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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.
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It’s Flagg, De
He tried to scream, but no sound came out.
The mouth of the intruder did open; De
“Ulf!” De
“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, De
Two more shapes in the darkness, one taller than the other. Not Flagg, that much was clear. Castle guards, then. De
The two figures had stopped a little short of him.
“Come on,” De
“De
De
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 De
“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,” De
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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 De
“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 De
“Well, I just kept reminding myself of what would happen to me if I got caught,” De
Ben laughed at this and nodded, and De
“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 De