The Eyes of the Dragon (9 page)

Roland had taken a cold in the damp. He took cold more and more easily these days, and Flagg's medicines, potent as they were, were losing their power to cure him. One of these colds—perhaps even the one he was hacking and wheezing with now—would eventually deepen into the Wet Lung Disease, and that would kill him. Magic medicines were not like doctors' medicines, and Flagg knew that one of the reasons the potions he gave the old King were now so slow to work, was that he, Flagg, no longer really
wanted
them to work. The only reason he was keeping Roland alive was that he feared Peter.

I wish you were dead, old man
, Flagg thought with childish anger as he sat before a guttering candle, listening to the wind shriek without and his two-headed parrot mutter sleepily to itself within.
For a row of pins—a very short row at that—I'd kill you myself for all the trouble you and your stupid wife and your elder son have caused me. The joy of killing you would almost be worth the ruin of my plans.

Suddenly he froze, sitting upright, staring off into the darkness of his underground rooms, where the shadows moved uneasily. His eyes glittered silver. An idea blazed in his mind like a torch.

The candle flared a brilliant green and then went out.

“Death!”
one of the parrot's two heads shrieked in the darkness.

“Murder!”
shrieked the other.

And in that blackness, unseen by anyone, Flagg began to laugh.

O
f all the weapons ever used to commit regicide—the murder of a King—none has been as frequently used as poison. And no one has greater knowledge of poisons than a magician.

Flagg, one of the greatest magicians who ever lived, knew all the poisons that we know—arsenic; strychnine; the curare, which steals inward, paralyzing all the muscles and the heart last; nicotine; belladonna; nightshade; toadstool. He knew the poison venoms of a hundred snakes and spiders; the clear distillation of the clanah lily which smells like honey but kills its victims in screaming torments; Deadly Clawfoot which grows in the deepest shadows of the Dismal Swamp. Flagg did not know just dozens of poisons but dozens of dozens, each worse than the last. They were all neatly ranked on the shelves of an inner room where no servant ever went. They were in beakers, in phials, in little envelopes. Each deadly item was neatly marked. This was Flagg's chapel of screams-in-waiting—agony's antechamber, foyer of fevers, dressing room for death. Flagg visited it often when he felt out of sorts and wanted to cheer himself up. In this devil's marketplace waited all those things that humans, who are made of flesh and are so weak, dread: hammering headaches, screaming stomach cramps, detonations of diarrhea, vomiting, collapsing blood vessels, paralysis of the heart, exploding eyeballs, swelling, blackening tongues, madness.

But the worst poison of all Flagg kept separate from even these. In his study there was a desk. Every drawer of this desk was locked . . . but one was triple-locked. In it was a teak box, carved all over with magical symbols . . . runes and such. The lock on this box was unique. Its plate seemed to be a dull orange steel, but very close inspection showed it was really some sort of vegetable matter. It was, in fact, a kleffa carrot, and once a week Flagg watered this living lock with a tiny spray bottle. The kleffa carrot also seemed to have some dull species of intelligence. If anyone tried to jimmy the kleffa lock open, or even if the wrong someone tried to use the right key, the lock would scream. Inside this box was a smaller box, which opened with a key Flagg wore always around his neck.

Inside this second box was a packet. Inside the packet was a small quantity of green sand. Pretty, you would have said, but nothing spectacular. Nothing to write home to Mother about. Yet this green sand was one of the deadliest poisons in all the worlds, so deadly that even Flagg was afraid of it. It came from the desert of Grenh. This huge poisoned waste lay even beyond Garlan, and was a land unknown in Delain. Grenh could be approached only on a day when the wind was blowing the other way, because a single breath of the fumes which came from the desert of Grenh would cause death.

Not instant death. That was not the way the poison worked. For a day or two—perhaps even three—the person who breathed the poison fumes (or even worse, swallowed the grains of sand) would feel fine—perhaps better than ever before in his life. Then, suddenly, his lungs would grow red-hot, his skin would begin to smoke, and his body would shrivel like the body of a mummy. Then he would drop dead, often with his hair on fire. Someone who breathed or swallowed this deadly stuff would burn from the inside out.

This was Dragon Sand, and there was no antidote, no cure. What fun.

On that wild, rainy night, Flagg determined to give a bit of Dragon Sand to Roland in a glass of wine. It had become Peter's custom to take his father a glass of wine each night, shortly before Roland turned in. Everyone in the palace knew it, and commented on what a loyal son Peter was. Roland enjoyed his son's company as much as the wine he brought, Flagg thought, but a certain maiden had caught Peter's eye and he rarely stayed longer than half an hour with his father these days.

If Flagg came one night after Peter had left, Flagg did not think the old man would turn down a second glass of wine.

A very special glass of wine.

A hot vintage
,
my Lord
, Flagg thought, a grin dawning on his narrow face.
A hot vintage indeed, and why not? The vineyard was right next door to hell
,
I think
,
and when this stuff starts working in your guts
,
you'll think hell is where you are
.

Flagg threw back his head and began to laugh.

O
nce his plan was laid—a plan that would rid him of both Roland and Peter forever—Flagg wasted no time. He first used all his wizardry to make the King well again. He was delighted to find that his magic potions worked better than they had for a long, long time. It was another irony. He earnestly wanted to make Roland better, so the potions worked. But he wanted to make the King better so he could kill him and make sure everyone knew it was murder. It was really quite funny, when you stopped to think it over.

