The reason was plain enough. If the next that went failed then the Twelfth Keeper’s position would be weak indeed. Of Clowder and Mallice the former was certainly the more likely to succeed, and his success would surely encourage Mallice when she went, and thereafter... not a mole could doubt that Terce was thinking of a way in which Lucerne might gain Henbane’s permission, if not peaceably then by force.
Clowder came forward past a grim-faced Lucerne in a chamber now cast down into a silence of suppressed excitement. The shaft of light was strong on the Rock, from the maw of the cavern now came the loudest suckings yet heard and the lake’s water lapped hungrily at the shore. Not a mole but Terce and Clowder moved.
“Forasmuch as all moles are conceived and born in shame and weakness...” Terce began the rite once more, raising his paws over Clowder’s head, his words finding a clear and distant echo all about the chamber.
There was about Clowder’s anointing an assurance that even the strongest moles had not yet shown, and a confidence in the way he rose from submergence and turned, unaided by the Keepers, and began to swim steadily towards the Rock. Not once did he falter, not once deviate, not once slow. But on he went steadily, driving the dark waters before him, the grunt of his breathing powerful, and dark sound subservient to his strength. On, on, watched in awe by the other moles, unperturbed by the occasion, certain of success.
Indeed, his reaching the Rock was almost an anticlimax, for he made his scrivening swiftly and then turned and was coming back, water flowing off his face and back as his body rose with each stroke he made, looming nearer and nearer to the shore once more. He emerged and shook himself dry without the support of anymole, stared balefully around at Henbane, then, instead of joining those other moles who had made the swim successfully, he returned to take stance at Lucerne’s side.
“Next!” commanded Henbane icily, and Mallice rose and went past Lucerne and Clowder and advanced towards Terce, her father-tutor, and the rite began once more.
The watching moles regarded Mallice’s progress through the rite, from Declaration of Assent to the moment of immersion, with less interest than they might before Clowder had swum. His triumph had made the whole rite seem easy and had released among the survivors a mood of cheer and renewed excitement. Lucerne seemed diminished and the once-feared Mallice irrelevant; whatever plottings lay between Terce and Lucerne, whatever failings the Mistress might have, she was in the ascendant once more and the survivors could relax and look forward to the pleasures of being acknowledged to be sideem.
It would be hard, impossible perhaps, to say quite why or when they began to pay attention to what, only gradually, mole after mole realised was becoming a scene of profound tension, climax and change in Whern.
Mallice spoke her responses quietly, and though clearly nervous there was something impressive about the almost pup-like sincerity and fragility she seemed to emanate as Terce loomed over her and Henbane and he progressed through the now familiar Declaration of Assent.
Moles seemed to sense that something powerful, something sacrificial, was taking place and that now, in Mallice, a mole most feared for her dark self-centred beauty and closeness to three such moles as Terce, Clowder and Lucerne, there rested something greater than all of them.
Perhaps it was the tension in Henbane’s voice that gave away the fact that if this mole failed then the Mistress would in some way regain power. Perhaps it was the subtle frailty in Terce’s voice, as if at this last moment of the rite he was revealing the attachment he had to this mole, whom all knew to be of his own blood; an attachment that betrayed him and marked him out for dismissal and death. They felt his fear for her.
But more than that there was something in the way the demeaned Lucerne watched her through her rite, something of an attachment which until then none had guessed. Not love, for that short word was never one for Lucerne’s use; nor lust. Nor even liking.
Need... that was it. Need. There was a kindredness between these two, one prevented from taking part in the rite, the other – moles now began to guess – who would almost certainly not have strength for it. Was this then Henbane’s intent in barring Lucerne from the rite, to rob Mallice of the support his success would have brought? To isolate her? And so destroy them both?
If this were so it found confirmation in the strange protective stance that Clowder had taken, and the way he looked malevolently at the Mistress, and then at Terce, as if waiting for a word of command to raise his paws and talon Henbane to death.
Indeed, so overt did his restless anger seem that several Keepers now began to move nearer to Henbane as if, recognising her right to power still and her success in wielding it, they would not allow Clowder or those of his ilk to attack the Mistress of the Word.
But understand this well: this was all unspoken. This was but in the minds of those who watched. And the mole who kept all in control, who kept the anger and the evil there unspoken and contained, was Terce. Still, calm, in control; and all about them the dire whisper of dark sound as the Rock, seeming to respond to what they did and thought, echoed back their silent struggle all about.
Then Mallice was submerged and, rising, she was turned to face the Rock and with the familiar last whispered advice that goes to such novices, “Keep left! Keep left!” was gone out into the unforgiving lake.
She swam more slowly than great Clowder, but steadily enough at first, and in good line. The shining maw was to her right, her strokes were steady, the lake lapped darkly, the dark sound did not grow unkind.
But just when she seemed in reach of the Rock and as the moles began to relax she gasped, suddenly and audibly, and the dark sound cruelly gathered in the Rock above her, and she gasped again, and her distress began to deepen.
