Veneficus: Stones of the Chosen (8 page)

He held up his long hand to still the anguished words on Twilight’s lips.

“I know, I know. We have only just met and I’m already talking of my own death. It’s an unfortunate subject for one so young. You, my little skirmisher, have to grow up very quickly in a very short time. It’s an inevitable consequence of where we find ourselves.”

“I don’t understand death,” mumbled the boy. “I don’t understand it at all.”

The long magus patted him on the head. “It is nothing to fear,” he said kindly. “After Avebury we will go to another special place nearby, also made of ringed stones. This place is called Stonehenge. It is the great council seat of the raging cowerers, the place where they have their Equinoctial Festival of the Dead. It is not time for the festival yet - that is a few weeks away - and as you know we must attend on that day. Our visit today is purely educational so that you will understand a little more about the ways of such matters at the appropriate time.”

Twilight wiped away a tear. He was beginning to understand the enormity of the task they faced as teacher and pupil. And in seven years time, the entire responsibility would be his. It didn’t seem such a long time now.

“I am frightened. There is so much to be learned,” he said quietly. “Must you depart this earth in seven years, and if so, will I be able to call on you?”

“It is a perfectly natural feeling, but remember this. Fear is the jailer of reason. You will soon learn to conquer its icy grip. Ofttimes you will feel overwhelmed by the tide of wrongdoing you will be expected to subdue. One against the multitudes. But do not despair. Your power is your strength, and it is always greater than the forces that would overthrow you. Learn to trust it. There is always a path, a way to overcome every obstacle. Part of my job is to ensure you have the means to discover that path. And don’t forget your loyal birds. They will always be by your side. Yes, I must depart this earth at the end of seven more years, and no, you will not be able to call on me. The death of a veneficus is a finite affair. When you have laid my body to rest under one of the mighty stones of Avebury, you will don the full mantle of the enchantments with pride and confidence. That is my remaining task on this earth, and I will see that it is accomplished.”

“Why do we
have
to attend the Equinoctial Festival of the Dead, and what will we
do
there?”

“When the ancients began to understand how the complicated existence of erring humankind affected the world, and how the errant behavior and deeds of the past influenced and affected the present and the future, they decided that a system of retribution should be put in place to punish, when dead, those who had led an unworthy life. In those far-off days, and still to some extent today, people were judged on their courage. Mettle spoke for all. As a result the ancients set up a system whereby all cowerers, whatever the reasoning, had their souls confined to a minute droplet of moisture within a great, raging charnel mist. The confinement did not result, as envisaged, in a manifestation of future goodness but turned the countless millions of cowerers into a screaming, raging mass, whose rage is directed at the ancients for the entrapment of their tortured souls. In the sarcophagal mists there is no place called Oblivion, no eternal rest. The screaming souls of the cowerers are trapped. There is a powerful legend that says one day these raging mists will break through the sarcophagal barriers that bind them to the mist and sweep across the earth in a screaming mass of undiluted hatred. Many thousands of years ago venefici were placed by the ancients to police the cowerers. We are the only people who can commune with them, their only link with the live world. And that communing can only take place throughout the first day of the Autumn Equinox when the mists are at their most active. We soothsay them, listen to the tortured pleas of their elected representatives, soothe, placate, and maintain … then we listen again, and again, always soft-voiced to contain their rage. Our role on behalf of mankind is to maintain them as the charnel mists. It is a wasteland from which they must never be released.”

“And if they are released?” Twilight held his breath, already knowing the answer to his question.

“It would be the end of mankind as we know it,” said the long magus in little more than a whisper. “The combined power of the cowerers is capable of wiping all traces of our existence from this earth in a matter of days.”

“And previous venefici have always managed to maintain this situation?”

“Much to their credit, they have,” replied the still-whispering Merlin. “But it gets harder every year due to the increasing numbers. Cowerers don’t die - they already have - nor do they fade away. They just multiply as more candidates arrive in the mists.”

“How on earth do we do it?” whispered Twilight, following his master.

Suddenly, Merlin spoke directly into his mind.

By the Epigrams of Martialis I will tell you this, and, for the time being, only this, for the burden of this knowledge could easily subsume you. Gradually, as you learn to handle the knowing, I will reveal more. The ancients left a method of control, a key to the imprisonment of the cowering masses that can be known only to the ruling veneficus in residence. At the right time I will pass the secrets of that key to you. In the meantime, any reference to it between us must be made through direct mind-speech. No one else must ever learn how the key works or even become aware of its existence. In the wrong hands that knowledge could result in total catastrophe. As long as we alone hold that key, the safe kingdom of mankind will be preserved, cowering insurrection remain shackled, and our venefical obligation settled. I realize that it’s not a very satisfactory answer, dear boy, especially to one so eager for knowledge, but the unwritten laws governing the actions and reactions necessary to maintain a balance across all sections of humankind require that such knowledge is held only in one place, and that place is in the wilderness of my head. There is no known method of coercion that can remove it; we venefici don’t feel physical pain.

What if anything should happen to you before you pass on the key to me?

There will always be time, a way. And while we are not venefici perennis - indestructible wizards - if threatened with death, our power will always enable us to seek another state for as long as is needed.

And if death threatens to engulf both of us?

Then we have twice as much power with which to resist it.

Am I really a wizard? I still find it hard to believe that all these wonderful and frightening things are happening to me.

“Oh yes!” Merlin broke into speech and laughed as he got to his feet. “You just haven’t realized it yet. And a very quick one at that. Your mind has the speed of a shooting star and the agility of puffballs on an eddying wind. Now, forward. We have a two-hour walk in front of us.”

“Why don’t you merely transform us to the site of the ringed stones of Avebury? I know it’s power-sapping, but so is walking. Besides, I hate walking.”

