I Am Alice

by Joseph Delaney

  ‘You didn’t have to be trained by her, did you?’ she asked me next.

  My time with the bone-witch wasn’t usually something I liked to dwell on, never mind talk about. But Thorne’s words had annoyed me.

  ‘Easy for you to say!’ I exclaimed angrily. ‘Ain’t so easy to do, though. Didn’t want her to train me, did I? But Lizzie wasn’t one to take no for an answer. She’d decided to teach me the craft and she got her way. That’s how it was.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have run away?’ Thorne asked.

  I had tried it on several occasions, but each time she found me and dragged me back. ‘Whenever I did, I suffered days and nights of pain, hunger and terror as a punishment,’ I told her. ‘Used sprogs against me, she did. They tried to eat their way into my brain.’

  Sprogs were newborn entities from the dark, still trying to understand who they were and what their place was. They had tentacles with hooks, and sharp teeth, and could bite themselves right into your head if you weren’t careful, forcing their way up your nose or into your ears.

  ‘So mostly I did as I was told,’ I continued. ‘If Lizzie said, “Study!” I studied. She scared me with her magic, and I remember the cutting and the big sharp knife she used. Sometimes that hurt a lot. Got scars all over my body, I have. She took blood from me most weeks to help with her spells.’

  I glanced across at Thorne, who had put her hands over her ears and was shuddering, her eyes tightly closed.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked when she finally took her hands away and opened her eyes to look at me.

  ‘When you said Lizzie came at you with a knife, it reminded me of how I died,’ she replied. ‘I have terrible flashbacks. The kretch seized me in its jaws and carried me to a mage called Bowker. Then witches held me down. I fought with all my strength, but there were too many of them. When Bowker sliced off my thumb-bones, the pain was terrible, but there was something even worse. I knew it was the end of my time on earth; I’d never get to be a witch assassin like Grimalkin. And I wanted so much to follow in her footsteps. I wanted to be the best – the greatest Malkin assassin who’d ever lived. And all that was cut from me.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to bring back bad memories.’

  ‘It’s not your fault. I just keep remembering how I died. It’ll come back to me again and again.’

  There was a sudden noise from somewhere back down the tunnel, and we both came to our feet in an instant. Had Tanaki sent something smaller after us? I wondered.

  ‘We need to press on. The sooner we reach the next domain, the better!’ Thorne said.

  I’d expected to see the path again, but we emerged from the tunnel straight into what was clearly another domain.

  There was enough light radiating from the purple sky above for us to see what a terrible place we’d arrived in. There were no trees or grass, just a vast, arid wilderness scattered with rocks and boulders. The air was very warm, with a stink of sulphur, but not as hot as the ground beneath our feet. I bent and touched it, removing my fingers quickly. It was very uneven, with long cracks that vented steam.

  This was a strange and terrifying place. I wondered who it belonged to. What manner of god would make this home?

  Thorne and I glanced at each other and set off up the nearest slope. When we reached the top, I could see mountains directly ahead.

  ‘We should head over there.’ Thorne pointed towards them. ‘From higher ground we’ll be able to get our bearings.’

  ‘What is this place? Who would want to live here?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, that’s a good question, Alice. You said you’ve seen Pan’s domain. It’s suited to him, isn’t it? It must be green and lush because he’s a god of nature . . .’

  I realized what she was getting at. ‘So what sort of creature would be happy living in this hot, barren wilderness?’ I wondered. ‘Some sort of fire entity, no doubt.’

  Thorne nodded. ‘That sounds likely; whatever it is, we don’t want to meet it. It won’t be long before the owner knows we’re here and comes looking for us. We need to get out as quickly as possible. From the slopes of those mountains ahead, we might just be able to see our best route.’

  There was no arguing with that, so we set off just as fast as we could. Wasn’t easy, though. Sometimes huge boulders blocked our path and we had to go round. We had a close escape when a jet of steam hissed up from the ground about ten paces to our left. Any nearer and it would have scalded our faces. It was so hot that we had to turn away.

