Free The Eyes of the Dragon by Stephen King

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.
    â€œNot 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.”
    â€œThen is that not all the more reason—?” Dennis began timidly.
    â€œA 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.
    â€œDeath!” one of the parrot’s two heads shrieked in the darkness.
    â€œMurder!” shrieked the other.
    And in that blackness, unseen by anyone, Flagg began to laugh.

20
    O f 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;