'I USUALLY GIVE them a coating of chocolate at the last minute; it makes them look a lot better,' Valerie said.
'It must be four o'clock,' Max said then. 'Better get the chocolate ready, so it'll have time to harden.'
Valerie took the lump with her and started down the ladder to the kitchen. 'You never did a better job; smile.'
'It'll work without a hitch?' Inigo said.
Max nodded very firmly. But he did not smile. There was something in the back of his mind bothering him; he never forgot things, not important things, and he didn't forget this either.
He just didn't remember it in time....
AT 4:45 PRINCE Humperdinck summoned Yellin to his chambers. Yellin came immediately, though he dreaded what was, he knew, about to happen. As a matter of fact, Yellin already had his resignation written and in an envelope in his pocket. 'Your Highness,' Yellin began.
'Report,' Prince Humperdinck said. He was dressed brilliantly in white, his wedding costume. He still looked like a mighty barrel, but brighter.
'All of your wishes have been carried out, Highness. Personally I have attended to each detail.' He was very tired, Yellin was, and his nerves long past frayed.
'Specify,' said the Prince. He was seventy-five minutes away from his first female murder, and he wondered if he could get his fingers to her throat before even the start of a scream. He had been practicing on giant sausages all the afternoon and had the movements down pretty pat, but then, giant sausages weren't necks and all the wishing in the world wouldn't make them so.
'All passages to the castle itself have been resealed this very morning, save the main gate. That is now the only way in, and the only way out. I have changed the lock to the main gate. There is only one key to the new lock and I keep it wherever I am. When I am outside with the one hundred troops, the key is in the outside lock and no one can leave the castle from the inside. When I am with you, as I am now, the key is in the inside lock, and no one may enter from the outside.'
'Follow,' said the Prince, and he moved to the large window of his chamber. He pointed outside. Below the window was a lovely planted garden. Beyond that the Prince's private stables. Beyond that, naturally, the outside castle wall. 'That is how they will come,' he said. 'Over the wall, through my stables, past my garden, to my window, throttle the Queen and back the way they came before we know it.'
'They?' Yellin said, though he knew the answer.
'The Guilderians, of course.'
'But the wall where you suggest is the highest wall surrounding all of Florin Castle—it is fifty feet high at that point—so that would seem the least likely point of attack.' He was trying desperately to keep himself under control.
'All the more reason why they should choose this spot; besides, the world knows that the Guilderians are unsurpassed as climbers.'
Yellin had never heard that. He had always thought the Swiss were the ones who were unsurpassed as climbers. 'Highness,' he said, in one last attempt, 'I have not yet, from a single spy, heard a single word about a single plot against the Princess.'
'I have it on unimpeachable authority that there will be an attempt made to strangle the Princess this very night.'
'In that case,' Yellin said, and he dropped to one knee and held out the envelope, 'I must resign.' It was a difficult decision—the Yellins had headed enforcement in Florin for generations, and they took their work more than seriously. 'I am not doing a capable job, sire; please forgive me and believe me when I say that my failures were those of the body and mind and not of the heart.'
Prince Humperdinck found himself, quite suddenly, in a genuine pickle, for once the war was finished, he needed someone to stay in Guilder and run it, since he couldn't be in two places at once, and the only men he trusted were Yellin and the Count, and the Count would never take the job, being obsessed, as he was these days, with finishing his stupid Pain Primer. 'I do
Yellin didn't know what to say. 'Thank you' seemed so inadequate, but it was all he could come up with.
'Once the wedding is done with I shall send her here to make ready while I shall, with boots carefully procured in advance, make tracks leading from the wall to the bedroom and returning then from the bedroom to the wall. Since you are in charge of law enforcement, I expect you will not take long to verify my fears that the prints could only be made by the boots of Guilderian soldiers. Once we have that, we'll need a royal proclamation or two, my father can resign as being unfit for battle, and you, dear Yellin, will soon be living in Guilder Castle.'
Yellin knew a dismissal speech when he heard one. 'I leave with no thought in my heart but to serve you.'
'Thank you,' Humperdinck said, pleased, because, after all, loyalty was one thing you couldn't buy. And in that mood, he said to Yellin by the door, 'And, oh, if you see the albino, tell him he may stand in the back for my wedding; it's quite all right with me.'
'I will, Highness,' Yellin said, adding, 'but I don't know where my cousin is—I went looking for him less than an hour ago and he was nowhere to be found.'
The Prince understood important news when he heard it because he wasn't the greatest hunter in the world for nothing and, even more, because if there was one thing you could say about the albino it was that he was
'I will rush to the gate and fight, to the death if necessary,' Yellin said.
'Good man,' the Prince called after him. If there was an attack, it would come at the busiest time, during the wedding, so he would have to move that up. State affairs went slowly, but, still, he had authority. Six o'clock was out. He would be married no later than half past five or know the reason why.
AT FIVE O'CLOCK, MAX and Valerie were in the basement sipping coffee. 'You better get right to bed,' Valerie said; 'you look all troubled. You can't stay up all night as if you were a pup.'
'I'm not tired,' Max said. 'But you're right about the other.'
'Tell Mama.' Valerie crossed to him, stroked where his hair had been.
'It's just I been remembering, about the pill.'
'It was a beautiful pill, honey. Feel proud.'
'I think I messed up the amounts, though. Didn't they want an hour? When I doubled the recipe, I didn't do enough. I don't think it'll work over forty minutes.'
Valerie moved into his lap. 'Let's be honest with each other; sure, you're a genius, but even a genius gets rusty. You were three years out of practice. Forty minutes'll be plenty.'
'I suppose you're right. Anyway, what can we do about it? Down is down.'
'The pressures you been under, if it works at all, it'll be a miracle.'
Max had to agree with her. 'A fantasmagoria.' He nodded.
THE MAN IN black was nearly stiff when Fezzik reached the wall. It was almost five o'clock and Fezzik had been carrying the corpse the whole way from Miracle Max's, back street to back street, alleyway to alleyway, and it was one of the hardest things he had ever done. Not taxing. He wasn't even winded. But if the pill was just what it looked like, a chocolate lump, then he, Fezzik, was going to have a lifetime of bad dreams of bodies growing stiff between his fingers.
When he at last was in the wall shadow, he said to Inigo, 'What now?'
'We've got to see if it's still safe. There might be a trap waiting.' It was the same part of the wall that led, shortly, to the Zoo, in the farther corner of the castle grounds. But if the albino's body had been discovered, then
