The Rose Cord

by J. D. Oswald

  ‘I don’t know,’ Errol said.

  ‘Oh, but I think you do.’ Melyn stood, opened the door and called in the captain. ‘And you’re going to tell me all about it.’

  Errol could taste Osgal’s nervousness at being summoned into the private chapel. This was a place only for inquisitors. His astonishment at seeing Errol lying on the floor was even more apparent, but like the professional soldier he was, he recovered quickly, hefting Errol over his shoulder like a dead ewe and following the inquisitor out.

  They went up to Melyn’s private chambers, which were at least warmer than the chapel. Errol winced as he was dumped into a hard wooden chair, almost cried out when Osgal produced some rope and tied his arms and legs. The captain then held his mouth open while Melyn poured wine straight from a pitcher down his throat. He choked on the sharp liquid, but swallowed it gratefully. His throat was dry, his stomach empty, and he really didn’t care what happened to him any more, just as long as the pain stopped soon.

  It wasn’t long before the wine began to take effect. Errol found it more difficult to keep his eyes focused. His thoughts were slippery like eels in a spring river and he found that the pain was something he could ignore, at least for now.

  ‘Tell me what happened in Tynhelyg,’ Melyn said after what seemed to be a very long time. Errol felt sleepy, but he managed to open his eyes enough to look at the inquisitor.

  ‘Dondal turned me in.’ He tried hard not to slur his words. ‘Ballah locked me up inna Wes’ Tower. I met Iolwen there. She’s pretty but sad. Then he broke my ankles an’ had my head chopped off. Or somethin’ like that.’ For some reason this seemed very funny to Errol, so he laughed, then stopped when he saw the look on the inquisitor’s face. ‘What happened to you?’ he asked Melyn, wondering inside why he was behaving the way he was. ‘Y’ look like a dragon jus’ belched in y’ face.’

  The shock in his brain was like a faceful of icy water. The inquisitor’s fury was like a tempest, blowing through his memories, smashing open doors and overturning the furniture. Still fuddled by the mixture of pain-relieving draught and strong red wine, Errol could only wither under the onslaught. He had no time to construct a false memory and was too tired anyway to even begin.

  Almost idly, a spectator to the plunder of his memories, Errol wondered why the inquisitor had suddenly flown into a rage. It had to have been what he’d said, and to be honest with himself he didn’t know why he had said it. It sounded like a good little aphorism, but he couldn’t recall having heard anyone use it before. But when he thought about it, the inquisitor had just recently been belched in the face by a dragon. He could see the incident and feel the horror and surprise as Melyn lost his grip on the aethereal dragon. On Benfro.

  With a start Errol realized he was looking at Melyn’s memories. Whatever magic the inquisitor used to get into his mind, it was obviously a two-way street. He wondered what else was going through his tormentor’s mind, and an image of Queen Beulah appeared in front of him. No, not Queen Beulah. Though her face was similar, this was a different woman – older, naked and in the throes of passion.

  ‘Get out of my head!’ Errol heard the words an instant before something hard smashed into the side of his face, knocking him into temporary senselessness. When he came round, it was to the familiar pain as his bonds were roughly untied. Captain Osgal once more hauled him up and threw him over his shoulder.

  ‘Take him away,’ Errol heard the inquisitor say through the foggy blur of his drunken, drugged mind.

  ‘What shall I do with him, Your Grace?’ Osgal asked, his deep voice reverberating through Errol where his head lay against the captain’s back. Melyn’s answer came instantly, without time for hesitation or thought.

  ‘Cast him into the chasm at first light.’

  ‘Master Magog, how is it you create the flame for the fire and candles?’ Benfro asked. They sat at the dining table in the room he had explored earlier. Once more there had been a feast, and the food had gone some way to damping down the raging headache he still felt. Full almost to bursting point with questions, this was the first that Benfro had managed to pluck from the confusion of his mind.

