Rune’s method was more subtle and perhaps even more effective. He would arbitrarily select a henchmole and accuse him of a crime that had not been a crime the day before, and was not one again in the days that followed. Perhaps a henchmole had killed another one unnecessarily in a mating fight—nothing normally wrong with that at all in Rune’s system: the more killing the better! But suddenly, out of the blue, that mole would be accused of harming Duncton by attacking a colleague and a friend, and Rune would throw his fate open to the whim of the group of trusty henchmoles who always stayed close by him, currying his favour. Great was their joy at not being the victim; pleasantly were their sadistic imaginations stretched to think of a way of punishing him. Injure him and leave him for the owls to take alive? Crush his snout and let him die slowly in full view of Barrow Vale? Whatever was decided, Rune liked to watch, and he rarely left a scene of punishment without his own talons being covered in blood and his unpleasant laughter carrying above that of the rest.
At the same time, he encouraged henchmoles to spy on each other and on other moles, and to tell him what they had found out. His punishments for moles successfully accused were always grim and form part of one of the cruellest, and saddest, periods in the history of Duncton. Maimings, blindings, snout-crushings and enforced cannibalism—the list is as long, as dark and as bloody as each individual death the henchmoles devised.
By the beginning of March, Rune had the henchmoles completely under his control, and with them all the system but the Marsh End. That he preferred to leave alone for a while longer, for fear that the disease that had broken out there—a rumour successfully propagated by Mekkins, who intended to resist Rune in every way he could—would spread into the main system. But if a henchmole could get hold of a wandering Marshender, that was fine, and what cruel pleasure was had by all before the poor creature died!
As March had begun and the mating season got under way, there was a certain decrease of the violence, for it had served its purpose and the henchmoles deserved to take their pleasures in mating and fighting among themselves and others. The sight of the big and bullying Westsiders, from whose ranks most of the henchmoles came, as they roamed about seeking mates became familiar in all the system, where females waited in abject fear, and males from such areas as the Eastside and around Barrow Vale preferred to scurry away and hide, lest they be lured into a mating fight they could not win.
The henchmoles did not, however always have things their own way. One female called Oxlip, who lived near the Marsh End, objected to the invasion of her tunnels by a henchmole and, with a combination of cunning and sheer anger, succeeded not only in killing him but also in injuring another henchmole who was lurking nearby.
Rune’s reaction was to kill the injured one who reported the incident ‘for bringing shame to the henchmoles’ and then to send others to find the female. They failed, for Oxlip turned north to the Marsh End, where Mekkins accepted her as a Marshender, glad to have any mole brave enough to fight and flee from the henchmoles.
But just as spiders suddenly appear from nowhere in damp September, so does evil manifest itself when a mole like Rune takes power. Strange, dark creatures of moles, diseased in mind, distorted in body, began to appear from the darkness in which they had so long lurked and to gather in the shadows that surrounded Rune. An old female from the Eastside, for example, appeared one day in Barrow Vale—her thin and haggard appearance and the cast of danger in her body all so threatening that the henchmole who found her and dared not touch her took her to Rune.
Although her origin was vaguely known—she said herself that she came from beyond the Eastside—nomole knew her name. The henchmole called her Nightshade and Rune very quickly seemed to take to her, liking to have her misshapen form lurking in the tunnels and burrows from which he ruled Duncton. He saw the silly, superstitious fear she caused and so exploited it. It was said that she knew dark and secret rituals banished from Duncton by the moles of the Ancient System and handed down in some outback of the Eastside by generation after generation of moles waiting for just such a moment as this. However it was, no henchmole dared to risk angering her or getting in her way before dawn, when she liked to squirm about the surface muttering and cursing to herself and casting spells that left an odour in the air.
