Last Stand of Dead Men

by Derek Landy

  “Ow,” said Myosotis Terra.

  “Sorry,” Valkyrie said, breathing hard and grinning as they circled each other.

  Myosotis came in low then switched high with a kick that turned out to be a feint. When Valkyrie swerved to avoid it, Myosotis spun, her foot crashing into Valkyrie’s legs. She hit the ground and Myosotis dropped on to her. They rolled. Myosotis found her back and Valkyrie tried to turn into her, but the choke was on and Valkyrie had no choice but to tap.

  They sat up. Valkyrie wiped the sweat away.

  “Are you all right?” Myosotis asked. Valkyrie had known her for years, but only remembered her when she was in sight. A handy trick for a thief and a spy. Not so handy for maintaining friendships. “You don’t seem like your usual self.”

  “I’m fine,” Valkyrie said. “Well, maybe I’m still a little annoyed that that Ivy girl beat the hell out of me.”

  “Ah.” Myosotis smiled. “Wounded pride.”

  “No, it’s not that, it’s … Well, OK, maybe it is that. But I’m supposed to be the cool one. I’m the youngest, the strongest, the most special …”

  “And then this little upstart,” said Myosotis, “this little neureiche, comes in and shows you up by being younger and stronger and cooler than you.”

  “Well,” Valkyrie said, frowning, “I don’t know about cooler …”

  “Face it, Val,” Myosotis said, lying back on the training mat. “You’re getting old.”

  “Shut up. I’m only eighteen.”

  “And she’s seventeen. You’re over the hill. Yesterday’s news.”

  “I swear to God, the only reason I’m not pounding your face into smush right now is because I’d hate to embarrass you in your home country.”

  Myosotis laughed. They got up, used the hotel showers, and Valkyrie went to look for Skulduggery. He was heading to Ravel’s makeshift office when she found him.

  “You look freshly scrubbed,” he said as she fell into step.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Just had a workout.”

  “Did Myosotis kick you around the place again?”

  She frowned. “Who?”

  Ravel looked up when they walked in. Skulduggery took a seat. “You look dreadful.”

  Valkyrie glared. “Skulduggery. Be positive.”

  “Sorry,” said Skulduggery. “You look positively dreadful.”

  Ravel gave the briefest of smiles. “You know, I’m starting to think I may be in over my head here.”

  “Really? You?”

  “Do you think I am?”

  “I’m going to be polite and encouraging, and say it doesn’t matter what I think.”

  “Skulduggery,” Valkyrie said.

  “No,” Ravel said, “he’s right. I was never meant to be Grand Mage. Corrival Deuce was. He would have been a great Grand Mage. This wouldn’t have happened if he were in charge.”

  “If only he hadn’t been bludgeoned to death by a Remnant,” said Skulduggery.

  Ravel winced. “Don’t say bludgeoned. He was struck once on the head.”

  “And it killed him,” said Skulduggery. “And that counts as a bludgeoning.”

  “But bludgeoning makes it sound a lot more violent than it actually was. When I think about it, I like to think that he was taken by surprise. That he never even knew what hit him.” Ravel sighed. “He was a good man. I learned so much during the years I spent at his side. The people he met with … sorcerers who hated mortals, who wanted to rule over them, who wanted to enslave them … Corrival would meet and talk and listen and by the end he’d almost have them convinced that the only way forward was to step even further back into the shadows. I used to just stand there and watch in amazement. If he had lived, I’d say we’d already be in the middle of discussions on how to effectively curb the use of magic in our day-to-day lives.”

  Valkyrie made a face. “I don’t much like the sound of that.”

  Ravel smiled. “Corrival would have convinced you. Magic, he used to say, should only be used to protect the mortals. And look at us now. Will any of us even think about the mortals until this war is over?”

  “Now that you’ve broached the subject,” said Skulduggery, and let his words hang.

  “Our friends in Australia and Africa don’t know what to do. They’re … panicking, I suppose. Angry. Scared. They don’t want to hold elections – they want to hit something. They’ve asked me to appoint interim Elders from within their Sanctuaries until all this is over.”

