use to them in the thickly falling snow.
Frisky’s eyes were the weakest of the three, and she was in the lead. Her ears were sharp enough, and she had heard the ice groaning beneath the new snow… but the scent was too much on her mind for her to take much notice of the faint creaks… until the ice gave way beneath her and she plunged into the moat with a splash.
“Frisky! Fr-”
Ben clapped a hand over her mouth. She struggled to get away from him. Ben had now seen the danger, however, and held her fast.
Naomi needn’t have worried. Of course all dogs can swim, and with her thick, oily coat, Frisky was safer in the water than either of the humans would have been. She paddled almost to the castle wall amid chunks of rotted ice and whipped-cream globs of snow that quickly turned into dark slush and disap-peared. She raised her head, smelling, searching for the scent… and when she knew where it went, she turned and paddled back toward Ben and Naomi. She found the edge of the ice. Her paws broke it off, and she tried again. Naomi cried out.
“Be still, Naomi, or you’ll have us in the dungeons by dawn,” Ben said. “Hold my ankles.” He let her go and then sprawled on his belly. Naomi crouched behind him and seized his boots. This close to the ice, Ben could hear it groaning and muttering. It could have been one of us, he thought, and that would have been trouble indeed.
He spread his legs out a bit to distribute his weight better, and then grabbed Frisky by the forepaws just below her wide, strong chest. “Here you come, girl,” Ben grunted. “I hope.” Then he pulled.
For a moment, Ben thought that the ice would just go on breaking under Frisky’s weight as he dragged her forward-first he and then Naomi would follow Frisky into the moat. Crossing that moat on his way into the castle to play with his friend Peter on a summer’s day, with blue sky and white clouds reflecting off its surface, Ben had always thought it beautiful, like a paint-ing. He had never once suspected that he might die in it one black night during a snowstorm. And it smelled very bad.
“Pull me backward!” he grunted. “Your damn dog weighs a ton!”
“Don’t you say mean things about my dog, Ben Staad!”
Ben’s eyes were slitted shut with strain, his lips split open over clenched teeth. “A million pardons. And if you don’t start pulling me, I’m going to be taking a bath, I think.”
Somehow she managed to do it, although Ben and Frisky together must have been three times her own weight. Ben’s prone, splayed body dug a channel in the new powder; a snow pyramid built up in his crotch, the way it will build up in the angle of a wooden plow.
At last-it seemed like “at last” to Ben and Naomi, although in truth it was probably only a matter of seconds-Frisky’s chest stopped breaking the ice and slid onto it. A moment later, her rear paws were digging for purchase. Then she was up and shaking herself vigorously. Dirty moat water sprayed into Ben’s face.
“Pah!” he grimaced, wiping it off. “Thanks a lot, Frisky!”
But Frisky paid no attention. She was looking toward the wall of the castle again. Although the ice was already freezing to her pelt in dirty spicules, the scent was what interested her. She had smelled it clearly, above her but not far above her. There was a darkness there. No cold white no-smell stuff there.
Ben was getting to his feet, brushing the snow off.
“I’m sorry I yelled like that,” Naomi whispered. “If it had been any other dog but Frisky… do you think I was heard?”
“If you’d been heard, we’d have been challenged,” Ben whispered back. “Gods, that was close.” Now they could see the open water just in front of the ancient stone wall of Castle Delain’s outer redan, because they were looking for it.
“What do we do?”
“We can’t go on,” Ben whispered, “that’s obvious. But what did he do, Naomi? Where did he go from here? Maybe he did fly”
“If we-”
But Naomi never finished the thought, because that was when Frisky took matters into her own paws. All of her ancestors had been famous hunters, and it was in her blood. She had been set upon this exciting, enticing electric-blue scent, and she found she could not leave it. So she screwed her haunches down to the ice, tensed her sled-toughened muscles, and leaped into the dark. Her eyes, as I’ve said, were the least of her sensory equipment, and her leap really was blind; she could not see the dark hole of the sewer pipe from the edge of the ice.
But she had seen it from the water, and even if she hadn’t, she had her nose, and she knew it was there.
106
It’s Flagg, Dennis’s sleep-fuddled mind thought as that dark shape with the burning eyes swept down on him. It’s Flagg, he’s found me, and now he’ll rip my throat out with his teeth
He tried to scream, but no sound came out.
The mouth of the intruder did open; Dennis saw huge white teeth… and then a big warm tongue was lapping his face.
“Ulf!” Dennis said, trying to push the thing away. Paws came up on either shoulder, and Dennis fell back on his mattress of napkins like a pinned wrestler. Lap-lap, lick-lick. “Ulf!” Dennis said again, and the dark, shaggy shape uttered a low, companionable woof, as if to say I know it, I’m glad to see you, too.
“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.
“You met no one? No one at all?” Dennis asked anxiously.