Now Mallice declined towards the fateful and terrible ending that the watching moles had already witnessed so many times before that long Midsummer day. Her strokes grew weaker and when she finally reached the Rock it was to falter and slide to her right along its lowering edge, such scrivening as she made weak and pathetic as she tried to push herself away and turn to swim the long impossible route back to the shore across water that swirled and raced with the dragging currents of the lake.
Her gasps were almost screams, her strokes became more frantic, her progress back slowed, she half turned, she saw above her the rising Rock and the maw of its sucking cavern and she cried out these memorable words, cried out as no other novice ever had before: “I shall not die! Your power, Word, is in me! I shall not die!”
On the shore the moles most affected by her fate were dumb and still. Terce loomed in the water, staring; Clowder hunched forward, one paw advanced as if wanting to reach out and bring her back. On Lucerne’s face was... what? What word exists for a feeling others do not feel? No word at all. Loss, anger, despair, kindredness... strange pride.
“I shall not die!” she had said, and Lucerne looked... proud? Even as the waters sucked her towards eternal pain? He did! Hunched forward like Clowder, eyes narrowed, snout thrusting, his elegant flanks and fur that caught the dark light of the chamber expressive of a mole about to thrust his talons into the very heart of time and turn it to his use. His breathing quickened, he sensed his potent time was almost come.
But now something more came to that hateful chamber as the others there, seeing Mallice so near death, wishing to align themselves to the one who would win the unspoken contest that was taking place before their eyes, instinctively began a dark chant to urge the female of Terce’s seed on to her death.
Slowly Lucerne looked around at them. The guttural chant whose principal refrain might have been Die, die die! was amply matched by the snarled and torsioned curls of their mouths and teeth, and the swelling of their reddening eyes. Die, and the rite is done and we can begin our celebration. Die, and our lives as sideem begin. Die, for thy lingering keeps us from what we would the sooner have.
It was a chant whose driving rhythm found like echo in the Rock that now soared above Mallice’s pathetic s
truggling form as, drawn down by that sucking current beneath the lake’s surface, she desperately tried to reach up the Rock’s slippery face and the cavern’s roof to hold herself from the grasp of death.
Her talons scraped and scrivened at the Rock and she began to add her own scrivenings to the ancient and evil ones already there.
But... “Die/” the chant cried out to her.
“Die!” the Rock above echoed back, sending out a sound so vile that horror came to all who heard it, and their eyes widened and their senses seemed to attune ever more to where there was weakness in that great chamber – which was where Mallice struggled and where, the only one there absolutely still, her father Terce, Twelfth Keeper, his reputation dying in some strange evil way out on the water before him, stared too.
Weakness there seemed now in that mole of towering strength, Clowder, for he too was still and staring and helpless as the companion of his training moleyears continued to die before his eyes.
Little wonder that such mite of pity as there was that day in that place was all unseen. Yet may the Stone be praised for what it gives, pity was there. Coursing as a single tear down one mole’s face: Henbane’s. She who had most to gain from the death of Mallice was the only mole there with heart enough to pity her. So far along the hard way towards the light had Henbane travelled, so far but no further.
For no others tears flowed, but rather her eyes hardened as she remembered that in the death of this mole Mallice some measure of hope that Lucerne’s growing power might be stalled remained alive. So Henbane pitied, but did nothing more.
Then a strange forbidding silence began to fall, as if the dark sound had reached its peak of frightfulness and found no more moles on which to dwell and swell its evil. So, an echo turning back on itself, it began to die and the moles there began to know a fear worse than any they had so far felt, now or ever before: a fear of a silence they had never even suspected existed before in which a mole, truly, as the Word taught, was nothing.
In that silence the moles witnessed an astonishing thing: Mallice still alive. Mallice clinging to the Rock, cursing, blaspheming, fighting for life and not sucked in, her talons tight to some cornice or cleft at the maw of the cavern and the dark, angry flow of the lake water at her body. Her screams had gone, her gasps had gone, and now in the silence the moles heard the answer to their guttural chant for death: the short, sharp breathing of a mole who has a will to live.
“I shall not!” whispered Mallice, and each mole heard those words as a charge against themselves. Each mole trembled, each felt anger, each felt frustration. She who should be dead was not. The Rock seemed defied. The Rock was demeaned. And yet there was glory in that moment, and revelation, and, surviving but yet unsaved, Mallice dared to laugh.
Then Lucerne moved. Forward. Slowly. As if dark shadows had taken life and moved out into the light. As if the chamber’s very shape was being realigned.
“Tutor Keeper,” he said, ignoring his mother Henbane utterly, “I shall make the Declaration of Assent. Now!”
“He shall not!” cried Henbane.
Clowder turned towards her, and seemed half inclined to attack her then and there, but Terce whispered, “Novice Clowder, thou art not a sideem yet. The rite is not concluded. But it is the Mistress herself who blasphemes. This mole seeks to make the Declaration and he cannot be denied.”
Henbane stared powerless as Clowder turned back towards Lucerne, hunched over him protectively, and nomole there to stop him or defy him as Lucerne entered the water, turned and began in a rapid powerful voice to speak out the Assent.
