“Quickly I lifted my leg clear of the stump and knelt to face Kernolde, my blood running down to soak the earthen floor of the killing pit. I held the spike like a spear and pointed it toward her. Before her hands could reach my throat, I would pierce her heart.
“Seeing that I had freed myself and was prepared to fight on, Kernolde looked astonished, but she quickly recovered herself and attacked me in a new way. She had drawn much of her stored magic from the tree, and now she halted and concentrated, hurling shards of darkness toward me. She tried dread first, and terror tried to claim me. My teeth began to chitter-chatter like those of the dead on the Halloween sabbath. Her magic was strong, but not strong enough. I braced myself and shrugged aside her spell. Soon its effects receded, and it bothered me no more than the cold wind that blew down from the arctic ice when I slew the wolves and left their bodies bleeding into the snow.
“Next she used the unquiet dead, hurling toward me the spirits she had trapped in limbo. They clung to my body, leaning hard on my arm to bring it down, and it took all my strength to keep hold of the spike.”
“Have you ever trapped spirits in limbo?” Thorne asked.
“I have in the past—but not any longer. That is why I have not taught you that skill. As assassins, we are better than your common bone witch. We use magic, yes, but our greatest strength lies in the combat skills that we acquire and in our strength of mind. It was the latter that enabled me to repulse Kernolde’s spirits. They were strong and fortified by dark magic: One was a strangler that gripped my throat so hard that Kernolde herself might have been squeezing it. The worst of them was an abhuman spirit, the ghost of one born of the Fiend and a witch. He darkened my eyes and thrust his long, cold fingers into my ears so that I thought my head would burst, but I fought back and cried out into the darkness and silence: ‘I’m still here, Kernolde! Still to be reckoned with. I am Grimalkin, your doom!’
“My eyes cleared, and the abhuman’s fingers left my ears with a pop so that sound rushed back. The weight was gone from my arms, and I struggled to my feet, taking aim with the spike. Kernolde rushed at me then—that big ugly bear of a woman with her strangler’s hands. But my aim was true. I thrust the spear right into her heart, and she fell at my feet, her blood soaking into the earth to mix with mine. She was choking, trying to speak, so I bent and put my ear close to her lips.
“‘You’re just a girl,’ she croaked. ‘To be defeated by a girl after all this time . . . How can this be?’
“‘Your time is over and mine is just beginning,’ I told her. ‘This girl took your life, and now she will take your bones.’
“I watched her die; then, after taking her thumb bones, which were very powerful and supplied me with magic for many months, I lifted her body out of the pit using her own ropes. Finally I hung her by her feet so that at dawn the birds could peck her clean. That done, I passed through the dell without incident, the dead witches keeping their distance. Grim Gertrude was on her hands and knees, still rooting through the sodden leaves, trying to find her head. Without eyes it would prove difficult and would keep her occupied for a long time.
“When I emerged from the trees, the clan was waiting to greet me. I held up Kernolde’s thumb bones, and they bowed their heads in acknowledgment of what I’d done. Even Katrise, the head of the coven of thirteen, made obeisance. When they looked up, I saw the new respect in their eyes; the fear too.
“With that victory, my quest to destroy my enemy, the Fiend, began. The spikes in the pit had given me an idea. What if I crafted a sharp spike of silver alloy and somehow impaled the Fiend on it?”
“Is that what you actually did to the Fiend before you cut off his head?” Thorne asked.
I nodded. “Yes, child—with the help of Tom Ward and his master, John Gregory, I impaled the Fiend with silver spears and nailed his hands and feet to the rock. Then the Spook’s apprentice cut the Fiend’s head from his shoulders, and I placed it in this leather sack. We filled the pit with earth, then sealed it with a large, flat stone, finally placing a boulder on top of that. Until this head is returned to its body, the Fiend is securely bound.”
“It will never be returned to its body,” Thorne said. “Even if one of us dies, the other will continue to be its custodian. Then one day the Fiend will be destroyed forever!”
