Spook's: The Dark Army (The Starblade Chronicles) (2 page)

Terror gripped her. She sensed that there was something really bad here; something big and dangerous; something that wanted to kill her.

Jenny stepped away from the circle of stones, away from the couches, pressing her back against the wall.

From the depths below, something enormous took a breath. It was so vast that the air it sucked in rushed past Jenny with the force of a gale, slamming the inner door shut with a bang. The blast made her stagger forward onto her knees before it swirled away down the dark shaft towards an unseen mouth and cavernous lungs.

She dropped the lantern and was plunged into total darkness.

Jenny cried out in terror as a monstrous glowing shape bulged up out of the vast impossible space and hovered in the air above it. Six glowing ruby-red eyes stared towards her; eyes set deep within a bulbous head.

When it exhaled, the breath of this creature – whatever it was – felt hot and putrid; there was a stench of decay, of dead things that still slithered or crawled in a subterranean darkness.

Then tentacles were coiling and writhing, reaching out towards her, intending to twine about her and drag her back down into that dark impossible hole.

She would never live to become a spook now.

She would die here alone in the darkness.

YESTERDAY WAS THE
worst day of my life.

It was the day that Thomas Ward, the Chipenden Spook, my master, died.

Tom should have been back in the County fighting the dark, dealing with ghosts, ghasts, witches and boggarts. We should have been visiting places such as Priestown, Caster, Poulton, Burnley and Blackburn. I should have spent time in the Chipenden library and garden being trained as a spook’s apprentice. I should have been practising digging boggart pits and improving my skills with a silver chain.

Instead we followed the witch assassin, Grimalkin, on a long doomed journey north towards the lands of the Kobalos. They’re barbaric non-human warriors with a thick hide of fur and faces like wolves. They plan to make war on the human race; they intend to kill all the men and boys and enslave the females.

One of their warriors, a shaiksa assassin with deadly fighting skills, had been visiting the river, the divide between the territories of men and Kobalos. He’d been issuing challenges, then fighting human opponents in single combat, killing his adversaries with ease. But the holy men of this land, the magowie, had been visited by a winged figure – a figure who had the appearance of an angel and who had made a prophecy:

One day soon a human will come who will defeat the Kobalos warrior. After his victory he will lead the combined armies of the principalities to victory!

Hearing of this prophecy, Grimalkin had formulated a plan. It was a plan that cost Tom his life.

Grimalkin’s scheme was for Tom Ward to fight and defeat the warrior and then lead an army into Kobalos lands so that she could learn of their magical and military abilities.

Tom had indeed defeated the warrior, but the Kobalos’s dying act had been to pierce Tom’s body with his sabre.

So Tom Ward had died too.

That was yesterday.

Today we are going to bury him.

Tom’s coffin rested on the grass in the open. Prince Stanislaw, who ruled Polyznia, the largest of the principalities bordering Kobalos territory, stood beside it, flanked by two of his guards. He nodded towards Grimalkin and me, and then beckoned four of his men forward. They hefted the coffin up onto their shoulders.

He and this armed escort were with us to do honour to Tom. I wished they didn’t have to be here; I wanted to take Tom back to the County where his old master was buried and his family still lived on their farm.

I glanced sideways at the prince – a big man with short grey hair, a large nose and close-set eyes. He was in his fifties, I guessed, and hadn’t an ounce of fat on his body. His intelligent eyes looked sad now.

He and his warriors had been impressed by Tom’s fighting skill. Despite suffering a mortal wound, he had slain the Kobalos warrior, something that the prince’s own champions had been unable to do.

As we trudged up towards the place where Tom was to be buried, thunder crashed overhead, and soon torrential rain had soaked us to the skin. Grimalkin gripped my shoulder. I suppose she meant to be comforting – in so far as someone as wild and cruel as a witch assassin can be. But Tom’s death had been brought about by her machinations and anger began to build within me. Her grip was firm to the point of hurting, but I shrugged her off and took a step nearer to the open grave.

I glanced at the headstone and began to read what had been carved upon it:

H
ERE LIETH
P
RINCE
T
HOMAS OF
C
ASTER
,
A BRAVE WARRIOR
WHO FELL IN COMBAT
BUT TRIUMPHED WHERE OTHERS FAILED

The lie we had created – that Tom was a prince – had gone too far; and now here it was written upon his gravestone. It made my stomach turn. Tom was a young spook who had fought the dark, and this should have been acknowledged. This shouldn’t have happened, I thought bitterly. He deserved the truth.

But this again had been Grimalkin’s doing. Tom had needed to pose as a prince because the armies of the principalities would not follow a commoner.

I watched as a hooded magowie, one of their priests, prayed for Tom, rain dripping from the end of his nose. The smell of wet soil was very strong. Soon it would cover Tom’s remains.

Then the prayers were over and the gravediggers began to shovel wet earth down upon the coffin. I glanced back at Grimalkin and saw that she was grinding her teeth. She seemed more angry than sad; but I was churning with mixed emotions too.

Suddenly the men stopped working and looked up. There was movement and light in the air high above us. I gasped as I spotted a winged figure hovering far above the grave; it glowed with a silver light, its fluttering wings huge.

It was the same angel-like being that had hovered over the hill while the three magowie made their prophecy, foretelling the coming of a champion to defeat the Shaiksa assassin and lead humans across the river to victory.

