Spook’s: Dark Assassin (The Starblade Chronicles) Read online

  After replacing my blades in their scabbards, I retook the shape of an orb, sped through the stone walls and soared into the dark sky to enter the purple tube of light. Within moments I was walking back down the path, trees on either side of me. In the distance I could see the cauldron, where Thorne was waiting patiently.

  ‘Did it go well?’ she asked brightly as I approached.

  ‘Very well. I will certainly be able to damage the Kobalos on my visits to Earth,’ I told her. k`1`2

  ‘And next time you will take me with you?’

  I shook my head. ‘Not yet. There are skills that you must acquire in order to make movement back on Earth easier. I must teach you a shamanistic skill. You will need to be able to project your soul from your body; in the dead state I find myself in, I can shift shape instantly. If you are to accompany me, child, such a skill is vital. It makes it possible to pass through solid objects and move at great speed. In some situations, this may be the only way we can access the path back to the cauldron.’

  ‘Then teach me, Grimalkin. I am eager to learn!’ Thorne cried.

  So I began to teach her. If she could learn the skill, she could accompany me on my nocturnal visits. Two could accomplish far more than one.

  However, in one respect my successful penetration of Valkarky had made me realize the limitations of what was possible. I wanted to hurt the Kobalos and damage their war effort, but my main ambition was to release the thousands of female slaves from the skleech pens and escort them to safety.

  The fact that my visits to Earth could take place only during the hours of darkness made that impossible. Who would guide and protect them under the glare of the sun? I would need an army of living humans to help me.

  If something wasn’t done soon, the Kobalos would achieve their terrible goal. All human males would be dead; all the females would be slaves.

  CHAPTER 14

  THE INCREASING THREAT

  THOMAS WARD

  NO SOONER HAD I spoken the word ‘tulpa’ than the entity that thought it was Bill Arkwright dropped the staff and sank to his knees on the edge of the millstream, facing the waterwheel, his whole body shuddering. Then he twisted his head and looked up at me, his face contorted with grief and pain.

  ‘You are right,’ he cried, tears streaming from his eyes. ‘Now I know myself. I am a tulpa, the creation of a mage. Even a dog has more soul than me. I’m a thing without a soul. From nothing I came and to nothing I will return!’

  Then the face seemed to distort. The left eye drooped down the cheek, the jawbone stretched until it hung low on his chest, and the mouth began to drool a thick slimy grey ribbon of saliva that puddled in the mud. I took a step backwards in horror and heard Jenny stifle a scream. I suddenly saw flecks of white in the saliva, and realized that the creature’s teeth were falling out.

  The trembling of the body turned into violent convulsions. The thing that had mimicked Arkwright was crouched low, its forehead in the mud. It was moaning pitifully, its limbs writhing and twisting, the head becoming tubular and worm-like. Grey slime oozed from under its clothes and slid into the water, to be whirled away by the rush of the stream.

  In less than a minute nothing remained but empty garments. All that remained of the tulpa’s flesh was the stench of rot.

  Jenny and I left the waterwheel and went back to sit facing each other in the kitchen, stunned by what we’d just witnessed. Blood was sleeping fitfully; she kept twitching as if troubled by bad dreams. We talked things through, trying to make sense of what had happened.

  ‘You really think it was a tulpa?’ Jenny asked, still trembling, her head in her hands.

  I frowned. ‘It seemed to acknowledge the fact at the end. Didn’t you hear what it said?’

  I reached into my bag and pulled out the sheets of paper copied from the version of Nicholas Browne’s glossary that I’d borrowed from Grimalkin. Browne had been a spook, and he’d once studied the Kobalos and left a guide to their customs, gods, magic and behaviour. Grimalkin and I had added to that glossary as we learned new things, building up our store of knowledge.

  Jenny looked up as I skimmed down through the entries.

  I turned to the Tulpa heading and handed the piece of paper to her, then stood up and read the entry over her shoulder. It consisted of the original Browne entry, followed by Grimalkin’s comment and then my own:

  Tulpa: A creature created within the mind of a mage and occasionally given form in the outer world.

