The Eyes of the Dragon

56

On the following evening, shortly after nine had struck, Anders Peyna’s butler answered an unaccustomedly late knock and looked down his long nose at the figure of the Chief Warder standing on the doorstep. Arlen-that was the butler’s name-had seen Beson before, of course; like Arlen’s master, Beson was a part of the Kingdom’s legal machinery. But Arlen did not recognize him now. The beating Peter had given Beson had had a day to set, and his face was a sunset of reds and purples and yellows. His left eye had opened a little, but was still little more than a slit. He looked like a dwarvish ghoul, and the butler began to swing the door shut almost at once.

“Wait,” Beson said in a hard growl that made the butler hesitate. “I come with a message for your master.”

The butler hesitated for a moment and then began to swing the door closed again. The man’s sullen, swollen face was frightening. Could he actually be a dwarf, down from the north country? Supposedly the last of those wild, fur-clad tribes had either died or been killed off in his grandfather’s time, but still… one never knew…

“It is from Prince Peter,” Beson said. “If you close this door, you will hear hard things later from your master, thinks”

Arlen hesitated again, torn between closing the door against the ghoul and the power the name of Prince Peter still held. If this man came from Peter, he must be the Needle’s Chief Warder. Yet

“You don’t look like Beson,” he said.

“You don’t look like your father, neither, Arlen, and it’s made me wonder more than once where your mother may have been,” the lumpish ghoul retorted rudely, and stuck a smudged envelope through the crack still open in the door. “Here… take it to ’im. I’ll wait. Close the door if you want, although it’s devilish cold out here.”

Arlen didn’t care if it was twenty below. He didn’t intend to have the horrible-looking fellow toasting his feet in front of the fire in the servants’ kitchen. He snatched the envelope, shut the door, bolted it, started away… then returned and double-bolted it.