There came a deep groan from the sack. The Fiend had been listening to our conversation and had not liked what he’d heard. In the long silence that followed, I could almost hear Thorne thinking. At last she spoke. It was a probing question.
“Have you ever taken the thumb bones of your enemies while they were still alive?” she asked.
No doubt the threat to her own thumb bones was fresh in her mind, but before I could control myself I let out a hiss of anger.
“It’s just that some say that is what you do to those you hate most,” Thorne continued quickly.
“My enemies must fear me,” I replied. “With my scissors I snip the flesh of the dead, the clan enemies that I have slain in combat. Then I cut out their thumb bones, which I wear around my neck as a warning to others. What else would I do? Without ruthlessness and savagery I could not survive even a week of the life I lead.”
“But the living? Have you ever done it to the living?” Thorne persisted. She was brave to pursue the matter when I was clearly angry—courage was one of her best qualities. But it also displayed another side of her, a fault. She could be reckless. She did not know when to back off.
“I do not wish to speak of it,” I said quietly. “The matter is closed.”
CHAPTER XIX
WITCH DELL
I have looked into the darkness,
into the greatest darkness of all,
and now I fear nothing.
ONE hour after nightfall, we approached the dell but halted beneath the wide branches of a solitary oak a hundred yards short of its nearest trees.
“Call her,” I whispered.
The night of the full moon had been and gone. Somewhere within those trees Agnes Sowerbutts would now have awoken to a new existence as a dead witch. In time, as her body slowly decayed, a witch sometimes became bitter and twisted, hating all those whom she had befriended and cared for in life. But those taken to the dell did not change their loves, hatreds, and allegiances immediately. To a certain extent she would still be the same Agnes, and I hoped that we could rely on her to effect our safe entry to the dell—or at least to let us know the situation there.
Thorne gave a long, mournful cry, something close to that made by a corpse fowl but subtly modified into the signal that she always used when approaching Agnes’s cottage. I had introduced Thorne to the old witch soon after I had begun her training, and Agnes had taken the child under her wing, teaching her about potions, and occasionally, when I was away from Pendle, offering her a place to stay.
We waited in silence. There were faint rustles in the distant trees, but nothing alive or dead ventured into the open. After about five minutes, I instructed Thorne to try again. Once more we waited while the wind sighed through the branches of the oak. It was a night of sudden showers, and at that moment a particularly heavy one was falling; for a while all we could hear was rain drumming on the ground. The shower passed as quickly as it had started, and the moon came out briefly. It was then that I saw the dark shape crawling toward us across the clearing. Without doubt it was a dead witch. I could hear her sniffing and snuffling, her nose almost touching the wet grass, her gown a slithering shadow. Only when she lifted her face into the moonlight did I recognize her as Agnes. Death had already changed her for the worse.
She came in under cover of the branches, gasping and wheezing, and pulled herself up into a sitting position, resting her back against the tree trunk. For a while nobody spoke, and I listened to the drops of water dripping from leaf to leaf on their long, slow journey to the ground.
I looked at Agnes with my keen eyes, and she was a sorry sight indeed. Some dead witches are strong and can run for miles, hunting
human prey; others are weak, and theirs is a miserable existence crawling through the slime and leaf mold, searching for small creatures such as rats and mice. If this was indeed Agnes’s existence now, I pitied her. She had always been a proud woman. Although at first glance her cottage had appeared cluttered, her bottles and jars were placed in perfect order upon her shelves, and her house was immaculate—never even a speck of dust in sight. Very few witches cared about cleanliness; Agnes had been the exception. She had changed her clothes every day, and her pointy shoes were so highly polished that you could see your reflection in them.
Thorne looked shocked and momentarily covered her face with her hands. I too was dismayed to see the change that had befallen Agnes in so short a time. Her tattered dress was caked in dirt. No doubt she’d been crawling through brambles in search of prey. As for her once clean, shining hair, it was now greasy and infested with wriggling white maggots, while her gaunt face was smeared with mud and blood.