  At times the ground rumbled and shook, though not as violently as when Tanaki had come close. According to Thorne, he was mostly a threat between domains. Whatever was making the ground shake was something peculiar to this place.

  I was thinking again about what sort of god would have this as his home when, as if she had read my thoughts, Thorne spoke up:

  ‘Do you know what?’ she said. ‘I think this is a new domain that hasn’t been around for very long. Grimalkin travelled a lot and told me about her journeys. She said that she had recently visited an island full of volcanoes. The ground there was hot underfoot, with scalding steam just like this. The fisherman she forced to take her there told her that three years earlier there had been nothing there but sea; it was a new island born of fire that had burst up out of the waves. This seems to be something similar.’

  ‘That makes sense,’ I told her. ‘Maybe it’s a new god, only just born. Most gods are ancient, but they all had to begin somewhere, didn’t they?’

  Thorne nodded in agreement. ‘Grimalkin has her own ideas about that,’ she said. ‘She’s learned things on her travels that those Pendle witches, set in their ways, wouldn’t even dream of. She thinks that a daemon can sometimes grow in power until it becomes a god; or that the reverse can happen.’

  I had always known that there was much I could learn from Grimalkin. Not only was she a great assassin, but she had also acquired a great deal of knowledge.

  ‘That’s true enough,’ I agreed. ‘Old Gregory thought that about the daemon called the Bane. It was trapped behind a silver gate in the labyrinth under Priestown Cathedral. Once it was a god, but because it was no longer worshipped it gradually grew weaker.’

  ‘I suppose it depends on what people believe,’ continued Thorne. ‘If enough of them want something to happen, it will! You could well be right. Maybe a new god has been born here or is about to come into existence because of the worship of thousands of people somewhere back on earth.’

  I shuddered at the prospect of another dark god. Weren’t there enough already? ‘Well, let’s hope we never meet it,’ I said. ‘We must find our way to the Fiend’s domain. I need to get that dagger.’

  We trudged onwards, and I started to get thirsty – though I realized that I wasn’t the slightest bit hungry. This might be the dark, but I was here with my human body. Surely it had the same needs as back on earth. I wondered what it was like for the dead. Did Thorne need to eat?

  I tried to remember how I had managed when I’d been a prisoner of the Fiend all those months ago, but could bring little to mind. When I arrived, he had immediately handed me over to his servants. At first I had been kept in a cage, and I remembered a wet sponge being pushed through the bars into my hands. I had sucked on it eagerly, desperate for any drop of moisture. Sometimes the Fiend’s servants had soaked the sponge in vinegar rather than water, and I recalled the intense stinging pain as it made contact with my parched, cracked lips. Once they’d held me down and rubbed it into all my cuts. The memory made me more determined than ever to play my part in destroying the Fiend – no matter what it cost me.

  Once again, it was difficult to judge the passing of time. Crossing the abyss, it had moved very slowly; here it flashed past, and it seemed to me that we were nearing the mountains much more quickly than we would have done back on earth. I could now see that their upper slopes were white.

  ‘Snow and ice!’ I pointed upwards.

  Thorne stared at the jagged peak
s for a few moments, then nodded. ‘On earth, the higher you go, the cooler it gets. The same could apply in this domain.’

  ‘Snow and ice means water!’ I exclaimed. ‘Don’t know about you, but I’ve never felt so thirsty. My mouth is so dry I can hardly swallow. If there’s ice up there and it’s hot down here, then at some point on those slopes it must turn to water. There’ll be streams running down the mountainside!’

  Thorne nodded, not saying whether she was thirsty too, and we hurried on. Soon we were climbing, once more picking our way between boulders and giving the crevices a wide berth. At any moment they could send up jets of scalding steam.

  The closer we got to the mountains, the more formidable and inaccessible they appeared; soon they’d become too steep to climb. But then Thorne pointed to our left.

  ‘There’s a gap . . . a valley – let’s head for that.’

