Duncton Found (116 page)

“Master....”

“I heard. Summon the senior guardmole. He will be ready. And Terce as well. Get him.”

Quickly the guardmole came with a companion and they waited hushed and silent.

Then Terce arrived, a little slower, a good deal older. They heard Mallice scream again.

“Mallice has begun,” said Lucerne calmly, moving not at all.

Terce was watchful, and silent.

“What would you say, Twelfth Keeper, if I told you that the pups she is about to pup were bastards all? Eh? What would you have me do?” Lucerne’s voice was cold, his eyes black, his fur glossy with night.

Terce said nothing.

“Well, Twelfth Keeper, father of this bitch, you shall hear what I shall do and we will know your loyalty then.”

“My loyalty is to the Master and the Word,” said Terce.

Lucerne laughed at this and, turning to the guardmoles, said, “Go to your prisoners. Take the moles Henbane and Harebell to the entrance of the tunnels where the sideem Mallice is held. Brook no argument with them, use force if need be. Do it now.”

Lucerne turned to Terce and loomed over him in a posture that was almost bullying, and certainly insolent.

“Come with me,” he said. It was an order, not a request.

“Yes, Master,” said Terce softly, and they went. But the eyes of Terce were not those of an abject mole, but of one who awaited his time.

The surface was chill and damp, the clouds above were lit up with the equinoctial moon, off below them down the slopes the Manifold, still full with the rain of the day before, flowed and roared in the gloom.

Shapes came out of the dark, two great guardmoles each guiding a female. The first to come was breathing heavily, and in some pain.

“Hello, Harebell,” said the stranger in the dark, his voice mock warm and therefore cruel.

The second guardmole brought the Mistress Henbane.

“Hello, mother,” said Lucerne. “I have found a challenge for thee greater than any you have faced before. You will not like it, but I shall – very much – and so shall the Word.” This was Lucerne’s greeting to his mother after so long: cold, cynical, matter-of-fact.

Henbane’s eyes widened fractionally, and though when Harebell turned and looked at her in alarm she nodded a sign to keep calm, she herself felt shock. He was here sooner than she could have expected; and vile Terce as well.

With that instinct she herself had bred into him, and which Terce had trained and refined still more, she knew why he had come: he was here for the kill.

“Now follow me, all of you,” he said, and she knew their true ordeal was beginning. To Harebell he spoke no more.

While in the shadows near that place Holm stared at Sleekit, and Sleekit stared at the tunnel entrance, empty now of moles. She turned to Holm and said quietly, “Listen now, my dear, and listen well. You are a route-finder; you never were and I think the Stone never desired you to be, a fighter. I do not know what is going to happen tonight, but I think there will be much violence. It is plain that Harebell is near her time, and already Mallice has begun. Lucerne means no good in bringing them together here.

“Yesterday, when Squeezebelly spoke to us, he asked that survivors should seek to escape while they still could. I trust that some did so.
We
got away, this far at least, and I think that others might have done. For myself... when I said goodbye to Mayweed at Chadlington I knew that I was beginning a task from which I might not come back. My beloved Mayweed knew it too. We have had our time, and he is always with me, as I am with him.

“But you and Lorren, your time must not be yet. So promise me, Holm, that you will escape from here and not try to fight. Promise me, my dear.”

Holm looked at her in the dark, his eyes wider than ever, and he said, “Sleekit, I don’t want to travel alone. I don’t want to leave you.”

“Promise it, my dear. I need to know to have the strength for what I think that I must do. Henbane needed me once before like this, she needs me now. I owe it... I owe it to myself, and to the memory of Tryfan, who knew her truer than anymole, and loved her as I do. But this is not your fight and not your task.”

“Could help though,” said Holm miserably.

Sleekit smiled.

“Yes, you could! The others will not be so well guarded this terrible night. There might be a chance for them. Soon you can leave me, go back to the tunnel into the garrison and wait your chance, for a mole there might need guidance.”

Holm perked up.

“But first,” she whispered, “guide me into the tunnel the Master has taken Henbane down. We need a route by which we can escape. Will you do that?”

Holm nodded.

“Stay here, don’t move, I’ll come back,” he said. And soon he was, grubbier than ever.

“Found one.”