There was no point in trying to pretend that things were better than they appeared. Agnes had always been kind but plain speaking, so I didn’t mince my words, even though she was dead.
“It sorrows me to see you in this state, Agnes,” I told her kindly. “Is there anything that we can do to help?”
“I never thought I would come to this,” she said, shaking her head so that maggots dropped from her hair into her lap. “I was strong in life and hoped to be the same in death. But I thirst! I thirst so much and can never get enough blood. I am not strong enough to hunt large creatures or humans. Small rodents are all I can manage. Rabbits are too fast.”
“Don’t the other dead help? Don’t the strong help those weaker than themselves?” asked Thorne.
Agnes shook her head. “Dead witches hunt alone and care for naught but themselves.”
“Then at least tonight your thirst will be quenched,” I said. I turned to Thorne. “Bring Agnes something large.”
In an instant the girl had sped away.
“I still have the Fiend’s head,” I told Agnes. “It is in all our interests that it remains detached from his body. Will you help? Our enemies are approaching, and we need to take refuge in the dell. We need some of our dead sisters to fight alongside us.”
“Others rule here,” Agnes croaked. “I am feeble, and my word counts for little within that dark place.”
“Are those within for the Fiend or against him?” I asked.
“Dead witches, be they strong or weak, care for nothing but blood. If they think at all, it is blood that fills their thoughts. I hope that I will never be like them. My memories of my life are precious, and I want to hold on to them for as long as I can. But you needn’t attempt to win them to your cause. They will kill anything living that enters the dell—you too, if they can catch you.”
“How many of the strong ones are close at hand?” I said, listening to the rustles and scratching sounds from the dell, which told me that some of the weaker witches were close by.
“Only two. The third has been away for more than two nights but could return at any time.”
“It is as I thought. So if we can get to the center of the dell before our enemies arrive, the dead will effectively be our allies, whether they wish it or not.”
I looked up and saw that Thorne was crossing the clearing toward us. Each hand held a large wriggling hare. She reached us and held out one to Agnes. The dead witch seized the frightened animal, then immediately sank her teeth into its neck and began to suck its blood. Within moments it had stopped twitching; it was drained and dead. Then she started on the second one.
“You’re a good girl, Thorne!” Agnes cried when she’d finished. “That’s the sweetest blood I’ve sipped since coming to this miserable dell.”
“I wish I could do more for you,” Thorne said. “You’ve always been good to me, Agnes, and it pains me to see you like this.”
Suddenly I sensed danger and sniffed the wind. Our enemies were close at hand.
“They’re no more than ten minutes away,” I told Thorne. “It’s a risk, but we need to take refuge in the dell now, before it’s too late.” I turned to Agnes. “Follow as best you can.”
I led Thorne to the edge of the dell. “There are still pits and traps—those crafted by Kernolde many years ago. Some I will avoid; others I’ll leap. We must move fast but follow close on my heels.”
So I sprinted into the dell, taking the same route that I had taken all those years earlier when I fought Kernolde. But this time, no dead hands reached up to clutch my ankles. Last time I had called out a challenge and drawn the witches toward me; this time we had the element of surprise, and the dead would be scattered among the trees. Only the two very strongest and fastest might be able to intercept us. And we were lucky, as the third had already left the dell to hunt. She might roam for miles and spend several nights away before returning. Or she could reappear at any moment.
I still had the exact location of each pit clear in my mind, and soon I was leaping over the first one. I never even glanced back to see if Thorne was safe. The girl was as sure-footed as I was, and her reactions were just as quick.
Soon I sprang over a second, then a third, but at one point I dodged left to avoid a long, thin pit that was impossible to jump; a tree trunk formed a barrier at its far edge. I remembered the way in which Kernolde had tricked and almost defeated me—by digging an extra pit that was unknown to me and filling it with sharp stakes to spear me. A sudden thought struck me.
