by Derek Landy
“By making you walk the plank?”
“By getting us stabbed with swords.”
“Oh.”
“You look so disappointed.”
“Naw, it’s fine.”
“We were surrounded, sharpened blades levelled at our hearts, snarling faces—”
“It’s just,” Valkyrie said, “what’s the point of being a pirate and doing pirate stuff if you don’t take advantage of the fact that you have a sea, and you have a plank, and you can make people walk off that plank into that sea? That’s all I’m saying. It seems like it’d be a missed opportunity to do anything else.”
“I think you’ve become overly fixated on the plank.”
“They’re pirates, though. They’re not … highwaymen, or …”
“Can I finish my story?”
Valkyrie sighed. “Sure.”
“Thank you. Where was I?”
“They had you surrounded but obviously you escaped.”
He tilted his head. “Don’t say it like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like that. Dismissively. It was a wonderful escape. There was fighting and swordplay and fireballs and clambering up the rigging and swinging from masts … It was very, very exciting.”
“OK,” said Valkyrie, “so tell me about that.”
“Well … I just did.”
“Oh.”
“Just there.”
“You were right,” Valkyrie said. “It was very exciting.”
He was starting to sound grumpy. “So we fought them until the deadline passed and the curse hit, and that’s the end.”
“How did you get off the ship?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“No, Skulduggery, it does matter. I’m sorry if I ruined your story. Please tell me how it ends.”
He didn’t respond.
“Please?” she asked.
“We jumped off and swam.”
She blinked. “That’s it?”
“It was a long swim. Even with our magic, we could have drowned.”
“OK.”
“I was almost eaten by a shark.”
“Yeah?”
“I mean … it was a small one, but … yes.”
“Didn’t you once tell me that the story of how you met Ghastly wasn’t very exciting at all? And yet it’s full of fighting and escape attempts.”
He shrugged. “We’d just met. I didn’t want to appear to be bragging.”
“Yes,” she said, “because that would have totally given me the wrong impression of you.”
They looked at each other.
“They’re here,” Skulduggery said, and Valkyrie turned to watch a thick fog rolling in.
There was a shape within that fog, a darkness, and that darkness sharpened to a point as a prow burst through the fog and the King’s Fury came after it, a huge ship with black sails and the Jolly Roger fluttering from the highest mast.
“Awesome,” Valkyrie whispered.
The King’s Fury veered away from the pier and Skulduggery wrapped an arm round Valkyrie’s waist and they lifted off the ground. They landed on deck as the ship turned back to open waters, not slowing down even for a moment.
Grizzled ghost pirates stared. Valkyrie could just about see through them. It was weird.
“Captain Dudgeon,” Skulduggery said, nodding to a pirate with a long black beard and a three-cornered hat, “very good to see you again.”
Dudgeon peered at them. “I don’t seem to be understanding,” he said.
Skulduggery tilted his head. “What would be the problem?”
Dudgeon bared his teeth in confusion. The upper row was golden. The lower row was rotten. Valkyrie didn’t want to know how he’d ever eaten anything. “We’re here to facilitate passage for a landlubber named Skulduggery Pleasant and his companion,” Dudgeon said. “At no stage did anyone mention a talking skeleton.”
“Skeletons are bad luck on ships,” said one of the other pirates. “Probably.”
“Throw it over the side,” said another.
“Ah, no,” Skulduggery said. “You see, I am Skulduggery Pleasant. It’s me, captain.”
Dudgeon frowned. “You’re the boy?”
“Indeed I am.”
“What happened to you?”
“I was killed,” Skulduggery said, “and I came back to life without my flesh. Highly unconventional, I grant you, but then I’ve led a highly unconventional life. As have we all, have we not?”
He looked around, nodding to the pirates. They just gazed back.
“You’re alive, then?” Dudgeon asked.
“In a manner of speaking.”
A pirate raised his hand. “How come you don’t fall apart?”