Twilight’s dark eyes craned upward to fix the long magus in a childlike look of pleading.

“Because, my lazy little skirmisher, we can usefully occupy the time teaching you some of the great secrets of the flora and fauna we pass on the way. Besides, your guardian pica would think it most rude of us if we suddenly disappeared having only just met you.”

“Then can you please extend the length of my legs to that of yours so I can keep up?” The boy was pouting as he scampered along beside the long-striding Merlin.

“No, that would be another waste of power.”

“When I’m a
real
wizard with
real
powers I’ll do it myself.”

“But you are a
real
wizard with
real
powers.”

“Then why can’t I make my legs grow longer?”

“Because I haven’t shown you how to do it.”

“Then show me. Please!”

Merlin stopped beside a clump of flowers and gently caressed one of them with his long fingers. “Ahhh, the wonderfully aromatic
tanacetum vulgar
, known as tansy or feverfew because, boiled into a tonic and drunk, it reduces fevers. And here, look, hiding on the underside of the leaves, none other than the larvae of the
tanyderidae,
otherwise known as the crane fly. The wings of this elongated fly are marked in the most delicate, almost clear patterns fused with silver and turquoise. It is said that these wings are so fine that to look through them is to gaze upon the world through a mother-ofpearl mirror that will not reveal evil. You would know them by the more popular name of daddy longlegs …”

“Ho ho,” said Twilight sarcastically.

Merlin leaned on the great sarsen stone sunk into the ground, pressed his cheek to its smooth coldness, and closed his eyes. He remained like this for a long time as Twilight walked around the stone, inspecting it and running his fingers over its bumps and fissures. With almost a third of its mass underground, it towered above him at three times his height, a solid, immovable, roughly diamond-shaped edifice to a hundred years of venefical life, wizardry, and dedicated teaching. Merlin spoke reverently, without opening his eyes. “This stone is called the Summit. It is the burial stone of my mentor and teacher the Elder Pendragon. I placed his body here, deep in the damp, protecting earth, and then put this mighty sarsen from the chalk downs over him. It was the saddest time of my life, a time when I questioned everything yet felt the heavy hand of destiny on my shoulder. Intense grief, even though the death is foretold and expected, forces a certain questioning of beliefs. Every time I come here, even now, I feel intense poignancy at our years together, and heavy-hearted at his loss. Of all my travails, his passing cuts the deepest swathe across the waving grass of my eventful life. His teaching was sublime, his insights beyond prophecy, and his patience endless. I have not lived up to the expectations he had in me, and for that alone my sorrow is heavy. He will always be with me.”

He opened his moist eyes and pointed toward another great stone thirty paces away.

“Idris the Former lies under that one. It is called the Turret. The Elder Pendragon put that in place. The next one is called Presidium
-
it is where Idris placed the Pale Sybil.”

He then pointed at each of the individual stones as they stood out proudly against the bright blue of the sky atop the earthen ramparts. “Point Hill, Great Crag, the Peak, Long Crest, Eyrie, Giant Tor, High Mount, Overtop, the Tower, Behemoth. This outer circle consists of ninety-eight great stones, each one of them sheltering the bones of an ancestral martyr who lived the prescribed one hundred years. Nine thousand eight hundred years of venefical existence is represented here. The ghosts of countless small miracles and huge, heroic deeds shimmer around each stone. Here lie the bones of your ancestors, Wessex history, the magnificent teachers, and every one of them indomitable in bringing the enchantments to bear upon their annual equinoctial duties and whatever else they believed in. Those buried here lived through and influenced all the great upheavals of the last ten thousand years
-
at the sides of kings, by the hearths of peasants, in the shrines of religious orders. Beneath these stones lie the perpetrators of all the eternal truths that shone through the wars and tragedies of those times, the holders of the magical resonance and universal earthshine in the shape of the enchantments. We stand now among the epic echoes of thousands of years of human folly and imagery and their mighty attempts to cease its restless quest for death. We stand among the frailty of sorcery in the face of the vitality of warfare. We stand among the bones of the few who have given their all to halt the spread of evil. We stand among those who understood, enchanted, transformed, moved, reshaped, and changed … yet seemingly made no difference.”

“Did you make a difference?” the boy asked.

Merlin sighed and gently ran his long fingers over the Summit stone.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I allowed myself to be blinded by what I perceived as greatness instead of seeing that it was just another excuse for human ignorance and slaughter.”

Once again the old wizard’s emerald eyes flashed the image of the young King Arthur with the mighty Excalibur raised in victory. There was silence between them for a while before Twilight quoted two of the couplets from the Song of the Veneficus:

“Consider your time within its place

As no more than a flash in space,

And in that flash you would deface

The beauty of its timeless place.”

“There is a relationship between nature and fighting?” Twilight asked after a while.

“Yes, but that of opposites, and another perfect example of man’s complete ignorance of the truths right under his overweening and boastful nose.” Merlin nodded toward the stones. “All of those buried here fully understood the earth and her ways and sought to influence the course of events by applying those ways to the disputes they were involved in. Coexistence and understanding of the ways of other species are the fundamental laws of nature, as demonstrated by all the many different plants living happily together in that meadow over there, or all the animals and insects that coexist peacefully in the mighty Wessex. The need for survival and to eat, and protect the young, makes for some natural slaughter, but that is essential for balance. If man understood and sought to copy nature he would, like the plants in that field, live happily alongside his fellow man. He does not need to slaughter his fellow man in order to eat nor, as a general rule, protect his young, yet slaughter him he does. Those who force war upon their fellow man have no understanding of the laws of nature. Otherwise domination would have been replaced in favor of coexistence a long time ago.”