Veneficus: Stones of the Chosen

by Chris Page

  Although no one outside his immediate family had any proof that Will was responsible for some of the strange things that happened around the settlement, most of them regarded him with suspicion, and had probably heaved a sigh of relief when his father had finally taken him away.

  But none of their treatment of Will deserved what they got when the slavering gray wolves came rushing out of the dawn.

  When Merlin finally closed the huge woven-willow gates of his stockaded compound, he knew he was doing it forever.

  “Remember, skirmisher, all strangers from here on, howsoever they present themselves to you, are dangerous. Only when they have proved themselves, either way, will you know how to treat with them. They will say ‘How can I prove myself to you if you will not let me near you?’ Your answer must be that if they value such proof highly enough, they will find a way.”

  Twilight nodded as the long magus continued.

  “It is not safe for us here at the compound. She will attack very soon, and we must make all haste for the catacombs of Cheddar, and then on to Glastonbury and the southwest to continue the fight within the marshlands of the Levels. From there, if necessary, we will move further west toward Exeter and then Kernow, drumming up support from the local thanes if they have not all grown too fat and lazy upon the land they have stolen from the people. We will take human and wolverine lives as and when we can. Our birds will remain in close attendance. From now on, skirmisher, we fight on the move.”

  The long magus took a last look around the compound.

  His eyes glowed and twelve blood-dripping skinned deer carcasses appeared, hung from the compound fence posts.

  He handed Twilight an ochre pot.

  “Use a long stick to smear each carcass with some of the potion in this pot. Be very careful not to get any of the potion on your skin. We will leave more hanging from boughs along false routes.”

  “What is it?”

  “An appetizer to welcome ravenous guests with highly developed senses of smell and odor.” Merlin chuckled. “A sweet-tasting concoction made up of three plants from around here: spotted hemlock from the conium variety, staggergrass from amianthium, and foxglove from the digitalis strain. Boiled into a delicious-tasting, irresistible meat additive that no self-respecting wolf could possibly ignore.”

  “What will it do to them?”

  “The spotted hemlock will cause almost instant respiratory - breathing - failure. The staggergrass causes excessive salivation followed by a poisonous death, and the foxglove will immediately stop the heart beating.”

  “Why all three? Surely any one of them will do?”

  Merlin chuckled. “Elelendise might well be with them. Due to its carnal diet the wolf’s bodily system is basic but hardy and well used to discarding unwanted substances. If she hits on the cause quickly she has the power to provide an antidote for, perhaps, one of the poisons. It is not possible to provide an antidote for all three in the short time she will have before the wolves are past the point of no return.”

  Twilight shook his head in awe. “So much knowledge, so much understanding of death.”

  The long magus looked down at him from his great height. “We haven’t even begun, my little tyro spellbinder. By the time this battle is over you will understand death in many more forms.”

  “Can victory be achieved without so many deaths?” The dark brown eyes glowed concern.

  “Only hers.” The long magus turned abruptly.

  One hundred wolves hit the compound in a mass of snarling hatred. Again, the flimsy woven willow gates and walls of the shelter splintered under their impact as they frantically sought the presence of humans. Finding none they fell in a ferocious feeding frenzy upon the hanging carcasses.

  In no hurry, Elelendise later strode into the clearing with the white baby wolf cub cradled in her arms. She knew Merlin and Twilight would be long gone, but the symbolism of destroying the compound was too strong for her to resist. It would be added to all the other myths that would be sung about around the dying embers of the Celtic campfires as the beginning of the end for the mighty long magus.

  And the ascendancy of the wolf-woman.

  She stopped abruptly. All around the smashed compound wolves lay dead. Here and there a gray-furred leg with white markings around the large padded foot twitched as the last throes of life ebbed into the Wessex soil. Stiff, foam-flecked tongues lolled from mouths red with deer blood as the rigor mortise of death had arrested them in mid snarl. Quickly she took in the ripped carcasses, some still hanging, others littered in pieces of torn deer flesh and bone around the compound.

