The Broken World (50 page)

‘My lady, how is it they have not killed him? Or he them?'

Beulah turned to see Lord Beylin standing just behind her. At least he hadn't run, though he gripped his thin steel blade inexpertly.

‘I do not know, Petyr. The Duke of Abervenn is full of surprises. Perhaps one day I will find out where a lad of scarce nineteen summers learned all that he knows, but for now I am just glad to have him around.'

Beylin opened his mouth to speak again, then shut it, his eyes widening. Beulah turned to see Clun extinguish his blade of fire, climb back into Godric's saddle, turn and
ride slowly towards her. The two dragons flanked him, their movements strangely catlike as they matched his speed but kept a few dozen paces behind. They stopped a hundred yards from the encampment, leaving Clun to ride on alone.

‘What manner of sorcery is this? Are you bewitched, my love?' Beulah approached the great black stallion without fear and it dipped its massive head to her, flaring its nostrils in recognition. Clun dismounted again, letting the reins fall slack.

‘Quite the opposite, my lady.' He took her hand in his, lifted it to his lips and kissed it, the mischievous glint in his eye making him seem barely those nineteen summers.

‘Then what, pray, are those two beasts doing?' Beulah nodded in the direction of the dragons. They had hunkered down on the grass and now were as motionless as statues.

‘The one on the left is Sir Sgarnog, if I've got the pronunciation right. The other is his mate, Angharad the Red. The beast I killed was their leader, Sir Chwilog. I tried to speak to him, but I think he was a bit mad. These two are really quite happy to see the back of him.'

‘I didn't ask who they were, I asked what they were doing.' Beulah felt a certain sense of safety so close to Clun and Godric, but she was still nervous at the closeness of the two dragons. Neither was as large as Caradoc, but between the two of them they could destroy half her army if they so chose. And there were more wheeling around the Neuadd to contend with too.

‘They are awaiting my command, my lady. I have
defeated their leader in combat, so as far as they are concerned I am their leader now.'

For an endless moment there was silence, as if the whole of Gwlad held its breath. Then the air grew thick, squeezing his lungs until Benfro could scarcely breathe. A terrible wailing screech built up, so loud he thought his head must surely break. And then the great glass doors burst outwards, shattering into a million pieces that were whipped away on the wind. Massive stone benches flipped into the air as if thrown around by an invisible hand. Papers exploded out of bookcases, strange instruments flew about the room, some clattering against the walls, others disappearing out of the windows. Flame billowed from the fireplace as if some great beast had blown down the chimney. Benfro covered his face to avoid losing his other eye and just caught the movement as Melyn sprang at him. He ducked and rolled, narrowly missing the swinging arc of the inquisitor's blades.

‘I will kill you all now and claim both of these worlds as my own.' Melyn's voice cracked with madness as he circled the body of Gog. Benfro backed away, risking a glance to see Martha and the young boy cowering beside the golden cage, trying desperately to avoid being sucked out of the windows by the gale that had sprung up from nowhere.

‘Run!' he shouted even as he knew running was pointless. And then there was a commotion at the doorway as Enedoc appeared at the top of the stairs, closely followed by his two companions. They took only an instant to appraise the situation, then Enedoc launched himself
across the room, wings wide, claws extended in attack. Melyn moved in a blur, his twin blades screaming in the wind. Enedoc reared up at the last minute, narrowly missing going the same way as his master. He spun smoothly on one leg, whipping his tail around to cut Melyn off at the knees, but the inquisitor just laughed, leaping like a man a third his age. One blade swung down as he rose, and Enedoc let out a howl of pain and rage.

‘There will be no sons of Gog in my world,' Melyn shouted above the wind. ‘Only their jewels will remain, and I will tap them for their power.'

Their power. Benfro saw the body of Gog lying by the now-empty fireplace. His head lay just to the side, and in it were surely the greatest jewels ever to have grown inside a dragon's brain. Benfro knew then that unreckoned they would be Melyn's – Magog's – to control. And with them the inquisitor would be truly unstoppable. He would have to do something about that, but first he had to get Errol's friend to safety.

