The Last of the Runners

The steady hiss clunk of the clock vibrated through the walls of the Head Learner’s office, freezing the silence as she stared from her perch as the Magister and his assistant.

“So you think your little speech was a success?”

“I do, Head Learner,” oozed the Magister. “I’m sure it made it clear to all the trainees that there is no point attempting to run as I will catch them.”

The Sub-Magister coughed. The Head Learner’s head swivelled round to focus on the young man without any other movement of her body.

“You wish to comment?” she snapped. His youth, the dark glasses and his incredibly calm manner irritated her intensely.

“Indeed, Head Learner,” he said with a slight smile, “With your permission, of course.”

“Well?”

“All the trainees learned was that the running route that started in Mrs Bruntler’s house had been blocked.”

“You mentioned it explicitly?” The Head Learner swivelled back to fix the Magister with her large eyes.

“Not in so many words,” he mumbled.

“No, you just mentioned the coloured house near the Lattern Gate,” said the Sub-Magister quietly.

“How will the boys know which house I meant?” the magister blustered, beads of sweat bubbling up beneath his moustache.

“Because they aren’t stupid,” The Sub-Magister spoke very calmly, his voice devoid of any emotion. “We have lost an opportunity to plug one of the rat holes without anyone knowing it was plugged and of catching one of these runners in the very act of starting.”

“The Watcher says he saw a boy going into the back of Bruntler’s house,” the Magister snarled as he tried to defend himself. “That’s why they moved in.”

“Boys were bound to go in, Magister,” The younger man retained his calm. “Boys visited Mrs Bruntler to learn how to survive when they were on the run. They needed to learn how to read the signs that are left out in the country to help them find food and shelter.”

“So they would have been doing something illegal?” asked the Head Learner.

“Absolutely illegal,” blustered the Magister, grateful for any form of support.

“As I understand the statutes of the city,” the Sub-Magister said quietly, “Talking about running is not an illegal act. Only when a boy sets out on the road does it become so.”

“Well, it should be illegal,” muttered the Magister, caught out again by his young assistant.

“And what was wrong with attempting to stop the spreading of this vile creed?” asked the Head Learner, her head swivelling from one to the other as she wondered who to strike at.

“As I explained, Head Learner,” the Sub-Magister said patiently, “runners begin on the moonless night. They benefit from the darkness to get away. If the Magister had waited until the moonless night, he would have seized the runner or runners before they left as well as getting his hands on the notes they prepare on the signs they need to look out for and interpret. We would have had comprehensive information on the runner network that would have allowed us to track them and their supporters. As it is, we have one woman in jail. One elderly, eccentric woman who is of no value and we have to look for another point at which to interrupt the runners.”

“And you know these points?” The big eyes of the Head Learner fixed the Sub-Magister to his seat. “It is for this knowledge that you have been rewarded.”

“I know the places I visited,” said the Sub-Magister calmly, “But there are many runner routes in the country. We need to hope that one of the other places I visited will prove as pivotal to the network as Mrs Bruntler’s house.”

“You had better start looking,” said the Head Learner icily. “And might I suggest you train your Watchers, Magister, so they don’t make any more mistakes.”

“Yes, Head Learner.” The fat man bit his lip in his reply. He dared not challenge the Head Learner. The boy was undermining him, casting doubt on his ability to control the runners, but he was doing it very cleverly. The Head Learner was right. There had better not be any more mistakes. If they occurred, he might have to do something more drastic to make his position safe. He had not clawed his way up from caretaker to part-time teacher to Magister to have some horrible boy, some incomer, take it all away. That was not the way he intended his story to end.

The Sub-Magister smiled to himself as he followed the pear shaped man back to their offices. Let the fat man fume, he thought. Let him suffer. I am doing no more than the voice in my head asked me. I am helping him and helping my friends succeed.

In the dark of the forest, two hooded shadows met. Brown cloaked and staff in hand, they melted out of the trees, coming together in the small clearing. One was taller and thicker set than his companion and his voice was deeper than his questioner.

“Has he been seen yet?”

“No.”

“You know he has started?”

“Yes. He will come this way, I’m sure. Absolutely certain.”

“Does he know how important he is?”

“Of course not. It has to come from within. His mother has done all she can to make the idea of running negative and keep him away from Weavers.”

