"Breaking strain," he said, "is a good thing for a prince to know about, Peter. Chains break if you put on enough of a tug, and people do, too. Keep it in mind."
He kept it in mind now, as he pulled at his first cable. How much of a "tug" was he putting on? Five rull? At least. Ten? Perhaps. But maybe that was only wishful thinking. He would say eight. No, seven. Better to make a mistake on the pessimistic side, if a mistake was to be made. If he miscalculated* well, the cobblestones in the Plaza of the Needle were very, very hard.
He tugged harder still, the muscles on his arms now beginning to stand out a little. When the first cable finally snapped, Pete guessed he might be applying as much as fifteen roll-almost sixty-four pounds-of tug.
He was not unhappy with this result.
Later that night, he threw the broken cable out of his window, where the men who cleaned the Plaza of the Needle daily would sweep it up with the rest of the rubbish the following day.
Peter"s mother, seeing his interest in the dollhouse and the little furnishings inside, had taught him how to weave cables and braid them into tiny rugs. When we have not done a thing for a long period, we are apt to forget exactly how that thing was done, but Peter had nothing but time, and after some experimentation, the trick of braiding came back to him.
"Braiding" was what his mother had called it and so that was how he thought of it, but braiding was not really the right word for it; a braid, precisely speaking, is the hand-weaving of two cables. Wrapping, which is how rugs are made, is the hand--weaving of three or more cables. In wrapping, two cables are placed apart, but with their tops and bottoms even. The third is placed between them, but lower, so its end sticks out. This pattern is carried on as length after length is added. The result looks a little bit like Chinese finger-pullers* or the braided rugs in your favorite grandmother"s house.
It took Peter three weeks to save enough threads to try this technique, and most of a fourth to remember exactly how the over-and-under pattern of wrapping had gone. But when he was done, he had a real rope. It was thin, and you would have thought him mad to entrust his weight to it, but it was much stronger than it looked. He found he could break it, but only by wrapping its ends firmly around his hands and pulling until the muscles bulged on his arms and chest and the cords stood out on his neck.
Overhead in his sleeping chamber were a number of stout oak beams. He would have to test his weight from one of these, when he had a rope long enough. If it snapped, he would have to start all over again* but such thoughts were useless and Peter knew it-so he just got to work.
Each thread he pulled was about twenty inches long, but Peter lost roughly two inches in the weaving and wrapping. It took him three months to make a rope of three strands, each strand consisting of a hundred and five cotton threads, into a cable three feet long. One night, after he was sure all of the warders were drunk and at cards below, he tied this pigtail to a rope over one of the beams. When it had been looped over and tied in a slipknot, less than a foot and a half hung down.
It looked woefully thin.
Nevertheless, Peter seized it and hung from it, mouth tightened to a grim white line, expecting the threads to let go at any moment and spill him to the floor. But they held.
They held.
Hardly daring to believe it was happening, Peter hung there from a rope almost too thin to see. He hung there for almost a full minute, and then he stood on his bed to pull the slipknot free. His hands trembled as he did it, and he had to fumble at the knot twice, because his eyes kept blurring with tears. He didn"t believe his heart had been so full since reading Ben"s tiny note.
He had been keeping the rope under his mattress, but Peter realized this would not do much longer. The Needle was three hundred and forty feet high at the peak of its conical roof; his window was just about three hundred feet above the cobblestones. He was six feet tall and believed he would dare to drop as much as twenty feet from the end of his rope. But even at best, he would eventually have to hide two hundred and seventy feet of rope.
He discovered a loose stone on the east side of the bedroom floor, and cautiously pried it up. He was surprised and pleased to find a little s.p.a.ce beneath. He couldn"t see into it properly s he reached in and felt around in the darkness, his whole body stiff and tense as he waited for something down there in the dark to crawl over his hand* or bite it.