What if she had dug other pits? What if there were ones that I was unaware of?
I calmed myself, picking up my pace through the dell. Such pits might or might not exist. But as long as I took the same route as last time, we would surely come to no harm.
Soon Kernolde’s tree came into view. It was an ancient oak, the tree within which she had stored her magic. Despite the action of the elements during the intervening years, some of the ropes still hung down from the branches. From those she had once hung her defeated enemies.
I motioned to Thorne, and we came to a halt. I pointed to the pit with my forefinger. It was still partially covered with branches and bracken, onto which many autumns had layered a bed of moldering brown leaves. But at the edge I saw the large hole through which I had fallen, to be impaled below. We walked around the pit and turned, leaning our backs against the huge tree trunk as once Kernolde had done. It was strange to return to this place after all these years. My life had circled me back to the same spot, and I somehow sensed that I would soon face a similar crisis.
There was a rustling to my right. Something was approaching. No doubt it was one of the weaker dead witches—no real threat. After a few moments there were other, louder sounds: the breaking of twigs underfoot, the heavy, confident steps of someone who was not afraid to betray their presence.
A dead witch came into view. She was tall, but even if I had known her in life she would have been a stranger to me now. In place of her right eye was a black empty socket, and the flesh on that side of her face was missing, revealing the skull and cheekbone. The remaining eye, however, glared at me with hatred. There was something very unusual about this dead witch too. Into the leather belt that held up her blood-splattered skirt was tucked a long blade with a curved handle shaped like a ram’s horn, and she carried a long, thin spear.
Dead witches don’t usually arm themselves in this way. Their extreme strength, claws, and teeth are sufficient weapons.
Suddenly I knew her, and everything was instantly clear. This was Needle, one of my predecessors, the witch assassin who had been defeated by Kernolde. Such a clan sister could have been an ally, but the hostile stare of her remaining eye said otherwise. It was filled with madness.
“You have crossed a line!” Needle hissed. “I rule here. This is the place of the dead, not the living. Do you come to challenge me, Grimalkin?”
“Why should the living challenge the dead?” I demanded. “Your time is over. Kernolde defeated you, and I defeated her. One day my tim
e will also be over, and I will take my place here alongside you. We should be allies. There is a dangerous foe approaching.”
“Kernolde used trickery. She used the dead in her cause. Had she fought fairly, I would have defeated her, and in time you too would have died at my hands. So let us put that to the test now. Let us fight—just the two of us!”
“First help me to defeat our common enemy,” I said. “What do you say?”
“Who is this enemy?”
“They are supporters of the Fiend. They want what I carry within this bag.”
I untied the sack, lifted out the head of the Fiend, and showed it to Needle.
She smiled grotesquely, and her white skull bone gleamed in a shaft of moonlight. “I have no love for the Fiend,” she said. “But neither do I care for you! They call you the greatest of the Malkin assassins. It is a lie!”
I returned the Fiend’s head to the sack and was just preparing to tie it shut when madness flickered in Needle’s remaining eye and she ran at me, the spear pointing toward my heart.
I dropped the sack and the head and prepared to defend myself. The most powerful of the dead witches were fast and very strong, much stronger than the living could hope to be. They could tear off my limbs with their bare hands. But this was worse: Needle was a trained witch assassin with a fearsome reputation. She would not be easy to overcome.
Thorne drew a blade and started to move toward my side, but I waved her back—my pride bade me deal with this dead assassin alone. At the last moment, I twisted my body aside, and the point of the spear missed me by inches. My blade was in my hand, but I did not use it. Once I had cut the head from a dead witch in this very dell. To stop Needle, I would have to do something similar—maybe even cut her into pieces. I decided to try to reason with her one more time. I still hoped that she might become our ally.
“Help me to defeat our enemies, and then we will fight,” I offered.
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