“Magic.”
“And where’s that other fella?” Dudgeon asked. “The scarred fella? Did he change, too?” He looked at Valkyrie. “Did he turn into you?”
“Not quite,” she responded. “My name’s Valkyrie Cain. Thank you for welcoming us on to your fine ship.”
Dudgeon grunted. “Fine ship, indeed. Most feared ship on the seven seas, so it is.”
“I’ve heard. You must be very proud.”
The captain peered at her. “Aye,” he said again, then turned and shouted. “All right, ye scurvy-ridden seadogs! You know where we’re going! Make haste!”
Valkyrie smiled to herself as the ghost pirates hurried back to work all around her. Every now and then, life definitely had a way of delighting her.
“They’re going to kill us, aren’t they?” Valkyrie murmured to Skulduggery two hours later as they stood together on the prow of the ship. The King’s Fury cut through the waves faster than it had any right to, blowing her hair back off her face. She was freezing. Her clothes were damp with sea spray, and she tasted salt on her tongue.
“They’re going to try,” Skulduggery responded.
She sighed. “Are we at least getting close to Nye’s underwater lab?”
“Judging by our speed and our trajectory, we should be approaching the coordinates Caisson gave you as we speak.”
“I just wish we could meet people who didn’t want to attack us all the time.”
“It’s a sad state of affairs, all right.”
She tied her hair into a ponytail. “OK then,” she said, “we may as well get it over with.”
They turned, to face Captain Dudgeon and his crew, their cutlasses already drawn.
“I’d like to say this is entirely unexpected,” Skulduggery announced, “but unfortunately it is not.”
Dudgeon grinned. “Surprised?”
Skulduggery tilted his head. “No. I just … I just said that.”
“When?”
“Just then.”
Dudgeon scowled. “Well, I didn’t hear you.”
“You’re right in front of me.”
“It’s hard to hear every little word over the wind and the sea and the … Anyway, you’ll be wanting to shut up now. You’re our prisoners, and you remember the policy for prisoners on the King’s Fury, don’t you?”
“If I recall correctly, they don’t last long.”
“Right you are,” said Dudgeon. “Over four hundred years ago, you tricked us into an eternity trapped as ghosts. For four hundred years, we’ve been planning our revenge.”
“But … I came to you.”
“And now you’re in our grasp.”
“No,” Skulduggery said, “my point is, in all these four hundred years, you had to wait until I came to you. That’s not very good planning.”
“We didn’t have much of a choice,” Dudgeon snarled. “We were cursed to never again set foot on land. Thanks to you and your scarred friend.”
“You can’t blame Skulduggery and Ghastly for what happened, though,” said Valkyrie. “You got the curse put on yourselves. You spent a year trying, and failing, to find the treasure of whoever.”
“Bravo Cortes,” came a chorus from the pirates.
“In the last, what, eleven days, S
kulduggery and Ghastly may have led you on a wild goose chase, or whatever the nautical equivalent of that is, but if you’re honest with yourselves, you’d have to admit that you wouldn’t have found the treasure anyway.”
“In fact,” Skulduggery chimed in, “because you believed us when we told you we knew where it was hidden, your last few days as mortals were happy ones. We gave you that. We gave you that happiness.”
The pirates frowned. Started muttering amongst themselves. Finally, Dudgeon shook his head.
“No,” he said. “You gave us false hope, and that’s the worst kind of hope there is. It’s entirely possible that we’d have found someone who genuinely knew where the treasure was buried. Instead, we put our faith in two hornswagglers.”
The ghost-pirates repeated that word – hornswagglers – and shook their fists and their cutlasses and generally looked very, very angry. There was no talking their way out of this situation – Valkyrie could see that now. The pirate closest to her looked away to grouch to his friend, and Valkyrie stepped in with a right hook to the jaw.
In theory.
In practice, her fist passed through his head and he jumped back, startled.
Everyone else fell silent.
