The Eyes of the Dragon (8 page)

That decided the case. Thomas stood over the old dog and threw stones at it until it was dead. No one saw him, but if someone had, he or she would have thought:
There is a boy who is bad . . . bad, and perhaps even evil.
But the person who saw only the cruel murder of that dog would not have seen what happened the day before—would not have seen Thomas throwing up into a basin and crying bitterly as he did it. He was often a confused boy, often a sadly unlucky boy, but I stick to what I said—he was never a bad boy, not really.

I also said that no one saw the stoning of the mongrel dog behind the outer kitchens, but that was not quite true. Flagg saw it that night, in his magic crystal. He saw it . . . and was well pleased by it.

R
oland . . . Sasha . . . Peter . . . Thomas. Now there is only one more we must speak of, isn't there? Now there is only the shadowy fifth. The time has come to speak of Flagg, as dreadful as that may be.

Sometimes the people of Delain called him Flagg the Hooded; sometimes simply the dark man—for, in spite of his white corpse's face, he was a dark man indeed. They called him well preserved, but they used the term in a way that was uneasy rather than complimentary. He had come to Delain from Garlan in the time of Roland's grandfather. In those days he had appeared to be a thin and stern-faced man of about forty. Now, in the closing years of Roland's reign, he appeared to be a thin and stern-faced man of about fifty. Yet it had not been ten years, or even twenty, between then and now—it had been seventy-six years in all. Babies who had been sucking toothlessly at their mother's breasts when Flagg first came to Delain had grown up, married, had children, grown old, and died toothlessly in their beds or their chimney corners. But in all that time, Flagg seemed to have aged only ten years. It was magic, they whispered, and of course it was good to have a magician at court, a
real
magician and not just a stage conjurer who knew how to palm coins or hide a sleeping dove up his sleeve. Yet in their hearts, they knew there was
nothing
good about Flagg. When the people of Delain saw him coming, with his eyes peeking redly out from his hood, they quickly found business on the far side of the street.

Did he really come from Garlan, with its far vistas and its purple dreaming mountains? I do not know. It was and is a magical land where carpets sometimes fly, and where holy men sometimes pipe ropes up from wicker baskets, climb them, and disappear at the tops, never to be seen again. A great many seekers of knowledge from more civilized lands like Delain and Andua have gone to Garlan. Most disappear as completely and as permanently as those strange mystics who climb the floating ropes. Those who do return don't always come back changed for the better. Yes, Flagg might well have come to Delain from Garlan, but if he did, it was not in the reign of Roland's grandfather but much, much earlier.

He had, in fact, come to Delain often. He came under a different name each time, but always with the same load of woe and misery and death. This time he was Flagg. The time before he had been known as Bill Hinch, and he had been the King's Lord High Executioner. Although that time was two hundred and fifty years past, his was a name mothers still used to frighten their children when they were bad. “If you don't shut up that squalling, I reckon Bill Hinch will come and take you away!” they said. Serving as Lord High Executioner under three of the bloodiest Kings in Delain's long history, Bill Hinch had made an end to hundreds—thousands, some said—of prisoners with his heavy axe.

The time before
that
, four hundred years before the time of Roland and his sons, he came as a singer named Browson, who became a close advisor to the King and a Queen. Browson disappeared like smoke after drumming up a great and bloody war between Delain and Andua.

The time before
that
. . .

Ah, but why go on? I'm not sure I could if I wanted to. When times are long enough, even the storytellers forget the tales. Flagg always showed up with a different face and a different bag of tricks, but two things about him were always the same. He always came hooded, a man who seemed almost to have no face, and he never came as a King himself, but always as the whisperer in the shadows, the man who poured poison into the porches of Kings' ears.

Who was he, really, this dark man?

I do not know.

Where did he wander between visits to Delain?

I do not know that, either.

Was he never suspected?

Yes, by a few—by historians and spinners of tales like me, mostly. They suspected that the man who now called himself Flagg had been in Delain before, and never to any good purpose. But they were afraid to speak. A man who could live among them for seventy-six years and appear to age only ten was obviously a magician; a man who had lived for ten times as long, perhaps longer than that . . . such a man might be the devil himself.

What did he want? That question I think I can answer.

He wanted what evil men always want: to have power and use that power to make mischief. Being a King did not interest him because the heads of Kings all too often found their way to spikes on castle walls when things went wrong. But the advisors to Kings . . . the spinners in the shadows . . . such people usually melted away like evening shadows at dawning as soon as the headsman's axe started to fall. Flagg was a sickness, a fever looking for a cool brow to heat up. He hooded his actions just as he hooded his face. And when the great trouble came—as it always did after a span of years—Flagg always disappeared like shadows at dawn.

Later, when the carnage was over and the fever had passed, when the rebuilding was complete and there was again something worth destroying, Flagg would appear once more.

T
his time, Flagg had found the Kingdom of Delain in exasperatingly healthy condition. Landry, Roland's grandfather, was a drunken old fool, easy to influence and twist, but a heart attack had taken him too soon. Flagg knew by then that Lita, Roland's mother, was the last person he wanted holding the scepter. She was ugly but good-hearted and strongwilled. Such a Queen was not a good growth medium for Flagg's brand of insanity.

If he had come earlier in Landry's reign, there would have been time to put Lita out of the way, as he expected to put Peter out of the way. But he'd had only six years, and that was not long enough.

Still, she had accepted him as an advisor, and that was something. She did not like him much but she accepted him—mostly because he could tell wonderful fortunes with cards. Lita loved hearing bits of gossip and scandal about those in her court and her Cabinet, and the gossip and scandal were doubly good because she got to hear not only what had happened but what
would
happen. It was hard to rid yourself of such an amusing diversion, even when you sensed that a person able to do such tricks might be dangerous. Flagg never told the Queen any of the darker news he sometimes saw in the cards. She wanted to know who had taken a lover or who had had words with his wife or her husband. She did not want to know about dark cabals and murderous plans. What she wanted from the cards was relatively innocent.

During the long, long reign of Lita, Flagg was chagrined to find his main accomplishment was to be not turned out. He was able to maintain a foothold but to do little more than that. Oh, there were a few bright spots—the encouragement of bad blood between two powerful squires in the Southern Barony and the discrediting of a doctor who had found a cure for some blood infections (Flagg wanted no cures in the Kingdom that were not magical—which is to say, given or withheld at his own whim) were examples of Flagg's work during that period. It was all pretty small change.

Under Roland—poor bowlegged, insecure Roland—things marched more quickly toward Flagg's goal. Because he did have a goal, you know, in his fuzzy, malevolent sort of way, and this time it was grand indeed. He planned nothing more nor less than the complete overthrow of the monarchy—a bloody revolt that would plunge Delain into a thousand years of darkness and anarchy.

Give or take a year or two, of course.

I
n 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.

But it was harder than it seemed. Roland loved and 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!

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.