  Note: I have travelled extensively and probed into the esoteric arts of witches and mages, but this is a magical skill that I have never encountered before. Are Kobalos mages capable of this? If so, their creatures may be limited only by the extent of their imaginations – Grimalkin

  Note: The winged being that spoke to the magowie and seemed to bring me back to life was a tulpa created from the imagination of Alice. We have yet to encounter a tulpa created by the Kobalos but we must be on our guard – Tom Ward

  I had once fought a Shaiksa assassin, but in the moment of victory I’d been slain, a sabre passing right through my body. I still had scars to prove it – scales that covered the site of the wound, a legacy of the lamia blood I’d inherited from my mam. I’d died, but had been brought back to life by the power of Alice’s magic. As I’d burst out of my coffin, an angel tulpa had appeared in the sky.

  ‘According to Alice, the winged angel was a tulpa, but we’ve no proof that this creature was,’ Jenny observed. ‘We don’t know enough about them. Maybe the thing just picked up on what you said, Tom. Maybe it just accepted your explanation. It had been having problems with its memory. It knew that things weren’t right.’

  I nodded, taking the sheet of paper from her and carefully replacing it with the others in my bag. ‘It does seem likely, though. What’s interesting is that, at first, the tulpa really thought it was Bill Arkwright.’

  I’d experienced a real sense of loss when the entity melted away. It had been good to be in Arkwright’s company again – I’d missed him; now I was overcome by the feeling of sadness I’d felt when he died back in Greece.

  ‘That’s the really horrible thing about it,’ Jenny said. ‘It was alive and aware, and it died a horrible death knowing that was the end of it because it didn’t have a soul. When you called it a “tulpa”, that’s when it started to melt.’

  ‘Maybe naming it is what ends the spell that holds it together,’ I suggested. ‘It might have believed it was Bill Arkwright, which was why it didn’t attack us at first. But there must have been some sort of trigger to make it understand its true purpose, to see us as enemies and go on the offensive.’

  ‘Maybe that would have happened when it had the Starblade in its possession,’ Jenny mused. ‘It asked to hold the sword, remember? I think its mission was to seize the Starblade and make you vulnerable to Kobalos magic. This thing was far more intricate than Alice’s tulpa. Hers just kept its distance in the sky; it was perhaps more of an illusion than a creature with real substance. If this one was a tulpa, it was incredibly complex. It interacted with us for days. I wonder which mage created it. Maybe it was Balkai. Maybe he sent it.’

  We had yet to encounter this most powerful Kobalos mage, but it seemed likely that Jenny was right. It would have taken incredible magical skill to create such an entity.

  ‘I think the best thing we can do is head back to Chipenden right now, while we’ve still got a few hours of daylight ahead of us,’ I said.

  ‘It can’t be soon enough for me. This place is creepy,’ Jenny said, rising to her feet and picking up her bag and staff.

  We went into the front room with Blood at our heels, but when I opened the door she growled and lay down on her haunches, reluctant to go any further. I clicked my tongue impatiently, and she finally came to her feet, shook herself, then followed us through the doorway into the mist.

  I led the way through the garden towards the gap in the fence. The visibility was still deteriorating and the air was cold and damp. It would
be good to reach the canal and head south. But when we reached the moat, we came to a halt and stared across at the sight that awaited us there.

  There was something sticking up out of the mist; it looked like a line of stakes set into the ground at forty-five degrees to repel attackers – but these were moving in unison. As we drew closer, we realized what they were.

  Skelts!

  Quivering on their multi-jointed legs, they moved like giant insects – though the segmented, tubular bodies were hard and ridged like the shells of lobsters, and they were covered with barnacles that had attached themselves during the long periods they spent under water.

  Suddenly one of the skelts rushed forward to attack. Jenny gave a cry and took a step backwards, but it came to a halt at the edge of the moat and crouched there, trembling, thwarted by the salt in the water.

  These creatures were dangerous and could move incredibly quickly. I knew that there were too many for us to fight our way through. We were totally outnumbered. The only thing keeping those skelts at bay was that saltwater moat.

