by Stephen King
If' tis so, I cry out to you; Avenge, Avenge, Avenge! Ignore me and my lost Years if you must, but never, never, never ignore my dear Eleanor, murdered as she slept in her Bed! It was not I who poisoned her Wine; I write the name of the Murderer here in Blood: Flagg! 'Twas Flagg! Flagg! Flagg!
Take the Locket, and show it to him the instant before you relieve this the World of Its greatest Scoundrel--show him so that he may know in that Instant that I have been a part of his Downfall, even from beyond my unjust Murderer's Grayve.
Leven Valera
Perhaps now you can understand the true source of Peter's chill; perhaps not. Perhaps you will understand it better if I remind you that, although he looked to be a man in a hale and hearty middle age, Flagg was really very old.
Peter had read about the supposed crime of Leven Valera, yes. But the books in which he had read of it were histories. Ancient histories. This crumbling, yellowed parchment first spoke of the King's magician, and then spoke of Flagg by name. Spoke his name? Cried it, shrieked it--in blood.
But Vatera's supposed crime had happened in the reign of Alan II--
--and Alan II had ruled Delain four hundred and fifty years ago.
"God, oh great God," Peter whispered. He staggered back to his bed and sat down on it heavily, just before his knees would have unhinged and spilled him to the floor. "He's done it all before! He's done it all before, and in exactly the same way, but he did it over four centuries ago!"
Peter's face was deadly white; his hair was standing on end. For the first time he realized that Flagg, the King's magician, was in reality Flagg the monster, loose in Detain again now, serving a new King--serving his own young, confused, easily led brother.
73
Peter at first entertained giddy thoughts of promising Beson another bribe to take the locket and the crumbling sheet of foolscap to Anders Peyna. In his initial flush of excitement, it seemed to him that this note must point the finger of guilt at Flagg and set him, Peter, free. A little reflection convinced him that while that might happen in a storybook, it would not happen in real life. Peyna would laugh and call it a forgery. And if he took it seriously? That might mean the end of both the Judge-General and the imprisoned prince. Peter's ears were sharp, and he listened closely to the gossip of the meadhouses and the wineshops as it was passed back and forth between Beson and the Lesser Warders. He had heard of the Farmers' Tax Increase, had heard the bitter joke which suggested that Thomas the Light-Bringer should be renamed Thomas the Tax-Bringer. He had even heard that some few daring wags had renamed his brother Foggy Tom the Constantly Bombed. The headsman's axe had swung with the regularity of a clock's pendulum since Thomas had ascended Delain's throne, only this clock called out treason-sedition, treason-sedition, treason-sedition with a regularity that would have been monotonous, had it not been so frightening.
By now Peter had begun to suspect Flagg's goal: to bring the ordered monarchy of Delain to an utter smash. Showing the locket and the note would only get him laughed at or cause Peyna to take some sort of action. And that would undoubtedly get them both killed.
In the end Peter put the locket and foolscap back where they had come from. And with them he put the little three-foot pigtail it had taken him a month to weave. On the whole, he did not feel too bitter about the evening's work--the rope had held, and the finding of the locket and foolscap after more than four hundred years proved at least one thing--the hiding place was not apt to be discovered.
Still, he had much food for thought, and he lay long awake that night.
When he slept, he seemed to hear Leven Valera's dry, stony voice whispering in one ear: Avenge! Avenge! Avenge!
74
Time, yes, time--Peter spent a great deal of time at the top of the Needle. His beard grew long, save for where that white scar streaked his cheek like a lightning bolt. He saw many changes from his window, as it grew. He heard of more terrible changes yet. The headsman's pendulum had not slowed down but actually speeded up: treason-sedition, treason-sedition, it sang, and sometimes half a dozen heads rolled in the course of but a single day.
