China stepped away and Valkyrie turned to the portal. It was taller than she was now. She licked her lips and walked forward. The wind whipped her hair and she could feel the gravitational pull, eager to welcome her. Valkyrie hesitated and then ran, straight into the yellow.
8
CALLING DIBS
Springheeled Jack missed London. He missed its rooftops and its towers and its parapets. He missed the way he could dance, high above it all, watching the people pass below him. He missed the way Londoners sounded as he killed them – like they were offended that anyone would even dare.
Jack hadn’t been home in over a year. They were hunting him there. He’d tried Paris, he’d tried Berlin, and he’d liked them well enough, but he knew he was homesick when he realised the only people he was killing were English tourists. That had sent him into a spiral of depression that lasted months. Finally, in an effort to confront this problem, he had made a list of everyone he viewed as being responsible for his exile, and he marvelled at the way the depression quickly turned to anger. Every name on that list worked for various Sanctuaries around the world, and suddenly Jack’s mission was clear.
Destroy the Sanctuaries.
And now here he was, serendipity be praised, back in Dublin, working with two men he had never expected to share the same space with again, Billy-Ray Sanguine and Dusk. But since Sanguine was no longer palling around with those Faceless Ones nutters, and since his fight with Dusk hadn’t been personal to begin with, Jack was willing to forgive and forget. They were all working towards the same goal after all – revenge on those who had wronged them.
“I want Tanith Low,” he said to that other bloke, Scapegrace, while they were lounging about in the castle.
Scapegrace looked up, startled that anyone was talking to him. “I’m sorry?”
“Tanith Low,” Jack repeated. “Her of the brown leather and the singing sword. I want to be the one to get her.”
“Oh,” Scapegrace said.
“In a way, you know, she’s responsible for me bein’ hunted. She arrested me – put me in that cell where Sanguine found me. If I hadn’t agreed to help him in return for freedom, I’d never have been hunted in the first place.”
“Right,” Scapegrace said.
“What about you then?”
“Me?”
“Who do you want revenge on?”
“Oh, uh, Valkyrie Cain.”
“She’s a popular one to get revenge on. What age is she, fifteen? Fifteen years old and already four people want to kill her.”
“Well,” Scapegrace said, leaning forward, like he was confiding, “she’s responsible for foiling my plans, you see.”
“That so?”
“Oh, yes. I’m an artist. I make murder into art. That’s kind of what I do – that’s my whole thing. And she has repeatedly stopped me from doing that. Also, one time, she beat me up when I was already really badly injured.”
“A fifteen-year-old girl beat you up?”
“When I was badly injured, yes. And she was fourteen at the time.”
“Well, I suppose in the right environment, Elemental magic is hard to defend against.”
“Oh, she didn’t use any magic.”
“So she just…beat you up then?”
“When I was injured, yes.”
“How injured were you?”
“Very.”
“You were very injured?”
“Yes, I was. Have you ever been beaten up by a fourteen-year-old girl?”
“Can’t say I have.”
“It’s not very nice.”
“I wouldn’t say it is.”
“So that’s why I want revenge.”
“Listen, mate, I don’t mean to pick a fight or nothin’, but you call yourself the Killer Supreme, right? Have you ever actually killed anyone?”
Scapegrace erupted into horribly forced laughter, desperate and panicky, and Jack could have sworn he started to blush.
Jack didn’t much care of course. They were here to make up the numbers, to sit here while Scarab and Sanguine called the shots. And then, when it was time, they would strike.
Jack was looking forward to that bit.
9
DEAD NEW WORLD
The sky was red.
The sun, directly above her, was a ball of fire. It was big and hot, and closer than the sun back home.
Once the city would have been impressive. Its inhabitants would have lived in the towering cliff, using the caves as homes, carving doors and windows from the rock, before extending outwards. The stone houses that they built, on top of each other, jutted from the cliff face and reminded Valkyrie of pictures she’d seen of mountain towns in Brazil. She imagined that it had been a city teeming with life, energy and noise, with hundreds of thousands of people packed in together and forced to get along.
