The Eyes of the Dragon (39 page)

And I must tell you now that Peter's rope was bound to break. When he tested it, it had held his weight . . . but there was one fact about that mystic thing called “breaking strain” that Peter didn't know. Yosef hadn't known, either. The ox drivers knew it, though, and if Peter had asked them, they would have told him an old axiom, one known to sailors, loggers, seamstresses, and anyone else who works with thread or rope:
The longer the cord, the sooner the break.

Peter's short test rope had held him.

The rope to which he meant to entrust his life—the very
thin
rope—was about two hundred and sixty-five feet long.

It was bound to break, I tell you, and the cobbles below waited to catch him, and break his bones, and bleed away his life.

T
here were many disasters and near-disasters on that long, stormy day, just as there were many acts of heroism, some successful and some doomed to failure. Some farmhouses in the Inner Baronies blew over, as the houses of the indolent pigs were blown over by the wolfs hungry breath in the old story. Some of those who were thus rendered homeless managed to work their way across the white wastes to the castle keep, roped together for safety; others wandered off the Delain Great Road and into the whiteness, where they were lost—their frozen, wolf-gnawed bodies wouldn't be found until the spring.

But by seven that evening, the snow had finally begun to abate a little, and the wind to fall. The excitement was ending, and the castle went to bed early. There was little else to do. Fires were banked, children tucked in, last cups of field-tea drunk, prayers said.

One by one, the lights went out. The Crier called in his loudest voice, but the wind still tore his voice out of his mouth at eight o' the clock and again at nine; it was not until ten that he could be heard again, and by then, most people were asleep.

Thomas was also asleep—but his sleep was not easy. There was no Dennis to stay with him and comfort him this night; Dennis was still home ill. Thomas had thought several times of sending a page to check on him (or even to go himself; he liked Dennis very much), but something always seemed to come up—papers to sign . . . petitions to hear . . . and, of course, bottles of wine to be drunk. Thomas hoped Flagg would come and give him a powder to help him sleep . . . but ever since Flagg's useless trip into the north, the magician had been strange and distant. It was as if Flagg knew there was something wrong, but could not quite tell what it was. Thomas hoped the magician would come, but hadn't dared to summon him.

As always, the shrieking wind reminded Thomas of the night his father died, and he feared he would have a hard time getting to sleep . . . and that, once he was asleep, horrible nightmares might come, dreams in which his father would scream and rant and finally burst into flames. So Thomas did what he had grown accustomed to doing; he spent the day with a glass of wine always in his hand, and if I told you how many bottles of wine this mere boy consumed before he finally went to bed at ten o' the clock, you probably wouldn't believe me—so ! I won't say. But it was a lot.

Lying there miserably on his sofa, wishing that Dennis was in his accustomed place on the hearth, Thomas thought:
My head aches and my stomach feels sick . . . Is being King worth all this? I wonder.
You might wonder, too . . . but before Thomas himself could wonder anymore, he fell heavily asleep.

He slept for almost an hour . . . and then he rose and walked. Out the door he went and down the halls, ghostly in his long white nightshirt. This night a late-going maid with an armload of sheets saw him, and he looked so much like old Kng Roland that the maid dropped her sheets and fled, screaming.

Thomas's darkly dreaming mind heard her screams and thought they were his father's.

He walked on, turning into the less used corridor. He paused halfway down and pushed the secret stone. He went into the passageway, closed the door behind him, and walked to the end of the corridor. He pushed aside the panels which were behind Niner's glass eyes, and though he was still asleep, he pushed his face up to the holes, as if looking into his dead father's sitting room. And here we will leave the unfortunate boy for a while, with the smell of wine surrounding him and tears of regret running from his sleeping eyes and down his cheeks.

He was sometimes a cruel boy, often a sad boy, this pretend King, and he had almost always been a weak boy . . . but even now I must tell you that I do not believe he was ever really a bad boy. If you hate him because of the things he did—and the things he
allowed
to be done—I will understand; but if you do not pity him a little as well, I will be surprised.

