The Eyes of the Dragon

107

There followed a great exchange of stories-I think you have heard most of them, and the parts you haven’t can be told quickly enough.

Frisky’s leap was a bull’s-eye. She carried straight into the pipe and then turned around to see if Naomi and Ben would follow her.

If they hadn’t done so, Frisky would have eventually leaped back to the ice-she should have been greatly disappointed to do it, but she would not have left her mistress for the most exciting scent in the world. Frisky knew that; Naomi was less sure. She didn’t even dare call Frisky back, for fear of a guard’s overhearing. She therefore intended to go after the dog. She would not leave Frisky, and if Ben tried to make her, she would deck him with a right hook.

She needn’t have worried. The minute he spotted the pipe, Ben understood where Dennis had gone.

“Noble nose, Frisky,” he said again. He turned to Naomi “Can you make it?”

“If I draw back and run, I can make it.”

“Don’t misjudge where the ice goes rotten or you’ll take a dunking. And your heavy clothes will drag you down very quickly.”

“I won’t misjudge.”

“Let me go first,” Ben said. “If I have to, maybe I can catch you.

He drew back a few paces and jumped so strongly that he almost took off the top of his head on the upper curve of the pipe. Frisky barked once, excitedly. “Shut up, dog!” Ben said.

Naomi drew back to the edge of the moat, stood there for a moment (the snow had by then been coming down so heavily that Ben couldn’t see her), and then ran forward. Ben held his breath, hoping she wouldn’t misjudge the edge of the good ice. If she ran too far before trying to make her leap, the longest arms in the world wouldn’t catch her.

But she timed it perfectly. Ben didn’t need to catch her; all he had to do was to get out of her way as she carried into the pipe. She didn’t even bump her head, as Ben had done.

“The worst part of it was the smell,” Naomi said as they told their story to a wondering Dennis. “How did you stand it?”

“Well, I just kept reminding myself of what would happen to me if I got caught,” Dennis said. “Every time I did that, the air seemed to smell a little better.”

Ben laughed at this and nodded, and Dennis looked at him with shining eyes for a moment. Then he looked back at Naomi.

“It did smell awfully bad, though,” he agreed. “I remember that it smelled bad when I was a kid, but not that bad. Maybe a kid doesn’t really know how bad a smell is. Or something.”

“I guess that could be,” Naomi said.

Frisky was lying on a pile of royal napkins with her muzzle on her paws, her eyes moving from one person to the next as each spoke. She knew very little of what they were saying, but if she had, and if she could have spoken, she would have told Dennis that his perceptions of what made a really bad smell hadn’t changed at all since he was a boy. It had been the last dying remainder of the Dragon Sand they had smelled, of course. The odor had been much stronger to Frisky than to THE GIRL and THE TALL-BOY. Dennis’s scent had still been there, now mostly in splashes and blobs on the curved walls (these were the places Dennis had touched with his hands; the floor of the pipes was covered with a foul warm water that had washed away all scent). It was the same bright electric blue. The other scent was a dull leathery green-Frisky was afraid of it. She knew that some scents could kill, and she knew that, not so long ago, this had been just such a scent. But it was losing its potency now, and in any case, Dennis’s scent led away from the greater concentrations of it. Not too long before they reached the grating Dennis had used to get out of the sewer system, she began to lose the green smell altogether-and Frisky was never in her whole life so happy to lose a smell.

“You met no one? No one at all?” Dennis asked anxiously.

“No one,” Ben said. “I ranged a little bit ahead to keep an eye out. I saw guards several times, but we always had plenty of time to get to some cover before they could see us. In truth, I think we could have come directly here and passed twenty guards and only have been challenged once or twice. Most of them were drunk.”

Naomi nodded. “Guards o’ the Watch,” she said. “Drunk. And not drunk out on picket along the northern borders of some pissy little barony no one ever heard of; drunk in the castle. Right in the castle!”

Dennis, remembering the toneless, nose-blowing singer, nodded gloomily. “I suppose we should be glad. If the Guard o’ the Watch was now what it was in Roland’s day, we’d all be in the Needle along wi' Peter. But I can’t be glad, somehow.”

“I’ll tell you this,” Ben said in a soft voice, “if I were Thomas, I’d quake in my boots every time I looked north, if such as we saw tonight are all he has around him.”

Naomi looked very troubled at this. “Pray the gods it never comes to that,” she said.

Ben nodded.

Dennis reached out and stroked Frisky’s head. “Followed me all the way from Peyna’s, did you? What a smart dog you are, ayes”

Frisky thumped her tail happily.

Naomi said: “I would hear this story of the sleepwalking King, Dennis, if you would tell it again.”

So Dennis told his story, much as he told it to Peyna and as I have told it to you, and they listened as spellbound as children hearing the tale of the talking wolf in the gammer’s nightcap.