It was quiet now though. Quiet and dead.
The portal closed behind her and Valkyrie was in a narrow alley of white, sun-bleached stone that hurt her eyes. She followed the alley down, her footsteps crunching on the cracked ground. She peered into half-crumbled houses as she passed, but every room was empty, stripped bare by the elements and whatever else was around here.
The alley plateaued and opened into a square, and she walked to the middle and turned in a slow circle, scanning her surroundings. She looked up at the cliff face, the sheer size of it finally becoming clear. It wouldn’t have been hundreds of thousands of people living here, she realised – it would have been millions. A thought struck her. She was standing on an alien world.
Despite herself, Valkyrie grinned.
She shook her head. She had a job to do and a limited amount of time to do it in. She walked through a street that led to her right. The street curved and she was walking on sand that had blown in from the vast expanses of the dry valley around the city. The sand was a deep gold.
She walked for a few minutes, careful to move in a relatively straight line so she could be sure of finding her way back. Ghastly had claimed that her clothes would regulate her temperature no matter what, but something wasn’t working. She was perspiring. A trickle of sweat rolled down her face. She took off her coat and left it at a corner as a marker, and felt the sun on her bare shoulders. She opened her top to let the air in, but whatever breeze there may have been was being blocked by the labyrinth of streets. Then she turned another corner and saw the body.
It sat on the ground, propped up against the wall. Its chest was a gaping hole, the insides long since dried up. The head was smooth and featureless. This had been the body of the man called Batu, a body that had been commandeered by the last Faceless One to come through the portal. There was no sign of life in it now though. To the Faceless Ones, human bodies were mere vessels to be used and discarded. Batu’s body was nothing more than a leaky old boat or a rusted car. So much for his masterplan to become a god.
The body was holding something in its right hand, a bone, most of it covered by rags. Valkyrie didn’t want to imagine that it might be one of Skulduggery’s. She was desperate to call out his name, but the idea of breaking this eerie silence repelled her. She didn’t know what else to do though. She could spend months checking this city without finding him. No. No, the portal would have opened somewhere in Skulduggery’s vicinity. He was nearby. He had to be.
Valkyrie headed back the way she’d come, scooping up her coat and walking fast. She got back to the alley where the portal had delivered her. She followed it as far as she could, until the alley led into a cave. She dropped her coat again and summoned a flame into her hand. Then she stepped out of the sun into pitch-black.
As she walked, she saw shelves carved from the walls and a table that had once been a boulder. There were large areas of the cave where she didn’t even need the flame – the windows had been constructed to drink in the sunlight and spread it around. The cave ended at a wall. As Valkyrie turned to go back, she saw a bone in the dirt and beside it stone steps, leading up. She climbed them.
The sun came
in through the three windows along the far wall and Valkyrie let the fire in her hand go out. She stood beside the steps and didn’t move. In the centre of the room a skeleton lay. Its clothes were shredded and hung off the frame that had been constructed to give the illusion of mass. From what she could see, the trouser-legs were empty and the skeleton’s right arm was missing. It lay on its back, its exposed ribcage dirty and covered in dust, and it didn’t move.
Something clutched at Valkyrie’s heart and wouldn’t let go. She made a sound, like a whimper, but when she tried to say his name, she couldn’t. Her first step was uncertain because her legs felt weak. She walked slowly, so very slowly, to the middle of the room.
“Hello?” she whispered. The skeleton lay on the ground and didn’t move.
“It’s me. I’ve come to take you back. Can you hear me? I found you.”
Not even a breeze stirred the ragged clothing.
She knelt by the skeleton. “Please say something. Please. I’ve missed you so much and I’ve worked so hard to find you. Please.”
She reached out to touch him, and Skulduggery Pleasant whipped his head to her and roared, “Boo!”
