Veneficus: Stones of the Chosen

by Chris Page

  “The excitement of victory is still strong within us, my lord, and, welcome as it is, it must not be allowed to lead us into uncharted territory. I would counsel caution and a much-needed rest for your army before we proceed.”

  “You have been to Wessex?” the king asked.

  “Once, one year ago, soon after I succeeded Mael. My prophecies pointed me toward it as a possible future campaign.”

  “What are the dangers?”

  “There are no armies to speak of now, no known leader under whom they would unite. The realm has been riven by internecine battles for a number of years: Britons, Angles, Jutes, and Celts. Mainly local warlords flexing their muscles, small factions struggling for local domination, settlement versus settlement, family against family. I do not foresee a battlefield like this one, only local skirmishes and inexpert ambush.”

  “Excellent, then we march on to Wessex in the morning,” King Penda exclaimed, slapping a mailed glove to his thigh and causing the settled white wolf to start instantly to his feet, ready to protect his mistress.

  “Steady, Lupa.” Elelendise again soothed the twitchy animal with a gentle hand before addressing the king.

  “My lord, I did perceive one problem during my visit to Wessex that should be addressed before we set out.”

  “What is it?”

  Elelendise paused momentarily before continuing.

  “There is a resident veneficus of some repute of whom you have heard. Although he is getting near the end of his term and has forsaken all forms of warfare, he has been a mighty force in the battles and enchanted history of those lands.”

  “You refer to the legendary Merlin?” Penda frowned.

  “Yes,” replied Elelendise. “Known as the long magus because of his great height.”

  “Why has he forsaken all forms of warfare?”

  “When, fifty years ago, he was the famed counselor to King Arthur of Camelot - who, as you know, was a relative of Oswald, whom we have defeated here today - Merlin became disillusioned with the perpetuation of continuous killing in the name of war.”

  “But legend has it that Arthur only embarked upon a campaign when the prophecies of Merlin so declared it,” said Penda with a furrowed brow.

  “That is so, my lord. The Grail King fought twelve successive battles on the advice of Merlin, but somewhere along that bloodthirsty trail the long magus had a change of heart and began to turn away from warfare.”

  Penda looked at her carefully. “I hope that you are not likely to have such a change of heart. Our Saxon cause needs your prophecies undivided by any considerations of pity or vulgarian subversion.”

  Elelendise smiled. “Worry not, my lord. All the astoundments at my command are in your service for as long as you need them. Have I not demonstrated my complete loyalty to your Saxon Christian cause?”

  “You have, particularly here on this field of battle. Tell me, does Merlin have the power or the will left to disrupt our invasion of Wessex?”

  She thought for a while. “I think not. He is old and weary, although he will probably be teaching a replacement who could have a different view on the matter.”

  “What do you suggest?” asked the Saxon king.

  Elelendise caressed the long, coarse white fur on Lupa’s neck, causing the wolf to whine and push against her hand in pleasure.

  “Lupa and I will go there and entreat forcibly with him. Goad and push at his aged venefical pride to see if there is anything left that would cause him to use the enchantments to impede our progress.”

  “And if he does?”

  “We will ensure his immediate incarceration under his destiny stone.”

  “You have the power to extinguish the mighty Merlin’s flame?” asked Penda with incredulity.

  “I have the power to extinguish the inferno of Hades itself,” she replied softly.

  “And his venefical replacement?”

  “When I was there one year ago he did not have one. If he has one now he has not had the time to pass on anything of consequence. The replacement will be a novice in the enchantments - one year is not enough. I sat at the feet of Mael for fifteen years in order to learn how to command the phenomena of great sorcery.”

  Penda pondered for a moment.

  “Then go and goad the long magus. We will rest here until your return. If you are not back within three days we will begin the march toward Wessex. In the meantime,” he turned to his equerry, “send a strongly armed detail to the north for my wife and daughter. I have need of their company, and they shall join us in Wessex.”

  “Immediately, my lord.” The equerry hurried away to carry out the order.

  As Elelendise strode purposefully through the still-warm blood of the battlefield with the ever-vigilant Lupa locked to her side, a flock of silent night-black rooks swooped low over the bloody battlefield and landed on the top of the nearby hill. A broadsword flashed in the still morning air of the Marches, and the severed head of the former King Oswald thudded to the ground in preparation for its hilltop vigil.

  When each one of the many millions of cowerers died, they died badly. Whimpering, roaring, or mute, whatever their final state, they all died locked in the craven grip of a dread that had accompanied them throughout their lives. That is the lot of the cowerer. Every cringing thought revolved around the terror of ultimate death. No matter what they did throughout their abject lives, the finality of death lurked behind every action, every moment, an ever-present mare waiting to snatch them into the beckoning maw of its black embrace. Recognizing the inevitability of that embrace and their stomach-churning susceptibility to its remorseless inevitability, many of them took their own trembling lives.

  Which took a certain kind of courage.

  Wither the cowerer then?