“You can’t do that!” he shouted. “You can’t just put your hands through me! My body is a sovereign entity!”
Another pirate, a particularly thin one, sighed. “You don’t have a body, Triston.”
“I have the form of one! I have the memory of one!”
“I didn’t mean to put my hand through you,” Valkyrie clarified. “I just meant to punch you. I didn’t know that would happen. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah,” said a pirate from the back of the crowd, “calm down, Triston.”
“Shut up, Bernard!” Triston screeched.
“Please excuse me,” Valkyrie said. “I haven’t had a lot of experience with ghosts. I didn’t know the rules. I’m genuinely sorry.”
Triston took a deep breath, and nodded. “Very well,” he said. “I’m willing to forget this. It was a shock, and it was very distressing, but … but I just want to put it behind me and move on. I forgive you.”
“Thank you,” said Valkyrie.
“Are you both quite finished?” asked Dudgeon. “Because, if you don’t mind, I’d rather like to get to the killing part of the afternoon.”
Valkyrie frowned. “How are you going to kill us if we can’t touch each other?”
Dudgeon smiled an unpretty smile and stepped forward, his finger raised. “You can’t touch us, girly. But we can touch you.” He poked Valkyrie in the chest. She felt it.
“Well,” said Valkyrie, “that hardly seems fair.”
“Life isn’t fair,” said the captain. “Life isn’t designed to be fair. We’re born unequal. Some are strong, some are weak, some fast, some slow, some clever, some not. Some have the luck about them, others wallow in misfortune. Fairness means nothing, and so you must take your opportunities when they present themselves. And I intend to take this opportunity to kill the man who condemned us to this fresh hell.”
Valkyrie raised a hand. “Does that mean I can go?”
Dudgeon considered it. “No.”
“But I wasn’t even there. I had nothing to do with any of this.”
“We’re still going to kill you, though.”
“Aw, man,” Valkyrie muttered.
“Captain!” a pirate yelled from the crow’s nest on the very top of the main mast. “Ship to starboard! Closing fast! It’s the Savagery!”
They all turned. A large patch of impossibly dense fog was moving towards them fast.
“Ah, bugger,” muttered Dudgeon, then he shouted, “Avast ye, lads! Prepare for battle!”
The deck was suddenly a scramble of ghostly bodies, some of them passing through Valkyrie. She shivered every single time.
“The Savagery?” she asked Skulduggery.
“Another cursed ship,” he told her, “captained by a bloodthirsty maniac and crewed by the most merciless killers on the seven seas.”
“I thought the King’s Fury had the most merciless killers on the seven seas.”
He shook his head. “The King’s Fury is the most feared ship. The Savagery has the most merciless killers.”
“Which is worse?”
He shrugged. “Much of a muchness, really.”
The Savagery loomed out of the fog, a great beast with a sharp prow. Her masts were taller than the masts on King’s Fury and she was longer and fatter. Valkyrie could see the leering, screaming faces of the crew and the cutlasses they waved over their heads.
She frowned. “Are they going to hit us?”
The Savagery collided with King’s Fury and Valkyrie was thrown backwards. She slammed against a couple of barrels, her heart lurching as violently as the ship itself. The two ships sailed onwards side by side, ploughing through the waters. Ropes were thrown from the Savagery. Ghost ropes.
The Savagery’s crew boarded. Suddenly the ghost pirates were screaming and shouting and trying to kill each other. Valkyrie watched them fight, watched them hack and slash and stab and swing. It was hard to keep track of it all. She switched on her aura-vision and that was better.
Skulduggery pulled her to her feet, and they dodged between the fighting, those cutlasses coming awfully close. One of the pirates, she couldn’t tell which side he was on, saw her and decided he wanted to kill something made of good old-fashioned flesh and blood. He came for her, and she watched her hand rise, watched her lightning leap from her fingertips and connect with the pirate’s aura. The aura convulsed and exploded into nothingness, taking the pirate with it.
