The Broken World (46 page)

‘Your Majesty. We are approaching the lower docks. My scouts inform me that the River Gate is down and the upper docks sealed. Too much to hope we could have entered the city that easily.'

‘They've prepared themselves for a siege this time? I'd have thought that coward Padraig would be throwing himself upon my mercy. Anything to protect his precious city from harm.'

‘Is it not your city, ma'am?'

‘It was, Petrus. And it will be again. And I'm not going to let the people go unpunished for their treason.'

A cold breeze rustled the dying autumn leaves in Ruthin's Grove, toying with Melyn's hair as he stood at the edge of the cliff and gazed across the forest of the Ffrydd. To the casual observer he might have appeared a statue, so still was he on the outside. Inside was another matter.

The Grym flowed through him like nothing he had ever known before. It soothed away his aches and pains, healed old injuries he had long since grown accustomed to. It nourished him and brought him information from all over Gwlad. He could sense the thoughts of the novitiates and quaisters in the monastery nearby. Picking an individual was as easy as tuning into a conversation in a crowded hall, but he was not interested in their petty, everyday lives. Everything they stood for was a lie anyway. Now he remembered. Now he knew.

Other thoughts babbled close by, the stable hands, workmen, cooks and a hundred different professions who kept the monastery working. Outside it, the village that had grown up in the shadow of the great arch muttered contentedly to itself at the approach of evening and the end of a hard day's work. Only the almshouses where the mindless failed novitiates lived were quiet. No thought there, just empty husks waiting to be fed and watered and
cleaned, as if that was somehow kinder than just putting them out of their misery.

With a single step Melyn was outside the long stone building that served as the almshouses' central refectory. Anywhere else the complex would have seemed big, but against the massive hulk of the monastery the buildings looked little more than doll's houses. Inside, upwards of a hundred men would be sitting patiently in their chairs. Soon the youngest novitiates would come out from the monastery to tend them, feeding them thin gruel before taking them back to their beds. He wasn't here to see any of this, could scarcely bring himself to care. He knew so much more about the Grym now it was hard to feel sad for people who had lost their minds to it.

The door was locked as usual; most of the inmates were catatonic, but a few had been known to wander around, aimless as cattle and just as destructive. Melyn pulled on the stout rope that rang the bell, waited patiently for it to be answered. All his life he had chafed at the slowness of others, their slowness at learning, slowness at responding to his commands, slowness at understanding his skill and acknowledging his superiority. Now he knew better, understood just how unimportant time was. His anger still burned bright, but it was controlled, directed. In time he would unleash it, and the whole of Gwlad would tremble at his fury.

‘Your Grace? I thought …' The man who opened the door was dressed in the plain brown robes of a novitiate, but he was older than the inquisitor by many years. Few who had been candled by the order remained in its service; most slunk home with heads low or moved far
away to build new lives for themselves. One or two in each generation hung around, maybe hoping for a second chance, and every so often they might be given it, although they would never again set foot inside the great monastery. Tending to the mindless was considered a high honour, although Melyn couldn't begin to understand why. Wiping another man's arse was not something he would undertake.

‘That I was away? That I might not survive? I would have thought you knew me better than that, Eifion.' Melyn pushed past the old man into the entrance hall of the building. The smell that confronted him was at once familiar and dreadful, the stench of soiled bodies and rot. He headed straight for the door that would take him to Eifion's office. The air would be slightly clearer there, away from the mindless.

‘No, sire. Of course not. I just hadn't heard the warrior priests returning. Normally the noise echoes from miles out. Not that these old ears are up to much these days. None of us is getting any younger.' The old man shuffled along after Melyn, complaining all the while. He closed the door firmly behind them, then went straight to a low sideboard where a tray held a jug and a couple of goblets. ‘Wine?'

‘The army is still in Tynhelyg. I came here alone.' Melyn took the offered drink, savouring the smell of it before slaking his thirst. How Eifion managed to get hold of the good stuff was anyone's guess, and it had been a while since the inquisitor had drunk anything as fine. ‘I needed to see you.'

‘Me? Why?' The old man slumped into his seat behind
the untidy desk that sat by the only window in the room and took a drink from his own goblet. Melyn felt the stirrings of his old anger at the overfamiliarity and suppressed it. True, Eifion was no longer a member of the order as such, but even so he should have shown a little more deference. Then again the old man had known him longer than most.

‘I have some questions. About how I came here, how I joined the order. My family before that.'

Melyn saw Eifion's eyes widen in surprise, rode that sensation into the old man's thoughts. It wasn't as if he needed to use subtlety; the man was an open book.

‘Your Grace, surely the order is—'

‘The only mother and father I will ever need. Yes, I know. I also know the order was founded to serve the Shepherd, to defend Gwlad from the creatures of the Wolf, to prepare for the time when he would come and take us to the safe pastures. Yes, Eifion old friend, I know the scriptures and I know they're bunk. So, tell me about my family. Tell me where I came from.'

Too late the old man tried to put up a fight. He was hopelessly outclassed, no better than a wet-behind-the-ears novitiate. Worse even, with his brain addled by age and wine. Melyn's questions brought the images, the memories, to the front of his mind. So easy to read, so easy to see. But far from the relief he craved, the release from the madness, Eifion's answers only compounded it.

