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.