The Eyes of the Dragon (29 page)

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 nobility 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 from 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 assumption 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.

E
ventually 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 glass of wine with him. The wine always made Dennis feel sick to his stomach, 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 halfway 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 passed 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.

I
t 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 passed 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 nobitity—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 become 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 nobles 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.

S
o 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 passed 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 passed them with an armload of sheets, as one had once passed 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 passed 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—passed 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, perhaps 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 glimmering 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 clittering 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.

F
ifty 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 passageway. 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.