“All this belongs to the Kingdom?” Thomas asked in an awed voice.
“It all belongs to your father,” Flagg replied, although Thomas had actually been correct. “Someday it will all belong to Peter.”
“And me,” Thomas said with a ten-year-olds confidence.
“No,” Flagg said, just the right tinge of regret in his voice, `just to Peter. Because he’s the oldest, and he’ll be King.”
“He’ll share,” Thomas said, but with the slightest tremor of doubt in his voice. “Pete always shares.”
“Peter’s a fine boy, and I’m sure you’re right. He’ll probably share. But no one can make a King share, you know. No one can make a King do anything he doesn’t want to do.” He looked at Thomas to gauge the effect of this remark, then looked back at the deep, shadowy treasure room. Somewhere, one of the aged clerks was droning out a count of ducats. “Such a lot of treasure, and all for one man, “Flagg remarked. “It’s really something to think about, isn’t it, Tommy?”
Thomas said nothing, but Flagg had been well pleased. He saw that Tommy was thinking about it, all right, and he judged than another of those poisoned caskets was tumbling down into the well of Thomas’s mind-ker-splash! And that was indeed so. Later, when Peter proposed to Thomas that they share the expense of the nightly bottle of wine, Thomas had remembered the great treasure room-and he remembered that all the treasure in it would belong to his brother. Easy for you to talk so blithely of buying wine! Why not? Someday you’ll have all the money in the world!
Then, about a year before he brought the poisoned wine to the King, on impulse, Flagg had shown Thomas this secret passage… and on this one occasion his usually unerring instinct for mischief might have led him astray. Again, I leave it for you to decide.
26
Tommy, you look down in the dumps!” he cried. The hood of his cloak was pushed back on that day, and he looked almost normal.
Almost.
Tommy felt down in them. He had suffered through a long luncheon at which his father had praised Peter’s scores in geometry and navigation to his advisors with the most lavish superlatives. Roland had never rightly understood either. He knew that a triangle had three sides and a square had four; he knew you could find your way out of the woods when you were lost by following Old Star in the sky; and that was where his knowledge ended. That was where Thomas’s knowledge ended, too, so he felt that luncheon would never be done. Worse, the meat was just the way his father liked it-bloody and barely cooked. Bloody meat made Thomas feel almost sick.
“My lunch didn’t agree with me, that’s all,” he said to Flagg.
“Well, I know just the thing to cheer you up,” Flagg said. “I’ll show you a secret of the castle, Tommy my boy.”
Thomas was playing with a buggerlug bug. He had it on his desk and had set his schoolbooks around it in a series of barriers. If the trundling beetle looked as if he might find a way out, Thomas would shift one of the books to keep him in.
“I’m pretty tired,” Thomas said. This was not a lie. Hearing Peter praised so highly always made him feel tired.
“You’ll like it,” Flagg said in a tone that was mostly wheedling… but a little threatening, too.
Thomas looked at him apprehensively. “There aren’t any… any bats, are there?”
Flagg laughed cheerily-but that laugh raised gooseflesh on Thomas’s arms anyway. He clapped Thomas on the back. “Not a bat! Not a drip! Not a draft! Warm as toast! And you can peek at your father, Tommy!”
Thomas knew that peeking was just another way of saying spying, and that spying was wrong-but this had been a shrewd shot all the same. This next time the buggerlug bug found a way to escape between two of the books, Thomas let it go. “All right,” he said, “but there better not be any bats.”
Flagg slipped an arm around the boy’s shoulders. “No bats, I swear-but here’s something for you to mull over in your mind, Tommy. You’ll not only see your father, you’ll see him through the eyes of his greatest trophy.”
Thomas’s own eyes widened with interest. Flagg was satisfied. The fish was hooked and landed. “What do you mean?”
“Come and see for yourself,” was all he would say.
He led Thomas through a maze of corridors. You would have become lost very soon, and I probably would have gotten lost myself before long, but Thomas knew this way as well as you know your way through your own bedroom in the dark-at least he did until Flagg led him aside.
They had almost reached the King’s own apartments when Flagg pushed open a recessed wooden door that Thomas had never really noticed before. Of course it had always been there, but in castles there are often doors-whole wings, even-that have mastered the art of being dim.
This passage was quite narrow. A chambermaid with an arm-load of sheets passed them; she was so terrified to have met the King’s magician in this slim stone throat that it seemed she would happily have shrunk into the very pores of the stone blocks to avoid touching him. Thomas almost laughed because sometimes he felt a little like that himself when Flagg was around. They met no one else at all.
Faintly, from below them, he could hear dogs barking, and that gave him a rough idea of where he was. The only dogs inside the castle proper were his father’s hunting dogs, and they were probably barking because it was time for them to be fed. Most of Roland’s dogs were now almost as old as he was, and because he knew how the cold ached in his own bones, Roland had commanded that a kennel be made for them right here in the castle. To reach the dogs from his father’s main sitting cham-ber, one went down a flight of stairs, turned right, and walked ten yards or so up an interior corridor. So Thomas knew they were about thirty feet to the right of his father’s private rooms.
Flagg stopped so suddenly that Thomas almost ran into him. The magician looked swiftly around to make sure they had the passageway to themselves. They did.
“Fourth stone up from the one at the bottom with the chip in it,” Flagg said. “Press it. Quick!”
Ah, there was a secret here, all right, and Thomas loved secrets. Brightening, he counted up four stones from the one with the chip and pressed. He expected some neat little bit of Jiggery-pokery a sliding panel, perhaps-but he was quite unprepared for what did happen.
The stone slid in with perfect ease to a depth of about three inches. There was a click. An entire section of wall suddenly swung inward, revealing a dark vertical crack. This wasn’t a wall at all! It was a huge door! Thomas’s jaw dropped.
Flagg slapped Thomas’s bottom.
“Quick, I said, you little fool!” he cried in a low voice. There was urgency in his voice, and this wasn’t simply put on for Thomas’s benefit, as many of Flagg’s emotions were. He looked right and left to verify that the passage was still empty. “Go! Now!”
Thomas looked at the dark crack that had been revealed and thought uneasily about bats again. But one look at Flagg’s face showed him that this would be a bad time to attempt a discussion on the subject.
He pushed the door open wider and stepped into the darkness. Flagg followed at once. Thomas heard the low flap of the magician’s cloak as he turned and shoved the wall closed again. The darkness was utter and complete, the air still and dry. Before he could open his mouth to say anything, the blue flame at the tip of Flagg’s index finger flared alight, throwing a harsh blue-white fan of illumination.
Thomas cringed without even thinking about it, and his hands flew up.
Flagg laughed harshly. “No bats, Tommy. Didn’t I promise?”
Nor were there. The ceiling was quite low, and Thomas could see for himself. No bats, and warm as toast… just as the magician had promised. By the light of Flagg’s magic finger-flare, he could also see they were in a secret passage which was about twenty-five feet long. Walls, floor, and ceiling were covered with ironwood boards. He couldn’t see the far end very well, but it looked perfectly blank.
He could still hear the muffled barking of the dogs.