  “The files?”

  Ravel lifted a folder from the pile and let it fall again. “All likely candidates. We know most of them. Some are astonishingly ill-suited to the task, but others are … possibilities. Ghastly’s helping me go through them, but it’s …”

  “It’s not what you signed up for,” Skulduggery finished.

  “We’re finding it hard enough to run our own Sanctuary. And now they want us to help run theirs? The new Elders, whoever they end up being, won’t have half the experience of Ubuntu or Karrik. They’ll be looking to us for leadership and we’ll be … flailing around, trying to look like we know what we’re doing.”

  “You’ve managed to be pretty convincing so far.”

  “I’ve led us into a war.”

  “But you’ve done it convincingly. The best thing to do now is probably let the dust settle for a few days, see how everything lies—”

  “No,” Ravel said.

  Skulduggery tilted his head. “No what?”

  “No, I can’t let you go. That’s what you’re going to say, right? You want a few days off so you can look deeper into this Warlock activity? The killings in Africa? I can’t spare you. Either of you. Not at this stage. Things are too … unstable.”

  “If the Warlocks attack,” Valkyrie said, “things are going to get a lot worse.”

  “We don’t know that they will attack. We don’t know that they even want to attack. The last time Charivari was even seen was a hundred years ago.”

  Skulduggery nodded. “When he killed an entire town for the death of one Warlock.”

  Ravel frowned. “You sound like you have something to say.”

  “Someone has been killing Warlocks, Erskine. Dozens of them, over the last five years. If Charivari killed a town for one, what will he do for dozens?”

  “Who’s killing them?”

  “All the evidence points to Department X.”

  “Department X doesn’t exist.”

  “I didn’t say they did. I just said all the evidence points to them.”

  “So … Someone’s setting up a non-existent organisation?”

  “A non-existent mortal organisation.”

  Ravel closed his eyes. “Oh, this just gets better. Dare I ask who is setting up the mortals?”

  “The Torment.”

  Ravel cracked one eye open. “He’s still dead, right?”

  “Yes, but his associates aren’t. We’re looking for a mystery man who associates with Mist and other unsavoury characters.”

  “And why the hell am I only hearing about this now?”

  Skulduggery shrugged. “You’ve had a war to blunder through. We didn’t want to burden you unnecessarily.”

  “But now you’ve decided to burden me anyway? Thanks. So where did you want to go?”

  “I got a message from China,” Valkyrie said. “A Warlock’s been spotted in Africa.”

  “Africa’s a big place.”

  “Mozambique.”

  “Mozambique is a big place.”

  “This Warlock, we think it might have been Charivari himself. He killed eighteen sorcerers.”

  Ravel blinked. “Eighteen?”

  “Sixteen African, plus two foreign. We think they were Supreme Council operatives.”

  “Do you have any idea where you’d even start looking?”

  “We’re detectives,” Skulduggery said. “We follow the trail.”

  “And how long would that take? I can’t let you go. You know I can’t let you go. If you didn’t already
know it, you’d be convincing me right now to let you go. But you’re not, so …”

  “The Warlocks are a threat, Erskine. And someone from Roarhaven is luring them towards the mortals, using Department X as bait. It’s tied up in this war somehow, we just haven’t figured out how yet.”

  “Please don’t tell me we have to go to war with Roarhaven.”

  “Not yet. Look, if you can’t send us, send someone else. Either way, we need to—”

  The door opened and Ghastly walked in, lips set in a straight line. “They’ve taken the bait,” he said. “Mantis is attacking the Keep.”

  letcher arrived in the lab as Nye and Clarabelle were manoeuvring the Engineer up to a standing position. Alarms wailed.

  “Where are the others?” Fletcher asked, making Nye jerk round, its small yellow eyes opening wide.

  “Do not do that!” it said. “I have a delicate heart!”

  “That it keeps in a jar on its desk,” Clarabelle whispered loudly.

  Nye glared at her, then looked back at Fletcher. “The Monster Hunters and Mr Maybury have not reached us yet. Perhaps we should teleport without them. They may very well be dead.”