  A blue feather fluttered gently on a thin sapling.

  Then she got very angry.

  Merlin and Twilight sat high in the branches of a mighty oak tree overlooking the Plain of Glastonbury. The long magus had insisted they walk there, a journey that took them the whole day and wore Twilight out. There had been many stops along the way as Merlin explained a particular bit of magic and how it was completed. As the evening shadows began to lengthen they had reached their destination, and Merlin began the process of teaching the boy how to transform from one place to another. Using small distances to begin with in and around the oak tree, Twilight began to get to grips with the complicated enchantment of putting himself instantly in another place.

  “As you know, most of what we do is controlled by the mind.” Merlin chuckled as the boy, intending to transform himself to the ground under the tree they were in, suddenly found himself sitting in Merlin’s lap. “In order to execute any transformation, the mind must be completely clear of any distraction. Otherwise, you will end up in the wrong place, as, I believe, you have just demonstrated.” He patted the boy’s head gently. “It’s all controlled from in here.”

  “But I can’t get those wolves and the slaughter of the settlement out of my head,” said Twilight. “I keep hearing the screams of the dying villagers and seeing terrible images. And besides all that I’m tired. You have worn me out with all this walking.”

  The long magus sighed. “I know. Let’s give it a rest for a while.”

  He waved a long arm around to encompass the area.

  “We are in an area of Wessex known as Summer Land. A

  land of diverse Celtic tribes and independent barbarians, each worshipping their own pagan gods. Fifty years ago this realm was under the rule of Melwas. Each winter the marshes of the Levels flood this plain and turn the Tor,” he pointed to a steep hill rising out of a valley in the distance, “into an island. The people around here call it the Island of Glass.”

  “You knew Melwas?” Twilight asked.

  Merlin gazed into the distance as if looking back in time.

  “Quite well. We were on friendly terms … until he kidnapped Guinevere and imprisoned her in his fortress here in Glastonbury.”

  “Why?”

  “She was a beautiful woman. He wanted her for his wife, but she was already betrothed to Arthur.”

  “Which made Arthur very angry, and they fought a battle for the hand of Guinevere?” Twilight’s dark eyes again shone with the experience of being so close to great events.

  “Not this time.” The long magus smiled down at his charge. “Arthur’s army became stuck in the winter marshlands of the Levels and could not make any headway.”

  Twilight looked at him quizzically. “You were with King Arthur?”

  “I was. In those days he never referred to himself as a king. He called himself Dux Bellorum, Battle Leader in your tongue. There were others who had a greater paternal claim on the throne of the Britains, but Arthur was unequalled as an inspirer of men.”

  Twilight sighed. “The Latin tongue is so much better at drawing pictures, a kind of speech music. Will I ever learn how to use it?”

  “Of course you will. In the meantime you speak a perfectly able substitute, which is universally understoo
d throughout this land.”

  Twilight nodded before picking up the theme of Melwas again. “The marshlands of the Levels do not offer a barrier to you. We have just proven that by our instant transition here today.”

  “True, and so it was that I traversed the marshes, bargained with Melwas, and Guinevere was released.”

  “What was the bargain?”

  “Arthur’s army was bigger and better trained. He would have waited until the summer when the marshlands dried out and then put Melwas and his men to the sword. I persuaded Melwas that if he returned Guinevere unharmed, Dux Bellorum would turn back and peace would reign between them.”

  “Arthur was happy with that?”

  “Only when reunited with Guinevere. She soothed the anger from him. Besides, he had other, more important battles to fight. Saxons, warlords, and pretenders were everywhere.”

  Twilight was silent for a while.

  “So,” he said at last. “Since we are getting close to winter, the lesson is that Penda’s army could also get bogged down in the marshlands of the Levels.”