Nothing did, and he was just about to withdraw it, when one of his fingers brushed something-cold metal. Peter brought it out. It was, he saw, a heart-shaped locket on a fine chain. Both locket and chain looked to be made of gold. Nor did he think, by its weight, that the locket was false gold. After some poking and feeling, he found a delicate catch. He pushed it and the locket sprang open. Inside were two pictures, one on each side-they were as fine as any of the tiny paintings in Sasha"s dollhouse; even finer, perhaps. Peter stared at their faces with a boy"s frank wonder. The man was very handsome, the woman very beau- tiful. There was a faint smile on the man"s lips and a devil-may--care look in his eyes. The woman"s eyes were grave and dark. Part of Peter"s wonder came from the fact that this locket must be very old, judging by what he could make out of their dress, but only part of it. Most came from the fact that these two faces looked eerily familiar. He had seen them before.
He closed the locket and looked on the back. He thought there were initials entwined there, but they were too flounced and curlicued for him to read.
On impulse, he delved into the hold again. This time he touched paper. The single sheet of foolscap he brought out was ancient and crumbling, but the writing was clear and the signature un-mistakable. The name was Leven Valera, the infamous Black Duke of the Southern Barony. Valera, who might someday have been King, had instead spent the last twenty-five years of his life in the room at the top of the Needle for the murder of his wife. No wonder the pictures in the locket looked familiar! The man was Valera; the woman was Valera "s murdered wife, Eleanor, about whose beauty ballads were still sung.
The ink Valera had used was a strange rusty black, and the first line of his note chilled Peter"s heart. The note entire chilled his heart, and not only because the similarity between Valera "s position and his own seemed too great for coincidence.
To the Finder of the Note- I write with my own Blood, drawn from a vayne I have opened in my left Forearm, my pen the Shaft of a Spune which I have sharpened long and long upon the stones of my Bedchamber. Nearly a quarter of a Centurie I have spent here in the sloe; I came here a Young Man and now am I Old. The Coughing Spells and Fayver have come on me again, and this time I think I shall not survive.
I did not kill my Wyfe. Nay, though all the Evidence say otherwise, I did not kill my Wyfe. I did love her and love her still, although her dear Face has grown misty in my treacherous Mind.
I believe "twas the King"s Magician who killed Eleanor, and arranged Matters to see me put asyde, for I stood in his Way. It seems his Plans have worked and he has prospered; yet I believe there are G.o.ds who punish Wickedness in the end. His Day shall come, and I have come to feel more and more strongly as my own Death approaches that he shall be brought down by One who comes to this Place of Dispair, One who finds and reads this Letter written in my Blood.
If "tis so, I cry out to you; Avenge, Avenge, Avenge! Ignore me and my lost Years if you must, but never, never, never ignore my dear Eleanor, murdered as she slept in her Bed! It was not I who poisoned her Wine; I write the name of the Murderer here in Blood: Flagg! " Twas Flagg! Flagg! Flagg!
Take the Locket, and show it to him the instant before you relieve this the World of Its greatest Scoundrel-show him so that he may know in that Instant that I have been a part of his Downfall, even from beyond my unjust Murderer"s Grayve.
Leven Valer Perhaps now you can understand the true source of Peter"s chill; perhaps not. Perhaps you will understand it better if I remind you that, although he looked to be a man in a hale and hearty middle age, Flagg was really very old.
Peter had read about the supposed crime of Leven Valera, yes. But the books in which he had read of it were histories. Ancient histories. This crumbling, yellowed parchment first spoke of th King"s magician, and then spoke of Flagg by name. Spoke his name? Cried it, shrieked it-in blood.
But Valera "s supposed crime had happened in the reign of Alan I -and Alan II had ruled Delain four hundred and fifty years ago.
"G.o.d, oh great G.o.d," Peter whispered. He staggered back to his bed and sat down on it heavily, just before his knees would have unhinged and spilled him to the floor. "He"s done it all before! He"s done it all before, and in exactly the same way, but he did it over four centuries ago!"