Valkyrie shrieked and scrambled back, and Skulduggery laughed hysterically, like it was the funniest thing he had ever seen. He was still laughing when she got to her feet, and when she glared at him, he laughed even harder. Eventually, with bouts of laughter still rattling his bones, Skulduggery propped himself up on the only elbow he had left.
“Oh, dear,” he said. “Now I’m deriving amusement from scaring my hallucinations. This can’t be good for me, psychologically speaking.”
“I’m not a hallucination.”
He looked up at her. “Yes, you are, my dear, but I wouldn’t worry about it. Being a hallucination is a state of mind, I always say.”
“Skulduggery, I’m real.”
“That’s the spirit.”
“No, I mean I’m really real, and I’ve come to take you home.”
“You’re an odd one. Usually my hallucinations do a lot more singing and dancing.”
“It’s me. It’s Valkyrie.”
“You’d be surprised how many figments of my imagination say that. You don’t happen to have an imaginary chessboard with you, do you? I’ve had a hankering to play for a while now, and since you’re an aspect of my personality, you’d probably be a worthy opponent.”
“How do I prove to you that I’m real?”
This made him pause. “Intriguing. It’s not as if you can tell me something only we would know because if I know it, my hallucination would know it. But, in the theoretical extension of that approach, if you were to tell me something only you would know, then that would prove to me that I’m not conjuring you up in my mind.”
“So…what will I tell you? My deepest, darkest secret? My earliest memory? My ultimate fear?”
“How about what you had for breakfast this morning?”
“Honey Loops.”
“Well, there you go.”
“So now you believe I’m real?”
“Not in the slightest. I may have just made that up.”
“I found your skull – the one the goblins took. Fletcher used it as an Isthmus Anchor to open the portal and I came through to take you back.”
“My skull?”
“It makes sense, doesn’t it? It’s possible, right?”
“It’s…very possible actually.”
“Did you think of it? Did you imagine your skull could be used as an Anchor?”
“I didn’t, but then I have been preoccupied by the torture and the lack of good conversation.”
“So if this is something that you hadn’t thought of yet, how could I come up with it if I were just a figment of your imagination?”
“Well,” Skulduggery said slowly, “you could be a figment of my subconscious.”
“I’m not your subconscious. I’m Valkyrie. I’m real. And I’m here to rescue you.”
“If you can get me my limbs back, I’ll believe you.”
“Fine,” Valkyrie said, looking around the cave.
He spoke to her as she searched. “To be honest, I’ve given up hope of ever being rescued, so this entire scenario is kind of redundant. No offence meant. At first, I thought some of the survivors might come for me, but I’ve reconciled myself to the fact that they’re all dead by now.”
“Survivors?” Valkyrie echoed. She picked up a leg, fully intact, and brushed off the dust before handing it to him.
“There were survivors when I arrived,” he told her, fixing the femur to his hip in that convenient, yet obviously painful, way of his. “This was the last world the Faceless Ones reached and they took their time with it. I got to know a couple of people before they were killed and I was captured. It took me a while to learn their language, but from what they told me, this was once a world full of magic. Then, 300 years ago, the Faceless Ones appeared.”
“But the Faceless Ones were expelled from our reality thousands of years ago.” Valkyrie went down the stone steps to the bone she’d glimpsed earlier. This was his other leg, and she scooped up a handful of what appeared to be toes.
“Ah, but this isn’t where the Faceless Ones were exiled to,” Skulduggery said as she came back up. “The Ancients expelled them from our world and forced them into a barren dimension. But the Faceless Ones escaped and tore through the walls of reality to a universe teeming with life. Over time, they decimated that universe, killing everyone, destroying suns, laying waste to whole galaxies. And when they were finished, they moved on.”
She gave him the pieces of his leg. “To another reality?”
