My relief gave way to shame. What about those hundreds of innocent people at the market? I thought.
Then I realized that my family was not safe after all. My brothers visited Topley market on Friday mornings. At least one of them would be there, I was sure of it.
By now I could see the familiar hill in the distance and felt a surge of hope.
“Is that Hangman’s Hill?” Jenny gasped, struggling to keep up.
I nodded, saving my breath.
“Then it should miss your brother’s farm.”
“There’s a chance that it might just miss the village too,” I told her.
We would pass half a mile to the east of the hill. Beyond it lay Topley. Although the vartek would pass close by, it seemed likely that it would just miss the village. What was the creature planning? I wondered.
As we passed Hangman’s Hill, leaving Jack’s farm behind, the vartek paused for a moment, and I thought it was about to surface.
Then it set off again at an angle. My worst fears were realized. It must have sensed the presence of people.
It was now heading straight for the center of the village.
20
The Fanatical Gleam
YEARS earlier, when I’d visited the market with my dad, the early-rising farmers had done their business first: cattle, sheep, horses, and hens were penned and displayed before being bought and sold; farm implements were on display; bales of hay were neatly stacked. Only later, toward noon, did the streets become thronged with mothers and children browsing among the stands.
It was now nine o’clock, still early. The air was chilly, but the sun was high enough in the sky to bathe the village in light and radiate a pleasant warmth. As a result, there were more people on the streets than usual, and the stallholders, anticipating good business, had already set out their wares. Never had I seen it so busy this early.
As we raced down the main street, heading toward the village green, still following the line taken by the vartek, heads turned to watch us. Many stalls were set up in the streets that radiated like spokes from the large village green; others stood on the periphery. People turned to gaze at us in astonishment. Fear flickered on their faces at the sight of the witch assassin, and there were a few shouts of fear and anger. Ignoring the reactions of the shoppers, we ran on down the cobbled street.
Suddenly I knew where the vartek would emerge: right at the heart of the green, where the cattle were penned. I didn’t know what senses it used to find its prey—perhaps it located its victims by scent, even when deep underground. Maybe it could see through rock or sense warm blood from a great distance. Whatever the reason, the closely penned cattle had attracted it in preference to the people.
Perhaps so much flesh and blood collected together was irresistible, compelling it to attack. After all, wouldn’t that be the design of its Kobalos creators? They would require it to strike at the heart of an enemy army, erupting from the ground to take the soldiers by surprise, spreading panic through the ranks.
My gift was working perfectly now, and I sensed the vartek pass beneath the market stalls and move toward the cattle pens. I imagined its jaws working feverishly, its acidic saliva working on the earth and rock it ingested.
So far we had kept pace with the creature, no more than twenty or thirty yards behind it at any point. Now, suddenly, it took me by surprise and accelerated away from us; it was moving as fast as it had on the surface.
How was that possible?
Maybe the earth under the green was softer, I thought. Perhaps the creature was propelled by a frantic bloodlust as it neared its prey . . . but all that mattered was that we confront it before it had fully emerged from its burrow.
I sprinted after it, jostling an aproned man aside, dodging between the stalls and onto the grass. Suddenly there was a terrible scream from the center of the green. I saw three black tentacles coiling and swaying high in the air above a herd of cattle. Meanwhile, a farmer was running toward the pen, no doubt fearing for his stock.
Seconds later, the terrified cows broke through the hurdles that enclosed them, scattering them like matchwood, and stampeded toward us. The farmer turned on his heel and ran for his life.
Grimalkin and I stood shoulder to shoulder, while Jenny stayed close behind. The witch assassin had drawn two of her blades and I raised my staff, pointing the blade toward the approaching animals. They were big long-horned cattle and could easily trample us into the ground. When I was young, at least two local farmers had been charged by their own cattle; one had died, and the other had never walked again without the aid of a stick.
However, we stood firm, and at the very last moment, just as I thought we were going to be impaled by their horns, the beasts parted like two curtains being drawn aside. They passed on either side of us, splattering us with clods of mud.
But as they thundered away, another scream rent the air.
The vartek was about thirty yards ahead of us, and I saw that it had taken a cow in its huge mouth; it was shaking it as a dog shakes a rat. It had grown since we last saw it aboveground, and its three tentacles, with their sharp bone tips, now reached at least twenty feet into the air.
I saw that another cow had been injured. It was bellowing with pain and trying to rise, but it was missing a leg, and the stump was spurting blood.
As we ran forward, the first animal gave another cry, and we heard the crunching of bone as the vartek closed its jaws, cutting it clean in two. As the bloodied halves fell onto the grass, the monstrous creature seized the other injured cow.
This was what saved our lives as we prepared to attack. With its mouth full, the vartek couldn’t spit globules of acid at us.
Grimalkin reached it first and thrust a blade into the bulbous right eye, twisting the weapon as she did so in order to do maximum damage. Meanwhile I went for the other eye, stabbing deep into it with the blade of my staff.
The vartek was blinded, but it was far from finished. Its response was to spit out the remains of the second cow, splattering us with blood as it surged up onto the grass, its many legs scrabbling for purchase.