‘You have to go. Take the Llinellau. Get as far from here as possible.' Benfro spoke the words quietly but pushed them at Martha with his mind.

The young woman looked up at him, shouted back, ‘I can't leave Xando. And we can't use the lines anyway. Look at them!'

Benfro did and instantly saw what she meant. The Llinellau here were all crimson, power pouring through them into Melyn. How the inquisitor was not devoured by them he couldn't begin to understand, but trying to step into them was plainly suicide.

‘Get to the ledge outside,' Benfro said. Martha looked
around, saw the two dragons in the doorway at the top of the stairs, then ducked down as Enedoc flew overhead. Dark gouts of blood spattered the floor and walls, but the dragon once more took the fight to Melyn.

‘Go!' Benfro shouted, then turned back to the fray. He could feel the fire building up inside him, the Fflam Gwir. The reckoning flame. He just needed to get a little closer. But Melyn stood between him and Gog's body now. Benfro might have just burned them both, but he remembered the casual ease with which the inquisitor had brushed aside his flame before. He couldn't risk that happening again.

Then Enedoc launched himself once more, and this time Melyn's blades were not swift enough. The dragon wrapped his claws around the inquisitor's body, the two of them tumbling together, knocking the writing desk over. Benfro took a deep breath and then released the flame.

Palest blue, it leaped on to Gog's body as if it were alive, enveloping him totally in an instant. Through the glow Benfro thought he saw Gog rise in his magnificent aethereal form, and then something crashed into his back, knocking the wind out of him.

‘What have you done! The master!' Blows rained down on him as Benfro tried to escape from a weight pinning him to the floor. One of Enedoc's companions had seen him breathe the reckoning flame and had assumed he was attacking Gog.

‘He's dead, you fool.' Benfro managed to get his weaker arm underneath him, pivot and roll. The dragon fell from him, momentarily stunned. This gave Benfro just
enough time to get to his feet and run for the broken window as he saw a blade of light spear up out of the middle of Enedoc's back. Out on the ledge Martha and Xando huddled against the wall, shivering in the bitter cold. ‘Grab hold of each other. Tight.' Benfro shouted above the wind. It wasn't really necessary; they were all close together anyway.

‘You will not escape me, Benfro.' The voice was Melyn's, but the surge of fury that lit up the rose cord looping away from his forehead was all Magog. Benfro screamed at the pain as the long-dead dragon mage poured all his efforts into breaking him. His vision dimmed, both eyes robbed of their function. His limbs froze and it felt like a giant hand had reached into his chest and was squeezing his hearts. He could feel his strength ebbing more swiftly even than when Fflint had thrown him repeatedly against a wall.

And then the pain was gone.

‘I think we should go now.'

Benfro opened his eyes, seeing the rose cord tied closed with a loop of dark green aura, strong and solid as it flowed from Martha. She had her arms around Xando, and they both stood at the edge now, teetering over a thousand-foot drop.

He didn't need to turn to see the inquisitor rushing towards him; Benfro's blind eye showed him both the man and the dragon that had overtaken him. In that last instant he saw too the twin points of crimson light where each blade of fire began, and the way the Grym bent towards Melyn, feeding him with energy that came from …

But there was no time to explore that. Benfro bounded to the edge of the platform, swept Martha and Xando into the tightest embrace he could manage even as he opened his wings further than they had been since his fight with Fflint.

And then he jumped.

This book has been a long time coming.

I began writing The Ballad of Sir Benfro over ten years ago. At the time, I was working on a livestock research farm in mid Wales and beginning to learn Welsh. During one evening class (Dosbarth Nos), we were discussing the county names and Sîr Benfro came up. Sîr is the Welsh equivalent of the English ‘shire' and Benfro comes from Pen meaning ‘head' or ‘end' and Fro, an old Welsh word for the land, so literally the Headland or the end of the land, which anyone who knows Pembrokeshire will realize is very apt.

