Then quickly she led Lucerne to a cell in the Upper Sumps, in which Drule and a repulsive female henchmole squatted staring at a mole. Lucerne saw that though the mole had been tortured and was limp, she was still alive. Four talons of one paw had been ripped out, two talons of another.
“It was necessary,” said Mallice, nodding at the wardress to leave them be. Drule stayed, smiling.
“Who is she?” said Lucerne, staring at the mole, utterly unmoved by the fear in her eyes, and the continual shudder of pain in her paws.
“She shall tell her name. Won’t she?” said Mallice, sliding one of her talons gently along Betony’s cut face. “She shall tell you everything, won’t you, my poor hurt love? She shall say again all and more than she has said to me. Then I suggest that Drule has his way with her to find out whatever still remains. There is something about Drule that repulses information from female moles.”
“Whatmole are you?” asked Lucerne.
“I am the friend of Wharfe and Harebell, I am their friend,” intoned Betony, a look of utter despair and hopelessness in her eyes.
“Who are they?”
The mole darted a frightened look at Mallice. A solitary tear coursed down her face, made ugly by the scars of her first torturing, which had long since congealed.
“They were Henbane’s pups.”
A look of surprise followed by exaltation crossed Lucerne’s face, but there was barely a pause before he asked the next question.
“How do you know this?”
“My father told me.”
“Who is your father, mole?”
“Squeezebelly of Beechenhill.”
“And what is thy name?”
“Betony, I think,” she said. Her eyes, though open, seemed for a moment to drift, as if the mention of her own name brought back a place and time and memory forever lost to her. “Please don’t hurt me any more, I don’t know anything more to tell.”
“Oh but you know so much more that you don’t know,” said Mallice.
“How came you to know this Wharfe and this Harebell?” He came closer to her, glaring, and she began to shake with pathetic fear.
“Please don’t... not again. I told her they were brought to Beechenhill by the moles Mayweed and Sleekit. They were left for my father to rear.”
Lucerne turned to Drule and ordered him away.
“Sleekit! I know that name,” he said, for once showing his anger. He turned back to Betony. “This mole is cursed of the Stone, but she has value. Great value. Drule shall not have her yet, for once he has done with a mole she is good for nothing more. We must learn all we can of Beechenhill, and she shall be kept alive. Alive, Squeezebelly will still give much up for her; but dead she will add resolution and righteousness to his spirit.”
Mallice nodded.
“She should have been physically unharmed,” said Lucerne, still annoyed.
“She would have been silent if not harmed,” said Mallice matter of factly. “Her will was strong.”
Lucerne stared at Betony.
“What are they like?” he asked eventually. Mallice came close to him and tried to draw him away. “What are they like?” he said again, more forcefully.
Betony looked at him, and into his eyes, and at his flanks and paws and snout.
“They are... they are....”
“Yes, mole?”
“But for their eyes they are like you.”
“Their eyes?” whispered Lucerne, who seemed for the first time in this terrible interview to be discomfited rather than merely angry.
“Their eyes are not like yours but like their... like your father’s. Their eyes are Tryfan’s eyes and full of love. Not like yours.”
“My love,” purred Mallice with delight, “you can make her tell you things she would not tell me.”
Betony’s eyes began to close.
“She is not so hurt...?” began Lucerne.
Mallice smiled and said, “Your consort knows her art. This mole shall not die quite yet. But she is tired and the pain dulls, and she must be allowed to sleep.”
“Be it so. You have done well, better than well. This mole shall be the destruction of Beechenhill. My own siblings there, and of the Stone! Of the mighty Stone! From Henbane they came, of Tryfan were they the spawn. And the Word shall punish them through me, born with Rune’s blood in my veins, true Master of the Word. This delights me, Mallice.”
“I thought it might,” she said softly.
He laughed and turned from that burrow, excited and pleased, exclaiming, “Thou art mighty, Word, and thy servant glories in thy justice. Thy talons shall make of Beechenhill a desolation that such punishments as that of Mallerstang, and others yet to come, shall seem but pleasant interludes on the way to the Stone’s agony. Blessed be the Word!”
“Blest be!” responded Mallice as they swept out of that drear burrow in the Sumps where Betony now lived a living death.
So Betony’s agony in Cannock had begun, and many the time she had wished to die, and would have done so had she had her way. But Drule’s fat mate kept her alive, and when she worsened she was allowed out briefly into fresher air, and as the molemonths dragged by her brain began to dull, her mind to numb, as if something inside of her was protecting her from the terrible reality of her lot. One thing she could not know was that her presence disturbed Lucerne because it stirred that place within his heart which he might have hoped to leave alone, which was curiosity about the siblings he had had at birth. Until Betony came he assumed they must be dead, as Henbane had reassured him they were; but once he knew they lived he was consumed with desire to know about them.
Then too there was the knowledge that Tryfan, his father, had been seen and talked to by this vile female who was now his prisoner. Was he dead? He must be. Even if he survived the journey back to Duncton Wood, the plagues and diseases of that place surely would have killed him by now. So often he found his sleep was disturbed with such unanswered thoughts.
“Master mine?”