Then, secret as water in the night, he led her upslope above the tunnels and then through faults and solution crevices in the limestone and so into the tunnels below.

Mallice was near pupping when Lucerne and the others reached her, and the guardmole there was much concerned.

“Dismissed,” said Lucerne quickly. He wanted moles loyal to him alone here now.

“Yes,
Sir
!” said the guardmole, and scrabbled to get away.

Lucerne turned to Mallice and said pitilessly, “You needed company, my dear, and now you have it. This is the Mistress Henbane, and this her daughter, my sister, Harebell. Near pupping too, it seems! Well, well, and what shall we all do? I’ll tell you what you’ll do, and I’ll tell you once only. But first I’ll tell you why.

“Sweet Mallice here, whose very life I once saved – remember, mother? I’m sure you do – Mallice carries bastards in her womb and now they struggle to get out.”

He held up a paw to stop Mallice’s whimpering her feeble protest as she screamed out a contraction again.

“Harebell too will soon start pupping and I intend to leave. She, like me, is too young to remember it, but mother does. We were made separate at birth, and I was reared and groomed in Whern for the Mastership. She I know not as a sister, but as a rival she... exists. That will not do.

“But now I need an heir. I thought Mallice would provide and so she might, if the Word allows it. The pups she carries might well be mine. Who knows? She does not, nor I. Nor the mole Weld who is at this moment cast down into the Lower Sumps of Cannock.”

He turned to Harebell as Mallice screamed again.

“Where, you may like to know, certain other moles are kept. Poor Betony for one, mindless now. Wharfe, for another, our dear brother. Yes, yes, he is there, forgotten, dying slow.

“Now you, Harebell....”

Harebell gasped with coming pain, and turned to Henbane in horror at what she heard, and at the coldness she saw. Henbane stared out rejection and contempt at her son. Harebell gasped again.

“Males are not wanted here, Terce, so we shall go, but for safety’s sake these guardmoles can remain. Know only this. I want to see none of you alive again, not one. But your pups, well, that’s a different thing. One will do. Yes, one. Guardmoles, bring the last surviving pup to me. He, or she, shall be the one. The Word shall judge which one is best. If Mallice’s, why, then the Word surely intends me to know that the pups she carries were mine after all. If Harebell’s, then at least they are my kin. One will do. As for you, my mother dear, you have been dead to me for many moleyears past, and you are dead still.

“Terce? No comment? We’ll leave it to the Word and a mother’s love to decide. One only of you all shall survive, and that a pup. Sort it out between yourselves. Now we shall go, and you guardmoles shall kill anymole that tries to escape. And when the pupping is done let these females decide among themselves which is to survive.

“Questions?”

The guardmoles frowned and shook their heads. Talking was not necessary.

“Come Terce, let us leave the future to forces greater than ourselves.”

With one last look at Mallice, who was now in a corner of the unpleasant chamber and breathing fast and ever faster, Terce turned and left. Lucerne smiled, the madness of evil on his face, and followed.

The guardmoles raised their talons, and forced Henbane and the weeping Harebell fully into the chamber.

“Get on with it, you bitches,” the senior guardmole growled.

Some of this – enough – Sleekit and Holm had heard in the shadows of the tunnel Holm had found. They had frozen where they stancea when the dismissed guardmole had gone by, and then again when Terce and Lucerne left.

“You will wait here until I come back, and guide anymole with me out of this place. Then you must go as you promised,” breathed Sleekit.

Holm stared at her.

“When I go home, and if I see Mayweed, what shall I say to him from you?” he whispered.

She smiled, tears in her eyes.

“My dear, I think I know where my Mayweed will be and that I shall see him there before you do. But if you find him before me, you shall know what to say on my behalf! Now, I must go, and when your chance comes, as it will, take it knowing the Stone is with you. And then get yourself back to Lorren as quickly as you can!”

“Bitches!” muttered the guardmole again, and Sleekit prepared herself for the bloody hours soon to come.

There are times when anymole, even a Chronicler devoted to the truth, hesitates to scribe, still less to speak. He turns from the evidence in grim despair, tears in his eyes; he turns back to it and tries again but cannot; he ventures to the surface and seeks comfort in the trees and in the skies, but sees them not, for the shameful images of what he knows fills his mind and sickens his heart.