Peter"s face was deadly white; his hair was standing on end. For the first time he realized that Flagg, the King"s magician, was in reality Flagg the monster, loose in Delain again now, serving a new King-serving his own young, confused, easily led brother.
Peter at first entertained giddy thoughts of promising Beson another bribe to take the locket and the crumbling sheet of foolscap to Anders Peyna. In his initial flush of excitement, it seemed to him that this note must point the finger of guilt at Flagg and set him, Peter, free. A little reflection convinced him that while that might happen in a storybook, it would not happen in real life. Peyna would laugh and call it a forgery. And if he took it seriously? That might mean the end of both the Judge General and the imprisoned prince. Peter"s ears were sharp, and he listened closely to the gossip of the meadhouses and the wineshops as it was pa.s.sed back and forth between Beson and the Lesser Warders. He had heard of the Farmers" Tax Increase, had heard the bitter joke which suggested that Thomas the LightBringer should be renamed Thomas the Tax-Bringer. He had even heard that some few daring wags had renamed his brother Foggy Tom the Constantly Bombed. The headsman"s axe had swung with the regularity of a clock"s pendulum since Thomas had ascended Delain"s throne, only this clock called out treason-sedition, treason-sedition, treason-sedition with a regularity that would have been monotonous, had it not been so frightening.
By now Peter had begun to suspect Flagg"s goal: to bring the ordered monarchy of Delain to an utter smash. Showing the locket and the note would only get him laughed at or cause Peyna to take some sort of action. And that would undoubtedly get them both killed.
In the end Peter put the locket and foolscap back where they had come from. And with them he put the little three-foot pigtail it had taken him a month to weave. On the whole, he did not feel too bitter about the evening"s work-the rope had held, and the finding of the locket and foolscap after more than four hundred years proved at least one thing-the hiding place was not apt to be discovered.
Still, he had much food for thought, and he lay long awake that night.
When he slept, he seemed to hear Leven Valera"s dry, stony voice whispering in one ear: Avenge! Avenge! Avenge!
Time yes, time-Peter spent a great deal of time at the top of the Needle. His beard grew long, save for where that white scar streaked his cheek like a lightning bolt. He saw many changes from his window, as it grew. He heard of more terrible changes yet. The headsman"s pendulum had not slowed down but actually speeded up: treason-sedition, treason-sedition, it sang, and sometimes half a dozen heads rolled in the course of but a single day.
During Peter"s third year of imprisonment, the year in which Peter was first able to do thirty chin-ups in a single effort from his bedchamber"s central beam, Peyna resigned his post as Judge General in disgust. It was the talk of the meadhouses and wineshops for a week, and the talk of Peter"s keepers for a week and a day. The warders believed that Flagg would have Peyna jailed almost before the heat of the old man"s b.u.m had left the judge"s bench, and that soon after the citizens of Delain would find out once and for all if there was blood or ice water in the judge-General"s veins. But when Peyna remained free, the talk died down. Peter was glad Peyna had not been arrested. He bore him no ill will, in spite of Peyna"s willingness to believe that he had murdered his father; and he knew that the arrangement of the evidence had been Flagg"s doing.
Also during Peter"s third year in the Needle, Dennis"s good old da ", Brandon, died. His pa.s.sing was simple but dignified. He had finished his day"s work in spite of a terrible pain in his chest and side and came slowly home. He sat down in the little living room, hoping the pain would pa.s.s. Instead it grew worse. He called his wife and son to his side, kissed them both, and asked if he might have a gla.s.s of bundle-gin. This was provided. He drank it off, kissed his wife again, and then sent her from the room.
"You must serve your master well now, Dennis," he said. " Ye"re a man now, with a man"s tasks set before you."
