19
In Peter’s cool gaze he saw the very possible derailment of all his plans and careful work. More and more Flagg came to believe that getting rid of Peter was a necessity. Flagg has overstayed in Delain this time and he knew it. The muttering had begun. The work so well begun under Roland-the steady rises in taxes, the midnight searches of small farmers’ barns and silage sheds for unreported crops and foodstuffs, the arming of the Home Guards-must continue to its end under Thomas. He did not have time to wait through the reign of Peter as he had through that of his grandmother.
Peter might not even wait for the mutterings of the people to come to his ears; Peter’s first command as King might well be that Flagg should be sent eastward out of the Kingdom and forbidden ever to come again, on pain of death. Flagg might murder an advisor before he could give the young King such advice, but the hell of it was, Peter would need no advisor. He would advise himself-and when Flagg saw the cool, unafraid way the boy, now fifteen and very tall, looked at him, he thought that Peter might already have given himself that advice.
The boy liked to read, and he liked history, and in the last two years, as his father grew steadily grayer and frailer, he had been asking a lot of questions of his father’s other advisors, and of some of his teachers. Many of these questions-too many had to do either with Flagg or with roads which would lead to Flagg if followed far enough.
That the boy was asking such questions at fourteen and fifteen was bad. That he was getting comparatively honest answers from such timid, watchful men as the Kingdom’s historians and Roland’s advisors was much worse. It meant that, in the minds of these people, Peter was already almost King-and that they were glad. They welcomed him and rejoiced in him, because he would be an intellectual, like them. And they also welcomed him because, unlike them, he was a brave boy who might well grow into a lionhearted King whose tale would be the stuff of legends. In him, they saw again the coming of the White, that ancient, resilient, yet humble force that has redeemed humankind again and again and again.
He had to be put out of the way. Had to be.
Flagg told himself this each night when he retired in the blackness of his inner chambers, and it was his first thought when he awoke in that blackness the next morning.
He must be put out of the way, the boy must be put out of the way.
But it was harder than it seemed. Roland loved aid would have died for either of his sons, but he loved Peter with a particular fierceness. Smothering the boy in his cradle, making it look as if the Baby Death had taken him, would have once perhaps been possible, but Peter was now a healthy teen-ager. Any accident would be examined with all the raging scrutiny of Roland’s grief, and Flagg had thought more than once that the final irony might be this: Suppose Peter really did die an accidental death, and he, Flagg, was somehow blamed for it? A small miscalculation while shinnying up a drainpipe… a slip while crawling around on a stable roof playing Dare You with his friend Staad… a tumble from his horse. And what would the result be? Might not Roland, wild in his grief and growing senile and confused in his mind, see willful murder in what was really an accident? And might his eye not turn on Flagg? Of course. His eye would turn to Flagg before it turned to anyone else. Roland’s mother had mistrusted him, and he knew that, deep down, Roland mistrusted him as well. He had been able to hold that mistrust in check with mingled fear and fascination, but Flagg knew that if Roland ever had reason to think Flagg had caused, or even played a part in, the death of his son
Flagg could actually imagine situations where he might have to interfere in Peter’s behalf to keep the boy safe. It was damnable. Damnable!
He must be put out of the way. Must be put out of the way! Must!
As the days and weeks and months passed, the drumbeat of this thought in Flagg’s head grew ever more urgent. Every day Roland grew older and weaker; every day Peter grew older and wiser and thus a more dangerous opponent. What was to be done?
Flagg’s thoughts turned and turned and turned on this. He grew morose and irritable. Servants, especially Peter’s butler, Brandon, and Brandon’s son, Dennis, gave him a wide berth, and spoke to each other in whispers of the terrible smells that sometimes came from his laboratory late at night. Dennis in particular, who would someday take,the place of his good old Da’ as Peter’s butler, was terrified of Flagg, and once asked his father if he might say a word about the magician. “To make him safe, is all I’m thinking,” Dennis said.
“Not a word,” Brandon said, and fixed Dennis, who was only a boy himself, with a forbidding look. “Not a word will you say. The man’s dangerous.”
“Then is that not all the more reason-?” Dennis began timidly.
“A dullard may mistake the rattle of a Biter-Snake for the sound of pebbles in a hollow gourd and put out his hand to touch it,” Brandon said, “but our prince is no dullard, Dennis. Now fetch me another glass of bundle-gin, and say no more on’t.”
So Dennis did not speak of it to Peter, but his love of his young master and his fear of the King’s hooded advisor both grew after that short exchange. Whenever he saw Flagg sweeping up one of the corridors of the castle in his long hooded robe he would draw aside, trembling, thinking: Biter-Snake! Biter-Snake! Watch for him, Peter! And listen for him!
Then, one night when Peter was sixteen, just as Flagg had begun to believe that there really might not be any way to put an end to the boy without unacceptable risk to himself, an answer came. That was a wild night. A terrible autumn storm raged and shrieked around the castle, and the streets of Delain were empty as people sought shelter from the sheets of chilly rain and the battering wind.
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. The joy of killing you
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.
20
Of 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 deep-est 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.