The Last Apprentice: Grimalkin the Witch Assassin Page 2

  I coil myself like a sharp metal spring and concentrate on my attack, searching for the mage, probing the darkness with my keen eyes. He is a young man, but although his magic is strong, physically he is out of condition and overweight, breathing heavily from the climb.

  I whirl into motion. Three rapid steps downhill, and I hurl the throwing blade without breaking my stride. It takes the mage in the heart and he falls backward, dead even before he can cry out. His magical defenses proved inadequate.

  The abhuman is my next target. He is big, with wide-set eyes and sharp yellow fangs jutting up over his top lip. Such creatures—children of the Fiend and a witch—are immensely strong and need to be kept at a distance and tackled at arm’s length. To fall into their grasp is to risk being torn limb from limb. They are invariably brutal and morally debased, the worst of them capable of anything. If my child had been such an evil creature, I would have drowned it at birth.

  I sprint toward him at full pelt, plucking another throwing knife from its leather sheath. My throw is accurate and would have taken him in the throat, but he has been protected. The witches have infused him with their power, creating wards that deflect my blade. It skitters away uselessly and he surges toward me, roaring in fury, wielding a large club in one hand and a barbed spear in the other. He swings the club and jabs with the spear. But I have moved before either reaches me.

  The heavy sack bounces against my back as I change direction again. Then, with my long blade, I cut the abhuman’s throat, and he falls, choking, a stream of blood spraying upward. Still without checking my stride, I run on.

  Now I must deal with the third enemy—the familiar witch.

  I am running widdershins, against the clock, so that my left and more deadly arm is facing the slope and the remaining witches, who are still moving toward me. A witch attacks, but not the one I seek. I ram the hilt of my blade into her face and she falls back. She will live, but without her front teeth.

  By now the powerful familiar witch has sensed my attack, and she turns to face me, sending dark enchantments like poisoned spears at my heart. I flick them aside and head directly for her. I hear the beating of wings, and something swoops toward my face with claws outstretched. It is a small hawk, a kestrel. I sweep my blade in an arc and the hawk screams, its feathers falling upon me like blood-flecked snow.

  The witch shrieks as her familiar dies; she shrieks again when I cut her the first time. My next blow ends her life, and the only sounds now are the slip-slap of my feet on the ground and the wish-swish of my breath as I accelerate down the hill and leave the cover of the trees.

  I speed eastward out of the wood, leaving my enemies to find their dead. As I run, I go over in my mind what has happened. An assassin must evaluate both her successes and her failures; she must always learn from the past.

  I consider again the means by which they have found me. The witch was powerful, but her familiar was just a small hawk. Their combined magic could not have seen beyond the cloak that I had cast about myself. No, it has to be something else.

  What about the strange presence advancing with the larger group farther back? What is it? Is it this that has discovered me? If so, it must be powerful. And it is something that I have never encountered before. Something new.

  It is wise to be wary of the unknown. Its unfamiliarity makes it dangerous. But soon it will be dead. How can it hope to defeat me?

  I am Grimalkin.

  CHAPTER II

  AN UNKNOWN THREAT

  Each day say to yourself that you are the best,

  the strongest, and the most deadly.

  Eventually you will start to believe it.

  Finally it will come true.

  It came true for me.

  I am Grimalkin.

  JUST before dawn I rested for an hour, drinking cool water from a stream and chewing my last few strips of dried meat.

  My supplies were almost exhausted, and I would need fresh meat to keep up my strength. Rabbits would have been easy to trap, but I was still being pursued and could not afford to rest for more than a few moments. The majority of my enemies were almost two miles back now, but one of their number had come on ahead of the group and was closing on me. It was the unknown creature that I had first sniffed back in the wood.

  It was moving faster than I was. Whatever the danger it presented, soon I would have to turn and face it. But first I had to know more. So I took a small mirror from its sheath on my shoulder strap, muttered a spell, then breathed on it.

  Within moments a face appeared. It was that of Agnes Sowerbutts. She was a Deane but bore no great love for her own clan. She lived apart from the life of Pendle and had helped me before. We had a bond between us—a common interest. She was the aunt of Alice Deane and a close friend of Tom Ward, the Spook’s apprentice.

  Agnes is skilled in the use of the mirror. Few are her equal in locating people, objects, and dark entities. But she keeps herself to herself, and few know that she is also a powerful scryer—far better than Martha Ribstalk, our greatest Malkin seer, who is now dead.

  It was too dark for Agnes to read my lips, so I breathed on the mirror and made my request by writing on its surface. I wanted to know about the creature that pursued me.

  What pursues me?

  What will happen when I face it?

  Can you help?

  I wiped the mirror. Agnes merely smiled and nodded. She would do her best to help.

  So I ran on, trying to maintain the same distance between myself and my pursuer. The leather bag slapped against my back with each second stride. The Fiend’s head seemed to be growing heavier by the hour. It was undoubtedly slowing me down. The pursuit was relentless, and gradually I was being overtaken. That fact did not displease me. Running like this was not my preferred option. I looked forward to the moment when I would have to turn and fight.

