The Obsidian Throne Page 17

  ‘You do not feel my invitation is sufficient to allow entry?’

  ‘Only the reigning monarch may grant that boon, ma’am.’

  ‘So you will be staying here then?’

  ‘I have no choice. My sacred oath forbids any other course of action.’

  Iolwen studied the man’s face. He wasn’t old, maybe only in his thirties where men of his calling might well expect to see their eighth decade. He had about him that same dry, dense quality as the ledgers he no doubt spent all his time creating, studying and amending. If he kept away from the dragons, it was likely Beulah’s army would simply set him back to his business; he was not senior enough to have been part of Padraig’s conspiracy. The predicants behind him were a different matter. Young, scared and with only basic training, they were expendable. Iolwen could see them being strung up as a warning to others not to betray the queen. She addressed the nearest of them, a lad who looked like he’d only just stopped wearing short trousers.

  ‘What is your name, Predicant?’

  The youngster’s eyes widened in surprise and fear. No doubt he was from a little village in the middle of nowhere, overwhelmed by the honour of being chosen. ‘M-me, Your Highness?’

  ‘Yes, you.’

  ‘Umm, Bendle, ma’am.’

  ‘Well, Master Bendle. Do you wish to stay here and take your chances with the dragons and my sister? Or would you rather flee the city and go home to your family? There is no shame in that, not in these circumstances.’

  Bendle’s eyes widened even further, until Iolwen feared his eyeballs might pop out. ‘It is forbidden, ma’am.’

  ‘Your seneschal was eaten by one of those dragons, you know. My sister appears to command them. Do you think she will treat you well or just feed you to the beasts?’

  The predicant swallowed hard. His face had shown little colour to start with, but now it was paler than Candle Ioan’s pasty complexion. Iolwen decided she could spare no more time trying to persuade them. No one could say she hadn’t tried.

  ‘Suit yourself.’ She shook her head once, then turned back to her guard. ‘Seize them, will you? If they’re forced down the stairs then no one can say they broke their precious vows.’

  Without another word, a dozen of the irregular soldiers leaped upon the predicants, put them into armlocks and marched them off down the stairs. Captain Derridge himself went for the clerk, but Iolwen put a hand on his arm.

  ‘Not him. He can stay. My sister will have need of his skills. And besides, he doesn’t really want to leave his beloved books.’

  Ioan bowed his head in acceptance of her appraisal. His whole demeanour was so dry it made Iolwen’s skin itch. He looked over to the doorway where the last of the barely protesting predicants was disappearing out of sight, then back to the princess with the ghost of a smile. ‘I do not think your sister would have been so considerate. I will pray for your safe journey, Your Highness.’ And with that he turned and walked off slowly down the corridor.

  ‘He’s a bit of an odd fish,’ Captain Derridge said as the clerk of the Candle disappeared into the dusty gloom.

  ‘His kind often are. It’s their books. They dry out their brains from staring at them too long.’ Iolwen tried a smile, then remembered who was missing from the party. For a moment she had been distracted enough to forget Dafydd’s uncertain plight. She had to find the dragon Merriel, had to track her husband down. Bad enough that their triumph had turned so quickly to despair; she didn’t think she could live without seeing his face again.

  The first thing Errol noticed was the cold whistling around his bare feet and ankles. Flurries of snow whipped on the wind, carried in through the vast windows, which opened out on to a raging blizzard. The storm should have knocked him off his feet, such was its ferocity outside, but something held it back from the threshold, damping its force although doing nothing to alleviate the chill. His head was surprisingly cold too, and when he reached up to feel it he realized his hair had been shaved off. Without a thought he reached out for the Grym, tapping it for warmth, then yelped as it rushed into him with unexpected force. Concentrating harder, he calmed the unruly flow, seeing the lines more clearly now. They shimmered and writhed like disturbed snakes, twisted by some terrible cataclysm that centred around the spot where he had seen the great carved writing desk. As he looked, so he could see how they formed an invisible curtain over the great windows too. Once it would have been completely impermeable, but now it was failing, buckling under the onslaught of the weather outside.

