The Eyes of the Dragon (40 page)

He sat down and touched the stone. He slipped his palms down its sides, feeling its ragged edges and angles.

“Show me,” he murmured. “This is my command.”

At first, nothing. Then, little by little, the crystal began to glow from within. There was only a tiny light at first, diffuse and pallid. Flagg touched the crystal again, this time with the tips of his fingers. It had grown warm.

“Show me Peter. This is my command. Show me the whelp that dares put himself in my way, and show me what he plans to do.”

The light grew brighter . . . brighter . . . brighter. Eyes glittering, cruel thin lips parted to show his teeth, Flagg bent over his crystal. Now Peter, Ben, Dennis, and Naomi would have recognized their dream—and they would have recognized the glow which lit the magician's face, the glow which was not a candle.

The crystal's milky cast suddenly disappeared, drawing into the brightening glow. Now Flagg could see into its heart. His eyes widened . . . then narrowed in bewilderment.

Impatiently, Flagg passed his hands over the crystal, which now gave off waves of heat.

“Show me what I need to know! This is my command!”

“Bah!” Flagg cried, waving his hands over the crystal again. “Why do you show me these old, meaningless stories? I need to know how he plans to escape . . . and when! Now show me! This is my
command!
”.

The crystal had grown hotter and hotter. If he did not allow it to go dark soon, it would split apart forever, Flagg knew, and magic crystals were not easy to come by—it had taken thirty years of searching to find this one. But he would see it broken into a billion pieces before he gave up.

“This is my command!” he repeated again, and for the third time, the milkiness of the crystal drew inward. Flagg bent over it until its heat made his eyes water and gush tears. He slitted them . . . and then, in spite of the heat, they flew open wide in shock and fury.

It was Peter. Peter was slowly descending the side of the Needle. Surely this was some treacherous magic, because, although he was making hand-over-hand motions, there was no rope to be seen—

Or . . . was there?

Flagg waved a hand in front of his face, dissipating the heat for a moment. A rope? Not exactly. But there was something . . . something as gossamer as a strand of spiderweb . . . and yet it bore his weight.

“Peter,”
Flagg breathed, and at the sound of his voice, the tiny figure looked around.

Flagg blew on the crystal and its bright, wavering light went out. He saw its afterglow in front of his eyes as he sat in the dark.

Peter. Escaping. When? It had been night in the crystal, and Flagg had seen errant, gritty sheaves of snow blowing past the tiny figure working its way down the rounded wall. Was it to be later tonight? Tomorrow night? Sometime next week? Or—

Flagg pushed back from his desk and stood up with a lurch. His eyes filled with fire as he looked around his dark and stinking basement rooms.

“Enough,” he breathed. “By all the gods that ever were and ever will be, this is enough.”

He strode across the darkened room and seized a huge weapon that hung on the wall. It was clumsy, but he held it with ease and familiarity. Familiar with it? Yes, of course he was! He had swung it many times when he had lived here and done business as Bill Hinch, the most feared executioner Delain had ever known. This terrible blade had bitten through hundreds of necks. Above the blades, which were of twice-forged Anduan steel, was Flagg's own modification—a spiked iron ball. Each spike had been tipped with poison.

“
ENOUGH
! Flagg screamed again in a fury of rage and frustration and fear. The two-headed parrot, even in the depths of its unconsciousness, moaned at that sound.

Flagg pulled his cloak from the hook by the door, swept it over his shoulders, and fastened the clasp—a hammered-silver scarab beetle—at his throat.

It was enough. This time his plans would not be thwarted, certainly not by one hateful boy. Roland was dead, Peyna unbenched, the nobles driven into exile. There was no one to raise an outcry over one dead prince . . . especially one who had murdered his own father.

As he strode down the corridor toward the Dungeon Gate, Flagg began to laugh . . . a sound which would have given a stone statue bad dreams.

E
lagg's intuition was right. Peter had finished going over his rope of twisted linen fibers, but he was still in his tower room, awaiting the Crier's announcement of midnight, when Flagg burst out of the Dungeon Gate and began to cross the Plaza of the Needle. The Church of the Great Gods had fallen at quarter past eleven; it was quarter of twelve when the crystal showed Flagg what he wanted to know (and perhaps you'll agree with my idea that it tried to show him the truth in two other ways at first), and when Flagg started across the Plaza, it was still lacking ten minutes of midnight.