  Dawn came, and with it gray skies and a chill drizzle drifting into my face. After about an hour I felt the mirror begin to move within its sheath. Agnes was trying to make contact, so I halted beneath the shelter of a large tree, lifted out the mirror, and found Agnes’s face staring back. It was a kindly face, with round cheeks and a plump chin, but one glance at her eyes told you that she was brave and not a woman to be trifled with.

  Her name was Sowerbutts because she’d married a man from Whalley, leaving Roughlee, the Deane village, behind. Ten years later he died and she went home, but this time to live in a cottage on the outskirts of Roughlee. Although she liked to keep her distance from the clan, nevertheless she knew all their business. There wasn’t much that went on in Pendle that escaped Agnes and her mirror.

  She gave me a brief smile of welcome, but I could see the warning in her eyes before she spoke. It would not be good news. I concentrated, staring hard at her lips to read what was being silently mouthed at me.

  What follows you is a kretch. It was created by an alliance of witches, abhumans, and mages especially to hunt you down and slay you. Its mother was a she-wolf, but its father was a demon.

  “Can you name the demon?” I asked.

  That knowledge was vital. I needed to know what powers it had. It would be wolflike, but much would be determined by the gifts passed down from its father. My own clan, the Malkins, have also created kretches. The last one we named Tibb. We used it to try and counter the growing power of a seer from the Mouldheel clan. Kretches are usually created for a specific purpose. This one was supposed to kill me.

  Agnes shook her head. I am sorry, she mouthed. Strong magic cloaks that information. But I will keep trying.

  “Yes, I’ll be grateful if you do that. But did you scry also? Did you see the outcome of my fight against this kretch?”

  If you fight it soon, you will suffer a mortal wound. That much is certain, Agnes told me, her face grim.

  “And if I delay that fight?”

  The outcome is less clear. But your chances of survival increase as time passes.

  I thanked her, replaced the mirror in its sheath
, and set off again at a sprint, trying to stay ahead of the kretch. As I ran, I thought over what Agnes had said. The fact that it was a kretch made me determined to elude it for as long as possible. Such creatures had short life spans. It would age rapidly, so why face it in its prime? I had to keep the Fiend’s head out of his servants’ clutches. That was more important than my growing urge to turn and fight my enemy.

  I did believe in the power of scrying, but it was not always accurate. In fact sometimes—though rarely—it could be inaccurate.

  I remember my first consultation with Martha Ribstalk. Rather than using a mirror, her chosen method of scrying was to peer into a steaming blood-tainted cauldron in which she boiled up thumb and finger bones to strip away the dead flesh. At that time she was the foremost practitioner of that dark art.

  As arranged, I visited her one hour after midnight. She had already drunk the blood of an enemy and performed the necessary rituals.

  “Do you accept my money?” I demanded.

  She looked at me disdainfully but nodded, so I tossed three coins into the cauldron.

  “Be seated!” she commanded sternly, pointing to the cold stone flags before the large bubbling pot. The air was thick with the smell of blood, and each breath I took increased the metallic taste on the back of my tongue.

  I obeyed, sitting cross-legged and gazing up at her through the steam. She had remained standing beyond the cauldron, so that her body would be higher than mine, a tactic frequently employed by those who wish to dominate others. But I was not cowed and met her gaze calmly.

  “What did you see?” I asked steadily. “What is my future?”

  She did not speak for a long time. It pleased her to keep me waiting. I think Martha was annoyed because I had asked a question rather than waiting to be told the outcome of her scrying.

  “You have chosen an enemy,” she said at last. “The Fiend is the most powerful enemy any mortal could face. The outcome should be simple. Unless you allow it, the Fiend cannot come near you, but he will await your death, then seize your soul and subject it to everlasting torments. However, there is something else that I cannot see clearly. There is uncertainty—another force that may intervene, one that presents a faint glimmer of hope....”

  She paused, stepped forward, and peered into the steam. Once again there was a long pause. “There is someone … a child just born…”

  “Who is this child?” I demanded.

  “I cannot see him clearly,” Martha Ribstalk admitted. “Someone hides him from my sight. And as for you, even with his intervention, only one highly skilled with weapons could hope to survive—only one with the speed and ruthlessness of a witch assassin, only the greatest of all witch assassins, one even more deadly than Kernolde—could do that. Nothing less will do. So what hope have you?” Martha mocked.

  At that time Kernolde was the witch assassin of the Malkins, a fearsome woman of great strength and speed who had slain twenty-seven pretenders to her position—three each year, as this was the tenth year of her reign.

  I rose to my feet and smiled down at Martha. “I will slay Kernolde and then take her place. I will become the witch assassin of the Malkins, the greatest of them all.”

  Martha had laughed mockingly as I walked away, but I was perfectly serious. To defeat the Fiend, I knew that I would have to develop my fighting skills and become the assassin of the Malkin clan. And then I would have to form an alliance with that unknown child.

  Eventually I learned his name.

  Tom Ward.

  I hurried on, trying to pick up my pace. The drizzle had now become a torrential downpour, driving into my face and soaking me to the skin.