Suddenly it folded its white wings and dropped towards us like a stone, coming to a stop less than thirty feet above our heads. Now I could make out a beautiful face that shone with pale light. Everyone was gazing upwards now, gasping in astonishment.

There was a noise from the grave but, fascinated by the winged figure, I continued to look up. It was only when the sound came again that I glanced down.

At first I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me, but I wasn’t the only person staring down into the grave. I saw that the casket was slightly tilted, and the sodden earth that covered it was sliding away to reveal the wet wooden lid.

Grimalkin hissed in anger and stared up at the winged being. I could understand her annoyance at the interference. Couldn’t Tom even be left to be buried in peace? But then I saw that the coffin was moving. What could be causing that?

I hardly dared to hope . . . Could it be that Tom was alive . . .?

With a jerk, the coffin rose up into the air above the grave and began to spin, spraying mud and droplets of water in all directions. The corner caught one of the gravediggers and knocked him backwards into the waiting mound of earth.

I stared open-mouthed as the coffin slowly rose upwards. Grimalkin rushed forward, stretching out her arms as if to grab it. But, spinning faster and faster, it eluded her grasp and whirled towards the winged figure. I heard another hiss of anger from Grimalkin – but it was lost in an ear-splitting boom of thunder that set my teeth on edge.

Suddenly the heavens were split with intense light – not the sheet lightning we had experienced so far: this was a jagged fork of blue lightning that seemed to come from the winged figure. It struck Tom’s coffin with a crack that hurt my ears.

It had to be something supernatural – a wielding of dark magic. Judging by her reactions, it certainly wasn’t Grimalkin’s doing. But who was responsible?

The coffin immediately disintegrated, splinters of wood falling towards us. I quickly retreated, shielding my head with my arms, bumping into people in my haste to get clear.

Some of the pieces splashed into the water at the bottom of the empty grave; others fell around me.

When I looked up again, Tom’s corpse was spinning above us, his arms and legs flopping and jerking, his body spiralling down towards the grave again. I stared at him in amazement. His eyes were closed in death; he looked like a puppet dangling from invisible controlling strings. I could hardly bear to watch: that such an indignity should be inflicted upon him!

Suddenly, far above him, the winged creature vanished like a candle flame snuffed out by a giant thumb and forefinger. Sheet lightning flashed and Tom’s corpse fell twenty feet or more into the mound of soil beside the grave.

For a moment there was absolute silence. I held my breath, stunned by what I had just witnessed, a whole range of emotions churning through me.

Then, from the corpse, we heard an unmistakable groan.

GRIMALKIN WAS THE
first to reach Tom. She lifted him out of the mud and carried him in her arms like a child, pushing through the crowd and ignoring even the prince. She was hurrying back towards the camp. I ran after her, calling her name, but she never even glanced back.

Soon we were back in the tent where we had washed the corpse – which now seemed very much alive. Grimalkin laid Tom on the pallet and covered him with a blanket. He was breathing and giving the occasional moan, but he didn’t open his eyes.

‘Tom! Tom!’ I cried, kneeling beside him, but Grimalkin pushed me away.

‘Leave him, child! He needs to sleep deeply,’ she commanded, giving me a glimpse of her pointy teeth. She seemed concerned, but angry too. Being a seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, one of my gifts is that of empathy – but it didn’t work with the witch assassin. Perhaps she had magical barriers in place.

Soon Prince Stanislaw, escorted by four guards, came to see Tom; he had a brief animated conversation with Grimalkin in the local language, Losta; she didn’t bother to translate for me so I don’t know exactly what was said – though sometimes I can read people’s thoughts, and the prince’s mind was open to me. He was excited and astonished and filled with rapture, believing that he had witnessed a miracle. He was happy for Tom too; happy that he still lived, and fervently wished for a full recovery. But beneath all these thoughts was calculation: already he was anticipating using Tom as a figurehead to rally more troops and launch an attack upon the Kobalos.

After the departure of the prince we were left alone in the tent. Grimalkin sat beside Tom, staring down into his face while I paced back and forth in agitation, my mind racing with what I had seen. I longed to ask Grimalkin how he was doing, but her expression was forbidding. At last I blurted out my question.

‘Will he get better?’ I asked. ‘Is it possible?’

‘Come here, child,’ Grimalkin told me. ‘Look at this . . .’

I approached the low trestle table where Tom lay. She pulled back the sheet and pointed to the place where the Kobalos’s sabre had transfixed his body. I had seen scales around Tom’s wound before, but now it had closed right up, sealed with scales.

‘It’s a miracle!’ I exclaimed. ‘The angel has restored him to life!’

Grimalkin shook her head, looking nothing like her usual confident self. ‘It was not a miracle and that creature was no angel. In part, the healing came about because of the lamia blood that courses through his veins – something that he inherited from his mother. But he was certainly dead, and restoring him to life required a dark magic so powerful that everyone who witnessed it should be afraid.’

Lamia witches were shape-shifters. In their ‘domestic’ form they had the appearance of human women but for the line of green and yellow scales that ran the length of their spines. In their ‘feral’ shape they scuttled around on all fours with sharp teeth and talons, crunching bones and drinking the blood of their victims.