“Mallice?”
“Come closer to me. It will help you rest and sleep.”
“That mole....”
“Dear Betony?”
“The same.”
“What of her?”
“I would talk with her. I would hear more now of Beechenhill.”
“Again? She cannot tell you more. And anyway, my love, have we not pups to make?” She smiled, she shifted her haunches near and invitingly. Pups were her desire now, pups by the Master, to find an heir, to confirm her supreme position as mother of a Master yet to be.
Since Betony’s coming the same thought had consumed Lucerne as well, as if by making young he could in some strange way blot out the void in his life that the loss of Henbane, and then the discovery of siblings he had never known, had created.
He turned back to her, and took her. Oh yes, they mated savagely, and in the way his taloned paws raked Mallice’s back, and his teeth bit at her shoulders, a mole might have learned how near love is to hatred, and hatred is to murder.
“Am I your mother that you hate me so?” screamed Mallice with delight.
She was uncomfortably near the truth.
But when they had done, and their energies were spent, then she let him leave her for his long sessions with Betony, during which, it seemed, he did little but stare and ask the same question, again and again.
“What are they like?”
“I cannot say more...” whispered Betony.
“You must, or I shall send you to the Lower Sumps again in punishment as I did last time. Tell me one new thing and you shall be spared that place.”
“They...” And Betony wept, broken, for every secret moment of her life with Wharfe and Harebell this mole who looked like them had ripped from out her heart. But worse, she had begun to hate them for what her knowledge of them made this mole do to her.
“Blessed art thou by the Word, Betony,” he said to her, “acknowledge me as thy Master, let this be thy Atonement to the Word, l
et the Word’s power take the shadow of the Stone from off your body.”
“But... b —” She gazed through eyes brimming with tears at the ragged scars where her talons had been, stared at the flattened damp floor, and at the shadowed walls and high fissures where dead light lurked. Somewhere a mole screamed, and Betony dared to say, “B-but the Stone is all I’ve got.”
“There is no Stone.”
Where does a mole find such courage as Betony so long found, where such hope?
“There is,” she said, “and it shall find you out.”
By mid-November the report-back by the trinities was underway, and every day seemed to bring members of the sideem back to Cannock with news of the followers and the Stone.
Lucerne and the Keepers seemed permanently convened, considering and weighing up the evidence as it came in, and there was an atmosphere of confidence and excitement about the tunnels, and suspense as well.
Although Lucerne and Terce had kept their thinking secret, the sideem talk in the tunnels was accurate enough about its general direction. The Keepers were debating where and when a punitive strike might be made for the crusade, such as Lucerne had all but promised them back in October before they had set off. Where, and when... and how complete?
The answers sideem gave depended on where their own reports had taken them. Those returning from the east had seen widespread abuse of the Word and argued for swift and thorough retribution.
Trinities from the Midlands and west lowlands up to the western front itself, where the Word was strong and followers few and isolated, agreed that a strike was needed, but argued it should be limited to making an example of one area or system.
Between these two extremes were the views of those trinities who had returned from the south-east, the old heartland of Stone belief where the once-powerful Holy Burrows of Uffington were. Strange and sombre news had come from that important quarter, for the trinities deputed to Buckland returned with the news that Wyre had died of murrain and Buckland was leaderless; and, worse, that the trinity led by Heanor of Nidd had been murdered by followers in Fyfield, a system of symbolic significance since it was one of the Ancient Seven of the Stone.
This was especially annoying to Lucerne who had instructed that trinity to enquire of Duncton Wood and whether Tryfan, his father, had ever returned there from Whern as some said he had. If he was alive... But this appealing line of thought was broken by the pressing news that several Buckland trinities had received positive reports of a Stone-fool who followers in those parts were daring to call the Stone Mole, which put the Master-elect in some difficulty....
“Difficulty, Mallice?”
“Yes, it’s what the gossips say: that the Word will be debased if you let the murder of Heanor pass without retribution, yet if our guardmoles impose it they may create a martyr if this supposed Stone Mole should be taken and put to death....”
“We need a single devastating strike of the kind I led on Mallerstang,” said Clowder. “Having kicked my talons on the Western Front for so long I no longer believe that that is the place for it. Ginnell argues that we should take Caer Caradoc, also one of the Ancient Seven systems of the Stone, and I agree with him. As I was leaving the Marches it was being reoccupied by followers, and but for your order that there should be no violence yet, we should have taken Caradoc by now. But when the time comes it will not be hard.” Clowder shrugged and smiled briefly before he continued.
“I think Beechenhill’s the place now. Our sources have given us all the information we are ever likely to need to successfully invade it. It remains a symbol of resistance to many moles, particularly in parts north of here, and is a living insult to the Word. Let us destroy its blasphemy forever that all moles know such resistance is not the way. It is the kind of gesture we are looking for, and I do not think followers in the south feel sufficiently strongly about it to use it as a rallying cry.”
Lucerne raised a paw to end the discussion.
“There are still more reports to come. The Word does not desire us to act quite yet. Longest Night is probably right, and we have time to muster our strengths to south or north or west, whichever we finally choose.
