The Eyes of the Dragon

26

Tommy, you look down in the dumps!” he cried. The hood of his cloak was pushed back on that day, and he looked almost normal.

Almost.

Tommy felt down in them. He had suffered through a long luncheon at which his father had praised Peter’s scores in geometry and navigation to his advisors with the most lavish superlatives. Roland had never rightly understood either. He knew that a triangle had three sides and a square had four; he knew you could find your way out of the woods when you were lost by following Old Star in the sky; and that was where his knowledge ended. That was where Thomas’s knowledge ended, too, so he felt that luncheon would never be done. Worse, the meat was just the way his father liked it-bloody and barely cooked. Bloody meat made Thomas feel almost sick.

“My lunch didn’t agree with me, that’s all,” he said to Flagg.

“Well, I know just the thing to cheer you up,” Flagg said. “I’ll show you a secret of the castle, Tommy my boy.”

Thomas was playing with a buggerlug bug. He had it on his desk and had set his schoolbooks around it in a series of barriers. If the trundling beetle looked as if he might find a way out, Thomas would shift one of the books to keep him in.

“I’m pretty tired,” Thomas said. This was not a lie. Hearing Peter praised so highly always made him feel tired.

“You’ll like it,” Flagg said in a tone that was mostly wheedling… but a little threatening, too.

Thomas looked at him apprehensively. “There aren’t any… any bats, are there?”

Flagg laughed cheerily-but that laugh raised gooseflesh on Thomas’s arms anyway. He clapped Thomas on the back. “Not a bat! Not a drip! Not a draft! Warm as toast! And you can peek at your father, Tommy!”

Thomas knew that peeking was just another way of saying spying, and that spying was wrong-but this had been a shrewd shot all the same. This next time the buggerlug bug found a way to escape between two of the books, Thomas let it go. “All right,” he said, “but there better not be any bats.”

Flagg slipped an arm around the boy’s shoulders. “No bats, I swear-but here’s something for you to mull over in your mind, Tommy. You’ll not only see your father, you’ll see him through the eyes of his greatest trophy.”

Thomas’s own eyes widened with interest. Flagg was satisfied. The fish was hooked and landed. “What do you mean?”

“Come and see for yourself,” was all he would say.

He led Thomas through a maze of corridors. You would have become lost very soon, and I probably would have gotten lost myself before long, but Thomas knew this way as well as you know your way through your own bedroom in the dark-at least he did until Flagg led him aside.

They had almost reached the King’s own apartments when Flagg pushed open a recessed wooden door that Thomas had never really noticed before. Of course it had always been there, but in castles there are often doors-whole wings, even-that have mastered the art of being dim.

This passage was quite narrow. A chambermaid with an arm-load of sheets passed them; she was so terrified to have met the King’s magician in this slim stone throat that it seemed she would happily have shrunk into the very pores of the stone blocks to avoid touching him. Thomas almost laughed because sometimes he felt a little like that himself when Flagg was around. They met no one else at all.

Faintly, from below them, he could hear dogs barking, and that gave him a rough idea of where he was. The only dogs inside the castle proper were his father’s hunting dogs, and they were probably barking because it was time for them to be fed. Most of Roland’s dogs were now almost as old as he was, and because he knew how the cold ached in his own bones, Roland had commanded that a kennel be made for them right here in the castle. To reach the dogs from his father’s main sitting cham-ber, one went down a flight of stairs, turned right, and walked ten yards or so up an interior corridor. So Thomas knew they were about thirty feet to the right of his father’s private rooms.

Flagg stopped so suddenly that Thomas almost ran into him. The magician looked swiftly around to make sure they had the passageway to themselves. They did.

“Fourth stone up from the one at the bottom with the chip in it,” Flagg said. “Press it. Quick!”

Ah, there was a secret here, all right, and Thomas loved secrets. Brightening, he counted up four stones from the one with the chip and pressed. He expected some neat little bit of Jiggery-pokery a sliding panel, perhaps-but he was quite unprepared for what did happen.

The stone slid in with perfect ease to a depth of about three inches. There was a click. An entire section of wall suddenly swung inward, revealing a dark vertical crack. This wasn’t a wall at all! It was a huge door! Thomas’s jaw dropped.

Flagg slapped Thomas’s bottom.

“Quick, I said, you little fool!” he cried in a low voice. There was urgency in his voice, and this wasn’t simply put on for Thomas’s benefit, as many of Flagg’s emotions were. He looked right and left to verify that the passage was still empty. “Go! Now!”

Thomas looked at the dark crack that had been revealed and thought uneasily about bats again. But one look at Flagg’s face showed him that this would be a bad time to attempt a discussion on the subject.

He pushed the door open wider and stepped into the darkness. Flagg followed at once. Thomas heard the low flap of the magician’s cloak as he turned and shoved the wall closed again. The darkness was utter and complete, the air still and dry. Before he could open his mouth to say anything, the blue flame at the tip of Flagg’s index finger flared alight, throwing a harsh blue-white fan of illumination.

Thomas cringed without even thinking about it, and his hands flew up.

Flagg laughed harshly. “No bats, Tommy. Didn’t I promise?”

Nor were there. The ceiling was quite low, and Thomas could see for himself. No bats, and warm as toast… just as the magician had promised. By the light of Flagg’s magic finger-flare, he could also see they were in a secret passage which was about twenty-five feet long. Walls, floor, and ceiling were covered with ironwood boards. He couldn’t see the far end very well, but it looked perfectly blank.

He could still hear the muffled barking of the dogs.