  It proved to be a narrow ravine, no more than a hundred paces across; two sheer walls of rock confined us on either side. It was very gloomy, and the sky was just a narrow zigzag, far above our heads.

  Soon we emerged onto a plateau, and I saw what I needed. So thirsty, I was! We had reached an almost circular area surrounded on all sides by walls of sheer rock. At its centre was a lake . . . But after one glance at the water, my elation turned to disappointment. There was no way I could even approach it, let alone drink it. The surface bubbled and churned, and steam rose up to form a cloud above our heads. The water was boiling.

  ‘Ain’t no chance of drinking that!’ I complained, suddenly aware that the ground was hot beneath my feet too. I could feel it through my pointy shoes.

  ‘The water must come from somewhere to fill that lake, Alice,’ Thorne pointed out. ‘Most likely from the mountain peaks. There must be streams flowing down the slopes and across the ground towards it. They might be cooler.’

  So we began to follow the curve of the rock walls that bounded the plateau, moving to our left, widdershins. Soon we met a narrow stream, but it too was sizzling across the stones and hissing steam as it wound its way towards the hot lake.

  ‘We should keep going,’ I told Thorne. ‘There might be something better further along.’

  We jumped across the stream and continued in the same direction. Suddenly we got lucky. Water ran down the vertical rock and fell like heavy rain five or six paces beyond it.

  ‘Ain’t steaming,’ I said. ‘Don’t look hot at all. Maybe it’s falling from much higher up?’

  I walked towards the waterfall and cautiously stretched my fingers out into it. It was just mildly warm. Moments later, Thorne and I were both dancing around, getting soaked to the skin, laughing and shouting with happiness. I lifted my head, opened my mouth wide and wet my cracked lips and dry tongue. Next I moved closer to the rock face, cupped my hands under the water, and drank until I’d had my fill.

  It was then that I noticed something strange. Although Thorne was happy to let the water soak her and was busy washing her face and arms and hair, she wasn’t drinking anything at all.

  Didn’t the dead need water and food?

  But that thought was immediately driven from my head. I heard a sequence of clicks, like dry twigs being snapped underfoot. I looked about for the source of the sound. It seemed to be coming from the rock face about four or five paces beyond the waterfall.

  There was a narrow crack in the rock and I could hear something inside it. Was it a rat? I wondered.

  I was curious, but also very wary; I prepared to use my magic if I had to. Then something gleamed in the darkness. There was a loud, angry hiss and two menacing eyes stared into mine. I backed away from the crevice. The eyes had been large – far too big for a rat. What could be hiding in a narrow crack like that? What manner of creature was down there?

  I WATCHED, SCARED silly, as a twig-like thing poked out, making a curious circling movement, as if testing the air. It was grey, multi-jointed and very long indeed. It looked like the leg of a giant insect. As it lowered itself to make contact with the floor, a second limb followed, making the same spiral jerky movement. When the head emerged, I knew immediately what the creature was. Its thin head and long snout were familiar to me. I knew them only too well.

  ‘Thorne!’ I shouted, for she was still under the water. ‘A skelt!’ I didn’t take my eyes off it as the rest of the spindly creature extricated itself from the crack.

  The two segments of body were ridged and hard, as tough as armour. It was a cross between a lobster and a giant insect, but with eight rather than six legs. As it stared at me, I felt the strength slowly starting to leave my body. There was power in those eyes; the ability to freeze its prey to the spot while it approached them.

  Skelts were very dangerous. I’d witnessed them in action killing victims as part of a ritual practised by water witches; they’d also attacked Tom Ward at the watermill north of Caster – Bill Arkwright had killed that one.

  The long snout was a bone-tube which it would stick into the throat or chest of its victims in order to suck out their blood. The creature was a vicious killer – bigger than I was, and a lot stronger, and very fast.

  I knew I could fight it off with my magic, but that had to be a last resort. There were lots of reasons why I needed to keep my use of magic to a minimum; I had realized very quickly that I might need all my reserves to do what I had to do and escape from the dark.

