Not only that. She was a girl, and as far as I knew there were no precedents for a female apprentice spook. It might cause all sorts of problems. And who knew what powers a seventh daughter of a seventh daughter possessed? I had been hasty in taking her on—perhaps I’d done so to make up for almost getting her killed by the Kobalos. I knew that she could hide and make herself difficult to detect, but did she have any immunity to witchcraft? Could she really hear the dead and talk to them, as she’d claimed?
To tell the truth, my feelings were mixed. Although I had no evidence that she really was a seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, I had expected her to pass the test. In my mind I had gotten used to the idea of her being my apprentice. I was lonely—that came with the job, of course, but since my master died I’d been completely alone. Alice had left us and gone to the dark for good. I would have liked to have someone else living in the house again; someone to work with. I remembered something Alice had once said to me, back in the first year of my apprenticeship: “One day this house will belong to us, Tom. Don’t you feel it?”
A lump came into my throat as I heard her utter those words again. Loneliness was a terrible thing, I reflected.
When Jenny first told me her name, I had been stunned, taken back to the vision of the future I’d been given by the mage . . . of the new name added to the list on my bedroom wall in the Chipenden house.
Jenny.
I shrugged in annoyance. Scrying did not always foretell the future accurately. The future could be changed with each decision we made, with every step we took or failed to take.
Jenny’s steps had been in the wrong direction—away from the cellar. She had failed the test, and now her name would never be written on that wall.
Whatever the future might bring, I remembered with a curse that Jenny still had the tinderbox that Dad had given me. I wanted it back. If she didn’t return it, at some point I would have to return to Grimsargh to collect it.
The next two days were quiet. Nobody rang the bell at the withy trees crossroads. So while waiting for Grimalkin to return, I spent my time on routine business. I put in some hours of practice with my chain and staff, determined to get my skills back up to their former level, and taking out my annoyance with Jenny on the tree stump.
I also started to read the Spook’s notebooks again, in case I’d missed any mention of the Kobalos. There was only the short section in the Bestiary, but it comforted me to read my master’s words and to hear his voice in my head.
John Gregory had written and illustrated the Bestiary himself, and now I read his final words about the loss by fire of his beloved library and the books it contained; books that were a bequest from past spooks to those yet to ply their trade.
Now I have had time to reflect, and I am filled with renewed strength and determination. My fight against the dark will continue. One day I will rebuild the library, and this book, my personal Bestiary, will be the first to be placed upon its shelves.
John Gregory of Chipenden
Before he had died in battle, my master had made good that promise. He had rebuilt the house and library. Unfortunately, as yet, there were precious few books restored to those new wooden shelves. That would be my task. During my lifetime as a spook, in addition to fighting the dark, I would endeavor to restock the Chipenden library.
It was early in the morning of the third day after Jenny had fled that Grimalkin arrived. I heard her call through the trees and went to the edge of the garden to escort her through to the house and tell the boggart that she was here with my permission.
She’d arrived on horseback, and after taking a large envelope from her saddlebag, she left the animal grazing in the western garden. She greeted me curtly, and we walked toward the house in silence.
The witch assassin looked much as she had when I first met her. As usual, leather straps crisscrossed her body, holding a large number of blades. There were a few bloodstains on her clothes, but I doubted very much that they were her own.
“Is the leg giving you any problems?” I asked her.
Her left leg had been badly broken when she was attacked by the servants of the Fiend. It had been fixed with a silver pin that, although it restored that limb to its previous strength, gave her continual pain.
“Why do you ask?”
“The horse,” I said. “At one time you used to walk or run everywhere.”
She shook her head. “The leg gives me pain but functions as well as it ever did. I need the horse because recently it has been necessary to cover long distances faster than is possible on foot.”
I nodded, wondering where her latest journeys had taken her, but she didn’t elaborate. What she did as a witch assassin was her business.
I led her into the kitchen. “Are you hungry?” I asked.
“Water will suffice for now.”
I poured her a large cup of water and she drank it down quickly.
“Did you bury the creature?” she asked.
“No, because I thought you’d want to see it. I left it inside its lair.”
“It will be stinking by now—but yes, you were right not to do so. I want to examine it. Is it far from here?”
“About forty-five minutes by foot.”
“Then let’s waste no further time. How did you kill it?”
“With the sword you gave me. The beast had powerful dark magic. It shrank in size and slipped out of my silver chain. I was helpless against it. It paralyzed me for a while, but I managed to escape and ran back to get the sword.”
“You dug it up out of John Gregory’s grave?”
I bowed my head. “I had no choice. The creature held a girl captive. It was drinking her blood and would eventually have killed her.”
“You needed the sword just to survive, then. . . . It sounds as though you were dealing with a very rare type of Kobalos. You were a fool to bury the sword in the first place,” Grimalkin said bluntly. “I expected better of you.”
I did not reply. I knew that she was right.
“If it is who I think it is,” she continued, “you were lucky to prevail, even using the sword.”
“You know the creature?”
“Perhaps. I will find out soon enough. Here.” She placed the envelope on the table. “This is a copy of a document that your master once had in his possession. It is a glossary of information about the Kobalos, collated by an ancient spook called Nicholas Browne. I suggest you study it closely.”