Flagg began to pace rapidly back and forth. His teeth were bared. His hands worked together restlessly, the fingers of one warring with the fingers of the other. His boots struck up green-ish sparks from the niter-caked stones of his laboratory floor; these sparks smelled like summer lightning.
How? When? Who helped?
He could not remember. Already the dream was fading. But…
“I have to know!” he whispered. “I have to know!”
Because it would be soon; he sensed that much. It would be very, very soon.
He found his keyring and opened the bottom drawer of his desk. He took out a box made of finely carved ironwood, opened it, and drew out a leather bag. He opened the bag’s drawstring top and carefully took out a chunk of rock that seemed to glow with its own inner light. This rock was as milky as an old man’s blind eye. It looked like a piece of soapstone, but was in fact a crystal-Flagg’s magic crystal.
He circled his room, turning down the lamps and capping the candles. Soon his apartment was in absolute darkness. Dark or not, Flagg returned to his desk with quick confidence, passing easily around objects that you or I would have barked our shins on or fallen over. The dark was nothing to the King’s magician; he liked the dark, and he could see in it like a cat.
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 glit-tering, 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.
It was Sasha, very pregnant, sitting at a little boy’s bed. The little boy was holding a slate. On it were written two words: GOD and DOG.
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!”
The crystal cleared again.
It was Peter, playing with his dead mother’s dollhouse, pretending the house and the family inside were being attacked by Indians… or dragons… or some foolish thing. The old King stood in the corner, watching his son, wanting to join in…
“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.
–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.