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 every 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.
22
Roland 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.”
23
Whether 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 second-class 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 eavesdropper -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.
In truth, Flagg had never seen either trick done. He had once known a great Anduan magician who believed he had mastered the trick of changing his shape, but after six months of meditation and nearly a week of incantations in a series of agonizing body postures, he uttered the last awesome spell and succeeded only in making his nose nearly nine feet long and driving himself insane. And there had been fingernails growing out of his nose. Flagg remembered with a grim little smile. Great magician or not, the man had been a fool.