The Broken World (36 page)

‘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.'

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.

‘A dragon? Is it Caradoc?'

Frecknock turned to greet him, her great dark eyes heavy. ‘It is he. And he has found friends. I see at least ten, maybe more.'

Melyn moved closer, taking up a spot beside her. ‘Where have they come from?'

‘I do not know, Your Grace. I sensed … something approaching. But I had no idea. I'm grateful for the spell of concealment, and the Llfyr Draconius. Without them I fear we would be suffering the same fate as Prince Geraint's army.'

‘This was the Shepherd's plan all along. To use these creatures of the Wolf against each other.' Melyn gazed out across the plain, watching as the sun first tinged the eastern horizon with pink, then spread light across a scene of the most terrible carnage. The camp had been well organized, Geraint's army disciplined enough to take time over lining up the tents, corralling the horses, building basic fortifications even though their home was only a few short miles away. These professional soldiers would have made short work of Beulah's peasant army, but they were no match for a dozen dragons. More. He watched as three of them swooped on the panicked camp, huge wings blasting campfires in all directions, setting tents alight along with their hapless occupants. One vast creature grabbed a horse, carrying the screaming, terrified animal high into the air before releasing it to fall crashing back down on top of a troop of soldiers. Squinting, Melyn saw a line of archers hurl a swarm of arrows after one dragon, but the shafts simply bounced off its scaly hide. It turned, dived, taloned feet outstretched as it swept
through the ranks, scattering the bowmen. Few got up after it had passed.

And so it went on as the sun rimmed the far horizon and began its climb into the morning sky. Melyn counted perhaps twenty dragons, though they swept and dived and spun and spiralled so swiftly it was difficult to be sure. They seemed never to tire, and they put him in mind of foxes among chickens. For them it was not enough to kill what was needed to survive; these creatures were in a frenzy and would not stop until everything was dead, ripped apart, half devoured.

One beast, larger even than Caradoc, landed in the middle of the camp where the biggest tents had been pitched. This was where Prince Geraint would be, his generals with him. Melyn almost pitied them; there was little they could hope to do against such an enemy. Even his warrior priests would have been hard pressed, though with a few like Clun he would have been able to drive them off.

‘Why do they not use the Grym against these beasts?' Melyn asked. It was perhaps too distant to see whether individual soldiers were conjuring their puissant swords, as the Llanwennogs called them, but he had felt nothing in the Grym himself to suggest multiple adepts were tapping it.

‘A few have managed, Your Grace. But the plain below is as weak in the Grym as this hill is strong. Some great disaster befell this place aeons ago. I have no idea what, but its effects persist. Much like the magics that flourished in the forest of the Ffrydd, only here the opposite is true.'

Melyn relaxed, letting the lines come into his vision.
Unbidden, he found himself in the aethereal, only this time the Grym was painted clearly over the scene as well. He could hear the noises of the battle, feel the damp of dewy grass seeping through his robes. Turning his head, he saw Frecknock both as her normal physical self and the larger, more striking dragon she perceived herself to be. The aethereal and the mundane together.

‘How is this happening?' Melyn held his hand in front of his face, momentarily distracted from the slaughter going on below.

‘Your Grace, this is how it should be. The Grym and the aethereal, as you call it, are but two faces of the same thing. This is central to our subtle arts. Come, let me show you something.' Frecknock stood, her aethereal self separating from the dragon sitting on the grass hilltop. Melyn rose too, feeling the weight of the world slip from him. Together they descended the hill, covering the space between them and the battle in a heartbeat.

‘Will the dragons not see us like this?' Melyn asked.

‘I do not think so. Caradoc, maybe. If he is looking. But the others have nothing of the subtle arts about them. They are not magical creatures. I don't understand how this can be, but to my senses they appear as base animals.'

They stood at the edge of the enemy camp now, watching in silence as the chaos unfolded. Men ran this way and that, grabbing for swords, bows, anything that might be used to fight. But the dragons swept in too swiftly to be targeted, grabbed a man or a tent or whatever came to claw, threw it about or heaved it into the air before dropping it. Nearby, one great beast had landed and was simply lashing out at anything that came near. It caught one
soldier with its tail, taking his legs out from underneath him. Before he could move, much less stand, the dragon opened its mouth wide and half swallowed him before biting him clean in two. One half fell wetly to the trampled ground, the other continued its way down the beast's gullet.