  At my side, Blood began to whine and cower in fear. It was a sad thing to see: her spirit seemed to have been broken by her recent experiences.

  I gestured with my staff and led Jenny and the dog back towards the mill. We needed to consider our options. We didn’t have many, and none offered an easy exit from the mill garden.

  Back in the kitchen, we sat in silence while I thought things through.

  ‘Well, what do you think we should do about the skelt problem?’ I asked Jenny.

  ‘We could sit tight for a while. There are rabbit warrens in the far corner of the garden behind the mill. We wouldn’t starve,’ she replied.

  ‘But if it rains, as it often does in the County, the salt content of the moat will get diluted. After a while the skelts will be able to cross. We’d have a few days at most, Jenny. Then we’d have to face them. We’d just be delaying the inevitable.’

  ‘Couldn’t you use a mirror and ask Alice for help? She’d sort them out. Remember what she did to the Kobalos army!’

  With the aid of the Old God Pan, Alice had used her magic to cause a massive eruption of earth which had destroyed part of the Kobalos army and allowed our rearguard to escape across the river to the human principality of Polyznia.

  ‘I can’t ask her to come here,’ I told Jenny. ‘She’s trying to arrange an alliance with the Pendle witches. That’s important. It may be all that stands between the County and the power of the Kobalos mages. No, we’re going to wait for nightfall and then make a run for it.’

  ‘We’ll never get past those skelts,’ she cried.

  ‘There is a way. Think about it. Imagine you’re on your own and you have to escape. How would you do it?’

  Jenny frowned, but suddenly her face lit up. ‘There’s another way out! We could follow the course of the stream that runs under the fence and the moat.’

  ‘Well done!’ I said. ‘That’s exactly what we’re going to do!’

  The garden was surrounded by the moat, but was also enclosed by a high iron fence. However, the millstream flowed through two tunnels that led under the moat. Across the mouths of these were iron grilles, allowing the water through but stopping anything from the dark coming into the garden. Each grille was bolted to the stones that lined the tunnel. I’d need to remove one – a job that would have to be accomplished in daylight, for after dark I’d need a lantern to see what I was doing and that would attract the attention of the skelts.

  The tunnel that headed east out of the garden and emerged closest to the canal was our best option, I decided. I explained to Jenny what needed to be done, then headed for the workshop and selected some likely spanners. While I did this, she started collecting pebbles and setting them down on the grass near the gap in the fence. When I emerged again, she was filling the pockets of her gown with the last batch. She looked dejected.

  ‘See how many skelts you can hit!’ I laughed, trying to cheer her up.

  She nodded but didn’t even raise a smile. I didn’t blame her. We were in serious trouble.

  The danger wasn’t immediate, but the threat was still severe. If we didn’t manage to escape, within days we would be dead. And there was no guarantee that there wouldn’t be skelts lurking beyond the tunnel.

  The plan was for Jenny to stand by the moat and hurl stones over it at the skelts. She’d be safe enough because they couldn’t cross the salty water. It wouldn’t do them any serious damage because of their hard shells, but I hoped it would distract them from what I was doing. Otherwise they might come round and enter the tunnel from the other end.

  I walked rapidly along beside the stream, stepped into the cold water and splashed my way down the tunnel towards the iron grille. Luckily the stream wasn’t deep here; it only came up to my knees. It was gloomy, but my eyes soon adjusted. One of the spanners I’d brought seemed to be the right size, I thought.

  I got down to work right away, but despite my best efforts the spanner kept slipping off the nuts. Each time that happened there was a loud metallic clang; at one point the spanner caught the grille and I thought the noise would surely give me away. I worked as quickly as I could: there were six nuts in all, and I had to get them off before the sun went down, when I would be forced to use a lantern. We needed to escape tonight: there was no guarantee that we’d survive another day. One heavy downpour might dilute the salt, and the skelts would cross the moat and attack.

  The two remaining nuts lay below the surface and were badly rusted. I was working just as fast as I could, but I made slow progress. The final nut was resisting all my efforts, but fortunately the stud snapped off and the nut fell into the water, still attached to it.