  As I ran, I meditated on the art of scrying. Generally a witch uses a mirror, but some go into deep trances and glimpse the future through dreams. Some throw bones into the north wind and see how they land. It is also possible to cut open a dead animal and examine its entrails. But seeing into the future is uncertain, no matter what some scryers would have us believe. There is always the element of chance. Not everything can be foreseen—and a witch can never foretell her own death: Another must scry it for her.

  I disliked Martha Ribstalk, but she was good at her art and I consulted her many times after that first session. During our final meeting she predicted the time and manner of my death. She insisted that it would come about many years into the future, but I could not rely on that. Time has many paths. Perhaps I have already taken one that made that prophecy void. If so, I know exactly what step that was.

  I have allied myself with John Gregory and Thomas Ward. I have chosen to use my own dark powers to fight the dark and destroy the Fiend. That could change everything.

  I was climbing now, my pace slowing. I reached a ridge and looked back in the direction of my pursuer. I crouched low so that the kretch would not see me against the skyline and waited, eager to catch my first glimpse of it.

  I did not have long to wait. I saw the beast created by my enemies emerge from a cluster of sycamores and leap a ditch before disappearing into a hedgerow. I saw it for only a second, but that was enough to tell me that I was dealing with something dangerous and formidable.

  From a distance it looked, as I had suspected, like an enormous wolf. Just how big, it was difficult to estimate. It seemed to be loping along on four legs and was covered in black hair that was flecked with silver on its back. But then I realized that the front two limbs were really powerful, muscular arms. The creature was designed to fight and kill me. Everything about it would have been crafted to achieve one objective—my death.

  It would be swift in combat, and very strong. Those arms would be like those of an abhuman, able to crunch my bones and tear off my limbs. No doubt its teeth and claws would be poisoned. One bite, or even a scratch, might be enough to bring about my slow, agonizing death. Perhaps that was what Agnes Sowerbutts had meant when she referred to the threat of a mortal wound.

  My instincts screamed at me to turn and fight now, to get it over with and slay this kretch. Pride bade me do the same. I wanted to test myself in combat against it. I would prove that I was stronger and better than anything they could send against me.

  Oh, Mr. Wolf! Are you ready to die?

  But more was at stake here than my survival and my pride. In battle, chance often played a part. An ankle could be twisted by a stone hidden in the grass; an enemy less skilled than me might be favored by a lucky strike. Malkin assassins had died like that before, bested by inferior opponents. I found it very difficult to imagine being defeated under any circumstances, but if I did lose, the Fiend’s head would fall into the hands of my enemies, and before long he would walk the earth once more.

  I had promised to keep the Fiend’s head out of the clutches of his servants, so despite my lust for combat I would continue to run for just as long as I could.

  CHAPTER III

  YOU ARE BLEEDING

  Look—you are bleeding! Maybe close to death. The pain is terrible.

  Now your enemy approaches, ready to take your life.

  Is this the end? Are you finally defeated?

  No! You have only just begun to fight!

  Believe me because I know.

  I am Grimalkin.

  AS I ran on, I went through my options once more.

  In which direction should I go? So far my journey had been unplanned.

  After following a long meandering path through Ireland, I had made a safe crossing from its eastern shores to the County by threatening a lone fisherman. After that voyage, most Pendle witches would have killed the man and taken his blood or thumb bones. But I, the most dangerous of them all, had spared his life.

  “You will never be closer to a violent death than you have been these past few hours,” I told him as I stepped onto the shore of the County. “Go back to your family. Live a long and happy life.”

  Why had I behaved thus? My enemies would see it as a weakness, evidence that I was growing soft and was ready to be taken, that I was no longer fit to be
the witch assassin of the Malkin clan. How wrong they would be! He was no threat to me. When you kill as often as I am required to do, you grow weary of taking lives—especially the easy ones. Besides, the man begged. He had told me of his wife and young children and the daily struggle to keep them from starvation. Without him, he’d said, they would die. So I set him free and continued on my way.

  Where should I go now? I could travel north into the lair of the hostile water witches and weave my way through the hills and lakes, but those slimy hordes were loyal supporters of the Fiend. South was another option, but there a different danger awaited me. The forces that had invaded the County had only recently been driven south. It would be foolish to head toward their lines.

  Yes, to keep moving was the best way to make sure that the head stayed out of the clutches of the Fiend’s servants. But I needed to rest, and there was one place I could go that my enemies might not expect. I could return to Pendle, the home of my clan. Both friends and enemies awaited me there. Some witches were happy to see the Fiend loose in the world; others would like to destroy him or return him to the dark. Yes, I would head for Pendle—for a special place where I could take refuge while I rested, regained my strength, and augmented my magical resources. Malkin Tower, once the stronghold of my clan, was now in the possession of two feral lamia witches, sisters of Tom Ward’s dead mother.

  Would they allow me in? They were enemies of the Fiend, so perhaps I could persuade them to let me share that refuge.

  It was worth a try, so I changed course and ran directly toward Pendle.

  However, long before I reached it, I realized that I would have to fight the kretch first. I had no choice. Better to turn and fight the enemy face-to-face than be brought down from behind. To continue running was no longer an option—the creature was now little more than a hundred yards to my rear and closing fast.