Spook's: The Dark Army (The Starblade Chronicles) (26 page)

Tom nodded, and we started knocking on doors. The first was opened by a man who actually raised his fist at us. I could hear children crying upstairs, and a woman trying to soothe them.

‘There’s danger,’ Tom said. ‘We’re evacuating the village. Get your family to the square. We’re moving in ten minutes.’

‘Danger? What danger? What nonsense is this? I know you – you’re the lad who used to work for old Mr Gregory.’

Tom pointed across the cobbled street to the burly blacksmith, head and shoulders lit by the lantern he was holding above his head.

‘It’s the smith’s orders. Everybody must assemble now!’ Tom said. ‘If you stay here, you could all be slain in your beds!’

Waiting no longer, we moved on while the man just gaped after us.

Some villagers obeyed us without question, but if anyone argued, we just pointed to the square and moved on to the next door. There was no time to waste arguing. They soon got the message, because the square was now full of people shouting and crying in terror.

It was almost fifteen minutes before they were all gathered there: walking back, we heard them arguing among themselves. As we approached, they turned towards us and the smith raised his arm for silence and spoke.

‘Some of you will know this young man. If you don’t, he’s Tom Ward, who was apprenticed to Mr Gregory for over four years, helping to keep this village safe. Now he’s the local Spook and is continuing his good work. He warns of a threat from the east; enemy soldiers who intend to kill us all. So we are leaving now – heading west down the valley! Try to keep up, but we’ll move at the pace of the slowest. Nobody will be left behind.’

I assumed that we’d go with them, but Tom had other ideas. ‘We need to buy time for them to get away,’ he told the smith. ‘I intend to try and hold them off.’

‘I’ll stay with you,’ said the smith. ‘I’m sure I can persuade a few of the lads to fight as well.’

‘No – it’s better if you lead the others away. Take them as far as possible. If the enemy get past me, you might have to fight anyway. Trust me on this, please. We’re not just facing enemy soldiers – we’re dealing with the dark here, and that’s my job. But please take my apprentice with you.’

I could see that the smith didn’t like it, but he nodded in agreement.

‘No! I want to go with you!’ I protested.

‘Jenny, just do as you’re told. It’s better that you stay safe.’

‘But I’m supposed to
share
the danger. That’s what an apprentice does.’

‘Not this time. This is different. You’d only be in the way.’

I was stung by this remark – but before I could protest, Tom had nodded to the blacksmith, who immediately grabbed me by the arm. Before I could object, Tom was striding off towards the east and I was being dragged in the opposite direction.

But ten minutes later, the smith had to let go of my arm, distracted by a man who’d twisted his ankle and couldn’t walk. He picked him up like a child and slung him over his shoulder.

That was my chance. I slipped away into the darkness and ran. I went east. I had to help Tom. I couldn’t let him fight alone.

It took me another ten minutes to find him. He was still some way ahead of me, skirting a small wood, holding the Starblade in both hands. Suddenly three figures emerged from the trees, heading straight for him. Judging by their size and gait, they were Kobalos warriors. I was about to call out a warning, but Tom had already spotted them, and changed direction to meet them head on.

I watched as he began the dance of death, whirling and spinning, the Starblade flashing in the moonlight. Tom quickly cut down the first of his enemies, displaying all his old strength and skill. He seemed to be fully recovered at last.

Within seconds another of the Kobalos gave a terrible high-pitched scream and was brought to his knees. Tom now seemed to be in control of the situation – but then I heard guttural shouts of command: dozens of Kobalos warriors burst out of the trees and ran full pelt towards him.

After scything down the third warrior, Tom turned on his heel and sprinted away. I was frozen to the spot in horror, for there must have been at least forty of them streaming out of the trees. He couldn’t fight so many. Had he appreciated the size of the threat? If so, why had he come here alone – to sell his life in order to buy time for the villagers to escape?

I knew that I couldn’t help him, but I wasn’t going to leave him to die alone. I began to run after him. The warriors hadn’t seen me yet, but eventually I’d be noticed and they’d come for me too. Maybe they’d split up, but there would still be far too many of them to cope with.

He was now heading directly towards what the locals called the ‘lunk stone’ – an ancient standing stone at the very top of a small hill. There were a lot of such stones in the area. Tom had told me that they had been there long before the first houses were built in Chipenden – maybe even before the first farms; built at a time when people were just hunters and gatherers.

He climbed the small hill and stood to the right of the stone, then turned to face his enemies, holding the sword in his right hand. Did he intend to make a stand there? The Kobalos would have to climb to reach him, so he had some sort of advantage.

I was still running towards him, but I was now converging with our enemies. At any moment one of them might glance across and see me.

