven from the castle keep . . . from the very Kingdom itself for all you know.
He would trust to luck, then. King's luck. It was a thing his father had often talked about. There are lucky Kings and unlucky. But you'll be your own King and you'll have your own luck. M'self I think you'll be very lucky.
He had been King of Delain--at least in his own heart--for five years now, and he thought his luck had been the kind which the Staad family, with its famous bad luck, would have understood. But perhaps tonight would make up for all.
His rope, his legs, his luck. Either all would hold or all would break, quite possibly at the same time. No matter. Poor as it had been, he would trust to his luck.
"Tonight," he murmured, turning from the window . . . but something happened at supper which changed his mind.
90
It took Peyna and Arlen all day Tuesday to make the ten miles to the Reechul farm, and they were nearly done in when they arrived. Castle Delain was twice as far, but Dennis probably could have been knocking at the West Gate--if he had actually been mad enough to do such a thing--by two that afternoon, in spite of his long walk the day before. Such is the difference, of course, between young men and old men. But what he could have done really didn't matter, because Peyna had been very clear in his instructions (especially for a man who claimed not to have the slightest idea of what he was doing), and Dennis meant to follow them to the letter. As a result, it would be some time yet before he entered the castle.
After covering not quite half the distance, he began to look for a place where he could hole up for the next few days. So far he had met no one on the road, but noon had passed and soon there would be people returning from the castle market. Dennis wanted no one to see him and mark him. He was, after all, supposed to be home, sick in bed. He did not have to look long before he found a place that suited him well enough. It was a deserted farmstead, once well kept but now beginning to fall into ruin. Thanks to Thomas the Tax-Bringer, there were many such places on the roads leading to the castle keep.
Dennis remained there until late Saturday afternoon--four days in all. Ben Staad and Naomi were already on their way back from the Far Forests to Peyna's farm by then, Naomi pushing her team of huskies for all they were worth. The knowledge would have eased Dennis a bit if he had known--but of course he did not, and he was lonely.
There was no food at all upstairs, but in the cell
ar he found a few potatoes and a handful of turnips. He ate the potatoes (Dennis hated turnips, always had, and always would), using his knife to cut out the rotten places--which meant he cut away three-fourths of every potato. He was left with a handful of white globes the size of pigeons' eggs. He ate a few, looked toward the turnips in the vegetable bin, and sighed. Like them (he didn't) or hate them (he did), he supposed he would be reduced to eating them by Friday or so.
If I'm hungry enough, Dennis thought hopefully, maybe they'll taste good. Maybe I'll just gobble those old turnips up and beg for more!
He finally did have to eat a number of them, although he managed to hold out until Saturday noon. By then, they actually had begun to look good, but as hungry as he was, they still tasted terrible.
Dennis, who suspected the days ahead might be very hard, ate them anyway.
91
Dennis also found an old pair of snowshoes in the basement. The straps were far too large, but he had plenty of time to shorten them. The lacings had begun to rot, and there was nothing Dennis could do about that, but he thought they would serve the purpose. He wouldn't need them for long.
He slept in the cellar, fearing surprise, but during the daylight hours of those four long days, Dennis spent most of his time in the parlor of the deserted farmstead, watching the traffic pass to and fro--what little there was began around three o' the clock and had mostly ceased by five, when early-winter shadows began to cover the land. The parlor was a sad, empty place. Once it had been a cheery spot in which the family had gathered to discuss the day just done. Now it belonged only to the mice . . . and to Dennis, of course.
Peyna, after hearing Dennis declare that he could read and write "pretty well for a fellow in service" and seeing him draw his Great Letters (this had been over breakfast on Tuesday--the last real meal Dennis had had since his own lunch on Monday, a meal he looked back on with understandable nostalgia), had provided him with several sheets of paper and a lead pencil. And during most of the hours he spent in the deserted house, Dennis labored earnestly over a note. He wrote, scratched out, rewrote, frowned horribly as he reread, scratched his head, resharpened his pencil with his knife, and wrote again. He was ashamed of his spelling, and terrified he would forget some crucial thing Peyna had told him to put in. There were several times, times when his poor frazzled brain could make no more progress, when he wished Peyna had stayed up an hour longer on the night Dennis had come and written his own damned note, or called it aloud to Arlen. Most times, however, he was glad of the job. He had worked hard his whole life, and idleness made him nervous and uneasy. He would rather have worked his sturdy young man's body than his not-so-sturdy young man's brains, but work was work, and he was glad to have it.
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.
92
At 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 tightl
y 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.