My staff, still embedded in its eye, was snatched out of my hand, and I fell backward. I rolled over, came to my feet, and drew the Starblade. I studied the vartek’s many thin legs. They had a slimy yellow coating, and I remembered Grimalkin’s warning—they oozed a deadly poison, so I had to keep away from them.
The witch assassin had already renewed her attack, hurling three blades in quick succession into the beast’s throat and soft underbelly as it attempted to climb out of its burrow. Now she was rushing toward it again, a long blade in her left hand.
To my surprise, I suddenly realized that Jenny was running past me, heading straight for the vartek. She stopped a little to the left of the massive jaws. The retractable blade at the end of her staff glinted in the sunlight as she buried it deep into the side of its neck.
“Watch out for its legs!” I warned, running toward her.
But the immediate threat came from another direction. Although blinded, the vartek clearly had other senses to guide it. One of the tentacles scythed toward Jenny, the sharp tip heading straight for her head.
Just in time, I managed to bring my sword around in a circle, cutting the tentacle off just above the bone, so that it flicked backward, spraying us with blood. Then I went for the throat, swinging wildly into the soft flesh, each deep cut bringing forth spouts of fresh blood to soak the grass.
At last the vartek was weakening; its tentacles lay inert and useless. It shuddered and gasped, opening its mouth wide to reveal the rows of movable teeth. And then it let out a deep sigh, its foul breath washing over us. With that dying breath, its legs buckled. It had not managed to climb out of its burrow, and now its body slid slowly back in until only its head was visible.
“It’s a pity it didn’t emerge fully,” Grimalkin said, wiping her blades on the grass as she tugged each one from the creature’s throat. “I would have liked to see its full length
. My fear is that this creature is still far from fully grown. Imagine what a score of these could do to a human army!”
There was much to discuss, but this was not the place to do it, and so we left the village almost immediately.
Once the cattle had been rounded up, and the farmers and villagers had finally summoned up the courage to approach the green, they would be asking plenty of questions. The presence of a witch would further complicate matters, so it was best to get away as quickly as possible.
As we walked, I saw cattle milling around in the distance, and people staring at us from outside the nearest cottages. Perhaps my brothers were among them, but it made no difference. There was no sense in staying to offer explanations.
Nobody had died. Apart from the two dead animals and the broken fence, little harm had been done. The vartek was dead. Topley had gotten off lightly.
We headed back toward Chipenden, saying little. Jenny was unusually silent. I could tell that she was angry—her jaw was firmly set—but I didn’t question her. There’d be time for that later.
I’d hoped to get away without being questioned, but that wasn’t to be. Soon we were being followed by a crowd of agitated villagers, about a dozen of them. At one point Grimalkin turned and glared at them. They paused for a moment, but when we set off again, they continued to keep pace with us.
As we left the last of the cottages behind us, Grimalkin suddenly turned to face them again. This time they came closer and halted less than twenty strides away. They were muttering angrily; some of them were brandishing sticks. They would have no chance against Grimalkin and would flee at the first serious threat from her blades, but I didn’t want any of them to get hurt.
“What do you want?” I demanded, coming to stand at Grimalkin’s side.
“What are you doing with a witch, boy?” asked their leader, a big brawny man with a shaved head and an angry, jutting chin.
I searched desperately from face to face, hoping to see someone I knew from my childhood visits to Topley with my dad, someone I could appeal to. But these were strangers, people from outlying farms to the south.
“She has helped me to save your village!” I retorted.
“Save it from what—her own dark magic? She conjured a hell beast, and you did nothing.”
“I’m Tom Ward, the Chipenden Spook. She fought by my side to save you from a monster that would have devoured you all. If you don’t believe me, go back to the green. There you’ll find the body of the creature we killed to save you.”
“You’re lying, boy. All three of you are coming back with us. We’ll send to Priestown for the quisitor—he’s due to visit there this month. Then we’ll have ourselves a burning. At the end of it there’ll be three cinders . . . a witch and her two accomplices.”
Quisitors hunted and burned witches; they had no liking for spooks, either. The man’s threat was real: if they managed to capture us, the future was bleak. But I couldn’t let Grimalkin kill these angry and frightened people. Once they returned to the village, they’d soon realize the truth of what I’d said. But their leader was a hothead and would have to be dealt with.
“Go back and see what we killed,” I said softly. “Then think again. What was done was for your own good. Now let us be on our way.”
Their leader took a couple more paces toward us. “You first, boy. Surrender your weapons, and it’ll go easier with you. Come with us peacefully, and you’ll get a fair trial,” he said, stepping closer to me.
“Do you want me to kill him for you?” Grimalkin hissed into my ear.
I shook my head and strode toward the man. He was carrying a wooden club about the length of his forearm; it was thick and heavy at the business end, stout enough to split my skull. He swung it at my head with surprising speed, but I stepped to the side and danced away. He swung and missed again, and came after me, brandishing the weapon wildly.
A second later, I rapped him hard on the wrist with my staff; he groaned but wasn’t deterred. He attacked again, cursing, his face red with rage. I hit him twice more, once on the knee and once on the shoulder. It hardly checked his advance. He looked ready to tear me apart with his bare hands.
