The Eyes of the Dragon(66)

The King was weeping.

At that sound, some of Dennis's fear left him. He felt a great wonder, and a great pity for Thomas, who always seemed so unhappy, and who had grown fat and pimply as King-often he was pallid and shaky-handed from too much wine the night before, and his breath was usually bad. Already Thomas's legs were beginning to bow, and unless Flagg was with him, he had a tendency to walk with his head down and his hair hanging in his face.

Dennis felt his way forward, his hands held out in front of him. The sound of weeping grew closer in the dark... and then, suddenly, the dark was no longer complete. He heard a faint sliding noise and then he could see Thomas faintly. He was standing at the end of the corridor, and faint amber light was coming in from two small holes in the dark. To Dennis, those holes looked strangely like floating eyes.

Just as Dennis began to believe that he would be all right, that he would probably survive this strange night walk, Thomas shrieked. He shrieked so loudly it seemed that his vocal cords must split open. The strength ran out of Dennis's legs and he fell to his knees, hands clapped over his mouth to stop his own screams, and now it seemed to him that this secret way was filled with ghosts, ghosts like strange flapping bats that might at any moment snare themselves in his hair; oh yes, the place seemed filled with the unquiet dead to Dennis, and perhaps it was; perhaps it was.

He almost swooned... almost... but not quite.

Somewhere below him, he heard barking dogs and realized they were above the old King's kennels. The few of Roland's dogs still alive had never been moved outside again. They were the only living beings-besides Dennis himself-that had heard those wild shrieks. But the dogs were real, not ghosts, and Dennis held on to that thought the way a drowning man might hold on to a floating mast.

A moment or two later, he realized that Thomas was not just shrieking-he was crying out words. At first Dennis could make out only a single phrase, howled out again and again: "Don't drink the wine! Don't drink the wine! Don't drink the wine!"

Chapter 12

81

Three nights later, a light knock came at the closed sitting-room door of a farm in one of the Inner Baronies, a farm quite close to where the Staad family had lived not so long ago.

"Come!" Anders Peyna growled. "And it better be damned good, Arlen!"

Arlen had aged in the years since Beson had appeared at Peyna's door with Peter's note. The changes in him, however, were slight when compared with the changes in Peyna. The former JudgeGeneral's hair was almost all gone. His spareness of frame had become gauntness. The loss of hair and weight were very little, however, when compared with the changes in his face. Formerly he had been stern. Now he was grim. Dark-brown hollows floated below his eyes. The stamp of despair was clear on his face, and there was good reason for this. He had seen the things he had spent his life defending brought to ruin... and this ruin had been accomplished with shocking ease, and in a shockingly brief period of time. Oh, I suppose all men of intelligence know how fragile such things as Law and Justice and Civilization really are, but it's not a thing they think of willingly, because it disturbs one's rest and plays hob with one's appetite.

Seeing his life's work knocked casually apart like a child's tower of blocks was bad enough, but there was another thing which had haunted Peyna these last four years, something that was even worse. This was the knowledge that Flagg had not achieved all the dark changes in Delain alone. Peyna had helped him. For who else had seen Peter brought to a trial which was perhaps too speedy? Who else had been so convinced of Peter's guilt... and not so much by the evidence as by a young boy's shocked tears?

Since the day Peter had been led to the top of the Needle, the chopping block in the Plaza of the Needle had been stained a sinister rusty color. Not even the hardest rain could wash it clean. And Peyna thought he could detect that sinister red stain spread-ing out from the block-spreading out to cover the Plaza, the market streets, the alleys. In his troubled dreams Peyna saw rills of fresh blood washing in bright, accusing threads between the cobblestones and running down the gutters in streamlets. He saw the redans of Castle Delain gleaming bloody in the sun. He saw the carp in the moat floating belly-up, poisoned by the blood which poured out of the sewers in floods and which rose from the springs in the earth itself. He saw the blood rising every-where, staining the fields and forests. In these unhappy dreams even the sun began to look like a bloodshot, dying eye.

Flagg had let him live. In the meadhouses, people whispered behind their hands that he had reached an agreement with the magician-that he had perhaps given Flagg the names of certain traitors, or that perhaps Peyna "had something" on Flagg, some secret that would come out if Peyna died suddenly. This was, of course, ridiculous. Flagg was not a man to be threatened -not by Peyna, not by anyone. There were no secrets. There had been no agreements or deals. Flagg had simply let him live... and Peyna knew why. Dead, he would perhaps have been at peace. Alive, he was left to twist on the rack of his own bad conscience. He was left to watch the terrible changes Flagg had wrought on Delain.

"Well?" he asked irritably. "What is it, Arlen?"

"A boy has come, my Lord. He says he must see you."

"Send him away," Peyna said moodily. He reflected that, even a year ago, he would have heard a knock at the front door, but it seemed that he became more deaf with every passing day. "I see no one after nine, you know that. Much has changed, but not that."