A
t quarter past eleven on that momentous night, the storm breathed its last gasp. A tremendous cold gust of wind swept down on the castle. It ran in excess of a hundred miles an hour. It tore the thinning clouds overhead apart like the swipe of a great hand. Cold, watery moonlight shone through.

In the Third East'ard Alley was a squat stone tower called the Church of the Great Gods; it had stood there since time out of mind. Many people worshipped there, but it was empty now. A good thing, too. The tower was not very tall—nowhere near the height of the Needle—but it nevertheless stood high above the neighboring buildings in the Third East'ard Alley, and all day long it had been punished by the unbroken force of the storm wind. This final gust was too much for it. The top thirty feet—all stone—simply blew off, as a hat might fly off a scarecrow in a high gale. Part landed in the alley; part hit the neighboring buildings. There was a tremendous crash.

Most of the populace of the castle keep, wearied by the excitement of the storm and already sleeping deeply, took no mind of the fall of the Church of the Great Gods (although they would wonder greatly over the snow-covered wreckage in the morning). Most simply muttered, turned over, and went back to sleep.

Some Guards of the Watch—those not too drunk to care—heard it, of course, and ran to see what had happened. Other than by these few, the fall of the tower went mostly unremarked when it happened . . . but there were a few others who heard it, and by now you know them all.

Ben, Dennis, and Naomi, who were getting ready for their attempt to rescue the rightful King, heard it in the napkin storeroom, and looked around at each other with wide eyes. “Never mind,” Ben said, after a moment. “I don't know what it was, but it doesn't matter. Let's get on with it.”

Beson and the Lesser Warders, all of them drunk, didn't hear the Church of the Great Gods fall down, but Peter did. He was sitting on the floor of his bedroom, carefully pulling his woven rope through his fingers, looking anxiously for weak points. He raised his head at the snow-muted thunder of falling stones, and went rapidly to the window. He could see nothing ; whatever had fallen was on the Needle's far side. After several considering moments, he went back to his rope. Midnight was close now, and he had come to much the same conclusion as his friend Ben. It didn't matter. The dice had been thrown. Now he must go on.

Deep in the darkness of the secret passage, Thomas heard the muffled thunder-thud of the falling tower and woke up. He heard the muffled barking of dogs below him and realized in horror where he was.

And one other who had been sleeping lightly and dreaming troubled dreams awoke at the fall of the tower. He woke even though he was deep in the bowels of the castle.

“Disaster!”
one of the parrot's two heads screamed.

“Fire, flood
,
and escape!” the other screamed.

Flagg had awakened. I have told you that evil is sometimes strangely blind, and so it is. Sometimes evil is lulled with no reason, and sleeps.

But now Flagg had awakened.

F
lagg had come back from his trip into the north with a bit of a fever, a heavy cold, and a troubled mind.

Something wrong, something wrong
. The very stones of the castle seemed to whisper it to him . . . but Flagg was damned if he knew what it was. All he knew for sure was that unknown “something wrong” had sharp teeth. It felt like a ferret running around in his brain, taking a bite here and a bite there. He knew exactly when that animal had begun to run and gnaw: while he was coming back from the fruitless expedition in search of the rebels. Because . . . because . . .

They hadn't been, and Flagg hated to be fooled. Worse, he hated feeling that he might have made a mistake. If he had made a mistake about where the rebels were to be found, then perhaps he had made mistakes about other things. What other things? He didn't know. But his dreams were bad. That small, bad-tempered animal ran around in his head, worrying him, insisting that he had forgotten things, that other things were going on behind his back. It raced, it gnawed, it ruined his sleep. Flagg had medicines that would rid him of his cold, but none that would touch that growing ferret in his brain.