  Errol was certain this was the place he had seen before, but it was changed utterly. In his dreams the tower room had been cluttered, but there had been a certain order to it. The long workbenches had been the right way up, the strange apparatus arranged on their tops whole and unbroken. Now glass fragments glittered on a floor strewn with broken vessels and twisted metal. Chairs lay smashed against the walls and the great fireplace was empty, no flames leaping from the damp charred logs. The golden cage in which Martha had been confined lay on the floor close to the writing desk. Both appeared unharmed, but all around was a scene of chaos. Scrolls lay in haphazard piles on the floor, pages ripped from books fluttering in the oddly muted wind that whistled between the two arched openings where the glass windows had been. A few scraps of frame hung from one hinge, but the rest was long gone.

  ‘So it’s true. He really did meet his end here. But what manner of beast could slay one so powerful? And here in his lair?’ Myfanwy picked her way around the room, moving broken furniture out of her way as she approached the fireplace and the writing desk. Errol came at it from the other side, but was distracted by Nellore.

  ‘Freezing in here. How can you stand there in your bedclothes?’

  She was better dressed for the weather than him, but only just. Her skirt was a thick dark wool, and fell to just above the ground, mostly covering a pair of shiny leather boots. She wore a jacket of the same material, embroidered around the lapels with fine silver thread. It was probably quite warm, but the blouse underneath it was thin cotton. Errol was about to tell her to use the Grym for warmth, then reminded himself that not everyone knew that magic. The people of this world seemed particularly ill-attuned to it. He looked around for something that would do as a cloak, which was when he noticed the body lying over by the entrance to the stairwell.

  How he could have missed it, he couldn’t be sure. It was a dragon twice the size of Myfanwy, and even though it lay on its back, wings twisted and broken, head lolling, its belly still rose higher off the ground than Errol standing. Perhaps it was the shadows, or maybe the complete lack of any spark of life. More likely that he had been too busy looking the other way to notice. Now he had seen it, however, he couldn’t take in anything else.

  Treading as carefully as he could, Errol moved across the room until he was right beside the dead creature. He didn’t recognize it, but it was clearly not one of the feral beasts from the Twmp. It was too clean, its scales polished and shiny except for a half-dozen places where something appeared to have burned through them leaving perfectly round holes. There was no blood around the wounds, and when he leaned closer to inspect the nearest one, Errol could smell something that wasn’t quite burning but gave the impression of fire. Like the tang of two rocks cracked together.

  ‘I know what has done this,’ he said, sensing Myfanwy beside him even though he hadn’t heard her cross the room.

  ‘Ah, Enedoc, you were meant for greater things than this.’ She crouched down beside the dead dragon, reached out and gently touched his face.

  ‘You knew him?’ Errol asked.

  ‘I raised him from an egg. Enedoc son of Gog was my eldest. He must be given the respect due all our kind in death.’ Myfanwy set about arranging the dragon’s body, carefully folding in his wings and arms. ‘I will take him to the place of his hatching. He can wait there a while, but not too long. Oh, these old bones.’ She reached out and took the dead dragon’s head in both hands before fixing Errol with a look as
weary as he felt. ‘I won’t be long,’ she said, then disappeared, the corpse of Enedoc going with her into the Grym.

  ‘Did she just leave us here?’ Nellore had wandered across the room to see what was happening, arriving just in time for Myfanwy’s disappearance. Now she stared at the dragon-shaped empty space on the floor with her mouth open, her arms hugged to her sides for warmth.

  ‘Looks like it. Let’s hope she’s not gone long. Not sure how easy it will be to get back. Not sure where back is, if I’m honest.’ Errol hugged his arms around himself, shivering as the cold wind whipped at his bedclothes and the bare skin of his feet. His shaved scalp leaked heat, chilling his head and making it hard to concentrate on tapping the unruly Grym for warmth.

  ‘What is this place? What happened here?’