  Chapter Five

  Merlin sat quietly on the side of the boy’s straw bed and watched the rise and fall of his thin young chest and listened to the hush of his breath as he slept. Occasional incoherent mutterings broke from Twilight’s lips as the fantastic events of the previous two days played across his subconscious. The old wizard’s face softened, and he reached out his long, bony fingers and gently stroked the dark hair that partly covered the sleeping face. It was a tremendous burden to be placed upon one so young, so vulnerable, yet there was an inner strength in that thin body and a quick mind behind those dark, Cimmerian eyes that belied his age. Were seven years enough to accomplish all that needed to be done? Could the complexity of the enchantments and their enactment be learned to the point where they could be applied correctly? Would the raging mists accept a mere stripling at their Equinoctial Festival of the Dead?

  He sighed deeply, got up from the boy’s bed, and walked to the door of the small dwelling house situated in the center of the compound. Looking out, he nodded and began to smile.

  Another big question had just been answered.

  Turning back to the bed he saw Twilight’s dark eyes were wide open and fixed upon him.

  “Good morning, skirmisher. I trust you slept well.”

  “I felt your hand,” said Twilight. “It was gentle, yet spoke of doubt.”

  “Ahhh.” The old wizard’s eyes flashed. “That was before I looked outside and saw what awaits you in the twilight glow of the dawn. Ad tempus, my monochrome-viewing little friend, has arrived.”

  The boy sat bolt upright. “My ligamen!” he shouted excitedly. “My ligamen are here!”

  He leapt from his straw bed and ran to the door … and stopped dead, stunned by the sight that greeted his black-andwhite vision.

  Row upon row of black and white.

  “Pica,” Merlin breathed in his ear. “You are the liege-lord of the entire population of the wondrously inventive pica … otherwise known by the Celts as the magpie, the most proudly twinkling and capriciously intelligent, bauble-loving blatherskites of all the wild birds.” />
  On every available place around the compound, festooned along the tops of the stockade fence, crowded onto the straw roofs of the two simple dwelling houses, along fallen logs used as seats, and on every available branch in the surrounding trees perched thousands of beautiful, silent, glossy black-and-white fan-tailed birds. Every one of their glinting, dark brown eyes was fixed upon the doorway that now held Merlin and Twilight, every sharp black beak pointed in proud homage toward the ground.

  “Pica,” Twilight whispered in awe.

  Raising his hands toward them Twilight stepped from the doorway and turned in a circle to include the entire multitude of birds in his salute. As he did so all the birds began to hop from one foot to the other and to flutter and fan their long tails and wings. Finally the massed rows settled down.

  “Oh Merlin, they are magnificent,” he whispered. “What should I do now?”

  “Nothing … just wait for a few moments,” came the quiet reply. “They will have selected leaders, and they will be gathering all their courage for the right moment to present themselves to you. Remember, pica mate for life and are never far apart from each other.”

  Twilight thought of the many times he had observed the magpie pairs from his settlement, their bright-eyed, natural wariness of humans always ensuring that they kept a safe distance from him. He had become the same with his fellow man, especially after he had given up speech and had become steadily more isolated from the daily life of the settlement. Most of his time was spent alone in hidden hollows and copse, closely observing the seasonal movements and changes of nature and animals and living in his own head. The other settlement boys around his age, when not taunting him, kept out of his way, especially after the dwelling house affair.

  The largest building in the Malmesbury settlement was known as the dwelling house, an open structure in the center of all the other dwellings and in which all communal life took place. It was a circular building with a pitched reed roof interwoven through strong willow boughs with eight sturdy oak posts to support it. The settlement elders met there regularly to discuss communal matters and collect the geld; the crops and harvest was sold there; village women gathered there to weave their rough tunics and to chatter, and it was used for hand-fasting ceremonies, proclamations, feast day celebrations, and anything else requiring an assembly of the inhabitants. One quiet summer afternoon Will was sitting in a shady spot under a beech tree on the edge of the settlement, when he was suddenly hit by a barrage of hard acorns. A group of five giggling settlement boys aged from seven to ten stepped from behind an oak tree nearby and sauntered off, still firing at him spasmodically using their crude, jute-stringed slings, a favorite and easily mastered weapon. Wearying of the sport - baiting and firing at Will was a common pastime of theirs and one to which he never retaliated - they took to chasing each other in and around the sturdy poles of the dwelling house.

  Ruefully rubbing the stinging spots where the acorns had peppered his body, Will found himself wishing that something ill would happen to them to teach them a lesson. Something

  like the roof of the dwelling house falling on their heads.

  And that was precisely what happened.

  With a crackling of seasoned willow boughs, the entire roof collapsed on top of the five boys. When the dust and reed debris had cleared, the eight sturdy oak posts were the only things left standing.

  Luckily there had not been anything else going on there at the time.

  Coughing and spluttering, four of the boys, covered in broken reeds, dust, and bits of willow, crawled out from the heap that had been the settlement house roof.

  But one of them did not.

  A group of people appeared instantly and, with much pointing, shouting, and frantic tearing away at the debris, finally dug out the missing boy, and he was carried unconscious back to his home. The following day he appeared with a huge purple bruise on his forehead and his broken right leg in a wooden splint.

