Rue, however, was a poor leader. She felt nervous and sick at the strain of it all and at one point actually collapsed, unable to on. ‘Get her food,’ snapped Rune impatiently to the henchmole, who did so with ill grace.
‘Last bloody time I find worms for a female, I can tell yer that,’ he muttered angrily as he hurled three worms down before her in the tunnel where she lay. Rune noted this remark down in his memory. He didn’t trust moles who lost their tempers over something as trivial as that, or even lost their tempers at all.
‘Well now, is ’er ladyship ready to move ’erself forward then?’ asked the henchmole sarcastically when she had eaten the food. She nodded and got up, feeling very shaky and nervous, for to add to her fear of Mandrake and Rune, there was her apprehension about what might be waiting for them in her tunnel.
Eventually she reached the end of the communal tunnel, led them out on to the surface, and from there pressed on the last few hundred moleyards to her tunnels.
‘Well!’ said Rune when they got there, with sarcasm lurking behind the good-humoured tone in his voice. ‘This is where it all happened, is it?’
Rue nodded her head miserably. She felt she was going to be attacked at any moment by one of them, or perhaps all of them.
‘Why didn’t you say that this was Hulver’s old system right from the start?’ Rune spoke the words silkily, but to Rue they sounded as threatening as a thousand moles. And she didn’t understand what he meant at all.
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.
