The Golden Cage

by J. D. Oswald

  ‘Here, Frecknock. I’m here.’ Melyn sent the thought out. Frecknock’s reaction was instant. He felt like someone had grabbed him, even though it was all in his mind. The connection with the dragon strengthened as she anchored herself to him. He could feel something of those alien thoughts, that strange way of looking at the world, at life and death and the slow passing of time. He was old, had witnessed many decades in his life, but he was an infant compared to her, and she no older than a newly chosen novitiate in comparison with her extended family.

  Through her eyes Melyn watched as Frecknock pushed once more at the solid rock. The water was lapping at her tail, licking at her heels as her hand slid slowly through the barrier. For an instant he experienced the strange sensation of feeling both her hand touch his and his touch hers, then he was back in his own mind, clasping her hand tight and pulling her through the wall.

  It resisted like soft mud on a river bottom. Frecknock’s arm came slowly through, then her other hand. Melyn looked round, seeing Captain Osgal a half-hundred paces away, not willing to come any closer.

  ‘Grab her hand. Help me pull her through.’ For a moment Melyn thought the captain was going to disobey his order, such was his fear. But with a shake almost like a dog ridding itself of icy water, Osgal jogged over. He took Frecknock’s other hand, reluctantly the inquisitor thought, and put his back into the task of pulling her through.

  Whether it was the captain’s strength or the touch of Melyn’s mind helping the dragon to anchor herself, she came through in a rush that had them all tumbling to the ground. Osgal was the first to his feet, and Melyn rolled slowly on to his side before struggling up, holding his burned hand out from his body as if it was contagious. Frecknock stayed motionless, slumped on her front in an undignified pose, breathing heavily, her eyes closed tight. Finally she pushed herself up into a crouch, holding the tip of her tail off the ground as if it pained her, and looked round at the inquisitor.

  ‘You saved me, Your Grace. For that you have my eternal gratitude.’

  Melyn wasn’t sure whether to be pleased or ashamed. He had returned the favour, had saved her for his own selfish purposes, but he couldn’t help thinking that he had also betrayed his order and all it stood for.

  There was a strange comfort to be had in sorting through the great pile of jewels. It wasn’t as big as once it had been, thanks to his diligence. Benfro didn’t look around – he didn’t need to. The endless rows of alcoves, each home to a single dead dragon, were testimony to months of hard work. It was an achievement, something to be proud of. Something that in years to come they might write ballads about.

  ‘Benfro.’

  The voice was a whisper, somewhere out in the cold dark. He didn’t like the place beyond the walls of the repository. It was frightening, hostile and icy. There he was chased by demons in the shape of men, beasts who murdered and butchered his kind just because they could. It was safer in here, with his jewels and the wonderful memories they contained.

  ‘Benfro.’

  More insistent this time, the voice buzzed in his head like an insect on a hot sunny day, constantly niggling away, never leaving him alone. Benfro shifted slightly, or at least tried to. He seemed to be stuck where he was, held in place by invisible hands. Cold hands.

  ‘Benfro.’

  Louder. Benfro thought he recognized the voice now, but he couldn’t put a name to it. Just a feeling. He was angry at the voice, hurt by it. It was the voice of a man, for one thing, and all they did was kill. But it had betrayed him too, betrayed his only friend and kept him away from his mother.

  ‘Benfro!’

  He saw a blade of purest white light arcing through the air in a parody of the sun, descending with unstoppable force. He tried to close his eyes, to stop them seeing what came next, what he knew would happen, but his eyes were closed already. He was seeing this in his mind, watching as Inquisitor Melyn cut off Morgwm’s head. Watching as the band of warrior priests descended on it like wolves around a wounded deer, ripping it apart for the goodness deep within. The memories of his mother. Her jewels.

  Something changed then. He still sat in front of the pile of jewels, but the one crystal he held did not belong there. He knew it like he knew his own wings, could picture that first time he had touched it, after he had set the Fflam Gwir about his mother’s body and burned it away to ash.

