The Eyes of the Dragon(85)

"Frisky!" a low voice called from the darkness. "Stand down, Frisky! No sounds!"

The dark shape was not Flagg at all; it was an extremely large dog-a dog which looked too much like a wolf for comfort, Dennis thought. When the girl spoke, it drew away and sat down. It looked happily at Dennis; its tail thumped mutedly on Dennis's bed of napkins.

Two more shapes in the darkness, one taller than the other. Not Flagg, that much was clear. Castle guards, then. Dennis grabbed his dagger. If the gods were good, he might be able to get rid of both of them. If not, then he would try to die well in the service of his King.

The two figures had stopped a little short of him.

"Come on," Dennis said, and raised his dagger (it was really not much more than a pocketknife, and was rather rusty and quite dull) in a brave gesture. "First you two and then your devil-dog!"

"Dennis?" The voice was eerily familiar. "Dennis, have we really found you?"

Dennis started to lower his dagger, then brought it up again.

It had to be a trick. Had to be. But the voice sounded so much like

"Ben?" he whispered. "Is it Ben Staad?"

"It's Ben," the taller shape confirmed, and gladness filled Dennis's heart. The shape began to come forward. Alarmed, Dennis raised his dagger again.

"Wait! Do you have a light?"

"Flint and steel, yes."

"Strike it." Aye.

A moment later, a big yellow spark, surely dangerous in that room filled with dry cotton napkins, flared in the gloom.

"Come forward, Ben," Dennis said, reseating his poor excuse for a dagger in its sheath. He got to his feet, trembling with gladness and relief. Ben was here. By what magic Dennis did not know-only that it had somehow happened. His feet caught in the napkins and he stumbled forward, but there was no danger that he might fall, because Ben's arms swept him up in a strong embrace. Ben was here and all would be well, Dennis thought, and it was all he could do to keep from bursting into unmanly tears.

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.