  Magog looked up from his plate of steaming stew, swallowed and placed his fork back on the table. With deliberate, almost exaggerated slowness, he raised a napkin to his mouth and dabbed at his lips before placing it alongside his fork. When he was satisfied all was neat and tidy, the mage raised one bony taloned hand, palm upwards and fingers slightly bent.

  ‘Like this?’ he asked, and a perfect sphere of light appeared, hovering within his grasp without actually touching any part of his hand. It was flame, Benfro could tell, but not like anything he had ever seen before. It flickered within itself, faint patterns swirling around like creatures chasing their own tails.

  ‘Here, you take it.’ The dragon mage uncurled his fingers towards Benfro. The orb rolled out of his hand and floated, spinning slowly, towards him. Instinctively he reached for it, cupping his hand as he had seen Magog do to receive the gift. But instead of hovering above his hand, it settled into his palm. Pain seared through the leathery skin as an incredible heat burned him.

  He yelped, pulling away from the orb as quickly as he could. ‘That hurts.’

  ‘It’s fire,’ Magog countered, an evil laugh in his voice. ‘What do you expect?’

  ‘But how …?’ Benfro said, shoving his burned hand into the jug of water that sat by his place.

  ‘Observe.’ The mage curled his hand into a fist and lifted it towards him. The glowing ball of fire rose and sped through the air. As it neared him, he opened his hand again, palm out towards the fiery orb. It slowed, then stopped an inch from his skin, and once more sat cupped but untouched in his outstretched hand.

  ‘How did you do that?’

  ‘Were you not watching?’

  ‘I saw, but I don’t know how you did it.’ Benfro realized his mistake even as he uttered the words. Corwen always asked him to describe what he saw, not expecting him to use just his eyes. Magog was trying to encourage him to use his other senses, to see the Llinellau and possibly something more.

  ‘Please, could you do it again. I’ll try to be more observant.’

  ‘Very well.’ Magog went through the trick again. First he extinguished the existing flame, blowing it out with a theatrical puff. Then he conjured another into being and rolled it through the air towards his young apprentice. Benfro watched closely, but not the action itself. Rather he was looking to see if his master manipulated the Llinellau in any way. What he saw was not what he was expecting at all.

  The image of Magog glowed all around, his aura a tight shadow of red light covering him like a well fitting coat. Benfro was not adept at reading auras. He knew that forest animals had a certain life force around them, as did the trees and other plants. He could see their glow, but it didn’t extend out from them as was the case with sentient beings and was nothing at all like the magnificent swirl of colours he had seen in his own reflection. Magog looked more like a simple beast than the greatest mage that had ever lived.

  Benfro looked down at his own arms and saw that they too were clothed in a thick layer of light. His was a rainbow of hues, pulsing and swirling as he bent his elbows and flexed his hands. Bringing his two index fingers together so that the talons almost touched, he could see the aura swell and distend, reaching out to make the connection long before any physical contact occurred. He pulled his hands apart and the light stretched, getting thinner and thinner like some strange goo, the colours fading into white before the bond was broken. He could actually feel the tension snap as he brushed his fingers past each other again and again without ever touching.

  ‘Now take the orb,’ Magog said, and Benfro looked up. The ball of fire was stationary, floating in the air just below his head height. It was a blaze of brilliant light in his enhanced vision, awash with whites and yellows and oranges, all undercut with that same angry red that surrounded its creator. And, stretching through the dark a
ir between mage and ball, the thinnest of glowing strings connected the two together.

  Benfro reached up, not touching the flame but feeling its heat. It was hard to tell where the fire ended and the aura began, but as he studied it and as his eyes grew accustomed to the glare, so he began to make out the boundary. Closer, he brought one cupped hand up until his own aura just began to caress the fringes of the orb. And then something clicked in his head.

  It was as if he had always known how to do it. He couldn’t imagine a time when he had not. It was simplicity in itself to guide the ball with his own aura. He passed it from hand to hand, marvelling at the way it tingled but didn’t burn.