‘They brought you to me. The villagers. Said they'd found you walking in a daze near the edge of the Faaeren Chasm. Reckoned you were a novitiate who'd lost himself to the Grym, maybe escaped from here. But you weren't
like the others, and you were too young to be a novitiate. Your mind had wandered out along the lines, but you came back. Took a while – weeks, months. I've been tending the mindless eighty years now and I've never seen one of them come back. Except you.'

As Eifion spoke, so Melyn saw the memories, faded at the edges with time. The north fields, strewn with boulders and pocked with the occasional scrappy tree, marching towards the edge of the precipice that plunged a thousand feet into the chasm. And there, on the other side, the southern flank of the Rim mountains. It was a vista he knew well, one he had seen almost every day of his adult life, and yet now it felt wrong, incomplete. As if something had taken a vast swathe of the land and ripped it away.

‘And no one ever knew where I'd come from.' It wasn't a question. Melyn tightened his grip on the old man's mind, digging for any hidden secrets. The sour-sweet smell of urine suggested to him that he might have been a bit less brutal about it, but the inquisitor found he no longer cared. Eifion was a failure, had always been a failure, and the kindest thing to do would be to put him out of his misery.

‘Farewell,' he said and stopped the man's heart with a thought. His ancient frame slumped in his seat, tilted forward and knocked over the goblet. Red wine spilled across the chaos of papers, dripping to the floor to mingle with the piss.

Melyn cast his mind out further, sensing nothing. Only the empty husks of the mindless remained in this place, and that suited him just fine. With a single step he was
standing in the main hall, staring at them as they sat motionless in their chairs. The teaching of the order had it that the mindless were in service to the Shepherd, that they had gone to join him in his fight, but it had always been accepted that they were kept alive as a warning to novitiates not to try and run before they had learned to walk. Melyn knew it was also guilt on the part of the quaisters and senior members of the order. They had let these young men down, maybe chosen unsuitable candidates or not paid enough attention to their charges. They were a constant reminder of the need to try harder. They were an abomination.

The ball of fire he conjured was not large, but it burned with a heat as hot as any furnace. Ancient wood caught swiftly, filling the hall with thick white smoke. None of the mindless moved. Not even as the flames licked at their feet, caught their clothing and singed their hair. They would not be mourned or missed.

A memory tugged from Eifion's mind came to him as he stood in the hall, listened to the crackling flames. Again Melyn saw the view from the northern fields where he'd been found wandering and mindless as a boy. A blink and he was there, gazing out across the chasm as the first few stars pierced the deep blue evening sky. He couldn't recall being found, only slowly coming to life in the old almshouse now burning merrily a mile behind him. But this was where it had happened. This was where it had started. Melyn looked around, his mind seeing the aetheral even as his eyes saw the mundane, and layered over everything the lines of the Grym. There was something about this place, this spot, that tugged at him, called him. Focusing on a
patch of sky, he could make out stars that were different somehow to those he had known all his life.

Then he saw it, silhouetted against the darkening sky, a tower taller than the highest mountain. The sight of it sent a shiver through him, not of cold or fear, but of joyous recognition. A single word formed on his lips.

‘Home.'

And then the floodgates opened in Melyn's mind, the mental blocks of a lifetime dissolving with dizzying speed. His memories returned with a force that would have rendered a lesser man senseless, but he stood firm against the deluge, letting it wash over him, around him. Letting it fill him completely. He knew then what had happened to him, how he had ended up at Emmass Fawr, how he had been touched by a god and then discarded like some unwanted plaything. Well, he was a god now too, and his vengeance would be sweet indeed.

‘Your Highness, take my hand.'

Prince Dafydd was still transfixed by the dragon standing in the great doorway to the Neuadd. It was twice the size of the one they had seen in the islands, its head bigger than an ox cart. It wasn't attacking, didn't need to really. The people were doing far more damage to each other trying to escape than one dragon, however large, could ever hope to achieve.

‘What is it?' Dafydd heard the idiocy in his question even as he asked it.

‘It's a dragon, Dafydd. A bloody big one.' Usel's normally calm demeanour had vanished, replaced with a calm urgency. ‘Now I think it would be best if we left.'

‘I cannot.'

Dafydd and Usel both looked to the princess, who stood tall, staring at the creature that had gatecrashed her homecoming.

‘Iol—'

‘It's not attacking us. Please, Usel. You have to speak to it. Find out what it wants. I will try to calm everyone down.'

Dafydd took a moment to understand what Iolwen was saying. His instinct, Usel's too, had been to hide, escape. But Iolwen was more concerned with the safety of the panicking crowd than herself. He felt both humbled and ashamed.

‘Use the throne. Calm them,' she said to Dafydd, then turned to Usel. ‘You speak Draigiaith. Tell me what that creature is saying.'

Her words galvanized them both into action. Dafydd reached out for the throne, feeling the power of the Grym that surged through it like nothing he had ever experienced before. It was intoxicating even from a distance; how much more so would it be to sit on the thing? He shook away the question, concentrating instead on smoothing out the waves of panic surging through the crowd. There were smaller exits on all the other sides of the Neuadd, and already people were fighting to get out. Most were heading for the north doors, so he sent out a suggestion pointing out the other exits. Groups of terrified people started to break off from the main crowd, and soon they were flowing out through all three sets of doors. Only he, Iolwen and Usel stood on the dais, their backs to the great throne, and Dafydd couldn't help but notice that
none of the panicked people clambered up on to it. No one even ventured on to the first of the low, wide steps.