Suddenly my own anger flared. I thought of my job as a spook—how I tried to keep the County safe, always putting duty first despite the danger. I thought of my own master, who had given his life to save men like this from the dark. I remembered how people used to cross to the other side of the road as we approached. They needed spooks, but they were afraid of what we did. Most of them didn’t like us one bit.
So I attacked with renewed energy, in a fury now. My first blow caught the man hard across the mouth, and he staggered backward. Then I rammed the base of my staff deep into his belly, and he fell to his knees, fighting for breath. He looked up at me, his face twisted with pain, and spat two bloodied teeth out onto the grass.
I strode past him and approached the others. “Who’s next?” I demanded.
They backed away warily, so I turned and strode away. Grimalkin and Jenny followed hard on my heels. I was still seething with anger, and nobody spoke for a long time.
“What if they do talk to a quisitor?” Jenny finally asked, breaking the silence. “You told them you were the Chipenden Spook. They know where we live. He could come after us.”
I shrugged. “Once they see what we killed on the green, they’ll forget all about that,” I told her. “That was just anger and bluster talking.”
To my surprise, Grimalkin took her leave of us just before dark, with no explanation of where she was going.
“I will visit you early next week,” she said. “I have concluded my experiments and will then tell you something of what I have learned.”
Later, as we sat around a fire cooking a chicken I’d bought from a farmer on the way home, Jenny finally exploded.
“Hundreds of people could have died in that village!” she said. “Had the witch no sense of the terrible risk she was taking?”
“You mean her experiments?” I asked. “I suppose she thought she could contain the creatures. Grimalkin’s magic is extremely powerful. She would not have expected the varteks to escape.”
“But she was dealing with something completely unknown to her. It was foolish to take such risks. Surely you can see that. . . .”
I nodded. “Yes, with hindsight I can see it. No doubt that’s why she said she’d finished her experiments. But you have to see what happened through her eyes—”
“The eyes of a witch! The eyes of a fool! You can see the fanatical gleam in her eyes.”
“I wouldn’t say that to her face,” I warned. “Look, she was proved wrong to take such risks, and now she certainly knows it. But she took them because she believes she must grasp every opportunity to learn about an enemy with whom we may one day be at war. At least we now know what we’re up against.”
“She was certainly wrong to take such risks!” Jenny said vehemently, her voice raised in anger. “She could have gotten a lot of innocent people killed. We could have died attempting to sort out the mess she’d made. That witch is dangerous to be around. Life is cheap to her!”
I sighed but didn’t defend Grimalkin any further, and eventually Jenny calmed down. I could see her point, but reckless or not, the witch assassin had demonstrated something more important—the enormity of the threat we faced.
21
Grimalkin’s Notes
HOWEVER great that threat, it was now back to routine spook’s business.
As I began Jenny’s practical lesson the next afternoon, I got out the measuring rod and checked the dimensions of the boggart pit she had dug previously.
“Well done! It’s perfect,” I told her. “If you were doing this for real, by now the stonemason and the riggers would have gotten to work.” I had managed to calm Jenny’s anger, and she beamed at me. “The stone lid would be in position over the pit, leaving you just three things to do. What are they?”
Jenny remembered what I’d told her earlier. “F
irst I line the pit with salt and iron to stop the boggart from escaping. Second, I use a bait dish to lure it in. Third, I wait for nightfall, when the boggart will sniff the blood and go down into the pit, but I must have the riggers standing by to lower the lid.”
“Well done again!” I said, keen to give her praise when she remembered my lessons. “Now for this afternoon’s practical. Your job is to line the pit.”
I tugged the lid off the big bucket we’d carried with us into the southern garden. Instantly the strong smell of the glue made Jenny frown and hold her nose. It was boiled up out of the bones of dead animals, and it stank to high heaven.
There were also two sacks on the grass: one contained iron filings, the other salt.
“Use half a bag of each,” I instructed.
I was pleased with the way the practical lesson was going. John Gregory had taught me well, and I realized that I had a lot of information to pass on to my new apprentice.
Jenny tipped half a bag of each into the glue and then began to stir the thick mixture with a big stick. I made her persevere for a good ten minutes, until the salt and iron were properly mixed in. Then I helped her, using a rope to lower the heavy bucket into the pit. Jenny jumped down beside it and, using an ordinary paintbrush, began to coat the walls.
“You have to cover every inch,” I told her, “or the boggart will make itself really small and escape. If it was a ripper boggart, then you’d be the next person on the menu. It would drain your blood in less than a minute. If it was a stone-chucker, then it would probably come back with a small boulder and drop it on your head, cracking it open like an egg. Boggarts are dangerous, so you’ve got to do the binding correctly. Make one mistake, and you’re dead.”
After Jenny had finished the walls to my satisfaction, I took her hand and helped her climb out. Then I hauled up the bucket. Next I showed her how to tie the brush to a long stick, and she used this to reach down and paint the bottom of the pit with the mixture.
She’d almost finished when I heard a shout from the edge of the western garden. It was Grimalkin. I went and called out to the boggart, letting it know that she was not to be touched, and then escorted her back to the pit.