I didn’t want the same thing to happen to me now. I prepared to use my magic again, but Thorne had other ideas.
‘Stay behind me, Alice!’ she commanded. Then she stepped forward to face the kretch.
To my astonishment, she kicked off her pointy shoes and, balancing on one leg, reached up with her left foot for the leather straps that crisscrossed her body. Gripping the hilt with her toes, she drew a blade from its sheath.
The kretch was bounding directly towards her now, eyes full of anger and hate, teeth ready to rend her body. Thorne kicked out savagely, and the blade flew from her toes, skittering across the forehead of the beast, missing its eye by a whisker. She changed legs, now balancing on the left. This time the toes of her right foot selected a blade.
I admired her calmness. The kretch was almost upon her now, but the second blade sped from her foot and buried itself up to the hilt in the beast’s left eye – right on target. It gave a roar of pain and reared up onto its hind legs, trying to tug the dagger out of its eye-socket. It was then that Thorne despatched a third blade and found the other eye.
Blood was running down the creature’s face, matting the fur and dripping from its chin. Blinded, it slashed wildly at the girl, but she was no longer there. Howling with rage and pain, it lost its balance and fell off the path. The scream faded as it plunged into the abyss, getting fainter and fainter until it could no longer be heard.
I looked for Thorne to ask if we could be sure that the kretch was gone . . . But she was already running past me and sprinting onwards. ‘Quickly! That could bring its father, the daemon Tanaki, after us!’
We ran at full pelt down the path, Thorne carrying her shoes in her mutilated left hand. I was impressed by her despatch of the kretch, but from what she’d just said we were now in even greater danger. Tanaki might arrive in the blink of an eye: we had to reach the next set of tunnels.
Another cliff face was now in sight, the path disappearing into a cave once more. As we approached it, we heard a sound that became more worrying and scary with every step we took. It began as a low rumble, but quickly grew in volume and intensity, until the small white stones on the path were shaking, juddering and jumping.
‘Those sounds – that’s Tanaki!’ cried Thorne. ‘He’s big – really big – and the nearer he comes, the louder they will get!’
By now even the teeth in my head were vibrating. Then the vault of darkness above was suddenly sundered by blue-white lightning. The deafening crash of thunder was simultaneous.
‘Run! Run!’ Thorne shouted, sprinting ahead. ‘That lightning means he’s almost here!’
Tanaki was still out of sight, but I sensed him getting closer and closer, and I ran at Thorne’s heels feeling that he might appear at any second.
But soon, to my relief, we gained the refuge of a cave mouth once more.
‘We’re safe for now,’ Thorne said, falling to her knees. ‘Tanaki never gives up, though. Each time we walk the path between domains he will be hunting us.’
THORNE LOOKED EXHAUSTED, and the blood still dripped where her thumbs had been. She tried to stand, but her legs buckled under her and she sat down again. ‘Sorry, but it looks like I need to rest up for a while. That took a lot out of me,’ she said.
‘Ain’t no problem. You rest until you feel better. That was a good trick throwing knives with your feet!’ I told her.
Thorne stared at me for a moment. ‘I’ve had to teach myself to do that. I can grip daggers with my fingers, but not half as well as I could when I had thumbs. It’s painful too – makes it hard to concentrate. But I was trained by Grimalkin and she taught me to improvise and never give up.’
‘Must have been good to be taught by the witch assassin,’ I said. ‘I drew the short straw – Bony Lizzie taught me, and I had to endure two years of cruelty and misery!’
‘I could never abide her,’ Thorne said.
‘Me neither!’ I exclaimed with a smile.
‘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.’