The Broken World, page 33
‘Can you see, little Benfro?’ He was dragged to his feet, pulled off them by the impossibly strong Fflint. Benfro could hardly focus, but he saw the shape of the larger dragon’s face swim in front of him. Then colours exploded in his head, his sight gone on one side as Fflint poked a needle-pointed talon into his eyeball. He screwed the other eye tight shut, fearing he would lose both even as he started to pass out with shock.
‘Pathetic. Hardly worth the effort.’ The words were close, echoing in his head. It was all too quick, too violent. He couldn’t understand what was happening. Benfro didn’t think he could have hurt any more, but new pain lanced up his half-sized regrowing hand. Somewhere in the fog of agony and bewilderment he saw something that looked like a dragon’s arm being bent and twisted a way it was never meant to go. There was a horrible cracking sound and bone gave way, thick red blood oozing out of split skin and ripped-off scales. His arm. His scales. His blood. He was going to die here, not at the hands of a man but a fellow dragon. How could this be happening? He had not avenged his mother’s death yet. Had not thrown off Magog’s malign influence. He hadn’t found Gog, or Errol, or done any of the things he was supposed to do. How could it end here? Like this?
‘You have skills he cannot comprehend, Benfro. Use them.’
The voice was his mother’s, but it was also Corwen’s. Hearing them, he could almost believe he had reached the end. Was this what it meant to die? To be reunited with those you loved? Maybe it wasn’t so bad after all.
‘Fight him. Use that dread curse of yours and burn off his face.’
This time the voice was unmistakable. The words were inside him and the thought of them brought Benfro renewed fear. He was weak, near death. There was no way he could fight Fflint and Magog both. And yet as he thought of the dead mage, so the world of the Grym opened up to him. One eye tight shut, the other gone, he could still see the village, the dragons all around him watching and waiting for Fflint to make the killing blow. He could see the Llinellau stretching everywhere. He could escape this madness if he could just get a moment to clear his head.
But Fflint wouldn’t let up. He was throwing Benfro around like a doll now. Smashing his head against the stone wall of the one building that had denied him entry. Benfro could see the terrified people huddling inside. Errol wasn’t among them, but that didn’t mean they deserved to die any more than he did. What right did this arrogant creature, no better than a beast, have to kill just for fun? Just because he felt entitled or aggrieved? Just because anger was all he knew? He might call himself a dragon, might wear a dragon’s form, but Fflint son of Caradoc was no more a dragon than Melyn. He deserved nothing less than the inquisitor.
Benfro opened his one remaining eye just as Fflint grabbed him once more by the throat. Sucking in what breath he could, he tried to reach for Fflint’s arm, but his regrowing hand was too small to grasp it, closing weakly around the big dragon’s wrist.
‘Oh, so you are still alive. Well that just makes this all the—’
Fflint didn’t finish his words. With the last of his dying strength, Benfro breathed out pure flame. It leaped from his mouth and nostrils like a living thing, enveloping Fflint in seconds. Where it touched him, his scales turned black, cracked and fell off. He screamed as his face blistered, his eyes turning white, then bursting. Released, Benfro slumped to the ground, fell back against the wall Fflint had been battering him against, watched as the larger dragon stumbled, fell, burned. His screams were terrible, the mewlings of a terrified kitling magnified a thousandfold. He beat at his head and chest and wings, trying to extinguish the fire that clung to him like cloth, flowed over him like water, devoured him more thoroughly than time.
Benfro could only watch with a mixture of horror and terrible delight as Fflint crumpled in on himself. His screams grew weaker, turning to bubbling sobs and then finally disappearing altogether. And still the fire devoured him, rendering him down to fine ash like the Fflam Gwir, the reckoning flame. How many jewels would they retrieve from the ashes? Benfro wondered. Not many. Maybe none at all.
He couldn’t move, could hardly breathe. Something was loose inside him, hot pain jabbing him with every breath. The sight in his one remaining eye was fading now. Either that or night had come early. The remains of Fflint were shrinking away to nothing now, the magical flame that had devoured him guttering. For a moment Benfro thought that it might all be over, but then he saw the other dragons.
