Duncton Quest by William Horwood & William Horwood

Author:William Horwood & William Horwood
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781911420538
Publisher: Canelo Digital Publishing Ltd
Published: 2017-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Henbane of Whern was ready to kill. Wrekin, the head of all her guardmoles knew it. Sideem Sleekit knew it. Smaile, servant to all of them, doer of evil and unpleasant things, knew it.

But most of all, Weed, adviser to the WordSpeaker, was quite certain of it.

Never in all his long acquaintance with Henbane – ‘acquaintance’ was exactly the right word since neither mole ever liked the other much, or could have been said to have been a friend – had Weed known her more dangerously angry. It would need but a slip from any one of them for her to turn, thrust, and kill.

Her anger had been mounting ever since entering into this Word-forsaken place the locals revered and called Duncton Wood, when they had discovered that there was not a mole in the system. Not one. Not a half one. None at all on whom Henbane might have vented her annoyance at the Duncton moles’ protracted defence. So annoyance changed to anger and now, by the look of it, anger was turning to murderous rage.

So the atmosphere about the great Stone as they crouched there a few days later having a ‘conference’ was tense, and as explosive as the seed pods of rosebay willowherb on a hot September day…

From the first, the coming of Henbane and the moles of the Word to Duncton had been curiously ominous, and cast a shadow over what she had already been claiming as the end of her long campaign to conquer southern moledom, and annihilate the Stone followers.

For two days the Duncton moles had fought with unexpected courage and resolution, sustaining fewer losses than they inflicted, and causing the first real setback

Henbane ever suffered, unless a mole included the irritation of Siabod, which resisted the Word still but which Henbane herself had dismissed as of no great consequence. But Duncton was different, more central, and demoralising to moles who had been nowhere near ever losing a battle.

Indeed, but for Weed’s military leadership, and Henbane’s determined purpose that brooked no failure, and the guardmoles’ fighting strength, the defence might easily have been even more successful.

Eventually the Duncton moles had weakened and retreated, first from the cow crossunder that witnessed so many grike deaths, and then upslope by as clever a line of defences as Weed and Wrekin had ever seen. From there they had held out another half day, even mounting an effective counter-assault downslope, which slowed the guardmoles yet more for a time.

Then suddenly they were gone, gone on all fronts. Surface burrows deserted, defence tunnels empty, quite gone.

Few guardmoles who were there then forgot – or allowed others they told to forget – their first eerie entry into the Duncton system. The slow advance upslope expecting ambush at any time, the entry into the wood itself and the graceful ancient tunnels they found there, deserted but for the strange rootsound of the high trees which made a moor mole nervous and jumpy. So much so that there were at least two incidents of grikes believing they had seen an attack coming and assaulting their own moles.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.