“When I said be quick, I meant it,” Flagg said. He bent over Thomas, a vague, looming shadow that was, in this darkness, rather batlike itself. Thomas drew back a step, uneasily. As always, there was an unpleasant smell about the magician-a smell of secret powders and bitter herbs. “You know where the passage is now, and I’ll not be the one to tell you not to use it. But if you’re ever caught using it, you must say you discovered it by accident.”

The shape loomed even closer, forcing Thomas back another step.

“If you say I showed it to you, Tommy, I’ll make you sorry.”

“I’ll never tell,” Thomas said. His words sounded thin and shaky.

“Good. Better yet if no one ever sees you using it. Spying on a King is serious business, prince or not. Now follow me. And be quiet.”

Flagg led him to the end of the passageway. The far wall was also dressed with ironwood, but when Flagg raised the flame that burned from the tip of his finger, Thomas saw two little panels. Flagg pursed his lips and blew out the light.

In utter blackness, he whispered: “Never open these two panels with a light burning. He might see. He’s old, but he still sees well. He might see something, even though the eyeballs are of tinted glass.”

“What-”

“Shhhh! There isn’t much wrong with his ears, either.”

Thomas fell quiet, his heart pounding in his chest. He felt a great excitement that he didn’t understand. Later he thought that he had been excited because he knew in some way what was going to happen.

In the darkness he heard a faint sliding sound, and suddenly a dim ray of light-torchlight-lit the darkness. There was a second sliding sound and a second ray of light appeared. Now he could see Flagg again, very faintly, and his own hands when he held them up before him.

Thomas saw Flagg step up to the wall and bend a little; then most of the light was cut out as he put his eyes to the two holes through which the rays of light fell. He looked for a moment, then grunted and stepped away. He motioned to Thomas. “Have a look,” he said.

More excited than ever, Thomas cautiously put his eyes to the holes. He saw clearly enough, although everything had an odd greenish-yellow aspect-it was as if he were looking through smoked glass. A sense of perfect, delighted wonder rose in him. He was looking down into his father’s sitting room. He saw his father slouched by the fire in his favorite chair-one with high wings which threw shadows across his lined face.

It was very much the room of a huntsman; in our world such a room would often be called a den, although this one was as big as some ordinary houses. Flaring torches lined the long walls. Heads were mounted everywhere: heads of bear, of deer, of elk, of wildebeest, of cormorant. There was even a grand featherex, which is the cousin of our legendary bird the phoenix. Thomas could not see the head of Niner, the dragon his father had killed before he was born, but this did not immediately register on him.

His father was picking morosely at a sweet. A pot of tea steamed near at hand.

That was all that was really happening in that great room that could have (and at times had) held upward of two hundred people just his father, with a fur robe draped around him, having a solitary afternoon tea. Yet Thomas watched for a time that seemed endless. His fascination and his excitement with this view of his father cannot be told. His heartbeat, which had been rapid before, doubled. Blood sang and pounded in his head. His hands clenched into fists so tight that he would later discover bloody crescent moons imprinted into his palms where his fin-gernails had bitten.

Why was he so excited simply to be looking at an old man picking halfheartedly at a piece of cake? Well, first you must remember that the old man wasn’t just any old man. He was Thomas’s father. And spying, sad to say, has its own attraction. When you can see people doing something and they don’t see you, even the most trivial actions seem important.

After awhile, Thomas began to feel a little ashamed of what he was doing, and that was not really surprising. Spying on a person is a kind of stealing, after all-it’s stealing a look at what people do when they think they are alone. But that is also one of its chief fascinations, and Thomas might have looked for hours if Flagg had not murmured, “Do you know where you are, Tommy?”

“I-” don’t think so, he was going to add, but of course he did know. His sense of direction was good, and with a little thought he could imagine the reverse of this angle. He suddenly understood what Flagg meant when he said he, Thomas, would see his father through the eyes of Roland’s greatest trophy. He was looking down at his father from a little more than halfway up the west wall… and that was where the greatest head of all was hung-that of Niner, his father’s dragon.

He might see something, even though the eyeballs are of tinted glass.

Now he understood that, too. Thomas had to clap his hands to his mouth to stifle a shrill giggle.

Flagg slid the little panels shut again… but he, too, was smiling.

“No!” Thomas whispered. “No, I want to see more!”

“Not this afternoon,” Flagg said. “You’ve seen enough this afternoon. You can come again when you want… although if you come too often, you’ll surely be caught. Now come on. We’re going back.”

Flagg relit the magic flame and led Thomas down the corridor again. At the end, he put the light out and there was another sliding sound as he opened a peephole. He guided Thomas’s hand to it so he would know where it was, and then bade him look.

“Notice that you can see the passageway in both directions,” Flagg said. “Always be careful to look before you open the secret door, or someday you will be surprised.”

Thomas put one eye to the peephole and saw, directly across the corridor, an ornate window with glass sides that angled slightly into the passageway. It was much too fancy for such a small passageway, but Thomas understood without having to be told that it had been put here by whoever had made the secret passageway. Looking into the angled sides, he could indeed see a ghostly reflection of the corridor in both directions.

“Empty?” Flagg whispered.

“Yes,” Thomas whispered back.

Flagg pushed an interior spring (again guiding Thomas’s hand to it for future reference), and the door clicked open. “Quickly now!” Flagg said. They were out and the door was shut behind them in a trice.

Ten minutes later, they were back in Thomas’s rooms.

“Enough excitement for one day,” Flagg said. “Remember what I told you, Tommy: don’t use the passageway so often that you’ll be caught, and if you are caught” -Flagg’s eyes glittered grimly-"remember that you found that place by accident.”

“I will,” Thomas said quickly. His voice was high and it squeaked like a hinge that needed oil. When Flagg looked at him that way, his heart felt like a bird caught in his chest, fluttering in panic.