They had watched the whole spectacle, of course. He understood now: this was how they lived. Not noble dragons, but feral beasts. No better than animals. Caradoc had been their pack leader, but he had gone. Fflint had taken over, big and fast and stupid. Now he was gone too, and they didn’t like the manner of his passing.
‘What did he do?’ Benfro heard the words as if his head were underwater, but he recognized the horror in them, the fear.
‘By the moon, Fflint?’ This was Cerys, and the concern in her voice was a sharp blade through his hearts. Benfro let his head slump back, blinking away the blood clouding his eye. The movement sent shocks of pain through him, but sharpened his vision at the same time. The entire hunting party were staring at him now, inching closer as their collective fear was overcome by anger at what he had done. He could see it in their auras, read them as clearly as the books in Magog’s mountain-top retreat. Their intentions were as plain as they were simple. He would not leave this village alive.
Tormod was the first to make a move, or perhaps it was Torquil. The two of them had always been Fflint’s closest allies, hanging on his every word but lacking even his rudimentary intelligence. Whichever one it was, he came at Benfro fast, screaming in rage or more likely to overcome his fear. He wasn’t much smaller than Fflint, certainly strong enough to break Benfro in half. No time to think, certainly no strength to run, barely enough to breathe, Benfro did the only thing he could think of.
He reached out for the lines and jumped.
Beulah followed the trail easily enough by the carnage Clun left in his wake. She wouldn’t have been able to keep up with him anyway, but it had taken time to stabilize Alicia, staunch the bleeding and find someone to tend her until the medics came. Only then had she summoned a couple of warrior priests and headed off after the Duke of Abervenn, aware all the time of the images she had seen in the young maid’s mind, the words she had heard the kidnapper utter as he slid his long knife into her guts.
‘The Shepherd returns. There will be no more usurpers on the Obsidian Throne.’
Beulah quickened her pace across the courtyard and out of the castle keep. At least dressed for the road she could walk without having to worry about endless layers getting in the way.
‘Why were there no guards on the stairway to the royal apartment?’ she demanded as Captain Celtin rushed up to greet her.
‘Your Majesty, there were three warrior priests, but they swear on their lives you came down, dismissed them and climbed into your carriage.’
‘On their lives?’ Beulah raised an eyebrow, but in truth she had no stomach for punishment. They would need warrior priests in the campaign against Abervenn, so executing three of them just because they had fallen for some magic trick would be self-defeating. The laugh that escaped from her when she realized how much she had changed in a year was mirthless, and it must have been taken as an order by the captain.
‘I shall see to their execution at once, ma’am.’ He clasped a hand to his chest in salute and was about to turn away when she interrupted him.
‘You shall do no such thing, Celtin. They must be punished, true. Perhaps some time marching with the foot soldiers will focus their minds on their training. But their deaths serve no one but our enemies. Enemies who can fool a trained warrior priest into thinking he has seen something that never happened. Not one of them, either, but three. Who has that kind of skill?’
‘I might have believed King Ballah himself could do such a working, or Inquisitor Melyn, of course. But neither of them are here.’
‘Are you forgetting our more recent run-in with an adept masquerading as a Candle?’
‘Father Tolley? The Guardians of the Throne?’ Celtin’s face paled at the memory.
‘Tolley is long dead, but we’d be fools to believe there weren’t many more like him.’
Beulah set off towards the main town square, following both the physical signs of her husband’s progress and the more delicate clues left by the disturbance in the Grym. She wasn’t entirely sure how Clun was tracking the kidnapper, but he wasn’t being very subtle about it. Carts were overturned, their contents strewn about the muddy streets. People huddled in doorways, nursing bruises and worse. The corner of one building had caved in, slashed by a blade of light if Beulah’s hurried appraisal of the damage was anything to go by. In the square a group of traders had formed themselves into a huddle, arguing among themselves. She heard snippets of their angry talk, demanding who was going to compensate them for their losses, as if all of them hadn’t been enriched by the presence of the army outside the city walls. As she approached, the most opulently dressed of them turned swiftly, his face a picture of righteous indignation.
