Dreamwalker (42 page)

Errol nearly jumped out of his skin. The corridor outside Melyn’s quarters was gloomy, lit only by occasional torches hanging in their iron sconces from the rough stone wall. A face leered out of the darkness, promising violence and pain. Without thinking, he took a step backwards and the menace leached away, replaced by a deep-throated chuckle. Captain Osgal stepped out of the shadows.

‘Don’t panic, boy,’ he said. ‘I know that you’re here on the Inquisitor’s business. You won’t get a thrashing, this time.’

‘I… I’ve finished for this evening. I was just heading to the chapel for candle-lighting.’ Errol was nervous of the captain. There was something about the man that filled him with a deep unease, as if Osgal had done him a great disservice at some time but he could not remember what, or when. It didn’t help that the captain of the Inquisitor’s personal troop had a reputation worse by far than any of the quaisters in the monastery.

‘Not so fast, young Ramsbottom. The Inquisitor has a guard in this corridor at all times. This is my shift right now but I have to go… somewhere for ten minutes. You’ll stay here and guard the corridor until I get back.’

‘But I’m not armed,’ Errol said.

‘Don’t be stupid, boy.’ Errol could see the discomfort on the captain’s face. By the way he was holding his hands across his belly and the faint sheen of sweat on his face, it wasn’t hard to imagine what he wanted ten minutes for. Errol wondered what they had been serving in the officer’s mess that evening that could disagree so fundamentally with a constitution as robust as that of Captain Osgal.

‘There’s a full troop of warrior priests in the lower floors of this building,’ the captain said. ‘Any intruder would have to get through the main gates undetected and across the monastery complex unchallenged before they even came close to here. And if they made it as far as the Inquisitor’s study then they would have him to contend with. You won’t be needed to fight off hordes of Llanwennog spies, but if his grace comes out of there and doesn’t see a guard in this corridor, it’ll be my head on the block. So just stand there in the shadows and try not to fall asleep. Ten minutes, that’s all I need.’

Errol watched as Captain Osgal hurried away, unsure whether he was going to be thanked for being helpful or reviled for being party to the soldier’s moment of weakness. On balance, he favoured his chances of the latter and the thought of yet more humiliation and punishment at the hands of the man filled him with a deepening sense of gloom.

Settling back into the shadows as instructed, Errol considered his life since he had come to Emmass Fawr. It wasn’t the great adventure he had expected, though neither could he deny that the opportunities for learning were far greater than anything he might have found back home. Home. The word seemed almost alien to him. This was his home now, or so he was told every day. The Order was his family, not Hennas and Godric. There was no room, nor any need, for Maggs Clusster in his life.

The thought brought Errol up short. He hadn’t considered his past for a while, and neither had he thought about Maggs. Now that he did, he realised that she was the wrong person. He knew her well enough, but what he knew about her was not what sat at the front of his mind. He had never walked hand in hand with her through the trees, nor had he sat on warm summer evenings by her side as they gazed over the forest from the rock at Jagged Leap. Maggs was the sad-faced, thin young woman who had appeared at the cottage door late one night with a terrible tale. The girl who’s own father had got her pregnant. The girl who’s bully of a brother, Trell, had pushed Errol off the rock at Jagged Leap into the pool where old Ben Coulter had drowned. Pushed Errol and… someone else.

It was the first time Errol had thought of her in months. The green girl, he liked to call her. Sometimes she was in his dreams, sad and silently calling his name. Always he had thought of her as Maggs, but now it was as if a barrier in his brain had been pulled down. He knew that she wasn’t Maggs. So who was she?

The familiar dull ache spread across the front of his head. It always seemed to come when he thought hard about his past. Errol tried his best to ignore it, massaging his temples and concentrating on the floor as he wracked his memory for a name, even a face. Without summoning, the lines appeared to his eyes, criss-crossing the floor and walls in a pattern far more intricate than any he had seen before. They were smaller, thinner, than usual, almost invisible like the lightest of morning dews evaporating from leaves. The corridor pulsed with the power of the grym as if it were alive. Instinctively, Errol reached out and connected with it, looking for relief.