  “Or we could wait a minute,” Clarabelle suggested.

  “What about the Engineer?” Fletcher asked. “Is it working?”

  “I am, Mr Fletcher,” the Engineer said. “Fully functioning and mobile. How are you?”

  “I’m good,” Fletcher muttered, hurrying to the door and peeking out. “Everyone stay here,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

  He took off running, hearing now the sounds of explosions over the alarm. There were Hollow Men up ahead, shuffling quickly for the exit, eager in their own way to join the fight. Fletcher got to a cracked window. Through the clouds of green gas he saw stumbling figures and flashes of coloured energy, and then a dark shape ran straight at him.

  He ducked back as Gracious came smashing through the glass, landing in a spectacularly bad roll/sprawl combo. Donegan jumped through next, followed by Maybury. All three of them were coughing, with tears streaming from their eyes.

  “They’ve taken the bait,” Donegan wheezed. “We should probably go.”

  They linked arms and Fletcher teleported them back to the lab, where he collected Clarabelle and Nye and the Engineer and then they were outside in the fresh air, down the other end of the valley, right where Fletcher had teleported the Dead Men and their army a mere two minutes earlier.

  Skulduggery looked round. “You took your time.”

  “Our fault,” Gracious coughed. “We wanted to see how many of the enemy we could take down before we had to retreat.”

  Valkyrie walked over. “How many did you manage?”

  “I didn’t get any,” Gracious said. “Donegan, you almost took down that tall guy, didn’t you?”

  Donegan was too busy coughing to answer.

  “But then the tall guy started hitting you, so you stopped and ran away. Maybury?”

  Maybury pressed his fingertips against his closed eyelids. “I was going right for Mantis, but then that bloody gas got in my eyes and, I don’t know, some massive bloke reared up in front of me. I hit him but I swear, it was like hitting a wall.”

  Gracious nodded. “You hit a wall.”

  Maybury blinked at him. “I what?”

  “I saw it. You ran into a cloud of gas and stumbled around for a second until you reached a wall, and then you shrieked and punched it. It was very heroic.”

  Fletcher moved away from them, looked up the valley towards the Keep. Hundreds of sorcerers, just realising they’d been had.

  Valkyrie stood beside him. “Scary sight, isn’t it?”

  “They’ve got an army up there.”

  She shrugged. “We’ve got an army down here. Skulduggery expects them to hunker down in the Keep for the time being until they come up with some kind of plan.”

  “And what’s our plan?”

  “You teleport Nye and Clarabelle and the Engineer back to Roarhaven, and we wait right where we are. They’ll have to come to us eventually.”

  “So … it worked. The plan worked.”

  Valkyrie grinned. “Don’t you love it when that happens?”

  Fletcher took Dr Nye, Clarabelle and the Engineer back to the Sanctuary, where the Engineer immediately began the deactivation process for the Accelerator. He returned to the valley minutes later, and Gracious saw him, walked over, and clamped a hand on his shoulder. “The Fellowship is together once again.”

  “Sorry?”

  “We quest, young Fletcher. We travel far, to strange lands, seeking strange people, eating strange food, saying strange things. We are a Fellowship of Three. Comrades-in-arms. Friends. Brothers.”

  “Uh …”

  “We’ve been assigned to investigate some Warlock activity in Mozambique,” said Donegan. “We were told it could be incredibly dangerous, so we’re taking you along with us to get us out of there if things go wrong.”

  “It will be a great adventure,” said Gracious. “They will sing songs of this!”

  “Seriously,” Donegan said, “stop talking like that.”

  “But we go questing!”

  “We’re going hunting. Just like we always do. Don’t let him worry you, Fletcher. We’ve done this a thousand times and we’ll do it a thousand more. We’re professionals.”

  “I’m going to wear my shorts,” Gracious announced.

  Donegan glared. “You’ll get sunburnt.”

  “I can handle it.”

  “No you can’t.”