"I"ll serve the King as well as I may, Da "," Dennis said, although the thought of taking over his father"s responsibilities terrified him. His good, homely face was shiny with tears. For the last three years, Brandon and Dennis had b.u.t.tled for Thomas, and Dennis"s responsibilities had been much the same as before, with Peter; but it had never been the same, somehow-never even close to the same.
"Thomas, aye," Brandon said, and then whispered: "But if the time comes to do yer first master a service, Dennis, you mustn"t hesitate. I have never-"
At that moment, Brandon clutched the left side of his chest, stiffened, and died. He died where he would have wanted to die, in his own chair, in front of his own fire.
In Peter"s fourth year of imprisonment-his rope below the stones growing steadily longer and longer-the Staad family disappeared. The throne possessed itself of what little there remained of their lands, as it had done when other n.o.ble families disappeared. And as Thomas"s reign progressed, there were more and more disappearances.
The Staads were only one item of meadhouse gossip in a busy week that included four beheadings, an increased levy against shopkeepers, and the imprisonment of an old woman who had for three days walked back and forth in front of the palace, screaming that her grandson had been taken and tortured for speaking against the previous year"s Cattle Levies. But when Peter heard the Staad name in the warders" conversation, his heart had stopped for a moment.
The chain of events leading to the disappearance of the Staads was one familiar to everyone in Delain by now. The tick- tocking pendulum of the headsman"s axe had thinned the numbers of the n.o.bility terribly. Many of these n.o.bles died because their families had served the Kingdom for hundreds-or thousands-of years, and they could not believe such an unjust fate would or could fall on them. Others, seeing b.l.o.o.d.y handwriting on the wall, fled. The Staads were among these.
And the whispering began.
Tales were told behind cupped hands, tales suggesting that these n.o.bles had not simply scattered to the four winds but had gathered together somewhere, perhaps in the deep woods at the northern end of the Kingdom, to plan an overthrow of the throne.
These stories pa.s.sed to Peter like the wind through his win- dow, the drafts beneath his door* They were dreams of a wider world. Mostly he worked on his rope. During the first year, the rope grew longer by eighteen inches every three weeks.
At the end of that year, he had a slim cable that was twenty-five feet long-a cable that was, theoretically at least, strong enough to bear his weight. But there was a difference between dangling from a beam in his bedroom and dangling above a drop of three hundred feet, and Peter knew it. He was, quite literally, staking his life on that slim cord.
And twenty-five feet a year was perhaps not enough; it would take more than eight years before he could even try, and the rumblings he heard at second hand had grown loud enough to be disturbing. Above all else, the Kingdom must endure-there must be no revolt, no chaos. Wrongs must be put right, but by law, not by bows and slings and maces and clubs. Thomas, Leven Valera, Roland, he himself, even Flagg paled into insignificance next to that. There must be law.
How Anders Peyna, growing old and bitter by his fire, would have loved him for that!
Peter determined that he must make his effort to escape as soon as possible. Accordingly he made long calculations, doing the figures in his head so as to leave no trace. He did them again and again and again, proving to himself that he had made no mistake.
In his second year in the Needle, he began to pluck ten threads from each napkin; in his third year fifteen; in his fourth year, twenty. The rope grew. Fifty-eight feet long after the second year; a hundred and four after the third; a hundred and sixty after the fourth.
The rope at that time would still have fetched up a hundred and forty feet from the ground.
During his last year, Peter began to take thirty threads from each napkin, and for the first time his robberies showed clearly -each napkin looked frayed on all four sides, as if mice had been at it. Peter waited in agony for his thefts to be discovered.
But they were not discovered then, or ever. There was not so much as a question ever raised. Peter had spent endless nights (or so they seemed to him) wondering and worrying when Flagg would hear some wrong thing, some wrong note, and so get wind of what he was up to. He would send some underling, Peter supposed, and the questions would begin. Peter had thought things out with agonizing care, and he had made only one wrong a.s.sumption-but that one led to a second (as wrong a.s.sumptions so often do) and that second was a dilly. He had a.s.sumed that there was some finite number of napkins-perhaps a thousand or so in all-and that they were being used over and over again. His thinking on the subject of the napkin supply never went much further than that. Dennis could have told him differently and saved him perhaps two years of work, but Dennis was never asked. The truth was simple but staggering. Peter"s napkins were not coming from a supply of a thousand, or two thousand, or twenty thousand; there were nearly half a million of these old, musty napkins in all.