In an instance his perspective changed. It was as if he no longer stood in the darkness looking at the flickering torch light that lit the door to the Inquisitor’s study. Instead he was the walls and ceiling. He was the floor and the heavy wooden door. He was the heat of the flame, fluttering as it consumed the thick grease. The ache in his head was gone simply because he could no longer feel his head. He was far greater than that, spreading out along the lines, becoming the building, the monastery, the mountain, the whole of Gwlad.

Errol bit his tongue, a reflex action that pulled him back into himself with a sharp tang of pain. His heart hammered in his chest and cold sweat prickled the back of his neck. He had been drawn out so quickly it was breathtaking. There would have been nothing of him left. He would have spread himself too thinly and dissipated into the colossal emptiness of the grym. Somewhere in the back of his mind he remembered the words of Father Castlemilk about the perils of losing oneself in the web of power. Down in the classroom, when they had practised the application of magic, it had been controlled and they had been closely watched by the quaisters. Here, the whole world was open to him and he had almost lost himself to it.

On the other hand, his headache was gone and he could think more clearly than ever. He buzzed with an energy that knew no restraint. Only the realisation of where he was stopped him from laughing out loud. Deep down, he knew that it would be foolish even to think about going back into the grym, but like an alcoholic faced with an unopened bottle of wine, he could no more help himself than he could deny his true nature.

This time when he gave himself up to the lines he was ready for its terrible, dissipating pull. Errol held tight to an image of himself and was pleased to see him coalesce into existence in the corridor. It was slightly disorienting to see himself and see through his own eyes at the same time, but it felt oddly familiar, as if this were something he had done many times before. Even the pull of the grym all around him was a reassurance, as if it was there merely to remind him that he existed. And he had known instinctively how to cope with it.

Curious, Errol looked around. He knew that he was in the corridor outside Melyn’s study, and yet it was subtly different. The walls were still the same rough stone, the sconces and torches were there, even the floorboards, polished by age and uncounted thousands of feet were unchanged from the many times he had stared at them before, waiting to be summoned into the Inquisitor’s rooms. Only the doorway was different.

It glowed with an unnatural red light, a sickly emanation that clashed with the peaceful quiet surrounding him. It was obvious to Errol that it was a ward of some form, meant to keep him out. It pushed him away in much the same way as the grym pulled him, an insistence that was not physical but which was nonetheless hard to deny. As he inspected the door more closely, he could feel the pain once more at his temples, as if his head were being squeezed by a vast hand of cold stone. Whatever lay beyond that door, the Inquisitor did not want anyone seeing it.

Errol didn’t know how he had done it. One moment he was looking over the corridor, the next he was back inside the Inquisitor’s study, staring at the old man as he sat at his desk, eyes closed as if asleep. Maybe it was the voices that had called him, or maybe it was the thought of the door as an impenetrable barrier that had piqued his curiosity. Either way, he felt a surge of guilt and fear. What if he were caught here? He wasn’t even really sure where here was. It looked like the Inquisitor’s study but it felt very different, somehow colder and even more uninviting than it usually was.

The voices came to him again. He couldn’t quite make out what they were saying, as if the two speakers were standing in an adjacent room. Yet one of the voices he recognised as that of the Inquisitor. As he recognised the speaker, so the words became clearer, but Melyn was not using his usual tone, nor was he speaking Saesneg. Instead the words were a language so foreign to him it could have been from another world, guttural and sibilant, with odd glottal stops and strange clicking sounds. Yet for all the effort speaking in such a bizarre tongue must have been exacting on the Inquisitor, he was not moving a muscle.

The other speaker was female. Errol didn’t know how he knew this, but as he focussed on her voice, so he began to see the link that joined her to the Inquisitor. Without knowing what he was doing, he followed that link. It was as if he had stepped across an enormous chasm. He knew that he had covered a vast distance and yet in the blink of an eye he was no longer in the Inquisitor’s study but standing on the edge of a clearing in the deep forest.

