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Fifty miles away, rolled into five blankets against the bitter cold and the roaring wind, Flagg cried out in his sleep at the precise moment Dennis followed the King into the secret passageway. On a knoll not far distant, wolves howled in unison with that cry. The soldier sleeping nearest Flagg on the left died instantly of a heart attack, dreaming that a great lion had come to gobble him up. The soldier sleeping on Flagg's right woke up in the morning to discover he was blind. Worlds sometimes shudder and turn inside their axes, and this was such a time. Flagg felt it, but did not grasp it. The salvation of all that is good is only this-at times of great import, evil beings sometimes fall strangely blind. When the King's magician awoke in the morn-ing, he knew that he had had a bad dream, probably from his own long-forgotten past, but he did not remember what it had been.
80
The darkness inside the secret passage was utter and complete, the air still and dry. In it, coming from somewhere ahead, Dennis heard a terrible, desolate sound.
The King was weeping.
At that sound, some of Dennis's fear left him. He felt a great wonder, and a great pity for Thomas, who always seemed so unhappy, and who had grown fat and pimply as King-often he was pallid and shaky-handed from too much wine the night before, and his breath was usually bad. Already Thomas's legs were beginning to bow, and unless Flagg was with him, he had a tendency to walk with his head down and his hair hanging in his face.
Dennis felt his way forward, his hands held out in front of him. The sound of weeping grew closer in the dark... and then, suddenly, the dark was no longer complete. He heard a faint sliding noise and then he could see Thomas faintly. He was standing at the end of the corridor, and faint amber light was coming in from two small holes in the dark. To Dennis, those holes looked strangely like floating eyes.
Just as Dennis began to believe that he would be all right, that he would probably survive this strange night walk, Thomas shrieked. He shrieked so loudly it seemed that his vocal cords must split open. The strength ran out of Dennis's legs and he fell to his knees, hands clapped over his mouth to stop his own screams, and now it seemed to him that this secret way was filled with ghosts, ghosts like strange flapping bats that might at any moment snare themselves in his hair; oh yes, the place seemed filled with the unquiet dead to Dennis, and perhaps it was; perhaps it was.
He almost swooned... almost... but not quite.
Somewhere below him, he heard barking dogs and realized they were above the old King's kennels. The few of Roland's dogs still alive had never been moved outside again. They were the only living beings-besides Dennis himself-that had heard those wild shrieks. But the dogs were real, not ghosts, and Dennis held on to that thought the way a drowning man might hold on to a floating mast.
A moment or two later, he realized that Thomas was not just shrieking-he was crying out words. At first Dennis could make out only a single phrase, howled out again and again: "Don't drink the wine! Don't drink the wine! Don't drink the wine!"
Chapter 12
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Three nights later, a light knock came at the closed sitting-room door of a farm in one of the Inner Baronies, a farm quite close to where the Staad family had lived not so long ago.
"Come!" Anders Peyna growled. "And it better be damned good, Arlen!"
Arlen had aged in the years since Beson had appeared at Peyna's door with Peter's note. The changes in him, however, were slight when compared with the changes in Peyna. The former JudgeGeneral's hair was almost all gone. His spareness of frame had become gauntness. The loss of hair and weight were very little, however, when compared with the changes in his face. Formerly he had been stern. Now he was grim. Dark-brown hollows floated below his eyes. The stamp of despair was clear on his face, and there was good reason for this. He had seen the things he had spent his life defending brought to ruin... and this ruin had been accomplished with shocking ease, and in a shockingly brief period of time. Oh, I suppose all men of intelligence know how fragile such things as Law and Justice and Civilization really are, but it's not a thing they think of willingly, because it disturbs one's rest and plays hob with one's appetite.