  “We’re going to Mozambique! I have to wear my shorts and my Lion King T-shirt and sing ‘Hakuna Matata’. It’s the only words of Swahili I know.”

  “And what happens when you get sunburnt? Who has to hear you complain about it, eh? I do. Fletcher, have you been to Africa before?”

  “Yes,” Fletcher said. “I’ve been to all three Sanctuaries and, like, a few other places. I went over to see lions and stuff.”

  “Did you see any?”

  “Yes. Lots. It was cool.”

  “Excellent,” said Donegan. “Well, we probably won’t be seeing any lions on this trip, I’m afraid. We’ll be going to Maputo, asking a few questions, and staying away from dangerous things.”

  “Danger is my middle name,” said Gracious.

  “No it isn’t,” said Donegan. “We’ll be leaving as soon as I find fresh ammunition for my gun.”

  Fletcher frowned. “I thought you said we’d be staying away from dangerous things.”

  “I did. But there’s no guarantee they’ll stay away from us.”

  hree days they’d been trapped in the Keep, and Regis almost wanted someone to fire the first shot just to relieve the boredom.

  He raised the binoculars to his eyes and watched the Irish. Good people, good soldiers, experienced in battle and unforgiving to enemies. He never thought he’d have to go up against them, but life is what life is, as his mother used to say, and life’s damn unfair when you think about it.

  “How many now?” asked Ashione, appearing so quietly beside him he almost jumped out of his skin.

  Scowling, Regis said, “Four hundred, maybe five. Those woods down there are probably teeming with Cleavers, though. I can see movement.”

  “Five hundred at the very least,” Ashione said. “Well, that’s not so bad. That’s practically two to one. And here I thought Mantis had led us into trouble.”

  Regis glanced round to make sure no one had overheard. There wasn’t a soul on the planet that he trusted more than Ashione, but the woman had a smart mouth that was going to get her killed one of these days. Not today, though.

  She squinted up at the sun. “What do you reckon the chances are of the bosses having a big friendly conversation and the war being called off before we have to hit anybody? It’s a nice day. Too nice to be killing people we used to call friends.”

  Regis grunted. “If they didn’t call it off during those weeks we were skulking about and hiding in bushe
s, I doubt they’re going to call it off now. You’re just worried you’ll find yourself face to face with Saracen Rue. And then you’ll fall into his arms like last time.”

  Ashione punched his shoulder. It hurt. “I didn’t fall into his arms. If anything, he fell into mine. No man can resist my smile.”

  “I’ve managed to these long years.”

  “Well, you’re an especially grumpy man.”

  “That I am. To be honest, though, I’m rather hoping I don’t see Saracen Rue on the battlefield. For a start, I have no interest in falling into his arms. And for another, if he’s here, the rest of the Dead Men probably are, too.”

  Ashione laughed. “You don’t believe the stories, do you? They’re good, don’t get me wrong, but they’re not some unstoppable force. They can be beaten.”

  “Have you ever seen Anton Shudder on a battlefield? What about Skulduggery Pleasant? What kind of man can bring himself back from the dead with the pure power of his hatred alone? I don’t want to go up against any of the Dead Men – but those two in particular.”

  Ashione wrapped an arm round his shoulders. “Don’t you worry, Regis. You just situate yourself behind me and I’ll bat my eyelashes at them. No man can resist my eyes. Or you could go after Cain – she’d be an easier target.”

  “Mm. Don’t know about that. She’s still a girl. Feels wrong to fight someone who hasn’t even had their Surge yet.”

  “Well, what do you know? Regis has a streak of nobility left in him, after all.”

  “That’s me, all right. Regis the Noble.”

  “Regis the Dim-witted, more like,” said Rad Crockett, coming up behind them. A punk of a mage who’d taken his name in the 1980s and had failed utterly to live it down ever since, Rad had a thing for Ashione, and for everyone else he had nothing but a sneer and a smirk. Except for Mantis, of course. When Mantis was around, that sneer was nowhere to be seen.

  “The General wants to see you,” Rad said, delivering his message and immediately turning his attention to Ashione. “Hey, baby. You’re looking well today.”