  I’d succeeded, but it had taken me almost two hours. By the time I’d finished I was shivering with cold. I headed over to where Jenny was still throwing stones and beckoned her back to the mill.

  Inside, Blood was still sleeping fitfully by the door. I fed wood into the stove and Jenny went to catch a couple of rabbits. She returned with only one, and we shared it with the dog so we still felt hungry after our meal. However, dark came soon enough and we prepared for our escape.

  ‘Listen,’ I told Jenny. ‘The skelts may follow us. They’re quick over short distances, but once we’re clear we can make good progress. We need to keep moving through the night and not let up until we’re safely home.’

  ‘The sooner the better,’ Jenny agreed. ‘I certainly won’t be dawdling.’

  ‘There could be other dangers from the dark out there. We might encounter Kobalos warriors brought here by their mages – or even Balkai himself. So we’re not going to take the most direct route back to Chipenden – as soon as we leave the canal we’ll follow the ley lines.’

  ‘You plan to summon the boggart?’ Jenny asked me.

  ‘Yes, if there’s no other option,’ I replied.

  Ley lines were invisible routes that crossed the County; boggarts used them to move from place to place. I had a pact with Kratch, the boggart that defended the Chipenden garden: if summoned, it would come to my aid, but I needed to be on a ley line or within range of one of the intersection points.

  ‘You’ve studied the maps, but how well do you know them?’ I asked Jenny. ‘Are they fixed inside your memory? A spook needs to know the County like the back of his – or her – hand,’ I added with a smile. ‘So consider this to be part of your training. Try to work out the fastest route to Chipenden making the best use of ley lines.’

  ‘I can only remember two of the major ones,’ Jenny said. ‘One runs northeast, passing through Leyland, Hoghton and Billinge. But that’s south of Priestown – nowhere near where we are now. If we were down there heading north, the second one would be more promising. It runs through Priestown, Goosnargh, Beacon Fell and Bleasdale, ending up west of Chipenden.’

  ‘Well, that’s good. You know two, but there are a lot more than that, and one lies quite close to where we are now. Keep thinking about it. It’s time we w
ere off …’

  We left the mill, locking the door behind us, and followed the stream to the tunnel. I led the way and Jenny followed, but Blood stayed on the bank and started to whine softly. I clicked my tongue at her but she didn’t move. There was nothing I could do about it. If the dog had any sense, she would follow us.

  Jenny was struggling to carry both our staffs and bags. I had the Starblade in my shoulder scabbard but needed both arms free so that I could lift the heavy iron grille out of the way. I went ahead into the darkness of the tunnel, gripped the iron lattice and tugged it towards me. At first there was resistance. It had snagged on the studs – maybe they were bent. I tried again, and it jerked free with a loud clang of metal on stone that echoed down the tunnel. I leaned it against the left wall, leaving us just enough space to pass by.

  I walked on deeper into the tunnel and had an unpleasant surprise. The water suddenly became a lot deeper, almost reaching my waist. I gasped with cold and struggled on, with Jenny splashing along behind me. Moments later I was out of the tunnel and able to climb up onto the bank. It was still very misty, but I could see the gibbous moon overhead. As I turned and looked back to see if Jenny was all right, I heard a sound to my right.

  Before I could react, a huge skelt came scuttling towards me, its joints creaking. I twisted aside and managed to avoid the point of its bone-tube, but in doing so I overbalanced and fell heavily, knocking the wind from my lungs.

  I came up onto my knees and reached up for the Starblade as the skelt, ears flattened against its bony elongated head, darted in again.

  My blood ran cold.

  I had no time to draw my sword.

  CHAPTER 15

  WHAT DARK THING?

  GRIMALKIN

  WHILE I WAS teaching Thorne the skills she needed, the air shimmered in front of us and Pan appeared.

  He was smiling. ‘I bear good tidings,’ he said. ‘Lukrasta lives!’

  I gazed at him in astonishment. ‘Alice said that he was dead.’