During Peter's third year of imprisonment, the year in which Peter was first able to do thirty chin-ups in a single effort from his bedchamber's central beam, Peyna resigned his post as Judge-General in disgust. It was the talk of the meadhouses and wineshops for a week, and the talk of Peter's keepers for a week and a day. The warders believed that Flagg would have Peyna jailed almost before the heat of the old man's burn had left the judge's bench, and that soon after the citizens of Delain would find out once and for all if there was blood or ice water in the Judge-General's veins. But when Peyna remained free, the talk died down. Peter was glad Peyna had not been arrested. He bore him no ill will, in spite of Peyna's willingness to believe that he had murdered his father; and he knew that the arrangement of the evidence had been Flagg's doing.
Also during Peter's third year in the Needle, Dennis's good old da', Brandon, died. His passing was simple but dignified. He had finished his day's work in spite of a terrible pain in his chest and side and came slowly home. He sat down in the little living room, hoping the pain would pass. Instead it grew worse. He called his wife and son to his side, kissed them both, and asked if he might have a glass of bundle-gin. This was provided. He drank it off, kissed his wife again, and then sent her from the room.
"You must serve your master well now, Dennis," he said. "Ye're a man now, with a man's tasks set before you."
"I'll serve the King as well as I may, Da'," Dennis said, although the thought of taking over his father's responsibilities terrified him. His good, homely face was shiny with tears. For the last three years, Brandon and Dennis had buttled for Thomas, and Dennis's responsibilities had been much the same as before, with Peter; but it had never been the same, somehow--never even close to the same.
"Thomas, aye," Brandon said, and then whispered: "But if the time comes to do yer first master a service, Dennis, you mustn't hesitate. I have never--"
At that moment, Brandon clutched the left side of his chest, stiffened, and died. He died where he would have wanted to die, in his own chair, in front of his own fire.
In Peter's fourth year of imprisonment--his rope below the stones growing steadily longer and longer--the Staad family disappeared. The throne possessed itself of what little there remained of their lands, as it had done when other noble families disappeared. And as Thomas's reign progressed, there were more and more disappearances.
The Staads were only one item of meadhouse gossip in a busy week that included four beheadings, an increased levy against shopkeepers, and the imprisonment of an old woman who had for three days walked back and forth in front of the palace, screaming that her grandson had been taken and tortured for speaking against the previous year's Cattle Levies. But when Peter heard the Staad name in the warders' conversation, his heart had stopped for a moment.
The chain of events leading to the disappearance of the Staads was one familiar to everyone in Delain by now. The tick-tocking pendulum of the headsman's axe had thinned the numbers of the nobility terribly. Many of these nobles died because their families had served the Kingdom for hundreds--or thousands--of years, and they could not believe such an unjust fate would or could fall on them. Others, seeing bloody handwriting on the wall, fled. The Staads were among these.
And the whispering began.
Tales were told behind cupped hands, tales suggesting that these nobles had not simply scattered to the four winds but had gathered together somewhere, perhaps in the deep woods at the northern end of the Kingdom, to plan an overthrow of the throne.
These stories passed to Peter like the wind through his window, the drafts beneath his door. . . . They were dreams of a wider world. Mostly he worked on his rope. During the first year, the rope grew longer by eighteen inches every three weeks. At the end of that year, he had a slim cable that was twenty-five feet long--a cable that was, theoretically at least, strong enough to bear his weight. But there wa
s a difference between dangling from a beam in his bedroom and dangling above a drop of three hundred feet, and Peter knew it. He was, quite literally, staking his life on that slim cord.
And twenty-five feet a year was perhaps not enough; it would take more than eight years before he could even try, and the rumblings he heard at second hand had grown loud enough to be disturbing. Above all else, the Kingdom must endure--there must be no revolt, no chaos. Wrongs must be put right, but by law, not by bows and slings and maces and clubs. Thomas, Leven Valera, Roland, he himself, even Flagg paled into insignificance next to that. There must be law.
How Anders Peyna, growing old and bitter by his fire, would have loved him for that!
Peter determined that he must make his effort to escape as soon as possible. Accordingly he made long calculations, doing the figures in his head so as to leave no trace. He did them again and again and again, proving to himself that he had made no mistake.