On one of the deep levels below the castle was a storeroom as big as a ballroom. And it was filled with napkins* napkins* nothing but napkins. They smelled musty to Peter, and that wasn"t surprising-most of them, coincidentally or not, dated from a time not long after the imprisonment and death of Leven Valera, and the existence of all those napkins-coincidentally or not-was, indirectly at least, the work of Flagg. In a queer sort of way, he had created them.
Those had been dark times indeed for Delain. The chaos Flagg so earnestly wished had almost come upon the land. Valera had been removed; mad King Alan had ascended the throne in his place. If he had lived another ten years, the Kingdom surely would have drowned in blood* but Alan was struck down by lightning while playing cubits on the back lawn in the pourin rain one day (as I told you, he was mad). It was lightning, some said, sent by the G.o.ds themselves. He was followed by his niece, Kyla, who became known as Kyla the Good* and from Kyla, the line of succession had run straight and true down through the generations to Roland, and the brothers to whose tale you have been listening. It was Kyla, the Good Queen, who brought the land out of its darkness and poverty. She had nearly bankrupted the Royal Treasury to do it, but she knew that currency, hard currency-is the life"s blood of a kingdom. Much of Delain"s hard currency had been drained away during the wild, weird reign of Alan II, a King who had sometimes drunk blood from the notched ears of his servants and who had insisted that he could fly; a King more interested in magic and necromancy than profit and loss and the welfare of his people. Kyla knew it would take a ma.s.sive flow of both love and guilders to set the wrongs of Alan"s reign right, and she began by trying to put every able-bodied person in Delain back to work, from eldest to youngest.
Many of the older citizens of the castle keep had been set to making napkins-not because napkins were needed (I think I have already told you how most of Delain"s royalty and n.o.bility felt about them), but because work was needed. These were hands that had been idle for twenty years or more in some cases, and they worked with a will, weaving on looms exactly like the one in Sasha"s dollhouse* except in the matter of size, of course!
For ten years these old people, over a thousand of them, made napkins and drew hard coin from Kyla"s Treasury for their work. For ten years people only slightly younger and a little more able to get about had taken them down to the cool, dry storeroom below the castle. Peter had noticed that some of the napkins brought to him were moth-eaten as well as musty-smelling. The wonder, although he didn"t know it, was that so many of them were still in such fine condition.
Dennis could have told him that the napkins were brought, used once, removed (minus the few threads Peter plucked fro each), and then simply thrown away. After all, why not? There were enough of them, all told, to last five hundred princes five hundred years* and longer. If Anders Peyna had not been a merciful man as well as a hard one, there really might have been a finite number of napkins. But he knew how badly that nameless woman in the rocking chair needed the work and the pittance it brought in (Kyla the Good had known the same, in her time), and so he kept her on, as he continued to see that Beson"s guilders went on flowing after the Staads were forced to flee. She became a fixture outside the room of the napkins, that old woman with her needle for unmaking rather than making. There she sat in her rocker, year after year, removing tens of thousands of royal crests, and so it was really not surprising that no word of Peter"s petty thievery ever reached Flagg"s ears.
So you see that, except for that one mistaken a.s.sumption and that one unasked question, Peter could have gotten about his work much faster. It did sometimes seem to him that the napkins were not shrinking as rapidly as they ought to have done, but it never occurred to him to question his basic (if vague) idea that the napkins he used were being regularly returned to him. If he had asked himself that one simple question-!
But perhaps, in the end, all things worked for the best.
Or perhaps not. That is another thing you must decide for yourself.