“How could she do that? It’s evil.”

“It was necessary. He must discover the power for himself. It must not be taught. Only when he has discovered it can we guide him.”

“So we keep looking?”

“Indeed, but we don’t interfere. We only observe.”

The Magister stomped wheezily to his office the next morning. He was in a foul mood. His treatment in the Head Learner’s office upset him and the behaviour of his deputy, this boy he had chosen and raised from nothing, upset him. This upstart behaviour was not in the weave. He was sure it was not. The boy was supposed to be subservient. He was supposed to be there to help, not point the finger of blame. Maybe he needed to revise the weave to protect himself. Perhaps the boy should have a little headache if he overstepped the mark.

His mood did not improve when he found the Sub-Magister already in the office, a number of large dusty ledgers piled on his desk. He hardly looked up when the Magister entered and continued to pore over the manuscript pages, making pencil notes on a pad he had perched on his knee.

“You’re here early,” the Magister said grumpily. He had liked, in the few weeks he had had an assistant, the luxury of a few minutes to himself each morning to prepare for the challenge of the day.

“There is work to be done, Magister,” the young man said, “And the sooner it is done, the better it will be for everybody.”

“That’s true enough.”

The Magister waited for his assistant to tell him what he was doing, but the Sub-Magister just carried on methodically going through page after page in the open ledger, noting names and dates as he went.

“And where does this study lead?”

The Sub-Magister looked up at the older man with the patient tolerance of someone who has just been asked a very stupid question but doesn’t want to give a rude answer.

“The records of the runners, Magister, note when they left, where they left from, where they were seen, where they were caught, if they were seen in Villombre, or if they just disappeared.”

“I know what the records contain,” growled the Magister, “I have to write them.”

“Some of the recent records seem to contain gaps, Magister, so I have had to look at older volumes in order to establish a true picture.”

“A picture of what, you irritating worm?” The Magister was finding his dislike of his young protégé growing by the second.

“Of where the runners go, Magister,” the young man said calmly. “There must be a reason why we see them in some places and why those who are seen in other places disappear.”

“They are runners, boy,” the Magister snapped crossly. “They run from here to Villombre via any hovel that’ll give them a crust. That’s all there is to it.”

“I wonder if, with the greatest respect, Magister, that is why you have such problems catching them.”

“What do you mean by that?” The Magister was close to boiling point.

“If you see the runners’ behaviour as random, Magister, when, in truth, it is logical and organised.”

“I’ll organise you back into that cell if you don’t stop this cheek!” The Magister was positively quivering with rage. “You’d better explain yourself and quick.”

“It is really simple, Magister,” There was nothing in the Sub-Magister’s tone that could be taken as rudeness, but the Magister felt it all the same. “For example, runners who leave from Nideroy are seen in Contefay, Pardeday or Racontour if they are caught or end up in Villombre. If they disappear, they are seen in Contefay, Racontour or Tournemittes. Those runners from Tronson, however, are seen…”

“So there’s a pattern. What about it?”

The Sub-Magister smiled. He had always enjoyed problems of this sort, where calculus had to meet the storyteller’s art to solve them.

“If you understand the pattern, you can work out where the runner will be heading. You just have to get there first.”

“Well work it out fully, you little upstart, so we can test it the next time a runner is declared.”

The Magister stomped out, having taken a leather pouch from the top left hand drawer of his desk. The Sub-Magister smiled to himself. If the Magister had taken the pouch, he was stressed and would need an hour to compose himself. He would return smelling of smoke, which he would blame on the stove in the gatehouse, though everyone could recognise it as tobacco.

He returned to his study of the runner ledgers. What interested him most were those who disappeared. Disappearances seemed to happen at solstice time in winter and summer and then only to runners who went through Contefay, Racontour and Tournemittes. Why those villages and why in that order? Those who visited them in any other sequence were caught or sighted later in Villombre.

He had visited Contefay, Tournemittes and Racontour on his run. What had he missed? Why would the order you went through these villages as you dodged the Watchers make a difference to what happened to you? And why was it only at certain times of the year?

These were questions to which he had no answer, so whilst he could see patterns in the behaviour of the runners, he could see no reason behind them. Nothing unusual had happened to him at any place he had stopped. He had been given food and a bed for the night, that was all.

So, whatever it was that caused runners to disappear, it had not happened to him. What a mystery!