The other pirates stopped fighting. They stared at her. Valkyrie switched off her aura-vision.
“You killed him,” said someone.
“She can’t have,” said someone else. “You can’t kill what’s dead.”
“She did,” a pirate close to her whispered.
Skulduggery stepped forward. “We should probably be leaving now,” he announced. “Captain Dudgeon, thank you for the ride. It was very much appreciated. To everyone else, feel free to get back to the fighting.”
But the pirates weren’t looking at her any more.
Valkyrie turned as something swooped down, bony arms wrapping round her, then heaved her off the deck and away from the ship. She looked down, to the sea churning below, to the long serpent body that disappeared beneath the waves. Long hair, wet and knotted and twisted with seaweed, whipped across her face. Valkyrie pulled one arm free, used it to push herself back, but the creature’s grip was too strong.
A long face appeared between that curtain of hair, old and lined, the cheeks hollow, the nose hooked, the eyes sunken but bright. The Sea Hag gave her a smile of rotting teeth and breath that stank of fish, and then they plummeted into the water.
Oh, it was cold.
She had thought she was cold before, standing on the deck of the King’s Fury. But that was nothing. That was a summer’s breeze compared to this.
The cold surrounded her. It seeped into her. It divided her mind and cleaved her thoughts, then swept them to one side and filled what was left with the cold and the dark and the wet.
Valkyrie focused on what little she could still feel: the arms round her, the body against her. She opened her eyes, but her vision was obscured by dark hair – her own or the Sea Hag’s, she couldn’t tell.
The Sea Hag. From all those years ago.
She turned her head, saw the Hag’s serpent body, long and writhing, coiling into the dark. She saw Skulduggery, moving towards her like a torpedo, but the serpent body convulsed and slammed into him and the Sea Hag pulled Valkyrie away and brought her twisting downwards.
For the first time, she thought about air, and thought about how little of it she had in her lungs.
Her instinct was to struggle and bite, to reach up and plunge her thumb into the Sea Hag’s eye – but the Sea Hag was drowning her, and desperate exertions were only going to use up whatever oxy
gen she had left. So she calmed the hell down, and brought her magic out to play.
Her whole body crackled and the Sea Hag released her in an instant, screaming as she recoiled, and Valkyrie broke away, flying now through the water.
Her lungs burned. She fought the urge to suck in a breath.
She piled on the speed. Any moment now she’d burst into the air. Any moment now. Any moment.
But it was dark. Dark and getting darker.
Dimly, she knew she’d been twisted around, had lost her sense of up and down. But the darkness meant that she was going down, getting deeper.
Valkyrie arched her back, swung her arms up, pulled out of the dive and headed in the opposite direction. The darkness was following her now. It was dark everywhere. Her lungs were steel traps, but they burned, they were on fire, and they were setting off fireworks in her brain.
The crackling faded. She was slowing. Didn’t know where she was.
The crackling stopped. She drifted. The cold came in again, but it was nice this time. It soothed her. It played with her hair and prised at her lungs. Open up. Just a little. After everything she’d done, all the terrible things, all she had to do was open up and let the water in and she wouldn’t have to feel bad any more.
A shape moved in the darkness. Long hair. Serpent tail.
Hands gripped her. A face. A mouth. On hers. A kiss.
Sweet oxygen rushed down her throat to her lungs, inflating them, expanding them. Strength exploded within her, ran to her numb toes and the tips of her tingling fingers. It filled her mind with thoughts.
The kiss broke off. Valkyrie raised her hand and lit it up like a lantern. It wasn’t the Sea Hag who held her but a young woman with soft lips, beautiful eyes and glorious hair. Valkyrie couldn’t help it – she looked down, down past the torso, down to where the hips swelled and the fish tail began.
A fish tail. Not a serpent tail. A fish tail.
A mermaid. A proper mermaid.