  ‘Now send it back to me,’ the dragon mage said, startling Benfro into nearly dropping the ball. He had become so wrapped up in it that he had forgotten where he was and what he was doing. Benfro opened his hand to roll the ball away, as he had seen his master do, but nothing happened. It didn’t roll, didn’t drop, just sat there, stuck to his palm by the thickness of its aura.

  He tried to push it away with his other hand, which worked, but instead of floating through the air, the orb simply rolled off and fell on to the tabletop, where it started to burn through the wood. Swiftly Benfro scooped it up again and dashed water from his jug over the charred mark. He was doing something wrong, but what?

  Looking up at Magog, he could see that the thin cord connecting him with the fire was gone. Had that been the key? Did he have to extend his aura around the flame, use that to both hold it aloft and push it along? He tried to imagine what that would feel like, tried to imagine the thick multicoloured coating around his hands and arms swelling. To his surprise, it did, forcing the orb up from his hand. He opened his fingers and extended the field out from them. The fire rolled slowly along the colourful trail. Further and further he extended his reach towards his master, feeling the flow around him. The room was forgotten, his meal and the burn on the table distant memories. All his concentration was focused on the fire and the fading lines of his aura stretching away from his hand.

  He was aware that his arm was heavy, almost shaking with the effort even though earlier the ball had felt almost weightless. It rolled so slowly and his master was sitting so far away, not even stretching to take back his conjured fire. Still he would not fail now. He was determined to succeed.

  It was as if time had stopped. Magog was smiling slightly with that enigmatic expression that Benfro could never quite read. Was it encouragement or a sneer at his clumsiness? He was so motionless as to be almost a statue; only the thin pulsing red light around him signified that there was sentience there at all, and not very much at that. It was as if he wasn’t really there at all.

  Benfro’s eyes scanned the image, seeing for the first time how his master tapped into the Grym. Red spilled down the normally pristine whiteness where he connected with the Llinellau. In most directions the lines faded back to their normal white within a few paces of the great dragon, but one line stayed deepest crimson, spearing out through the door. And fainter than the lines themselves, barely visible at all, a thin rose cord snaked through the air from Magog, straight towards him.

  Dawn wasn’t far off. The blackness of light was fading to reveal the distant details of jagged peak and scrubby tree-strewn gorge. Stars peeping through gaps in the clouds seemed pale, as if a night of twinkling had worn them out and they needed a day to recuperate. This was the quiet hour, when the wind died away to nothing and the only noise was the occasional screech of an owl hurrying home.

  Errol wanted nothing more than to rest his head, to lie somewhere still and warm and let the trouble of the past weeks, months, years roll away from him. He wanted to surrender himself to oblivion, but even that was denied him. Slung over Captain Osgal’s shoulder, he felt every step as a jarring, agonizing pain in his shattered ankles. Each breath was a trial, and his encounter with the inquisitor and his wine had left his head feeling like a battleground picked over by carrion birds.

  They were going to throw him into the Faaeren Chasm. Eight hundred feet straight down on to jagged rocks. And after all he had been through, he couldn’t care less. If it meant the pain would end, he welcomed it.

  But that was just the melancholy talking, the after-effects of the potion. He didn’t really want to die, just to rest a while. He longed to be free of these people who wanted only to use him. He would happily have walked away from the Twin Kingdoms and Llanwennog, gone so far away that no one need ever worry about him coming back. But for some reason he couldn’t begin to understand, they didn’t want that. They didn’t want him to be happy. They didn’t want him to find Martha. They wanted rid of him completely, and the best way they knew of doing that was to throw him off a cliff.

  The Faaeren Chasm was reserved for the worst traitors, the wilful failures and those who broke the most sacred laws of the Order of the High Ffrydd. Setting foot inside the inquisitor’s chapel without an invitation was enough to have him executed, but Errol knew what had pushed Melyn over the edge. He’d felt it just before the old man hit him with the empty wine pitcher. Melyn had been afraid of him because Errol had turned his magic back on himself. He had waded into the inquisitor’s mind and seen dreadful things. Melyn couldn’t allow anyone with that kind of ability to stay alive. And so he was to be executed.