“The strength of the Stone followers does not seem to me as great as we had feared, and if anything our position has become more secure since the trinities went out than before. We shall ponder the matter a little more yet. It hurts nomole and can only benefit the Word if our sideem argue and gossip and grow angry in the tunnels outside this chamber for a little longer.”
“Well,” growled Clowder with a grimace, “I only ask that it is not too long – at every turn I take a sideem seeks to ask me what the Word shall decide, and to lobby me to tell it what it should do!”
“I like being lobbied,” said Mallice, “it teaches me so much about the greed of mole....”
It was into this busy, contentious, sanguine scene that the eldrene Wort arrived a day or two after the Keepers’ adjourned debate.
Although the guardmoles who patrolled the approach routes to Cannock were under strict instructions not to allow through moles who were not sideem or members of trinities, Wort made short shrift of any attempt to stop her. She had not journeyed so far so fast to be stopped by a mere guardmole and nor was she impressed one bit by the fact that the successively senior guardmoles who came to get rid of her were unimpressed by her title of eldrene of Cumnor.
The henchmoles who had come with her were utterly exhausted by their journey, but Wort, like all moles who have a mission and know they are right, radiated purpose and energy.
“Take me to the Master-elect!” was virtually all she was prepared to say, except for repeating that she was....
“Yes, ‘eldrene of Cumnor’, you have said so before,” said yet another mole summoned to deal with the troublesome arrival.
“And I shall say so again until you begin to show some sign of action. We are here to serve the Word, and in my view your lethargy comes close to blasphemy. I have important information for the Master-elect, and he shall hear it from me direct.”
The eldrene Wort was aware that it would do her no good to reveal her information to a mole too unimportant to know how to deal with it, apart from the very real risk that another mole might annex it to his advantage.
So she made a nuisance of herself until, eventually, a sideem was summoned, and to him she revealed but one thing: she had seen the Stone Mole.
“I would talk to the Master-elect about this matter.”
“Eldrene, do you know how rarely even a sideem gets to talk to the Master?”
“Master-elect is his correct title, mole. I assume the reason sideem rarely “get to talk to him” is because he knows they have little to say. I have a great deal. Now get off your rump and do something about it.”
“Mole...!”
“I’d do it if I were you, mate,” said one of Wort’s henchmoles wearily, “it’ll be easier in the long run.”
So, mole by mole, never daunted, Wort clawed her way up Cannock’s hierarchy until at last she found herself ushered into the presence of an inoffensive and quiet-seeming mole about whom she knew nothing but that his name was Slighe.
After whispering with the sideem who had finally brought her to his chamber, he turned a mild gaze on her and said, “Well, and will you talk to me?”
“In the name of the Word, I shall talk to anymole who serves the Word’s purpose. What is your task?”
“I organise the place,” said Slighe blandly.
“Then, mole, forgive my bluntness, but organise the place so that its Master is informed that there is a mole can tell him of the Stone Mole.”
Slighe smiled faintly and his eyes hardened. The Sumps seemed an inviting place to send this difficult female, and yet there was something about her that impressed. He measured his words carefully, for he knew that sideem Mallice was listening in.
“Eldrene Wort, I ask you to believe everything I am about to say, everything.”
Wort blinked and stared at
the mole. He might look mild but she sensed that at last she had met a mole of power.
“If you do not tell me enough to decide which mole of several, including myself, might be the best recipient of your information then you shall not leave Cannock for a very long time, during which you shall see neither the sky nor feel the wind at all. If you do tell me but you do not trust me to decide to whom you should speak, then the outcome will be the same. Therefore, mole, speak.”
Wort gave a bleak smile. In Slighe she had met her match.
“The Stone Mole is one Beechen of Duncton. He is not a Stone-fool or an imposter, or mad. He is the Stone Mole. He has such power over followers as nomole of the Word yet knows. He is evil come to moledom. I have seen him, I have seen his power, and I tell you this, sideem Slighe: if you do not believe me, if you abuse the trust I place in you by failing to tell the right mole the importance of what I have said, then it will not matter if you imprison me forever, for forever shall not come. The Stone Mole shall come and the Word shall be destroyed.”
It was Slighe’s turn to blink. Then a shadow crossed the portal of his chamber and he looked past Wort and her henchmoles and saw Mallice.
Mallice smiled and nodded, and as Wort turned to see who it was had entered Mallice said, “I think, Slighe, that our Master-elect will wish to listen to this mole. Please inform him.”
A few moments later Wort was shown into the presence of Lucerne himself. Mallice was with him.
“My love,” she said. “I think it wise that Keeper Terce is present.”
Lucerne nodded to Slighe to get him while he continued to stare at this strange female.
“Sideem Slighe has told me briefly what you have said to him,” said Lucerne pleasantly. “Now tell me, is not Cumnor adjacent to Duncton Wood?”
“It is, Master-elect,” said Wort, impressed. He was the first mole in Cannock who had heard of it.
“And I am impressed as well,” said Lucerne.
Wort was startled. It seemed the Master could read her thoughts.
“You are not nervous of me, Most moles who meet me are afraid, and not just the first time.”
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