It is also, as my better half pointed out to me at the time, the perfect name for a dragon, and thus Sir Benfro was born.

He started off as a rather ungainly fellow, and because I was working on a sheep farm it made perfect sense for his arch-foes to be sheep (at least it did in my mind at the time). I wrote a couple of short stories exploring the characters and mythology of this world I had imagined, and then decided there was enough in it for a fantasy epic.

It took the wise counsel of my good friend Stuart MacBride to convince me that sheep would never be taken seriously as evil foes. I changed them to men, but kept their names. Some of you will recognise such breeds as Llanwennog, Clun Forest, Beulah Speckle-Face, Torwen
and Tordu. It is no coincidence that the god of these people is called the Shepherd.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I found it very hard to find a publisher for this sprawling tale of magic, dragons and
sheep
men. I wrote three of a planned five-novel series, then realized that even if a publisher did pick up the first one it would be several years until they needed book four. I was dabbling with crime fiction at the time too, which was something of a distraction. Eventually I self-published both my first two crime novels and the three Benfro books that were already written. I had no great hopes for huge commercial success, but liked the idea of them being out there.

That's not quite how things worked out.

The crime novels, featuring Edinburgh-based Detective Inspector Tony McLean took off spectacularly well, selling hundreds of thousands of copies. The Benfro books were very well received too, and I started getting emails from people wanting to know when the next one was coming out. Soon, I'd tell them, and then get a call from my editor asking when the next McLean book would be ready. My initial deadline of summer 2012 passed by, then summer 2013 was gone. I always meant to get the book written, but there just never seemed to be any spare time.

Then my editor at Penguin decided he too liked the Benfro series and wanted to publish it. This knocked the schedule back even further, as I had to review and edit the first three books all over again before even thinking about writing the fourth. And there was another problem. Books one,
Dreamwalker
, and two,
The Rose Cord
, came
in at a reasonable one hundred-and-twenty thousand and one hundred-and-forty thousand words respectively. Book three,
The Golden Cage
, in my original self-published version, was almost two hundred-and-thirty thousand words. Too long for a paperback, and out of keeping with the flow of the earlier books. Something had to be done.

So after much soul-searching, I took the decision to cut a large section from the end of book three and use it as the opening to book four. There is a natural point in
The Golden Cage
where this works well, and the Penguin edition of the book is thus shorter than the original DevilDog version.

The beginning of this book,
The Broken World
, will therefore be strangely familiar to some of my earlier readers, and for that I apologize. I hope you don't feel short-changed; there's well over a hundred thousand words of new story in here!

I must also apologise for the long delay in picking up the story again. You have all been very patient, and I promise not to take so long with the final instalment.

Thank you all for being such wonderful readers. I hope you enjoy this latest chapter in the adventures of Benfro and Errol.

James Oswald

Fife – May 2015

I may have been the one sitting at a desk in the wee small hours dreaming of dragons and magic (and sheep), but an army of people have helped to bring those dreams to the wider world. I run the risk of upsetting people by not including them in this list, but I must thank Alex Clarke, Sophie Elletson, Hugh Davis and all the rest of the team at Michael Joseph for polishing my words into something readable, and for wrapping them up in such gorgeous covers. Thanks too to Roy McMillan and Wayne Forrester for the truly wonderful audiobook editions.

I wouldn't be where I am today without the irrepressible Juliet Mushens, agent extraordinaire, friend and now cat lady in training. Thank you seems somehow inadequate, so I'll just have to keep sending the pink fizz.

A shout out to Stuart MacBride, who probably never realised all those years ago how his advice to ditch the sheep would pay off. And thank you to my long-suffering partner Barbara McLean, who first pointed out all those years ago that Sir Benfro would be great name for a dragon.

And finally the biggest thank you of all to you readers, who not only took a chance with an unknown, self-published author, but also stuck around this far. I could probably do it without you, but it wouldn't be half as much fun.