The Broken World (45 page)

‘Is that not what it is? I know it is huge, larger than any I could imagine, but it was down there with all the others. Almost as if they were there to protect it.' Frecknock's confusion was as plain to Melyn as her thoughts. She had no idea that he could read her so clearly now. The rings and the heart stone made everything so easy, at the same time as they softened his rage.

‘You're right, of course. It is a jewel, and it has come from a dragon. One of the mightiest ever to walk these lands. It is also the distilled essence of the Shepherd. My god. His eternal presence in Gwlad, you might say.' Melyn twisted the stone this way and that, inspecting it for flaws. The more he saw of it, the more he understood. The two rings, one for King Balwen, one for some distant, ancient ancestor of Ballah, had identical crimson gemstones in
them; both skilfully cut from this larger jewel, fashioned so that even an adept such as he would think them born of the deep earth rather than grown in the brain of the very beasts he had dedicated his life to eradicating. And yet they had been a bond, linking every inquisitor since Ruthin to the heart stone hidden deep beneath Tynhelyg. No wonder he had always felt drawn to the place, jealous of the race of men that lived here.

‘I … I do not understand, sire.'

‘No. I don't suppose you do. And neither do I. At least not yet. Tell me, Frecknock. How did Errol slip away from us, vanish in front of our eyes? How did Benfro leap from this very throne into nothing?'

Frecknock's eyes were transfixed by the heart stone now, like a dog taunted by a tasty morsel. Melyn could have waved it around and her gaze would have followed, her head swivelling from side to side as if she were on strings. Instead he placed it back on the arm of the throne and waited for her answer. In among the maelstrom of his own thoughts and everything the stone had unlocked in him, he knew what it would be. Easier to let her tell him though.

‘It is one of the most complex of the subtle arts, Your Grace. Few master it completely. I have told you how we can reach out along the Llinellau Grym and bring things to us, food and so on? Well this is similar, but instead of bringing things to us, we go to them.'

‘We? You can perform this magic yourself?'

Frecknock bowed her head. ‘Only over the shortest distances. I have to be able to see my destination, know it like I know the scales on the back of my hands.'

‘And yet Errol Ramsbottom managed to travel from
King Ballah's execution block a few hundred yards from here all the way to my private chapel at Emmass Fawr. Somewhere he had never seen before. How is this possible?'

‘For one such as he, it should not be. Even if he knew how to step into the Llinellau, he would surely end up dissipated over the whole of Gwlad.'

‘Could Benfro have taught him?'

‘Benfro?' Frecknock's eyes widened and her gaze finally shifted from the heart stone to Melyn. ‘Benfro is only a kitling. He hardly mastered the hiding spell before … He couldn't even manage to see the Llinellau when Sir Frynwy and Meirionydd were trying to teach him. But …' She fell silent, her eyes dropping away from his.

‘But what?'

‘There was his dreamwalking, sire. That puzzled even Sir Frynwy. He shouldn't have been able to do it. Our dreams are when we are at our most helpless and vulnerable. And yet Benfro walked them as if he had been born there. He didn't even know how.'

A memory stirred then: Queen Beulah noticing a dragon form flying around Candlehall in the aethereal. Melyn had encountered it himself, recognized the dragon Benfro had become. That dragon had breathed fire at him too.

‘So Benfro walks the aethereal in his dreams yet lacks the skill to see the Grym. He is a kitling of just seventeen years but can fly like no other dragon. He breathes fire that burns only what he wants it to, as poor Captain Osgal found to his cost. How do you suppose he has learned to do all these things in only a year?'

‘I cannot say. Even Sir Frynwy couldn't do these things, and he was over a thousand years old. And he had the Llyfr Draconius to help him.' As if she anticipated his asking for it, Frecknock pulled the heavy book out of her shoulder bag and handed it to him.

Melyn took it, feeling the weight of more than leather and parchment and ink. The knowledge contained in its pages had its own destiny, tugging at his mind and adding to the chaos of thoughts and images bubbling away just under the surface. Only the mental discipline from all his years in the Order of the High Ffrydd kept him from going completely mad. And that same mental discipline would help him bring order to it, claim it all for his own. His entire life up to this moment might have been built on a lie, but Melyn knew an opportunity when he saw one. He laid it across his lap and took up the heart stone once more, feeling the heat build within it.