What made it harder was that there was no one else to ask as family members of those who disappeared usually vanished themselves half a year later or if they did not, they totally disowned the runner and denied all knowledge of their ever having existed. This last was especially true if the family had any position of note within Villblanche. Also, as the record of recent years had not been maintained with any degree of accuracy, there were no recent cases he could follow up with certainty. The Magister obviously loathed the record keeping required of him and had done the bare minimum, making some details up to save time. The Sub-Magister had tried to visit the mother of a runner who had disappeared at the summer solstice, only to have the door opened to him by the runner himself. His run had been little more than a few days fun in the woods during the holidays, which the boy sheepishly said had involved his girlfriend and that his “paranoid” mother had reported him as a runner. He had come home before the Watchers even went looking, been told off and totally forgotten the whole incident.

The Sub-Magister had been equally sheepish about why he had gone to the house, choosing to pretend it was just a routine check on those mistakenly reported as runners. It had happened on two other occasions he had tried to follow up recent disappearances and this had meant that he had been unable to use any of the current Magister’s records in his attempt to understand the patterns of the runners. The fat man was obviously making the records up, the final proof of which came when the Sub-Magister found the details of his own run had been completely fabricated, having been seen by Watchers in places he had never been before he had disappeared without trace!

It was time to look elsewhere for answers and the Sub-Magister turned to the history of the city for clues as to the origins of the runners. The pile of books on his desk grew, much to the irritation of the Magister, who did not see there was anything to understand, but where to set the steam dogs loose or where to position the Watchers. The Sub-Magister ignored his scornful looks, did whatever task he was asked and returned to his study once it was completed. The more he read, the more he understood.

The second night after leaving home was the moonless night and Kyrin was determined to cover as great a distance as possible with the benefit of such darkness to hide in. He had made reasonable progress when he left home and had worked his way via the hedgerows to the first band of woodland. He had slept in a laurel thicket before moving on as dusk fell. Continuing through the woods had been easy, but then he had had to follow the hedgerows when he moved into more open country.

That had slowed him more than he had expected. Looking at the map, he had thought he would have reached the village of Contefay in the time. In truth, he had covered perhaps half the distance, as far as he could tell. His feet and legs were sore and he missed a good bed. That said, he was determined to move on. He was still too close to home and had followed the most obvious route towards the first village. It was after getting to Contefay that he planned to go in a different direction. The zigzag route he had plotted across the map took him from Contefay onto the villages of Racontour and Tournemittes as he went deeper into the forest. Once he got to Tournemittes, there was a long drag through the forest to the feet of the Mountains of Myddlyn, where another cut across the lesser pass took him to the plains that opened out before the city of Villombre.

Kyrin had been dozing through the afternoon in the bracken at the edge of the wood. No one could have seen him unless they stumbled into the same patch of bracken. A couple of rabbits had been surprised as they bounced through the undergrowth to find Kyrin wrapped in his coat and snoring. For all the hours Kyrin had lain by himself in the grass at the back of his house, the silence and lack of conversation were beginning to bother him. He had said nothing since saying goodbye to Antol forty-eight hours earlier and his mouth was beginning to feel strange.

It was like that feeling when your mouth is really dry and you are about to have a drink. Your mouth anticipates the sensation of the water. Kyrin’s mouth wanted to talk, but there was no one to talk to, so he could not slake that thirst. There was no voice to comfort his ear either, only the cry of the birds and the music of the wind in the branches, the different rustling of the leaves, the bracken and the creak of the tree trunks themselves. When the birds were silent, all that was left was the silent breathing of the trees, the slow movement of the trunks and the rattles of the branches that stood out over the whispering of the leaves. Yet with all that sound, nothing spoke to Kyrin. The silence hurt his ears as he learned what it was to be alone.

There had been no sun that afternoon and, as dusk came, the high grey cloud just got darker and darker. It would be a really dark night then, thought Kyrin. No moon to shine even on the backs of the clouds and no stars to twinkle in the black blanket of the sky. It would make it easier to move certainly, but without even a star to break the gloom, it added to Kyrin’s feeling of loneliness. When he had dreamed of adventures, he had never been alone. There had always been someone to share his adventure with, who made it easier to laugh at the fear and enjoy the excitement. Maybe he would find someone at Contefay, at least someone to talk to for a moment.