It was then that Tom called out. I thought he was shouting at the Kobalos, who were closing on him fast. Then he shouted again – a single word, snatched away by the wind before I could identify it. But as I approached, I heard the word clearly:

‘
Kratch!
’

I suddenly realized what he was attempting to do. He was next to the standing stone, which would be on a ley line. Boggarts used such hidden lines of power to travel from place to place in the twinkling of an eye. He was summoning the boggart from the garden.

Suddenly it appeared on his right. It was the cat boggart that cooked the breakfast and protected the house and garden. Most of the time it was invisible, but I’d caught occasional glimpses of it: it resembled a large tom cat with ginger fur – but now it was utterly transformed.

It was an immense entity, glowing with power; even on all fours it came up to Tom’s shoulders. Two enormous fangs curved down, their sharp points protruding below its jaw. Its ginger fur stood up on end and its right eye glinted red like fire. Now it bounded towards its prey. Some of the Kobalos warriors tried to turn and run, but it was too fast.

It sent the first two or three flying with swipes from its gigantic paws. Another was seized in its jaws and bitten in half. Then it seemed to dissolve and became a great spinning tornado of fire and energy that smashed into the warriors; the air was filled with blood and fragments of bone, and the screams and wails of its victims.

The central mass of the attackers was destroyed in seconds; then the vortex of fire began to pursue individual warriors as they fled back towards the trees. Not one survived.

I watched as it turned back towards us, and then my stomach started to knot with fear. The orange vortex was heading directly for me. It thought I was an enemy: it would reduce me to fragments and absorb every last drop of my blood. I stood there, terrified, frozen to the spot.

I heard Tom call out the boggart’s name once more, but nothing could stop it now. It was almost upon me, a maelstrom of fire and energy; I felt its heat against my face. I closed my eyes and waited to die.

Suddenly a gust of warm air swept over me; a breath tainted with blood. Then there was only silence, and I heard the wind whistling through the trees.

I opened my eyes. The boggart was gone, and Tom was walking towards me, looking anything but pleased.

‘Are you never going to learn to listen and obey?’ he demanded angrily as we headed after the villagers. ‘When I said you’d be in the way, I meant exactly that. The boggart is dangerous – it could have killed you as well. It was full of blood-lust. You were lucky it listened to me; lucky that it recognized you at the very last moment.’

We walked on in a silence that soon became uncomfortable. I asked a question to bring it to an end.

‘Tell me a bit more about how you found out about the attack on the village.’

‘It’s one of my gifts. Do you remember how I was able to track that vartek last August – the one that was heading for Topley village? It was the same process. I woke up in the middle of the night and knew that something was wrong and where the threat was. I suppose their mages were using the space between worlds to bring warriors directly into the County. I located the copse where they were starting to assemble but wasn’t certain about their target. Was it our Chipenden house, or the village itself? Initially I wasn’t sure.

‘At last I decided that it had to be the village. You see, Lukrasta once showed me a terrible vision of the future. In it I had arrived too late to help, and everybody in the village had been slaughtered. I was with the blacksmith when he died. So I planned all along to use the boggart. All I had to do was lure them to the ley line where it could reach me.’

‘I would have thought Slither and Grimalkin would have given us an earlier warning,’ I said.

‘They can’t find out everything,’ Tom replied. ‘And it’s been a long time since we last had any contact with them. Things could be going very badly.’

THE FOLLOWING EVENING
Alice returned from Pendle. She and Tom were clearly glad to see each other: they hugged for a long time, talking in low voices so that I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Then they went into the kitchen and Tom beckoned me to follow.

‘Alice is going to use a mirror to communicate with Grimalkin. Witches do this all the time. This is a chance for you to see it in action.’

It surely wasn’t right for a spook to be involved in witch practices like this, but we did need to know what was happening, and this was part of my training – something I needed to see. So I moved closer to the table, and we sat facing the kitchen fire. Outside, the weather had turned cold. Last night there’d been a heavy frost.

Alice had already set up the mirror from the room where we washed. I was quite large – about a foot square. She placed her left palm against the glass and began to mutter under her breath. No doubt it was some sort of spell. Nothing happened, and she removed her hand from the glass and breathed on her palm before replacing it.

This time, almost immediately, the mirror began to brighten. She removed her hand again, and suddenly Grimalkin was staring out at us. Her face looked haggard and there was a smear of blood across her forehead. She kept going out of focus, the image jerky and flickering.

Alice leaned forward and breathed gently upon the mirror until it became misty, and then began to write on it:

The mirror slowly cleared and the words disappeared, but then I saw Grimalkin’s mouth move close to the mirror and the image became misty again. Then she quickly began to write.

I couldn’t make out a word of it, but Tom smiled at the puzzlement on my face.

‘Grimalkin is writing normally,’ he said, ‘but the mirror is presenting her words to us backwards. I’ve had a bit of practice, so I can read it easily enough. Grimalkin says that Golgoth is striking from the Round Loaf up on Anglezarke Moor and that the Kobalos mages are making that possible.