  ‘This? This is the top of Gog’s tower. This is where I saw Martha, trapped in that cage over there.’ Errol stepped carefully through the rubbish towards it. Nellore hurried ahead, booted feet unconcerned by the shards of broken glass everywhere, so that by the time Errol reached it she was already inside. The bars of the cage had been woven through with stiff material, pieces of wood and discarded parchment so that it resembled nothing so much as the nest of some giant carrion bird. Nellore emerged from the darkness bearing a heavy woollen blanket and a silver bowl with a wooden spoon sticking out of it.

  ‘Looks like someone’s been living in here.’ She sniffed the bowl, wrinkled her nose at something unpleasant. ‘Not for a while mind.’

  Errol took the blanket from her, lifting it to his nose. He didn’t know whether he was expecting to smell anything; he wasn’t sure he’d have recognized Martha’s scent anyway after their long parting. But there was something in the rough fabric, an aroma of autumn leaves and dark loam that sparked a memory. He took another breath and could almost see himself back in the woods close to his mother’s cottage. That long summer before Inquisitor Melyn and Princess Beulah had arrived in the village to destroy everyone’s lives.

  ‘Here, what’s this? Looks like someone’s been having a bonfire.’

  Errol snatched himself out of the dream as he saw Nellore walk over to a spot behind the writing desk. The floor there was clear except for a pile of fine white ash roughly the shape of a dragon. The breeze picked at it, whittling down the heap so that in parts the flagstones of the floor showed through. He remembered a very similar pile of ashes in the long grass on the empty plains of north Llanwennog. The last remains of a man called Tibbits, devoured by dragon-breathed flame.

  ‘Careful. It might be dangerous.’

  ‘Nonsense. It’s just ash.’ Nellore scuffed at the edges of the pile with her boot. ‘Oh, but there’s something in here.’

  Errol opened his mouth to tell her not to pick up what he knew must be there, but he trod on a shard of glass and let out a squawk of pain instead. It was enough to distract her for a moment, but she was already crouched down, hand reaching into the pile as the wind brushed the last of the ash from the top of Gog’s reckoned jewels.

  ‘Don’t touch them!’ He gasped out the words over the agony in his foot. Too late, Nellore’s fingers connected with the jewels and they lit up like the sun. Her eyes turned bright as all the Grym rushed from the room into her, through her.

  15

  The conjuring of the Fflam Gwir for the reckoning of a dead dragon’s jewels is the most important responsibility of a mage. While most dragons possess a varying degree of skill in the subtle arts, few have the depth of knowledge required to perform this key act. Instead, they must resort to using a potent mixture of rare oils and minerals to bring forth the flame, setting firm the memories and learning of the deceased.

  Second in importance only to the reckoning, the mage is charged with taking the reckoned jewels and placing them with those of dragons already passed. For death is only a stage in our existence, and transitory at that. Collections of dragons’ jewels, sometimes called hoards by those who do not understand them, are places of great power in the Grym. Laid to rest, the collected jewels feed off this power, the experience and wisdom of generations mingling as one. Such places are protected from accidental discovery by wards the mage will maintain daily, linked to their own life force. And when they die, for death must come to us all, those wards will be tied to the dead mage’s own reckoned jewels, strengthening the protection already provided by mages long since passed.

  It is for this reason that the reckoned jewels of dead mages are not laid to rest alongside those of their fellow dragons. Instead, they are hidden away in solitude, there to watch over us for all eternity.

  Corwen teul Maddau,

  The Way of the Mage

  Unlike the corridors and palace above, the cavern deep beneath the Neuadd was packed with people. Only a small fraction of the number who must have passed through already, but it was still enough to make the air taste stale. A line of Llanwennog palace guards and nervous predicants of the Order of the Candle had so far managed to keep the crowd away from the stone columns and their priceless contents, but a couple of the curtains Teryll had draped over them had slipped, and the glow of the jewels bathed everything in a hellish red light. They seemed to burn brighter, or so Iolwen thought. Almost as if they were feeding off the Grym emanating from so many people collected in one place.