In his second year in the Needle, he began to pluck ten threads from each napkin; in his third year fifteen; in his fourth year, twenty. The rope grew. Fifty-eight feet long after the second year; a hundred and four after the third; a hundred and sixty after the fourth.
The rope at that time would still have fetched up a hundred and forty feet from the ground.
During his last year, Peter began to take thirty threads from each napkin, and for the first time his robberies showed clearly--each napkin looked frayed on all four sides, as if mice had been at it. Peter waited in agony for his thefts to be discovered.
75
But they were not discovered then, or ever. There was not so much as a question ever raised. Peter had spent endless nights (or so they seemed to him) wondering and worrying when Flagg would hear some wrong thing, some wrong note, and so get wind of what he was up to. He would send some underling, Peter supposed, and the questions would begin. Peter had thought things out with agonizing care, and he had made only one wrong assumption--but that one led to a second (as wrong assumptions so often do) and that second was a dilly. He had assumed that there was some finite number of napkins--perhaps a thousand or so in all--and that they were being used over and over again. His thinking on the subject of the napkin supply never went much further than that. Dennis could have told him differently and saved him perhaps two years of work, but Dennis was never asked. The truth was simple but staggering. Peter's napkins were not coming from a supply of a thousand, or two thousand, or twenty thousand; there were nearly half a million of these old, musty napkins in all.
On one of the deep levels below the castle was a storeroom as big as a ballroom. And it was filled with napkins . . . napkins . . . nothing but napkins. They smelled musty to Peter, and that wasn't surprising--most of them, coincidentally or not, dated from a time not long after the imprisonment and death of Leven Valera, and the existence of all those napkins--coincidentally or not--was, indirectly at least, the work of Flagg. In a queer sort of way, he had created them.
Those had been dark times indeed for Delain. The chaos Flagg so earnestly wished had almost come upon the land. Valera had been removed; mad King Alan had ascended the throne in his place. If he had lived another ten years, the Kingdom surely would have drowned in blood . . . but Alan was struck down by lightning while playing cubits on the back lawn in the pouring rain one day (as I told you, he was mad). It was lightning, some said, sent by the gods themselves. He was followed by his niece, Kyla, who became known as Kyla the Good . . . and from Kyla, the line of succession had run straight and true down through the generations to Roland, and the brothers to whose tale you have been listening. It was Kyla, the Good Queen, who brought the land out of its darkness and poverty. She had nearly bankrupted the Royal Treasury to do it, but she knew that currency--hard currency--is the life's blood of a kingdom. Much of Delain's hard currency had been drained away during the wild, weird reign of Alan II, a King who had sometimes drunk blood from the notched ears of his servants and who had insisted that he could fly; a King more interested in magic and necromancy than profit and loss and the welfare of his people. Kyla knew it would take a massive flow of both love and guilders to set the wrongs of Alan's reign right, and she began by trying to put every able-bodied person in Delain back to work, from eldest to youngest.
Many of the older citizens of the castle keep had been set to making napkins--not because napkins were needed (I think I have already told you how most of Delain's royalty and nobility felt about them), but because work was needed. These were hands that had been idle for twenty years or more in some cases, and they worked with a will, weaving on looms exactly like the one in Sasha's dollhouse . . . except in the matter of size, of course!
For ten years these old people, over a thousand of them, made napkins and drew hard coin from Kyla's Treasury for their work. For ten years people only slightly younger and a little more able to get about had taken them down to the cool, dry storeroom below the castle. Peter had noticed that some of the napkins brought to him were moth-eaten as well as musty-smelling. The wonder, although he didn't know it, was that so many of them were still in such fine condition.