Eventually Dennis got over his fright of being Thomas"s butler. After all, Thomas ignored him almost completely, except to sometimes berate him for forgetting to put out his shoes (usually Thomas himself had left his shoes somewhere else, then forgotten where) or to insist Dennis have a gla.s.s of wine with him. The wine always made Dennis feel sick to his2stomach, although he had come to enjoy a wee drop of bundle--gin in the evenings. He drank it nonetheless. He did not need his good old da " around to tell him one did not refuse to drink with the King when asked. And sometimes, usually when he was drunk, Thomas would forbid Dennis to go home but insist that he spend the night in Thomas"s apartments instead. Dennis supposed-and rightly-that these were nights on which Thomas simply felt too lonely to bear his own solitary company. He would give long, besotted, rambling sermons on how difficult it was to be King, how he was trying to do the best job he could and be fair, and how everyone hated him for some reason or other just the same. Thomas often wept during these sermons, or laughed wildly at nothing, but usually he just fell asleep half-way through some mangled defense of one tax or another. Sometimes he staggered off to his bed, and Dennis could sleep on the couch. More often, Thomas fell asleep-or pa.s.sed out-on the couch, and Dennis made his uncomfortable bed on the cooling hearth. It was perhaps the strangest existence any King"s butler had ever known, but, of course, it seemed normal enough to Dennis because it was all he had ever known.
Thomas mostly ignoring him was one thing. Flagg ignoring him was another, even more important thing. Flagg had, in fact, entirely dismissed Dennis"s part in his scheme to send Peter to the Needle. Dennis had been no more than a tool to him-a tool which had served its purpose and could be put aside. If he had thought of Dennis, it would have seemed to him that the tool had been well rewarded: Dennis was the King"s butler, after all.
But on an early winter"s night in the year when Peter was twenty-one and Thomas sixteen, a night when Peter"s thin rope was finally nearing completion, Dennis saw something which changed everything-and it is with the thing Dennis saw that cold night that I must begin to narrate the final events in my tale.
It was a night much like those during the terrible time just before and after Roland"s death. The wind shrieked out of a black sky and moaned in the alleys of Delain. Frost lay thick in the pastures of the Inner Baronies and on the cobbles of the castle city. At first, a three-quarters moon chased in and out of the rushing clouds, but by midnight the clouds had thickened enough to obscure the moon completely, and by two in the morning, when Thomas awoke Dennis by rattling the latch of the door between his sitting room and the corridor outside, it had begun to snow.
Dennis heard the rattling and sat up, grimacing at the stiffness in his back and the pins and needles in his legs. Tonight Thomas had fallen asleep on the couch instead of lurching his way to bed, so it had been the hearth for the young butler. Now the fire was almost out. The side of him which had been lying closer to it felt baked; the other side of him felt frozen.
He looked toward the rattling sound* and for a moment terror froze his heart and vitals. For that one moment he thought there was a ghost at the door, and he almost screamed. Then he saw it was only Thomas in his white nightshirt.
"M-My Lord King?"
Thomas took no notice. His eyes were open, but they were not looking at the latch; they were wide and dreaming and they looked straight ahead at nothing. Dennis suddenly guessed that the young King was sleepwalking.
Even as Dennis decided this, Thomas seemed to realize that the reason the latch wouldn"t work was that the bolt was still on. He drew it and then pa.s.sed out into the hall, looking more ghostlike than ever in the guttering light of the corridor sconces. There was a swirl of nightshirt hem, and then he was gone on bare feet.
Dennis sat stock-still on the hearth for a moment, cross-legged, his pins and needles forgotten, his heart thumping. Outside, the wind hurled snow against the diamond-shaped panes of the sitting-room window and uttered a long banshee howl. What should he do?
There was only one thing, of course-the young King was his master. He must follow.