  The skelt was moving slowly towards me now, its joints clicking and creaking as it stepped delicately over the warm rocks. I could feel its power as it attempted to control my mind and freeze me to the spot as a stoat does a rabbit. I struggled and began to resist, but my strength was still draining away. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Thorne running towards me. She held a dagger in each hand, and her face was twisted with pain.

  Before she reached the creature, it sensed her and turned, ready to meet her attack. I was suddenly free of its influence.

  This was my chance. I picked up a rock – a heavy one that I could only lift with two hands. Then I did what Bill Arkwright had done when he saved Tom Ward. As the skelt lifted its two front legs, ready to fend off Thorne’s attack, I brought the rock down on the back of its head with all my strength. There was a crack, then a crunching, squelching sound as the skelt’s head split open. Its legs collapsed under it and began to twitch and shake. It was dead or dying.

  To my shock and astonishment, Thorne said nothing. She replaced her blades in their scabbards, knelt down beside the skelt and began to lap the warm blood and fluid from its shattered skull.

  I stepped back, horrified.

  Thorne looked up and saw the expression on my face. Her lips were covered in blood. It began to trickle down from the corner of her mouth and drip off her chin. ‘What are you looking at me like that for?!’ she shouted. ‘It’s what we need to keep up our strength. It’s what the dead have to do in the dark. How else could we survive?’

  She continued to drink the blood in greedy, desperate gulps, ignoring me.

  Sickened, I couldn’t watch; I turned my back on her and walked slowly away from the rock face, heading back towards the boiling lake. As I walked, I gradually began to calm down. Lots of Pendle witches used blood magic, but usually it was only small amounts. The rest of the time they ate normal food, like mutton, bacon and bread. It was true that Lizzie had had a good appetite for rats’ blood, but the only witches who gorged themselves on blood as Thorne was doing now were dead ones, bound to their bones, like those in the dell east of Pendle.

  The rules must be different here – as I was starting to find out. This was the dark, and the dead here needed blood. How then could I judge or blame Thorne? She was just doing what was necessary in order to survive.

  Although I was still some distance away from the lake, I realized that I could already feel warmth on my face. It was giving off far more heat than could be accounted for by the hot water flowing into it. Maybe there was volcanic activity directly below it? What if it suddenly exploded in a great surge of fire and boiling w
ater?

  I came to a halt. Suddenly I was afraid of the bubbling, churning lake. I sniffed quickly three times, trying to find out what threat it posed. I’ve always been good at sniffing things out. Some witches are better at it than others, but the skill came easily to me. It was one of the few things that seemed to impress Bony Lizzie when she first began my training. This time I was having difficulty gathering information. I tried again – three more quick sniffs.

  I still couldn’t find precisely what the threat from the boiling lake was: I felt that something might emerge from it at any time.

  Then, as I watched, some small creature came crawling out of the lake towards me. How could that be? How could anything actually live within water of that temperature?

  Another of the creatures emerged, and then another. Within seconds there were at least a dozen, all heading in my direction.

  That was when I realized that they were not small, after all. The lake was much further away than I had thought. The creatures only appeared small because of the distance between us. But they were moving fast, and getting larger and larger – which meant they were getting steadily closer.

  Suddenly I knew what they were. The fact that they’d been some distance away and had crawled out of a boiling lake had delayed that realization.

  They were skelts too!

  I turned and ran back towards Thorne. ‘Skelts! More skelts!’ I shouted at the top of my voice.

  She looked up from where she was still feeding from the skelt’s head, and at first did nothing but stare. I knew she was looking towards the lake beyond me. She too would be able to see the creatures.

  Slowly she came to her feet but stayed where she was. She was brave, Thorne, and I knew that she would wait until we were level before running herself. She was truly loyal – Grimalkin had made sure of that – and would not flee while I was still in danger.

  I was right. As I came alongside her, Thorne gestured towards the plateau, and we sprinted towards it stride for stride. We ran hard, and soon the breath was rasping in my throat – though Thorne seemed full of energy, her breaths still coming easily. Was that a result of the blood that she’d just drunk?