‘These are worse than base animals, Frecknock.' Melyn had seen his fair share of carnage. He knew the battlefield was friend only to carrion birds and the corpse collectors who would pick the dead for anything of value. He knew too that these men were his enemy, the godless Llanwennogs who had sent spies and assassins to kill Queen Beulah. There was a joy to be had in witnessing their destruction, but a small part of him, long hidden, almost wept.

And then he saw it, in the heart of the camp. One tent still stood, surrounded by the cream of Llanwennog soldiery. Prince Geraint's standard flew from a lance planted in the churned earth just a few paces from the tent's entrance. As he watched, Melyn saw the prince himself march out of the tent, place a helmet over his head and conjure into being a blade of white fire. He felt the surge in the Grym as the prince sucked life out of a place already lacking.

It happened in an instant. No brave fight, no cunning strategy. One moment Geraint was there, the next a flash of green and gold scales glittering in the low morning sunlight as something the size of a house smashed past, and then there was nothing. No tent, no lance, no standard, no soldiers. Just a helmet spinning in the flat-skimmed mud. A helmet with a head still inside.

The first thing he noticed was the noise. Like nothing he had ever heard before, it was as if the wind were whistling through distant trees, but rising and falling with a regular tempo. It was a peaceful sound, gentle after the screaming mayhem of the village, the bone-crunching violence of his fight with Fflint. Benfro couldn't see anything, had no idea where he was. He tried opening his eyes, then remembered the terrible noise of talon piercing eyeball, the hot fluid running down his cheek. Was he blind now?

Something warm and wet slapped against his face, then retreated. Benfro tasted saltwater and choked as it ran up his nose. The movement brought agonizing stabs of pain to his chest and a bubbling wheeziness to his breathing that suggested all was not well. He tried to move, but his wings were tangled around him like broken branches and he couldn't even feel his arms.

Another wash of saltwater in his face, stronger this time. He felt it surge along his body and realized he was half buried. It took all his strength to raise his head, but at least the retreating water washed out his eye so he could see. What he saw didn't make much sense.

He was lying on a beach of fine black sand, staring out over an expanse of water that faded off into a haze so distant he couldn't see the other shore. Perhaps their wasn't another shore at all. Waves lapped gently a few feet from him, most falling back before they reached his face. Every so often a larger one would break, rush up to his body and slap his legs, his belly and tail before running back like a frightened kitling. These waves were getting more frequent, bolder. Another rushed up his side, splashing his nose even though he was holding his head as high
as his failing strength would let him. Benfro didn't understand how this could be happening, but he knew he had to move or drown.

But even the strain of holding his head up was too much. He let it drop back down to the sand in despair. At least he could see each wave approaching now, and stop the worst of it from going up his nose.

Something squawked just out of his line of sight, a strange sound he didn't recognize. Then the sand crunched under shuffling feet as whatever it was approached. Benfro first saw webbed orange feet and a squat black body, a round smear of white on the front of the creature as it waddled into view. It had tiny wings, more like flippers, and its head merged into its body without any obvious sign of neck. Close up, he could see it was a bird, simply by the tiny tight-knit feathers covering its body, but it was unlike any bird he had ever seen. It shuffled even closer, bending slightly as it fixed him with a quizzical stare from its black, beady eyes. It made that noise again, a cross between a gurgle and a cough, and a smell of rotting fish filled the air.

Powerless to move, Benfro could only watch as the creature looked first at him, then out at the water, then back at him again, then out at the water again. After a dozen or so repetitions, it leaned in close, pecked him lightly on the snout as if checking to see he really existed and wasn't some strange hallucination. Then it turned, gurgle-coughing to itself as it waddled away again. He heard the noise of its feet in the sand and that curious call like an argument with itself fading away gently to be replaced by the wash of the waves on the beach, the swish
of the wind in unseen trees. Perhaps it had gone to get help, though Benfro doubted it. More likely it had gone to find its friends and tell them of the feast it had just found.

A larger wave rocked him, taking some of his weight and shifting his body a fraction. Benfro felt bones grinding together in ways they were never meant to, but he also felt his trapped arm free up. Pins and needles were the least of his troubles as he waited for another wave to help him. Everything hurt, and the pain in his chest made it all but impossible to breathe deeply. The short, rapid breaths he could take were unsatisfying, leaving him tired beyond belief and light-headed. Still he had to try. He wasn't going to die here.

When the wave came, the agony of freeing his arm completely almost knocked him cold. He used the pain and the momentum to roll over as best he could, trying to get his legs to work enough to at least push him further up the beach and away from the water. It sort of worked, but he was left so exhausted all he could do was stare at his new view, panting like a deer chased to the edge of death.