It was dark, a few stars overhead twinkling through gaps in the cloud. Around him Errol could see that the trees were putting on their first spring growth of leaves. The scent of blossom hung heavy in the warm air and the night was full of the sounds of animals waking from their long winter sleep. All of these things registered only lightly on his consciousness; for what grabbed his attention and held it as strongly as any cord sat still and stiff in the middle of the clearing.

It was a dragon.

She was a dragon. Again Errol did not know how he knew, but he was certain that the creature in front of him was female. She had her eyes tightly shut and sat in a very similar pose to the Inquisitor. With a start, Errol realised that they were communicating. But what possible reason could a dragon have for wanting to speak to Melyn? He hated them with every fibre of his being. His mission in life was to hunt them all down and exterminate them. Only King Divitie’s edict had thwarted his ambition, but it was months since Queen Beulah had lifted that. All the talk in the dormitories and refectory had been about the preparations for the hunt.

Errol was deeply troubled by the promise of slaughter. He knew that he felt no antipathy towards dragons. Quite the opposite indeed. Seeing this one now, seated and calm in the dark, he was filled with a strange melancholy, an inexplicable feeling that he wanted to be friends with her and all her kind. The creature should have filled him with fear and disgust, but instead he felt safe and loved. He knew so much about dragons, about their history, their legends and their teachings. But how could he have learned all that if he had never even met one before?

Father Kewick taught you, the voice of his memory told him. But it wasn’t right. It didn’t sound like him. It sounded like Inquisitor Melyn. And Errol knew Father Kewick. The fat old priest from the Order of the Candle was interested only in his books on administration, accounting, cleric work. Errol could distinctly recall the dull lessons in which his unwanted teacher had told him that dragons did not actually exist, that they had been invented by King Brynceri as an excuse to form his military order. There was no way that the priest would ever have taught him about dragon lore. So how did he know about Palisander? Gog and Magog? Rasalene and Arhelion?

A name appeared in Errol’s mind like a bubble of marsh gas erupting from a muddy pool. Sir Radnor. With it came an image of a familiar place. Jagged Leap, the rock standing proud above the river, and sitting on its flat top much the way this small, thin dragon sat in her clearing, a massive, magnificent beast fully three times her size, with huge wings outstretched to reveal the intricate patterns of his multi-coloured scales. A warm happiness filled Errol. He remembered the endless hours he had spent listening to the spirit of the mage as it told him its stories. But alongside the happiness was a growing rage. He had been tricked.

As the memories came back, Errol began to see what had happened to him. At his mother’s wedding the Inquisitor had tried to get into his mind and failed. A sudden terror gripped him as he realised that he had not wanted to join the order. Quite the reverse, he had been planning on running away from them. Not alone, with somebody else. But who? He was so close, but still that memory was locked away from him.

He remembered the princess staring at him as if he had personally insulted her whole family. He remembered going outside, being cold. What had he done with his jacket? He’d given it to someone. Then…?

The floodgates opened. Then he had been captured by the troop of warrior priests who had accompanied the princess and the Inquisitor to the village. He had been tied up and Captain Osgal had forced a skinful of wine down his throat. Errol could taste the sour liquid, feel it burning as it went down. He had never drunk alcohol before and it had hit his stomach with unfamiliar harshness. He had brought it straight back up again, he remembered, peppering Osgal’s tunic with bits of the wedding feast and a dark red stain like blood. The Captain had just laughed and then forced another skinful down. This one had stayed put, as had the third, by which time Errol’s senses had almost entirely gone. Yet he watched from this strange dreamscape as if he recalled it all perfectly.

About an hour had passed. He must have slept a bit and then been woken. His head had whirled sickeningly and someone had held him up so that the Inquisitor could stare straight into his eyes. Errol had tried to fight, but she was not holding his hand and lending him her strength. Who was she? He knew, but he couldn’t remember. Green. The girl in green.