“I believe... I so believe... I believe it... so I shall be!” he cried, uttering the responses boldly as Terce spoke his own part of the litany and that of the Mistress as well. Shock at such seeming blasphemy was palpable about them and some of the other Keepers stirred uncertainly, wishing to protest, but the light and the power of the moment seemed gathered about Lucerne and so confident, so overpowering was the speed and utterance of his litany, so at one with the darkness and the light in the chamber about him, so matching it was the defiance that came from the struggling Mallice out at the very portal into suffering, that nomole there dared gainsay it, or him. And nor, for good measure, would any have tried but with the certain knowledge that even as they spoke their protest Clowder would have raised his talons and dashed the life from them.
Then Terce signalled to Clowder to come to his side, and the two moles – one most senior Keeper of all and the other the most recently anointed sideem – sought to reach forward and immerse Lucerne in the holy sanctifying waters of the lake.
But even this he would not have.
He waved them back imperiously and then, alone and untouched, he turned to face across the lake towards the Rock. He dipped his paws in the water, he raised them and tumbled the water’s shining darkness in cascades upon himself.
“Word, to thy service I commend myself,” he said. “Anointed by thee alone. To thy care I commit my body, to thy will I commit my soul, to thy purpose I commit my life.”
With this he thrust off into the water and swam out towards the Rock, but not to the left, nor to the right, but straight to its darkest heart and very centre where Mallice awaited him.
Nomole who witnessed that fabled moment in Whern’s dread history, save Henbane alone, ever gainsaid the dark glory and evil wonder of that moment. But for her it seemed a moment of turning evil.
Out swam Lucerne, swift and sure, and if Clowder’s swim had seemed powerful his appeared as if preordained to triumph by the lake and Rock itself.
The waters drew him on, the shaft of light cast down upon the Rock and dappled now in reflections as he went lighting his way.
This was the Master in the making. This was Scirpuscan power reborn. This was of such power that anymole who saw it would follow him for evermore. Anymole but Henbane.
To the right flank of Mallice he went, defying the current that ought to have swept him on, turning without seeming to need to touch the Rock for support at all.
“Return to thy life renewed! I, thy Master now, so order it!” he cried out to Mallice. Dark sound whispered, strength came to her, and she who had so nearly died now swam out against the current and defied it. Back towards the awestruck moles she came, across the dappled water, as Lucerne watched, his power beyond questioning.
Then he turned, stared up at the Rock and then, as the waters seemed to surge and raise him up, he reached forward his talons and scrivened bold and mightily across the Rock’s great face.
Such dark sound sounded then that moles covered their ears in fear, moles closed their eyes in terror, and moles sought vainly to bury their snouts in the unyielding ground.
Then, when that sound began to die, they looked back across the lake, and saw Mallice coming and Lucerne protectively behind. While on the shore Clowder waited for the mole who, the moment he touched the shore once more, must surely be acknowledged Master; and for she who, saved by him, would be his consort and mistress.
So they stared, and might have stared on had not a sudden movement to their right reminded and alerted them that the Mistress was witness to her own supersession. They turned as one and saw Henbane turn before them, back and gone into the cavern wherein the Master-dead lay encrusted by the flow of time.
“Take her!” cried out Terce. “By my power as Twelfth Keeper I order thee to follow her to where the Masters of the past lie still, and take her!”
So it was that Lucerne’s triumphant return to shore with Mallice was overtaken by a rush of moles up to that raised place where Henbane had been, and then on to where she had retreated among the encrustations of the past.
The first there saw her at that tunnel’s mouth from which one of the feeder streams came down, with the contorted body of Rune, limed over, at her side.
“Take her!” roared her son Lucerne, Master designate, as he reached the shore and sought to scramble up to where she had been. “All favour to him who gets his talons on her first!” br />
Ominous and strange what happened next. Unreported until now. Distasteful. A precursor of worse to come.
Henbane seemed unsure, as if to flee was to turn towards an unknown that even now she feared more than the evil from which she fled. But moles advanced upon her, greedy to touch their talons to her hallowed flanks. Greedy for the favour her capture might bring.
Quickly she turned, suddenly she stumbled, and her left paw fell upon the flank of her dead father Rune. So vile, so unexpected what happened then.
Rune’s flank cracked. Rune’s dead body burst. The encrustation broke beneath her paw and revealed a body rotted into slime and dark tuberous remnants, sliming odorous protrusions that burst and spattered, slid and flowed down towards the moles that advanced on Henbane. The smell was viler than moles had ever smelt before, as if all evil was concentrated in the squirting cracking thing that Rune’s body had become.
For a long moment Henbane floundered in her father’s body’s rotten flesh, then she screamed; and as the odour of what she had disturbed rose up she screamed once more and found the strength to push on past it, leaving its sliming flow in her wake, a wave of vileness that stopped the pursuing moles in their tracks.
Some pulled back; others, too late, found their snouts and mouths caught by the filthy stuff and retched and vomited where they were. While others, behind these ones, were overtaken by the horror of the smell and turned away, deaf to the cries and orders of Lucerne, their paws to their retching mouths, their eyes watering into blindness.
Most strange of all was Lucerne. Such was the confusion of the moles ahead of him that he could not break through; and yet he retched not and seemed unaffected. The rottenness of death had no hold on him.