He asked himself this question over and over again, and in truth it seemed—on the surface, at least—that nothing could be. For many centuries, the old dark chaos inside him had hated the love and light and order of Detain, and he had worked hard to destroy all that—to knock it down as that last cold gust of storm had knocked down the Church of the Great Gods. Always, something had interfered with his plans—a Kyla the Good, a Sasha, someone, something. But now he saw no possible interference, no matter where he looked. Thomas was totally his creature; if Flagg told him to step off the highest parapet of the castle, the fool would want to know only at which o'clock he should do it. The farmers were groaning under the weight of the killing taxes Flagg had persuaded Thomas to impose.

Yosef had told Peter there was a breaking strain on people as well as on ropes and chains, and so there is—the farmers and the merchants of Detain had nearly reached theirs. The rope by which the great blocks of taxes are attached to any citizenry is simple loyalty—loyalty to King, to country, to government. Flagg knew that if he made the tax-blocks big enough, all the ropes would snap, and the stupid oxen—for that was really how he saw the people of Detain—would stampede, knocking down everything in their path. The first of the oxen had already broken free and had gathered in the north. They called themselves exiles now, but Flagg knew they would call themselves rebels soon enough. Peyna had been driven away and Peter was locked in the Needle.

So what could be wrong?

Nothing! Damn it,
nothing!

But the ferret ran and squirmed and gnawed and twisted. Many times over the last three or four weeks he had awakened in a cold sweat, not because of his recurring fever but because he had had some horrible dream. What was the substance of this dream? He could never remember. He only knew that he woke from it with his left hand pressed to his left eye, as if he had been wounded there—and that eye would burn, although he could find nothing wrong with it.

O
n this night, Flagg awoke with his dream fresh in his mind, because he was awakened before it was over. It was, of course, the fall of the Church of the Great Gods which woke him.

“Huh!”
Flagg cried, sitting bolt upright in his chair. His eyes were wide and staring, his white cheeks damp and shiny with sweat.

“Disaster!”
one of the parrot's heads screamed.

He looked down at his hands and saw that they were trembling. This infuriated him, and he sprang out of his chair.

“He means to escape,” he muttered, running his hands through his hair. “He means to try, anyway. But how? How? What's his Plan? Who helped him? They'll pay with their heads, I promise that . . . and they won't come off all in a chop, no! They'll come off an inch . . . a haft-inch . . . a quarter-inch . . . at a time. They'll be driven insane with the agony long before they die . . .”

“Insane!”
one of the parrot heads shrieked.

“Agony!”
the other shrieked back.

“Will you shut up and let me think!”
Flagg howled. He seized a jar filled with murky brown fluid from a nearby table and threw it at the parrot's cage. It struck and shattered; there was a flash of bright, heatless light. The parrot's two heads squawked in terror; it fell off its perch and lay stunned at the bottom of its cage until morning.

Flagg began to pace rapidly back and forth. His teeth were bared. His hands worked together restlessly, the fingers of one warring with the fingers of the other. His boots struck up greenish sparks from the niter-caked stones of his laboratory floor; these sparks smelled like summer lightning.

He could not remember. Already the dream was fading. But . . .

“
I have
to know!” he whispered.
“I have to know!”

Because it would be soon; he sensed that much. It would be very, very soon.

He found his keyring and opened the bottom drawer of his desk. He took out a box made of finely carved ironwood, opened it, and drew out a leather bag. He opened the bag's drawstring top and carefully took out a chunk of rock that seemed to glow with its own inner light. This rock was as milky as an old man's blind eye. It looked like a piece of soapstone, but was in fact a crystal—Flagg's magic crystal.

He circled his room, turning down the lamps and capping the candles. Soon his apartment was in absolute darkness. Dark or not, Flagg returned to his desk with quick confidence, passing easily around objects that you or I would have barked our shins on or fallen over. The dark was nothing to the King's magician; he liked the dark, and he could see in it like a cat.