“One after another, snuffing each one out as they searched for their way back home. 300 years ago they arrived here, and could go no further. They’ve been looking for a way off ever since.”
“Oh my God…”
“And all this time we thought the Ancients had exiled them to where they could do no harm. Countless trillions of beings, Valkyrie, killed because of us.”
She didn’t respond.
“If you’re real,” he said, “I know what you’re feeling. Guilt, yes? A tremendous sense of awful responsibility for something you had no part of. That was my reaction when I first heard the story. I didn’t know what to do. Maybe send each reality a card, with a little apology? Then, when the Faceless Ones found us and killed the others and took me, I finally realised that nothing good could come from pointless remorse and I got over it. The constant torture proved to be a good distraction.”
“Are you…OK?”
“Not even remotely.” He paused, halfway through putting his leg back together. “They haven’t killed me, and they haven’t taken my magic away, because every day they hunt me. They take turns, I think, in inhabiting Batu’s body. They track me down, I fight back, they win easily and they tear me apart. Yesterday, for instance, they pulled off my legs and wandered off with one of my arms. They leave me overnight to put myself back together, so that they can hunt me down again with their pets the next day. It is, as you can imagine, oodles of fun.”
“Well, all that’s over now. We have half an hour before the portal opens again and we’re going through. Come on.”
He looked up at her. “I’m missing an arm.”
“So?”
“You wouldn’t say that if it were your arm. I’m not going anywhere without my arm. Fetch me my limb and I’ll go through the imaginary portal with you.”
“Well, you can help me look for it,” Valkyrie said and reached for him. Her hand hit an invisible wall. “What is this?”
“Something I’ve been working on,” he replied smugly. “I’ve had a lot of time with nothing to concentrate on but magic. The Faceless Ones have no problems getting through this little wall of air, but for figments of my imagination like yourself, it’s quite tough. I’ve also taught myself a couple of other new tricks.”
“So you’re going to sit here while I do all the work?”
“Indeed I am. If I were you,
I’d find the body that used to be Batu’s. If the arm is anywhere, it’s there.”
“Yes, I saw it. It’s outside, down a couple of streets. We could walk there and still be back in plenty of time for the portal.”
“And if you run, you’ll get it to me sooner.”
Valkyrie sighed and left him while he finished putting his leg back together, and a muttered rendition of ‘Dry Bones’ followed her down the steps. She hurried out to the red sky and retraced her path, guided by her footsteps in the sand. She wished she had a pair of sunglasses to offset the glare. Her arms were rapidly turning red under the sun, and she wondered how she’d explain sunburn in September to her parents.
The body sat where she had left it, head down and lifeless. She ran her tongue over her lower lip while she debated the best way to go about this, and then she kicked it in the head. When it didn’t try and grab her, she bent down, pulled Skulduggery’s arm from its clutches and then her ears popped. She staggered, feeling the goosebumps ripple. The inside of her mouth was tight, dry skin and her beating heart was the drum it was stretched across. She stumbled over the body and fell, and now she was crawling. Her head was filled with deafening whispers.
The Faceless Ones were coming.
10
BLOOD AND BULLETS
China knew when someone was staring at her. It was a sense she’d honed over the last few hundred years, as precise as it was useless. People were always staring at her, after all.
She glanced around and Fletcher looked away, embarrassed.
“How long do you think she’ll be?” he asked.
China didn’t answer. She didn’t do small talk. He shrugged and nodded then stuffed his hands in his pockets. He all but started to whistle.
If she bothered with idle conversation, she would have told the poor boy that this thing with Valkyrie was never going to go anywhere, not when Skulduggery got back. Valkyrie’s life revolved around Skulduggery now – she was caught in his orbit, and someone like Fletcher didn’t stand a chance.
Skulduggery and Valkyrie were meant for each other. China could see that now. They were meant to find each other, to form this bond and to affect each other’s lives. The best the boy could hope for, the best anyone could hope for, would be to stand in the wings and look on.