  Will had been horrified. Although no one in the settlement associated him with the collapsed roof, he knew that he had caused it. His thought processes had been too specific and the result too instantaneous. He knew he was different from the others in some vaguely undefined way, knew he possessed some sort of power, but this demonstration of it was frightening, especially when used to harm a relatively innocent settlement boy. A few stinging acorns certainly didn’t merit his injuries, and this boy could easily have been killed.

  In a blind panic he had run into the woods and sat there for a long time considering the consequences of what had just happened. It was then he decided that he would not speak. Silence would be his shield against the strange things that he could not yet understand. Something else had happened that day. When he had fled into the woods he’d been accompanied. A pair of pica had stayed high in the treetops but kept with him. Chattering and flapping around loudly it was almost as if they knew of his distress and wanted him to know that they were there.

  Strangely, from that point on he became more aware of them. They always seemed to be around him. In his many private sojourns into private places in the meadows and woods around the settlement, unnoticed at first, an inevitable pair of the black-and-white plumaged birds would be close by.

  They obviously knew far more than he did at that time.

  Now he was their liege-lord and guardian and, in their turn, they would help him whenever he needed them.

  From the highest point in one of the surrounding trees, two almost identically marked glossy-feathered birds flew toward them in that curious dipping flight peculiar to the species. Landing together on the other side of the compound they walked in a slow, dignified waddle toward the boy and Merlin. With their black heads held beak down and tails respectfully fanned downward, proud, bright brown eyes fixed unblinkingly upon the boy’s face, they came to a halt a few yards away. The dawn light glinted on their almost purple wing feathers in stark contrast to the prominent white of their proudly presented breast down. As they approached, the boy felt a gentle nudge in his back propelling him away from Merlin toward the birds.

  After a suitable interval when the young liege-lord and his two subjects had eyed each other carefully for a while, Twilight spoke quietly. “Welcome, most honorable pica, welcome. I am Twilight, tyro veneficus.”

  The larger bird raised his right claw outward and then put it down again in much the same way as Phi had done. As he did so there was a general movement in the multitudinous rows of black-and-white birds all around the compound as they all repeated the greeting. His beak opened and closed several times, and a low-register cackle came out, which, to Twilight’s complete surprise, he found he could understand.

  “I am Bell, leader of the Wessex pica. This is my lifelong partner, Ceeba. We salute you, Twilight, tyro veneficus, and welcome you as our liege-lord. We have waited a long time for your coming.”

  Twilight went down on one knee and spoke gravely.

  “It is a great honor for me to be your liege-lord. I will endeavor always to wear that title with courage and humility.”

  “Two of us will be in your vicinity at all times, day and night,” cackled Ceeba. “You may not see them, but they will be there. Should you need them for anything you only have to call out the word ‘pica,’ and the nearest will come to you immediately.”

  “Thank you,” was all Twilight could say.

  “We know that some of the things you will have to face will be terrifying,” said Bell. “Pica are well-versed in the intricacies of terror, as witnessed by some of the names history has bestowed upon us. Names such as the Devil Bird or Lucifer’s Shadow, the Checkered Phantom or Piedpoly Demon, and, of course, your namesake, the Wings of Twilight. We are now, truly, the Wings of Twilight.”

  Before the boy could clear his throat of the emotion he felt and husk out a suitably gracious reply, Ceeba, her head inclined slightly to one side, an attitude of talking Twilight was to come t
o know well in the female of the species, cackled at him again.

  “We watched over your journey here with your father, just in case, but you did not need us.”

  “You knew of my journey and its purpose?” said Twilight.

  Bell turned his black beak in a circle to encompass all the surrounding birds. “As I said, the pica of Wessex have been waiting for you for a long time. It was prophesied that you would come now, to this place, to learn the ways of the veneficus from the long magus.”

  He dipped his head in salute toward Merlin and then, as if on a silent, instant signal, the two birds stepped backward in complete unison and flew to a space on a branch high in a nearby tree.

  “Good-bye, liege-lord of the pica,” called Ceeba from her perch. “And remember, two of us will be close by at all times.”

  They both raised their right claws and were gone. In a cacophony of “good-byes,” raising of claws and the frantic beating of wings, the entire population of many hundreds of Wessex pica took off. As the great flock circled above the compound in their dipping flight, Twilight and Merlin waved to them.

  “Good-bye, pica, good-bye,” called Twilight, his eyes full of tears. “And thank you for letting me be your liege-lord.”

  “Fortuna prospera, Wings of Twilight,” whispered Merlin before turning to the boy. “Et nunc et semper ars magica et cor rara avis quo fata vocant.”

  “Such a wonderful gift, language,” said Twilight, almost to himself. “I now understand two of them: my own tongue and, to my complete surprise, the language of the pica. Alas, I have yet to master Latin.”

  “Ahhh yes, Latin. I allowed the occasion to get to me, didn’t I. What I said was: ‘Now and always you will have on your side both sorcery and the hearts of those rare birds … whither the fates call.’”

  “Quo fata vocant,” remembered the boy, watching the birds breaking into pairs and dispersing over the tree line. “They are so beautiful and brave. Bell said that they have waited a long time for my coming.”