‘Who do you suppose wrote your precious Llyfr Draconius?' he asked of no one in particular. A face seemed to swim into view in the red-tinged darkness, the ancient dragon who lived at the top of a tall tower in a vast castle. Somewhere Melyn knew but didn't know.

‘It is said to have been begun by Gog, Son of the Winter Moon, though many others have added to it down the generations. I've always believed Gog to be a myth though, like Arhelion and Rasalene, Palisander of the Spreading Span and Ammorgwm the Fair.'

With each name Frecknock spoke, so Melyn saw another dragon's face in front of him. Some old, some young, but all vast and magnificent. In his long life he had hunted and killed their kind almost to the edge of
extinction, but never had he seen any as majestic as these. Nor had he understood the rage and hatred of their kind that had driven him to do so. It had just always been that way. Until now.

‘They all existed, long ago. All the tales are true. It's the ones they don't tell you that are more interesting though. The acts of petty jealousy, greed and lust. I thought us men were bloodthirsty, but we are amateurs compared to your kind.'

Melyn stood again, suddenly anxious to do something. Or possibly just to dispel the ghosts of long-dead dragons. The turmoil in his mind was settling down now, his new understanding of Gwlad and his place in it beginning to make sense. And as he examined that sense, that place, so his old friend anger began to heat up.

‘Here, take this.' He handed the Llyfr Draconius back to Frecknock. ‘Show me how you use the lines to travel. It needn't be far, but I want to watch you.'

‘Of course, Your Grace.' Frecknock nodded, putting one hand flat on the cover of the book for a moment before tucking it back into her bag. As she did so, Melyn summoned the trance state that would let him see the aethereal, bringing the lines to his vision at the same time. There was a brief instant when Frecknock appeared to him as she saw herself – a far more pleasing shape even he had to admit. And then that form was leached of its vibrant colours, becoming the same hue as the Grym itself. There was the briefest of hesitations, then the dragon dissolved in front of his eyes, reappearing a few dozen paces across the room. First as her ghostly Grym outline, then solidifying into her mundane self.

‘Again,' Melyn commanded, and he watched her perform the trick once more.

‘Again. And again. And again.' He studied closely as Frecknock performed like a well-trained dog. And then finally, when he was sure he knew what she was doing, he reached into the Grym, concentrating on the spot where she now stood halfway across the throne room, and stepped forward.

‘Your Grace. How is this possible?' Frecknock caught him as his knees buckled. He was close to her, too close, and the smell of her was strangely intoxicating, her cradling arms strong as they wrapped around him. It brought back yet more memories, the life before he came to Emmass Fawr that his initiation into the order had all but obliterated. Still seeing the aethereal and the Grym, Melyn shook himself free of her with greater reluctance than he expected, turning back to face the throne some twenty paces away. He had crossed that distance with a thought, but it wasn't the first time he had done that.

‘When Benfro escaped, did you see which way he went?' Melyn scanned the edge of Frecknock's thoughts as he asked her the question, seeing her memory of the event in a blur of motion and concern. Concern for her own safety, for his, and yes, for the young dragon as well. Even though she had despised him all his short life, still she had not wanted to see him dead. He could understand that, up to a point, but it didn't help his rising temper. All his life he had been lied to, manipulated by her kind, but it went back to that first, great betrayal.

‘He was moving towards the throne, Your Grace. I think he saw something there. It all happened too quickly.'

Melyn pushed out with senses he couldn't put a name to, feeling the lines and the power of the Grym coursing through them. There was a flavour to their ebb and flow, like the smell of the cold stone corridors in the depths of the monastery, the river as it flowed past the great rock upon which the Neuadd was built, the trees in Ruthin's Grove. And there, above the throne, was a different scent. As if someone had opened a window on to another world. Tantalizingly familiar.

And then he noticed the heart stone, sitting on the arm of the throne. It glowed with a fiery light, echoing that of the two rings on his fingers. Melyn felt a familiar surge of power, and the Shepherd was within him. Only it wasn't the Shepherd at all. He tried to push it away, but it was far too late for that. It had been far too late for most of his life.