Dennis could have told him that the napkins were brought, used once, removed (minus the few threads Peter plucked from each), and then simply thrown away. After all, why not? There were enough of them, all told, to last five hundred princes five hundred years . . . and longer. If Anders Peyna had not been a merciful man as well as a hard one, there really might have been a finite number of napkins. But he knew how badly that nameless woman in the rocking chair needed the work and the pittance it brought in (Kyla the Good had known the same, in her time), and so he kept her on, as he continued to see that Beson's guilders went on flowing after the Staads were forced to flee. She became a fixture outside the room of the napkins, that old woman with her needle for unmaking rather than making. There she sat in her rocker, year after year, removing tens of thousands of royal crests, and so it was really not surprising that no word of Peter's petty thievery ever reached Flagg's ears.
So you see that, except for that one mistaken assumption and that one unasked question, Peter could have gotten about his work much faster. It did sometimes seem to him that the napkins were not shrinking as rapidly as they ought to have done, but it never occurred to him to question his basic (if vague) idea that the napkins he used were being regularly returned to him. If he had asked himself that one simple question--!
But perhaps, in the end, all things worked for the best.
Or perhaps not. That is another thing you must decide for yourself.
76
Eventually Dennis got over his fright of being Thomas's butler. After all, Thomas ignored him almost completely, except to sometimes berate him for forgetting to put out his shoes (usually Thomas himself had left his shoes somewhere else, then forgotten where) or to insist Dennis have a glass of wine with him. The wine always made Dennis feel sick to his stomach, although he had come to enjoy a wee drop of bundle-gin in the evenings. He drank it nonetheless. He did not need his good old da' around to tell him one did not refuse to drink with the King when asked. And sometimes, usually when he was drunk, Thomas would forbid Dennis to go home but insist that he spend the night in Thomas's apartments instead. Dennis supposed--and rightly--that these were nights on which Thomas simply felt too lonely to bear his own solitary company. He would give long, besotted, rambling sermons on how difficult it was to be King, how he was trying to do the best job he could and be fair, and how everyone hated him for some reason or other just the same. Thomas often wept during these sermons, or laughed wildly at nothing, but usually he just fell asleep halfway through some mangled defense of one tax or another. Sometimes he staggered off to his bed, and Dennis could sleep on the couch. More often, Thomas fell asleep--or passed out--on the couch, and Dennis made his uncomfortable bed on the cooling hearth. It was perhaps the strangest existence any King's butler had ever known, but, of course, it seemed normal enough to Dennis because it was all he had ever known.
Thomas mostly ignoring him was one thing. Flagg ignoring him was another, even more important thing. Flagg had, in fact, entirely dismissed Dennis's part in his scheme to send Peter to the Needle. Dennis had been no more than a tool to him--a tool which had served its purpose and could be put aside. If he had thought of Dennis, it would have seemed to him that the tool had been well rewarded: Dennis was the King's butler, after all.
But on an early winter's night in the year when Peter was twenty-one and Thomas sixteen, a night when Peter's thin rope was finally nearing completion, Dennis saw something which changed everything--and it is with the thing Dennis saw that cold night that I must begin to narrate the final events in my tale.
77
It was a night much like those during the terrible time just before and after Roland's death. The wind shrieked out of a black sky and moaned in the alleys of Delain. Frost lay thick in the pastures of the Inner Baronies and on the cobbles of the castle city. At first, a three-quarters moon chased in and out of the rushing clouds, but by midnight the clouds had thickened enough to obscure the moon completely, and by two in the morning, when Thomas awoke Dennis by rattling the latch of the door between his sitting room and the corridor outside, it had begun to snow.
Dennis heard the rattling and sat up, grimacing at the stiffness in his back and the pins and needles in his legs. Tonight Thomas had fallen asleep on the couch instead of lurching his way to bed, so it had been the hearth for the young butler. Now the fire was almost out. The side of him which had been lying closer to it felt baked; the other side of him felt frozen.
He looked toward the rattling sound . . . and for a moment terror froze his heart and vitals. For that one moment he thought there was a ghost at the door, and he almost screamed. Then he saw it was only Thomas in his white nightshirt.
"M-My Lord King?"
Thomas took no notice. His eyes were open, but they were not looking at the latch; they were wide and dreaming and they looked straight ahead at nothing. Dennis suddenly guessed that the young King was sleepwalking.