  ‘Benfro. Wake up.’

  For an instant the room darkened. Benfro felt a chill pass through him so intense it could have killed. It was like the fear that the warrior priests used to immobilize their enemies, but his mother had protected him from that before. Surely she could do it again. He clasped the jewel firmly in his hand, squeezing it tight until it dug into the tiny scales on his leathery palm. He waited for that familiar touch, the sense that she was standing in the next room just waiting for him. But all he could see was that arc of light endlessly falling.

  He tried to shake his head to chase away the image, but he was bound with ropes, his neck stiff and heavy. His legs were still stuck, and as reached out for the pile to take another jewel, he realized his arms were fixed too. He could flex his fingers, squeeze his palm tight on that one tiny point of agony, but nothing else worked.

  ‘Benfro, please.’

  Panic flickered around the edge of his thoughts like a fox skirting a henhouse, looking for the right place, the right moment to dive in and reduce everything to swirling feathers. How had he come here to Magog’s repository?

  Magog. Even the name filled him with alarm. How could he have thought this was a good place to be? How could he have been proud of the work he had done here? Benfro struggled against the ties that bound him. He was stronger now; he could fight the dead mage, push off his influence. He just needed to get moving. But he was stuck fast, held in place by something cold and unyielding. He fought it, but nothing worked. How had he come here? He racked his brain, trying to remember what he had been doing. Obviously he must have fallen asleep, but why wasn’t Errol watching over him?

  ‘Benfro. Wake up. Please.’

  Errol. It was Errol’s voice that he heard, distant but insistent. And he had been furious with the boy, had stalked off into the cold night. The memories started to slip back into place: the argument, his mother’s jewel overwhelming him with its need, the cliff he had not noticed until his wings had snapped open automatically, gliding him down to the ground far below, and walking, endless walking until exhaustion had taken over and he had sat down.

  ‘Benfro, please.’

  Errol’s voice was fading, and with it the view of the pile of jewels, as if their light was dying as the memories were plucked away. But Benfro could see beyond the pile, to the scroll stacks and the ancient writing desk. They too were fading, dimming to black. The cold he had felt was gone now, replaced with a relaxing warmth that soothed away his worries. So what if he couldn’t move? He could just sit here and drift off to sleep. Magog was no threat to him any more. He could sleep.

  ‘Benfro?’ The voice was barely a whisper, distant and unimportant.

  Benfro was drifting off into a dream where his mother was waiting for him. She was somewhere nearby, he knew. Just round the next corner perhaps. And she would protect him from harm for ever. All his struggles were over now; there was nothing left to worry about. Morgwm was with him. She was …

  He felt a snatching feeling somewhere in the region of his hand. His mother, so close he could almost see her, disappeared in an instant. The warmth left with her, its place taken by cold that made him shiver uncontrollably. It was as dark as a moonless night, his eyes gummed shut, and when he tried to open them, they wouldn’t move. Nothing would move any more, not his legs, nor his arms, his head or neck.

  ‘Come on, Benfro. Wake up. Do something.’ This time Errol’s voice was muffled, as if he was on the other side of a thin wall.

  As the words trickled into Benfro’s mind, he felt something collide with the side of his head. It wasn’t a hard blow, barely enough to register, but
for the briefest of instants he saw in his mind a small gully filled with deep-drifted snow, and sitting in the middle of it covered in ice, a dragon. He thought at first that it was dead. And then he realized it was him.

  ‘Don’t die on me, Benfro. I’m stuck in these mountains without you. There’s no way down.’ Again the voice was accompanied by the weakest of slaps to the head, only this time the image Benfro saw was of a boy, a young man, his face so pale it looked almost blue, his arms and legs hanging limp and useless, covered in snow.

  ‘Now you get it. Use that foul talent of yours if it will keep you alive. Then you can be mine.’ This time it was Magog who spoke to him, unmistakable even though he sounded like he was shouting against a storm. His presence, however slight, filled Benfro with anger and hatred. He could feel it boiling in his stomach, devouring the last of the food he had eaten so long ago. Without even the strength to open his mouth, Benfro let go of the fire and breathed out through his nose.