  She directed Captain Derridge and his ragtag band of soldiers towards one of the exit tunnels, then set about finding Lady Anwen and Prince Iolo. They were close to the centre of the cavern, directly beneath the Obsidian Throne itself, and Iolwen found Teryll and Captain Venner there too. The people were subdued, but even a whisper can be loud when a thousand people are making it. Iolwen thought that the susurrus would die down as she moved away from the crowd. Instead it grew louder, and as she focused on the words, she realized that the voices weren’t human, but the near-silent moans and wails of the jewels themselves.

  She had barely taken her sleeping infant from Anwen’s arms, scarcely had time to cuddle her child and shed a silent, hopeless tear at how much he resembled his missing father, before a cry of alarm went up close to one of the tunnel entrances. Clasping Prince Iolo tight to her, she hurried over to see what was happening. In the confined space it was hard to tell how many people there were, but it seemed to be more than before. The red light cast awkward shadows too, making it almost impossible to see the tunnel itself. Then she saw the young Predicant Trell, his hand still wrapped in blood-soaked bandages, gesticulating wildly as he tried to control a crowd of agitated people.

  ‘All will be well. Do not panic.’ Iolwen suppressed her own anxiety as best she could, projecting an aura of peace over the crowd. It calmed them a little, but she could feel the fear bubbling underneath the surface, the panic just waiting to erupt. She could ill-afford a riot in this confined space; no need for dragons if the people trampled each other.

  ‘Master Trell, what is happening?’ She hurried across to where he stood. His face was pale, his exhaustion clear in the way his shoulders slumped and he swayed ever so slightly. As he saw her, he straightened.

  ‘I do not know, Your Highness. The line was moving slowly, but we’d got most of the people out. I turned my back for a second and when I looked again the tunnel was gone.’

  Iolwen could see now. The shape she had taken for the tunnel mouth was just a shadow on the rock. ‘Make way,’ she said, putting enough compulsion behind the words for the anxious mob to comply. When she reached the wall, there was no sign of an entrance. Only the tracks worn in the dusty floor by a thousand pairs of feet showed that anything had been here at all.

  ‘How can this be?’ She put a hand out, felt the rough stone. No magic coursed through it, and when she tried to summon the lines to her vision there was nothing to see.

  ‘Take the prince, please, Anwen.’ Iolwen passed back her sleeping infant with great reluctance, but this was not something she could do while carrying him. She steadied herself, blanking out the growing fear all around her, and let herself slip briefly into the aethereal. That was h
ow she had located the tunnels before, but now the silver arch was gone. No trace in the stone that there had ever been a way out.

  ‘What of the other tunnels?’ Iolwen stumbled out of the trance and set off towards the next entrance. Before she was even close she could see that it was gone, and the next as well. The fourth exit sealed up as she approached it, the people who had been about to enter tumbling to the floor as if pushed away by an invisible hand. Beyond it the fifth entrance remained open, and the crowd surged towards it, their panic growing.

  ‘Be calm, but be swift.’ She placed her hand on the wall close to the tunnel entrance, feeling the surge in the Grym here as her presence reinforced whatever magic controlled this escape route. Tapping it for strength, Iolwen pushed the compulsion out across the room, backing up her words. The rush slowed, feet falling into a steady rhythm as they began to move like a well trained army on parade. Soon the people were marching through the opening three and four abreast. Iolwen tried not to dwell too much on what might have caused the other tunnels to disappear. No doubt it was her sister’s doing. That this one was still open left too many uncomfortable questions, but then the existence of the tunnels was just as troubling. Where they might lead, doubly so. What had happened to the thousands who had already left? Were they trapped in the rock, crushed like poor Predicant Trell’s fingers? Or had they fallen into the waiting hands of Beulah’s tame dragons?

  Iolwen was aware of an increase in the noise echoing in the huge cavern, a general unease threatening to erupt into chaos. She tried hard to quell her own fears, knowing how easy it was to send them to everyone, amplified by the powerful Grym in the place. But the doubts were not easy to ignore, and the more she tried, the more she could feel control slipping away. Then a hand rested on her shoulder and she felt the familiar presence of the medic Usel.

  ‘Take my strength if you need it. Calm yourself. There are not many left to go.’