It was so grey he did not wait for it to be completely dark. He shouldered his bags once more and cut through the woods in the direction of the road. In that short distance, the stiffness in his feet and legs was warmed away so that when he came to the edge of the trees and stepped onto the beaten path that was the road through the forest, he felt able to stride away.

Five minutes later, as the last of the light vanished from the strip of sky visible above the road, Kyrin understood why so many runs began on moonless nights. Everything was equal on moonless nights. There were no shadows to betray you, no deep dark area where a Watcher could hide. It meant that you could walk quickly along the roads without having to cling to the shelter of shadows or hedgerows. Being able to walk completely upright helped you move faster too, and Kyrin felt happier as the miles passed under his feet, which felt less weary as they took him away from home and towards his first goal.

Had his mother returned from his aunt’s yet? Had she found that he had gone and had she reported him missing? He had no idea. Her absence had been one of the reasons he had left. It had given him a head start over the Watchers and the Magister. Would his mother report him missing? She had been furious with him when Gan left so why would she not report his disappearance.

Kyrin reckoned he had covered about six miles when he rested for the first time. A small bite to eat and a drink of water was all the refreshment he had. He did need to reach Contefay soon or he would run out of food, so he allowed himself just a quarter of an hour’s rest.

As he moved on, the woods changed on either side of the road. The outer edge of the forest seemed to have been planted with pines, if you planted a forest. However it had happened, the first miles of forest he had come through had been almost exclusively conifers of one sort or another, with their tall, straight trunks and the soft brown carpet of fallen needles covering the ground. These trees did not rustle, they whispered with the wind as it brushed through their evergreen branches, maybe creaking slightly when it blew hard. Inside the pine groves, you could hardly feel the wind for the trees did little more than sway slightly. Kyrin had not been cold sleeping in pinewoods.

However, the apparent order of the pine trees started to give way to a more haphazard sort of forest. Ash and sycamore, birch and oak began to crowd in and compete with each other, growing at whatever angle they could to reach the light. In the darkness, the tangle of trees appeared more forbidding than the seemingly straight lines of the pine forest. Kyrin was glad he could become accustomed to these trees in the dark. With moonbeams cutting through the tangled branches and throwing all kinds of shadows, he did not doubt it would have been a scary place.

He passed on through the dark night, mile following weary mile, with nothing to break the tedium. Nothing else seemed to be moving that moonless night. None of the creatures of the night, the owls, the badgers, the foxes, that one would expect to hear if not to see, were about, as if the lack of the moon’s light required them to rest, Sabbath-like in their nests, and do no work. Was this another reason that runners started on the moonless night, as no startled beast would cry to betray their movement?

It was a strange sensation to have nothing but the sound of your own footfalls for company. For all he knew, Kyrin could be the only living thing in the world, it was so silent. As his feet became heavier, only his desire to get to a place where he might hear the sound of voices kept them going down one after another, though they now felt every indentation or pebble on the road as if they were some deep rut or jagged rock.

He allowed himself a couple of short breaks as the night wore on, but he knew he had to make the most of the darkness. As the first grey streaks began to lighten the sky, he crested what he knew had to be the last slope of the night. As the road wound down the other side, he could see the forest open out and the silhouettes of houses appear against the sky. The village of Contefay lay before him. The first stage of his journey was complete.

He did not, however, run down into the village. Instead, he went a little way back down the slope before heading off the road. It would be better to sleep out of sight. He needed to be fresh to spot the signs that would tell him where was safe. Easier to do that after some sleep and a chance to read through Antol’s notes on the book of signs.

Now the character of the forest had changed, it did not seem as easy to find a place to sleep. It felt damper under these trees than it had under the conifers. Eventually, he found an ancient oak on a bank, a giant tree whose roots had been exposed on one side, perhaps at first by a badger looking to dig a set. Whatever the cause, the bank had long since fallen away and the roots hardened in the air, leaving a dry gully the width of an armchair that Kyrin slipped into gratefully. His feet ached, but he did not take off his boots, fearing he would not get them back on that evening. He wrapped himself in his heavy coat, tucked his bags into another crevice under the tree and pulled his hood down over his eyes. He was asleep by the time he had taken his second breath and he did not stir for many hours. Unless you looked closely, you would have thought he was part of the tree.