The Spook's Stories: Grimalkin's Tale

hidden pit.
    The moon was high, and as I fell I saw the sharp spikes below waiting to impale me. I twisted desperately, trying to protect my body, but to avoid every spike was impossible. All I could do was contort myself so that only one spike speared into me, inflicting the least damage.
    The least, did I say? It hurt me enough: the spike pierced right through my thigh. Down its length I slid until I hit the ground hard and all the breath left my body, the long blade flying from my hand to lie out of reach.
    I lay there, trying to breathe and control the pain in my leg. The spikes were sharp, thin and very long – more than six feet – so there was no way I could lift my leg and free it. I cursed my folly. I had thought myself safe, but Kernolde had dug another pit – probably the previous night. No doubt she’d been aware of my forays into the dell and had waited until the last moment to add another trap.
    A witch assassin must constantly adapt and learn from her own mistakes. Even as I lay there, facing my imminent death, I recognized my stupidity. I had been too confident and had underestimated Kernolde. If I survived, I swore to temper my attitude with a smidgeon of caution. If …
    The witch assassin’s broad moon-face appeared above and she looked down at me without uttering a word. I was fast and I excelled with blades. I was strong too – but not as strong as Kernolde. Not for nothing did some call her Kernolde the Strangler. Once victorious, Kernolde sometimes hung her victims by their thumbs before slowly asphyxiating them. Not this time though. She had seen what I had achieved already and would take no chances. She would soon put her hands about my throat and squeeze the breath and life from my body. I knew that I would die here.
    She began to climb down into the pit. I was calm and ready to die if need be, but I had already thought of something. I had a slim chance of survival.
    As Kernolde reached the bottom of the pit and began to weave her way towards me through the spikes, flexing her big muscular hands, I prepared myself to cope with pain. Not the pain she would inflict upon me; that which I chose myself.
    My hands were strong; my arms and shoulders capable of exerting extreme leverage. The spikes in the pit were thin but sturdy; flexible, not brittle. But I had to try. From where I lay I could reach only the one that had pierced my leg, so I seized it and began to bend it. Back and forth, back and forth, I flexed and twisted the spike, each movement sending pain shooting down my leg and up into my body. But I gritted my teeth and worked away at the spike, until it finally yielded and broke, coming away in my hands.
    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 towards her. Before her hands could reach my throat I would pierce her heart.
    But the witch assassin had drawn much of her stored magic out of the tree, and now she halted and concentrated, beginning to hurl shards of darkness towards me. First of all she tried dread – that dark spell a witch uses to terrify her enemies, holding them in thrall to fear. Terror tried to claim me and my teeth began to chitter-chatter like those of the dead on the Halloween sabbath.
    Kernolde’s 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 had blown down from the arctic ice when I slew the wolves and left their bodies on the snow.
    Next she used the unquiet dead – the ‘bone-bound’ – against me, hurling towards me the spirits she had trapped in Limbo. They clung to my body, dragging my arm down so that it took all my strength to keep hold of that spike. They were strong and fortified by dark magic – one was a strangler, who 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 was about to 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