Perhaps it was the wild night which had brought Roland so vividly to Thomas"s mind, but not necessarily-in fact, Thomas thought of his father a great deal. Guilt is like a sore, endlessly fascinating, and the guilty party feels compelled to examine it and pick at it, so that it never really heals. Thomas had drunk far less than usual, but, strangely, had seemed drunker than ever to Dennis. His sentences had been broken and garbled, his eyes wide and staring, showing too much of the whites.
This was, to a large extent, because Flagg was gone. There had been rumors that the renegade n.o.bility- Staads among them- had been seen gathered together in the Far Forests at the northern reaches of the Kingdom. Flagg had led a regiment of tough, battle-hardened soldiers in search of them. Thomas was always more skittish when Flagg was gone. He knew it was because he had come to depend completely on the dark magician* but he had come to depend on Flagg in ways he did not fully understand. Too much wine was no longer Thomas"s only vice. Sleep is often denied to those with secrets, and Thomas was afflicted with severe insomnia. Without knowing it, he had be-come addicted to Flagg"s sleeping potions. Flagg had left a supply of the drug with Thomas when he led the soldiers north, but Flagg had expected to be gone only three days-four at the most. For the last three days, Thomas had slept badly, or not at all. He felt strange, never quite awake, never quite asleep. Thoughts of his father haunted him. He seemed to hear his father"s voice in the wind, crying out Why do you stare at me? Why do you stare at me so? Visions of wine* visions of Flagg"s darkly cheerful face* visions of his father"s hair catching fire* these things drove sleep away and left him wide-eyed in the long watches of the night while the rest of the castle slept.
When Flagg had still not returned on the eighth night (he and his soldiers were even then camped fifty miles from the castle and Flagg was in a foul mood; the only trace of the n.o.bles they found had been frozen hoofprints that might have been days or weeks old), Thomas sent for Dennis. It was later that night, that eighth night, that Thomas arose from his couch and began to walk.
So Dennis followed his lord and master the King down those long, drafty stone corridors, and if you have come along this far, I think you must know where Thomas the Light -Bringer finished up.
Late stormy night had pa.s.sed into early stormy morning. No one was abroad in the corridors-at least, Dennis saw no one. If anyone had been abroad, he or she might well have fled in the other direction, perhaps screaming, believing he or she had seen two ghosts walking, the one leading in a long white nightshirt that could easily have been mistaken for a shroud, the other following in a plain jerkin, but with bare feet and a face pale enough to have been mistaken for the face of a corpse. Yes, I believe anyone who saw them would have fled, and told long prayers before sleeping* and even many prayers might not have kept the nightmares at bay.
Thomas stopped in the middle of a corridor that Dennis had seldom been down, and he opened a recessed door which Dennis had never really noticed at all. The boy King stepped into another corridor (no chambermaid pa.s.sed them with an armload of sheets, as one had once pa.s.sed Thomas and Flagg when Flagg had brought the prince this way some years before; all good chambermaids were long since in their beds), and partway down it, Thomas stopped so suddenly that Dennis almost ran into him.
Thomas looked around, as if to see if he had been followed, and his dreaming eyes pa.s.sed directly over Dennis. Dennis"s skin crawled, and it was all he could do to keep from crying out. The sconces in this almost forgotten hallway guttered and stank foully of das oil; the light was faint and gruesome. The young butler could feel his hair trying to clump up and push out in spikes as those empty eyes-eyes like dead lamps lit only by the moon-pa.s.sed over him.
He was there, standing right there, but Thomas did not see him; to Thomas, his butler was dim.
Oh, I must run, part of Dennis"s mind whispered distractedly- but inside his head, that distracted little whisper was like a scream. Oh, I must run, he has died, he has died in his sleep and I am following a walking corpse! But then he heard the voice of his da ", his own dear, dead da ", whispering: If the time ever comes to do yer first master a service, Dennis, you mustn"t hesitate.