‘This is an outrage! We demand …’ And then he saw who it was he addressed. His jaw dropped, eyes widening in surprise. He closed his mouth with an audible clacking of teeth, then swept into an ostentatious bow.
‘Your Majesty, I am your most humble servant.’
‘I very much doubt that, given your earlier comments.’ Beulah scanned the edges of his thoughts, looking for signs of treason, of any complicity in the kidnap. There were none, just the weasel thinking of a man unable to admit his own fault in any situation. A typical merchant.
‘My husband came through this way recently. Which way did he go?’ Beulah didn’t really need to ask the question, but somewhere in the gathered crowd she could feel a different kind of unhappiness, a dissatisfaction with far more than their recent upset. Out of practice after her pregnancy, and without the Obsidian Throne to bolster her power, she had to concentrate harder to pinpoint the thought and the person thinking it.
‘A man ran through here not ten minutes ago, screaming a girl’s name and wielding a sword the likes of which I have never seen before. He asked questions of us that made no sense, turned over our trestles, scattered our goods. Surely that was not His Grace the Duke of Abervenn?’
‘A sword like this?’ Beulah felt the Grym surge through her as she conjured her own blade. The merchant’s eyes widened again and he swallowed hard.
‘Very much like that, Your Majesty. Only his was red.’
‘My daughter, Princess Ellyn, has been kidnapped. The man who did it came this way. Do any of you know anything about it?’
And there it was, the uncontrolled thought Beulah had hoped to provoke. She focused on it, scanning the crowd in search of whoever might be thinking it. Eyes met hers and darted down, heads bowed. Except for one.
He stood in the middle of the crowd. Dressed all in black, he might have been taken for a predicant of the Order of the Candle were it not for the mud on his cloak and the smile on his face. He was thin, long lank hair hanging past his shoulders, and he gazed at the queen the way a cat might stare at a mouse.
‘Your borrowed magics don’t scare me, false queen.’ He spoke directly to her mind, lips not moving out of that predator smile as he walked towards her. The crowd seemed oblivious to his presence and yet at the same time cleared a path for him. Somewhere in the back of her mind Beulah could still hear the self-appointed leader of the traders express his horror and concern, his words no more sincere than anything else about him. She blanked them out, hardening her mind to the smiling man.
‘I have earned my magics, little man. My throne too.’ She pushed out a wave of fear with her words and was pleased to see the smile flicker. He took a step back and she almost fell for the ruse. But Melyn had taught her better.
The attack, when it came, was not physical. Beulah had used fear, as was the way of the warrior priests. She expected this man to do the same, but instead what enveloped her was an overwhelming sense of pleasure. For an instant she was caught up like a giddy teenager wrapped in the arms of her one true love, overwhelmed by a passion so intense it made her shudder. It was so different to what she had been expecting, it caught her off guard, but only for a couple of seconds. Shrugging off the enchantment, she stepped up to the man, holding her blade of light aloft. His smile didn’t fade, but she could see the panic in his eyes, feel the thrill of it in his thoughts.
‘Is that how you bed the girls? I think you’ll find me not so easy.’ Beulah levelled the point of her blade at his throat, only then realizing that he hadn’t backed away, hadn’t made any attempt to flee. She pushed at his thoughts again, testing his barriers. Skilled he might have been, but he wasn’t in the same league as Father Tolley. There was only a natural aptitude for magic and an all-too-familiar fanaticism. The plan was simple to see, poorly hidden in the tumble of images he threw at her with his mind. He was no more than a distraction, placed here to keep her and the warrior priests occupied while the rest of the plotters escaped with her daughter. They didn’t need long, twenty minutes perhaps. Half an hour would be better. Then the trail would be cold and the child would be theirs.