  Errol couldn’t have said what made him leap to one side the instant before Benfro coughed up a great belch of yellow flame. Some sixth sense, perhaps, an inbuilt mechanism for self-preservation. Unlike the flame the dragon had breathed before, which had left him unscathed, this one roared with an angry heat, melting the ice and snow all around. He felt it sear his face even as he scrabbled to the edge of the gully, the smell of freshly singed eyebrows wafting under his nose.

  Then the flames died away, finding nothing to burn. A patch of cleared ground steamed gently in the cold mountain air. Behind Benfro there was still snow, but in front of him and to the sides was clear. He didn’t move for a few seconds, then without opening his eyes he reached out with the hand that had held his mother’s jewel. Errol looked down at the tiny gem resting in his own palm. He had hardened his aura to it, not quite understanding how he had done so, and its siren song of patient wellbeing had stilled as soon as he had taken it from the dragon.

  Benfro leaned further forward, his eyes still closed, and then lost his balance. He tried to fight the inevitable for a few seconds, then gave up the struggle and fell gracelessly on to his face. When he didn’t get up again, Errol slid back down the gully and on to the bare patch of ground, now icing up again and threatening to trap the dragon once more. He reached out and touched Benfro’s shoulder with his free hand, hastily shoving Morgwm’s jewel deep into his pocket with the other. Benfro didn’t stir, and Errol could feel just how cold the dragon was. How long had he sat in the snow, asleep or otherwise immobile, while the life slowly leached out of him?

  Errol couldn’t begin to guess, but he knew that a man with no knowledge of magic would have lasted no longer than a couple of hours after dark in these mountains. He would have grown sleepy and weak, then drifted off into unconsciousness and died. If it was the same for dragons then Benfro had come perilously close to death and still hovered at its edge. However, if he just reached out to the lines, drew some of their power to him and used it to restore his energy, he might warm his muscles and bring himself back. Then again, what if he didn’t know how? Was it possible that the dragon was less skilled in magic than he was? Errol doubted it, but then nothing Benfro had done since they had met suggested that he was an adept.

  Errol’s stomach gurgled, reminding him that he hadn’t eaten in far too long. It was likely that Benfro hadn’t either, weakening him further. The bags were still on the dragon’s chest, though the straps of the food bag were charred and snapped as Errol pulled it around. He delved in, finding frozen strips of meat and handfuls of herbs and leaves. He took out a steak of raw venison solid with ice. It needed cooking, and for that Errol needed a source of heat, but he had never learned to conjure a flame the way Inquisitor Melyn did. The Grym gave him heat, though, so maybe he would be able to pass some of that on to the food. And if so, perhaps he could do the same for Benfro.

  Excited at the prospect of trying something new, Errol reached out to the lines he had been unconsciously tapping, feeling them all around him. He did his best to ignore their pull, instead trying to tap their most basic energy and bring it to himself. He felt his stomach warm, the heat spreading out through him until a few pinpricks of sweat beaded on his forehead. Getting warmth and energy from the lines had never been difficult, but how to transfer that to the steak in his hand?

  He shifted his focus so that he could see his aura around him, noticing as he did how palely Benfro’s clung to him. He imagined those swirling colours stretching away from him not in a thin line that could be used to hold back Magog’s influence, but as a wide sheet that enveloped the food he held. With a little extra effort he managed to lift it completely off his outstretched hand, away from his body. And then he pushed the energy of the Grym towards it.

  What happened wasn’t quite what he had been hoping for. A loud bang echoed off the nearby cliffs and the meat shot away from him, trailing a line of smoke that marked where it landed in the snow. He fell back as if pushed by a far greater force than that which had hurled the steak, and landed on his backside. Slightly winded, Errol picked himself up and hurried to retrieve the food before he lost sight of it in the snow. It had melted its way quite deep, and cooled off considerably in the process, but it was cooked to a crisp. It could have been charcoal and Errol wouldn’t have cared. He chewed his way through it as if it were the tastiest meal he had ever known then turned his attention back to Benfro.