  Merlin grinned at him. “Good, good, and that way we’ll let nature take some of the strain of battle … if, that is, the wolf-woman chooses to ignore the strategic usefulness of Cadbury Castle.”

  “Cadbury Castle?”

  “It is a strongly fortified castle on a hill just outside the settlement of Yeovil, which is on the northern edge of the Levels. Currently occupied by Gawain Godwinson, a lord of some standing whose father was one of the twelve Knights of the Round Table - one of only two Grail knights - it would be a good place for Penda’s army to sit out the coming winter.”

  “The Knights of the Round Table, the Grail chalice, Guinevere,” breathed Twilight in awe. “Campfire legends and heroes of the finest storytelling. Does the Grail chalice exist?”

  The long magus looked at him for a long while as if deciding just how far he should go with this. Then he raised his fingers to his lips to denote a secret and spoke directly to the boy’s mind.

  We will come to the Grail and its seekers in good time, my eager little moonshiner. Even though we are at the top of this mighty oak tree some myths must remain clandestina, spoken of only in whispers.

  Does it exist? Twilight asked again eagerly.

  It certainly does.

  Do you know its whereabouts?

  “I am its keeper,” said Merlin simply, reverting back to normal speech. “Now, enough of such matters, we have more pressing deeds to attend to.”

  “Does Godwinson have an army?” Twilight continued with his bombardment of questions.

  “Hardly an army.” The long magus scowled. “Two hundred, maybe three hundred men at most. I think we’ll pay him a visit tomorrow and see just what he’s made of. If he’s anything like his father he’ll be a man of honor and courage.”

  Just then a falcon alighted on a branch alongside him and screeched a message before arrowing back over the horizon on its return to shadow the army of Penda.

  “By the Hounds of the Otherworld, that’s fine crinkum crankum.” He chuckled. “Forty-one wolves dead, one-tenth of her slavering lupine army poisoned.” He turned to Twilight. “And all because of a little knowledge of local plants, eh skirmisher.”

  Twilight remembered the relevant section of the Elder Pen-dragon couplet. “Feel the sun, plunge the earth, whisper plant, whisper birth,” he said quietly.

  “Ahhh,” sighed Merlin. “There you have this one and the next one. Before we move on from this place we will also plunge the earth. That should take care of a few more of her allies.”

  “You have another plan?” asked Twilight.

  The green eyes of the veneficus glowed. “My mind is a firefly of plans. All of them now centered on ridding this earth of that cursed wolf-woman.”

  “And Penda and his army?”

  “They are but men who seek to conquer for nothing more than religious power. There will be such armies to the end of time. She is different. I haven’t got to the bottom of it yet, but her purpose in all this is something altogether more meaningful.”

  “Sinister, left-handed, the hidden warnings from Mael, her wish to be introduced as your successor at the Festival of the Dead.” Twilight mused. “Are there greater powers beyond even those of the mighty line of venefici in all this? The gods themselves perhaps?”

  The long magus looked at his charge admiringly. “You are learning quickly. Those are my thoughts also. We will ponder on it more as events offer us clues. In the meantime we have a loss to consider. In retribution for the deaths of her wolves, Elelendise has set fire to the mighty Savernake. As we sit here at the top of this mighty oak, many hundreds of other trees are burning to ash in a raging inferno engulfing the mighty woodland. My falcon tells me the entire forest will be nothing but smoldering embers by the morning.”

  Twilight was silent as he absorbed this.

  “Are any of our birds caught up in it?”

  “No, all are safe other than the loss of their habitat.”

  “Other animals?”

  “Everything that cannot burrow deep, fly, or run fast to escape the raging flames will be consumed within them.”

  “Can you stop it?” he asked.

  “Again, no. It would take too much power and leave me weakened. It will be a long time, especially for the trees, but eventually the forest will grow again.”

  After a while the long magus began to mutter to himself in the Latin tongue. After some time he turned to Twilight.

  “Can you arrange for ten pairs of pica to attend us?” he said conspiratorially.

