The Eyes of the Dragon(90)

"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.

-or had it happened already?

"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.

If you have not escaped, my fine prince, you never will-and something tells me you're still in the coop. But part of you WILL leave tonight, I promise you that-that part I intend to carry out by the hair.

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.

114

Flagg'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.

115

The 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 the King!"

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.

It's Flagg, and he's come for me.

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.

"Open up! On your feet, you licey drunken buggers! Beson, you son of a sot!"

Don't hurry, Peter told himself. If you hurry you'll make a mistake and do his work for him. No one's come to let him in yet. Beson's drunk-he was oddly at supper and probably paralyzed by the time he got to bed. Flagg hasn't a key or he wouldn't be wasting time knocking. So... one step at a time. Just as you planned it. He's got to get in, and then climb those stairs-all three hundred of them. You may beat him yet.

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.