  For a moment he thought he was too late. Even straining his vision, he could make out no aura surrounding the dragon at all. And then he saw the thin red cord that stretched from the jewel in his pocket and snaked around the gully to a spot just between the dragon’s eyes. Magog would not be still there if there was nothing of Benfro to leach, but by the fierce red colour pulsing along the line, the dead mage was encountering almost no resistance.

  Errol reached out with his aura, stretching it to meet the cord close to its source and tying it tight. Almost instantly the line faded from red back to palest pink and Benfro let out a low moan, slumping further to the icy ground. Errol could feel Magog now, pushing and questing, testing the Grym, searching for a way around the blockage. The power and subtlety were daunting, but Errol knew Magog’s evil power would not be able to touch him. At least he hoped so.

  Now all he had to do was save Benfro.

  The dragon was far too big for Errol to envelop entirely in his aura. He wasn’t sure that he could do much at all while concentrating on holding Magog at bay. Still, he had to try, so he reached out as best he could, wrapping Benfro’s upper body and arms as if he were covering him with a vast cloak. Errol felt strange, like he was made of toffee and someone was stretching him out of shape. It wasn’t painful in any conventional way, but it ached with wrongness the further he pulled his own aura away from himself. When he had gone about as far as he could without collapsing, Errol imagined the Grym flowing into the space he had created, filling it with the same warmth that made his skin slick with sweat.

  It felt like he was running uphill with a bag full of rocks on his back, and at the same time it was as if he were doing nothing at all. Errol could feel the power of the Grym coursing through him so much that he should have burned himself to a crisp if the teachings of the quaisters at Emmass Fawr were not exaggerations. And yet if anything he began to feel the cold around him more. It seeped in at the points where his aura was strained thin, like a winter wind finding the seams in an old jacket. A thought began to form in his mind as to how the Grym worked, but it was interrupted by another long groan from Benfro.

  Slowly the dragon rolled over on to his side, head still drooping. Errol pushed a little more of the Grym into his outstretched aura, feeling the strain in his mind like nothing he had ever known before. Then his own knees gave up without warning and he crumpled to the ground, his aura snapping back close around him. He sat there, confused and exhausted, staring as Benfro first pushed himself upright, then shivered in the renewed cold and finally opened his large eyes.

  23

  The northlands of Ll
anwennog are a barren and bleak landscape stretching from the Rim mountains in the west all the way to Kais and the Tegid River in the east. On their northern edge they are bounded by the Frozen Sea, and nothing grows there but rock. Southwards, the land flows into great plains covered in high sharp grass that only the native wild cattle can graze. Many hundreds of rivers cut deep gorges through the soft rock, making travel through this inhospitable land nigh on impossible. Yet people cling to life here, in small villages, rough towns and even one or two cities. The reason, as was ever the case, is gold.

  Only a few have made their fortune from the northlands goldfields, mostly through the sale of provisions and prospecting tools. And yet the lure of that precious metal drags in the foolish, the desperate and the hopeless with undiminished strength. Those who survive are tough and uncompromising people, wary of strangers and mistrustful of even those they call friends.

  From the travel journals of

  Usel of the Ram

  ‘It’s nice to get off that barge. I was beginning to think I’d forgotten how to ride.’

  Beulah kicked her horse lightly, spurring it into a trot. Clun, less skilled in the saddle, took a while to catch up. They were riding the pair he had bought for her at Beylinstown down a long straight tree-lined road that ran parallel to the River Hafren. At this point the river was at least two hundred paces wide, deep and swift-flowing. Had they stayed on the barge, they would have been in Castell Glas already, but Beulah didn’t like the idea of entering one of her cities like so much freight. The bulk of her entourage had been sent on ahead, including the fine Gomoran stallion she had bought for Clun, which no one dared go near. Now she and her consort rode at the head of a small troop of warrior priests.