Her terror, her general miserableness, now gave way to tears and she gulped her next words out: ‘I don’t know what you mean. I only did what you said. This is where I heard it and there is a mole up there on the higher slopes and I don’t know if his name is Hulver or anything. I didn’t even know moles lived in the Ancient System and I don’t know what you want me to say or do.’
‘Be quiet!’ Mandrake brought her flood of tearful words to a short, sharp stop as he raised his talons by a tunnel entrance and snouted inside. ‘There is a mole here, or has been recently,’ he said tersely. ‘You two wait here and let nomole out, nomole. I will see what we may find, for there is a scent here like none I have found before in the Ancient System— dry and dusty, old in its impression but fresh in its strength.’ With that, Mandrake boldly went into the tunnels, while Rune covered those entrances that lay nearby and the henchmole went off to cover more.
Mandrake was right—Bracken had been in the tunnels, having gone there for comfort after Rue had fled four moledays before. But he was getting wiser and, having worked out that if anymole returned it would almost certainly do so from the direction of the communal tunnels, he had kept himself as far over the other side of the tunnels as possible, with a line of retreat ready. On hearing the arrival of several moles, and in particular the whimpering of a female, he quietly crept out of the tunnels by a little entrance higher up the slopes, which he blocked behind him, and made his way down into the tunnel on the far side of the stone seal. He was very cautious indeed, and blocked up each tunnel as he went.
Mandrake explored the tunnels in a no-nonsense fashion, quite ready to do battle with whatever creature he might find there. The scent puzzled him, for it was strange and strong, but he could not trace its source. He called the others down, and Rue, still trembling, led them past the main burrow up to the stone seal. She told them what she had heard, pointing a talon at the black wall of the seal on the far side of which, unknown to any of them, Bracken crouched listening.
Mandrake sent Rue and the henchmole back to her burrow while he and Rune discussed the situation.
‘Mmm… It’s a seal, that’s for sure,’ mumbled Mandrake, ‘which means there must be a tunnel beyond it.’
‘A tunnel leading into the Ancient System?’ Rune asked it as a question, for he liked Mandrake to feel he had the initiative all the time, but it was more an obvious statement of fact. Mandrake nodded.
‘No wonder Hulver chose to live here, where he could be so close to his beloved dead tunnels of the past,’ said Rune.
Mandrake looked up at the seal and finally decided what he must do. A bold gesture was needed. He still doubted very much that there was anymole in the Ancient System— indeed, if there had been, whatever it was would surely have destroyed the seal and entered these tunnels. The fact was that something suggested to Mandrake that it was, as he had always suspected, just an ordinary mole—whom, when the time came, he would kill. If he was in the forgotten tunnels beyond, then well and good, let him know that Mandrake was here. He raised his massive talons to the seal, not knowing that beneath its cover of packed soil it was massive flint, and brought them down upon it, just as Bracken had done.
But this time the result was startlingly different. Again there was the terrifying screeching sound that Rue had told them about, but from behind the mass of dust and debris something far more frightening appeared. As the covering peeled away under Mandrake’s blow and the dust settled, there, staring at them all, and bigger even than Mandrake, was an image of an owl just like the one Bracken had already found in the Chamber of Dark Sound. Its eyes, its beak, its talons—each were picked out through the calcite covering of the flint so that they shone black with the hard, glossy shine of the raw stone underneath, while the screech of talon on flint sounded harshly about them, as it had sounded about Rue before, seeming to come from the owl face itself.
Their reactions to this sudden apparition were all different. Rue simply covered her ears with her paws, looked at the image forming in front of her and fled to her burrow. The henchmole staggered back from the sound and sight, his mouth open, trying to say something in his fear and surprise, but failing.
At first sight of the owl face, Mandrake reared up snarling before it, his talons poised on a level with the owl’s eyes, and his mouth open and ready for any kind of fighting. He was feeling that at last, in this system to which life had so miserably driven him, he had an adversary worth facing. And in that moment of poised action, he crossed over a boundary beyond which a mole never again knows physical fear.
Crouched behind him, Rune’s response was altogether different. It was an inward reaction, for outwardly he showed little or no response—a momentary look of surprise, an instinctive clawing of talons, but no more than that. But as Rune looked into the sudden black eyes of the owl face that materialised before him, he saw the power for evil which he had pursued for so long. His pulse quickened, he gazed with excited awe on the owl face, and he shivered with a frisson of sensuality far deeper, and for him far more exciting, than any he had felt with Rebecca. With her he was in charge and playing a game; here, he was surrendering his will to what, for him, was the only reality of life, its dark and arcane side where a mole might learn to agonise the souls of others by wielding the same black power that seemed to lie behind the shining flint eyes of the owl.
For each mole these moments lasted a very long time; for all of them together they lasted for no longer than it takes to draw breath. Then Mandrake’s paws dropped as he saw that the owl was no more than an image; the henchmole tried to recover his nonchalant stance, and Rune almost purred with pleasure at the sight before them. Rue’s screams could be heard coming up the tunnel from her burrow.
‘Shut her up,’ ordered Mandrake without taking his eyes off the image before him. The henchmole left the burrow.
‘Well, well!’ said Mandrake robustly. ‘So at long last the decaying Duncton system has actually sprung a surprise. You know what it is, don’t you Rune?’
‘I have an idea,’ lied Rune. It was the pleasant face of power, as far as he was concerned.
‘I have seen owl faces like this before,’ said Mandrake, ‘in burrows far from here, on my way from Siabod. They were used by ancient moles to create fear in the minds of moles who might feel tempted to see what secrets lie in the tunnels beyond. Very effective on some moles, not much use on a mole like me. See, they don’t really protect anything worth protecting. It’s all nonsense, isn’t it? Just a joke that ought to make a mole laugh.’
Meanwhile, Bracken, who was listening to this from his vantage point beyond the flint but could not fully understand what was happening, had heard Mandrake’s blow on the flint and seen its effect—for it was so powerful it sent some remnants of the soil cover on his side down on to the tunnel floor and on to his coat as well. He didn’t dare shake it off for fear that he might be heard. Then a silence followed the terrible screech of talon on stone: he heard one of the moles scream and pawsteps fading away, he heard what sounded like Mandrake himself snarl with rage, but then nothing more for some moments. Until Mandrake’s deep voice gave an inaudible command, and then, a little muffled by the flint between, said, ‘You know what it is, don’t you, Rune?’
So Rune was there! But what was ‘it’? He listened on.
The conversation that followed was largely meaningless to Bracken until, at last, Mandrake said that he had seen ‘owl faces like this’ in a system he had lived in for a short time ‘on my way from Siabod’.