On a windy night less than a week after the King's hacking cough had ceased, Flagg unlocked his desk and took out the teak box. He murmured, “Well done,” to the kleffa carrot, which squeaked mindlessly in reply, and then lifted the heavy lid and took out the smaller box inside. He used the key around his neck to open it, and took out the packet that contained the Dragon Sand. He had bewitched this packet, and it was immune to the Dragon Sand's terrible power. Or so he thought. Flagg took no chances, and removed the packet with a small pair of silver tweezers. He laid it beside one of the King's goblets on his desk. Sweat stood out on his forehead in great round drops, for this was ticklish work indeed. One little mistake and he would pay for it with his life.

Flagg went out into the corridor that led to the dungeons and began to pant. He was hyperventilating. When you breathe rapidly, you fill your whole body with oxygen, and you can hold your breath for a long time. During the critical stage of his preparations, Flagg did not mean to breathe at all. There would be no mistakes, big or little. He was having too much fun to die.

He took a final great gasp of clean air from the barred window just outside the door to his apartment and reentered his rooms. He went to the envelope, took his dagger from his belt, and delicately slit it open. There was a flat piece of obsidian, which the magician used as a paperweight, on his desk—in those days, obsidian was the hardest rock known. Using the tweezers again, he grasped the packet, turned it upside down, and poured out most of the green sand. He saved back a tiny bit—hardly more than a dozen grains, but this bit of extra was extremely important to his plans. Hard as the obsidian was, the rock immediately began to smoke.

Thirty seconds had passed now.

He picked up the obsidian, careful that not a single grain of Dragon Sand should touch his skin—if it did, it would work inward until it reached his heart and set it on fire. He tilted the stone over the goblet and poured it in.

Now, quickly, before the sand could began to eat into the glass, he poured in some of the King's favorite wine—the same sort of wine Peter would be taking his father about now. The sand dissolved immediately. For a moment the red wine glimmered a sinister green, and then it returned to its usual color.

Fifty seconds.

Flagg went back to his desk. He picked up the flat rock and took his dagger by its handle. Only a few grains of Dragon Sand had touched the blade when he slit through the paper, but already they were working their way in, and evil little streamers of smoke rose from the pocks in the Anduan steel. He carried both the stone and the dagger out into the hallway.

Seventy seconds, and his chest was beginning to cry for air.

Thirty feet down the hallway, which led to the dungeon if you followed it far enough (a trip no one in Delain wanted to make), there was a grating in the floor. Flagg could hear gurgling water, and if he had not been holding his breath, he would have smelled a foul stench. This was one of the castle's sewers. He dropped both the rock and the blade into it and grinned at the double splash in spite of his pounding chest. Then he hurried back to the window, leaned far out, and took breath after gasping breath.

When he had his wind back, he returned to his study. Now only the tweezers, the packet, and the glass of wine stood on the desk. There was not so much as a grain of sand on the tweezers, and the bit of sand left inside the bewitched packet could not harm him as long as he took reasonable care.

He felt he had done very well indeed so far. His work was by no means done, but it was well begun. He bent over the goblet and inhaled deeply. There was no danger now; when the sand was mixed with a liquid, its fumes became harmless and undetectable. Dragon Sand made deadly vapors only when it touched a solid, such as stone.

Such as flesh.

Flagg held the goblet up to the light, admiring its bloody glow.

“A final glass of wine, my King,” he said, and laughed until the two-headed parrot screamed in fear. “Something to warm your guts.”

He sat down, turned over his hourglass, and began to read from a huge book of spells. Flagg had been reading from this book—which was bound in human skin—for a thousand years and had gotten through only a quarter of it. To read too long of this book, written on the high, distant Plains of Leng by a madman named Alhazred, was to risk madness.

An hour . . . just an hour. When the top half of his hourglass was empty, he could be sure Peter would have come and gone. An hour, and he could take Roland this final glass of wine. For a moment, Flagg looked at the bone-white sand slipping smoothly through the waist of the hourglass, and then he bent calmly over his book.

R
oland was pleased and touched that Flagg should have brought him a glass of wine that night before he went to bed. He drank it off in two large gulps, and declared that it had warmed him greatly.

Smiling inside his hood, Flagg said: “I thought it would, your Highness.”

W
hether it was fate or only luck that caused Thomas to see Flagg with his father that night is another question you must answer for yourself. I only know that he
did
see, and that it happened in large part because Flagg had been at pains over the years to make a special friend of this friendless, miserable boy.

I'll explain in a moment—but first I must correct a wrong idea you may have about magic.

In stories of wizardry, there are three kinds that are usually spoken of almost carelessly, as if any secondclass wizard could do them. These are turning lead into gold, changing one's shape, and making oneself invisible. The first thing you should know is that real magic is never easy, and if you think it is, just try making your least favorite aunt disappear the next time she comes to spend a week or two. Real magic is
hard
, and although it is easier to do evil magic than good, even bad magic is tolerably hard.

Turning lead into gold
can
be done, once you know the names to call on, and if you can find someone to show you exactly the right trick of splitting the loaves of lead. Shape changing and invisibility, however, are impossible . . . or so close to it that you might as well use the word.

From time to time Flagg—who was a great eaves-dropper—had listened to fools tell tales about young princes who escaped the clutches of evil genies by uttering a simple magic word and popping out of sight, or beautiful young princesses (in the stories they were always beautiful, although Flagg's experience had been that most princesses were spoiled rotten and, as the end products of long, inbred family lines, ugly as sin and stupid in the bargain) who tricked great ogres into becoming flies, which they then quickly swatted. In most stories, the princesses were also good at swatting flies, although most of the princesses Flagg had seen wouldn't have been able to swat a fly dying on a cold windowsill in December. In
stories
it all sounded easy; in
stories
people changed their shapes or turned themselves into walking windowpanes all the time.