  They were going to throw him into the Faaeren Chasm. Osgal was making his way up narrow steps hewn into the rock face. Up ahead the plateau looking out over the gorge was shiny with morning dew. Technically the other side of the chasm was Llanwennog land, though nobody lived in the mountains. Neither could you cross anywhere for two days’ ride in either direction. The cliffs plunged into the earth as if some giant had hit the mountains with a hammer the size of the moon, splitting them apart in a jagged line. And here, at Emmass Fawr, was the highest point.

  Errol didn’t struggle as they reached the plateau; there was no point. Even if he had managed to escape Osgal, he couldn’t walk. Ballah’s torturer had seen to that quite effectively. But he would have liked there to have been a little ceremony at his death, a pause perhaps and maybe a few words. As it was he scarcely had time to register the change in the captain’s pace before he was pitched forward and over the edge, like a basket of night soil thrown from a window into the street without so much as a gardyloo.

  22

  An apt pupil should always be encouraged. Those who show talent for magic must not be held back waiting for others of their age to catch up, lest they become bored and attempt dangerous conjurings. Even so it may be that some pupils are blessed with skill beyond their understanding. This is a perilous situation and must be handled with care. If you suspect you have a student with such ability, test him with magics he should not be able to perform. Explain to him the more esoteric and complicated procedures then have him attempt them while you supervise closely. Failure at this point will likely fuel the pupil’s ambition to succeed and give to him a focus for his energies that will keep him from exploring further unsupervised.

  If he should succeed at the task you set him, then it may become necessary to dampen his magics with your own. Such a pupil will be a great and powerful mage if he can be protected from the fatal follies into which his youth and inexperience must inevitably lead him. Go carefully into his dreams and build a wall around the memories of his success. But be careful. The dreams of those powerful in the Grym are a strange and unsettling place.

  Aderyn,Educational Notes for the Young

  Melyn sat in his study, a full goblet of wine in his hand. He had been holding it for at least an hour, watching the light seeping through the windows and wondering whether he had done the right thing. Such self-doubt was a new feeling for him, but he had never come across such a dangerous enigma as Errol before. The boy had walked into his mind like it was open house. And the image he had plucked out – Queen Ellyn in her prime. When both of them had been young and foolish. Melyn had thought he had erased the memory. So how had the boy stumbled upon it so readily?

 
No, he was better off dead. It wasn’t as if he was any use as a spy any more. Not now every nobleman in Tynhelyg knew what he looked like. And if that meant Usel lost a potential apprentice, well that was what the medic got for being so disrespectful.

  Melyn called in his guard, putting the goblet down as the man entered. He was one of Osgal’s troop, but for the life of him the inquisitor couldn’t remember his name.

  ‘Go and find Usel,’ he said. The guard nodded his assent and disappeared. A moment later Melyn got up and followed him out. It would take at least half an hour for the message to get down to the infirmary, another for the man to return. Meanwhile he would go to the chapel and pray to the Shepherd for Errol’s soul.

  The chapel was cold in the pre-dawn, the candles still burning on the altar. Melyn took Brynceri’s ringed finger from the reliquary and placed it between the two flames, then knelt down. He could feel the stiffness in his joints, but he pushed the discomfort aside and tried to open his mind to his god.

  It wasn’t long before he felt a presence in the room. His heart soared with joy at the thought of being once more blessed. To talk with the Shepherd was to gain his youth and vigour again. But this was somehow different. He could still feel the aches and pains, still sense the chill of the draught from window to door, and yet undeniably a presence had entered the room.

  Melyn tried to relax, remembering the teachings of his old quaister so many years ago. There was no point trying to force the Shepherd to come. If he wanted to, he would and in whatever form he saw fit.

  Then he heard a low moan behind him.

  The inquisitor’s anger mounted inside him again as he rose, made the sign of the crook and turned to face whoever had dared to break one of the sacred laws of the order.

  Lying sprawled on the floor, blood leaking from his nose and pooling on the stone, unconscious and pale as a freshly laundered sheet, was Errol Ramsbottom.