‘You cannot defeat us,’ the man said, leaning in to the blade so that the skin of his neck sizzled. He still fixed Beulah with his stare, the smile on his lips making him look increasingly deranged. She tensed, holding her arm straight. It would be simple enough to let him kill himself. One less of them to worry about. She might even have his head off with just a flick of the wrist.
‘No. You don’t get away so easily.’ Beulah let her blade shorten, ducked as the man sprang at her, and with a side-swipe took his leg off at the knee.
At the cut, the magic he had been casting over the square vanished, and all of a sudden Beulah was standing in a clear space surrounded by startled merchants and traders. Captain Celtin stood nearby, his blade of light conjured, looking from side to side as if searching for something. Then he saw her.
‘Your Majesty! You disappeared. We … I …’ Celtin’s words faded away as he saw the injured man bleeding out on the cobbles.
‘Do you still want to punish the men who were guarding my stairs?’ Beulah grinned as she let her blade of light extinguish. It felt wonderful to be able to manipulate the Grym once more. She kicked the semi-conscious man. ‘This one is skilled at tricking the mind, making you see things that aren’t there. Chain him in the castle dungeons. I would like to find out what makes him tick. But first I must find my husband and child.’
‘There is no need for that.’
Beulah whirled to see a figure advancing through the crowd. Merchants shrank back from him as he approached her, and she could see why. His cloak was ripped, his face and hands covered in blood. Even his hair was matted as if someone had been smacking him about the head with a bludgeon. But Beulah could see that Clun was unharmed. The blood was not his, but the child held in the crook of his arm was.
‘Ellyn!’ Beulah rushed to greet them, scooping the child into her arms. Her daughter looked up at her quite unperturbed, the only sign that anything was amiss a thumbprint smudge of red on her cheek.
‘I found her in a house two streets down. They were getting ready to leave. Didn’t take too kindly to my stopping them.’ Clun wiped at his face, smearing the blood rather than cleaning it away. ‘They won’t be troubling us any more.’
22
Look back at the history of misfortunes befalling the House of Balwen and the Guardians of the Throne will always be there. Their name is a useful shorthand for the idiocy of inbreeding, the venality of men born to power and raised away from the harsh realities of the kingdom they would rule, the failure to adequately prepare the child to become the man. Wherever fault truly lies with a generation or two of the royal family, the Guardians get the blame. And still there is no smoke without fire, as the saying goes. Shadowy factions have always fought in the background, jostling for control of the power that has ruled over the Twin Kingdoms since Balwen first built the Neuadd atop Candlehall Hill millennia ago.
Every generation believes it lives in the end times, and ours is no exception. Where most wait patiently for the rapture, or carry on with their lives as best they can in ignorance, there are ever some who would hasten the end, embrace it. Perhaps they truly are creatures of the Wolf, sowing discord as is his bidding. Or maybe they simply prefer chaos over order, war over peace. Whatever their reasons, they have found inspiration in the inane doggerel of a mad woman who died more than five hundred years ago, and they have studied just enough history to steal for themselves the mantle once worn by those who would influence weak kings.
Barrod Sheepshead, The Guardians of the Throne – A Noble Folly
The screams started well before dawn. Melyn woke from strange dreams of flying through dark skies, driven ever onward by something he couldn’t understand. All around him the camp was coming to life, the Grym ebbing and flowing as several hundred warrior priests prepared themselves for battle.
‘No one is to leave this camp without my explicit order and no one is to use any magic,’ Melyn said as Osgal approached out of the darkness. The captain nodded and set off to relay the instructions. Melyn stretched, feeling the strength in the tightness across his chest, then went off in search of Frecknock.
He found her on the crest of the hill, staring out at the massive encampment below. The evening before it had been a well-ordered collection of tents, with fires dotted between them at regular intervals. Now it was like some madman’s imagination of the Wolf’s lair. Fires raged through canvas, unchecked as the men who might have put them out ran screaming. In the darkness it was hard to see what was causing the panic, but just occasionally Melyn spotted something vast swoop down out of the air, grabbing men, horses, tents or whole wagons and throwing them around like so many toys in the midst of a child’s tantrum.