A voice deeper than either told him that the time for that service had come. And Dennis, a lowly servant boy who had changed a kingdom once by discovering a burning mouse, per-haps changed it again by holding his place, in spite of the terror which froze his bones and pushed his heart into his throat.
In a strange, deep voice that was nothing at all like his usual voice (but to Dennis that voice sounded weirdly familiar), Thomas said: "Fourth stone up from the one at the bottom with the chip in it. Press it. Quick!"
The habit of obedience was so ingrained in Dennis that he had actually begun to move forward before realizing that Thomas, in his dream, had commanded himself in the voice of another. Thomas pushed the stone before Dennis could move more than a single step. It slid in perhaps three inches. There was a click. Dennis"s jaw dropped, as part of the wall swung inward. Thomas pushed it farther, and Dennis saw there was a huge secret door here. Secret doors made him think of secret panels, and secret panels made him think of burning mice. Again he felt an urge to run and fought it down.
Thomas went in. For a moment he was only a glimmerin nightshirt in the dark, a nightshirt with no one inside it. Then the stone wall closed again. The illusion was perfect.
Dennis stood there, shifting from one cold bare foot to the other cold bare foot. What should he do now?
Again, it was his da"s voice he seemed to hear, impatient now, brooking no refusal. Follow, you paltry boy! Follow, and be quick! This is the moment! Follow!
But Da ", the dark- He seemed to feel a stinging slap, and Dennis thought hysterically: Even when you"re dead you got a strong right hand, Da "! All right, all right, I"m going!
He counted up four from the chipped stone and pushed. The door swung about four inches inward on darkness.
There was a tiny Glittering sound in the awesome silence of the corridor-a sound like mice made of stone. After a moment Dennis realized that sound was his own teeth, chattering together.
Oh Da ", I"m so scared, he mourned* and then followed King Thomas into the darkness.
Fifty miles away, rolled into five blankets against the bitter cold and the roaring wind, Flagg cried out in his sleep at the precise moment Dennis followed the King into the secret pa.s.sageway. On a knoll not far distant, wolves howled in unison with that cry. The soldier sleeping nearest Flagg on the left died instantly of a heart attack, dreaming that a great lion had come to gobble him up. The soldier sleeping on Flagg"s right woke up in the morning to discover he was blind. Worlds sometimes shudder and turn inside their axes, and this was such a time. Flagg felt it, but did not grasp it. The salvation of all that is good is only this-at times of great import, evil beings sometimes fall strangely blind. When the King"s magician awoke in the morning, he knew that he had had a bad dream, probably from his own long-forgotten past, but he did not remember what it had been.
The darkness inside the secret pa.s.sage was utter and complete, the air still and dry. In it, coming from somewhere ahead, Dennis heard a terrible, desolate sound.
The King was weeping.
At that sound, some of Dennis"s fear left him. He felt a great wonder, and a great pity for Thomas, who always seemed so unhappy, and who had grown fat and pimply as King-often he was pallid and shaky-handed from too much wine the night before, and his breath was usually bad. Already Thomas"s legs were beginning to bow, and unless Flagg was with him, he had a tendency to walk with his head down and his hair hanging in his face.
Dennis felt his way forward, his hands held out in front of him. The sound of weeping grew closer in the dark* and then, suddenly, the dark was no longer complete. He heard a faint sliding noise and then he could see Thomas faintly. He was standing at the end of the corridor, and faint amber light was coming in from two small holes in the dark. To Dennis, those holes looked strangely like floating eyes.
Just as Dennis began to believe that he would be all right, that he would probably survive this strange night walk, Thomas shrieked. He shrieked so loudly it seemed that his vocal cords must split open. The strength ran out of Dennis"s legs and he fell to his knees, hands clapped over his mouth to stop his own screams, and now it seemed to him that this secret way was filled with ghosts, ghosts like strange flapping bats that might at any moment snare themselves in his hair; oh yes, the place seemed filled with the unquiet dead to Dennis, and perhaps it was; perhaps it was.