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 butler 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 along 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 in-drawn 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-facings 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 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 se-cretly. 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 up-ward. 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.