  “At once,” replied Twilight. “Do I sense another plan, one of those fireflies perhaps?”

  Merlin snorted in appreciation. “I have a question for you. Of the five senses - hearing, taste, smell, sight, and touch - which do you think is the most useful in a war such as that we are engaged in?”

  Twilight pondered long and hard. “It is a difficult question because all of them have a use, but I would say the most valuable would be sight.”

  “Umm. Summon the ten pairs. We’ll put it to the test.”

  In the early hours of that morning as Penda’s army slept on the chalk hills above the smoldering remains of the eastern fringes of what had been the mighty Savernake forest, ten pairs of pica glided silently and unseen between the evenly spaced sentries and landed on the ground. The air was thick with the smell of wood smoke from the forest inferno, which mingled with the same smell given off by the dying embers of the many campfires around which each cohort of ten soldiers slept. The ten pairs of birds, their black-and-white plumage offering the perfect camouflage against the dark night, hopped toward one circle of soldiers. With his weapons by his side and feet toward the fire, each soldier lay on his back covered by a rough woven blanket. Remaining in pairs the birds positioned themselves on each side of the snoring head of a soldier and waited.

  “Now,” the clear, young voice of their liege-lord sang in their heads simultaneously, and each bird stabbed down purposefully with its sharp, black-tipped beak. Through the closed lid and deep into the soft eyeball of the slumbering soldiers.

  As the agonized screams shattered the darkness the birds flew off silently … leaving ten blind soldiers and a single blue feather.

  Later that day, with the blinded soldiers being escorted back toward the north, the army struck camp and began to move slowly further westward across the verdant Wessex landscape. With scouts forward and outriders and wolves on both flanks they marched purposefully toward the Celtic heartland … into an area strewn with prepared adder pits.

  Plunge the earth.

  The pits had been prepared with typical Merlin cunning in that they were rectangular camouflaged pits randomly placed across the tracks and sheep walks over which much of the army would pass. At a man-and-a-half deep there was nothing in the bottom of the pit
s so that when the thin, grass-covered branches gave way under the weight of four soldiers and they tumbled in, nothing happened.

  Until they stood up.

  Ledges had been dug at head height around the upper part of each pit. It was here that many adders had been placed. The noise and tumult of soldiers clattering into their pit was guaranteed to upset the adders.

  Fifty-five soldiers died from poisonous adder strikes in the head and neck before Elelendise brought the situation under control by once again bringing the entire panicking army to a halt whilst she located the remaining pits and set fire to their reptilian inhabitants.

  In a small valley Elelendise called the pack leaders of her wolves together. They were nervous and whined and belly-crawled in her presence.

  “One of your greatest gifts is the sense of smell. Beware. It can also be a weakness. Our enemy is cunning and will play to our strengths as well as weaknesses. Do not rush into any situation. If you see, scent, or sense anything unusual, let me know before reacting to it.”

  An old male pack leader called Pad with three white fur-covered paws whined and asked if he could say something.

  “Our problem, supreme mother, is that we cannot fly. We could quickly reduce all those chickens to a feathered mash if we could get them out of the trees and onto the ground.”

  This was greeted with a chorus of approving yelps from the others. Elelendise stroked the little white Lupa cradled in her arms and thought for a moment.

  “You have given me an idea, old pack leader. Worry not. When the appropriate time comes, you shall all have your grounded chickens, and the air will be thick with their feathers. Now, go back to your stations and remember. Our enemy is everything and anything. He can take many forms. Stay on guard and ultra cautious at all times.”

  Penda summoned his counselor.

  “I have just received word that my wife and daughter and their escort are making good progress and will be with us tomorrow. In view of our recent losses - in particular the blinded soldiers and those killed in the adder pits - I am worried for their safety. They are very precious to me and must not be put in any danger. As much as I yearn to see them both again, I will not play with their lives and will turn them around now unless you can convince me that they will be safe.”