Stepping away from Frecknock, Melyn flowed into the Grym and was gone.

‘Damn it, where is he?'

Beulah woke herself from the aethereal trance, coming back to her real body with a snap that had her leaping out of her chair as if she'd been stung. A quick look out the barge window showed that the sun was low in the evening sky. She had been searching for Inquisitor Melyn for hours, pushing further and further into the unknown, driven by an insatiable need to know the truth. Haunted by the dying image Lady Dilyth had planted in her mind.

A soft gurgling cry told her what had broken her trance. Young Ellyn was awake and would need feeding. She wasn't a bad child, really. Quiet most of the time, almost
diffident in her requests for feeding and cleaning. Clun doted on her in a way that made Beulah almost jealous, but the queen herself couldn't feel the same stirrings of unconditional love. Not for the first time on their journey she mourned the loss of the wet nurse Blodwyn and hoped that a new one could be found soon.

‘You may enter.' Beulah sensed the hovering presence of her maidservant, another from the Hendry, though not as competent as Alicia. The door opened hesitantly, and the girl shuffled in. She curtsied nervously, then went straight to the baby's cot. Beulah was about to complain that she hadn't closed the door when it pushed open further and Clun stepped through.

‘No luck, my lady?'

‘None. It's as if he has closed his mind off completely. And all this damned water doesn't help.'

Beulah looked through the window again, watching the grassy bank slide by. Lord Beylin's barges were much swifter running up the river than they had been creeping around the coast to Abervenn, but it had still taken them several days, held back by the bulk of the army still travelling on foot.

‘I'm sure he's fine. If anything had happened to him we would have heard by now. I'm certain he isn't dead; I'd have felt that. All the warrior priests would have felt that.'

Beulah thought about reminding Clun that he was not a fully trained warrior priest, but in truth his connections to the Grym and the aethereal were so strong he would likely have been the first to feel something like that. She was distracted from commenting by the maidservant, bowing nervously and presenting the newly clean Princess Ellyn.
Beulah took the infant, wondering how long it would take for her to feel anything but mild annoyance at the child, then shrugged open her blouse and let her feed.

‘We have some news at least. Birds from General Otheng. His troops have secured Tynewydd, so the Rhedeg pass is open. He is waiting for confirmation from Cachog on the situation at Wrthol, but the last he heard, Prince Geraint had turned back to Tynhelyg.'

‘And that's meant to make me feel better?' Beulah shifted, trying to find a position that was comfortable and failing. ‘The larger of Ballah's two armies is heading his way and Melyn has only five hundred warrior priests to defend a city?'

‘He has no need to defend it. He can just retreat into the northlands, cut around behind Geraint's men and march south through either pass.'

‘Do you think Melyn would turn and run like that? That's not his style and you know it. And he's changed too. Somehow he's more powerful in his magic than ever before. You felt it, didn't you? When he dragged you into the aethereal.'

Clun frowned at the memory. ‘The dragon, Frecknock, has taught him something of their subtle arts. But there is more, as if something is standing behind him, pushing him ever further.'

‘The Shepherd?' Beulah's skin tingled at the thought of it. She remembered the night Clun had come to her possessed by his spirit. The night Ellyn had been conceived. As if sensing her change in mood, the infant stirred at her breast, opened her eyes and let out a tiny wail. Beulah lifted her up, stared at her tiny face and those impossibly
black eyes. Was she marked by the Shepherd for great things? Would she rule over a united Gwlad?

‘Shall I take her, ma'am? Little un's probably full now. She never takes all that much.'

Judging by the pain in her nipples, Beulah had to disagree, but she handed her child over to the maid anyway, swiftly rebuttoning her blouse. She was getting to her feet when a sharp knock at the cabin door broke the silence. Clun was there in an instant, putting himself between it and his daughter rather than his queen, Beulah noticed.

‘Enter,' she said.

Lord Beylin stepped into the room, ducking slightly to avoid hitting his head on the low lintel. He took in the whole of the cabin with a swift sweep of his head before bowing extravagantly.