The Dungeon Gate was on the northeast side of the Needle. On the southwest side was a little castle entrance known as the Peddlers' Gate. A straight diagonal line could have been drawn between the Dungeon Gate and the Peddlers' Gate. At the exact midpoint of that line was the Needle itself, of course.

At almost the same time that Flagg came out of the Dungeon Gate, Ben, Naomi, Dennis, and Frisky came out of the Peddlers' Gate. They approached each other without knowing it. The Needle was between them, but the wind had dropped, and Ben's party should have heard the clang-rasp of Flagg's bootheels against the cobbles; Flagg should have heard the faint squeak of an ungreased wheel. But all of them, including Frisky (who was back to her old job of pulling again), were lost in their own thoughts.

Ben and his party reached the Needle first.

“Now—” Ben began, and at that moment, from the other side, less than forty paces around the outside perimeter from where they now stood, Flagg began to hammer on the triple-bolted Warders' Door.

“Open!”
Flagg screamed.
“Open in the name of the
King!”

“What—” Dennis began, and then Naomi clamped a hand like steel over his mouth and looked at Ben with frightened eyes.

T
he voice came spiraling up to Peter on the cold post-storm air. It was faint, that voice, but perfectly clear.

Open in the name of hell, you mean,
Peter thought.

The good brave boy had become a good brave man, but when he heard that hoarse voice and remembered that narrow white face and those reddish eyes, always shadowed by the hood of his robe, Peter's bones turned to ice and his stomach to fire. His mouth went as dry as a wood chip. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. His hair stood on end. If someone has ever told you that being good and being brave means you will never be afraid, what that someone told you is not so. At that moment, Peter had never been so afraid in his whole life.

Peter got up and, for a moment, he thought he was going to simply fall over as his legs buckled under him. Doom was down there, hammering at the Warders' Door to be let in.

He went into his bedroom and pulled out the rough iron cotter pins that held the crude bedframe together. The bed collapsed. Peter grabbed one of the iron side-bars and carried it back into the sitting room. He had measured this bar carefully and knew it was wider than his window, and while its outer surface was rusted, he thought it was strong yet through the middle.
It had better be
, he thought.
It would be a bitter joke indeed if my rope held but my anchor broke
.

He looked out briefly. He could see no one now, but he had observed three figures crossing the Plaza toward the Needle shortly before Flagg's wild pounding had begun. Dennis had recruited friends, then. Had one of them been Ben? Peter hoped so, but did not dare to really believe it. Who was the third? And why the wagon? They were questions he had no time for now.

In the stillness of almost midnight, Peter heard the rattle-thud of the wrist-thick iron bolts far below being drawn back. He supposed the door opened, but he didn't hear that. Silence . . .

. . . and then a gurgling, choked scream.

T
he unfortunate Lesser Warder who finally answered Flagg's summons lived less than four seconds after drawing the third bolt on the Warders' Door. He caught a nightmare glimpse of a white face, glaring red eyes, and a black cloak that blew backward in the dying breeze like the wings of a raven. He screamed. Then the air was filled with a dry whooshing sound. The Lesser Warder, who was still half drunk, looked up just as Flagg's battle-axe split his head in two.

“Next time someone knocks in the name of the King, bestir yourselves and you won't have a mess to clean up in the morning!” Flagg bellowed. Then, laughing wildly, he kicked aside the body and strode up the corridor toward the stairs. Things were still all right. He had awakened to the danger in time. He knew it.

He
felt
it.

He opened a door on the right and stepped into the main corridor leading away from the courtroom where Anders Peyna had once dispensed justice. At the end of that corridor, the stairs began. He looked up, grinning his dreadful, sharklike grin.

“Here I come, Peter!”
he cried happily, his voice echoing and rebounding, spiraling up and up and up to where Peter stood preparing to tie his thin rope to the bar he had taken from the bed.
“Here I come, dear Peter, to do what I should have done a long, long time ago!”

Flagg's grin broadened and now he looked terrible indeed—he looked like a demon which might have climbed lately from some reeking pit in the earth. He raised the executioner's axe; drops of the slain warder's blood fell onto his face and ran down his cheeks like tears.

“Here I come, dear Peter, to chop off your head!”
Flagg screamed and began to run up the stairs.

One. Three. Six. Ten.

P
eter's shaking hands went wrong somehow. A knot he had made easily a thousand times before now fell apart and he had to start over again.

That was idiotic. He was scared, all right; scared green. Thomas would have been astounded to know that Peter had
always
been frightened of Flagg; Peter had just hid it better.